FORGED THROUGH DARKNESS

All her woes began with the sound of receding footfalls one cold September night in 1991.

Drunk and spreadeagled on the kitchen floor, with eyes half-open and droopy, staring dreamily at the flaking ceiling, she heard the sound above the din of the rain pelting down against the glass window. Somehow, even though delirious by the alcohol she had taken, she twigged that something was amiss, because the entrance to her apartment was locked was locked and the sound was frighteningly strange, like the sound of someone walking on tiptoes. While she lay there semi-unconscious and spent, and wondering if the sound was real or emanating from some drunken place in her mind, she heard the living room door creak open. Her heart lunged in terror. It was abundantly clear now that someone else was inside the house with her, someone who seemed to have carried out their operation and was now leaving. And then the door slammed shut. The person made no attempt to be surreptitious about that one. It seemed calculated to let her know that someone was at the door, or that someone had been inside the house, for the sound the door made when slammed jolted her out of her drunken stupor. But she discovered, in alarm, that she was unable to move: her whole body had atrohied, paralyzed, fixed to the ground like a breathing work of art. She willed herself to rise, to move, to make a beeline for the door and find out who the intruder was, or to run to her room and shut the door. Her heart was pounding now. She was alone and vulnerable, and danger had visited her right in her house, and her muscles had been rendered weak by the alcohol in her systwm and now she couldn't run or hide to save herself.

When she eventually managed to get to her feet and take a few uncertain steps toward the kitchen door, she made the mistake of looking at the floor and at once she felt a flicker of vertigo and lost her footing. She staggered back and propped herself up against the wall, and she stayed in that position for a while, too scared to move and too scared to keep standing.

Flashes of lightning blazed through the window and thunder rumbled outside, adding to the fear resident in her.

"Mummy," she whimpered, even though she hadn't spoken to her mum in almost 20 years. Was she dying? A force outside of her dipped her to a knees and she surrendered to it. Then she got up in a raging gale and began whirling in space, suspended between two planes of existence, with everything rotating, nay, spinning so fast, so maniacally, racking her and tossing her to a place she had never been before. And then there appeared to be a loss of gravity and she began the furious descent downward. It was a free fall and she kept going down and down. Beneath her, a bottomless pit yawned and she shut her eyes in a bid to quell the spasms that rocked her core.

"Mummy!" She cried again.

She realized, in shock, that she had forgotten just about any other word. She wanted to say something different - like David, her lover's name, or Jesus, her Saviour's name, or Peace or Tochi or Malik or Fred or anyone's name at all, anyone close by or far away, who could come now and rescue her from this horrible, lingering nightmare, this danger, no, this death awaiting her at the bottom of the pit she was descending. But the only word that could escape her lips - the only word her brain still remembered - was "Mummy." Totally strange, because she had spent the last two decades hating her mum and cherishing the hatred. The hatred had grown from visceral to pathological, carefully tended and fed each day by her; preserved, reinforced to last through life and in death, to last for all eternity. Whenever she so much as felt a letting up, an unwelcome softening, or sanctimonious scruples within her arising from the impact of random words of street preachers, or that of Reverend Onoja's, she was swift in stoking the flames of hatred by peeling back the layers of her bitter history with her mum, reliving every painful moment, every curse, every depressive bout, and all the tears her mum forcibly extracted from her eyes and forced her to drink so she could taste her own salty bitterness, her own evil, her own sorrow. So without wasting time, she would add faggot to this cherished hatred until the fire cackled and spat, until she felt her body quivering from naked rage, until she felt a weird contentment. Hating her mum was what she had grown to love. So how come "Mummy" was the only word she remembered now?

And she continued to descend, the terror she felt mingled with fury and confusion and sadness. The last time she said "Mummy," and in which her mum hadn't rebuked her outright, was in 1968, when she was six. That was to be the last, because life as she knew it changed the next day on the eve of her dad's birthday, and that was the day he slept and never woke up.

Again, as though compelled to utter it, she cried: "Mummy!"

Now she began to weep. What was happening to her? And who was that person, that man - yes, he walked like a man - who came to her house and tiptoed to the door only to slam it shut behind him? And how did he open the door? Didn't she lock it? Yes, she was muddled but she rememered the part where she locked the door before she started gulping down beer. She rememered tossing the key carelessly and happily on the living room sofa. What was happening tonight? Was she dying? Was this how dying felt like? A fast, senseless, never-ending descent into some dark and terrible pit that had no bottom? What was all this?

Yet again, as if rising from some far away place in her soul, it came again: "Mummy!"

By the time she remembered another word, the name of her lover, David, and before she could try to recall the name of her Saviour, she came crashing down, head first. She bashed it against the cold, tiled kitchen floor and lay still, very still.

She had gotten to the end of the pit.