Reading the Ceiling (2 page)

‘Ayodele, who would believe you're as old as eighteen?'

‘Morning, Ma.'

‘I'm just going to make you some
akara
for breakfast. I've sent Osman for some bread.'

As I sit up, part of the sheet covering my body slips to show half a boob and an entire nipple. Upstanding and free, the nipple looks, like the eraser end of a wood-wrapped pencil when tickled by air. My mother's smile freezes into a half-frown. Displays of flesh in teenage females, especially her own daughters, are always a worrying sign, regardless of whether I am safe in bed at home or not. ‘Cover yourself up' has greeted every excess shoulder, leg or chest exposure. ‘You can't go around looking like a
chagga
.' A slutty whore. Today, her look does the job. As I pull the sheet up to cover myself, the smile returns. My mother firmly believes in cloaking one's body's treasures.

‘I'll tell you when they're ready to eat,' she says.

As my mother closes the door, a memory slips in to sit alongside me and remind me of when her Good Behaviour Snippets began in earnest. It must have been when she was suddenly shocked into blood reality that I had left my childhood behind. I hadn't been at all amazed about my sudden thrust into womanhood, just plain disgusted by what followed.

I was not prepared for the red gush, at my very first dance at Amina's house. I had on my blue dress with the full skirt and tight waist. Slightly off-shoulder and specially tailored by Isatou's mother, in whose garage I had spent a couple of afternoons watching the tailor in order to hurry the dress along. At the party, I stood up and made my way into Amina's kitchen to ask for a drink. On the way back, I noticed a couple of fifth formers, who usually ignored me, whispering together and throwing a few looks my way. Soon after, Amina's mother appeared at my shoulder.

‘Come with me, dear. Your dress is soiled, can I give you something to use?'

What did I know of blood then? There had been no pain, yet she said, ‘The red splashes are a confirmation of you becoming a woman.'

She must have talked to my mother on the phone because Ma had a pack of sanitary towels ready when I got home.

‘You know what to do now, don't you? Use these supermarket bags to throw away the used ones. Wrap them in two bags. You'll need to take them out to the bin with the heavy metal lid so the cats don't get to them.'

And what I was left with were these heavy things between my legs that chaffed the skin they rubbed against. And they smelt. My first party was over, and only my cousin Tunji had asked me to dance.

*

Soon, I'll be leaving home, no longer a child. Like everyone else who wants to go to university, I have to go abroad. My mother's headmistress salary doesn't go far – Ma can't afford to pay overseas fees, so I've applied for scholarships. The Senegalese government may pay my fees at the University of Dakar, or the British Council my place at the University of London. I cannot control where I'll end up studying, but at least I will have a say in something else today – the who, the where, the when.

As I try to drift back into sleep, the green baized door in the kitchen bangs shut, waking me up for sure. Ma starts her clatter in the kitchen, and plans are afoot for today's meal. I make my way towards her noise. She has a bowlful of 
akara
 mixture ready.

‘I couldn't wait,' I say. ‘I've come to help.'

The beans were soaked, peeled and pounded yesterday, so all I have to do is to drop teaspoonfuls of cream-coloured mixture into sizzlingly hot oil and watch it deepfry. My bean balls puff up well, get themselves russet-coloured without burning, as if they are keen for me to have a breakfast worthy of a birthday.

When Osman comes back with the bread, my
akara
is resting in a covered calabash on the side and the fried onion and pepper sauce is sputtering in a small saucepan. He stands outside the door, stiffly holding a batch of loaves wrapped in an old flour bag.

When we were little, he gave all of us pet names. Mine was after my favourite orange-coloured forest fruit, my twin sisters were Solom and Saydame, after theirs. These were all fruits that were best bought up-country and we'd beg him before he went home to bring some back for us, rushing to him with a clutch of hastily grabbed dalasi notes in our hands. ‘I want fourteen,' I might say, ‘so I can eat one for every day of the Christmas school holiday.' Taiwo would ask for her
solom soloms
unpeeled, Kainde would ask him to remember to find the biggest, creamiest-tasting yellow
saydames
. ‘And don't forget,' my sisters would chorus, ‘bring us two bags each.' And Osman would nod and tickle us under our chins and arms, and we would wriggle and squeal.

