Reading the Ceiling (28 page)

‘
Sate
,' she replies, acknowledging me as the newest wife, the recently favoured.

We kiss and two lots of big-sleeved boubous embrace. She's in a lemony gold and I am in a purply pink. We ease ourselves onto the cushioned concrete benches and order our drinks. I started drinking the occasional light beer after Amadou died, but Rohey has kept to the teetotal principles she was brought up with. She orders a mango juice.

‘Now, tell me how life is,' she says, as she puts an elbow on the table, making her gold bangles slide down. When she smiles, the glint thrown from one of her rings is mirrored in the gold that covers her incisor tooth.

‘
Ehyey
, when did you get that put in?'

‘Just last week. I kept the gold nuggets I bought when I first went to Mecca all those years ago. I decided it was time to use them.'

She turns sideways and smiles again to give me a better view.

‘Where did you get it done?'

‘Dentist Tabbal. Do you think it suits?'

‘Very well.' I add a
huhunh
in additional admiration.

We natter on.

Good news! Good news! Christ died for me!

 Last Sunday, Brother Paul talked about how we need to share our faith more often. I feel blessed, but I tend to keep to myself the source of this blessing. I decide to give it a try.

‘Rohey, I have something for you to look at,' I say, handing over two credit-card-sized tracts:
Blessings of Creation
and
Left Behind
.

She opens one slowly. There are cartoons of the end of time: volcanoes erupting in the distance and tsunamis bulging over islands. On the final day, the sky thunders open, and Christ returns to collect his own, who ascend with him into a palette of blue and white sky.

‘Dele,' says Rohey slowly, ‘I see you believe in all this.' She pauses, taking her time to put the words of her next sentence together. ‘You changed when you started going to this church of yours.'

I nod. More drinks arrive. I am still on beer. Rohey has moved on to green tea.

She continues, ‘You were a better wife to Amadou than I ever expected. You also did all you could to make my daughters feel your house was their second home.'

‘Which it still is,' I interject.

‘They know that. When Amadou died, you were strong and organised. Without you, I don't know how I could have sorted out his businesses or even thought I could run one myself. I have learnt to be strong too, but using beliefs I was taught when I was small. We don't need to try to change each other's religion now.'

‘I was completely mixed up when Amadou died. I acted strong, but I wasn't sleeping well. This church helped me find a way to be. That's why I want to share my faith.'

‘That's all well and good. I think it best if everyone were left to follow what they feel inside. I admire what you have found. But your life and your ways cannot be my life and ways. I read my Koran, but do not understand all this talk of a world that is to come. What I really want is to live the life I can see now as best as I can.'

After we pay up, we walk to our cars. Rohey gives me a quick hug before she gets into hers, and says, ‘Remember, we are lucky.'

Kainde is forty-two and her lover is at least ten years younger. They have something I never had with Amadou. There isn't any of that excessive screech teenagers make to the outside world:
Look at us! We're in love!
Instead I see them acknowledge each other's entrance into a room. I see them pat a hand as they share a joke. I hear them chatting away in their room late at night. Laughter. The enjoyment of two people who each thrive in the company of the other.

The night before they leave for Canada, I remark on their ease with each other.

‘Yes, it's funny, isn't it? Remember what I used to say?' Kainde's face quietens and her eyes drift into the past. I follow her memory.

Kainde at fourteen. Donald Bah at sixteen. He kept sending her notes. She'd get home and find he'd slipped another letter into her school bag, swearing love to the death, quoting Shakespeare's Romeo, declaring that family would never keep them apart. We kept it to ourselves, not involving the grownups. He started phoning at odd hours. Kainde avoided answering the phone. Because their voices were indistinguishable to Donald, whenever Taiwo answered she'd get an earful of adolescent passion. He got angry if she said he'd got the wrong twin. It wasn't a passion any of us understood. Months later, it was defused by the new Namibian girl who came to our school; overnight, Donald switched his affection. Kainde declared at the time that if love could be so wrongfully blind, then she wanted no part of it.

