The God Child

by Nana Oforiatta Ayim

  I went up the stairs: more sofas and a large television. Aha, I thought, the mythical TV, at last. My mother had a disarming knack for turning dreams into reality. I opened a door to her powdery perfumy smell. In the room stood a large golden bed with a gold eiderdown cover on it and another, smaller TV against the wall facing it. The walls were lined with gold-handled wardrobes and in the corner were a golden chair and an ivory dresser, littered with perfume bottles, make-up, keys and papers. For comfort I touched the dresser before I closed the door.

  In the next room, there was a smaller cream-coloured gold-edged bed and a similar dressing table, but empty, and a cream wardrobe. My room. Princess-sized to my mother’s queen. I went in and lay on the bed. I looked up at the air conditioning, blowing cold air above my head, and switched it off with the remote.

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ I said after a pause.

  It was Kojo. ‘Come,’ he said, so much older than me now. ‘I called for someone to bring the Christmas tree from the airport; it is here and up, and I am leaving.’

  I turned to face the wall.

  ‘Come, tomorrow Ma will bring you to my house. We will go to Gyata, and we will do all.’ He pulled me up and put his arm around my shoulders as we walked down the stairs.

  The Christmas tree stood tall in the garden; Charles was up a ladder hanging the decorations and lights on it. I watched him clumsily draping tinsel on pine. My mother in turn barked orders and laughed. I rolled my eyes at Kojo, who came and squeezed me, kissed my mother on the cheek, shook hands with the driver, and reached a cedi note up to Charles, before going to speak to the gateman.

  ‘Nobody has eaten. Kojo, come back,’ my mother shouted to his departing car. ‘Charles, have you eaten at all? Security. Who in this house has eaten this evening…?’

  We all piled into the kitchen. My mother delegated tasks and set to making plantain and yam and green kontomire stew in palm oil with boiled eggs. She made everyone – John, Charles, the cook – laugh with her stories, and I thought, not for the first time, as I sat on the counter, what an actress she would have made, as she rushed from stove to fridge, dealing out portions of food for all in the house.

  With Charles, I laid out the costly plates for the two of us in the dining room.

  20

  I woke up the next morning to the absence of the mechanical noise of London and began to make out the rhythmic strains of someone pounding fufu, the distant echo of a radio. I opened my eyes, saw that the sky was covered in a fog-like cast; the harmattan was blowing in from the Sahara, its clouds said to carry disease and misfortune along with their dust. Catarrh clogged the lungs. Grit stuck in the eyes. Its still wind dried out the mind. There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Yes?’

  Charles came in. ‘Madam. Fine morning.’

  ‘Good morning, Charles. Call me Maya.’

  ‘Yes, sister. Maya. Please, I would like to bring the breakfast.’

  ‘Breakfast in bed?’ I smiled, thinking of the very recent scrimmage for coins.

  ‘Yes, sister, please, sausage and eggs.’

  ‘Mummy asked you to make this? I’ve been vegetarian since I was eight.’

  ‘Bejtan…?’

  ‘I don’t eat meat…’ I had stopped eating red meat at school when as teenage girls we had been given the option of what and how much we wanted to eat. And yet still my mother told me there was no meat in dishes in which there was, or that corned beef was not really meat. ‘Never mind. Where is she? Is she up?’

  ‘Please, Mummy has gone out.’

  ‘She will be back soon?’

  ‘This night.’

  ‘And there’s no car?’

  ‘No please.’

  I fell back into the pillows. I remembered now how hard it was to be independent here, with no car, no local phone, how my mother seemed to make sure I could do nothing alone without a driver, without her, and how easy it was, when you were not with Kojo, to lose him in the constant stream of engagements and meetings and busyness he was now engulfed in. And yet there was so much to do – the museum we were building in Gyata with all the goods that had gone missing, all our powers returned, and we now did not have much time.

  ‘Charles,’ I shouted, sitting up.

  ‘Sister,’ he replied quietly.

  ‘Sorry … I thought you’d gone. Is there a telephone?’

  ‘They have disconnected it.’

