The Girl Who Wasn’t There

Most of my twelfth year is now eclipsed in my memory, but I remember a sky that was often split in shades, into seas of white and black fire. It rained often. Almost every tree bloomed, and the smell of ripened mangoes hung forever in the air. I remember suddenly seeing a girl in my high school, who marched about as if she was barely there.

She stood often by the wide strip that linked the assembly ground to the walkway, or by the bougainvillea plants that marked the end to the grassy field, or by the edge of the sandy path where students were permitted to walk. The flowers were not wild; we barbed them low during the weekly manual labour. She waited by them always, the colour of her skin filling in spaces between the flowers. Her round face was bespectacled. The thick lenses zoomed her eyes to a faraway place, and coming from all that distance, her gaze poked me often with what I recognize now as pity. A red leather bag hung on her arm always, except during classes when she needed to write or take books out of her locker.

The sounds that infiltrated my reality that year were mostly of doors banged shut and the muffled shouts that emerged from behind the closed doors. The rope of my parents’ marriage was slackening.

I woke at five each morning, just as the cold plucked at my heart, and cleaned the poultry and the goat shed. I swept the compound next, lightly raking the leaves off the ground to avoid stirring up some dust. We had no alarm clock. The special alarm bell was my father’s cane. He woke me with some strokes every morning until fear piled up in my heart and rang out at five. My siblings spent most of the year at their boarding schools. My brother lived with an aunt in another town. I was left to stare my father’s frothing rage in the face, and was a firsthand witness to its snapping when his waterproof sales were bad; when he disagreed with a kinsman; when a flu crept into our poultry and left all the chickens cold and stiff; when the government delayed paying his pension benefits.

The girl’s spectacles claimed most of her face. They were square-shaped, and a brown rope was affixed to the frames. She was light-skinned or dark or somewhere in between. She stared deeply at things. Her eyes bore question marks, as if demanding if I did not also see beneath the crusts of surfaces. I sometimes wondered why I had not noticed her during our two previous high school years, and if she was simply nestled away in the folds of roughly two thousand schoolgirls. I do not remember how long it took before we crept close to each other. We both had the same nail buds with some dirt lurking underneath. I watched her when she wasn’t looking, noting how her pudgy body filled out her school uniform in ways that made me too aware of my thinness.

We attacked the cherries that lined our school fence when they ripened, jostling for the soft red pulp. Our uniforms chafed against the green branches, whilst our eyes darted about for long stringy snakes. She waited instead at the roadside, holding my bag by the base of the grove, unwilling to join the rest of us. Her glassy eyes were trained on me.

“There’s a way you look at people,” I told her once.

“It’s my glasses, the lens.”

Her cheeks were filled with dimples when she laughed—perfect depressions that mirrored her into everything I wanted to be. We chatted about books and protagonists who sprang out of the pages and lived in our rooms for a long time. I talked to her about my parents because she was not quite forthcoming about her life. To reach her, there was a fog that I constantly waded through, and I was not bothered. Though she was not fleeing, I always found her an inch further from me with that faraway gaze from lifetimes before.

After school, she walked some of the distance with me before she turned back. It appeared she was hobbled by the need to make me comfortable. She also wrote me letters—charming details of our reality that I could no longer find—in beautiful scrawls that sped across the page, where ‘g’ had a torso that was completely detached from the tail. When I read a note from her, the universe burst in colours and was suddenly full of things that repaired themselves for our sakes.

My moments were worth nothing if she was not waddling beside me in that sublime confidence, parroting about a book she’d read the night before. Her smiles were chaste, as though mean tricks did not ever traverse the field of her heart. When I was scolded at home, and Father’s whips crossed over to my back and created welts, my thoughts brimmed with the endearing questions she always threw me.

Sugar, have you eaten?

Sugar, are you alright?

Sugar, have you read this book?

I did not understand why she chose this name for me, nor what I had done to deserve it. But I relaxed in its ambience, my heart too cramped for the pleasure the name spiraled into it. Her voice boomed from somewhere deep in my gut, as if a voice inside me was conversing with me. I felt watched. Her intent eyes spread out over the low white ceiling of our home, bare and piercing.