Now she tells me, ‘Since then I've never been able to understand men. I've dated them, I've even kissed a few. But I stopped trying and thought that I might prefer to be on my own. Until now.'

I see truth in her face. Me, who's never known anything more fiery than a grateful holding of another in the dark. All right, but less. Less than what I needed. I don't like where my mind is leading me.

‘You have made your house into a den of iniquity,' Brother Paul says to me. ‘It would shame Jesus to see what you are allowing your sister to do in your house. Would he not act as he did when he went to the temple and saw the moneychangers? He threw up their tables in anger. Righteous anger that knows its place and when it is to be shown. You have to tell them they are living in sin.'

My muteness is my response.

‘If you cannot witness to your own sister, you do not stand a chance of becoming a deaconess in this church,' he concludes.

When I am half pushed out of the Church of Christ Brethren for overquestioning authority, I go. My leaving gouges a hole in me, making me feel as light as a sunbird's feather, all iridescent and flashily pretty, but weightless, able to be pushed any which way. I do normal things – go to the office, shop, arrange what to cook. Inside, I am angry. I find I cry easily. I droop around the house on Sunday mornings, unable to place myself anywhere. I feel alone, cut off. After nine Sundays, I go back to the church my mother took me to as a child, the one where they have flowers on Easter Sundays, where breezes blow wave-soaked wind through the louvred windows, and there I make my kind of peace.

Away from books and films, what would love feel like if it happened in real life, my life? Superlative sex? A guaranteed Song of Solomon type heaven?

Instead of the daily reading suggested in my
Food for the Soul
guide, I pick up my Bible and find myself wanting to read the Song again. I want to prove to myself that earthly love is but a reflection of the love that exists between a creator and the created.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth / Your name is like perfume poured out.

I tried to imagine how it would feel to be intoxicated with the smell of someone you want to melt into. An intensity I have sometimes sniffed at. I have dreamed, I have wondered, but I have not felt.

Just as well I have my God, and this desire to seek ecstasy with my body can be safely locked away. The texture of my faith has changed. I no longer expect everything of it, I no longer let it swirl me up the way it used to in Brother Paul's church. Yet I find I still believe.

I set my breakfast table for one. Perky brown birds chirrup and hop about on the guava tree outside. I hear pedestrians talking in descants to each other as they walk past my open windows. My Sony radio is on. To the background of the ills in the world and the slow death dance being played out in Israel and the West Bank, I get a bowl and some cutlery. The drawer sticks in its wooden frame, sliding out jerkily as I tug at it. The news is sliced into chunks and delivered by a voice trying to make me understand how it all fits together. Today there is no shocking tragedy – no typhoons in Bangladesh or starving children in Ethiopia – but peace talks have gone stale and the Dow and the Footsie are jiggling up and down, the euro and the dollar are heading for all-out war.

Yesterday, several giant grapefruits fell off my tree. I slice into a chilled yellow one and concentrate on separating the skin from the tears of juice. The news roundup fails to hold the shreds of my thoughts together. Instead my mind runs off with a skittish skip. Words drift through it.

My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.

 To have a scent stuck between breasts constantly keeping your Other in your thoughts. You think about him without pause and carry his scent as you move through the day, doing normal things. What did Amadou and I have? It started off being this exchange of his comfort for my skill. That bred familiarity. We ate together when he stayed with me, chatting about this and that over supper. We hardly ever quarrelled. When he was at Rohey's I had space in my head for myself. It seemed balanced – that kind of life, that kind of sharing. I never wanted our lives to be so entwined that we suffocated each other. We made our marriage work, and that was enough. All this scent carrying never crossed my mind then.

I hear Bintou at the door. I walk over to let her in. She and I know the curves of each other's mornings now. With Kweku Sola gone, and less and less to do around the house, we have adjusted our hours. She comes in later now, and leaves earlier. That's why I have all this extra time to sit around thinking and making myself yearn for things I could never have had anyway, even when I was young.

