Reading the Ceiling

by Dayo Forster

  The festivities have started. Three groups of women sit on woven mats outside huts clustered around an open space. In a shadow-cooled corner, men sit on benches. They accept drinks from a tray held by a chubby girl in a cream-coloured dress made out of woven cotton strips. Alasane comes over to greet me.

  ‘I am happy you are here. Come and meet my daughter.’

  He leads me towards a square hut in the corner of the compound, ducking to get into the darkened interior. My eyes take a few minutes to adjust to the dark. I see a woman on a bed cradling a baby’s head in her arm while it breast-feeds. I murmur my greetings and sit next to Sidibe. She hands me the baby. The crocheted wool hat on her head leaves little to see of her face. Her white bootees peek out of an acrylic blanket with patches of yellow, pink and white. Asleep, her eyes seem puffy in a wrinkled-up face. Her fingers are tightly rolled into balls.

  When she opens her eyes and looks at me, I know she cannot really distinguish me from the shadows of the walls and the slats of light that come through cracks in the wooden windows, which are shut. I hold out my little finger and coax hers to wrap tight around it. In the split second before she yells, I understand something new, a flash – Yuan dies, she lives.

  Her cries are strands of sound full of compressed hunger or a need for arms that she knows. I leave the hut. I sit outside on the mat with the women. We watch the drummers. The baby is named. Some people get up to dance. And all the while, as dust is kicked up from unwilling, hard-packed earth, I can feel the grip of tiny new fingers.

  That night, I dream that Yuan is on a boat in the river. I am standing on the river bank and he is shouting something out at me. Every time I cry out What?, the wind whisks the sound away and scatters it into trees bare of leaves. Then he moves away from me, one rower in a team of four, and I keep shouting What? until finally he throws out a rope with words in glow paint: Would you like to make a baby?

  With the scratch of light and sound that starts a new day, I know we can’t. Not a baby like Mrs Chen’s granddaughter. Not a baby like the one gurgling on the plane. Not one like Alasane’s.

  I work through the rest of the desert’s harmattan dust storms until the winds change and the texture of the air changes and the sun drenches cloudless days. Ponds begin to present cracked cakes of mud alongside insistent bunches of bulrushes which are sucking the last bit of moisture caged in the ground. The light scours the eyes and slices the head. Then merciful clouds begin to float across the sky and smother the sun’s rays.

  Alasane and Sidibe visit sometimes with little Ayodele.

  ‘And look, she can smile now.’

  ‘She can lift her head while lying down on her stomach.’

  ‘She can sit up if you support her with cushions.’

  The memory of the little fingers doesn’t fade as I watch her grow. And the desire to know how to give comfort, the wanting to be needed gnaws.

  On a day when the clouds sheet rain, when the sound clatters on the roof like a thousand tin kettles banging, when the line of white fungus has crept down to greet the tops of my window frames, I phone Kainde, having made my decision.

  ‘I’m having a tough time with this baby business. An opening has come up as a senior lecturer at my old university and I could do it. The main thing I’m thinking is that I could try a sperm bank and get one by myself.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘I knew you’d say that, so what do you think?’

  ‘Fine if you’ve thought it through. But what about not knowing who the father is, and what to tell the child?’

  ‘It won’t matter for a few years . . .’

  ‘Yes, but it will matter one day. What will you say?’

  ‘I can’t figure it all out yet. I’m sure I can ask what other people do, there must be someone offering advice somewhere.’

  ‘Oh, mum will have a field day if you tell her all this. What will you say?’

  ‘That I’ve had an immaculate conception, of course.’

  We burst out laughing simultaneously.

  By saying it out loud to someone, I make the desire real. The wanting had built up without me seeing it. It had shredded my hope into little pieces – rough and torn at the edges. After Yuan died, someone else’s laughter had torn all of me apart. Now, my sister helps me laugh a new kind of laughter, which heaves my shoulders and stutters my breaths – a laughter that stitches me back together.

  My choice need not be about missed chances, about life skipping away with all my luck. I gulp down balmy air and soothe my lungs, and I laugh some more. My shoulders shake and the shakes rumble my head. Tiny hands gripping my finger. I don’t need to have a baby of my own. I have a girl called after me, here in Bamako, where I live.

  The laughter eases the want away and turns the future the right way up.

  12

  Senility

  Ma looks the same as she’s always done. I find her sitting in an upright wooden chair by the window, staring outside at the pomegranate bush, with its red bulbs and shivering stamens. I say hello. She looks up, turns back towards the small tree, and says, ‘All my children have abandoned me. Daughters who should have known better. God denied me sons. No friends to visit. But there are always red flowers. Beautiful flowers.’