My mother often called what I had as a child an active imagination. Growing up alone might have fueled it. Or perhaps, as the years wore on, it dwindled and mutated into an illness. It appeared I was desperate to stuff the empty crannies of my mind with people. I craved people, and it was not as if I lacked real people in my space; I just did not have them crafted in the manner I wanted. I was perhaps deeply disconnected from humanity and was attracted to the ‘others’ I saw when I looked at clumps of the grass, at the stems of plantain trees, or on the walls where my father drew some instructions with chalks of charcoal. I turned one of my exercise books into a register of imaginary names, and suddenly they looked real. I was kind to some names, and brutal to some others. Some were impossibly beautiful, and their faces, carefully fashioned in my thoughts, stirred warmth within me. They spoke to me while on errands, or in the middle of chores. Their voices moved through the air, subsonic, unfazed by nothing. Sometimes I replied to them, and if you saw me then, like my father did one afternoon, I cut a perfect picture of a little crazy girl, laughing and whispering to the wind.

My mother said that every child had what I had, except mine was slightly different. I did not know how different she meant. Once, I mentioned a name to my sisters. It was someone I thought we all knew in our small community while growing up, and they glanced at me and burst out laughing. I could not stitch together the reason for this collective denial, or why my mother had to come to my defense, asking them to be kind. It appeared they all knew something about me that I did not, and that half the things that formed the memories of my childhood might have been figments of my imagination. This discovery sloughed a large chunk off my self-awareness.

If half the things I knew did not exist, who then was I? What was true and what was not? How could I trace the true version of every story I put out there? I had spent years nursing the terror that a dead woman had frightened my older sister Chidi and me under the udala trees of our hometown. I remembered caking into a statue while my sister shivered until the woman melted into the darkness.

“You and who?” my sister asked as I told the story. “This girl was a mad child. I don’t recognize myself in this story at all.”

The whole house imploded with laughter. Even my mother’s worried eyes caved in, and the mirth buckled her knees. I was tossed into confusion. The woman I thought we had seen had traumatized me for long years, chasing after me in nightmares.

My sister explained that the woman we both saw at the udala trees was not dead at the time, though she was now. This truth felt too heavy in my hands. I mulled over it for long, wondering whether I should cut out the slabs of my truth and replace them with my sister’s. What if I held on to mine? Would I be altering an important event in time? If I tricked myself into believing that a living woman was a ghost, what about the other people I tricked into this crude belief, especially tracing back to the early years of high school when it happened?

Did I abandon reality for phantasm for too long that the latter glued to the fringes of my truth? I became afraid of resurrecting thoughts of dead relatives who might as well be gusts of my childhood imagination, a bustling that filled my eyes and head. I did not know what to call this discovery, nor where the raging cavern of my imagination ended while I strolled through my teen years. Did it end when the chaos in my house was stubbed out? Did it end when I was enrolled in the boarding school, taking some break from the stress of being my father’s child?

There was always a song calling to me, a chant from another universe. It spoke to me about belonging, and each time I rose and followed it, pinwheeling to the tones. I saw more people than the universe held. I found more stories, more characters in the theatre of life. They filled the paths. They lurked in the bushes.

“You were a sick child,” my sisters said in jest.

I then resorted to introducing tales of the past with questions. I would first ask if a certain event ever took place. If everyone agreed it did, I would then dig deeper, lacing it with details. If they exchanged confused looks, I would say, “Never mind. I must have mixed things up.”

I was often content that it all happened in the past, and to the child I was, someone I could no longer recognize. This surety helped me navigate anxiety and assured me that I could stockpile memories afresh, with accuracy. I was twenty-three the year Chidi got married. Months later, when I casually raised an important incident that happened during her wedding, I got the look from everyone.

“You don’t remember the man who snatched the microphone at Chidi’s wedding?” I stressed, surprised. He was a thickset man and had white hairs on his head and jaw.

“Don’t start again, please,” one of my sisters said. Even my mother, who must be tired of this mix-up I suffered, said nothing.

I was pricked by alarm bells. They tolled from every nook of my body. I saw childhood being replayed all over again, and I was afraid. At what point would I stop being simply imaginative and become a liar? What about all the people I strung along these lines of lies? Did I owe them a rebuttal of any sort, perhaps obligated by posterity to contact them and confess that most of the stories did not happen? Perhaps it was better not to splinter an important bridge forged with too many stories and people. I would have to protect everyone from that sting.