With relief, I find something else to shunt these thoughts away. I discuss food.

‘You could do me some fish
mbahal
today,' I say.

‘If you're going to the market, I'll need some parsley and garlic for the stuffing. How many cups of rice should I cook?'

‘Four. Might as well. Kweku Sola will be coming later and people may drop in.' I open the fridge to check on the tomato paste.

‘That boy can eat – remember how high he used to pile his plate with my
benachin
?'

I turn round to look her up and down before reminding her, ‘And who needs
two 
extra cups when we do
mbahal bu tilim
, as a late-evening snack?'

Bintou laughs with a bubbly gruff from her middles which makes her upper arms jiggle. She slaps her thigh loudly and says, with a touch of pride, ‘I have an excuse, I need the fat. It helps to pad my knees for scrubbing floors.'

She waddles off to get the bucket and cloths from the broom cupboard, and I hear her bustle into the bathroom as her workday begins.

I walk to the market. On the way, I wave to people I know in the cars going past, and several stop to offer me a ride. Each time, I insist that I need the walk to strengthen my bones. I wish greetings on family, household and assorted relatives and continue on.

The market is full of activity – and flies. It's ten o'clock and the women who dry fish for a living are gutting the morning's catch. I edge past stacks of rancid beige fish curled into irregular cardboard. My mother would have said: ‘Oh, look at you – without
gayja
, your
mbahal
will lack that undertone. Just put perfume on your wrists before you go. Hold your breath if you need to, but just buy it, you hear?' Now I can choose to cook
gayja
-less
mbahal
, changing her recipe to suit my nose.

I bump into Reverend Sillah at the market, idling by a fishmonger's stall.

‘I was wondering,' he says, ‘what the difference is between squid and octopus, and whether it matters which one I get for supper tonight.'

I dither about the amount of detail I should get into. He has been a widower for five years, and several members of our congregation regard that as time enough for his heart to have mended.

‘It really does not matter,' I assure him. ‘Get whichever is cheaper by the kilo.'

I have noticed that he often sits next to me at our church's social events and I'm not yet sure what I think about that. Especially as church members have been dropping hints as plentiful as a swarm of flying termites after the rain.

‘Do you think I should fry, or grill?'

‘Squid pockets are easier to clean and quick to grill.' Seeing that he may well stretch out our discussion, I excuse myself with: ‘In a bit of a hurry. I need to get my fish home, fresh without ice.' I move with a speed and purpose that make me grateful for healthy bones.

Kweku Sola does come to visit, just as he always does on Fridays after work. While we eat, we usually chat about politics, goings- on at his office, how my business is doing. Today, as I dish out a mound of glistening rice onto his plate, he's quieter than usual. Eventually I ask, ‘What's the matter?'

He lets his fork clatter onto the table, takes in a wide breath and lets it puff out again. ‘Ma, do you remember after you got married and you said I should call Amadou Pa?'

 

‘Yes I do.'

‘You also said there were things you couldn't explain then but would explain when I was older.'

‘And now you're ready to ask your questions again?'

He nods.

‘Who's my father?'

We both wait for the years from long ago to come crashing into the present.

‘I made certain choices when I was young, younger than you. That choice created you.'

He shakes his head. ‘I want to know whose face I've got.' ‘You've got my eyes,' I say and touch one of his. ‘If your ears were just a bit smaller they'd be exactly like mine. I see nothing of anyone else in you.'

‘You're not giving me a straight answer, Ma'

I pause. And think about how a little wanting to know what a skin that was allowed to sing felt like. And how wanting to know how much rougher it could be standing up behind a watchman's hut. Not things I can explain, not now.

‘Once you make some choices, they stick – you can't shake them off. They cling and shape you.'

His face is full of questions. My head has no better answer. The call for prayer from the mosque a mile away rises and fades.