HOMO HERBALIST (Part IV till THE END)

I woke up blurry eyed, with a pulsating headache that seemed to come from deep inside my brain. The first person I saw was my husband and the bouquet of flowers by our bedside.
It must have been a dream.
I wondered how long I had been sleeping that made my body ache so badly.

As I made to sit up, a searing pain in my back, down to my pelvis forced me back on the bed. I groaned loudly as my husband, who had not seen me wake, ran to my side, a lot of concern on his face.
Forced to lie on my back, I looked about the unfamiliar room and realised that it was a hospital and the bouquet of flowers (which indeed were the ones in our bedroom) must have been put there by my husband. Absent memories on blank pages flipped through my mind longing to be filled. I tried to remember why I was here; what had happened?
But the pictures that ran through my mind were blurry and the hue had gone from them.

I closed my eyes forcing back the memories as they swirled; our arrival in a small house...fighting...scattered candles...sleeping dogs...with burning eyes.
Yes they had burning eyes!
...laboured breaths...Doris...the darkness and the far away voice of the....
The herbalist!

‘Doris!!!’ I started to scream
‘D-O-R-I-S!’

My screaming brought a troop of nurses running into the hospital ward room where I lay, my husband still trying to calm me down. The more I remembered the experience, the more the hatred for Doris burned.

‘Doris’ I kept screaming as I felt the hands of the nurses hold me down to the bed and a pin prick sting my arm. As the nurses held me down, I started to fight frantically.

No, I screamed! I didn’t want to be held down again.
‘Doris’, I made to shout but the words only left my mouth in a slur this time. I remembered clearly, Doris’ name was the last thing I called before sleeping the first time. I was afraid to sleep again. I forced my eyelids to stay open but the drug had started to have its way.
I don’t want to sleep! I kept thinking to myself, I don’t want to bath again....

The last person I saw as I fell asleep was my husband, who stared sadly at me from behind the nurses- he must have thought I was going insane.

When next I woke up, the room was dark and the white ceiling looked grey in the darkness. I could hear snores beside me drowning out the chirping of the crickets outside.
Was I still at the hospital? Was I safe?

Looking at the faint outline of the snoring mass that slept on the chair beside me, I felt better my husband was here- only him snored that way. As I looked at him sleeping innocently, and I remembered the ruse that led to my rape, I started to cry silently. Why did it have to happen to me? only if I had listened to my intuition. But what had happened after I lost the strength to fight the herbalist? I strained to search those lost pages again but the only images that came to my mind was the bobbing face of a stranger in the dark. I don’t know for how long I cried or sat up thinking but later, I got exhausted and fell asleep.
The morning after, I was discharged.

As my husband drove home in silence, I felt an uncustomary distance between us as he simply stared ahead, barely looking at me. I could not help wondering what had happened and what he knew. I wanted to ask him but I feared to. The only person I could ask was Doris, who was the mastermind behind the rape and she had disappeared- switching off her phones, totally unreachable. Unfortunately even if I found her at the moment, I would kill her before I inquired about what had happened. I felt so debased, I felt so alone.
When we got home, I found the car I had taken to Doris' house parked in the driveway, I wondered where my clothes were.

Emeka prepared a meal of oats for me. Not being one to bottle up for long, spoke for the first time since we left the hospital.

“You know if you had told me, I could have taken you to the fertility doctor in the morning rather than you running over to Doris.”
“And what were you thinking of, trying to kill yourself?”
“If this had not happened, so I would not have found out?”
“I just want you to know that I care about you so much and I need a child as much as you do. But running off with Doris to a God-knows-who fertility doctor or trying to commit suicide, is not my idea of sticking together to solve our common problems”

I could not say a word.

Had Doris told my husband we were planning to go to a fertility doctor?
What else had she told him?
“Doris told you all that?” I asked my husband.

“Why wouldn’t she tell me”, he raised his voice,
“Why wouldn’t she tell me, when you wouldn’t”
“The poison you took almost killed you, you know?”
“What if it had? Do you know what I went through watching you sleep for almost two days? Praying you won’t die?”

I just looked on, trying to figure it all out.
Doris must have called my husband after the incident at the herbalist’s to tell him I had tried to kill myself. She must have brought up a story about both of us going to see a fertility doctor together. There were a lot of blanks in the jigsaw but I could only imagine the picture. As the torrent of words flowed from my husband’s angered ego, I was the more, grieved and made up my mind about how this was going to end.

I was going to find Doris and I was going to kill her.

