Reading the Ceiling (20 page)

We have a family meeting later that day. A taxi drops me off at their side gate, and I find Reuben in a low-slung wooden armchair with cushions. He is reading
Newsweek
.

‘Have a seat. Taiwo's gone to the market to get some fresh
bonga
for you. She's going to cook some
chereh
this evening, saying she wants to welcome you back with your favourite dish.'

I settle into the armchair next to his; a low table with his pint glass of Julbrew separates us.

‘Something to drink?'

‘Yes, a beer would be great.'

‘Modupeh,' he bellows into the open door of the sitting room, ‘come and say hello to your aunt and bring her a beer.'

It's quiet on the murram road past their house. By the low verandah walls, some perky succulents are offering nectar-filled triangles to hovering sunbirds.

‘Look,' I say, ‘those pink flowers are the ones we used to open and lick for nectar when we were children.'

He is surprised. ‘These ones? Isn't the sap poisonous?'

‘The three of us are living proof that you can lick them and survive.' I know Reuben was a child when I was, but somehow it's impossible to imagine him as anything other than himself, as if he'd only ever been a miniature version of the person I am sitting next to now.

Modupeh emerges with a bottle of Julbrew already beaded with moisture. He clutches a glass in his other hand. Before he can open his mouth, his father says, ‘Come on, greet your aunt.'

He does. A polite how are you. His big clear eyes explore my face. I have only seen him twice in his seven years. He puts the bottle and glass on the table and darts off as quickly as he can, his mud-brown legs looking as if they can barely hold up his body.

Taiwo soon comes home, slapping the door of her white Toyota estate shut and coming towards me with a smile and her arms wide open.

At supper, Taiwo fusses around the table, getting up to shout instructions through a hatch between us in the dining room and her househelp in the kitchen.

‘You know Pa Reuben likes us to use the big glass serving dishes when we have visitors, why did you put it in this one?' She is holding one of their everyday serving dishes, yellow-painted enamel ovals with curved handles.

‘You can never get them to do exactly what you say, even if you repeat yourself fourteen times a day,' she complains as she swings round to the table. She settles the dish on the cork-backed, floral-pattern trivets in the middle of the table.

Reuben offers grace while the children sit with their hands held together in front of their faces and with their eyes tight shut.

We talk generalities while the children are with us. About schools and teachers and the cost of uniforms and books.

After dinner, Modupeh is encouraged to recite a poem from school.

‘‘The sunbird', by Wilson Obote,' he begins.

 ‘He's doing very well at school,' Reuben declares. ‘We do all we can at home. What about you, Iyamide? Can you play your star song on the piano now?'

Iyamide jumps to her feet to pick out her tune on the piano.

‘Now children, you can go and have showers and get into your night clothes.' And off they go, tiny backs down the corridor with crystals of light bouncing off the oil-painted beige walls.

The grownups can talk now. I represent the concerns of Kainde and me. Reuben represents himself and Taiwo. We move to the sitting room chairs, which are copies of the low-slung armchairs outside, but covered with a brown velvet fabric.

‘Quite frankly, Taiwo here has done a lot for your mother while you and Kainde have been away. It would be good if she had more time to concentrate on the children for a change,' Reuben starts.

‘Yes, but of course I will still help in some ways, especially at weekends when the children are at home. I can make lunch on Saturdays and Sundays, and Reuben or I will drop it off,' offers Taiwo.

And so we agree. I shall take on main responsibilities during the week. Two nurses will be hired to sleep in Ma's house at night, in rotation, making sure she takes her diabetes medicines.

**At the beginning, I'm reminded of the way you get used to life at sea, retching during the first few days with the movement of water underfoot. Ma is impossible. I am sure she has devised some inner game which she deliberately uses to irritate me. One minute she is lucid and willing to chat about Aunt K's antics when they were young. The next minute, she wrinkles up her forehead and laments that all her daughters have deserted her.

