Reading the Ceiling

by Dayo Forster

  He’s become afraid of me. He no longer jokes or calls me Little Cabadombo.

  When I open the door, I stare at his face, more out of curiosity than anything else. His eyes are focused on my feet. When I glance down, all I can see is a line of brown sugar ants following a crack in the cement pavement, heading for some nest buried underneath. ‘Jere jaiffe,’ I say as I reach for the loaves. I take longer than I need to, touching his fingers and easing the bag out of his hands. I know I have this ability to make some men uncomfortable looking at me. And it’s getting stronger. I have sometimes caught thick stares – the baobab juice kind, sticky and textured – that flick away the moment I turn to face them. Even from Osman.

  Osman’s always done a bit of the gardening, tending the tiny kitchen plot behind our L-shaped house, trimming the ever-sprouting casuarina hedge that shields us from the street, and supervising the sometimes unwieldly branches under which we had doll picnics and twirled on rope swings.

  Osman used to help us climb mango trees, or catch avocados that we threw down from the glossy-leaved trees in the back garden. He used to help us light fires in charcoal burners so we could roast maize or bake groundnuts in their shells. If we were really dirty from playing in the muddy puddles outside the gate during the rainy season, he’d hose us down after we stripped to our knickers, shivering as we stood on the driveway, waiting until we could dash up to the front door and be tutted at by Nimsatu, the househelp, for bringing in grit with our wet feet.

  The last time Osman helped us was after we’d been dancing in a July downpour, sheets of grey pelting our bodies. As was usual at the time, with Ma struggling to run her nursery school, we were at home under Nimsatu’s care. I knew Ma had to work hard because we didn’t have a father so I took charge whenever I could. I phoned Ma to tell her what she needed to buy on her way home, and sorted out squabbles between my sisters when twinship proved too hard for them to handle.

  Osman asked us to leave our wet things outside. My T-shirt got stuck as I tried to pull it over my head so I walked towards Osman for help. He’d done the same for my sisters. But as the neckband squeezed my ears tight and I bowed my head to make it easier to yank it off, my mother drove in through the gate. I hardly had any breasts then, they were barely the size of a mampatang. With one sour look in my direction, my mother barked at me, ‘Get inside at once!’ And to Osman, ‘Wait here, I need to speak to you.’ She’d followed me into the house, ‘You are growing up now, and you’re no longer a little girl.’ And she’d sent me off to have a proper shower.

  I talk to Osman in a different way now. Today I tell him, ‘I’m going out tonight. Taiwo and Kainde will be at the cinema with some friends. My mother wants you to come to work early, before it gets dark so there’ll be someone at the gate.’

  Then I turn into the kitchen with the bread resting against my chest spreading a soft warmth. I reach for a knife and slice a chunk off one of the loaves. I cut through the soft vertical vein in its side, then slobber in some onion sauce before stuffing in the crispy bean balls.

  Ma flaps her way into the kitchen to check on her Satiday soup, into which she’s flung dried kuta from the deep Atlantic mixed with tripe and rump steak from the cows at Mr Pratt’s farm up the road. Later she’ll add some chopped greens from our backyard and the okra I bought at the market yesterday. The okra are in a huge bowl of water next to a chopping board and as she starts to get them ready she says, ‘You should have chosen larger ones. These tiny little ones you bought will take ages to top, tail and chop.’

  I hate market errands.

  The only part I enjoy in making the soup is when I get to melt the oil, so I ask, ‘Can I do the palm oil now?’

  ‘Yes, you can. But you do need to concentrate a bit more on how you do it. Soup’s not just about palm oil. It's about all the ingredients. Unless you learn to get the details right, you’ll never be able to make proper food in your own house.’

  I go outside to collect the tin. The oil, usually stilled into a waxy orange when stored, has been left outside in a sun bright enough to turn the edges soft and red. I use a large metal scoop to ladle out eight spoonfuls and drop them into the furiously churning pot with the beginnings: chunks of meat mixed with peppeh en yabbas, raw chillies and onions which my ma has ground in our wooden mortar. As there is so much water in the pot, the oil separates into swirls of orange, as if hesitant about mingling with what’s already in there.