  Taiwo had not explained properly, Ma is worse than I expected. I kneel next to her chair and pat her busy hands. She’s got one of the living-room cushions on her lap, a geometric pattern resembling one of Escher’s designs – this one a staircase that never ends. Her fingers are restlessly picking at the piping on the edge. Her veins rise through her skin as she tenses and relaxes her muscles. Age’s gravity has stretched her face, added lines around her eyes, and a bit more jowl to her cheeks. Yet she looks much younger than her sixty-five years. I remember her mouth looking more pinched than it does today. Her face has mellowed with her mind.

  ‘Ma, it’s Ayodele.’

  ‘Ayodele, where have you been? Get up, child. Go make yourself busy in the kitchen. Get some drinks for the guests. There should be some wonjor in the freezer. Why are you looking at me like that? Go, go, go.’

  I get up and move towards the kitchen. I have only been home twice in the last ten years, both times to attend christenings of Taiwo’s children. She’d stopped after the second child, and there had been no other reason to come.

  I stayed at my posting in Mali, unable to make much headway with beef exports, but enjoying moderate success in bringing cotton to the fore of trade talks. Home brought back too many memories each time, and too much tension was cloaked in the hugs and hellos from my mother, Taiwo and Reuben. I preferred to go to other places. Rome, to see Amina. Toronto, to see Kainde. I rushed around Africa, from conference to conference, or one familiarisation tour to another – Ethiopia, Egypt, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea. Then I went further afield whenever I could, the more foreign-sounding the destination the better, especially if I could not locate it using a ten-year old map – Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan. There wasn’t much reason to my travelling except to stay on the move. I accumulated lots of air miles, per diems, lots of reports and business cards.

  Then Taiwo wrote a long email to both Kainde and me:

  I thought she was being stubborn about her diabetes medicine. I used to get really cross that I’d measured out all she needed to take every day for a week and put it in little plastic containers with labelled days. She would not take them. Her blood sugar would rise and I’d have to take her round to the doctor’s yet again. I actually thought she was being dopey when she looked blank as I yelled at her about wasting my time and risking her life. At the doctor’s surgery, we mostly saw the nurse, who measured her blood pressure and took her blood. But last month, we saw the doctor and he had a quiet word with me afterwards about a further appointment so he could do more tests. I thought it was all to do with the diabetes. But no – it turns out Mum has got Alzheimer’s. I am at my wits’ end with it all. She needs constant looking after. There’s the maid of course, but I think mother needs
medical attention, a nurse or someone living with her at home. Reuben thought I should ask you to help me sort this out. If either of you have leave coming up soon, could you please come home and see for yourselves. I did it all because I’ve been here. With the kids at school now, my family needs a lot of attention, I don’t see how I can handle this new angle of Ma’s illness on my own.

  I spoke to Kainde first. She offered to go home for a while. This I related to Taiwo when I phoned her later.

  ‘And you, Ayodele, what about you? Can you come home too?’ At first, I said I’d have to see how a visit fitted in with work. I didn’t want to see my mother. I didn’t want to come home at all. Home was where the past was, and I preferred the past to stay where it was – far away. Physical distance meant emotional separation and, gradually, the selective forgetfulness of voluntary exile.

  That simple question had grated – can I go home? Not, will I go home? The will did not want to go, although it had every means at its disposal to do so. I’d been at my posting for fifteen years – there was nothing new about the job any more. I would get a full pension if I left now, particularly for a compassionate reason, a sick parent.

  Human Resources at head office swung into action at my tentative request for information. They sent me photocopied brochures, links to the website on pension options, and a helpful little reminder that the organisational president was encouraging early retirement.

  I began to feel unnaturally optimistic about home and started to make plans. I could buy some land. Build a house. Settle somewhere along the river. Graft mango trees. It seemed feasible, and I gradually evolved an entirely unproven wish to return and help my mother through her twilight years. I wouldn’t have to live in her house, but could find a place to rent close by and visit once or twice a day. I could help supervise the nursing care. And for once, I would be home without my mother interfering in my day-to-day living.

  We have a family meeting later that day. A taxi drops me off at their side gate, and I find Reuben in a low-slung wooden armchair with cushions. He is reading Newsweek.

  ‘Have a seat. Taiwo’s gone to the market to get some fresh bonga for you. She’s going to cook some chereh this evening, saying she wants to welcome you back with your favourite dish.’

  I settle into the armchair next to his; a low table with his pint glass of Julbrew separates us.

  ‘Something to drink?’

  ‘Yes, a beer would be great.’

  ‘Modupeh,’ he bellows into the open door of the sitting room, ‘come and say hello to your aunt and bring her a beer.’