He's become afraid of me. He no longer jokes or calls me Little Cabadombo.

When I open the door, I stare at his face, more out of curiosity than anything else. His eyes are focused on my feet. When I glance down, all I can see is a line of brown sugar ants following a crack in the cement pavement, heading for some nest buried underneath. ‘
Jere jaiffe,
' I say as I reach for the loaves. I take longer than I need to, touching his fingers and easing the bag out of his hands. I know I have this ability to make some men uncomfortable looking at me. And it's getting stronger. I have sometimes caught thick stares – the baobab juice kind, sticky and textured – that flick away the moment I turn to face them. Even from Osman.

Osman's always done a bit of the gardening, tending the tiny kitchen plot behind our L-shaped house, trimming the ever-sprouting casuarina hedge that shields us from the street, and supervising the sometimes unwieldly branches under which we had doll picnics and twirled on rope swings.

Osman used to help us climb mango trees, or catch avocados that we threw down from the glossy-leaved trees in the back garden. He used to help us light fires in charcoal burners so we could roast maize or bake groundnuts in their shells. If we were really dirty from playing in the muddy puddles outside the gate during the rainy season, he'd hose us down after we stripped to our knickers, shivering as we stood on the driveway, waiting until we could dash up to the front door and be tutted at by Nimsatu, the househelp, for bringing in grit with our wet feet.

The last time Osman helped us was after we'd been dancing in a July downpour, sheets of grey pelting our bodies. As was usual at the time, with Ma struggling to run her nursery school, we were at home under Nimsatu's care. I knew Ma had to work hard because we didn't have a father so I took charge whenever I could. I phoned Ma to tell her what she needed to buy on her way home, and sorted out squabbles between my sisters when twinship proved too hard for them to handle.

Osman asked us to leave our wet things outside. My T-shirt got stuck as I tried to pull it over my head so I walked towards Osman for help. He'd done the same for my sisters. But as the neckband squeezed my ears tight and I bowed my head to make it easier to yank it off, my mother drove in through the gate. I hardly had any breasts then, they were barely the size of a
mampatang
. With one sour look in my direction, my mother barked at me, ‘Get inside at once!' And to Osman, ‘Wait here, I need to speak to you.' She'd followed me into the house, ‘You are growing up now, and you're no longer a little girl.' And she'd sent me off to have a proper shower.

I talk to Osman in a different way now. Today I tell him, ‘I'm going out tonight. Taiwo and Kainde will be at the cinema with some friends. My mother wants you to come to work early, before it gets dark so there'll be someone at the gate.'

Then I turn into the kitchen with the bread resting against my chest spreading a soft warmth. I reach for a knife and slice a chunk off one of the loaves. I cut through the soft vertical vein in its side, then slobber in some onion sauce before stuffing in the crispy bean balls.

Ma flaps her way into the kitchen to check on her
Satiday
soup, into which she's flung dried
kuta
 from the deep Atlantic mixed with tripe and rump steak from the cows at Mr Pratt's farm up the road. Later she'll add some chopped greens from our backyard and the okra I bought at the market yesterday. The okra are in a huge bowl of water next to a chopping board and as she starts to get them ready she says, ‘You should have chosen larger ones. These tiny little ones you bought will take ages to top, tail and chop.'

I hate market errands.

The only part I enjoy in making the soup is when I get to melt the oil, so I ask, ‘Can I do the palm oil now?'

‘Yes, you can. But you do need to concentrate a bit more on how you do it. Soup's not just about palm oil. It's about all the ingredients. Unless you learn to get the details right, you'll never be able to make proper food in your own house.'

I go outside to collect the tin. The oil, usually stilled into a waxy orange when stored, has been left outside in a sun bright enough to turn the edges soft and red. I use a large metal scoop to ladle out eight spoonfuls and drop them into the furiously churning pot with the beginnings: chunks of meat mixed with
peppeh en yabbas
, raw chillies and onions which my ma has ground in our wooden mortar. As there is so much water in the pot, the oil separates into swirls of orange, as if hesitant about mingling with what's already in there.