The loneliness I felt in my head proved unassuageable. Even when a room popped with voices, I was the solitary traveler navigating seashores and beaches, attenuating to suit each place. I dreaded crowds. They altered the structure I had set up for the universe in my mind. A decade after my father passed on, I asked my mum if it was indeed ten years ago that our father died, and she laughed. It was a joke, obviously, but I was also scared that events I considered life-changing might one day be termed ‘imagined.’ I might have allowed much of life to ebb away while I was a child. I could not tell if I was still doing the same.

I did not tell my family about the girl, my best childhood companion, who called me Sugar when I was twelve. It could make them laugh or make them worry and pamper me with a pity I did not need.

There was a sudden labour strike the year I saw her last. We were instructed not to return to school for four months. When our school reopened, I could not find her nor her desk. Her existence in our school space appeared to have been erased. I endured three more days of her absence before I began to ask my classmates of her whereabouts. That was the first time it should have rung a bell―like the short eyesight I suffered, or the persistent pain in my left hip bone―that something was wrong with me.

“Who?” was the reply I mostly got. “Was she in our class?”

She and I lived three towns away from each other. My father would never let me leave home except for church and school. Even if I found a chance to leave, I had not known the world enough to cross main roads and walk long distances of unfamiliar trails in search of her. When the internet arrived, its fangs could not seek her out. This was perhaps because my memories had become gritty like the sands on a seashore, porous and unable to retain her name. I ran my hands through them, winnowing for a clue of what her real name might have been. I found nothing but a plethora of names that did not fit: Ada, Chinaza, Ifeyinwa. Her name was entrenched as far away as possible from my reach, like the hazy flashes I have now of that year’s vice principal or the music teacher.

My sisters advised that I meet with a mental health counsellor, though my mother always opined that the stories I made up were nothing but childish gibberish. But what about the reoccurrences I traced down to my mid- and late twenties, the culmination of a lifetime spent dreaming? Why did I dash often into the kitchen to turn off a stove I never lighted? Why did I have to run out to gather laundry when rain loomed, only to find that I hadn’t done any laundry? I was always panicky, in haste; standing; sitting; pushing through. A scream often stood ready in my throat, waiting. I dreaded seeking answers.

I still sang and talked in my sleep. I woke occasionally to my mother’s questioning glare. I still saw things: a man wielding an axe in the sky, a distorted face in the cracked paint of the toilet wall. I often heard shouts riding on the airwaves. Every evening, after school hours, I saw my neighbour’s child on the roof of his parents’ house. He made wild demonstrations with his arms and hands, threatening the empty air. He looked strikingly familiar, fused into the child I used to be.

Once, I signed up to volunteer for a mental health organization. It was the first time I learned the word: Schizophrenia. It sounded like a distant thing, unlike anything that altered the human mental coordination, causing lines of thought to zigzag along imperfect belts. The direct telephone line of a mental health doctor was made available on the WhatsApp group. I dialed it once. Not reachable. I never tried again. Ultimately, I was afraid of therapy. I could not submit myself to untangling of the mess in my head, or to resurrecting events long ripped away. What I feared more were the antipsychotic medications. I found the side effects dreary―blurred vision and drowsiness. I spent eight working hours on the website of a food packaging firm. I could not risk abseiling into a dwam during work hours.

“But you can’t be self-diagnosed. You have to be sure,” a friend once said when I told her. Then she added, “What if you made that girl up, your high school sweetheart? What if you were so sad that year that you invented her as a succour?”

I wondered if this was true. I vacillated between keeping her unbroken in my thoughts and blotting her out, between hoping to run into her someday and dismissing her as mere blast of wind. But she tempered the harsh weathers of my twelfth year. She was as real as the cherry trees we climbed that year, which still stood to this day by the school’s wall. I could not have made all that up. She was too detailed to be an imagination. She had such perfect squares as teeth, and when she laughed, it was a generous sprinkling of a beautiful sound that time paused for.

I foraged through my father’s books and the near-defunct family library some months back, and found an old notebook of mine. It had been squeezed and scrunched up by time. The leaves were brown and had an unread, gloomy scent. The ink from the writing had bled past the confines of the lines. Each page started with dates that were long lost to me. I tried to resurrect the details of 13/05/2002, but it had dissipated into small nothings. Something else struck my eyes. Neatly placed at the middle of the book were the letters I’d received from her, the girl I had loved. My heart was at first lifted until I saw, to my utter shock, that all the letters were penned in my own handwriting of eighteen years ago.

They all began with:

Dear Shugar.