  Ma is proud of her cooking. Depending on the type of soup she intends to make, she can add various enhancements – crushed egusi seeds, fermented tamarind, or a large grey segment of crystallised soda. She would be surprised to find out I’ve paid any attention at all to what she tells me: ‘When I make egusi soup, I like to mix it with a bit of green. Some of your grandmother’s Yoruba friends used to make it with no greens but I think that looks too coarse. Egusi needs balance.’

  Or, to explain the mysteries of adding the right touch of okra, she says, ‘To stop the okra from cutting in the soup, I’m going to add a largish chunk of lubi. I know your aunt in America uses bicarbonate of soda but I think her soup lacks depth. Flavour is what brings your cousin Tunji round here on Saturdays.’

  Her secret, she says, is letting the soup come into its own. The meat has to soften, the egusi has to blend, the oil has to turn. You simply cannot hurry it along.

  My mother has tried to teach me what she knows about managing men. I guess being deserted twice by the same man in one life has limited her experience. She never told me my father ran off with his secretary when I was four (and my sisters were two), came back home with his tail curled in regret and promptly died a year later, of a stomach tumour. I twisted the truth out of Aunt K a few years ago.

  Ma does say, ‘All men have two faces – the one they show you before they get what they want. This first face is attentive and caring. Then the coarse settles in and that’s the face that stays for the rest of the time you know them.’

  She tells us marriage is a battle. ‘You have to find some way of storing up your kindness in an armoured case. Otherwise your man will leak you dry and you’ll find you have none left – not even enough for your children.’

  I don’t remember my father. I used to make things up about him when I was little. That he would hear from the ground whenever I fell down, thinned my skin and then squeezed beads of blood out to show the hurt. Sometimes I dreamt he was sitting next to me as I slept, telling me about something that happened in heaven. Now, I wonder how life would have been different for us if he hadn’t died. My friend’s fathers are hardly ever at home, preferring the company of their beer buddies. Some of my mother’s friends have husbands with parallel unacknowledged families, chockful of stepchildren who everyone knows about but who are ignored in casual public encounters.

  I’m outside, tending to a freshly lit charcoal stove, when Remi’s father drops her off. My mother is hovering, distracted from dismantling a huge chunk of smoked fish by the noise of the car. He says, ‘Unakusheh.’ You’re hard at work, well done, keep it up.

  And with a few well-placed how-dos and goodbyes, Frederick Adams, the number 4 on my list, drives off in a cloud of Peugeot-disturbed dust. Leaving his daughter, my best friend, behind to discuss our plans for tonight.

  I holler to my sisters, ‘My jobs are done – the charcoal is lit.’ It’s their turn to see to the cooking of the rice as part of their ‘training’. Hard work, elbow grease and general busyness are advised to discourage loose thoughts. And also to help to prepare the female teenager for a well-kept house of her own one day. I do my big sister thing and complain to Remi, ‘They are probably in the bathroom again, messing around with my makeup.’

  Tonight Remi, Amina, Moira and I will celebrate my birthday at the newest disco in town. I didn’t want a home party so we’ve organised this between us instead, and invited some of our friends. Remi is styling my hair in the garden when my mother’s childhood friend, who we call Aunt K, short for Kiki, short for Katherine, arrives. H
er noisiness is announced at the iron gate where, instead of knocking or, more sensibly, simply swinging the unlocked door open, she shouts aloud, ‘Kong kong kong,’ her imitation of door knocking. I don’t understand how she’s stayed friends with my mother. They are as different as Kingston’s Chalk (boxed and imported from England) from Anchor Cheddar Cheese (tinned and shipped from New Zealand). Aunt K takes pride in ‘not having let herself go’. She regularly loiters around young people, ‘sucking up their spirit’ and ‘keeping her mind young’. She knows what music we like and listen to, whereas my mother’s tastes stopped with Jim Reeves, who tragically died in an aeroplane accident, ‘too young, too young – too tragic, too tragic’. From the newest Senegalese pachanga to the haHAhaHA of ‘Staying Alive’, Aunt K dances with her arms raised, adding some nifty footwork as she twirls her sturdy rectangular body around.

