Reading the Ceiling (16 page)

Aunt Yadi is called. She drives up from Connecticut overnight to pick me up. When she comes into the room where I have been left, mostly asleep, I wake up in a daze.

‘What time is it?' My tongue feels coated with tar and mucus. It also feels too large for my mouth.

I sit up too quickly and my head begins to pound so intensely, I fall back onto the sofa with a groan. Aunt Yadi rushes over to my side in a second.

‘Take it easy, Ayodele. You need to rest up. I'm here to take you home.'

‘What day is it? Lecture . . .'

‘The nurse here thinks you need a break from studying. The important thing is to come with me now. You're not well today. When you're a bit more sorted out, we'll work out how to get you back to your lectures.'

I try to shake my head, but that only feels as if I've left a piece of ultra-heavy rock inside which I am moving slowly from side to side as I incline one way then the other. There is no point in arguing.

‘What about my room, my clothes?'

‘I was there this morning and I've packed most of the things you'll need. The student service will send in a volunteer to clear out your room later.'

We leave together. I am escorted like an invalid – I shuffle along, and lean on Aunt Yadi as we make our way along the corridor. I have to concentrate hard on where I am putting my feet, and I aim to put each footstep as close as possible to the next wine- coloured triangle in the carpet.

The journey is soothing. The first time I wake up, we're still in Boston, and on a raised roadway with most of the high-rise buildings on our right, glinting back reflections from the sky too bright for my eyes. The next time, we're on the three-lane highway, moving quite fast, with the wheels of the car tracking the joins separating sections of the road. When I next open my eyes, I can keep them open for longer and I stretch my legs and move my head a bit.

Aunt Yadi asks, ‘Water?' and nods towards the drink holder set into the space between us. The water tastes funny – as if it has grit in it, chalky grit. I drink some anyway as my throat is dry and I haven't eaten anything.

‘Where are we?'

‘Almost there, we're coming up to the last big town before I turn off the road towards my house.'

The road narrows and trees, mostly bereft of leaves, edge closer to it. Some plucky evergreens jut their sharp angles across the skyline. Everything else looks lifeless, and tinged with chill.

In contrast, the house feels warm and smells faintly of
churrai
, incense that Aunt Yadi burns to flavour the air.

‘You can go through to your room to rest if you like. Or stay in the sitting room with the television on. Either way, I'll make you some hot strong tea and bring it in to you. Let me take your coat.'

The weeks pass, with Aunt Yadi nursing me by telling me what to do: when to eat, shower, go to bed. She returns to her job, as a lecturer in a small state college nearby, leaving me to occupy myself during the day. I cannot read, so she gets out books on tape or CD. I put them on for the comfort of a human voice, but the stories are usually too long for my mind to concentrate on for more than a few minutes at a time. I play them over and over again.

Winter morphs into a soggy spring, when the blossom comes out briefly before being blown away by gusts of wet wind. I borrow boots, a long slicker with a hood and start to venture outside for walks. The tears which spring unbidden, seeping out of scratched, clawed eyeballs, seem less conspicuous in the rain. With a wet face, I am able to cry whenever I want and for whatever reason. When I am able to look around me for longer periods, I start to notice other people, buildings, plants trying to stuff life into unwilling branches and twigs. Soon, staying at home all day listening to books on tape is no longer enough.

A neighbour of Aunt Yadi's pops in to borrow some wood polish, and mentions in passing, ‘I don't know why I bother to pay her. I honestly cannot see a difference beyond my desk looking a bit tidier.'

I offer to do her cleaning.

She looks startled, her eyes fly to Aunt Yadi's face. ‘Have a chat with your aunt about it first, and let me know.'

After the neighbour leaves, I explain, ‘It'll give me something else to do. At least I'll have a reason for going out.'

My first cleaning job, for three hours a week, pays $10 per hour. My fame soon spreads, and I am busy every day of the week, going from one house to the next in the neighbourhood.

I always tackle the kitchen first, it's the messiest room in the house. I load the dishwasher, scrub the top of the stove clean, scour the sink. Then I finish off by sweeping and mopping the floor.

