Reading the Ceiling (18 page)

The church part is over. As expected, the Old Testament reading was not from a raunchy part of the Song of Solomon, as Kainde had proposed, but instead from the rib creation passage of Genesis. The New Testament reading was pure Pauline – the parallels of head of household with the head of the Church, and the necessity of the head being male. Kainde and I have further roles to play today, and neither promises much joy. We have found it hard to be enthusiastic in today's celebration. Kainde is Taiwo's official flower girl. ‘But of course we can't call you that,' Taiwo had twittered to her twin sister, ‘you'll be my maid of honour.' I am to give the vote of thanks to the guests at the end of the speeches. Taiwo had said to us, ‘But you have to, otherwise what will people think?'

‘Honestly, who would imagine we were brought up in the same household. In fact, who would believe I shared a womb with her and let her come out first.' Kainde has her chin in her hand and her eyes stare out of the hall, through one of the doors thrown wide open to the garden.

Our mother makes her way through the tables, heading in our direction. Her arms are halfway raised in the air, ready lightly to land a hand on the nearest guest who stops to congratulate her. She has expanded into her role of Mother of the Bride, clearly demonstrated by the beams of joy radiating from her face, her gold-loaded neckline, her recently painted nails, her carefully done-up hair underneath the large headscarf, and the wine- coloured lipstick applied by the girl commissioned to ‘make us look our best'.

She gets closer. I give Kainde a quick pinch on her midriff to jolt her out of her morose daydreaming.

‘Ow,' she starts, turning to glare at me. As she swivels round, she catches a glimpse of Ma on the move. ‘Ohh,' she says. Ma is within ten metres of our table.

‘And what are you up to, you two? Shouldn't you be greeting the guests?' She flutters a hand towards the entrance. ‘Or checking on food?' The other hand trembles the air between us and the efficient-looking caterers behind a line of white-clothed tables that will hold the buffet. ‘Or maybe just mingling with the crowd?' This time her hand sweeps across to include the whole room.

‘We've done quite a lot of that already, Ma,' mutters Kainde. ‘We're having a quiet moment before Taiwo gets here.' The bride has gone home to freshen up before the wedding reception.

‘We'll have lots of time to socialise later,' I add.

‘Hmm,' Ma says, her eyes scanning our faces in turn, ‘do remember this is a big day for me. I don't know when I'll be mother of the bride again.'

I take a breath, but clamp my mouth down again. Aunt K is clumping her way towards us in her heels, her bust parting the way ahead of her, and her rear halves happily complying with the course set for them. She's spotted potential trouble and is en route to clear the air, and separate the likely combatants.

‘Millie,' she says to Ma, ‘I think you'd better come and talk to the people who are setting up the microphones. I am not sure they know where to put them.'

As she puts her hand through Ma's elbow and guides her towards the front of the hall, she turns round to give us both a warning look, with the edge of a frown between her eyebrows.

‘I suppose we'd better do our best to behave,' I say to Kainde.

And we do try, not making faces at each other even when our mother ends her speech with this: ‘I am proud to welcome the first of my daughters into this wonderful stage of life – married life.'

My vote of thanks includes a joke about a spider in a colony of ants. Even though she deftly avoids the bouquet Taiwo throws at her, Kainde's confetti throwing is noticeably energetic.

Once the stressful part of the day is over, we can sit around and socialise at the evening do. We cluster with Amina and Remi around a low square table on which we rest our drinks.

Talk starts with the usual familiarisation. What we have been up to. New shops we have discovered this time round. A new seamstress in Serrekunda.

My mother's voice carries from over by the drinks tent. ‘The
okor
 has just phoned to say they will be late.'

Kainde puts her hand to her forehead and moans. ‘Oh, and what an
okor
. How on earth are we going to cope with the years ahead of calling him our brother-in-law?'

Amina perks up in a supporting role. ‘We're not gossiping are we, if we discuss something I find spicily important – would you say Reuben has changed over time, or has he always had this in him?'

Kainde mutters, ‘This stuff is inbred, if you pinch him, it gathers under his skin; if you slice him, I'm sure it will come out with his blood.'

Remi offers, ‘I guess to his credit, he has a strong sense of social justice. I heard him the other day lament about how the ‘lack of courtesy is at the root of decay in modern African society'.'

