Fifteen-year-old Belinda made up her mind to take her life while in the bathroom on Saturday afternoon. She was bathing at 2 pm, because that’s what one did during school vacations when they had nothing to do. Somehow, even if you were the kind of person who bathed routinely first thing in the morning, the fact that your brain knew you would be home all day made your body lag at going to carry water and take a bath in the dry Harmattan cold that was Bamenda in December.
She was brushing her teeth and looking around the bathroom of the family house at Ntarikon; its old tiles, and the bathtub with peeling enamel spoke of the family’s middle-class history. Her granddad, Pa Achu, and his wife were, in their time, amongst the crème de la crème in Bamenda, with Pa working in the army and Mami a nurse at Bamenda District Hospital. All their children, the twins and their only daughter, went to the most prestigious schools at the time, travelling from Bamenda to Sasse in Buea, or Saker in Limbe. Belinda knew of her family’s golden days courtesy of too many repetitions from Pa Achu himself, who often reminisced while chewing bitter-cola on the veranda as if to ignore the reality that he had outlived all his children. Belinda’s own mother was the last to go just three months ago.
As she brushed her teeth, Belinda contemplated bathing with Ameh’s Dudu Osun soap because her own Dove moisturising bar was finished. Most of her American products were finished or finishing. She knew Mami kept some stuff from the last container locked in boxes in her room, but this did nothing to make Belinda feel better. The fact that her things were finishing only added to her melancholy and reminded her just how pitiful her life had become.
As she reached out for the soap that Ameh had recently bought for herself with the intention of lightening her complexion, Belinda’s eyes landed on a bottle of Advil behind the assortment of toothbrushes, squeezed-out toothpaste tubes, and packets of sanitary pads, all competing for space on the bathroom shelf. She took out the familiar bottle. It looked like one of those her mum would have bought at CVS to send to Cameroon just a year before. How many times had she watched her mum and dad buy stuff from yard sales, CVS, Payless, Costco, and other odd outlets, packaged them and sent via barrels in a container, or in boxes through friends or distant relatives, to Mami and Pa in Cameroon or one of the numerous distant cousins and aunts? The nudge of familiarity made her turn the bottle in her hand to see the black printed expiration date, which showed six months ago. That’s when she made up her mind. She would drink the bottle of expired tablets and die peacefully in sleep. It seemed like an easy way to go. No pain, just easy sleep and then when she crossed over, she would ask God what she had ever done to deserve the mess her life had become.
With her mind made up, she bathed meticulously. Her last bath had to be long and luxurious; she wanted to be found as lovely in death as Sleeping Beauty. She then put on her best house dress, the cute jersey Junior’s mother had bought for her as a gift before she came to Cameroon. She thought of Junior, her half-brother, who’d probably be the only one to truly mourn her, and whom she would miss. She was the only one who accepted him as he was and did not pretend that he was not different, being autistic. She had never understood why different meant “less than” to some people, so they avoided accepting it all together.
After she’d bathed and dressed, she took the bottle of pills in one hand and the bottle of water that was always kept under the ironing table to fill the steam iron in the other. She sat on the bed, hearing the weak springs creak and screech with her movement, and shut her eyes to think her last thoughts. As though to reassure herself that she had a good reason to go against all the guidance counselling she had got on suicide in elementary and middle school back in Maryland, her last thoughts played in her mind’s eye. The events of the last few months and how she had changed from the girl who had friends, her own room, and a family she could call her own, to the girl who had nothing but what boarding school lingua termed “fair-weather” friends who smiled with you when your trunk was full and had nothing to do with you otherwise.
*
It all began with her father’s announcement that he would return to Cameroon. Her mother was confused, not because it was odd to want to go back home, but because no one had died. It also wasn’t the end-of-year period fondly called “bushfaller season” for the Diasporans who returned home for the holidays. It was mid-April.
“People don’t just travel back home like that!” Belinda recalled her mum had spat at her father, demanding an explanation. When her father’s tale of a temporary visit to rest didn’t convince her, Belinda remembered overhearing calls made to Cameroon, and her mother questioning either his siblings or friends as to why he was really travelling. Neither Auntie Louisa, Auntie Glory, nor dad’s closest friend, Uncle Takor, could give a valid explanation to his sudden desire to travel home. In retrospect, Belinda understood that that period of suspicious looks and tension, built by one-word answers or no answer at all, was the silence before the storm. Because immediately after her father finally travelled, the winds that blew across the Atlantic in his wake tumbled the home and life she had known. Barely two weeks after Dad had been in Cameroon, mum received a call from Auntie Mindi. They had been watching the latest episode of America’s Next Top Model and Belinda could tell it was a long-distance call as she handed the phone to her mum. The Caller ID showed “Unknown,” but it was always known what country the call was coming from, if not the caller.
