Resting her forehead on the stiff curtain framing the window, Belinda watched the conductor, who was now on the tarmac, press his little machine to keep track of numbers. So many rules. So much to check. She nodded to slip her fake Ray Bans down from her forehead to her face. Once space became available, she too stepped into the soupy heat. Out there, smells of sewage sat in the air, smells ruder than when the bin men came with the huge truck to collect the rubbish on Spenser Road. Some of the Chinese coughed, eyes nearly watering, and covered their mouths before stumbling to the small stalls and loos. Under a brown sky, Belinda loitered among the other parked coaches and waiting tro tros, their cracked windscreens painted with slogans written in a familiar, shouty font: ‘Yesu Mo’, ‘His eyes watch us all … including you!’, ‘Beware the silver-tongued man’.
Mary loved those weighty mottos, especially if they had spelling mistakes. In fact she had loved everything about tro tros. On tro tro rides, especially those that took the busy route from Daban to Adum, Mary saw life and all of its surprises, so different from the silence and routine of Aunty and Uncle’s house. On tro tros, passengers pressed into cramped space with their rusted machetes, crates of Gulder, dried grasscutters, baskets of pink shallots; toddlers groaned wildly from their mothers’ backs. Drivers used fists and fingers to angrily gesture at pedestrians not paying attention as they crossed Lake Road. While Belinda usually did her best to make sure that their shopping bags did not get in anyone’s way or focused on holding the loop of frayed rope above her head for safety, Mary could not help but get involved in the minivan’s noise and mess.
Belinda remembered that, on one of those journeys last year, she and Mary had been sitting on fold-down seats next to a smartly dressed City-woman. The City-woman had a very straight back. Belinda had peered at the young woman’s newspaper and its centrefold showed farmers standing near piles of coconuts and a government notice about not urinating in public places. Beneath those: the mysterious daily Anansi sketch that Belinda and Mary often found Uncle thinking about while he had his morning cigarette. Belinda watched the City-woman grimace at that day’s difficult puzzle. In the first rectangle, Anansi stared at the sun with wide eyes. In the second, the spiderman was halfway through eating a chicken drumstick – its huge bone pointing out of Anansi’s thick lips. The third box was entirely black. The final one showed the question mark with the red dot that ended each and every strip.
The City-woman thrashed the pages and Belinda had been shocked by the anger with which she spoke. ‘If I had my chance to, I will find this Anansi cartoon-drawer and tell him a piece of my mind for challenging my brain so like this each day. Every blessed time I try but I never can get at the answer of this cartoonist, or even close to his sense, even if I try my very hardest. Nothing at all. A wicked man paaa.’
‘I. I don’t think is supposed to be like is in a schoolroom,’ Belinda had heard Mary say.
‘What you mean?’
‘Forgive. Forgive me coming in your personal and private chat, but. Well, why you carry on like every little thing it has to have answer? Maybe is fine fine to sometimes only have the questions, and leave there? There is so very much I do not know or understand. But is not causing me a rage and a heartbreaking. If someone just tell you answer, or, or even you are clever enough to work out the answer for yourself and get it, then bam: is finished. You have your answer and no more guessing and thinking. What is the use if all is finished and completed and there is nothing else left to do?’
The City-woman nodded, smiled and said to herself: ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.’
Because she couldn’t and didn’t want to think about that any more, Belinda repeatedly struck the coach park’s cracked earth with her heel, squashing termites that covered an old flyer for Milo with each movement of her foot. She stopped. The action was making her too sweaty: the temperature in Koforidua was even higher than in Accra. She longed for a smack of thunder louder than baking trays tumbling from Nana’s carousel cupboard. She needed a shocking flash of rain. Eventually, she found herself walking forward, away from the vehicles, their spluttering engines and their black smoke.