I get used to the swaying and the lapping sounds against the boat. It starts to feel normal, and the memory of a ground that used to feel solid, that never once moved, fades. She becomes familiar. Lots of things annoy her. Like how the nurse moves her plastic flipflops whenever she's not looking,

‘I put them under that chair, there. And now, she's moved them. What are they doing in the sink?'

My irritation sometimes becomes anger; at other times, I am flooded with pity, in an odd unsatisfactory surge of tenderness. I feel sorry that my mother is vulnerable. I always imagined her strong, imperious, commanding – right till the very end. That she was capable of fighting disease, and of pushing off death I had been in no doubt. Now, as her mind disintegrates, I sense bewilderment.

‘You see, when you take the
krein krein
,  you have to wash it well before you put it into the, that thing that you cook things in.' Words drop out of her vocabulary. Sometimes she finds the names for things, even objects that might seem complicated, like ‘toilet flush', but at other times she does not know what to call a pot, or a door.

When Aunt K visits, Ma always know who she is. They find memories in the long ago to talk about, which make Ma laugh. Her whole body moves, her shoulders shake. She cannot explain what is funny. I laugh mostly with relief at the sound coming from her mouth. She giggles, she stutters, she points with her index finger. She squeaks with merriment, bending over with the pleasure of her laughter, clutching her side. Her face looks alive, with crinkled eyes, flashing teeth, uplifted cheeks. The laughter can stay for five minutes or be slashed away in a few seconds. Aunt K and I learn to sit and laugh with her, laugh at the joke of life, the inconsistency of memory, the cruelty of language. We laugh.

She likes to have some noise. The radio stays on and she mutters along to the news to Fula, Jola and Serahuli. The light always needs to stay on.

One evening, when I am sitting outside on the verandah with her nurse to discuss my mother's care, the power goes out. Ma is in bed, asleep. Haddy, the nurse, has gone inside to get a candle. We hear a loud crash, then an almighty thump. Then a scream: ‘I cannot seeeeeee. Alone in the world. All alone. I cannot seeeeee.'

My mother's scream is a lament, a screech to rail against the holes in her mind that she can see reflected in the world around her. Dimmed, with hulking shadows that hide memories that might leap out and consume her.

Haddy comes from the kitchen with a lit candle and we meet at the door of my mother's room.

When we open the door she is not in the bed or on the floor by the bed. My eyes find her in the corner in her room where we installed the sink. Ma must have walked over to where the glint of moonshine shows through the curtains. Her foot snagged under the stool we leave by the sink, she lost her balance. As she fell, she caught hold of the sink with her right arm. It did not hold her weight. She's pulled it halfway off its metal struts and is now half lying under it, with her red Colgate toothbrush on her chest, the toothbrush holder by her head and the tube of toothpaste flung halfway across the room.

Haddy pushes the candle into my hand. ‘Hold that please.' She kneels next to my mother and holds her thumb against Ma's wrist. ‘A bit irregular. Leave the candle on the sill. Get some more.'

Time freezes. The skin around my eyes is tight. I cannot see through the corridor dark and stretch both arms out to feel my way along the walls to the kitchen. Here, the light is better because the windows have no curtains. The moon shines in, casting huge swirls of shadow from the metal grillwork on the windows. The cupboard where we keep the candles is open. I crunch on something. It's a box of matches on the floor. I light two more candles and take them back into the room.

‘Come closer,' Haddy says. ‘We need to get her to the hospital. Go and make the phone call. I will try to settle her down.'

I do as I am told.

‘The ambulance from the hospital in Serrekunda will be here in about twenty minutes,' I tell Haddy a few minutes later.

My mother is now on her back, supported by a pillow on her side. Haddy has more news. ‘Her arm is broken.'

She dies with her arm still in a cast. In the six weeks she is in hospital, the bone never sets. She dies in a web of tubes that balance her breathing with oxygen, feed her insulin and glucose, and take urine from her bladder. She dies alone, after I leave her room to go home for a shower, after being reassured by the duty sister that her condition is stable. The sun has set, drowning the air in orange light, keeping the world still, slowing us all down as the taxi takes me home.

