But a moment later, I felt all the same newly formed crystals of hope melt, drain away out through the ends of my fingers and the soles of my feet. He told me the cost. Six pounds!? I had never even seen so much money.
I returned home on a different bus. All the time I barely lifted my head to look at the landscape. I set my mind to thinking. I would write to my brothers. Perhaps they would help. I only had to work out how to ask them for the money in a way that meant they couldn’t refuse me.
These thoughts were still chasing each other in my mind as I walked the last of the way home. Too late, I realised I had forgotten to think up something to tell Khalil about my trip to see my sister.
The house was quiet. There was my son standing outside my neighbour’s house. I knelt down and stretched out my arms to him, and he ran to me, throwing himself against me. I lifted him up and held him to my chest, pushed my nose into his hair and breathed his good smell. I walked up the path.
The house was empty. No cooking smells. No children. Something strange. Where were Khalil and Zainab? I turned around and around on the same spot. Okurgba laughed as if this was a game. I set him down. I thought many things. Somebody ill? One of the children? I never imagined what was to come. I opened the door of my room. Everything was exactly as I had left it. One by one, I pushed open the doors of the other rooms. Khalil’s. Zainab’s. Empty. Just walls and a floor. Sleeping mats rolled up in the corner. Pegs bare. All gone.
They had left me.
The neighbour informed me of the manner of their departure. They had left my three sons with her. She relished my discomfort and the petty power her knowledge gave her, that much I could see. Watching me with gleaming eyes and a curved smile like that cat of hers. I half expected her to lick her lips as she spun the story out to see my reaction. I emptied my face, simply to deny her the satisfaction. But it came down to this: they left no forwarding address; hand in hand, they ran away like children.
When she had finished she pretended to comfort me, inviting me to sleep in her home, but I brushed her aside. I had only one question. When? I asked her. When did they go?
And she told me. Later on the same morning, the very morning that I had left for the city. At almost exactly the time I first laid eyes on the sea.
II
Mariama, 1970
Other Side of the Road
In the village where we lived people didn’t always greet each other in the usual way. Often they just said: ‘Baba?’ Like that, with a question in the word. A pair of doves somehow escaped from their locked cage and flew away, and people smiled knowingly: ‘Baba.’ If the bucket had been left at the bottom of the well, they said the same: ‘Baba.’ Or if a young girl had been made love to by some man whose name she refused to call, the other men nudged each other while the women spat into the dust. ‘Baba!’
When I was perhaps ten I asked Ya Sallay — who by then had become my mother: ‘Who is Baba?’ And she told me that she had asked the very same thing soon after she had married my father and come here herself. She was told there was once a man who went by that name. Babatunde was an unreliable type of person, the kind who would borrow something and not bring it back. This man owed money to everybody in the village, and was never ready to repay it. So his creditors decided to hold a meeting and sent a message telling him to attend. But Baba somehow got wind of the purpose of the gathering, and on that day he fled the village.
Well, the men went out looking. Even sent messages to the neighbouring villages asking after him. For days people searched the neighbourhood, and whenever they crossed paths would say to each other: ‘Have you seen Baba?’ And after many months and years the question became simply: ‘Baba?’ And then there came a time when the other began to answer in jest, as if to say, I am very well thank you: ‘Tunde.’
So this man’s name became detached from him and used for all sorts of other things. And in the end he stopped being whoever he had once been and became all the things they said about him.
Ya Sallay laughed when she told me this story. But I didn’t laugh. Rather I worried for Babatunde. I didn’t care that he was a scoundrel. I felt sorry. I wondered where he was and what had become of him. I thought about him living far away, among strangers, without his name, not knowing who he was any more.
Once I went to live among strangers and I learned what it was like to lose yourself. To feel the fragments flying off you. As if your soul has unhitched itself from your body and is flying away on a piece of string like a balloon. Lost in the clouds. You think, I only have to catch the end of the string. But though it hovers within sight, you cannot grasp it. You try and try. And then there comes a time when you are too tired. You no longer care. So you say: ‘Let it go. Let me just fall down here on the soft grass and go to sleep.’
I left home on the day our new President ordered everybody to drive on the opposite side of the road. In the crowded bus there was panic, because every time we looked up a car was hurtling towards us on the same side of the road. Unwary pedestrians stepped in front of vehicles. Drivers honked their horns. Cars swerved around each other. Our driver drove too close to the verge, skimming the wooden stalls. And when the bus reached the stop we all had to climb down into the traffic, because now the passenger door was on the wrong side.
By the time I reached the quay all I could think was how glad I was to be leaving. I showed my ticket, paid for by the Christian Mission who had given me a scholarship to study in England, to the man in a buttoned uniform who stood at the end of the gangplank. As the ship sailed off into the silence, some of the passengers, the Africans who had never left home before, gathered on the deck to wave goodbye to everything we were leaving behind. The sea swelled up and the sky stretched downwards. In front of our eyes the city disappeared and the coast shrivelled into a wavy line. And all of us saw how small our country really was.