Big white letters wobbling on the roof of the building ahead told her the rest stop was called Best Salvation. In front of shops selling gizzard kebabs, oily patties and sarsaparilla, three thin boys played a game of catching marbles in painted calabashes. The youngest boy was distracted, kept picking at the diamanté design on his T-shirt, bright spots sketching the skylines of cities faraway. Near them, two women in faded aprons sat on a bench. The battered silver dishes at their feet displayed swollen tomatoes and dripping guavas, the fruit on the top of each pile cut in half to show juicy insides. The limpness of the women’s dark arms and bowed heads, the carelessness of their legs, the not-minding if flies trekked the bones on their shoulders felt completely right to Belinda. Not embarrassed that they had noticed her staring, Belinda went past the women to the fishy WCs, ignoring their boasts about how they could steal her fine-fine sunglasses and fine-fine Nike shoes from right under her nose if they wanted. When they joked and called her ‘Akwada bone’ for showing neither respect nor manners, she didn’t turn back to tell them she was no child; had not felt like anyone’s child for so long.
In the shadowy cubicle, exhausted again by the journey done and the idea of how much more lay ahead, Belinda pulled her knickers down and sat heavily on the seat. She leant forward to trace the crosses and flames scratched into the wooden door. Old copper pipes whispered. A tank somewhere gradually filled up. A girl hummed senselessly as she washed her hands in the sink. Belinda pushed but nothing came out of her. Because she was so bored of sighing, deep in her chest she held on to the rush of breath aiming for her lips.
Belinda wondered what Mary would have asked for as a Christmas gift this year. Would Mary have made the request shyly or without fear? Would Belinda have trawled the narrow aisles at Morley’s with Nana, searching for something shiny Mary could carry about with her and show off when she wanted? And would Uncle and Aunty have bought Mary a special gift too; a reward for working alone since summer and being grown-up? A pinkish bike Mary would be allowed to ride round the edge of the garden after finishing the laundry, the dishes, the silverware? When she first pulled it out of the box would Mary have screamed until her throat hurt? And would Mary have screamed even more knowing how much Aunty and Uncle sometimes enjoyed her being ‘too much’? Later, would Mary have feasted on salty scraps of goat from Uncle’s plate? Would her serious mouth have chewed and chewed tough flesh, not wanting to swallow and waste precious meat, chewing and chewing until any flavour had disappeared?
Might Aunty and Uncle have sent Mary to school properly? Would Mary have been better at Mathematics than she had expected? Might she perhaps find herself placed as No. 1 in a few algebra tests, and then recite all of her correct answers down the line to Belinda? And would Belinda have nodded at the meaningless combinations of letters and numbers? One day, when her reading and writing got better, might Mary have told Belinda about how she had also read Lord of the Flies like they had at Abacus? Might Belinda and Mary have shouted about Piggy and shouted about Jack?
And one day, when her age and the time were correct, might a man have seen Mary at church or by the seamstress’ shop and taken her as his own? And, as the years went on, might Mary have been magical enough to make him stay? Clever and magical enough to distract the force, the thing that eventually seemed to sweep everyone away; made them disappear or turned them to nothing? In the cubicle, Belinda rolled the heel of her hand against the bulge of her forehead. She kicked up the puddle of water seeping across the floor tiles. She tightened her body and pushed down. A steady and strong stream ran from her.
It was a mean trick the world kept playing: making her feel like certainty or calm had finally arrived. Letting her think that because she finally worked out the wool settings on the washing machine, understood Doctor’s weird respect for the ginger woman Cilla Black and now knew how to g
et from Tulse Hill to the Whitgift Centre, she could relax; that she had worked enough to make sense of it and could stop.
She wiped. She stood. She flushed. She washed her hands and walked out, passing the crumpled women who were complaining about how Nkrumah was the country’s last honourable leader and they wouldn’t see his like again. She wanted to ask them how they managed to cope with how unfair everything seemed to be, to use Amma’s phrase. But the women would have found her ridiculous and laughed at her with all of their teeth, so loud the noise might have made Belinda lightheaded and set off the trembling. So Belinda asked nothing as she bent down for four guavas she did not want to eat, leaving her change as she went.
Back in her seat, Belinda shuffled closer to the window to allow the quiet Chinese businessman next to her some room. He checked his even, tidy fingernails. He rested his briefcase on his knees and took out his laptop and a little padded ring that reminded Belinda of the balloon animals on a particularly good episode of the Blue Peter programme. The engine began and the green fruits in Belinda’s lap rocked. The man slid a disk into the computer then put the ring around his neck and headphones into his ears. Switching between English and Twi, the conductor did another bossy performance at the front. Smiling, the Chinese man pressed the mousepad and wriggled as the film started. He adjusted his neck ring and concentrated, paying Belinda no attention at all. Belinda found the sight of him strangely calming.