  Characteristically, she walks up to us with a sway in her hips. ‘This is me at the very end of my prime. Can you imagine what I could do with a young body?’

  She makes a shape with her hands, starting from an imaginary bust, palms placed slightly upwards and flat, outlining down to a thin waist, then a bulge of curvaceous hip before narrowing again. In reality, Aunt K is wide-bosomed and big-bottomed, representing herself in a new character symbol for some odd European language, her own compacted percentage sign, a half-reflected capital B.

  ‘Here you are,’ she says to me as she bends down to kiss my cheek. ‘Happy birthday.’ She hands me an envelope. ‘I didn’t know what to get you, and decided you’d probably like to choose something yourself.’ I open it to peek. I’ve got a wad of money to spend.

  ‘Thank you. Hochiemy’s got some new things in, I’ll go and have a look,’ I say.

  ‘So. Where are you going tonight?’

  ‘Ocean, the new disco on the cliff by the junction.’

  ‘Ah, young people, this is a good time of your lives. Staying out late. Going dancing. You know of course that I used to COMMAND the floor,’ she continues.

  We know the routine now and mimic the perfect body shape with our hands, and shout out ‘COMMAND’ when she pauses for effect.

  She loiters at our home salon, curious to know what we are up to. She watches us for a minute before launching into options for my hairdo.

  ‘How about hot-tonged curls at the sides with a middle parting – that would suit your face,’ she says, and pulls out some of the pins Remi has just spent an hour putting in, yanking some of my hair in her enthusiasm. I yelp.

  ‘Hmm,’ she goes. ‘Or you can make some ringlets here.’

  Now she jabs at the back of my head. ‘I can see them dripping down if you hold it like this.’ She scoops all the hair off my face now, with a ‘Got any hair slides?’

  She pauses, weighing our silence.

  ‘No?’

  We shake our heads.

  ‘Well then, what shoes are you wearing?’

  When I asked my mother whether I could go to that first dance at Amina’s where I revealed I was a woman while still a child, Aunt K had put in a word for me. She’d said to my mother, ‘Bo, Millie, you have to leave young people to find out for themselves what life is about. We can’t always be watching, always advising.’ My mother had been taut with indecision, ‘I don’t know what kind of people will be there. She wants to stay out until ten o’clock.’ But Aunt K had worked out the logistics, who I could go with, who would bring me home. Among my mother’s circle of friends, she is someone who can be relied on.

  Out in the garden, the sun cools into evening. The breeze off the sea starts to wiggle the leaves of the mango tree above our heads. We gather up our things and move inside for the final stage of preparations. I’m not very good with eyeliner yet, the pencil drifts in my hand and I never seem to be able to do the upper eyelid. Remi’s better at it so she does mine for me, making my eyes look mysterious and grownup. We decide that the false eyelashes Aunt K brought back from America look ridiculous and cannot be left on. Remi laughs, ‘Allright for pop stars who need to define their eyes, but not when people will be looking at you up close.’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘ordinary people like us have to use what we’ve got as well as we can.’

  The phone rings and I dash to the living room to answer it. It’s my sisters’ friend, saying they’re on their way over for the cinema pickup. When I turn around, I see Osman watching me through the side door. Without sunlight to illuminate his face, and the distance of a wall and glass between us, he’s mostly shadow. He does not move.

  I’m wearing my pink bra with lacey edges and a sheer pink slip. I can feel the power of my body, the twang it has been creating from when my mampatang-sized breasts expanded to the size where I can push them up with this special bra to create the hint of a shadow on my chest. I guess that it both scares and pulls men. I think it might be possible to learn how to call the ones I want. When I want. Should Idris come off my list and Osman come on it?

  I have to think practical. I need to be sure I can make my plan work. I know both Yuan and Reuben will be borrowing cars from their parents so that should be relatively easy. I’ve had to think harder about the Frederick Adams option. Remi’s negotiated a pickup at one. Her father said, ‘I want to make sure you get home without getting yourselves into trouble.’ I will have to say I want to pick up my sports bag and kit from Remi’s room so I can start to keep my new eighteen-year-old promise to stay fit. If that sounds too lame, it’ll have to do. I don’t have any other ideas.