A girl on her way to the United States boasted she would soon be seeing the cowboys and indians for herself. Foolish girl! Still I said nothing because although I knew in England women no longer wore bustles and carried parasols, there were no horse-drawn carriages or steam trains, no hot-air balloons, and no white rabbits with fob watches — I could not imagine what I was going to.
In England the air was flat and colourless; sharp to breathe like broken glass. The pavements came up hard and struck the soles of my feet. The people walked fast, but spoke quietly. And skimmed past, never touching each other. Everybody went about and minded their own business. Even when they spoke to you, they seemed always to be looking at something outside the window or on the other side of the room.
In the hostel where I stayed we lived in rooms on top of each other and next to each other. Names on the doors: Bidwell, Holt, Pichette, Clowes, Schenck, Buchan, Bersvendsen, Wilkinson. And I saw that was how people lived all over the land. Like colonies of the blind. On top of each other and next to each other, but without ever seeing each other.
A girl from Ghana was assigned to help me settle in. Emma. Without her I would have been lost straight away. I liked her. I wished she had been there for longer. Maybe, if she had, things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. She would never have let it happen. Together we went shopping for warm clothes. The freezing air seeped through the fibres of my cotton clothes. Emma walked as swiftly as all the people in this place. Weaving in and out of the crowd like a needle through silk, and me a thread trailing behind her. In the shop she fingered woollen pullovers piled high on tables. Never had I laid eyes upon anything so luxurious, though the colours struck me as lifeless and dull.
‘Pah! Made in Hong Kong. And look at these prices!’ She wrinkled her nose, dropped the pullover as though it gave off an offensive odour and talked in a loud, loud voice. ‘Come on!’ She marched out past the security guard whose eyes followed her from the shadows beneath the peak of his cap.
‘They think we all steal,’ she told me out in the street.
‘Why would they think that?’ I said. To my mind nothing had happe
ned. I didn’t understand why we were suddenly standing outside the shop.
‘Just the way they are. Suspicious minds.’ I was silent, I didn’t know what to say.
Emma watched the television news a great deal. Every evening, jumping up to change channels to listen to the same things repeated by a different person, deaf to the complaints of anybody else who happened to be in the common room. I remember pictures of an aeroplane with a bent nose, that flew faster than the speed of sound. One day everybody would travel the world in this way. The Chinese put a satellite in orbit and joined the space race. I had never known such things were happening. I watched it all with wonder. I had never even seen a television before. I thought of our new President and how the only thing he had done was order everybody to drive on the other side of the road. Then another day a jet flew into a mountain. Two days later a second one smacked down on to the runway, like a tethered bird that had tried to fly. On the news they played the last words of the co-pilot taken from the flight recorder. ‘Oh! Sorry, Pete.’ A moment later every single person on that plane was dead. A week later a third aeroplane did the exact same thing, only this time the people were luckier and mostly survived.
I stared at the terrible images of rescuers picking over debris. In my dreams I saw fizzing, flashing pictures like the images on the television. I saw planes bellyflop out of the sky, smash nose first into mountainsides. I wondered if the people on the ground could hear the screams of the passengers. Or even if they screamed at all. Or just said ‘Oh!’ And were gone.
Emma whooped with joy when a black man punched a white man so hard in a boxing match he knocked him out. In South Carolina black children were driven to school in buses with armed guards. I saw the expressions on the faces of the crowds at the boxing ring. And I saw the looks upon the faces of the white people as they threw stones at a bus-load of small children. And I saw how similar they were.
Somewhere along the line I started to become confused. Missionaries had brought me here. Given me a scholarship so at last I could qualify as a teacher. I must be grateful. Of course, I was grateful. Emma, on the other hand, didn’t seem grateful at all. If anything she seemed to be angry a great deal of the time. Though once, when she was short-changed by a stall holder over a bag of plums, she laughed like it was a huge joke.
‘What would my mother say?’ she asked me, holding the coins up under my nose on the flat of her palm. ‘She thinks an English man’s word is his honour.’ And when she saw my nonplussed face she laughed all the more until the tears welled in her eyes. ‘Oh, Mary!’ Shook her head and put her arm around my shoulders.
Later, how I wished I had asked her all the things I wanted to know. At the time all I cared was that she wouldn’t think me stupid. I didn’t even know what the questions were, the answers to which I needed so much. Just ask, people would say. But how do you know what it is you don’t know? When I needed someone to tell me, Emma was gone. Back to Ghana. At the end of her sabbatical she stopped by to wish me farewell.
‘Take care. Don’t think you can go behaving the way the girls here do. One of our sisters was murdered like that, out alone at night. They found her body, but they never found who did it to her.’ She kissed my cheek and squeezed my arm and was gone.
Alone I walked to the teacher training college. I dared not deviate from the route Emma had taught me. After classes I hurried home, nervous of the dimming light. I worked hard. I copied the words of my teachers down on to my exercise book and spent my evenings memorising them line by line. Still, in my first oral test I scored poorly. It was difficult for me. People pushed words through closed lips, made lots of ‘zh, zh’ sounds. I couldn’t understand. I watched the television. I went out and bought a dictionary, set about learning twenty new words every day.
