Reading the Ceiling

by Dayo Forster

  We arrive at a bustling taxi terminal outside the main market. We say our goodbyes and I head towards the Standard Bank on Leman Street as Amina sets off for the Italian consulate on Jawara Avenue.

  Time whistles by. Soon I am packing up a suitcase, stuffing in the best clothes from my wardrobe, selecting four pairs of shoes that will help me cope with the beginnings of winter. I am to leave on the early-evening flight for London. Yuan left a week ago and has rung to say he’ll be meeting me at the airport tomorrow morning.

  The house is full of the charred smell of chicken barbecuing. People have been dropping in all day. My school friends come to chat and leave cards wishing me well. Aunts and uncles, by blood or by friendship, visit with little envelopes of money – dohlies – ‘just a little something, to help while you are settling in’.

  Aunt K comes to say goodbye.

  ‘She’s leaving you now,’ she says to my mother.

  ‘Yes, walai, after all these years, they do grow up. Aren’t they lucky to be going off by themselves? She can do anything now, no matter what I think,’ my mother replies.

  ‘I’m going to take her to her bedroom, for a little talk.’

  We sit on the bed, me cross-legged with my back to the wall, Aunt K sidesaddle on the bed’s edge. I start first. ‘I’m leaving all this, Aunt K.’ I look again at my room, through my soon-to-be-gone eyes, at the yellow walls, the fake velvet prayer mat I use as my bedside rug, my wardrobe with its doors that never quite shut. My desk that was littered with Letts revision notes only a few months ago.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you, woman to woman. Your mother’s mentioned this Chinese boy that you have been seeing. He’s going to England too, isn’t he?’

  I look up at the brown stains on the ceiling, diluted in the middle and sharply defined at their edges. They are making me promises about life, showing me how to allow the future to be. I start to reply, ‘But Aunt K, you don’t have to worry . . .’

  ‘Listen to me, child. I have seen you grow up. I know you are sensible enough. But this is the first time I won’t be around to see or hear what you do. You’ll be going to a big city and you can live however you like without busybodies like me to spy on you.’ She pats the bed, creating two soft puffs of air. Her dress has stitching around the neckline in a network of sweeping curves that arch towards each other but never quite meet.

  ‘My advice to you is to get your priorities right. Remember, you are going to study. Do that first, do it well. I hope you will get married one day, and a boyfriend is nice to have. But they can take your mind off what you are there for, and they can also get the most sensible of girls pregnant.’

  ‘I need you to think,’ she continues, tapping her temple with her right index finger. ‘Make sure you get a piece of paper that you can use to decide your life, so that you can get work that pays well regardless of whether you have a man or not. Only then should you allow babies into your life, or, if you want, marriage.’

  ‘I’ll try not to let you down.’

  ‘Another thing. I know your mother can be difficult. I’ve known her a long time, and seen her suffer the man she chose. She’s done what she could; being grown up does not mean we are completely without fear.’

  ‘She’s always telling me off, treating me like a little girl who can’t do anything right.’

  ‘She only wants the best for you.’

  ‘I don’t see that often, Aunt K, just her complaints about the way I am, or the way I do things.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her.’

  She reaches into her neckline and tugs at her bra. A bundle of purple crepe paper follows her fingers.

  ‘Look. I’ve got you something of mine I’d like you to have.’

  She unfolds the crepe paper; inside are two diamond-shaped filigreed silver earrings. She holds my left hand and places each one carefully on my palm. Then she forces my fingers to close over them, pats my fist and says, ‘Every time you wear them, remember your old Aunt K.’

  England offers a poor welcome to visitors from warmer climates. It looks pretty enough from the air. There are tidy patches of green as soon as the plane strikes the south coast. I see little clusters of stone within thickly wooded villages and small towns. The plane flies lower, over a sprawl of red brick and television aerials and busy roads with Matchbox cars. When I step out of the plane and my ears try to get unused to the dull throb of engines, they are greeted instead with a shushed silence. The carpet absorbs the footsteps of tired air travellers. The trapped air cuts off sound from the outside. There is a cloak of politeness and watchfulness in the staff welcoming us off the arrival tunnel. Outside I see careful rain that chooses not to convulse out of the clouds, but instead comes down in droplets of mist.

