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The God Child

Page 10

by Nana Oforiatta Ayim


  I took out one of her cigarettes, and put it between my lips. I had the urge to make myself feel sick, though I did not smoke. I walked to the little mirror we had found on a wall in the street and hung in our narrow corridor. I held the dead cigarette in my mouth and inhaled, then exhaled. Monica Vitti, I thought, narrowing my eyes. No, Romy Schneider: I pulled back my hair with my left hand and inhaled again. I parted my hair to the side and over my eyes, ruffled the back and pouted. Brigitte Bardot. I walked with a slow deliberate hip-swing to the window, leant out and tipped my imaginary ash. I fluttered my eyelashes at the wind and looked down at the bench opposite the terraced building. Someone had left a large blue Ikea bag there, brightly coloured clothes spilling out of its neck like the curdled brains of a man shot in the head.

  You are never poor. I heard the echo of my mother’s voice in my head.

  I put a coat over my blue-and-wine striped pyjamas and the Green Flash plimsolls that still had my name tag stitched into their tongues and thought of all the unopened bills in my mother’s house, and of the wardrobes stuffed to overspill with clothes. I walked out of the door, down the four flights of steps and along the side streets parallel to Ladbroke Grove which began to get wider as the houses grew taller, towards the second-hand clothes shop that I hoped would buy what I had.

  As I went, I looked into the windows of the perfectly arranged kitchens and front rooms. I knew that behind the facades lay messy imperfection, but wanted to glut myself on the fake perfections until my head hurt in the same way it did when I looked through the pages of Vogue magazine.

  I walked to the Notting Hill Exchange, looked down at the Vivienne Westwood platform shoes as I went in. They were selling for £250. The peroxided leather-jacket-​wearing sales assistant looked into my bag full of designer treasures, wordlessly took out five dirty ten-pound notes, and put them on the counter.

  Back home, I did not take my coat off to dial Kojo’s number, but sat on the bed in my pyjamas, held my breath at the familiar drawn-out ringtone.

  ‘Hello? … Maya. Is that you?’ Kojo shouted from the other end. ‘Maya, I need your help.’

  ‘Of course, of course I’ll help you.’

  He laughed. ‘You haven’t even heard, and you’re prepared. You’re either very trusting or a fool.’

  I bit my tongue. Since his return, Kojo had found his place, his calling, his person, when I, in staying, seemed to get more and more lost in the seeking. ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t, not fully, on the phone. We have an election coming. Do you remember, Maya, all the treasures we used to talk about? Those sold off?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘We have finally found the places they were sold to. Even the golden crown, Maya. Even the golden crown… Next year, before the election, we will have a grand exhibition, a festival, a museum, an Odwira here. On home soil. All the world’s leaders, everyone will come and see how deep our history is. You have to come. I asked your mother to book you a ticket, to come for Christmas.’

  ‘Does she want me to come?’

  ‘She wants a Christmas tree,’ he laughed.

  I said no to my mother’s demand to bring a Christmas tree with me from England; until Ben, who always wore patterned woollen jumpers and whose smile when he saw me was that of a child, asked me what good a Christmas tree would be in Africa. I told him it was Ghana, not Africa, and asked him why it was we couldn’t have Christmas trees if we wanted them, aware that I was sounding spoilt and unreasonable, and that he did not deserve my wrath; but there was something in his voice that reminded me of the line in the song heralding that there would be no snow in Africa this Christmas, the pop stars singing with their mouths downturned at the thought of snowless children in over forty degrees heat.

  My mother not only expected me to drag a live Christmas tree halfway across the world on a plane, as bulk luggage, but on her last visit to London had, as only she knew how, charmed a man the local taxi company had sent, whom we later baptised Uncle Matthew, into being her personal chauffeur, and had no qualms enlisting him to scour London scouting for just the right one.

  I was out of the bath, standing wet in the kitchen, when I heard the sound of a loud radio come up from the street, then that of a car horn. I went over and looked out of the window. Uncle Matthew’s car was dwarfed by a gigantic fir tree.