Ma is proud of her cooking. Depending on the type of soup she intends to make, she can add various enhancements – crushed
egusi
seeds, fermented tamarind, or a large grey segment of crystallised soda. She would be surprised to find out I've paid any attention at all to what she tells me: ‘When I make
egusi
 soup, I like to mix it with a bit of green. Some of your grandmother's Yoruba friends used to make it with no greens but I think that looks too coarse.
Egusi
needs balance.'

Or, to explain the mysteries of adding the right touch of okra, she says, ‘To stop the okra from cutting in the soup, I'm going to add a largish chunk of
lubi
. I know your aunt in America uses bicarbonate of soda but I think her soup lacks depth. Flavour is what brings your cousin Tunji round here on Saturdays.'

Her secret, she says, is letting the soup come into its own. The meat has to soften, the
egusi
 has to blend, the oil has to turn. You simply cannot hurry it along.

My mother has tried to teach me what she knows about managing men. I guess being deserted twice by the same man in one life has limited her experience. She never told me my father ran off with his secretary when I was four (and my sisters were two), came back home with his tail curled in regret and promptly died a year later, of a stomach tumour. I twisted the truth out of Aunt K a few years ago.

Ma does say, ‘All men have two faces – the one they show you before they get what they want. This first face is attentive and caring. Then the coarse settles in and that's the face that stays for the rest of the time you know them.'

She tells us marriage is a battle. ‘You have to find some way of storing up your kindness in an armoured case. Otherwise your man will leak you dry and you'll find you have none left – not even enough for your children.'

I don't remember my father. I used to make things up about him when I was little. That he would hear from the ground whenever I fell down, thinned my skin and then squeezed beads of blood out to show the hurt. Sometimes I dreamt he was sitting next to me as I slept, telling me about something that happened in heaven. Now, I wonder how life would have been different for us if he hadn't died. My friend's fathers are hardly ever at home, preferring the company of their beer buddies. Some of my mother's friends have husbands with parallel unacknowledged families, chockful of stepchildren who everyone knows about but who are ignored in casual public encounters.

I'm outside, tending to a freshly lit charcoal stove, when Remi's father drops her off. My mother is hovering, distracted from dismantling a huge chunk of smoked fish by the noise of the car. He says, ‘
Unakusheh.
' You're hard at work, well done, keep it up.

And with a few well-placed how-dos and goodbyes, Frederick Adams, the number 4 on my list, drives off in a cloud of Peugeot-disturbed dust. Leaving his daughter, my best friend, behind to discuss our plans for tonight.

I holler to my sisters, ‘My jobs are done – the charcoal is lit.' It's their turn to see to the cooking of the rice as part of their ‘training'. Hard work, elbow grease and general busyness are advised to discourage loose thoughts. And also to help to prepare the female teenager for a well-kept house of her own one day. I do my big sister thing and complain to Remi, ‘They are probably in the bathroom again, messing around with
my
 makeup.'

Tonight Remi, Amina, Moira and I will celebrate my birthday at the newest disco in town. I didn't want a home party so we've organised this between us instead, and invited some of our friends. Remi is styling my hair in the garden when my mother's childhood friend, who we call Aunt K, short for Kiki, short for Katherine, arrives. Her noisiness is announced at the iron gate where, instead of knocking or, more sensibly, simply swinging the unlocked door open, she shouts aloud, ‘Kong kong kong,' her imitation of door knocking. I don't understand how she's stayed friends with my mother. They are as different as Kingston's Chalk (boxed and imported from England) from Anchor Cheddar Cheese (tinned and shipped from New Zealand). Aunt K takes pride in ‘not having let herself go'. She regularly loiters around young people, ‘sucking up their spirit' and ‘keeping her mind young'. She knows what music we like and listen to, whereas my mother's tastes stopped with Jim Reeves, who tragically died in an aeroplane accident, ‘too young, too young – too tragic, too tragic'. From the newest Senegalese
pachanga
 to the haHAhaHA of ‘Staying Alive', Aunt K dances with her arms raised, adding some nifty footwork as she twirls her sturdy rectangular body around.