After nursing the thought for a day, I had gone to Doris’ house (again without my husband’s knowledge) with a kitchen knife in my handbag- to kill her.

Looking back in hindsight now, I would say fortunately, I had not met her at home that day. The gates to her apartment were locked and there did not seem to be a soul in the house. She still was not picking her phone, her shop at the plaza was locked and no one seemed to know her whereabouts. Still bitter, I thought up other ways to find her but I promised I would not stop looking.

As for the herbalist, I was not sure what I would do to get my vengeance. If I brought the police into it, my husband would eventually find out and would start asking questions I would not be able to answer. The weight of the injustice felt like a yoke, but my anger was not as much directed towards the herbalist as it was towards the one who called herself my friend.

Apart from my yearning for vengeance, I worried about the attendant issues of unprotected sex with the herbalist.

I had heard stories of women who contracted the HIV virus after being raped by robbers or other perverse men. I prayed hard that I would not turn out to be a victim of such as I found a clinic in a nondescript neighborhood on my way back home where I took the various tests for syphilis, gonorrhoea and the other members of the STD family. The doctor asked me to come back for the test results the following day but I asked him to contact me when the test results were ready. We had agreed on the wordings of an SMS text so that even if my husband accidentally stumbled upon it, it would not raise any eyebrows.
Aunty am in skl Pls call me

I left the clinic having the same feeling I had the night before leaving my house for the cleansing bath though unlike then, I was clear what I had to do. For both our good, I had to keep my husband in the dark till I sorted things out. The more I thought about myself as the victim of an unfortunate rape, the more bitter I became knowing I had to deal with it alone.

As I got back home later in the day with a kitchen knife in my handbag and the number of a Doctor saved as LITTLE NEPHEW on my phone, I met my husband sitting on the couch waiting for me.

In eight years, of a childless marriage, we had barely fought. As I watched him, in a singlet and boxer shorts, I knew there was trouble.

“Where are you coming from?” He asked, neither smiling nor frowning.
“I went to see a friend”
“Who? Doris?”
“Yes” I answered, speaking the truth.
“Why?”
“Because I had not seen her since the accident”
“Did I not ask you not to leave the house until you had fully recovered?”
“I am fine” I told him.
“What is your problem? What happened to you? Are we now at a stage when you will blatantly refuse to do what I ask you to do?”
He had stood up now, advancing towards me.
“What is your problem!” he was shouting now.

I covered my head with my arms. My husband had never beaten me before but I was not sure anymore what and what he could not do. We had gradually started becoming strangers. As he moved closer, he grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me violently looking into my eyes.
“Answer me!”
I just started to cry as the memories of a loving husband flooded in before Doris and her herbalist split us apart.
As I started to cry, he stopped and then started to cry too. We both stood there like children, crying until we could cry no more. Then he took me in his arms and for the first time since the ordeal had begun, we made love in a way we had not in long time. I slept in his arms that night not having a nightmare for the first time in days.

The morning after, things returned to normal (as though it could).

I still carried hatred in my heart for Doris but the fire of vengeance, even though still burned, did not burn as strong as it used to. I still tried calling her, even using other numbers but she could not be reached.
The memories of the herbalist still lingered but did not stay as long as it used to.
I received a text from my LITTLE NEPHEW who told me everything was fine.

As such, everything returned to normal until the day Doris showed up at my door steps.

It was that same day that the vomiting started.

When I saw the figure of Doris through the glass in the doorway, I simply stood there immobile, confused and angry.

At the time when I was looking to kill Doris. I had strove to find her but after the reconciliation with my husband, I had pushed her to a distant number two on my priority list as I worked at mending the fences the unfortunate event had broken in my home.
Now standing there seeing her walk willingly into my home again, the memories rushed back and re-awakened the burning hatred in me that had begun to glow like dying embers. Unfortunately, the hatred I felt on seeing Doris in my doorway had an element of fear in it- a feeling that her presence had brought evil into my home again.

"Out!" I screamed.
"O-U-T"

"I won't stay for long", Doris answered, unnaturally calm.
"I know you won't believe me but you'd have to. I am not behind all that happened and I will tell you the truth if you allow me"
"Why I have come is that there's is a problem. The herbalist took some pictures of you and he sent me some of those pictures this morning requesting for money if we wanted him to destroy it. He has insisted that if we as much as tell anyone about it, he would know and he will make the pictures public."
"I am sorry I got you into all this ..."