34
The final stop in Central Kumasi was at Kejetia. When they arrived, the conductor saluted. Passengers were shooed out into a square minutes away from the zoo where Belinda and Mary had settled for a crocodile rather than an ostrich, and had later made a scene almost as bad as Amma’s foolishness in Waitrose.
Here, everything blared and honked and irritated. Crowds gathered, shouted for no reason then moved on. Belinda slid her tongue over the roof of her mouth. In exchange for her rusted coins, an Albino boy collected her things and got her yet another taxi. A sweatily overdressed driver appeared, popped up his car’s boot and tried to impress her with his smart hat. He said it was called a fedora. He asked if she knew of the Godfather of Soul. She didn’t. Lifting the hem of her wrapper, Belinda pretended to be a classy lady, letting the driver open and close the door delicately, as if a slam might break her.
In the back seat, she soon gave in to the driver’s insistence that she stroke the fedora’s proud purple feather. She passed the hat, and a twitching smile, back to him. It seemed to do good because soon he stopped his chat and did his job properly. He went from Kejetia to Fanti New Town, then through Adieba and Atonsu. Every time he found a road ahead was too potholed, he stopped to think up a different route, petting the flopping pink flower in his lapel as he frowned and came up with a new plan.
When they finally reached it, Belinda saw that the track through poorer, Old Daban, was exactly the same as when she’d left. Along it, people from houses smaller and less fancy than Uncle and Aunty’s busied themselves. By the Sunlight Soap billboard, women with long breasts carried armfuls of laundry to scrub in the stream. The Methodist Believers’ Church was still as rickety, only now it was decorated with huge paper flowers for Christmas. Further along, the wrinkled moneylender drove his cane into the ground with fierce twists; toothless elders hacked sugar cane into pieces and a fat girl cooked turkey tails by a ribbon of sewage. As the taxi passed by, its wheels sprayed them all with red dust.
They drove up the avenue of palm trees marking the start of the foreigners’ villas: the enormous, four-storey for the old professor and his wife, both of whom had skin even fairer than Nana’s; the modest one for the Frempongs from Atlanta, with their three watchmen playing draughts on the porch; then the Nyantakyis with their enormous courtyard, in which their visiting grandson played on the trampoline that Mary had mentioned with the hottest envy.
In loose pyjamas, the eight- perhaps nine-year-old seemed to be having the best time of his life. The car threatened to pick up speed but Belinda wanted to stay and study his actions. His lightness. The way he seemed to fill up the sky each time he flew through it. He tried and failed to backflip, landing flat on his stomach, laughing, then whizzing up to do it again. His body delighted him. He spread-eagled his arms and did star jumps. He hugged his knees close to his chest, turning into a firm ball, striking and rising from the mat. He soared, his face full of both real fear and real joy. Up, up, up he went, driving himself with his own power, pushing so far from everything. The little boy stopped to wave at Belinda. Pressing against the window, she did the same back.
The driver eventually dropped Belinda off at Aunty and Uncle’s perimeter wall, whistling to himself as he sped away. Carpenter’s stall and its stack of tables and traditional stools remained in its usual spot, yards from the gate. And there, through the railings, the mango trees in the front garden she had sat beneath to sort through Aunty and Uncle’s boxes shipped over from the UK. And the corner of the garden that, each evening, was turned bluish by the pool’s lights. Ahead, up, the red slate roof, so impressive compared to Adurubaa’s corrugated iron. On the veranda, two rocking chairs swaying to different beats.
Belinda pressed the buzzer. The gates unwound with a whine and Belinda clutched her middle and tilted, bowing at the house. She fell to the ground, limbs and crinkling black cotton covering themselves in dirt. Every time she breathed – because she had to keep breathing – pain hit and her legs became less willing to cooperate. Someone’s quickening feet were getting nearer. Her throat throbbed.
‘Adɛn? Eh?’
‘Adɛn?’ Aunty and Uncle’s questions came out between little coughs and claps to her cheeks.