  Nevertheless I find adventure rising in me, waiting to explode like a huge firework hidden under a plastic bucket. It has nothing to do with my surroundings or the climate. As I move towards the immigration desks, obediently following the track for non-European Community nationals, it feels like there is a giant curtain in front of me, made up of large patchwork squares. Some are indigo-dyed patches of mbaseng, others are marked with batiked shapes of crocodiles in kola nut dye, there are eye- deceiving patches of black velvet reflecting silver, and bright floral patterns strong with sunflowers, strips of sturdy corduroy, bits of plain white calico. And it seems that the curtains are about to part and I am going to move into a life that is spanking new, to which I can add bits that come only from me, unmodified by my mother.

  In answer to the questions posed by the unsmiling male officer, I demonstrate proof of funding through my scholarship, I extract a piece of paper with my hall of residence address and am eventually allowed to push myself through the sentinel-like desks into a hallway where a signboard announces where I should pick up my baggage.

  As promised, Yuan is waiting beyond the barriers. He pokes his head way out of the line of people, waving his arms into huge arcs in the air.

  I’m relieved I have someone to hug, even through a midriff swollen by layers of thick jumper.

  ‘I brought you something for the cold.’

  He holds out a leather jacket for me to slip into. It smells of him – a fresh accent of soap, which used to be a pinky-orange bar of Lifebuoy, but is now something I don’t recognise.

  ‘You’ve changed your soap,’ I say.

  ‘One of the joys of doing my own shopping.’

  He commandeers my trolley and ushers me towards the underground, to the entrance of the dark blue train line that will swirl us into the city.

  The train is noisy and it’s hard to talk. We touch each other’s hands when we need to exchange information.

  ‘Give me your address so I can look it up in the A-Z.

  ‘When do we need to change to the other line?’

  ‘It’s getting close to rush hour so the train will start to fill up as we get closer in.’

  These little snippets of exchanged information start to warm, melt, ease, fill the air between us, building familiarity again with each other’s spaces.

  We spot a spike-gelled couple in greeny-black clothes, studded noses and eyebrows.

  ‘Fancy a safety pin in your ear?’

  ‘Or a few spikes of purple?’

  ‘All is possible now.’

  ‘There’s no one to see!’

  The train trundles upwards out of the tunnel. When the doors slide open, a blast of fridge-coated air hustles in with the passengers. The wind creeps under my trouser leg to wrap itself around my sock-covered ankles.

  ‘Has it been cold?’

  ‘A couple of days of weak sunshine. According to my mother, we see this kind of weather whenever seasons change their faces.’

  ‘Thank goodness for your coat.’ I hug it closer, bringing the collar ends together.

  In between stations the train blasts out a forceful stream of hot air, which creates a temporary sense of warmth. I am grateful when we descend once again into a tunnel that shudders with compressed air, yet offers
more consistent temperatures.

  Yuan and I phone each other when we can. We visit each other at weekends, when I try out my mother’s benachin recipe and he tries out a stir-fry. We both settle into our own peculiar rounds of lectures and the rhythms of our universities. We start to meet other people and a few grains of friendship settle. Nowhere offers much privacy, and in any case, there is so much of the new around us that the bond of having had sex cannot compete. The memory creates a mist of knowingness, and keeps itself alive because of home. Home – a different kind of place, with its unstructured streets and weather of strong passions – sticky heat, pelting rain, cloudy dust.

  Distances in London surprise. As does the amount of work we have to do. I start to go out enmeshed in groups that form within my hall of residence, my lectures and the clubs I join. So does he. As the term deepens, Yuan and I phone each other less frequently, we don’t see each other every weekend. Yet I find times when I do not wish to see my new friends. I force myself to be with them, to enjoy aspects of the new, to embrace all that has been offered me beyond my patchwork curtain.

