Where Women are Kings Read Free

that she said was called Winnie the Pooh. Sue read Elijah lots of stories. On the wall was a shelf with a lot of books, including the book about the bear. The book was Elijah’s second favourite thing in the room.
    His first favourite thing was next to his bed: a photo in a wooden frame. In the photograph, Mama had her hair in millions of tiny plaits and she was smiling, holding a King James Bible that her Uncle Pastor had given her. The colours of Nigeria were behind her: dark red, bright yellow, and green. And she was smiling.
    ‘You have contact tomorrow, so we need to be up extra early.’ Sue kissed the top of his head before he had time to move his head backwards. ‘Sleep well.’
    Elijah watched Sue walk out of the room and shut the door behind her. He touched the place where she’d kissed and pretended it was Mama who had kissed him instead.
    *
    Elijah stretched his hands, rubbing his fingers over a table scratched with a thousand pen marks, the light of day catching the dusting of glitter embedded into the wood, causing sparks as though the table held memories of children playing. Other children. It was morning and Ricardo had come to take him to the contact centre, but only after they’d had a chat. Elijah had sat down at the kitchen table while Ricardo spoke in a low voice to Sue outside the door. Then he came in and smiledand Elijah knew that he’d have to speak. Elijah didn’t much like talking, and the sooner he started talking the sooner they would leave for the contact centre, which was like a sort of prison where they were keeping Mama. He closed his eyes and forced the words out one by one. ‘Satan was here in the beginning, just like God.’
    He opened his eyes widely and looked up at Ricardo, who had leant back in his chair and crossed his long legs in front of him. Wafts of Ricardo’s aftershave travelled towards Elijah’s nose, something fruity, and spicy. Ricardo had told Elijah once that he owned over fifty different aftershaves, and Elijah had imagined them all, bottle after bottle, lined up on a neat shelf. Ricardo shuffled Elijah’s drawings, which were piled up in the middle of the table between them: dozens of penguins, a long branch of a tree with a line of marching ants carrying leaves across it, a butterfly wing in every colour possible – that had taken days – and a chalky white page that was meant to be a polar bear in the Arctic in the middle of a snowstorm. Elijah didn’t like looking at that picture, even though he’d drawn it; it was so empty and secret. But he kept it, anyway, with the others and told Ricardo that it was important.
    I am a wizard
. Elijah wanted to tell Ricardo about the wizard inside him, but his promise to Mama, never, ever to tell about the wizard, echoed in his head. ‘I’m a wicked boy,’ he whispered instead. ‘Full of evil and badness.’ Elijah pushed the words out and thought of Mama waiting for him, of the way her mouth curled into a smile on one side and into a sad face on the other side.
    Elijah reached his hand up to his face and touched the scar on his forehead with his fingertips. It felt lumpy and was the size of a matchstick. ‘Look at my scar,’ he whispered to Ricardo. ‘Only baddies have scars on their face.’
    Ricardo shrugged as if Elijah had said something uninteresting, or untrue. Elijah opened his eyes even wider until they began to fill with water and sting. He tried to ignore the stinging, looked down at the floor and took a big breath of Ricardo’s aftershave. ‘I don’t want to be wicked. Can you help me?’ Elijah’s voice changed into a younger boy’s voice. It moved in all directions as if the words didn’t know the way into Ricardo’s ears. He closed his eyes and listened to his insides:
Wizards bring sickness and bad luck and misery to anyone near. At night, they creep out of your skin and fly into the air before choosing a victim and eating their flesh, sometimes their very soul. I am full of evil