  ‘Of course they have…’

  ‘I bring break fast?’

  ‘No, thanks, I will come.’ I got out of bed, ran my fingers against the walls as I went down; the hollowness of empty rooms, empty apartments, empty houses, its resonance an old friend. I went into the kitchen. Charles was eating gari foto with stew. It was the one dish I had never taken to, the coarse grains sticking in my throat. I stood and watched him and he stopped eating. I looked around at the large bare kitchen completely stripped of herbs, condiments, oils and trimmings, unlike our kitchen in London with its olive oils and teas and paper cut-outs of roses and passport pictures on the cupboards.

  Charles had begun eating again.

  ‘You should sit down when you eat, it’s better for you,’ I said to him.

  He looked at me. ‘I know where there is telephone.’

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘There is a man who sell the unit. He has mobile phone.’

  ‘Charles, you are amazing.’ I ran up to my mother’s room and stopped. I did not have Kojo’s number. I looked around at the coloured woven cloths my mother had tried and discarded onto the bed and chair. I opened the bedside table that was attached to the large ill-shaped bed-board. Among the scribblings of Bible passages in my mother’s address book, I found the number I was looking for. It was underneath my own. Above a prayer my mother had written out for the protection of her children. Let no harm come to them, she had written, her writing spilling diagonally across the lines. I ran my fingers over them and closed the book.

  I went through the door between the wardrobes that opened into the bathroom. I turned the taps of the large amoeba-shaped sunken bath with holes in the bottom. Hot water. The luxury. I let the water run over my fingers, until it began to burn. I looked at the cosmetics on a trolley next to the basin. I began to straighten out all the powders, creams, ointments, oils and perfumes. I turned the labels outwards and picked up a facecloth and rubbed the dust off the Dax hairwax and the pink oil, the sticky heavy medicinal-smelling ointments I had put in my hair when I was little to tame its rebellious kink. I polished the Nina Ricci, the Diorissimo and the Chanel No5 bottles and smelt each one for my mother. I opened the blue-and-white tub of Astral cream and dipped my finger into its marshmallow whiteness and picked up a white blue-lettered container – skin lightener, as advertised on CNN. I opened the jar and the chemical aroma filled my nostrils. My mother was always telling me I was too dark. Once, I had tried it, but it had left dark patches on my temples and I could not stand the smell of limed poison on my skin. My mother was more expert and mixed it with less harmful creams and somehow achieved an even glossy hue. Not like the women you saw with large dark blotches, beige-coloured skin and down growing on their faces and arms. I got into the bath and pushed the button so that air came up out of the holes at the bottom. I closed my eyes and thought of how difficult life was in London and how often my mother had told me to come home. And yet, on my last visit to Ghana, when I had woken up one morning and put on a thin kaftan over my naked body to go down to breakfast, she had looked at me and hissed, ‘Are you wearing pants?’ I ignored her loud-whispered, ‘There are men in the house … that’s why no one respects you.’ In England I could be free, unrestrained. Here there were safety nets, but also rules, mores alien to me. And in both, it was a daily struggle to master the tightrope of existence, or risk falling. I stretched my head back into the soft bubbling water, held my breath.

  Outside the Christmas tree was beginning to go brown with the heat. Charles and I walked down
to the bottom of the untarred cratered lane. There was a half-finished house, unpainted and scaffolded. Men were sitting in a group around a small radio; a woman with a baby tied to her back was rhythmically lifting a long stick up and down above a bowl, pounding fufu.

  ‘What are they doing there?’

  ‘They sell yam.’

  ‘Do they live there?’

  ‘Ai.’

  ‘Does the landlord know?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The master of the house?’

  ‘Yes. Maybe they rent from him. I think he does not have enough money to finish so he is selling yam.’

  We walked on along red-earth lanes and past half-finished shells of houses and finished ones with basketball courts and pillars. We stopped at one house that had been made to look like a castle: turrets, golden lions and all.

  ‘My God. Who built this?’

  ‘It is a lady. She de come from Europe.’

