Reading the Ceiling (19 page)

‘This picture was taken when we were visiting them in San Francisco. Look, here is another one.'

And there are more: Mr and Mrs Chen with a pushchair outside a purple-painted wrought iron gate. Lee lying on a picnic blanket with a polkadot-hatted Ivy sitting on his stomach, looking at him. In a streetcar. On a bridge. Eating at a Chinese restaurant.

**I sit in the front row of the economy-class cabin on a Ghana Airways flight home, to Bamako. Next to me is a Bohora woman in a two-layered blue gown; the top layer is tied around the neck in a neat little bow. Her matching headscarf lets out a fringe of black hair onto her forehead and allows wisps to poke out of the side. She has a chubby-cheeked boy next to her, and is bouncing a chunky six-month-old baby on her lap.

She smiles at me when the flight takes off, revealing tiny rabbitlike teeth with gaps between them. We eat snack packets of Ritz crackers and fizzy drinks. Her son is now kicking his legs up in the air, thumping against the cabin wall while lying back on his seat with his head crooked.

‘He needs to go to the bathroom. Can you hold her please?'

I nod a surprised yes, confirming it with ‘Sure' then reaching out to take the baby onto my lap. She's got dimples in her fingers and smells of Johnson's baby powder. I breathe in baby essence. When they come back, I don't want to hand her over.

‘As long as she's happy, I can hold her.'

‘Thanks for your help. It's a bit hard because I am travelling without my husband.'

She's going home to visit family in Kenya. Her son is two. When the plane touches down, I pass over the scented bundle of talc back to her mother.

*

The fisherman, Alasane, and his brother have become my friends. Alasane has left a message with my watchman: I am to call him as soon as I get back to Bamako.

‘Is everything all right?' I ask.

‘Very much so,' Alasane replies. Then he pauses. ‘I want to tell you my news. My daughter was born on Wednesday, while you were away.'

‘Fantastic. How are they?'

‘Sidibe and the baby are both well. The christening is tomorrow and we want to name her after you.'

‘I'd be honoured.'

‘I do have to tell you, though, that some of the relatives think I should name my first child after someone in the Prophet's family.'

‘In that case, don't worry about me, do what they say.'

‘These are relatives who only come out for celebrations. My mother and sisters, who know how much you've helped us – they think differently. Now, because I moved back to the village, my uncles think my life is theirs to play with.'

‘I guess that's how village life is.'

‘They have kept on and on at me. I will bring bad luck on my baby, my family, the entire village. They called in the imam and the village chief to talk to me. So much pressure over such a little thing!'

‘Will it not be simpler to use an approved name?'

‘Yes, but we won't give in completely. Sidibe and I have decided that we'll call her what we like at home – after you. But we shall christen her Fatuma Ayodele Coulibaly.'

**As Alasane instructed, a skinny boy in a light blue kaftan much too short for him is waiting by the mosque. He detaches himself from the shaded wall he's been resting on and walks towards me.

‘I'm Mohammed. My cousin asked me to meet you and take you to the compound.'

My hands are weighed down with two bags full of presents.

‘Is it far to Alasane's house?'

‘Not very.'

He leads me through lanes with hard-packed earth and walled compounds. We squeeze by a few donkey carts and are nearly clipped by a hasty cyclist on a black Gunpowder bicycle.

‘It's here.'

He pushes open a door made of corrugated iron sheeting, its aluminium sheen corroded by the wear of many hands that have gone in before us. The door grumbles under the clunky weight of its automatic closing mechanism – an old tin of tomato puree with a metal hook stuck into its cement fill. A rope connects this hook to another in the back of the door frame, recessed into the mud archway.

The festivities have started. Three groups of women sit on woven mats outside huts clustered around an open space. In a shadow-cooled corner, men sit on benches. They accept drinks from a tray held by a chubby girl in a cream-coloured dress made out of woven cotton strips. Alasane comes over to greet me.

‘I am happy you are here. Come and meet my daughter.'

He leads me towards a square hut in the corner of the compound, ducking to get into the darkened interior. My eyes take a few minutes to adjust to the dark. I see a woman on a bed cradling a baby's head in her arm while it breast-feeds. I murmur my greetings and sit next to Sidibe. She hands me the baby. The crocheted wool hat on her head leaves little to see of her face. Her white bootees peek out of an acrylic blanket with patches of yellow, pink and white. Asleep, her eyes seem puffy in a wrinkled-up face. Her fingers are tightly rolled into balls.

When she opens her eyes and looks at me, I know she cannot really distinguish me from the shadows of the walls and the slats of light that come through cracks in the wooden windows, which are shut. I hold out my little finger and coax hers to wrap tight around it. In the split second before she yells, I understand something new, a flash –
Yuan dies, she lives
. 

Her cries are strands of sound full of compressed hunger or a need for arms that she knows. I leave the hut. I sit outside on the mat with the women. We watch the drummers. The baby is named. Some people get up to dance. And all the while, as dust is kicked up from unwilling, hard-packed earth, I can feel the grip of tiny new fingers.

That night, I dream that Yuan is on a boat in the river. I am standing on the river bank and he is shouting something out at me. Every time I cry out
What?
, the wind whisks the sound away and scatters it into trees bare of leaves. Then he moves away from me, one rower in a team of four, and I keep shouting
What?
until finally he throws out a rope with words in glow paint:
Would you like to make a baby?

With the scratch of light and sound that starts a new day, I know we can't. Not a baby like Mrs Chen's granddaughter. Not a baby like the one gurgling on the plane. Not one like Alasane's.

