Reading the Ceiling (12 page)

‘Look here, young man, I am no more past this white line than you are.'

‘If you hadn't swung out.'

‘What do you mean, me?'

Before either of us knows it, the conversation starts to involve index fingers being wagged, hands set on hips, long teeth sucking
tcheepoos
, and faces twisted into knots of anger.

Cars start to honk in both directions. There's no space for them to go around.

In the red Mitsubishi behind me someone shouts, ‘Just move your cars and give us some room to get by.'

I shout back, ‘We're waiting for the police. Find some other way.'

‘How? Look at all the cars behind me.'

I shrug, ‘Well it's not my fault this nincompoop takes out my light on my way to work.'

Eventually, a beret-topped man in a dark blue uniform comes up to tell us we're going to have to move one of our cars to clear the road. The police will use the other to measure where the accident occurred.

He organises several of the able-bodied men in the now sizeable crowd of stall holders and casual passers-by lacking excitement in their morning. Together, they wrench my car free of the taxi and, with me in it steering in neutral gear, perch it on the side of a large open stormwater drain.

I ring the Graceland Garage,

‘What did you say is wrong this time?'

I explain.

‘We'll send out our Land Rover rescue truck.'

In the next few months, I call out Graceland Garage at least four times.

Remi comes to visit her father sometimes. She brings Joy. When Fred complains that Joy cannot keep still and has to play outside, Remi gets cross and storms off, saying that if he can't appreciate having his granddaughter around, then he'll just have to go through old age on his own. The cold lasts until the next time she feels guilty.

The day my mother dies, I am in a mini jam near Latrikunda, in traffic that is so sluggish a tortoise could outrun it. We move forward one painful inch at a time. At the corner where a man sells some
tara
 benches and beds, I notice there is a tiny dirt road, swirling red murran dust around the wheels of the minibuses as they turn into it. What I miss is the end of the storm drain, which has no marking, the bricks once built to guide traffic having been knocked off soon after. I edge the car out of the main line of traffic and turn right. The back wheel does not make it onto the bridge. I hear an ominous thunk and then the grinding of the wheel against the concrete. The car settles onto its back axle and refuses to budge when I press down to inject petrol into its engine. Everything stops.

It's getting dark by the time my car is back on four wheels and a mechanic is checking underneath.

Taiwo phones. ‘Mum died ten minutes ago. The hospital just called.'

My mother's timing is impeccable.

‘What! I'm stuck in a ditch in traffic.'

‘Reuben says he'll leave work early and come pick me up to go to the hospital. Get there when you can.'

The mechanic pronounces the car ready. I rummage around my bag but cannot find small money, just a fifty-dalasi note.

‘This is for everyone. I have no change,' I say.

There's a mad scramble as all those who profess to have been involved in the car rescue move forward to claim their portion.

Lights are coming on in the little shops around. Those that are legal, on marked land designated for the purpose, have bare bulbs powered from the electric grid. Others that are perched on the road verge, with makeshift covers over the stormdrain for their customers to stand on, have kerosene lamps looped over nails, offering weak, dimmed light in the dusk. The mechanic waves his hand around. ‘I think you will all agree that I must first take my fees for being a mechanic. The rest, I will divide up for everyone else.'

There are a few murmurs of disagreement, but I turn the car round, edge back into the traffic and head for the hospital.

I guess it must happen to many people, that when you are unhappy to the degree that I am at the time my mother dies, all kindnesses become nests of comfort. Foday Sillah, the priest at my mother's church, comes round on the Sunday after she dies, doing his rounds of spreading goodwill in his parish. He seems prepared to chat and I drink it up. I kneel like a deer at a waterhole, support my body with lowered front limbs, put my head down to the water and drink my fill.

The comfort is in the little things.

It is in someone who is prepared to sit through silence. When I serve him tea, he sips it slowly as the light in my mother's living room plays with his face. I sit opposite with tiredness pulling at my eyeballs, and my shoulders frightened into tightness.

