The God Child

by Nana Oforiatta Ayim

  6

  I stood next to my mother at the New Apostolic Church. She was praying quietly. Fragments of her prayer came down to me. ‘Cover my child in the blood of Jesus and commit her to your hands, Lord…’

  Her faith was something astounding to me. She always believed, no matter what had happened and what might occur. It was like the laughter that was always inside her ready to come up even though she might be sad. My faith was different. I believed all that she conjured up through her belief would come to pass. I wondered what she knew that I did not and why it was her fear matched her faith. I leant into her and looked round at the coloured-glass depictions of scenes from the Bible in the windows, the stone and red-brick walls, at the tiled floors and the wooden beams that criss-crossed the ceilings, and thought just what an ugly church this was.

  At times I lost myself with her in the songs, but not like I did at night, while reading, or watching ZDF, which in the daytime, like this church and its hymns, showed programmes that uplifted because of their familiarity, but by night transformed into a chapel of frescoes whose beauty left in you something indelible. Night after night I went down, no longer needing to glut myself with reading, and turned on the television, sitting close enough to hear the whispers of the screen, far enough to see the subtitles though it was fine not to understand. I watched the women on the screen, their names like poems:

  Monica Vitti,

  Anna Karina,

  Ingrid Bergman,

  Catherine Deneuve,

  Audrey Hepburn,

  Katharine Hepburn,

  Romy Schneider,

  Grace Kelly.

  The night before, there had been, for the first time, Brigitte Bardot. I sat closer to the television, taking in the way she threw back her hair, her hips out, how her pout brought down men. Doris Day and Sophia Loren were my mother’s heroines. She had even had their names embedded in her passport along with the change in her year of birth, and she matched the extremity of her behaviour, her domesticity and carnal guile, to theirs. Yet here was Brigitte Bardot. In three films, one after the other. As if delivering a masterclass.

  ‘Tu vois mes pieds dans la glace?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Tu les trouves jolis?’

  ‘Oui, très!’

  The men that held her through their gazes were only punctuations, mirrors of her abandon. They had created the incarnation of desire, but now she inhabited its shape so thoroughly that it was clear they had sown their own destruction, her power hidden in plain view.

  I lay back and closed my eyes, imagining myself her, the same shaggy hair, the same pouted petulance, striped top and capri pants. When I opened them again, the images on the television were grainy, muted; the characters mumbled; nothing was clear. Teletext told me this new film was McCabe & Mrs. Miller; and though the incoherence and flatness of it too closely approximated what I knew of life, threatened to let it in, curl up on my chest, and make me struggle painfully for air, I stayed, watching the men wade through the coarseness of the American New World, the mud and the grit; waiting for the pay-off, the reward for the hardship. And there she was: the beauty, the relief.

  Only she had in her that same coarseness, that same mud and grit. I had seen her paired with the same actor in a film a few nights before, but now their interaction was stripped of all Technicolor lightness and escape; only a raw, Machiavellian will to thrive was left.

  And yet, when at last he laid his head upon her breast, knowing he was going to die, with only this floe of intimacy, this brief moment of connection to ground him, something broke into place so thoroughly, as if in that surrender was all of life.

  He died, alone, unheroically. And she was left behind, removed from the world, past feeling.

  In the protracted, helpless silence of his death was more of the truth of life, and in her there was something of me, impassive, spent, even though I was still so new to the earth, and I wondered where it came from, this detachment, this sight, which was neither curse nor protection.

  Now the hymns were over, tithes collected. We were on our way to the hairdresser’s.

  At the Afroshop, Paa Wilson, the owner, sat at the counter, selling dusty yams and powdered fufu and young green and ripe yellow plantains and hair creams and pieces and balms. His shop was like an annexe of home. Everyone spoke Twi at once and shouted and laughed as if we were not in a side road in north-west Germany, but in Legon or Kokomlemle or Teshie-Nungua.