Belinda heard screaming and her mum got up and left the living room. Standing underneath the arched doorway leading into the dining room, she kept saying, “What? What?” Then she reverted to pidgin “Na wetin you di talk Mindi? I no di understand you, why you di hala me?” Then just as abruptly as the confusing call started, it stopped, because as Belinda turned to look at mum, she stood frozen, staring at the phone as if she could see through it, through cords across the Atlantic and into the eyes of Auntie Mindi, who had just called. Mum did not come back to finish watching the show. She didn’t even ask which of the models won.
Knowing it was best to avoid breaking any rules when her mother was already angry, Belinda turned off the TV as soon as the show finished and went to say good-night early enough for her bedtime. The door of her parents’ room was shut, but she knocked briefly and let herself in. Her mum looked up, holding the phone to her ear with one hand and a calling card held in the other. Her face was a mixture of impatience, anger, hurt, and confusion. Belinda said good-night, half-hoping she would be called in and told what was wrong, and half-hoping she wouldn’t. All she got was a wave; theirs wasn’t that kind of relationship anyway. Unlike the mums in the American sitcoms they watched, her mother did not try to be her best friend. Her mother was her mother.
As Belinda returned to her room, she thought to herself that if the walls could talk, they would tell her what the matter was, what news had ruined the evening. But then if walls could talk, hers would likewise tell of the pills she had been drinking to lose weight, hidden behind her bedside cupboard, of the times she danced naked in front of the mirror, trying to imitate the video girls, and the way she prayed fervently on her knees with hands raised to be admitted into the cool girls clique at school before Junior prom.
She fell asleep pondering on the mixed blessing that would be talking walls.
*
Belinda took the tablets one by one then two by two, filling her mouth with water after every swallow, and repeated it till she had taken 15 of the oval, reddish-brown ibuprofen, symbolic of her age. She lay down on the bed after writing a note saying she was sorry but she “couldn’t take it anymore.” It sounded off to her, but it was what she had seen in every movie where people took their lives. The brief perfunctory note would give the police evidence that she could not have been killed but had opted out.
She would have turned 16 in July…
She had dreamt about her sweet sixteen, prom, and everything else that would come with it once she became a teenager. She had imagined chipping in with friends to rent a limo, a white limo, to make a grand entrance to prom. She had fantasised about how she would finally be asked out by Ty Munyoki, the part-Chinese part-Kenyan head of the debate club, whom she had had a crush on ever since his presentation on Cultural Day in fourth grade during Ms Keys’ class. She had imagined giving herself to him on prom night, like most girls did. She had imagined taking drivers ed, getting her first real job and saving up to help her parents buy a car.
She had never envisioned that by sixteen she would be dead by her own hand. But then nobody daydreams nightmares. Daydreams are happy hallucinations. She could not have imagined that at sixteen she’d be here with one parent dead and the other dying. She could not imagine that she would be in a school where proms were unheard of, or that she would look so ugly with her hair chopped off that Ty (had he been in this godforsaken place) would never even have spared a look in her direction.
She lay on the bed, covered herself with the bedspread, pulled it up and tucked it in her armpits like Sleeping Beauty in the illustrated Disney books. Seeking sleep and waiting for the deadly effects of the pills she had swallowed, Belinda thought of how quickly things had changed after the night of that call.
*
She had gone to school the morning after thinking nothing of the fact that her mum had already left home without seeing her. Mum worked as a nurse at a retirement home and as a caregiver at a home for special kids. She could be called in at any moment and might have had to leave urgently. It wasn’t completely unusual.
What was unusual was seeing a kaba’a-wearing Auntie Estella enter the gym with the female coach much later in the day while Belinda stood in line for cheerleader tryouts. She had been nervous, scared of making a fool of herself and ruining the fastest way of becoming a cool kid but that changed when she saw Auntie Estella. Her nervousness became full-blown alarm. She knew something was wrong. Belinda had thought of accidents but refused to consider death. How could she have even thought of death when Auntie Estella had just said, “We need to go to the hospital right away”?
When they finally got to the hospital, rather than rush to her mother’s sickbed as she’d expected, they went directly to a doctor’s office, a family friend Belinda recognised. Without an explanation, Belinda was asked to show her arm for a syringe. Belinda had several questions to ask, but Auntie Estella’s pleading eyes encouraged her to obey first, in this instance. Auntie Estella was her mother’s best friend and her favourite aunt. She was a big woman, with the height to match her weight so she looked like a female warrior. She always wore clothes with loud colours, fuchsia and lime-green screaming against her skin the colour of pebbe spices and just as smooth. Auntie Estella could make Belinda’s mum laugh even when she seemed furious and Auntie Estella gave her the coolest birthday gifts. That is why despite the apprehension she felt, she sat there collected, if not calm, as they tested her for HIV without her knowing. In the future, Belinda would often wonder what she would have done had she known that she was being tested for HIV because her mum had just died from shock at the news that she had it.