Blind rage is the phrase that comes to my mind when I remember what happened before Doris finished her sentence.
I felt faint and bile surged to my throat,

by the time I came back to my senses there were smithereens of shattered glass everywhere, our front door of glass panels left a jagged outline where the glass infills used to be, three fingernails on my right hand were torn and blood flowed freely from the hand on the tiled floor. Doris stood in a corner far away from me, her hair torn and claw marks on her face. I remember seeing my reflection in the vanity by the dining set that day and realizing that I had become an animal.

My gateman just stood in the doorway, I had never seen him so scared.

"Get out of my house"
I was screaming as I tried to catch my breath.

She did not say a word. she just left, dropping a brown envelope she had brought with her on the floor of our living room. I did not ask her to take it. I knew it contained pictures I did not want to see.

How I hated Doris.

The headache in my head and the pains all over my body, particularly my bleeding hands, started to register its presence. I walked dizzily to where Doris had stood and picked up the envelope with my other hand. I shut my eyes hoping all of it would disappear. The presence of the photopaper beneath the brown flaps scared me and my imagination concocted images that were absent within it.

The gateman was still in the doorway staring at me.

"Get out!" I screamed.

He was too scared to run at first, then he scampered like a dog to the safety of the gate house where he lived.

I tried, but could not get myself to look at those pictures and till date I never saw them. I took them to the kitchen lit a match under it and burnt it all- throwing the ashes as far from my house as I could.

My husband had come in that night and I had lied to him, yet again, that I injured myself at the glass door when I slumped on my way in.
Emeka didn't buy it and he kept asking the gateman to tell him what happened. The gateman could not either. That day I lost him, because he never talked like he used to anymore.

I remember him dragging me into the car and speeding like crazy to the hospital. Only if I had been a better liar maybe I would have kept my husband and kept the secret better. Within minutes of our arrival at the hospital, the doctor had run in boisterously to congratulate us on the baby. Emeka had only stared in amazement.

"You are pregnant?" I remember him asking.
"You are pregnant and you won't tell me?"

I just looked on, focused on a little space just before his eyes. I could not afford to look at him.

"You should be happy" the doctor had said. It is a miracle.


12 years later
Anytime I look at Elizabeth, like I am doing at the moment, I wonder what kind of future she would have to have had such a past.

She was born months after the incident. On a hot night, without her father to welcome her into this world. She was not born in a ward like most babies but in my father's house, delivered by my mother.
She resembled me, almost to a fault- and for that I was grateful because I dreaded seeing the face of that herbalist again.

Emeka was away while Elizabeth was born and when he came back he was happy. Not with me, but the little one whom he cuddled and carried everywhere with him. Ada he chose to call her, not Elizabeth like my parents had named her. Our home became a silent game of two camps where little Elizabeth or Ada, was the ball. We passed her to each other, rarely speaking to ourselves.
We had both grown a little but Emeka had changed a lot. He never smiled like he used to, except when he was with his friends and even when he spoke to me, he adopted a formal, almost official tone like our marriage had just become one of the many contracts he handled. I wondered if he had another wife but I could only wonder, as I might never know.

I had also changed too. I now wrote for a living, writing short stories and freelance pieces for whoever cared to read them. I very much longed to write of the herbalist; but the story, I knew, would never be told.

A week after the hospital experience, while pondering on whether I would tell my husband or pay the herbalist, Doris had sent me a message- The last one I ever got from her.
'The herbalist died yesterday' she wrote.
'He was murdered in his sleep'

I remember being suprised reading that text even though I was relieved. I was suprised because the use of the word 'Murder' sent a strange message as I read it on my phone that day. It almost felt like someone had killed the herbalist and that that murderer had been Doris, even though I could not say whether she was capable of doing such or not. Unfortunately, I might never know; just like Emeka might never say whether our daughter, the one he loved so much, was his or not.

I looked from my p.c to my daughters sleeping posture on the couch in the sitting room. She had left on the television and I had muted it to concentrate on finishing my latest story. The pictures ran soundlessly across the screen glowing and dimming at erratic intervals. Above the television set was an artistic impression of a well, one Emeka had brought with him on one of his many travels.

As I looked at the well again, I remember a favourite saying of my mother.

"A woman's heart is a deep well of secrets. A well so deep, from which no one can draw" she would say.

I smiled at the thoughts of secrets and at the sight of a sleeping girl and the sounds of a silent home and shook my head because I saw the truth in those words.

THE END, I managed to write to my newest story before logging off the computer and switching of the lone bulb in the dining, throwing the room into a darkness that flickered and glowed with the scenes from the silent tele.

OIO