  In the hair-salon room, there was superfluous hair from braid extensions all over the floor, even though one of the girls kept sweeping it up. There were almost as many girls braiding as clients, but the woman who was boss had longer nails and hair and lighter skin than all the others and she came to my mother, but my mother told her to take me first. She gave me a photo album to choose my style and there were cornrows and braids and long straight hair and asymmetric bobs; there was black and brown and red and blonde; there were straight lines and zigzags and rounds. My hair was thick and I was dreading having it combed.

  The boss woman took some of my hair in her hand and squeezed. ‘Ɛyɛ den,’ she said, it was hard.

  I showed her the style I wanted: tiny, imperceptible braids that ended in long, shiny hair falling onto my shoulders, a layered cut to make the hair look shaggy. She took me to the mirror. She yanked a narrow comb through my hair quickly and painfully from the root up and I closed my eyes and gripped the seat.

  ‘Hwɛ nanim.’ She was laughing at me.

  I heard my mother laugh too. I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror; she was having her hair washed behind me. My shoulders were hunched and my eyes looked haunted. The woman finished pulling out my hair. My eyes were already smarting, but now a toxic fume made them flow.

  She used a bristled brush to put the white relaxer cream on my roots, tender from yanking. ‘When it starts to burn, call me, eh?’

  Some of the girls were eating jollof rice and stew or gari from plastic Tupperware bowls and there were children running or crawling round the floor. The television in the corner of the room was set to an American soap opera, California Clan; one of the hairdressers changed over just as we were going to find out if Rick had really cheated on his wife with his mother-in-law.

  There was an American preacher on the screen: tall, white-haired, majestic. ‘For the Lord is mighty,’ the preacher said.

  ‘Jee-sus, amen, yes sir,’ the women in the room were saying.

  ‘There is no might greater than his,’ the priest was shouting now.

  ‘Amen,’ the women in the room shouted too. Some of them had their eyes closed.

  A man came in. He had a large suitcase with him and, when he opened it, out tumbled gold sandals with diamanté, stretch jeans, polyester jumpers, encrusted watches and knock-off perfumes. The cream was burning my hair. The hairdresser was trying on a pair of shoes.

  ‘It’s burning,’ I said to her, pointing at my hair.

  ‘Wait a minute, sweetie.’ She was looking in the mirror. The crevices of her feet were shades darker than the rest of her foot. I looked up at her face. The bleach had created a lightened band from the neck upwards as if her head had hatched from a different body.

  ‘It’s really burning.’ I looked at my mother.

  ‘Won’t somebody look after my little girl for me?’ My mother stood up from leaning over the open suitcase and one of the women took me to the basin and washed out the cream.

  My curls had gone and my hair lay permanently straight, flat, dead against my head. The woman began to blow-dry it and the hot hair burnt my scalp. I asked her to turn the temperature down.

  ‘Oh-ho, adɛn?’ she asked.

  ‘Ɛyɛ me ya.’ It hurt.

  She sucked her teeth and turned the temperature down, getting a comb and yanking it through my hair while she blew. ‘Cynthia,’ she called when she had finished.

  Another woman came with three different packets of hair. The throbbing of my scalp made it hard to see straight. I narrowed my eyes. One w
as black and curly, the other black and straight, the third brown and straight.

  ‘This one,’ I said, pointing at the black straight one. I looked over at my mother; she was having a weave sewn in and she was laughing her back-of-the-throat kh-kh-kh-kh-kh laugh. I opened my Three Sisters, but the three girls braiding my hair pushed my head down so that it was impossible to see the words on the page and the pain pulling from three directions made it hard to focus when I did.

  I closed my eyes and tried to listen to one of the strands of television, radio, children and women. They were talking about how the president of our country had buried a live cow to get his power.

  ‘Adɛn?’ my mother said. ‘Adɛn nti omo wɔyɛ saa?’

  All the women chorused in, hmm, nobody knew why. ‘Abayisem, the devil’s work.’

  Someone turned the radio up, so that it overpowered the preacher even.

