Maame(4)

“Hello, Mum. How are you?”

She laughs and it tinkles effervescently. “Hello, darling. I am blessed. Now, I’ve found someone with better conversion rates than last time, so let me give you the address. Do you have pen and paper?”

“I don’t have any spare cash this month.”

“Why? Have you been recklessly spending?”

“No.”

Pause. “What’s wrong, Maame? You don’t sound right. Tell your mother.”

Mum alternates between calling me one of three things: my name and all its variations included, a term of endearment, or Maame. “Maame” has many meanings in Twi, but in my case, it means “woman.” I’ve been called Maame ever since I can remember and I loved being referred to as a woman when I was still a girl. I loved being viewed as a grown-up before I’d even gotten my period. But now I—

“Maddie?” And I can hear the impatience coating the edge of her syllables like ever-present shadows.

“I’m not feeling very well.” The sun stays out late now, so I’ve shut the curtains in my room. I’m sat in a corner of my bed with my knees to my chest and I think about how to best describe how low I’ve felt without being able to list any defining reasons for it. When I feel my time to explain is running out, I say, “I’m just sad and, I think, anxious.”

“About what?”

“Just everything I’m doing at home and at work. I feel heavy and hopeless and tired and like I’m not really living—”

Mum sighs. “Maddie, please.” She stretches each word to emphasize the weariness behind her begging. “You like to complain about this too much. You’re not doing a lot, really, are you? You should see how the children here live. Don’t you relax when you come home from work and on the weekends? It’s because you don’t ever go out.”

My eyes begin to water.

“I have said you need to go outside more because you’ll never find a husband sitting at home,” she continues. “Your father doesn’t need company during all the sun’s hours. That’s why you’re sad all the time—you have no fun.”

I almost tell her that fun doesn’t equate to happiness; at the very least, it lends you happiness and I want to know how to keep it. I’ve googled “How to be happy”; I’ve taken walks in the park and written long gratitude lists; I’m consuming more fruits and vegetables and going to bed early; I’ve given out compliments and practiced mindful breathing. I have tried to fix myself.

“I think maybe I should go to the GP and—”

“No. We don’t rely on the GP for things like that,” Mum says. “They’ll just give you drugs; they work on some kind of commission with it.”

“I highly doubt that’s true.”

“I know more than you do about how the world is working, Maddie,” she says. “They’ll give you drugs for ailments that do not exist and then you will get sicker. It’s not necessary. With God, there is no illness He cannot cure, that’s why we rely on Him for all things.”

I quietly ask, “Then why doesn’t He give you money?”

“He blesses me through you, my daughter,” she says with finality.

I hug myself a little tighter.

“Have you been praying and reading your Bible?” Mum asks. “You know you always get like this when you stop, when you give the devil a chance. Have you been tuning in to that prayer channel I told you about—the five A.M. one?”

After we hang up, I start making dinner for Dad. Tears pour until I can taste salt. “Something is genuinely wrong with you,” I whisper, cutting peppers. “You’re so messed up. Chemically imbalanced, maybe—you should google that. You can’t be sad for no reason; it’s not a human’s natural state. In life, you’re meant to be happy or content, only experiencing moments of sadness, so if sadness is your natural state, what does that say about you?” I put the knife down and slap my palm against my forehead. “Just fucking stop it.” Surely, if I hit my head hard enough, I can fix my brain.

I wipe my eyes and keep cutting the peppers.





Chapter Two


I could take a more direct line into the West End, but morning walks featured extensively on all the “How to Be Happy” articles I read—something about daylight exposure. Besides, it only takes twenty minutes to walk along the River Thames, which today shimmers near-blue in the sunlight. I plug in my earphones and listen to a band a colleague introduced the office to by plugging her speaker in on the one Friday afternoon senior management were away. A band whose songs make me think of summers that don’t belong to me; of new Converses and cold drinks, short dresses and barbecues, and fleeting bursts of perennial freedom.

I work at the Covent Garden Theatre, more commonly known as the CGT. Named somewhat uninspiringly after its location, it’s a giant, haphazardly geometrical, Brutalist concrete building reached by crossing Waterloo Bridge. I enter through the backstage reception, which means I have to be buzzed in, but I’ve tried the other four entrances and got lost each time. The staff themselves described the building as a maze and rumor has it that the reason no map of the theater exists is because no one knows where everything is.

I walk past the stage doors and dressing rooms and once in the lift press for the third floor. Walking through my department’s double doors, I see the “kitchen” area (quotes intended as it’s simply a flat surface with a kettle and shelves heavy with various tea bags, mugs, and plastic cups) hasn’t been cleared. That’ll be my job then.