Each movement is rhythmic, the dipping into the bucket, the squeezing of the mop, the backward-and-forward swishing over the floor until my shoulders ache.

Bathrooms are places where it's hard to hide slovenliness. I pick clothes off the floor, dump cleanser into toilet bowls, squirt it into sinks to remove spat-out toothpaste, drench baths to dislodge rings of dirt left around the rims.

I go through bedrooms and shake bed linen free. I load up washing machines and take out fresh linen from airing cupboards. I open windows to let the air free, vacuum carpets and polish floors. A necessary job. My arm muscles start to gain tone and I look less like an invalid. I brush my hair before I go out, and always change out of my pyjamas before I leave the house.

While I clean, my entire purpose in life is to restore order. There's the detritus of daily living all around me. I put things away and leave with rooms tidy, clean, with everything in its place.

Mali doesn't have many tarmac roads. This one is a memory of what it used to be – the tarmac crumbled a while ago leaving little hummocks of gravelled tar tipped with laterite dust. I left America and came here for distance, so I can be miles away from dashed hope, from home, from ambition. I am in my six-year-old Citroen
Deux Cheveux
, bought new when I first arrived with my generous relocation allowance. Its motorcycle-sized engine hums away, sounding like the self-satisfied purr of a very fat cat. It is interrupted by the kind of frequent burps a small government official would make after eating a huge mound of crispy fried fish. Market stalls displaying fruit line both sides of the road. Apples imported from France, tinged with an almost golden green, sit in specially moulded rough cardboard dividers that separate layers of fruit. Spiky-topped pineapples in their brisk orange skins squat alongside. Whole bunches of green bananas are propped up against the supports of the stalls, with their squat black-tailed ends curving upwards.

My observations are cut short when the car simply stops. I am on a slight rise in the road and start to slide backwards. I twist and turn the handbrake back. The fruit seller at the stall opposite mouths something I cannot make out.

I shout back, ‘Pardon?'

He walks out from behind his stall and crosses the road over to my window, with its bottom half swung open and held up by a flimsy metal clasp.

He bends down.
‘Les difficultes?'

‘I think so, yes,' I reply, as I eye the fuel indicator.

Empty. If only I'd made it to the top of the rise, I would have been able to coast down to the petrol station.

‘Do you need help?' he asks.

By now, my car is attracting other people. A boy bends down to grin at himself in my right-hand wing mirror. A bandy-legged toddler waddles over to view the headlights. A woman with a sleeping baby tied to her back and a sun-yellow scarf on her head pokes the man who's just asked me the question. He turns away and they start a conversation, of which I understand little. Other stallholders abandon their wares and drag their feet into flipflops to come and check out what's happening.

I make my decision. ‘No. I don't need any help. Thank you.'

I try to close my window as a prelude to executing my plan.

‘Excuse me,' I say to the man who has one arm stretched out on my car, seeming not to have heard a thing I've said.

I prod the arm and point. ‘I want to close the window.'

He stands up straighter but continues talking to the yellow-scarfed woman. Someone else, with her loosely slung baby suckling at one elongated breast, joins their discussion. I slam the window down and the three of them glance at me, temporarily pausing their extended discussion of my situation.

I pick up my handbag from the passenger seat and slide the little lock on my door to Open.

‘Excuse me,' I repeat, opening the door an inch. The suckling-baby woman shifts her feet slightly. No one else moves. I holler again through the crack. ‘Excuse me.'

It does not seem to please them.

‘
Madame
, wait a minute.'

I don't want to wait, so I jerk the door outwards, forcing the woman to take a further two steps away from the car. My exit isn't wide enough for me to get out but I put my left foot outside, to add emphasis to my declared motive.

The man at the centre of the throng of people tugs at her arm and pulls her closer to him. He seems to be in charge.

‘We can help you.'

I cannot face the repercussions of how much I might have to pay for the help, even for a tiny push up the hill, given the number of people for whom I have provided a diversion from fruit selling. I want to walk. At the petrol station, I will ask someone to lend me a jerrycan and fill it up with petrol. Then I will walk back to the car and pour it in.

