Where Women are Kings (2 page)

You are loved, little Nigeria, like the world has never known love.

Disgusting dirty horrible evil
. Elijah heard the voice of the wizard all of the time. It told him to do bad things. Elijah knew he was bad. A disgusting boy. He wished the wizard would choose another boy, or just use superpowers for only good, like climbing really high or flying. The wizard could do anything. It could use superhuman strength to lift heavy things, and read people’s minds. It could turn into an animal, become invisible and fly through the night sky catching sticks of lightning in his hands. Elijah could use the wizard inside him to think right inside someone’s brain. If Elijah could control the wizard, he could make it only do good things, like superpowers, and then Elijah would not be so afraid of it. Of what it might do next. Of what it might make him do.

Elijah was staying with Sue and Gary in a house that was filled with signs telling you what to do. He couldn’t read, so he had to ask what each sign said, and Sue and Gary were bored with telling him. That is why it was lucky he could remember everything:

They lived in something called a cul-de-sac, which was a place where every house was big and looked the same, and where no black-skinned people went. The neighbours were always washing their cars, or cutting their hedges, or weeding their front gardens whenever Elijah went past. But he knew they were really waiting to get a look at the wizard. Elijah wanted to warn them. He looked at them and opened his mouth to tell them to run from him but, whenever he did so, no words came out. They’d better go inside their houses at night, he thought, and pray to God. Please pray to God, he thought. And he prayed so hard himself that they too would pray. They would have to pray every night to protect themselves. Or the wizard might melt their houses with acid. Or eat them up.

Sue and Gary’s house was very tidy and smelt of cabbage. They had no pets. They let Elijah play football on the grass outside but they didn’t let him go out of the garden on his own. The living room was where they spent most of the time, watching a big television that was hooked on to the wall. He liked to watch
Spiderman
and
Superman
and, once, when Sue was at bingo,
Harry Potter
, which was about a boy wizard who had a matching scar on his head. But Elijah’s scar was not the same shape: instead of being a zigzag it was a straight line, and Harry Potter was a good wizard and Elijah was the evil type. He sat on the sofa, which had cushions with writing on them:

Elijah had made Sue read them out to him.

Everywhere, there were pictures of children, all of them smiling, some with missing teeth. None of them looked like Sue or Gary. Sue and Gary had white skin with brown spots on their hands and hair you could see through. Sue was very short – Elijah came up to her shoulders – and her fingers were swollen and red all the time. Gary had glasses and wore slippers that had Mickey Mouse on them. They gave Elijah baths without oiling his skin afterwards and he felt dry and itchy and scratchy. The children in the pictures had different colours and different eyes and different hair. They must have been very itchy too. Elijah was so powerful he could read their minds, even in photos. They wanted their mamas.

‘All those kids we’ve fostered.’ Gary was behind him; Elijah could see him without turning around. ‘So far, twenty-two emergency placements.’ He laughed. ‘And eighteen who stayed for quite a long time: one of them, until he was sixteen. They still come at Christmas, pop in and see Sue, bring their washing sometimes …’

Elijah wouldn’t be staying for a long time. They wanted him to leave before the wizard killed them, and he couldn’t blame them. He liked living with Sue and Gary but they didn’t like living with a disgusting wizard. Gary kept talking to the air but Elijah blocked him out. All he could hear was the message sent directly from God. God sent messages sometimes. Twenty-two and eighteen. He had been told, and told to remember it well.

22:18 Exodus. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

It was night when Sue made Elijah brush his teeth. Even with the minty toothpaste, all he could taste were the boiled vegetables they forced him to eat. He looked at Sue. Since Ricardo had left, she’d been watching him closely. She tried
to hug him but Elijah managed to pull away from her arms. She was watching him now in the mirror but he knew that she couldn’t see him because he didn’t show up in mirrors. Sorcerers had no reflections or shadows. That’s how you could tell if a sorcerer was living inside you. Sue was looking hard but she couldn’t see Elijah at all. He couldn’t believe she forced him to eat a vegetable called swede, which was orange and tasted of spit. Mama would never make him eat vegetables. Mama would never give him food that tasted like spit. Mama had no evil inside her at all. Mama was an angel. She was so kind that if a baddie were dying, she would save them, even if they were a real baddie. She would never give boiled vegetables to anyone, not even the worst baddie in the world.

