Reading the Ceiling (11 page)

The knocks on the glass pane are smart, sharp. Three times. Three knocks.

As I feel my way out of bed, Fred turns and grunts in his sleep. I misjudge the opening of the bedroom door and the edge sears into my big toe and wrings an
aah
of intense pain from my lungs. I wait to find myself and then limp out. My feet meet the rough softness of our sitting room rug and I hobble along to the front door, not quite ready to put a light on inside the house.

The bulb on the verandah reflects off the shorn shiny head of a young man in dark sunglasses. He stands with his legs slightly apart in a pair of khaki trousers. His short-sleeved shirt is made of a printed leopard fabric and cropped just above the hip. When he sees my face peering out at him through the curtains, he lets his right hand swivel back so I can see he has a holster on.

‘Special Investigations. We're looking for Frederick Adams. He lives here.'

I cannot find any questions to ask. No time to think. No place to consider hiding him in. My head nods itself and I pull away from the door. Back to our bedroom where I try to shake Fred up.

‘Men at the door. They want you.'

He turns over onto his back and blinks up at me. A plank of light falls into the room from the corridor. He's never easy to wake.

The knocking is repeated at the door. I shout out, ‘He's coming,' but the noise continues.

I shake him again. ‘You need to wake up and talk to these people. Shall I ring Musa?'

I walk back to them and say, ‘He was sleeping.'

‘If he doesn't hurry, we'll come and wake him up ourselves.'

I go back to get him. Fred's sitting up on the bed now, hands on knees, still fast asleep.

‘You'll have to go in your pyjamas.' I'm shaking his shoulders as I tell him. ‘We can't make them crosser than they already are.' More sharp raps on the front door. Fred gets up and shuffles along, only just waking up enough to say, ‘But what do they want with me?'

At the door, the young man says, as I open up, ‘Old man, you took your time. We want to ask you some questions. You're coming with us.'

I notice the young man's shoes. They are black leather, buffed, with the tips of the toes curled slightly upwards. As he turns away, I can see the laces, threaded through in a classic crossover pattern. When I was six, I was taught to do mine just like that.

Two of the three men who'd been standing behind him all this while, dressed in army fatigues and berets, step forward, each taking one of Fred's arms. They propel him so it seems like he's being carried.

I shout out, ‘Where are you taking him?'

‘We'll bring him back when we're done.'

My toe hurts. I look down. The door lifted a flap of skin off my toe. Underneath, blood is slowly oozing out. I need to sit down. I need to clean it.

*

I ring Musa as soon as light breaks. It takes him three days to find Fred. He's being held in a cell at the main police station. Fred's been heard saying things about the government. Now they want to know where he's getting his opinions from.

He comes home five days after Musa finds him. There's a darkly lined inch of healing skin high on his right cheek. His eyelid is twice its normal size, and has forced his eye half closed. His voice is slurred as if his tongue has swollen to fill up his mouth and left no space for words.

It takes three weeks of fiery soups, fish, oxtail, and pig's trotters to get him to stay out of bed longer and longer, until he stays up after breakfast, goes in for a nap after lunch and sits up in the evening to listen to the radio. He says little. Whenever I ask ‘How are you feeling today?' he looks at me, steadily, then says, ‘Just fine.'

Musa, Suni and Alhaji drop in to see him sometimes. They phone at other times. It's not until early November, when the sun has started to bake the moisture out of the ground, that they decide its time to have another
ataya
session, as they used to.

When I look at him next to his friends, with a picture of how they used to be barely three months ago, I see how Fred has lost his jaunt. His skin is stretchier, his body has shrunk in it – his jowls, rough with several days' worth of stubble, fold over like a new definition of landscape. Air can puff in under his shirt to take up space freed by his shrinking paunch.

Their renewed
ataya
 sessions are like a two-day-old balloon, not quite full, and with a skin that gives a tired
thwap
 rather than a high-pitched
thwop
. You see it if you look closely, but otherwise you won't realise that the skin looks more like crepe than smooth enamel, that light no longer glints off it, that its bounce is a little lower.