  Oh no! I went into my room. Bags had to be closed. Papers still packed. Passport found. I stood at the doorway, wondering where to start. I went towards the suitcase, then back to the papers on the floor, then towards the desk. I stood still and looked from one to the other.

  ‘Here, you sit on it and I’ll zip it up.’ Zinaida was in the doorway. She knelt and tried to press shut the bulging suitcase.

  ‘My oh my,’ Uncle Matthew said as we went up and down the stairs, clutching suitcases, bags and notebooks.

  ‘That’s it.’ I looked up at the house. ‘Wish me luck.’

  ‘You don’t need it. You’re going home,’ Zinaida said.

  ‘I’m so nervous.’

  ‘I know you are, darling, but it will be all right. Your mother will be fine. Kojo will be there. And Saba will be … Saba,’ she said, as if Kojo’s sister’s presence could do anything but make things harder.

  ‘Thank you. Give my love to the others. And thank you.’ I drew back, clenched my fists and squeezed my shoulders up to my ears. ‘I am so excited.’

  The taxi crawled up Ladbroke Grove as the intensity of the cars beeping behind us grew.

  ‘It might help if you took your sunglasses off, Uncle Matthew. It’s actually quite dark.’

  ‘No, no it’s all right.’ He turned round and slowed down even further. The sunglasses had large white frames and, if he hadn’t been so old, he might have looked like a seventies pimp. He had found the sunglasses in the back of the taxi, he said, and lifted them up onto his forehead with a trembling hand to show me his smiling eyes underneath.

  Cars were overtaking us. Drivers shouted swear words as they passed by.

  Uncle Matthew waved his hand at them as if swatting off mosquitoes.

  I leant back for the snail-ride to the airport, ignoring the background sounds of horns and expletives. When we reached the roundabout that led to the different terminals of Heathrow, Uncle Matthew drove round and round at walking pace, leaning over the steering wheel and indicating for each exit before changing his mind, the orchestra of horns behind us a discordant symphony.

  We got to Terminal Four – I was late. My heart beat hard. I was going to miss the plane. I was my mother’s daughter after all. I lugged suitcases onto a trolley and ran.

  Uncle Matthew was behind with the Christmas tree.

  We drew all kinds of curious looks as we ran past German travellers with their compact Samsonite suitcases, Italian travellers with their matching leather ones and Americans with their rucksacks, or so it seemed. One of my suitcases fell off the trolley. ‘Damn them all for looking at me,’ I cursed. ‘May their stares turn back on them and into flames.’

  I saw the Ghanaian travellers with trolleys piled with bulging brown Sellotaped boxes and bound-together suitcases and washing machines and children’s bicycles and huge red-and-black chequered Ghana Must Go bags. Ghana Airways.

  I ran to the check-in. A man was pleading with the airline staff as he pulled item after item from his suitcase. People were giving large suitcases to relatives to hide so they could take them on as hand luggage and everyone was looking at my Christmas tree.

  I asked a harried-looking woman at the counter in a British Airways uniform if she had seen Mr Omisah. She looked at me, Uncle Matthew and our trolleys and said that Ghana Airways had overbooked; there was no time to check in people arriving now.

  ‘But I have to get on the plane,’ I told her.

  The woman had already turned away.

  ‘Uncle Matthew, wait here. I’m coming.’ I took the trolley and ran through the mass of people to the Ghana Airways counter.

  There were two women
in charge. One was trying to calm the madding crowd, the other had turned to face the wall and was silently holding a telephone receiver in her hand.

  I went round the counter to the woman on the phone. ‘Please, Auntie,’ I said, taking her arm, ‘please, I’m looking for Mr Omisah.’

  Uncle Matthew had followed me to the counter with the tree. I felt a surge of guilt for making the old man rush with me, but I knew he would not leave even if I told him to. I went to stand next to him and put my hand on his shoulder.

  The woman refused to look away from the wall and I tried again. ‘My mother is Yaa Agyata, she told me to look for Mr Omisah when I came.’