  Of course. She was one of the been-tos who went to Europe and worked as doctors, lawyers, nurses, taxi drivers or cleaners, and returned with the same qualification of the school of over there.

  ‘Will you take me to Aburokyire, sister?’

  ‘To Europe? It’s not that great there, Charles. It’s very difficult and cold and people don’t talk to each other.’

  ‘But everybody is rich?’

  I laughed. ‘No, not everybody.’

  ‘I would like to go to America.’

  ‘What would you do there?’

  ‘Play football. Buy a mobile phone. And a car.’

  ‘You think it’s easier there?’

  ‘Yes, sister.’

  We walked on in silence, towards the main road.

  ‘You marry an oburoni?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so. There are so many differences, but Ghanaian men think I’m funny.’

  We had reached the main road. In front of us was a kiosk selling household goods and refreshments and a two-storey-building with an ice-cream parlour, dressmaker and Internet café.

  ‘Why? Because you are too small?’ He pressed his arms to his side to show my thinness. ‘I will show you how to pound fufu, Sister Maya. Then we will find you a husband.’

  I smiled and pinched his nose.

  ‘Aich,’ he said and laughed. It was deep and boyish.

  ‘Where are your parents, Charles?’

  ‘They have passed.’

  ‘Your brothers and sisters…?’

  ‘In the village. Mummy came to get me and now she is sending me to school … sister, the number.’

  There was a man sitting on the edge of the road, with a wooden table and an old-fashioned handset, rather than a mobile phone. I wondered how it connected. I handed him the number I had written on a piece of paper. He dialled several times, but Kojo’s number was unresponsive.

  ‘Try again,’ I urged him, until he shook his head and gave me back the piece of paper.

  There was only one thing left to do.

  ‘You have a number for Saba?’ I asked Charles.

  ‘Yes, please. You want make me fo call am?’ He looked at me, sensing my reluctance.

  I nodded once, twice.

  Speaking to Kojo’s sister was as hard for me as swallowing fufu, but I had no other choice. Saba agreed to come over. We walked the red-dusted road towards the house in silence, passing by the shoeshiners ringing their bells and street traders with goods piled high on top of their heads as they went.

  A car was driving up to the gate when we got there and the elderly gateman slowly opened it. He was tall, stooped and very slender. A Volkswagen Golf pulled in and Saba stepped out. She was leaner and many shades lighter than Kojo. Her hair was scraped back, Sade-like, from her rounded forehead and she was wearing gold heels and a short aquamarine dress with a looped halter-neck encrusted with what looked like semi-precious multicoloured stones, which on anyone else might have looked tacky or overblown.

  ‘Maya, dah-ling. Mu-wah, mu-wah. How absolutely dah-ling to see you. What a dah-ling Christmas tree. Back in a mo.’ She swept into the house.

  It was still a source of amazement to me that Saba, having never really lived in England, affected the intonations of a Chelsea mum. After their mother’s death, Kojo and his sisters were shared between their mother’s siblings and Saba was the only one to have stayed in Ghana. She looked out of the front door. ‘Get changed, Maya, we’re going to a wedding!’

  ‘Saba,’ I followed her into the house, ‘I’d love to go, but I’m looking for Kojo.’

  ‘I thought you might be.’ Saba stood on the staircase with her hand on her hip. ‘Mummy tells me of you and your cousin’s aspirations. He’ll be at this do, so get dressed.’

  I went up the stairs behind Saba and turned into my room. I emptied the contents of my suitcases onto the floor – vintage frocks, skirts and tops that all looked fine on the streets of London – and pulled out a short black fitted dress. Downstairs, Saba was getting into the Golf and motioned for me to do the same. She began to beep her horn.

  ‘He’s already on his way to the gate, Saba.’

  ‘More like on his way to the grave. I don’t know why Mummy insists on employing these good-for-nothings.’

  ‘Hasn’t he been in the family for years?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘They are human beings too, you know.’