‘That’s right, Elijah. Brush for two whole minutes. You’re doing a great job. You are such a clever boy, and you’re so good at brushing your teeth.’

Elijah watched Sue looking at the empty mirror and pretending she saw a seven-year-old boy brushing his teeth. He used his laser eyes to steam the mirror up.

After brushing his teeth, Elijah followed Sue into his bedroom and climbed into bed. Sue pulled a blanket over him. ‘Stop wriggling,’ she said. ‘You’ll never drop off if you wriggle around like that. Maybe you’re feeling a bit frightened today? You know you can always talk to me about anything at all.’ Sue laughed and sighed at the same time. She looked at Elijah and patted his body. ‘Are you feeling a bit unsafe? Because I want you to remember all the things that I told you: you’re completely safe here; nobody will hurt you.’ She lifted her head and pulled the blanket down to see more of Elijah. He wanted to pull it back up. He wondered if Mama had a blanket or if she felt cold.

Sue rested her head on her hand. ‘I tell you, these social
workers don’t tell us half of it. Even Ricardo, as lovely as he is. Probably just as well, I suppose. Anyway, hun, you know you can always talk to me. It might help to talk it out. You know, share your problems.’ Elijah looked at the brown spots on Sue’s hand. The wizard was probably poisoning her.

Instead of looking at Sue’s hands and thinking about things, he looked around the bedroom. There was a wardrobe with a picture of a bear on it that she said was called Winnie the Pooh. Sue read Elijah lots of stories. On the wall was a shelf with a lot of books, including the book about the bear. The book was Elijah’s second favourite thing in the room.

His first favourite thing was next to his bed: a photo in a wooden frame. In the photograph, Mama had her hair in millions of tiny plaits and she was smiling, holding a King James Bible that her Uncle Pastor had given her. The colours of Nigeria were behind her: dark red, bright yellow, and green. And she was smiling.

‘You have contact tomorrow, so we need to be up extra early.’ Sue kissed the top of his head before he had time to move his head backwards. ‘Sleep well.’

Elijah watched Sue walk out of the room and shut the door behind her. He touched the place where she’d kissed and pretended it was Mama who had kissed him instead.

*

Elijah stretched his hands, rubbing his fingers over a table scratched with a thousand pen marks, the light of day catching the dusting of glitter embedded into the wood, causing sparks as though the table held memories of children playing. Other children. It was morning and Ricardo had come to take him to the contact centre, but only after they’d had a chat. Elijah had sat down at the kitchen table while Ricardo spoke in a low voice to Sue outside the door. Then he came in and smiled
and Elijah knew that he’d have to speak. Elijah didn’t much like talking, and the sooner he started talking the sooner they would leave for the contact centre, which was like a sort of prison where they were keeping Mama. He closed his eyes and forced the words out one by one. ‘Satan was here in the beginning, just like God.’

He opened his eyes widely and looked up at Ricardo, who had leant back in his chair and crossed his long legs in front of him. Wafts of Ricardo’s aftershave travelled towards Elijah’s nose, something fruity, and spicy. Ricardo had told Elijah once that he owned over fifty different aftershaves, and Elijah had imagined them all, bottle after bottle, lined up on a neat shelf. Ricardo shuffled Elijah’s drawings, which were piled up in the middle of the table between them: dozens of penguins, a long branch of a tree with a line of marching ants carrying leaves across it, a butterfly wing in every colour possible – that had taken days – and a chalky white page that was meant to be a polar bear in the Arctic in the middle of a snowstorm. Elijah didn’t like looking at that picture, even though he’d drawn it; it was so empty and secret. But he kept it, anyway, with the others and told Ricardo that it was important.

I am a wizard
. Elijah wanted to tell Ricardo about the wizard inside him, but his promise to Mama, never, ever to tell about the wizard, echoed in his head. ‘I’m a wicked boy,’ he whispered instead. ‘Full of evil and badness.’ Elijah pushed the words out and thought of Mama waiting for him, of the way her mouth curled into a smile on one side and into a sad face on the other side.

Elijah reached his hand up to his face and touched the scar on his forehead with his fingertips. It felt lumpy and was the size of a matchstick. ‘Look at my scar,’ he whispered to Ricardo. ‘Only baddies have scars on their face.’

