Reading the Ceiling

by Dayo Forster

  ‘And I have always been fond of you,’ he concludes.

  I tell him I’ll think about it.

  I dismiss it as soon as he leaves.

  Frederick Adams is persistent though. He mentions it to Remi as soon as he gets a chance, asking her to put in a good word for him.

  Remi is unsurprised. In her assessment, ‘Look, when I was growing up, there were all kinds of stories about him with women. I don’t know how much he’s changed. It’d be odd having my friend as my stepmother. We’ll have to work it out as we go along. You’ll have to take your chances if you’re interested.’

  And at first, I really am not.

  Then Mrs Adebayo sends me a cutting from a Lagos society magazine. Cutting does not do it justice – it is not raggedly cut out of the magazine, but specially reprinted, stapled to a copy of the magazine’s cover which features the lead story: ‘Lagos’ Wedding of the Year’.

  It comes in a yellow foolscap envelope, my name written on with a flourishy kind of handwriting, all loops and connecting lines. It is postmarked Amsterdam, and stamped as PRINTED MATTER. It is eight pages of glossy photographs, accompanied by a smattering of text.

  On the cover, Akim is in a white agbada embroidered at the neckline. The wife is petite, in an off-the-shoulder dress made out of the same material; a thick collar runs into a banded sleeve with delicate swirls of embroidery similar to the main pattern on Akim’s outfit. This co-ordinated look is commented on in the text. The outfits were designed by Bishola Adeyinke, an in-demand who clothes the president’s daughter.

  The church is a cathedral. It has ripples in the dressed stone and the doorway meets in a sharp arch above the rows of people standing in their plumage, surrounding the pair in white. There are close-ups of the bride’s bouquet, white lilies against petal tight roses, and sprigs of fresh green palm leaves cradling them.

  The photos of the reception show identikit little bridesmaids in fluffy ivory-and-yellow-pastel dresses, and reams of smiling relatives holding plates of food. There are pictures of couples standing with drinks in hand and smiling towards the camera, crowned with names like Hon. Chief Omolabi Adekunle with Mrs (Dr) Jumoke Oyintola. Most captions are followed by a short CV: Deputy Minister of Justice, Chief Executive Officer of the National Petroleum Corporation, Head of OTV network, Finance Director of Northern Airlines.

  In one of the pictures on the last page, the caption describes Akim as having a successful career in reinsurance, and as currently the Risk Analysis Director of Nipon Re. In the photo, he sits behind a huge desk, almost bare of papers, an expanse of smooth dark wood with a flat screen settled at the side, three telephone sets clustered on the other side. A huge old-fashioned blotter pad is in the middle, with fresh paper tucked into its flaps.

  It’s as if I’m on a large empty plain, and I’ve run full tilt into the only baobab tree for miles. Bang, face on. That I’ve winded myself and am now lying sprawled across its roots. I look up through sparse empty branches, some with the odd furry green fruit pod, straight through to a sky without a cloud in it. Flat on my back, unsure of how I’ve navigated myself into this position. Unsure of how I came to be like this: alone.

  Did I know what I meant when I said no? Who says I couldn’t have spun my own happiness in a life aligned with his?

  I didn’t kill him. The therapist sorted him out with time enough to rebuild a life. Mrs Adebayo had included a thick sheet of cream paper stapled to the front: I thought you might be interested in knowing this. With best wishes, TA. She had found me after all these years – just to tell me.

  A temple-throbbing headache beats a refrain in my head:

  and you said no

  AND YOU SAID NO

  and you said no

  Each beat of the rhythm tramples my choice into my history.

  The next time Frederick Adams helps me get a mechanic to fix my car and asks again, ‘Why don’t you, eh, marry me?’ I say yes. He isn’t perfect. I do not expect him to be. I’ve heard the rumours. As I tell Amina later, I am weary. I do not want to shoulder love at an intensity I cannot bear. I want respectability and some sex.

  My mother sniffs when I tell her: ‘Well, at least everything I trained you for won’t go to waste. You’ll have a household of your own to run at last.’

  Other comments and advice come thick and heavy, laced with humour or spite.