Musa beats Fred in a straight run of three games.

‘Boy, I'm seeing better than you tonight.' I can hear their conversation, fluttering in with the billows of the curtain by the door, and there is a ring of delight in Musa's voice.

Musa's lead increases to a run of six games. I hear Alhaji's high voice: ‘Six, man, what
are
 you doing?'

I drop a splodge of thick dough into a pool of hot oil. I am frying some pancakes for their snack. In the sizzle, I don't catch what happens next.

There's a babble of four men's voices, all of them speaking at once. Fred comes through the front door, clawing at the curtains that refuse to part before him.

‘Something's broken. We need a broom and the metal dustpan,' he says.

‘Cupboard beside the back door,' I reply.

His shoulders slope down as he takes small steps towards the kitchen door. He is in no hurry to finish his errand, or to return to the verandah, to his friends.

When I go out later with a bowl of hot fat
beignets
,  Fred is playing with Suni, who is letting Fred win. But the jollity is no longer in the air. Musa is helping Alhaji with the
ataya
. There's a scatter of charcoal shoved towards a corner, and there's a patch of wet to the left of the draughtsboard.

I come home one day from visiting Aunt K. As I walk into the kitchen, I ask the househelp, ‘
Ainge na?
' Has he eaten?

‘He's at the table, right now.'

It's like a switch goes off in his head, sparked by my voice.

‘Where's the salt? How can you cook food without taste?' He bellows with rage that confuses the ear.

In the small silence that follows, I offer, ‘I'll bring some for you.'

‘What kind of house do I live in? Call this food? It tastes like boiled water.'

He's shouting at me as I round the corner into the dining room. I'm holding out the salt cellar. He pushes back his chair with a fierce scrape. He puts his hands under the table and pulls. For one moment I think he won't pull high enough. But he does. He gives one final angry shove upwards and the table topples. The blue jug full of water that was furthest from him is what I hear breaking first, then there's a clang of Chinese enamel bowl and lid clashing onto thinly vinyled floor. His plate and his glass send their shards right over to my feet. The apologetic tablecloth tries to mop up the puddle of tomato-stained water, the clump of rice, the tiny bowl of
ranha
 upended and lending a splodge of green.

Of course, there have always been times during our five-year marriage when I have not known where he is, or could be. It takes him a while before he starts to go out at night again. At first, I am worried whenever he goes out. I try to ask.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Out with the boys,' he'd say.

‘When will you be back?'

And he'd stretch an eyebrow upward and reply, ‘I'll be back when we are through.'

To begin with, I try to explain with, ‘I'm only asking because . . .'

Sometimes I say something about ‘you never know with these people', or ‘roads are not safe at night with all the guns about', or ‘I heard they've put up a new roadblock on Pipeline Road'. Anything.

He never picks up on my word baits. Apart from the one time when I tried to dress a welt on his back after he came home from the police station, and the Savlon bit into his skin, and he jumped up with the pain, shut his eyes and muttered ‘those bastards'. He never said anything else about his eight days in a police cell. Instead he poured release into himself in golden liquid from a Johnny Walker bottle; he blew out the pain in drafts of smoke that eventually steadied his fingers.

He used to spend one or two days a week out with his friends, but quite often would have them round at our house, to chat, watch the news on television, and loudly declaim about events in the world. Now, he's at home maybe once a week, and mostly silent when in front of the television, sated with news, bulging with opinions, but keeping them to himself. The rest of the time he's ‘out for a quick drink'. This continues to happen, until around Christmas I'm hardly seeing him at all.

The four of them form a tight lattice of evasive answers when contacted for information about the whereabouts of any one of them.

‘Ring Musa and check – he might know.'

‘Last saw him playing billiards.'

‘Dr Faal had mentioned Rotary.'

‘Are you sure he hasn't rung?'

Circular enquiries with no answer except that provided by his key in the lock in the early morning, fumbling. Then followed by uneven breathing, uncertain footsteps. And, always, a shower and the smell of Colgate toothpaste before he comes to find me.