But at that time Belinda had not known, so she had waited for her results in ignorance, her mind preoccupied with imagining what state her mother was in if a doctor was here taking her blood, her mouth busy chomping on the sweets set out for grabs on the waiting-room table.
They didn’t wait long. The doctor friend called Auntie Estella aside and gave her the results in private. Belinda only saw her return with a tear-streaked face, her arms opening wide for Belinda to enter. Auntie Estella’s hug was tight, she mumbled repeatedly, “You are okay, thank God he spared you, and you are okay.” Belinda had felt good enough to ask the questions on her mind then: “Then why are you crying, where is mummy, can we visit her even if she has the flu? Is she in another room here?” She was only given answers later, after returning home and eating the fast food they’d bought on the way. Auntie Estella spoke as if she was telling a story of someone else’s life. She called her mum by her first name, rather than saying “your mother”. She said, “Beatrice had a heart failure after getting some bad news.” She did not tell Belinda what sort of news had induced heart failure, nor that heart failure equalled death. When Belinda asked more questions, she was told that they would all find out more later. But she, Auntie Estella said, will be with her all through. So, Belinda was left to put her active imagination to use. Nothing she imagined could be close to the truth.
She couldn’t have imagined that her father had travelled two weeks ago without telling them that he had been diagnosed with AIDS, which was why he had gone back to Cameroon with the idea of being cured by a certain Man of God. She couldn’t have imagined that her father who had gone looking for a way to be healed was discovered by his cousins who had called her mum and yelled at her, accusing her of infecting their brother. She couldn’t have imagined that the reason she hadn’t seen her mother that morning was because Beatrice had decided to bravely go alone to the local clinic and get tested. Despite her active imagination, Belinda could never have imagined that her mother, learning she was HIV positive, had decided to take a walk in the park and clear her head. Belinda could never have imagined that it was as she walked alone at a park not too far from Belinda’s school, thinking of how to share this news with her daughter, fearing her daughter was also infected, that Beatrice Achu’s heart gave out, failed from struggling to contain both her pain and what she imagined her only daughter would feel.
Belinda couldn’t have imagined all this, but she would find out in the following weeks that this could be. And it had happened.
The proof of it was that she was here in Bamenda in December and there was no snow on the brink of Christmas. For the first time in as long as she could remember she wouldn’t have a white Christmas, nor would she have her parents.
*
As Belinda slept drenched in her memories, Ameh marched to the room ready to give her a good yelling, and possibly twist her ears. It was Belinda’s duty to clean up the kitchen after Ameh and Bih had cooked, but she kept avoiding it. They were all dependents on Mami and Pa now and Belinda had to learn that. Yes, she may be the direct grandchild arriving from America while Ameh and Bih were the grandnieces brought in from the village, but as long as she ate and slept in this house she had to do her share. Washing the dishes was a minor chore, but the girl always had an excuse to escape. Yesterday, it was because she had gone to the cybercafé and lost track of time, before that, she was on her menses and had cramps—as if cramps ever stopped life from happening
Immediately Ameh entered the room she felt something was wrong. The madame was sleeping, but fitfully; her head tossing from side to side, her fists gripping the bedspread. Ameh looked Belinda over, took in the signature short hair of a boarding student, her nice shade of brown—the colour of bitter kola before the shell was cracked—and the tear tracks on her face which lent a back story to the fitful sleep. Ameh hesitated, perhaps she shouldn’t get the child up for a scolding. It could wait. It was then her eyes landed on the note, pinned down with the Advil bottle serving as a paperweight. She read the note once, then twice, then after her eyes had scanned the measly three sentences for the third time, she heard herself exclaim, “Jesus!” even though she felt speechless.
“Get up! Get up!” Ameh was pounding on Belinda’s body now, willing God to let her live just so she could kill her. That is how Belinda came “back to life,” with Ameh’s fists drumming on her chests and Ameh’s voice breaking in half sobs over her name and the constant repetition of “Jesus, Jesus, God abeg!” Belinda coughed and sputtered and opened her eyes even as Ameh commanded for her to do just that.