Other times I watched the birds squabbling on the window sill, gorging on pieces of the town’s rubbish. On the other side of the thick glass I was only inches away from them. I could see how they tottered on deformed, toeless feet — useless for roosting on the branches of trees. Only good for balancing on concrete ledges and hobbling along the pavements.
At night, when the heating went off, I pulled my overcoat on to my bed and told myself how lucky I was. Outside the silent rain drifted above the houses. Half-asleep, half-awake fragments of dreams drifted through my mind: bathing among the drifting weeds; running through the rooms of Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay’s house and finding each one empty; riding in a bus that veered from one side of the road to another, the passengers screaming, the bus hurtling off the road and down the side of the hill.
Mornings I woke early, watched my breath escape from me in thick plumes taking the memory of the dreams along with it. The dampness in the air reminded me of home, but that was all. I set my feet down on the freezing lino, in the tiled chill of the bathroom I waited for the water heater to produce a thin stream of hot water. Outside the sun shone brightly, invigorating me with hope. But by the time I stepped into the street the sky was suffocated by clouds and the sun was gone, like a promise broken every day.
Evening time I sat alone in the big refectory on the ground floor of the hostel. One day the cooks served roast chicken for supper. The flesh was pale, flaccid. Kept lukewarm under bright lights. The chickens here were so much bigger than at home, but tasted less good. How I yearned for a bowl of pepper soup, prepared the way my mother used to make it when I was ill with a fever: a little lime squeezed into the broth.
Still, I was hungry. The meat slipped down my throat. Afterwards I picked up the bone in my fingers and began to chew the ends. I cracked the shaft between my molars and licked out the marrow, careful to spit out the shards, making a pile of them on the side of my plate. A girl with pale hair and skin so thin you could see the blue veins in her neck came and set her plate down opposite me. For a moment she glanced at me and just as quickly looked away. Then she slid her tray off the table and moved to another place. Afterwards I noticed the way she kept glancing across at me. As though she had seen something dreadful, that never the less compelled her gaze.
That night I gazed into the mirror in my room. So many mirrors in this country. So much glass. In shops, on the sides of cars, on the outside of buildings. Everywhere I went I saw my image reflected back at me. Everywhere except in the eyes of the people. Nobody looked me in the eye. I saw how they watched the ground as I passed, only to feel their eyes boring into my back. Except, like the girl that evening, when they didn’t think I was looking. Caught out, they closed their faces and shifted their gaze as if, all the time, they had been looking at something else.
As I examined my reflection I wondered what it was she had seen. At home people did not look at my sliding face as if it was so strange. Then I remembered the time after my mother went away, and the people in the village, my father’s wives — how they fell silent when they had been speaking and saw me there. And how their eyes had begun to glide over me, as if I was invisible. And here was a girl who looked at me with a scared look, so scared she could not bring herself to sit near me, but moved away.
Dear Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay,
I have arrived in England. I have my own bed and even my own room. How happy I am to be here and for this most wonderful opportunity to expand my knowledge and to advance myself. There are so many things to learn. I am endeavouring to study hard so that you and all of my family will be proud of me.
It has been easy to settle in. I feel at home here already. The people are very friendly. Already I have made two new friends with whom I explore the town in my time away from my studies.
Please send my regards to my father, my mothers, my brothers and sisters.
Your respectful daughter,
Mary
I enclosed a portion of my scholarship money. Enough to buy two sacks of rice, plus a little left over to pay for the letter-writer to read them my words. I also sent a photograph of myself, taken soon after I arrived. The image was badly underexposed, my face a mass of shadows. At the last minute I picked up a pe
bble from the side of the road and pushed it into the envelope.
I went to live among strangers. Something happened. I have never told anybody, and nobody ever asked me, except you. It was nothing like what happened to the girl Emma told me about. The truth is, I can’t remember so much about it. I have some memories, a few. But when I look back to that time everything I see is like the photograph of me, a cluster of shadows. I have some memories, a very few — but they exist without clues.
Emma had left. I was alone. I moved through time, passing from day to night to day. I don’t know how many weeks or months went by. The days merged into each other, except for one day. One day was different.
I went for a walk. I had been feeding the pigeons on my window sill — pieces of dried up mashed potato. Increasingly I had taken to carrying my meals up to my room. In a strange way I had become quite fond of those ugly birds. They were not at all timid. I watched them land and take off, carrying pieces of potato in their beaks and I had the sudden urge to escape from my room for a few hours. I put on my duffel coat, pulled the hood up over my head and pushed my hands in my pockets. Outside the hostel I turned right, away from the college. The pavement followed the curve of the hill. I passed a shop selling newspapers and sweets. The road was lined with plane trees, their height and great leaves reminded me a little of home. At the bottom of the hill I found myself at a place where several roads met. In the middle was a small green, a duck pond, a parade of shops: Dewhurst Butchers, a bakery, a shop selling dressmaking fabric. In the window was a dummy draped in fabric fashioned into a flowing dress. I thought perhaps of buying cloth to send home; I didn’t dare go inside.
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