I never expected him to be perfect.

I am making some pastry: a measure of flour, half a measure of groundnut oil, plus a bit of water to make it all stick together. My filling, minced beef with fried onions and a hint of chopped-up green chillies, has been cooling. I roll the beige pastry out thin. When I hold it up to the window, I can see light through it as it bathes itself in borrowed sunshine. I use a large plastic cup, green with stripes of white, to cut out rounds for filling. I have put on a saucepan with deep oil, to heat through. As I work, I hear the oil start to kick up sputters and I see little tunnels of bubbles skipping off the bottom of the pan. I fill the pastry and smooth some water onto a semi-circle of its edge. I clamp the ends together and use a fork to press down, leaving welts. I drop the first one in to check the temperature. It immediately sinks to the bottom, the oil isn't quite hot enough yet. I continue making some more rounds while I wait. When the frying pie starts to float and gently bob with the currents of bubbles, I know I'm ready to start doing big batches. I pick up a towel to hold on to one side of the saucepan and spoon out the pie that is now ready. I concentrate so hard that I leave a tail of towel hanging into the open blue tongues of gas fire. I look down when I feel the heat licking my palm. With one throw I fling the towel off in an arc of hungry flame. My other hand clatters the frying spatula into a pool of its oil at the foot of the stove. I stand and watch the line of black burnt cloth spread, arc, advance and smoulder.

My househelp comes running in.

‘
Woiye. Lu hewh?
' What's happening?

She's out of breath. Her chest heaves as she wipes her hands on her
malan
.

‘
Du dara.
' Nothing. Nothing much.

She takes in the hunk of blue cloth charred black and grey, the tiny steams of smoke still coming from it. She smells the charring. She looks over at me, standing by a lit stove with a blackened meat pie in a slick of oil. She walks to the sink and fills up a cup of water. She pours it over the towel.

I turn off the gas.

Age sweeps across my husband, leaving his mind intact and his body decrepit. His right leg is arthritic. He uses a cane stick carved of ebony smuggled from Cameroun. The trunk of the elephantheaded top winds around the cane. On either side of the trunk, two slides of scoured wood mark the ivory. Two years ago, his prostate was removed. Age shouted and descended with a pension. All that was left youthful in him ran away for good. The gift left by his fear is a new desperation to live.

We now have a cook who can create what Fred wants for breakfast – porridge oats or coos pap, with slices of orange-pink papaya or mangos cut and turned out to sit like crowns on his plate. The meal I learned to cook best from my ma,
krein krein
, is no longer on his list of acceptable foods. The palm oil in it has too much cholesterol. ‘But it's packed with vitamin A,' I protested. In its place is steamed fish with a side salad for lunch. Supper is vegetable soup, with a small round of bread. No chilli peppers, bad for the gut. No cheese, much much too much fat.

*

My mother, on the other hand, looks fit and healthy, but memory has been grated from her mind. When I tell Taiwo that I cannot devote my life to two invalids, she screeches back, ‘Why can't that Remi help to look after her father? It's left to us two to look after Ma. Now that Kainde's decided her life is in America, she's never going to come home to do her share.'

‘Kainde's working hard. She's got an important job with lots of responsibility.'

‘I've got responsibilities too. There's Reuben. He's been promoted and he's also working all hours.'

In the end, we work out a rag-tag arrangement. Some of the nurses at the Fajara Clinic work out a roster that lets them check on Ma on their way to and from work. Nimsatu stops working for me at home and looks after Ma during the day, getting a relative of hers to cover weekends. The final step is paying a Sierra Leonean woman, a refugee, to live in Ma's house and keep an eye on her at night. Kainde sends over some money – much, much more than her share.

As I am driving into work past a clutch of yellow-striped taxis, one of them swirls into a fast U-turn and aims straight for my left headlight. The driver looks at me as if it's my fault.

We both stop. We have to.

We get out of our cars and move towards our engaged bumpers.

‘Mama, you were not looking where you were going.'