‘No. I will get some petrol.' I point up the hill, and ease myself through the crush of bodies.

The older children detach themselves from the group and start to follow me. A few sharp admonitions from mothers make some turn back: Ibrahim! Fatima! Mohammed! Miriam!

The rest giggle and run about. A couple of them try to match my stride and my walking style, waving their arms about and bending forward slightly with looks of intent concentration on their faces. Their bare feet stir up little dust clouds and we soon crest the hill. They run down the hill, with arms in the air, screaming for the sheer joy of it.

At the petrol station, it's not quite as straightforward as I expected. There are no jerrycans on loan. I can rent one for half an hour, but first I'd have to pay a deposit for the jerrycan equal to twice its sale value.

‘How much is a new one?' I ask.

‘We are actually out of stock, madame, and the only one I have available is a used one of my own. I could sell that to you at halfprice.'

I accept and ask for petrol to be pumped into it. I should know how trade works – a needy buyer and a willing seller. I am the one-person international trade department for the regional economic community, based in Mali.

By the time I get to the office, it's mid-morning and the secretaries have begun their tea break. The cleaner, Seydou Sankara, is delivering the last of the enamelled tin cups filled with hot tea. The tray he proffers to the receptionist has a large spoon stuck in an enormous plastic jar full of sugar and three large cans of La Vache Qui Rit evaporated milk, each with two holes pierced for pouring.

At my desk, I find a new pile of documents, most with a black plastic spiral binding and thick cellophane covers, which clearly indicate their source: internally produced reports. On top of the pile is a blue sheet of paper, headed:
From the desk of Musa Faal
. My boss has scribbled something:

Prepare summaries of all documents, and a position paper on West African cotton by Thursday. Attending fisheries meeting in Ouagadougou. I shall also want your decision by the time I get back.

Musa travels to any meeting he can. The per diems are good, and he often traces a route to and from Mali that goes through Dakar. In this way, he gets to see his wife and children, for whom Bamako exists only as an edge on their geographical boundary of sensible places to live. From what I can tell, the map extends around Dakar then out to sea, and briefly comes back inland to circle St Louis in the north of Senegal. Then it scoots past the Mauritanian coast and zooms up to France and encloses the French half of Switzerland, up to Geneva. It follows the French border up to the Channel, cuts a choppy way across while ensuring all of the United Kingdom is missed out. Then there's a hasty trip across the Atlantic to catch the northeastern coast of the US, with a small enclave around Montreal. To access a chunk of America's western coast, it has to take in a snippet of Panama before a final dive for a funky slice of California.

I've never met his wife, but his teenage children have been to visit. I asked Lamine, lanky and be-jeaned, how his holiday was going.

‘
Il y a rien a faire ici,
' he replied.

I knew what he meant, but felt it would be a betrayal of Bamako not to acknowledge its simplicity in its dustiness. The river, wide, lazy, with its huddles of unwanted sand, deserves better. The orange light that blankets the brown buildings at sunset should count for something.

By the time Lamine's father returns, I need to decide whether I can live here for another two years.

It takes the rest of the day for me to speedread the documents. Around eight, with sooty darkness as company, I get into my car. Life closes early in Bamako; a few people go winking by with their blue metal kerosene lamps – but apart from that, the roads are pretty deserted. Only two cars pass me, their headlights nodding as they negotiate the dips and bumps of the road.

My watchman, Ndiarra, scrambles to my gate, which is simply metal tubes shaped into two rectangles, with a flimsy grid soldered on top. My house is box-shaped with a covered verandah jutting out in the middle and darkened windows on either side –on the left, the kitchen and dining room, and the right, my bedroom and study. The house is painted cream, but this can only be seen where the external lights carve arcs out of the inky black shadows. The garden is hardy brown, with nothing growing in it except for dust-covered, scraggy hedge plants. There are also two unwilling mango trees that flower expectantly with the rain, and then deliver tiny fruit that are mostly stone and never ripen.