  My mother began singing, ‘Amazing Grace’, her voice vibrating on the aaaa’s like an opera singer, except she was doing it on purpose.

  The women braiding my hair and all the women in the salon sang with my mother. ‘’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved,’ they sang, but their fears were not relieved. They put as much faith in the devil and in witches as they did in God and grace. It was like the German word Ehrfurcht, a grace that frightened as it gave.

  My mother stood up. She looked like Doris Day and Sophia Loren and herself all at once.

  My braids were tight and heavy and my scalp felt like it was being pulled away from me by a ten-ton truck.

  A woman sprayed sheen on the braids to make them shinier and put strong-smelling cold sticky green Dax pomade on my scalp. ‘Wo ho yɛ fɛ paa,’ she said, smiling at me.

  ‘My sweetie little girl,’ my mother said, pinching my cheek.

  I smiled at them and it hurt my scalp. My hair was long now and it shook behind me. I looked in the mirror up at the women looking down on me so proudly, and my smile was not just on my face. Amidst all the noise of the TV and radio and the children and the talk of the women, and despite the tightness and throb of my head, I knew that I was now safe.

  7

  ‘Maya. There is a surprise coming this night.’ My mother whisper-spoke the words as I sat on the kitchen counter.

  A surprise, she said, and yet every year she told me in advance what my Christmas presents were, could not stop herself from leaving the price tags on.

  She sang: ‘“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey, you’ll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.”’

  I jumped down and squeezed her breath out from behind with my arms.

  ‘Agyei,’ she said, undoing my arms with one hand.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It is a surprise,’ she said.

  ‘Mummy.’ I put my hands on my hips and gave her a ‘now, come on’ look.

  ‘Foolish girl.’

  She was not going to tell me.

  That night I could not sleep with the anticipation of what was coming. I rubbed the ends cut from my mother’s wig against my cheek, but neither the rhythm nor the texture sent me to sleep. I sat up on my knees and looked out until all the dark shapes became familiar. I stood up and jumped across the chasm under my bed so no arms might reach out from underneath to grab me. I held my breath going down the stairs in case something might hear. I looked into the front room, but all was quiet. I went into the kitchen. There, in front of the open fridge door, stood a boy, dark like me, wearing glasses and a gold-cross chain on his bare chest. He was wearing a pair of my father’s pyjama trousers, which were too big for him, and he was looking deep into the fridge. I stood and looked at him. He turned to see me, closed the fridge door, walked past me up the stairs, and into the spare room. That was the surprise, a peeking boy?

  My mother told me his name was Kojo. That he was her brother’s son and that from now on he would live with us and I was to treat him like a brother. He smelt like the inside of the trunks we kept clothes in for when we finally went home.

  When we got on the bus to go to school, they stared at us, two brown ones now instead of one. I hoped that he would not embarrass me.

  I took small slow steps to the courtyard at break time, not wanting him to find me, not wanting to stand with him. Everyone it seemed was crowding around something in the courtyard. I walked a little faster, saw that it was Kojo. I still had time to turn around; no one had seen me. I stood where I was and looked. He was talking and they were watching, as if he were a teacher or preacher. Some of them were pushing to get nearer to him. I went closer.

  ‘Sometimes the leopards even come into the post office and the clerks have to jump on the counters until they have had a good look round,’ he was saying.

  The bell rang. Tom Anderson had moved closer to Kojo. ‘What a load of codswallop,’ he said loudly.

  Kojo turned and looked at him, then raised his hand and slapped him hard. Tom Anderson was holding his cheek. Everyone was talking and giggling and jostling. A teacher came and slowly they all went inside. I watched it all from afar. I watched and wondered how it was that Kojo had upset the order of things so completely on his first day.

  I kept watching him, and on the outside the balance of things was on my side. When he came into my room I pretended to be reading. When he put his cheek against mine, I pushed him away and wiped my face of his warmth. And still his presence crept into my solitude.