  The woman turned to me for the first time and took the receiver from her ear. ‘Who?’ She looked at me with bullish annoyance.

  I balked slightly at the woman’s hostile glance and at the realisation that I was now no longer just another African girl in London, but in territory in which the mention of my mother’s name could get me onto a plane.

  ‘Sister, you dey fo take this home?’ the man next to her asked, pointing at the tree just as I spotted Mr Omisah walking past the counter.

  I ran towards him, motioning at Uncle Matthew. ‘Mr Omisah,’ I shouted, as I reached him.

  He saw me, smiled at first, then looked alarmed when he spotted the Christmas tree. I felt flush with embarrassment, then remembered that my mother would reward him. I looked up at the display board for the first time – four hours’ delay.

  Mr Omisah took the Christmas-tree trolley from Uncle Matthew and led me to the front of the queue. I was getting my mother’s treatment.

  We were held up in Rome for two hours with no explanation, until a murmured chorus rose from the passengers. ‘What nonsense is this…? Why are they treating us like animals?’ Still, when the plane landed in Accra, everyone cheered and clapped like it had been a first-class journey. I sat in business class and had been refreshed by orange juice on a regular basis. Those in economy had none. It was now one of my mother’s pretensions to sit herself and her children in business class, wherever we flew or however little money she had. It was like the way her accent changed when she left the house. Or her voice rose when she wanted people to hear what she was talking about – her large house, her Jaguar, her royal lineage. Once, when listening to her boasting of our enormous television, I interjected, ‘But we don’t have one,’ and had been clipped for my troubles, learning to wince silently at the excesses.

  I stepped out of the plane onto the top step of the ladder. The hot muggy air swept over and into me. I closed my eyes. Home. We were herded into a bus and, when we got to the terminal building, the first thing I saw were the familiar gold-rimmed smiling eyes of Kojo. I ran into his arms.

  ‘Akwaaba, welcome.’ He took my bag from me. ‘You have grown into a beautiful young woman.’ He looked at my tight curly hair, misshapen from the journey, my pink crumpled flower skirt, white vest top and platform shoes.

  I smiled into his admiration. He whisked me past the passport control, throwing waves and smiles as he went. On the other side, a man in a white-shirt uniform, with a blue beret, met us with a trolley and asked me to describe my bags. The arrivals hall was small and matt compared to the glossiness of Heathrow. There were only two conveyer belts and a small wooden counter with ‘Bureau de Change’ written in black on yellow above it. Why French? I was wondering, when I saw my mother rushing towards me in a sumptuous long green, gold-dusted dress, gold slip-on shoes and matching bag. I had forgotten how beautiful she was. She was laughing, with her arms outstretched, her bag falling from her shoulder to her elbow. Her diamond-encrusted glasses hung diagonally across her face. She took me in her arms and kissed me hard on the cheek. I drew in my head at her effusiveness and looked up at her. She smelt of powdery luxury. Her arms and chest felt like butter and as always there was gold trapped beneath her skin.

  ‘Your hair looks awful!’ She put her hands through it. ‘And what are you wearing? Terrible!’ Even though I was next to her, her voice rang out to the walls.

  We had to pick up other boxes. My mother had demanded Christmas-tree lights and decorations from Switzerland and Lebkuchen biscuits, Dr. Oetker juices and a Christmas cake from Germany. I did not know what imperative drove her to have things sent from abroad, when she could readily buy them from the supermarkets and shops in Accra, but it was the same one that made her bring pineapples and mangoes and yams to me when she came to London, shirts and suits and dresses to relatives when she came back to Accra, and kente and Adinkra cloths when she visited friends in Europe. It was as if she always wanted to bear gifts with her from foreign lands or pass on the excess of her own rare, precious essence to those less well imbued, like the Three Magi bearing frankincense, gold and myrrh. The uniformed man came back with my luggage, followed by three other men in white shirts and blue trousers, pushing three trolleys piled high with boxes. They all walked towards customs. A man with a stern face and a blue customs suit beckoned them towards him.

