BROWN 4

Madam catches her throwing up one morning and drags her off to Doctor Madubuike. They are silent on the way to his private clinic, silent on the way back. Madam calls Edet as she enters the house and she emerges from her bedroom with the bottle of McDowell whisky she always gives to Edet before these sessions.

Lade isn’t shaking; she knew this day would come. She spends a small moment wishing that she had run away and she had her baby and they would have been happy being poor together, but it is now time to go into the room upstairs, the one that isn’t used except for special visitors, the one that Madam prefers to use because it is soundproof and has furniture that cleans easily. Madam really doesn’t like it whenever Oga hears and comes to interrupt these sessions.

Madam must have put something in Edet’s drink this night because this is worse, this is so much worse than the night she got her limp, this is death because he isn’t stopping. He is still throwing her against the wall and kicking her stomach and slipping in the blood she is spitting out and hitting her head against the floor and stomping on her back and she can dimly hear Madam screaming at him to stop, stop, can’t he see that she is bleeding...

Lade wakes up in the hospital for the second time in her life, the first time being the beating that got her left leg bad. Oga and Madam are there and Madam is saying over and over that she told him to stop, that that Edet is a monster, that she had only told him to beat Lade a little because if you spare these children, they will get spoilt, that he is fired because she can’t have such evil and abject wickedness living under her roof and eating her food. Then she is sobbing in Oga’s arms and Oga is comforting her, telling her that it is alright, everything is alright. She wails louder as Mummy Omolara, her best friend arrives, and she throws her hands up in supplication, asking Mummy Omolara if she hadn’t been good to Lade and treated her like a daughter. Of course you did, Mummy Omolara says, taking Oga’s place as Oga moves to the side, looking stupefied.