  Moira: I guess by this time of your life, you’ve got to take what you get.

  Kainde: Why don’t you try someone younger?

  Amina: Sample the goods beforehand.

  Aunt K: The world changes as you watch it.

  Moira: Marriage is a trial but God can get you through it.

  Taiwo: At last!

  Reuben: I hear congratulations are in order.

  Amina (by phone): Not to worry sweetie, my sharp ears tell me he’s been around town and some.

  Meena (by email): As long as your family is with you, it’ll be all right.

  My mother buys me a new Magimix that can chop peppeh en yabbas, cream butter and sugar, grind fluffy akara batter. She raids her cupboards and digs up an inheritance of her household treasures: tablecloths and napkins, embroidered sheets and pillowcases, tea towels with pictures of Buckingham Palace, Arcoroc glasses printed with butterflies, teapots with painted-on sunflowers, sharp kitchen knives.

  She says as she hands them over, ‘I saved these for many years. I’ve given Taiwo hers and these are yours. Kainde’s are still waiting for when she’s ready.’

  At our wedding, my mother’s magnificent hat shadows my face as we stand in the sunlight on the steps of the registry office.

  6

  Rejection

  ‘Boy, I’m telling you, I saw this with my own eyes. Grown-up men like me and you, rubbing their noses in that man’s shit for a post in government.’

  Frederick Adams is expressing his views on our verandah, lit by two kerosene lamps stuck on hooks on the pillars. There is no electricity tonight.

  ‘And look at this. Even if we’d been fighting a war, there’d be nothing worth bombing. We’re sitting in all their vomit. Ten years and still the same floating dustbin we had with the old guy.’

  His friend, Musa Kinteh, replies, ‘They call it progress. Did you see the Celebration of Liberation Day headlines yesterday? We came to power to give “Justice to the Poor”.’

  ‘You said it, also Water for Wasters. Farts for Farmers. All idiots, that’s what we’ve got.’

  ‘What makes it worse is that they are young idiots. At least the old guy knew how to do it with style.’

  ‘These young ones threaten, then bang! bang! Six foot deep.’ The two of them are playing damiyeh, loudly slapping round wooden pieces on a homemade board cut slightly out of its square by the gardener, and then painted black and white on an uncertain grid.

  ‘And then they go after your family.’

  ‘You’re right. We can talk and complain. But we have family responsibilities and you never know when they’ll go after them to get at you.’

  ‘Tai. Tai.’ With each bang of a black-painted counter onto the board, Fred skips over Musa’s white ones, embellishing the noise with his own sound of victory before settling to a final, ‘Tai. You were getting a bit overconfident there, weren’t you?’

  ‘Watch your back. One little game does not mean you’ve won the match. Tell that to our government.’ Musa stretches his arms out over his back, his chin, speckled with white beard, juts out.

  ‘What do you say, Dele, look, I’ve whapped him again. He thought my mind was on politics but it’s all tactics.’

  I bring out two more lamps and a tray of snacks for the men. Another two of Fred’s friends, Suni and Alhaji, are bent over a charcoal brazier, one holding a small teapot aloft while the other pokes at the coals.

  It’s game night. The men will play damiyeh on two boards in their own mini-league, well into the start of Sunday morning. A fresh pack of green tea waits on the small table on the verandah. The tea will be mixed with w
ater and brought to the boil. Someone will add sugar. The first round will be light and sweet, with no depth. They will simply pour this away into the flowerbed where those stubby succulents with boat-shaped flowers grow. There’s no one younger to give it to, no one who cannot as yet take the bitter tang of subsequent brews, the hit that drives away sleep. Their ataya will be thick and strong, but with a sweet undercurrent. There’s a little metal plate that holds four cups. Suni will point the spout downwards and pull his hand upwards, making the tea froth into the tiny glass cups. He will pour it all back into the teapot and make it boil, thicker, blacker, sucking the tannin out of the leaves. When he’s satisfied that it’s almost ready, he will pour little tasters for the group to confirm his analysis. Heads will nod, or they will rudely tell him to continue his work, to deepen the flavour, to not lighten his hand or they’ll choose someone else.