Resigned to the knowledge that she was still very much alive, Belinda drew herself up on the bed, hugging herself with her arms folded to her chest. The first thing she realised was that she had a headache. One would think that after taking fifteen ibuprofen tablets one would at least be void of a headache. Her hand went up to wipe her eyes and she felt her still tear-damp eyelashes which could explain the headache.
Belinda gradually took in Ameh’s presence, feeling the callouses of Ameh’s hands on her arms as she willed Belinda’s attention, demanding obvious answers to her questions: “Who wrote this note? What did you mean? Get up, answer me! Are you mad?”
“Leave me alone. Why did you wake me up?” Belinda’s voice was low and drawn out. “You should have just left me.”
“You are mad. You must be!” Ameh spoke with surprising rage for someone who had just been begging God for Belinda’s life. “Or whether na curse for this family oh? God forbid!” She snapped her fingers as if warding off the imagined curse and continued in an obvious attempt to backtrack, “See eh, if you wan die, please do it when I have left this house because me I don’t want to have to work for another funeral. Nonsense!”
When Ameh suddenly got up and left, Belinda feared what would come next. Feared what her grandparents’ reactions would be; Pa was already weak from losing so much and Mami would surely take her to the Pentecostal church she now frequented for an exorcism.
But Ameh didn’t tell Mami or Pa; she didn’t even bring up the incident. She was noticeably nicer though; she didn’t scold Belinda so much and must have asked Bih not to as well. It was three days later when Ameh finally did approach her. It was a Saturday so Bih had gone to the market and Pa and Mami had gone to play njangi. Only the two of them were left at home.
Ameh met Belinda in the bedroom the girls shared. She sounded uncomfortable as she asked Belinda to sit up. “I want to talk with you,” she said. “About what you did the other day.” Belinda said nothing, just waited to hear what she’d been expecting, a scolding and that her grandparents must be told.
“I have not told Mami or Pa because it would be too much for them just now. But I hope you know that what you did was wrong. I hope you know.”
Belinda knew no such thing. But still said nothing.
Ameh continued, “I have been thinking of how to discuss what must have pushed you to think of such a thing.” Belinda noted that Ameh obviously found it difficult to say suicide. “I know you have had a very difficult time, but I think you are more blessed than you realise.”
Belinda felt her eyes sting. She wanted to cry and was struggling not to in Ameh’s presence. Whether Ameh noticed the struggle or not, she continued speaking calmly. “I asked a friend of mine about this,” and as Belinda lowered her head in frustration, Ameh added quickly, “I didn’t mention that it was you, and he’s not even in Cameroon. I just asked him how to help someone like you.” Belinda heard “someone suicidal” clearly. “He said some things, a lot. And he reminded me of a film we had watched together when he was in Cameroon, Freedom Writers. I watched it again yesterday. We can watch it together if you like. But it gave me this idea I hope will help.”
Ameh moved from the door where she’d been leaning and speaking all this while and Belinda raised her head as she approached, noticing a book in her hand for the first time.
“Take this ledger, I want you to use it as a journal. If you can’t talk to me just write what is disturbing you in the book and leave it in the brown handbag under the bed. No one touches it. We’ll be the only ones to use the journal. I’ll occasionally write prompts for you to think about in it, like exercises. My friend gave me some. And you can answer as you like.”
Ameh stopped talking for a while, likely out of exasperation over Belinda’s silence. When she opened her mouth again, her words were a tired plea. “I don’t want to tell Mami or Pa about this, I want to understand and help. Please Belinda, I beg you, please don’t think of taking your life. Please just try this journal thing and help me help you, okay? Please?”
The tears Belinda had been struggling with fell freely now. Ameh joined her on the bed and hugged her, now the silent one as Belinda’s heavy sobs echoed through the otherwise empty house.
This is how Ameh became an amateur therapist; regularly visiting the cybercafé to seek knowledge from her former ENS classmate now furthering his studies as a counsellor in the US, all in an attempt to help Belinda overcome what neither of them understood.
In the weeks that followed they had whole conversations through the journal. And as Belinda returned to the dormitory with the resumption of school, Ameh would visit on Fridays. One of the on-campus staff was a family friend and they would meet there for “journal handovers.” One journal became two, then four by the next holiday.
Belinda would make an entry in the journal with some problem that weighed her down; whether or not to forgive her father and if so how? Why she had to stay with Mami and Pa even though they hardly made any effort to understand her, to understand that she was different. Or some soliloquy of discontent; her dreams of how her sweet sixteen would be, her thoughts on boarding school and how it meant living with bullies in school and having no escape… she would prefer to attend a day school.