  He showed me how to bore surreptitious holes in the packets of sweets in the cupboard, until finally they were empty and we were found out. We raided the drawers and pockets of the house for pfennigs and bought paper cones filled with shiny black liquorice, sour multicoloured tongues and white foamy mice that we ate until we were sick. We constructed elaborate systems of Dungeons and Dragons in my mother’s front garden until, in his enthusiasm, he cut off the head of her prized sunflower that had grown almost as tall as me, and we were banned from her garden’s pleasures forever. We cycled the neighbourhood, everywhere gathering friends I did not know existed.

  We went to one of their houses for a birthday; the girls played games outside and the boys disappeared indoors. I went to find them and there was Kojo standing by the kitchen counter with his hands in the girl’s birthday cake.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Did you eat all of it?’ It was almost gone. I looked at the other boys, eating handfuls of chocolates and crisps.

  ‘Shh,’ Kojo said, grinning. ‘Let’s go,’ he said to the boys.

  We cycled all the way to the large park; I looked ahead at them, and at myself in dungarees, as we cycled up the big hill, up, up. I wanted to not care about the girl whose cake had now gone. I wanted to keep up with them. ‘Look at me,’ I shouted at them. ‘Look at me.’

  All the boys turned to look as I swung my bike around right at the top, and sped downwards, faster and faster, freer and freer. ‘Look at—’ My bike went over a large stone, I was still going faster. I tried to press the brake. I did not stop. I threw myself sideways, down, crashed on the ground. My bike fell away. I could not hear a thing. I saw the light shining through the leaves of the trees, ringing somehow into the pain in the side of my head, chest, in my nose.

  There was Kojo, he was bending over me, and there were the others; I could see them now, standing not too close, somewhere between shock and laughter. Would Kojo laugh too, like my parents would? Call me a silly girl? Embarrass me in front of them all?

  He came to me and sat me up. ‘Sit up, Maya,’ he said, ‘sit up, breathe. Can you hear me?’

  I nodded, more fascinated now by the fear and panic in his face than by my own pain.

  He was picking out stones that had pressed into my hand. He was telling me that I was going to be OK, that nothing would happen to me now that he was around, that he would protect me, that if anyone tried to hurt me he would kill them. He was talking so hard and so fast now that his voice was becoming high. Then he starte
d to cry, suddenly, without warning, shaking from his chest outwards. I looked at him and at the boys standing around.

  No one said a thing. They pulled him up, and pulled me up, and picked up my bent bike.

  We walked slowly back towards the house, Kojo holding me up in a way that was annoying. I was not a cripple, I wanted to say, but still I let him.

  At home, I said nothing about the fall. I knew that it was Kojo who would get into trouble, and I did not want anything to harm him.

  Behind the back garden of the house we found pieces of plywood and began building a spaceship that would take us into orbit. We nailed together the floor and sides and roof. It began to hail. The others wanted to go home.

  ‘Hail is like superglue for these walls,’ Kojo told them, but they were already getting ready to leave. ‘Weaklings,’ he called after them, but they did not turn round.

  Kojo walked slowly, kicking gravel, and putting his face up towards the hail, but it was beginning to hurt me.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I said.

  ‘Wait. Look.’ He stopped by an abandoned old yellow Volkswagen Beetle. He tried the doors and opened the passenger one for me. ‘Perfect,’ he said.

  The seat was wobbly underneath me and I tried not to inhale the smell of mould and damp and danger.

  Kojo got behind the steering wheel. ‘We are going to do a tour of Europe and America, but first—’ He reached into his denim jacket and pulled out a red-topped packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Where did you get those?’

  He put one in his mouth and pulled out a lighter. ‘I walked in on Mummy in the bathroom, after she and Dad were fighting last week. She was sitting on the toilet, and she was smoking. I took them from her bag. What is she going to say?’ He pulled something else out from his jacket. ‘This is for you.’ It was a small glass bottle of cherry-cola lip gloss.

  I rolled some on my lips. ‘Do I look like Donna Summer?’