  I go to bed early and leave them to it. Despite the threat of mosquitoes easing their way through holes in the netting, I open my bedroom window.

  I can hear them.

  ‘Ayodele? Yes, she’s good to me, good for me. Right age too. Young ones want to go discoing every night. Older ones lose elasticity and only talk about who’s died and who’s born. She’s in the middle. I think she’ll do me right.’

  ‘Your first wife was a fine woman too. Gave you three goodlooking, well-brought-up children.’

  ‘I’m not saying I haven’t been lucky. But Bilor stopped delivering the goods soon after our third child was born. She couldn’t see the point.’

  Hearty laughter, one note brays out a nasal honk – Musa’s laugh. Fred’s laugh is mixed in too – heh heh heh. Then Musa’s voice: ‘That’s why you went sampling.’

  ‘Man, you can’t blame me. I had needs that had to be met. We all do.’

  A back is slapped. The night carries the hollowed thump. ‘Boy, we know you well. Which of us has not been tempted? We’ve all been there. At least you didn’t leave her.’

  ‘Not that I didn’t think about it. Bilor did many things well. She kept the house clean, she held on to the dalasis I gave her. She didn’t seem to hear the gossip. So, it worked for all of us.’

  ‘Say it again! Don’t we all like the good women in our houses and the bad ones in our trousers.’

  More laughs which rumble, almost seem to stop, then catch again and carry on.

  When they come to pick him up, they come early in the morning. Even the loudspeakers on the mosque in Latrikunda have not been turned on. They come in a quiet white Peugeot, and back up its duck-behind in our driveway, blocking Fred’s navy Honda with its crumpled back door. I am awake anyway. I often am, letting the sounds carried on the mixed air of early morning keep me company. Most of the footsteps are quiet treads of boots with thick plastic soles. Then there is the scratchier sound of a smooth-soled pair, wiping grit out from under it on the first step on our verandah.

  The knocks on the glass pane are smart, sharp. Three times. Three knocks.

  As I feel my way out of bed, Fred turns and grunts in his sleep. I misjudge the opening of the bedroom door and the edge sears into my big toe and wrings an aah of intense pain from my lungs. I wait to find myself and then limp out. My feet meet the rough softness of our sitting room rug and I hobble along to the front door, not quite ready to put a light on inside the house.

  The bulb on the verandah reflects off the shorn shiny head of a young man in dark sunglasses. He stands with his legs slightly apart in a pair of khaki trousers. His short-sleeved shirt is made of a printed leopard fabric and cropped just above the hip. When he sees my face peering out at him through the curtains, he lets his right hand swivel back so I can see he has a holster on.

  ‘Special Investigations. We’re looking for Frederick Adams. He lives here.’

  I cannot find any questions to ask. No time to think. No place to consider hiding him in. My head nods itself and I pull away from the door. Back to our bedroom where I try to shake Fred up.

  ‘Men at the door. They want you.’

  He turns over onto his back and blinks up at me. A plank of light falls into the room from the corridor. He’s never easy to wake.

  The knocking is repeated at the door. I shout out, ‘He’s coming,’ but the noise continues.

  I shake him again. ‘You need to wake up and talk to these people. Shall I ring Musa?’

  I walk back to them and say, ‘He was sleeping.’

  ‘If he doesn’t hurry, we’ll come and wake him up ourselves.’

  I go back to get him. Fred’s sitting up on the bed now, hands on knees, still fast asleep.

  ‘You’ll have to go in your pyjamas.’ I’m shaking his shoulders as I tell him. ‘We can’t make them crosser than they already are.’ More sharp raps on the front door. Fred gets up and shuffles along, only just waking up enough to say, ‘But what do they want with me?’

  At the door, the young man says, as I open up, ‘Old man, you took your time. We want to ask you some questions. You’re coming with us.’

  I notice the young man’s shoes. They are black leather, buffed, with the tips of the toes curled slightly upwards. As he turns away, I can see the laces, threaded through in a classic crossover pattern. When I was six, I was taught to do mine just like that.

  Two of the three men who’d been standing behind him all this while, dressed in army fatigues and berets, step forward, each taking one of Fred’s arms. They propel him so it seems like he’s being carried.