Kainde flies over for the funeral. We meet as siblings to plan, with Taiwo extending an invitation to Reuben for advice from a male point of view.

The week shudders along and the places where I can find quiet are less and less. My mother is gone. Yet the breaths of my mother's house swirl around me.

At the supermarket, I stand in the queue with my basket. In it are my calcium tablets and a tub of ice-cream. I'm behind a girl in a black leotard top with a deep V-neck and a skirt that swirls around her ankles. She is able to keep still with one knee bent, balancing on the other and not appearing at all stiff. She turns around as if she's felt my stare, and smiles. I smile back and strike up small talk.

‘I used to have a skirt like that once,' I tell her. ‘Yours looks good on you.'

‘Thanks,' she says, ‘what colour was yours?'

‘Red,' I reply. ‘Red – and it had two layers of froufrou at the bottom and was made of silk, and I used to wear it with one of those wraparound tops, long-sleeved. White.'

‘That sounds lovely,' she says.

‘Yes, it was. In it, I was too. It was one of those outfits that raise your mood to its level – my skirt was vibrant. Do you dance?'

The cashier extends a hand with a receipt and coinage as change, the girl in the black skirt stretches out long fingers to take it, and she half replies: ‘Yes, modern. Bye then.'

She walks off, her body tightly tucked into itself, wearing a piece of my past.

The cashier's mouth curves into a smile that only lifts up at the very edges of her mouth, and she starts to put my stuff through the till. I come here several times a week to pick up things, always small items that I can fit into my tote, but she never throws me a look of recognition.

When I was a girl I used to think all cashiers brimmed with poise. I wanted to become one. They always looked perky in buttoned uniforms a bit tight up top, slightly open, and had fingernails that used to take my breath away. The ones that impressed me were long talons, bright with pink lustre or geranium red, holding each item from the basket as if it were a treasure. The hands to which they belonged would turn an item over to locate the price, tap the number in, and then slide it to the packer waiting behind.

I see the cashier turn a wide-toothed grin, with a hint of a glisten of gold, on the customer behind me – a sharp-suited young man. I gather up my bag and leave.

I opt for a brisk walk on the beach, as brisk as I can make it with the warmth still clinging close to me, like fur. I stop at the golf course. The cut grass is freshly green, neatly sloping down the bank towards the sea. The park keepers have planted jasmine against the low wooden benches, so when I sit down for a rest, I prick off some of the tiny white flowers and let their crushed sweetness melt over me. The water plays with the breeze. I have a snack with me: neatly wrapped tuna sandwiches, a pack of crisps and a tiny flask of hot sweet tea.

While I eat, I notice a family on the beach with children. Their voices carry. They are shrieking at each other about sweets.

‘She won't share. She's being greedy!'

‘Calm down, you two. At once. Or I'll take the Skittles away. Now.'

A wail follows.

‘She hit me,' screams one.

‘She did it first. She scratched me,' screams the other.

‘That's it! I'm taking that,' yells the mother.

Double wails.

‘Pleeeeeease NOOOOOO!! Muuum!'

It's not that I
mind
children. My mother always expected me to become a mother in my turn, and a lot else besides.

I must have chosen this path in little steps, I have been so afraid of the harm I could do to a single other person. Harm was done to me too. Is that how it goes? The hurt yo-yoing from person to person until it loses its bounces and then stays in that last person – still and immovable. With all the Akims in the world, this is what I chose.

My mother – towards the end – when her memory played tricks on her would hold me one day and ask me never to grow up; another day she would scream at me for taking her favourite child away. She asked me once, almost playfully, ‘And what do you think of childbirth, eh? Does it hurt, jab at you and make you yell like there is no tomorrow?' A contented smile appeared on her face. ‘I bore twin girls, beautiful girls. Not everyone gets to have twins, you know. A blessing, a balm for my heart they were.' I barely knew her then. My Ma as I remembered her, acid of tongue, unreliable in praise, was gone. And instead was someone who wandered between different tenses: when her past became future and her present was never remembered. In odd moments, she seemed to glimpse that she had somehow lost herself, but mostly she hardly knew what she was. She became scared of the dark, and always needed a light on in her room. Faces from long ago she treated as old friends and her ever-present daughters were forgotten.