  ‘Oh here we go. Please spare me your First World guilt.’ She turned up the song playing on her car radio: Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’; Saba sang along at the top of her voice, shimmying her shoulders. I looked out of the window as we drove out of the dusty drive and onto the main roads of East Legon. Half-built houses nestled alongside ones with basketball courts. Areas of land were being cleared for more houses and luxury estates. Accra was expanding ever further outwards to accommodate its growing moneyed classes. We joined the slip road that led onto the motorway. I saw an enormous pillared building, the size of a stadium. There were empty flagpoles outside and a huge billboard of a smiling well-fed smooth-skinned man wearing a white Mao-style shirt and black suit jacket.

  ‘Whose wedding is it?’ I asked Saba.

  ‘Michael’s. He’s David’s friend.’

  ‘Is that where you were when I arrived, with David?’

  ‘None of your beeswax. We’re picking him up in Osu.’

  ‘Lovely,’ I said. I had met him many years ago, after Saba had divorced her first husband, and my memories of him were not rainbow-rimmed. We drove down the 37 highway and onto Oxford Street. The streets bustled with energy, music and honking cars. We passed tall girls in hotpants and short dresses, boys in baggy low-slung jeans and baseball caps, red-faced tourists wearing batik and printed dresses, neon-signed nightclubs, Chinese restaurants, fried chicken joints, an ice-cream bar, shops selling cards, wrapping paper and mobile phones, hawkers holding up Ghana football shirts, flags, masks and alligator-skin handbags. We stopped at a bar with an outside terrace and got out of the car. Saba went and whispered in the ear of a stocky dark man sitting with a group. Everything about him signalled wealth. His gold watch. The crisp white of his polo shirt with the small blue horseman above his nipple. The sunglasses perched on his head. The BMW key ring he dangled from his middle finger. I walked slowly towards them, looked round the patio with its tiled floor and shiny black tables. There was a shy-looking couple waiting to be seated. The girl whispered to the boy, who smiled up at her and put his hand on her back. A large, red-faced man in an open crumpled shirt pushed past me.

  I turned. ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Give me a table,’ he said to the waitress in a white and green African-print shirt-dress who was clearing plates.

  A wiry floppy-haired blond man came out and led the red-faced man to a table.

  The girl who had been waiting with her boyfriend whispered into his ear again.

  ‘I think they’re being racist,’ I said, joining Saba.

  ‘Stop being so sensitive,’ Saba said, wit
h her hand on the back of David’s chair.

  ‘Hey, little sis.’ David had an American accent at the edge of his voice.

  ‘We’ll see you there.’ Saba started walking away.

  I followed her to the car, and we waited for him to get into his.

  ‘That was fun,’ I said.

  ‘If you stopped being so mealy-mouthed, you might enjoy yourself. Isn’t he handsome?’

  ‘Not really. Where to now?’

  Kojo had wanted to go to Gyata today; it was getting late.

  ‘Michael’s fiancée’s. David’s pulling some strings for him to get a diamond concession in the Upper East.’

  ‘You mean his father’s strings? Isn’t that called corruption?’

  ‘I think it’s called making the best of your opportunities, sweetheart, and it’s a universal phenomenon. Besides no one here makes enough.’

  ‘He certainly doesn’t look like someone who doesn’t.’

  We trailed David’s BMW, as he stop-started rhythmically to the sound of some hip-hop tune.

  ‘Why does he only stop at some traffic lights?’

  ‘No point stopping when there aren’t any cars.’

  ‘You can do that here?’

  Saba shrugged.

  We were driving into the streets of Airport Residential Area, next to the airport, giving rulers past and present quick access to the shops of London, Paris and New York, and a ready escape route should the masses revolt. It was developed for colonial officers and now housed Accra’s most established residents. Its streets were wider and cleaner, its trees taller and fuller, its houses larger and fatter. We pulled up at a house with BMWs, Mercedes and Range Rovers parked outside.

  ‘I don’t understand why any of these people would have to take something that’s not actually theirs.’

  ‘It’ll take you a while to figure out how things work at the top, my bohemian princess.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to.’

  ‘Enough of this posturing and pouting. If you behave, you might even find yourself a husband,’ Saba said, putting on lip gloss in the rear-view mirror.