  ‘My little girl,’ my mother cooed at him, ‘she has just come. Books. Only books. Her food will get cold.’ She tickled the custom man’s cheek and waved the men pushing the trolleys on.

  We went past the thronged mass outside, waiting for the returnees; past the porters and taxi drivers sidling up for custom; past the suited men wanting to shake Kojo’s hand, to the waiting car.

  The driver got out of the four-wheel drive and nodded at me. ‘You are welcome, madam.’

  I smiled, uneasy with this form of address, not least because he was much older than me, my senses filled with the pulse of the airport, the frenzied shouting, the closeness, people holding hands and embracing and approaching as if there were no boundaries.

  We got into the car, to the loud chattering orders of my mother and the quieter efficiency of Kojo.

  At the traffic light, girls and boys selling ‘pia water’, pure water in sachets, plantain chips, portable radios, windscreen cloths, watches, mops and buckets, magazines and chewing gum, crowded round our air-conditioned car.

  My mother opened the window and let the warm air in.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ they shouted, as she bought toilet roll and joked with them about the prices.

  I sat in the back seat looking out at the legless men rolling past the cars in front of them.

  There was a knock on my window. A young boy was holding out his hand. A blind man leant on his shoulder.

  I tugged at my mother’s arm.

  She looked across at my side of the car and beckoned them over.

  ‘Please,’ the boy said, ‘my father is sick and we have no money for medicine. We have no money to go home. Please, Mummy, help us.’

  My mother took a 10,000-cedi note out of her bag. I looked at the boy and his father and the gauntness of their cheeks.

  My mother touched my cheek. ‘Don’t be sad, little girl. You don’t know if it is the Lord himself come down to test us.’ She pressed my hand.

  We passed women selling mangoes, pineapples, sweet potatoes and yams on their trolleys on the sides of the streets. New shopping centres stocked with high-end clothes, toys and household goods had sprung up since I had last come. In front of an aluminium-roofed kiosk, a young woman sat on a stool as another one braided her hair. A small fat-bellied boy ran naked and wet out in front of them, did a dance and ran back in. The tarmac turned into red earth where nascent concrete shells of houses stood. At the side of the road, a man lay on a bench with a radio beside him. The warm evening sun seemed to slow everything down and my heart struggled to settle into its pace. We pulled into the gates of a large peach-painted house that from the outside looked like any of the villas we had passed in the area. It stretched almost to the extremes of the compound.

  My mother shouted, ‘Charles!’

  Out of the annals of the house an echo answered, ‘Madam!’

  ‘Charles!’ my mother called again.

  ‘Madam!’ the echo responded once more, this time accompanied by a rush of feet
and a smiling shirt-clad young boy.

  ‘Where have you been, stu-pid boy? Sleeping? You damn fool! Hurry up! Hurry up and get the things out of the car!’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ Charles answered, still smiling through the storm of insults.

  They all seemed bemused – Kojo, the driver and Charles. Only I was mortified at my mother’s tone. I stood with my arms folded, scowling at her.

  ‘But, madam. Where is the tree for Christmas time?’ Charles asked, and in all innocence pushed a nuclear button.

  ‘A-wu-ra-de! Aich!’ My mother was waving her arms. ‘Oh Lord!’ She clutched her head. ‘Jeeee-sus! You damned fool!’ Her drama turned to the driver, John. ‘Id-iy-ot.’ She stood in front of this grown man shouting him down to his face. ‘Why did you not think of it? You, with your face like a goat! What do I pay you for?’

  John looked out at the gate through which we had just driven.

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ I said to my mother, arms still folded.

  She turned her attention to me. ‘How dare you talk to me like that in front of these people? What do you think I am? A damned fool?’

  I walked into the house. On the cold marble-flecked floors stood plush yellow embroidered sofas and a glass gold-encrusted centre-table underneath an ornate crystal chandelier. In the dining-room area, there was a lacquered dining table with eight chairs and a glass cabinet filled with the expensive plates and crockery that had caused my father to finally leave.

 

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