‘I'm sure somewhere, if we search very deep, we could discover the motivations for his pomposity. The problem is when he says something, you want to disagree on principle because it's come from him, even when he's probably right,' I add.

Kainde continues, ‘But that's exactly the point, when you think about all the problems in our society, only Reuben would pinpoint courtesy.
Courtesy
, I ask you.'

Amina again: ‘Well, your sister seems to be very taken up with him, anyway.'

Kainde groans. ‘Oh my God, you should have heard her. ‘We're just going off to buy our bedsheets. Reuben says the ones from Elhaj are the best value'. ‘Reuben thinks . . .' ‘As Reuben was saying just the other day . . .' It was so horrible to listen to, I forgot to puke.'

I smile at the memory of painful days spent listening to my sister. ‘It really was Taiwo's reverse version of Simon Says, wasn't it? If she said anything that did not include a reference to Reuben, we looked up and listened. Otherwise, I for one just imagined my ears were sponges, through which her words were passing.'

‘Aren't we being a bit harsh? Surely anything's better than being alone, isn't it,' says Remi.

‘Huh? I would much prefer to stay unmarried than to be hitched to that kind of man,' says Kainde.

A girl wanders up with a tray of crescent-shaped deep-fried meat pies. Kainde pauses in her potential tirade to scoop a few handfuls onto the snack plates we are sharing.

‘Honestly. Just as well there are good things to look forward to in life, such as delicious meat pies,' Kainde concludes.

Kainde and I came back for the wedding. Amina happened to be here for the Christmas holidays. Remi lives here. We're together for a short while, from different places and different lives. Anyone taking a snapshot of our group of women, first bound by attending the same school and later by friendship, would see what on the surface is a pretty conventional group.

Kainde is wearing our family evening
ashoibi
,  in a cream-and-black weave shot through with silver, made from Yoruba-style machine-embroidered cotton strips. Her huge head wrap is perched on her head but has slipped slightly to the right. Look closer and you'll see a nose ring. Should the head wrap fall off, you'd see a shaved head with a sprig of ponytail dreadlocks stuck in the middle. She has silver rings on every finger.

There's Remi, on the other side of childbirth. Her frame is still small, but her stomach is no longer held in by active muscles and it pushes against the Yoruba-style wrapper round her middle. Her hair, braided into chunky rows with extensions, peeks from underneath her headscarf.

Amina meanwhile is all manicured nails and zippy lipstick. Her interpretation of traditionally styled clothes is in the form of a tight-fitting panelled long skirt, with a halterneck top. She has dispensed with head covering and shows off hair that she has had blow-dried, wrapped, tonged and combed out with precision. Long sparkly earrings scrape her shoulders.

I'm in between the frump and the glam.

Conversation steers towards topics that do not heat up tempers or demonstrate our complete lack of sisterly pride in the wedding we are celebrating.

I spy Moira out of the corner of my eye. Her glasses cling to a nose much too small for them, crowding out her face and leaving only a bit of tightly drawn lips to define her personality. We can't all shrink into our seats, she's seen us and walks towards us.

‘Lord have mercy,' from Kainde.

‘Ow oona do?'

 Smatterings of ‘We are well, how about you?' from us.

‘Praise God, without Him, I wouldn't be able to say I am fine.' Her attention is focused on Amina. ‘I'm Moira, I've been saved for eight years. Who are you?'

‘Amina, of course. I remember you from school.'

‘Oh sorry, I didn't see you properly. Perhaps it's the shadows. Or maybe it's just that I am getting blinder the older I get.' She roars at her own joke, pushing her head back, revealing her unbraced teeth. Her glasses glint muted reflections of the lights strung out around the garden.

We suffer a few more minutes of Moira. She invites us to the New Year's Eve prayer meeting at the church. ‘There's communion of course, but reserved for those who commune regularly in the congregation.' She giggles again, her chest heaving with hilarity.

When she leaves, Amina says, ‘Oh. My. God,' and staggers off to get some more beers.

‘She clung to the church when that no-gooder left her with three children.' Remi tries to find an excuse for an old friend.

‘Why oh why did she not simply ask him for his sperm and then get on with it by herself? Look at the end result of trying to make a marriage work. Ends up with a screwed head,' is Kainde's judgement.