A young couple come ambling past sharing jean pockets, jumping the little steps to the beach together.

Fred is at home, possibly sitting in his wooden chair on the verandah, with a blanket covering his knees. The radio is probably on, very loud, as his ears have gone, and he needs new batteries in his hearing aid. I have ordered some from England which should arrive next week.

I go down the steps to the beach, not walking in the middle, where they are worn and the tread has an uneven edge. I walk with my body tilted sideways, making my right leg take the next step and carry all my weight before I bring the left to join it. Then the next. Halfway down, I stop to take my breath and let my eyes catch the sea. The waves are frothing busily in whisked white. There's a huddle of boys kicking a ball around on the beach, skimming splashes of wet sand.

We used to come down here sometimes when I was a girl, and I would skip down the steps to a beach empty of people and hotels, my flipflops flapping, my braid ends wrapped in red ribbon and bouncing. I'd wait at the bottom, watching my mother and Aunt K come down with a picnic bag each, packed with things from home – hard-fried tiny dough pieces, freshly warmed roasted cashew nuts,
wonjor
 juice, and maybe if we were lucky a teardrop-shaped bottle of imported orange squash. ‘I've beat you again,' I'd shout to my sisters. ‘You're bigger,' my mum would shout back for them. ‘You're still slowcoaches,' I'd yell back. Sometimes, the wind would whip the words away and we would keep shouting at each other until they came closer, when Aunt K would put down her bag, park her hands on her hip and let out an aah of accomplishment and pleasure.

‘Can I choose today? Can I choose?' Taiwo might say as I ran off to find a good sitting spot. ‘Pleaaaasse,' she'd beg. When I refused, she'd appeal to our mother. ‘Ma, Ayodele won't let me choose where to sit. I
never
 get to choose.'

I have taken to going to my mother's house in the evenings to rummage amongst the things she kept in my old bedroom. I find the old jewellery box that played a tune. When I open it, the ballerina in her pink tulle is still there. But her leg is broken. She is lying mixed in with heavy braids of gold chain and a tangle of silver brooches and earrings. The clockwork judders a bit as I twist the key, as if to prise itself out of a bump of metal rust. The mechanism still works and the tinkle begins, slower than I remember. The stump of the ballerina's leg begins to twirl.

I look for some photographs, anything that will bring back the faces, that will slice the time between now and then. I show some to Fred. There are pictures of Remi and me, dressed to go out on my eighteenth birthday. She has on a slinky silver dress. I am wearing trousers and a see-through top. Fred doesn't remember.

I find a grey-toned picture of me sitting on my father's lap, both of us dressed in Sunday finery and smiling widely. My ear is resting against a cloth-wrapped button on his safari suit. When I peer closely at his face in the picture, I can see what seems like a worry on his brow.

There are pictures of my sisters, just after they were born, their tiny heads together in identical pink babygros. There are more pictures of them as toddlers, with fat cheeks. Then as the pictures go on, Taiwo gets plumper and Kainde rangier. I am there too, on my first day at school, with two new upper teeth bursting free, and my knees freshly slicked with Vaseline.

School pictures. Home pictures. Party pictures. As I leave, I glance up at the ceiling. I see that it was painted with only one thin coat. I can make out fuzzy edges of faded brown underneath the paint. Not enough to dream a whole future, but enough to imagine how the past could have been. The time that has passed between me lying on my bed, making my choices, and the now, with hardly any choices left to make. My life is more than half over. I am next in line to go now, now that Ma has gone.

Remi and I approach the disco in celebratory mood, my arm tucked into hers. The door swings open to a blast of dark and thudding. It is our invitation to pull on our party faces. As we wait to pay and be checked out by the bouncer at the door, I glance back at the row of lights dotting the narrow footpath along which we have walked. The disco is right next to the ocean, and doubles as a restaurant, with outside seating in thatched alcoves with flowers creeping up their sides.