  I shout out, ‘Where are you taking him?’

  ‘We’ll bring him back when we’re done.’

  My toe hurts. I look down. The door lifted a flap of skin off my toe. Underneath, blood is slowly oozing out. I need to sit down. I need to clean it.

  *

  I ring Musa as soon as light breaks. It takes him three days to find Fred. He’s being held in a cell at the main police station. Fred’s been heard saying things about the government. Now they want to know where he’s getting his opinions from.

  He comes home five days after Musa finds him. There’s a darkly lined inch of healing skin high on his right cheek. His eyelid is twice its normal size, and has forced his eye half closed. His voice is slurred as if his tongue has swollen to fill up his mouth and left no space for words.

  It takes three weeks of fiery soups, fish, oxtail, and pig’s trotters to get him to stay out of bed longer and longer, until he stays up after breakfast, goes in for a nap after lunch and sits up in the evening to listen to the radio. He says little. Whenever I ask ‘How are you feeling today?’ he looks at me, steadily, then says, ‘Just fine.’

  Musa, Suni and Alhaji drop in to see him sometimes. They phone at other times. It’s not until early November, when the sun has started to bake the moisture out of the ground, that they decide its time to have another ataya session, as they used to.

  When I look at him next to his friends, with a picture of how they used to be barely three months ago, I see how Fred has lost his jaunt. His skin is stretchier, his body has shrunk in it – his jowls, rough with several days’ worth of stubble, fold over like a new definition of landscape. Air can puff in under his shirt to take up space freed by his shrinking paunch.

  Their renewed ataya sessions are like a two-day-old balloon, not quite full, and with a skin that gives a tired thwap rather than a high-pitched thwop. You see it if you look closely, but otherwise you won’t realise that the skin looks more like crepe than smooth enamel, that light no longer glints off it, that its bounce is a little lower.

  Musa beats Fred in a straight run of three games.

  ‘Boy, I’m seeing better than you tonight.’ I can hear their conversation, fluttering in with the billows of the curtain by the door, and there is a ring of delight in Musa’s voice.

  Musa’s lead increases to a run of six games. I hear Alhaji’s high voice: ‘Six, man, what are you doing?’

  I drop a splodge of thick dough into a pool of hot oil. I am frying some pancakes for their snack. In the sizzle, I don’t catch what hap
pens next.

  There’s a babble of four men’s voices, all of them speaking at once. Fred comes through the front door, clawing at the curtains that refuse to part before him.

  ‘Something’s broken. We need a broom and the metal dustpan,’ he says.

  ‘Cupboard beside the back door,’ I reply.

  His shoulders slope down as he takes small steps towards the kitchen door. He is in no hurry to finish his errand, or to return to the verandah, to his friends.

  When I go out later with a bowl of hot fat beignets, Fred is playing with Suni, who is letting Fred win. But the jollity is no longer in the air. Musa is helping Alhaji with the ataya. There’s a scatter of charcoal shoved towards a corner, and there’s a patch of wet to the left of the draughtsboard.

  I come home one day from visiting Aunt K. As I walk into the kitchen, I ask the househelp, ‘Ainge na?’ Has he eaten?

  ‘He’s at the table, right now.’

  It’s like a switch goes off in his head, sparked by my voice.

  ‘Where’s the salt? How can you cook food without taste?’ He bellows with rage that confuses the ear.

  In the small silence that follows, I offer, ‘I’ll bring some for you.’

  ‘What kind of house do I live in? Call this food? It tastes like boiled water.’

  He’s shouting at me as I round the corner into the dining room. I’m holding out the salt cellar. He pushes back his chair with a fierce scrape. He puts his hands under the table and pulls. For one moment I think he won’t pull high enough. But he does. He gives one final angry shove upwards and the table topples. The blue jug full of water that was furthest from him is what I hear breaking first, then there’s a clang of Chinese enamel bowl and lid clashing onto thinly vinyled floor. His plate and his glass send their shards right over to my feet. The apologetic tablecloth tries to mop up the puddle of tomato-stained water, the clump of rice, the tiny bowl of ranha upended and lending a splodge of green.