I work through the rest of the desert's harmattan dust storms until the winds change and the texture of the air changes and the sun drenches cloudless days. Ponds begin to present cracked cakes of mud alongside insistent bunches of bulrushes which are sucking the last bit of moisture caged in the ground. The light scours the eyes and slices the head. Then merciful clouds begin to float across the sky and smother the sun's rays.

Alasane and Sidibe visit sometimes with little Ayodele.

‘And look, she can smile now.'

‘She can lift her head while lying down on her stomach.'

‘She can sit up if you support her with cushions.'

The memory of the little fingers doesn't fade as I watch her grow. And the desire to know how to give comfort, the wanting to be needed gnaws.

On a day when the clouds sheet rain, when the sound clatters on the roof like a thousand tin kettles banging, when the line of white fungus has crept down to greet the tops of my window frames, I phone Kainde, having made my decision.

‘I'm having a tough time with this baby business. An opening has come up as a senior lecturer at my old university and I could do it. The main thing I'm thinking is that I could try a sperm bank and get one by myself.'

‘Bloody hell.'

‘I knew you'd say that, so what do you think?'

‘Fine if you've thought it through. But what about not knowing who the father is, and what to tell the child?'

‘It won't matter for a few years . . .'

‘Yes, but it will matter one day. What will you say?'

‘I can't figure it all out yet. I'm sure I can ask what other people do, there must be someone offering advice somewhere.'

‘Oh, mum will have a field day if you tell her all this. What will you say?'

‘That I've had an immaculate conception, of course.'

We burst out laughing simultaneously.

By saying it out loud to someone, I make the desire real. The wanting had built up without me seeing it. It had shredded my hope into little pieces – rough and torn at the edges. After Yuan died, someone else's laughter had torn all of me apart. Now, my sister helps me laugh a new kind of laughter, which heaves my shoulders and stutters my breaths – a laughter that stitches me back together.

My choice need not be about missed chances, about life skipping away with all my luck. I gulp down balmy air and soothe my lungs, and I laugh some more. My shoulders shake and the shakes rumble my head. Tiny hands gripping my finger. I don't need to have a baby of my own. I have a girl called after me, here in Bamako, where I live.

The laughter eases the want away and turns the future the right way up.

Ma looks the same as she's always done. I find her sitting in an upright wooden chair by the window, staring outside at the pomegranate bush, with its red bulbs and shivering stamens. I say hello. She looks up, turns back towards the small tree, and says, ‘All my children have abandoned me. Daughters who should have known better. God denied me sons. No friends to visit. But there are always red flowers. Beautiful flowers.'

Taiwo had not explained properly, Ma is worse than I expected. I kneel next to her chair and pat her busy hands. She's got one of the living-room cushions on her lap, a geometric pattern resembling one of Escher's designs – this one a staircase that never ends. Her fingers are restlessly picking at the piping on the edge. Her veins rise through her skin as she tenses and relaxes her muscles. Age's gravity has stretched her face, added lines around her eyes, and a bit more jowl to her cheeks. Yet she looks much younger than her sixty-five years. I remember her mouth looking more pinched than it does today. Her face has mellowed with her mind.

‘Ma, it's Ayodele.'

‘Ayodele, where have you been? Get up, child. Go make yourself busy in the kitchen. Get some drinks for the guests. There should be some
wonjor
 in the freezer. Why are you looking at me like that? Go, go, go.'

I get up and move towards the kitchen. I have only been home twice in the last ten years, both times to attend christenings of Taiwo's children. She'd stopped after the second child, and there had been no other reason to come.

I stayed at my posting in Mali, unable to make much headway with beef exports, but enjoying moderate success in bringing cotton to the fore of trade talks. Home brought back too many memories each time, and too much tension was cloaked in the hugs and hellos from my mother, Taiwo and Reuben. I preferred to go to other places. Rome, to see Amina. Toronto, to see Kainde. I rushed around Africa, from conference to conference, or one familiarisation tour to another – Ethiopia, Egypt, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea. Then I went further afield whenever I could, the more foreign-sounding the destination the better, especially if I could not locate it using a ten-year old map – Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan. There wasn't much reason to my travelling except to stay on the move. I accumulated lots of air miles, per diems, lots of reports and business cards.

Then Taiwo wrote a long email to both Kainde and me:

I spoke to Kainde first. She offered to go home for a while. This I related to Taiwo when I phoned her later.

‘And you, Ayodele, what about you? Can you come home too?' At first, I said I'd have to see how a visit fitted in with work. I didn't want to see my mother. I didn't want to come home at all. Home was where the past was, and I preferred the past to stay where it was – far away. Physical distance meant emotional separation and, gradually, the selective forgetfulness of voluntary exile.

That simple question had grated – can I go home? Not, will I go home? The will did not want to go, although it had every means at its disposal to do so. I'd been at my posting for fifteen years – there was nothing new about the job any more. I would get a full pension if I left now, particularly for a compassionate reason, a sick parent.

Human Resources at head office swung into action at my tentative request for information. They sent me photocopied brochures, links to the website on pension options, and a helpful little reminder that the organisational president was encouraging early retirement.

I began to feel unnaturally optimistic about home and started to make plans. I could buy some land. Build a house. Settle somewhere along the river. Graft mango trees. It seemed feasible, and I gradually evolved an entirely unproven wish to return and help my mother through her twilight years. I wouldn't have to live in her house, but could find a place to rent close by and visit once or twice a day. I could help supervise the nursing care. And for once, I would be home without my mother interfering in my day-to-day living.