Ricardo shrugged as if Elijah had said something uninteresting, or untrue. Elijah opened his eyes even wider until they began to fill with water and sting. He tried to ignore the stinging, looked down at the floor and took a big breath of Ricardo’s aftershave. ‘I don’t want to be wicked. Can you help me?’ Elijah’s voice changed into a younger boy’s voice. It moved in all directions as if the words didn’t know the way into Ricardo’s ears. He closed his eyes and listened to his insides:
Wizards bring sickness and bad luck and misery to anyone near. At night, they creep out of your skin and fly into the air before choosing a victim and eating their flesh, sometimes their very soul. I am full of evil spirits
.

‘I am wicked, under the direct control of Satan himself. Bishop told me so.’ Elijah began to sob, a large tear rolling slowly down to his jawline before falling to the table. He touched it with his thumb and rubbed it on the table until dry. ‘I don’t want to be wicked.’

‘Who is Bishop? Is he from your church?’

Elijah opened his eyes but not his mouth.

Ricardo frowned. ‘Well, whoever he is, you should know that you are not wicked in any way. You are a lovely boy who deserves to be happy and safe and playing.’

Elijah knew that Ricardo didn’t believe he was evil. He tried to speak to him telepathically, which is when you think straight inside someone else’s brain. It is true. Look at my eyes. It is true. ‘I am Elijah,’ he said, ‘but I’m also full of evil. I bring sickness and bad luck and misery to anyone near me. I am full up with badness.’

Ricardo put his hand on top of Elijah’s. ‘It sounds very confusing. I’m so glad you managed to talk to me. Can you tell me about the Bishop?’

Elijah blinked quickly. ‘He is a man of God.’

Ricardo squeezed Elijah’s hand and then wrote something in his notebook. ‘I’ll try and get in touch with him: can you remember his name? Or the name of his church?’

Elijah shook his head.

‘Don’t worry. But, meanwhile, you must understand that, whatever anyone has ever said to you – even a man of God – you are a good, good boy. Anyway, everyone’s a bit naughty sometimes. Even me, believe it or not!’ Ricardo laughed deep from his stomach. ‘And I’m sure that Bishop would never say that you are wicked. Sometimes, in Brazil, where I come from, the priests talk about heaven and hell and God and Satan. Is that what your Bishop was like?’

Elijah stopped blinking. His head nodded before he could stop it.

‘Well, if your Bishop is anything like the priests I know, he will know that children are good and not wicked.’

Elijah felt his head begin to shake but he managed to stop it in time.

‘And maybe if things weren’t very good at home with Mummy then it was easy to get confused during church and think about bad things.’ Ricardo lifted his head. ‘It must be awful to think that you’re bad inside.’

Elijah blinked slowly and pushed tears back inside his face by making his stomach twist tightly into a knot. Ricardo was wrong about everything. Things were always good at home with Mama. Always. He looked down at Ricardo’s feet, stretching out in front of him under his side of the table.

‘Thank you for telling me about Bishop; as I’ve said to you before, you can tell me anything at all. You’re completely safe with me.’ Ricardo put his hand across the table on top of Elijah’s hand, but Elijah felt his hand shaking. He didn’t want to risk touching Ricardo. Grown-ups said that he was
completely safe with them but he was only completely safe with Mama.

Mama.

Even thinking of Mama changed everything. When he thought of Mama, the table moved and shook and the ground fell away.

There was quiet in the kitchen for a short time, apart from the clock ticking above Sue’s cupboards. Elijah looked at the window, and the plants lining the windowsill, which Sue had told him were called orchids. They only needed a tiny bit of water every few weeks and the flowers were the pinkest pink. One of the flowers was white with dots on it and crept up a thin green pole. He had felt a petal earlier that day with his thumb, and he couldn’t work out if he was the petal or the thumb, both were so soft.

‘How long have we known each other?’ Ricardo smiled the smile he saved only for Elijah. Ricardo’s face was usually square, his mouth flat, and when he smiled he showed his teeth. But the special smile he saved for Elijah was when his eyes twinkled. Elijah had never seen him use that smile on anyone else. It was like a secret between them. ‘This is the first time you’ve told me properly that you feel like you’re bad – and mentioned Bishop – with more than a sentence here or there. I know Mummy used to pray a lot and she’s very religious. It’s good that you’re talking to me about things, Elijah. Talking is always good.’