Moira, who investigations can show is a second cousin thrice removed, is involved in the late-night dispensing of marital advice before Taiwo is sent away from her mother's household into her husband's. My mother wisely holds back, and her sole contribution is a brief comment: ‘Taiwo I am very happy for you. My only advice is to say this – marriage needs work.' It is Aunt K who takes up her advisory role with an even-handed, practical approach. ‘My dear, it is up to you to define how you want your marriage to be right from the start. If you want to work alongside your husband to build your family together, then that should colour every aspect of your life. Talk to him. Tell him your views. But above all, listen.'

Moira, taking advantage of a slight pause in the proceedings, grabs the verbal space and volunteers to pray. ‘We see around us today many barren women, women who cannot produce children in answer to God's command to go forth and multiply. So today, before our dear sister Taiwo leaves this room, I want to command the devil to leave her womb alone. Instead, we claim it for Christ and pray that it will be fruitful, that she will have many children who will be the crowning glory of her marriage.'

Kainde smothers a sound from her throat, halfway between a snort and a giggle. Moira continues, undented. ‘And so, Lord, we pray that you will reign in their home, that you will be held high, that you will dine each day with them at their table.' In the micro-second that it takes for Moira's oratorical breath, Aunt K breaks in with, ‘Thank you, Moira. We all hope God will indeed bless their marriage. Now, we must let Taiwo go and start her married life.'

**The days burn bright, and my eyes ache in cloudless noons. Three days after the wedding, it is New Year's Eve. Taiwo and Reuben have gone to Zinguinchor for their honeymoon, God speed them. There are a bunch of relatives and old friends still around. I get invitations to lunches, beach trips, river cruises,
ataya
 tea drinking sessions, nightclubs. But the buzz of thoughts inside me makes it impossible to accept. Wherever I look, emotions seep out of my skin, coating it in a thin layer of memory-drenched sweat.

The nights bring swift sea-chilled breezes off the Atlantic, and indigo darkness. Whatever I manage to fob off during the day slinks back semi-crouching with tail down and belly skirting the ground. I remember. In the jumble between sleep and wakefulness, Yuan talks to me. He laughs. He makes promises.

I will leave in two days' time. I have put off visiting Yuan's parents. I decide to walk to their restaurant, avoiding murderous taxis on the tarmac. I hope the trudge through sand-infested roads will calm me. I arrive to find two waiters outside setting the tables. There are carefully rolled napkins on which chopsticks are nestling. Little flowery bowls are upturned on plates. Several tables are still naked brown wood, waiting to be decorated.

My face feels dry, drawn. My head is heavy and my legs unwilling. I force the words out, feeling my heart drum out a loud irregular beat. I ask for Mrs Chen.

‘She's in the kitchen.'

I don't know either of these waiters – they're new, they're young. Neither of them looks in the slightest bit curious.

I pause, uncertain what to do next.

‘Do you want us to tell her you are here?'

‘Yes please.'

‘What's your name?'

Mrs Chen comes out wearing a red apron, wiping her hands on a towel looped through the front.

Her arms stretch out and as we meet, she enfolds me into the apron smells of burnt rice and soy sauce.

‘Ayodele. How lovely to see you.'

‘I wanted to visit before I leave.'

‘We didn't know you were here. Let's sit down for some tea.' She flutters her hands. One of the waiters goes off in search of freshly brewed green tea and rice-grained cups to drink from. When the tea arrives, we are talking about my life in Mali.

She pours. ‘Did you know I have a new granddaughter?'

‘No, when was she born?'

‘Last December, she's a year old now. She's called Ivy. I'll show you a photo. Dawda,' and she turns to one of the waiters, ‘can you please get me the photo album from the reception?'

‘Whose daughter is it, Lee's or Wu's?'

‘Lee's. He's living in California now. Married an American.' The album arrives. Mrs Chen selects one of the loose photos inside the cover. In it is a chubby-cheeked baby with strands of dark hair sticking past her hairline. Behind her is a brown-haired woman, kneeling and looking down at the baby. She's smiling. I detect many things in that smile – pride, contentment, pleasure, assurance. The baby has something in her mouth, a plastic chewing toy with a hole in the middle. She is staring at the camera with a slightly surprised look, holding out her left hand.