After every entry, using a different colour pen, blue or red in contrast to Belinda’s preferred black, Ameh would make inserts here or there as if reviewing Belinda’s train of thought, finding the negativity, attacking its one-sided logic and suggesting another perspective. With her red pen, Ameh would correct Belinda’s perception of herself:
No, you are not ugly with your low hair. You look like a student should, and you are beautiful, see your white neat teeth; your skin is so pretty, I envy it; your eyes are like Aunty Beatrice’s own and Pa always smiles because of them.
In one entry Belinda had ranted over being maltreated by Mami and Pa who were miserly with the things which had been shipped for Belinda after the sale of her parents’ home in the US. She railed over being forced to live in Cameroon when she had an American nationality, raged over not even having a good allowance like the other kids in her school whose parents were in the US.
Belinda received the journal the following Sunday to see a two-page entry from Ameh in blue pen offering insights that Belinda had missed or what Pa and Mami, had, in part-kindness and part-adult patronising, deemed unnecessary to tell her.
It was Ameh who told her that most of her parents’ savings had been used up between her father’s impromptu trip to Cameroon, and her mother’s death and subsequent shipping of her corpse home. Ameh had informed her that her father’s story had made rounds in Buea, where he was based, and the shop he had set up was doing poorly as people still had a stigma against AIDS patients. He was barely able to support his treatment let alone contribute to providing for Belinda. He had been asked to return to the US but so far seemed to prefer hopelessly waiting on what would eventually happen.
Ameh’s entry also informed Belinda that the house she had lived in with her parents was foreclosed upon and that the stuff she had in barrels were the last she may ever have, so Mami and Pa were only trying to make them last. Aunty Estella had sent the barrels, Ameh wrote, she had struggled to pack her personal belongings, selling what she could and buying any amenities she felt Belinda and her grandparents would need in Cameroon—things she had seen Belinda’s mum buy before. Few of Belinda’s parents’ friends had helped beyond funeral contributions, Junior’s mother being one of the few to send clothes for Belinda.
There was no money, Ameh told her; Mami and Pa were dependent on the rents they received from their tenants in the set of rooms they had built decades ago on land leading up to the village. This source of income had been ameliorated by what Belinda’s mother would regularly send home and the sporadic payment of their pensions by the government insurance fund, CNPS.
Ameh ended that entry sternly. Belinda, she said, ought to come to terms with the new reality. She had little, and ought to be grateful for people like Aunty Estella who were helping, be grateful to Mami and Pa who were trying their best with the little they had.
After that entry, Belinda did not write the following week. More than ever, she felt like a burden and wanted to die. Perhaps Ameh had sensed it, perhaps she just thought she had to do something to keep the journal exchange going. Whatever the reason, journal entries thereafter were led by Ameh who forced Belinda to write with “homework,” or wrote her own messages to Belinda for her to just read or respond to.
Belinda would collect the journal and see “write five things you hate about your life and find five things you like” written in red ink. Belinda would write seven things she hated and listing Ameh, Aunty Estella and Junior as the only good. Ameh would start a list titled: “Belinda’s Reasons to Live” and keep pages folded after the list pages, explaining with an asterisk at the bottom that the reasons will keep coming to them so they should leave room for more.
*
Belinda thought about all this on the flight to Cameroon. She had returned to the US as soon as she made the A’ Levels and had returned only twice to Cameroon since then: once for her grandfather’s funeral and once for Ameh’s marriage. Ameh had saved her, given her a sense of purpose, and inspired her decision to study clinical psychology and help others choose life again, as she had been helped.
She thought of Ameh regularly, of her offering therapy with no training, just love and will. But till now, all these years later, Belinda was only just realising that Ameh never showed her own pain. Why hadn’t she ever left a blank journal page for Ameh to share what disturbed her? Why hadn’t she ever returned the favour as an adult? How could she have thought bimonthly calls and gifts of money for birthdays and Christmas were enough? She had believed Ameh was content as an ENS graduate, a government school teacher with a fairly regular pay, a husband and beautiful daughter. A belief that was shattered just two days ago with news of Ameh hospitalised and on life support after what was reported as the latest of regular battering at the hands of her husband.
Restless in her seat, Belinda tried to picture an abused Ameh and clenched her fists. Was this too not attempting suicide in a different way, to stay in a relationship suffocating you? Had Ameh ever written a note, mentioned something that could have been an SOS? Nothing came to mind. But like Ameh had done over a decade before when she found Belinda’s note, Belinda whispered the two-word prayer, “God abeg.” With those two words Belinda willed the flight to arrive in time, hoped she was not too late, that Ameh was still alive, and pleaded for a second chance for the person who had helped her live again.
“Lifesavers” by Monique Kwachou is from Your Feet Will Lead You Where Your Heart Is.
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