  The cold deepens, the rain melds into iced droplets, and another kind of greyness starts to envelop my days. It is not until close to Christmas that I realise I am homesick. My hall of residence allows foreign students to stay over the holidays in self-catering apartments – Yuan’s doesn’t. He moves out to stay in a student sublet. Without the rhythm of lectures, we find time to spend with each other once again.

  It’s two weeks before Christmas, and I have bought presents for my sisters, mother and Aunt K. When Yuan comes I am wrapping them up, for posting the next day. The heating is on high and all the windows are closed. He puts the kettle on for tea and says, ‘It’s a bit warm in here, shall I open one of the windows?’

  I am still on the floor, surrounded by bits of wrapping paper, Sellotape and scissors. I have avoided jolly Father Christmases and red-cheeked angels. Instead my paper has wreaths of green holly with spots of red berries, or silver stars on a background of purple sky. I find that the first breath of a cold stream of air, which refreshes the room and my overheated nose, makes me catch my breath. I squeeze my eyes tight.

  ‘What’s up?’ He’s come back into the room with two mugs of tea.

  I try to explain. ‘It’s the rain being icy and the apartment so hot. And how it gets dark so quickly in the afternoons yet the mornings are slow to wake up. The pavements are full of people, the shops are full of cheery music but I am shopping alone. I like being able to decide what to do by myself but I miss my bedroom at home. I’ve made a few new friends, but they’ve all gone off on holiday. Here’s you, my old friend, and I hardly ever see you.’ With the tears come hugs. With our hugs come the fever of longing. Away from home and the familiarity of things around, I can know an old friend again. I will my mind to let go, I allow my body its space. I sink myself into him.

  9

  Grief

  This is all I remember of his last morning with me in our London flat. He’s clattering away with bathroom stuff; the shaving foam and razor that he hardly needs to use, the manly shower gel that has replaced bars of soap, the dental tape with which he religiously flosses his teeth at night, his special-action triple-layered toothbrush and associated paraphernalia. I am sitting at our breakfast table with a jar of strawberry jam and the remnants of a croissant-dominated breakfast. The leaves of the plane tree outside dapple the window.

  He shouts across to me. ‘You know what, despite your nitpicking tidiness, I think you’re cute, and one day I might ask you to marry me.’

  I reply, ‘You know what, despite your tendency to pick your nose, I like your lips, and one day I might even say yes.’

  There’s a snort from the bathroom as he walks out carrying his bag of toiletries, which he shoves into the suitcase propped open in the doorway.

  ‘I like planning life with you,’ he says.

  ‘And do not forget the practicalities. Find us a fantastic flat. Make sure it’s got two large desks and a great big shelf for all our books,’ I say.

  ‘Hey, you’re not going to be much richer as a master’s student, even in America.’

  The doorbell rings and we kiss and hug. He says at the door, ‘See you in a couple of months. I’ll phone as soon as I get there.’ And he’s gone.

  Life does not necessarily warn you, so you can’t take precautions. You don’t try to delay the moment, you simply let him go. And later, when he phones, practically every day, you go on about other stuff. The girl at the National Audit Office with brass hair and green lips. The supervisor at the temping firm who insists you can only type at 30 words per minute, when you know jolly well you rattle along much faster than that. And you ask about the stickiness of Boston in the summer, and laugh about how houses have central air conditioning. And then it comes – the silence. Three days without a phone call. He’d said not to bother to call him, as calls were so cheap from the States. ‘But just in case you get lost or something on your way over, I’ve written my cousin’s number in the little address book by the door.’

  When I ring, I start with, ‘Hello, Chang. This is Ayodele, phoning from London. Yuan gave me your number when he left, but as he hasn’t called for a few days, I just wondered how he is. Can I speak to him, please?’

  ‘This isn’t Chang. He is at the hospital.’

  ‘Then can I speak to Yuan please?’

  ‘Chang is with him at the hospital.’

  ‘I hope it’s nothing serious. When do you think Yuan will be back?’

  ‘Well it’s serious enough that his parents are flying over tonight.’