  My life needn’t unroll in the way my mother’s did. None of her friends seem to have ended up with the version of man they originally wanted, judging from their shared complaints. They suffer the poor specimen they landed with, as if none of them had figured out that their bodies could be wielded without leaving it all to chance. Clearly, they never saw that in the midst of trying to find out who they could become, they could aim beyond what they saw around them. They were satisfied with the usual end point of women, the finale of man-searching: a rubbing-along marriage or, at best, a partner you could occasionally talk to about the children. I want different.

  I turn away and head back to my bedroom to put on my clothes. Remi looks stunning in a tight-fitting shift dress with tiny little silver sequins all over, making her seem all shimmery. She’s small and compact with good curves – bum and boobs all perfectly proportioned. She’s jolly, smiles a lot, everyone likes her – from great-grandfathers to children. I put on my clingy velvet trousers over legs I think are a bit too thin, then ease my sheer top over my underdeveloped chest. As I twirl around I catch my eyes in the mirror. Serious, large, dark-rimmed. Almost overpowering my face, which today co-operates with the smooth flicked bob that Remi styled.

  We use the corridor as our catwalk. Taiwo and Kainde sit with their backs to my door and knees drawn up close to their chests.

  Kainde says, ‘Can I borrow that top when we go to the fifth- form dance?’

  Taiwo says, ‘How do you know Ma will let us go?’

  I tell them going out at night is a privilege to fight for. ‘I was fifteen before Ma let me go to my first dance.’

  Kainde says, ‘We’ll be fifteen in a couple of months. Aunt K said she’ll talk to Ma.’

  ‘Well then you’ll have to wait and see,’ I say. ‘Check this out.’

  Remi and I lengthen our strides and put some sway in our walk. Our audience watches and claps.

  **I am ready and waiting for Remi to finish her final touches in the bathroom. I lie back on my bed, forming support for my head with my hands to protect my hair, my elbows sticking out.

  Remi already has a proper boyfriend, and is sure she wants to get married soon and run her own household. She can cook and clean, and does not seem to mind doing either. We’ve known each other since we began stealing cashews together when we were six. She’s always loved the drippy juicy part, which stained our clothes unless we ate with care. I liked the planning part, the thinking through of probable exit routes from newly discovered cashew tree
sites. She knows pretty much everything about me. Yet in this, we are different. I’m ready now. I long to . . . lose something I’ve always felt was valuable, and exchange it for . . . well, I’m not quite sure exactly, but for something else. Not with any dour, mysterious, handsome men who need to be won over by my charm. Instead, I have to choose from a ragtag of misaligned teeth, pot bellies, turn-the-best-side-for-the-photographer kind of men-boys. I don’t need them to promise commitment or anything, I just need someone to show me It. And move me from where I am now to the other side of knowing.

  My eyes play on the ceiling. I find myself picking out patterns, just as we used to when my sisters and I were little. My ceiling’s boards have been repainted white, but rainwater, eager to leave behind a memory of itself, has sploshed new stains on it. I can see a bra, straps wriggling, with enormous cups. Also a leg, with well-toned thigh, bent at the knee, lying open, suggesting the other leg is also flung sideways, welcoming entry. A mouth in a grimace. An eye wide open in shock. All my fears, worries, traipsing across my ceiling, watching me watch them.

  A life beginning has many paths before it; but older people – women like my mother – they can only see the one path that brought their lives to the now. Cats on my shoulder. I can choose to be the hunter or the lion. What will my story be?

  Story I

  Reuben

  2

  Choice

  The sudden change from the warmth of bodies, noise and gaiety to a brash ocean wind squeezes my skin closer to me. I rub my hands over my arms, flattening the landscape of hair-tipped bobbles, only to have them peek up again in protest at the cold. My toes cling to each other for warmth as I crunch my way past the dread-topped coconut palms, past a few occupied benches shrouded in capsules of shadow. The bathrooms are at the back of the club.