Moira had taken to my mother's condition as part of her prayer portfolio. She inveigles her way into family discussions and seems to be consistently around my mother's house. She's usually here by mid-morning, after I've had my breakfast. I often make coos pap, from air-dried balls of millet flour rolled in a calabash with sprinklings of water.

Moira sticks as closely to us as sap from the frangipani. With nightfall, she clatters about, finds her shoes and says to either one us, ‘I am going . . . until tomorrow.' Kainde and I get used to leaving her in the sitting room and going off to a bedroom to make plans. We choose the Methodist church at the top of the hill for the funeral because it's not large, and will be less ostentatious than a cathedral ceremony.

Moira is banging around in the kitchen the day the priest comes to see us.

‘My housekeeper gave me your message about the funeral. I thought it would be wise to pop in and see you, because although I did know your mother, I have not met all her daughters.'

He is Foday Sillah, and has been installed as priest for three years. I introduce myself.

‘Where have you been?'

‘I gave up Christianity early,' I say.

‘Well,' he laughs, ‘I took to religion late. I was a Muslim before and did not take any of it seriously.'

‘Oh, what made you convert?'

‘Rather like Paul, on the road from Farafenni.'

‘How?'

‘You really want to know?'

I nod.

‘We came upon a car accident that had just happened. The car was crushed, and there was a sheet of windscreen across the road. The driver was folded into his seat with the steering wheel stuffed into his stomach and the front-seat passenger had flown out of the glassless windscreen, over the bonnet. In the back, on the floor between the seats, was a little boy, wrapped in layers of blanket. He must have rolled off onto the floor before the accident and got wedged in. He was crying when we arrived, but completely unharmed.'

‘In Africa, fate plays with our lives every day.'

‘For whatever reason, on this particular day this little boy made me see life differently. More like a mystery gift that needs to be looked at closely.'

‘What happened to the boy?'

‘We took him into our car and fed him biscuits and water. He would quieten for a bit and then bawl out,
Mama
. We waited around, sent a message for the police with the next car that came around. The orphanage eventually traced his family. What I kept seeing in my head was a repeat of the last moments of his parents' lives. The consequences of death. The appointments that were not met. The clothes left in the wardrobe.' He pauses. ‘Do you believe in God?'

‘Did a long time ago. Perhaps when I was about ten?'

‘And now? What is our purpose as human beings?'

‘We're lucky enough to be animals who can think. Sometimes, occasionally, infrequently, when I notice people helping others for no obvious reason, I feel a glimmer of hope.'

‘What kind of helping others?'

‘Well, the kind when a bus driver waits for a pregnant woman, that kind of helpful.'

‘But isn't that his job – to ferry people around? Isn't he looking after himself, doing what he is paid for, making sure he'll keep his job?'

‘Think about it, lots of people get paid to sit in stuffy old offices with piles of paper who don't do what they're paid to do. They don't supply phone lines, malaria tablets, passports, title deeds, or whatever. It's never only a job.'

‘You'll only believe in God, then, if you think it will make you help others better?'

‘If you want to put it like that, yes.'

I am feeling cosy with all the thought attention I've been given. I detect in his look a promise that more of what has happened can be delivered. Then Moira walks in.

‘Oh, Father Sillah, how lovely to see you. I hope you have been trying to talk Dele out of her unchristian ideas.'

‘Which ones, exactly?' he replies.

‘Hasn't she told you she's going to hold a funeral
charity
for her mother?'

‘Me? Not just me, we. I am doing it with my sisters,' I chip in.

‘But they only agreed because of her,' says Moira.

‘True, but it was because I had persuasive arguments,' I counter.

‘Which were?'

‘That we are losing our traditions and replacing them with things not from the heart. I remember my body tingling when I was told that the dead float around in spirit for a while before they toddle off to the never-never. It felt mysterious, but it also felt right.'