  ‘What do you think is a good time for me to ring back? When am I likely to find him in?’

  ‘Try again in about three hours.’

  I ring back and again ask for Yuan. This time Chang answers. ‘My brother told me you called earlier. You’re Ayodele, right?’ ‘Yes, but I thought you were in hospital, are you all right now?’ Silence can have many layers, and it traps air bubbles between them. Chang’s silence sears the moment in my memory. I get a spasm in my gut, where they used to imagine the centre of a person was. My lips are leaden, unable to form any more ques-tions. My fingers, gripping the phone, seem greasy. I clutch harder on the handset, holding on to the silence, the last few seconds between my chattering and my knowing.

  ‘I left the hospital only when Yuan’s parents arrived. They are there now.’

  I’ve been saving money while I work, so paying for my ticket over is easy. I take a single piece of hand luggage. I convert some pounds into a handful of green notes. On the plane I squeeze the ends of my lips upwards to offers of food or drink: ‘No, thanks, I don’t need anything.’ I get off the flight with dread in my ears and a twitch under my right eye. My shoulders are frozen into a position that helps me carry myself out of the airport, get into a taxi, ask for the Mount Auburn Hospital. Roads soar over other roads and a bridge crosses a slate-coloured river. There are boats and rowers on the water. There are people riding bicycles. The world is careless with my pain. I cannot respond to the taxi driver asking me where I am from. I hear him OK, but my brain is reluctant to string words together. I reject several combinations and after a lengthy pause, can only mutter ‘England.’ The truth would require many more syllables and would doubtless prompt a stream of other questions. He interprets my one-word answer for what it is – a reluctance to talk, possibly an inability to communicate. When he drops me off, I tell him to keep the change.

  This is what the hospital record says:

  July 3. Male, early twenties, head injury. Result of motorcycle accident. Brought in by ambulance 19.20. Broken ribs. Lung punctured. Cardiac failure in emergency room. Resuscitated. Put on life support.

  Much later, when I’ve left the weeks to creak by, after I’ve wondered about life’s flick at a dice, about chance and how hope can be whisked away in the slice of a single day, I ask Chang to describe to me what happened.

  This is what he says:

&nb
sp; We were both on my KTM, and Yuan was my passenger. It was a Sunday so the roads were relatively quiet. We were roaring up to an intersection. A delivery truck was backing up to park. The driver did not see me. I crashed into the truck, but held on as the motorcycle skidded. My leg got trapped under the front wheel. Yuan spun off with the impact. He would have been fine if there hadn’t been another car coming up fast on the other side of the road. I... He... It...

  Chang cannot finish his story, four weeks after the accident, and three weeks after the life support machine was turned off.

  Grief gets itself stamped on faces. Puffed-up faces, blanked-out faces, underlined eyes. I watch Yuan’s parents and it’s as if I am watching myself. Chang’s apartment becomes a place of refuge, for Chinese tea, and for sitting around talking in half-whispers. Yuan’s uncle flies over from San Francisco to sort out the funeral arrangements. Yuan’s parents decide on cremation and plan to take him home and bury his ashes in their garden.

  I can’t go back to England. I can’t go home. When awake, I get flashes of Yuan saying something, doing something. When I sleep, I imagine how the crash was, I imagine him saying to himself, ‘This looks pretty bad.’ And then the impact with the second car plays with decided slowness – pausing so I can hear his ribs crack, his mouth open in a scream. Then I see the ambulances rush in, and the stretcher, and a course ploughed through black-tarred streets by screeching, urgent lights.

  I phone my sister Kainde, now a student in Newcastle, to talk about everyday things like flats that need to be cleared – refrigerators that need to be emptied of milk, rental documents that need to be found, spare keys to be picked up from the property agent, Yuan’s books, my things.

  ‘I can’t go back to England,’ I blurt out.

  ‘I know,’ she says.

  ‘I need you to help me.’

  ‘I’m going to London the day after tomorrow. I’ll get the keys, sort out the flat and hand everything over to the agent.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And what about you, how are you coping?’ she asks.