‘Me se! Me se adɛn?!’ A much thinner Aunty came down low to Belinda and spoke hoarsely. The weight of Belinda’s skull increased. Tasting grass, she tried to smooth her breath. Aunty’s hard rubbing helped. Aunty held Belinda’s shoulders and Belinda wondered if Aunty had wanted to do the same to Mary, but could not because the small girl’s arm did not meet the small girl’s shoulder did not meet the small girl’s chest. Belinda screamed and crawled into Aunty’s lap, getting tighter as fabric folded round her.
Belinda thought of Mary’s mother. Wherever and whatever that woman might be. Somehow Belinda hoped Mary’s mother had felt it deep, deep inside her body when Mary’s spirit was taken. On that day, Mary’s mother might have been fetching water or prodding avocados before buying. And then suddenly, in the middle of that ordinary task, Mary’s mother would have found herself thrown back by a pain she had never experienced before but understood immediately. Onlookers maybe stopped to put their supporting hands on the woman’s back, like Aunty did to Belinda now. What was the point of anyone’s helping hands? The mother might eventually have been put upright, but the woman wouldn’t walk in the exactly same, normal way ever again.
After she had wiped herself down and steadied herself like they told her to, after the heat of embarrassment sank and stilled around her ankles, Belinda sat in the massive reception room with the two of them. Like when the trembling came, she tried to do very little. Sometimes, the ceiling’s pine tongue and groove was calming, with its straight lines following one another. She squeezed the green coconut given to her, put its straw between her lips and sipped at the cool saltiness. She studied her surroundings. Again, everything, everywhere, was like nothing had happened and this was a perfectly acceptable world. Same tasselled rug underneath her. Same chandelier above, icy as ever. Same old side tables with tiny claws for feet, today holding three plates of Aunty’s greasy Jollof. Belinda wondered how quietly her voice would come out if she pushed the straw aside to speak.
‘Is shock. You have a bad shock and who can blame for that one?’ Uncle said, from the armchair beside her.
Aunty nodded from the other sofa and smiled. Her black head-tie wagged stupidly. ‘Shock. Yes.’
Belinda became interested in the two large vases either side of the telly, covered with those blue, Chinese-style drawings also on Nana’s special crockery. Mary ha
d loved cleaning those vases. While they had polished, Belinda let Mary wear the nicer pink rubber gloves. Belinda took the yellow pair while Mary buffed the show-off vases with slow-motion care, sometimes pretending to drop them, catching with seconds to spare. If Mary had been less cautious and clever, if one of those two vases had cracked and split into pieces – so what? Really, so what?
Uncle stretched his legs, letting out little, tired puffs, and then put his feet on the chunky ottoman. He grinned with satisfaction as though finally achieving the rest he deserved.
‘Darling?’ he asked.
‘Yes, my darling?’
‘Why don’t, eh, why don’t we see what is on the television? Check, dear.’
Aunty’s flitting between channels brought so much colour and colour and colour and screaming and applause and singing and silence and beeping Belinda worried she might be sick. She bit the straw. A saxophone did a familiar tune through the speakers.
‘Oh, we all love this one very much, don’t we? Is so nice.’
‘Yes, dazzit. Leave it here, dear.’
‘Oh yes. Yes, this is a good one. Belinda, you know it well, eh?’
The Cosby Show titles were starting; the opening where the background was a child’s drawing on a wall, a painting of a city, something like that. Dr Huxtable was first on, in an orange suit and pulling silly expressions to give his old-dog face youth. Next, the wife Clair appeared – too attractive for the Cosby man, Belinda and Mary always agreed – swinging her bouncy relaxed hair. The kids followed, one by one, different kinds of brown and all friends. They played around too, doing ridiculous walks across the stage, wearing clownish clothes several sizes too big for them. As the tune continued, Aunty and Uncle clapped along, Uncle even sometimes imitated the saxophone when it hit the highest notes. Aunty seemed to like that a lot. When the programme started, with all the patterned jumpers and padded shoulders and the laughs from the audience, Belinda found it hard to concentrate. She guessed Clair was putting up with something bad Cliff had done because that was usual. Aunty was transfixed, folding a leg beneath her bottom and leaning forward so her black pata pata rode up. Every few minutes, Aunty repeated Clair Huxtable’s quick replies to the doctor’s silly behaviour like she could not believe the woman’s intelligence.
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