  It’s quiet on the murram road past their house. By the low verandah walls, some perky succulents are offering nectar-filled triangles to hovering sunbirds.

  ‘Look,’ I say, ‘those pink flowers are the ones we used to open and lick for nectar when we were children.’

  He is surprised. ‘These ones? Isn’t the sap poisonous?’

  ‘The three of us are living proof that you can lick them and survive.’ I know Reuben was a child when I was, but somehow it’s impossible to imagine him as anything other than himself, as if he’d only ever been a miniature version of the person I am sitting next to now.

  Modupeh emerges with a bottle of Julbrew already beaded with moisture. He clutches a glass in his other hand. Before he can open his mouth, his father says, ‘Come on, greet your aunt.’

  He does. A polite how are you. His big clear eyes explore my face. I have only seen him twice in his seven years. He puts the bottle and glass on the table and darts off as quickly as he can, his mud-brown legs looking as if they can barely hold up his body.

  Taiwo soon comes home, slapping the door of her white Toyota estate shut and coming towards me with a smile and her arms wide open.

  At supper, Taiwo fusses around the table, getting up to shout instructions through a hatch between us in the dining room and her househelp in the kitchen.

  ‘You know Pa Reuben likes us to use the big glass serving dishes when we have visitors, why did you put it in this one?’ She is holding one of their everyday serving dishes, yellow-painted enamel ovals with curved handles.

  ‘You can never get them to do exactly what you say, even if you repeat yourself fourteen times a day,’ she complains as she swings round to the table. She settles the dish on the cork-backed, floral-pattern trivets in the middle of the table.

  Reuben offers grace while the children sit with their hands held together in front of their faces and with their eyes tight shut.

  We talk generalities while the children are with us. About schools and teachers and the cost of uniforms and books.

  After dinner, Modupeh is encouraged to recite a poem from school.

  ‘‘The sunbird’, by Wilson Obote,’ he begins.

  ‘Quick of wing, rainbow feathered

  A trembly jewel pecks at my window

  The flash of light, the red of the sun

  Only the sister of the flower

  Opposite.’

  ‘He’s doing very well at school,’ Reuben declares. ‘We do all we can at home. What about you, Iyamide? Can you play your star song on the piano now?’

  Iyamide jumps to her feet to pick out her tune on the piano.

  ‘Now children, you can go and have showers and get into your night clothes.’ And off they go, tiny backs down the corridor with crystals of light bouncing off the oil-painted beige walls.

  The grownups can talk now. I represent the concerns of Kainde and me. Reuben represents himself and Taiwo. We move to the sitting room chairs, which are copies of the low-slung armchairs outside, but covered with a brown velvet fabric.

  ‘Quite frankly, Taiwo here has done a lot for your mother while you and Kainde have been away. It would be good if she had more time to concentrate on the children for a change,’ Reuben starts.

  ‘Yes, but of course I will still help in some ways, especially at weekends when the children are at home. I can make lunch on Saturdays and Sundays, and Reuben or I will drop it off,’ offers Taiwo.

  And so we agree. I shall take on main responsibilities during the week. Two nurses will be hired to sleep in Ma’s house at night, in rotation, making sure she takes her diabetes medicines.

  **At the beginning, I’m reminded of the way you get used to life at sea, retching during the first few days with the movement of water underfoot. Ma is impossible. I am sure she has devised some inner game which she deliberately uses to irritate me. One minute she is lucid and willing to chat about Aunt K’s antics when they were young. The next minute, she wrinkles up her forehead and laments that all her daughters have deserted her.

  I get used to the swaying and the lapping sounds against the boat. It starts to feel normal, and the memory of a ground that used to feel solid, that never once moved, fades. She becomes familiar. Lots of things annoy her. Like how the nurse moves her plastic flipflops whenever she’s not looking,

  ‘I put them under that chair, there. And now, she’s moved them. What are they doing in the sink?’

  My irritation sometimes becomes anger; at other times, I am flooded with pity, in an odd unsatisfactory surge of tenderness. I feel sorry that my mother is vulnerable. I always imagined her strong, imperious, commanding – right till the very end. That she was capable of fighting disease, and of pushing off death I had been in no doubt. Now, as her mind disintegrates, I sense bewilderment.

  ‘You see, when you take the krein krein, you have to wash it well before you put it into the, that thing that you cook things in.’ Words drop out of her vocabulary. Sometimes she finds the names for things, even objects that might seem complicated, like ‘toilet flush’, but at other times she does not know what to call a pot, or a door.

  When Aunt K visits, Ma always know who she is. They find memories in the long ago to talk about, which make Ma laugh. Her whole body moves, her shoulders shake. She cannot explain what is funny. I laugh mostly with relief at the sound coming from her mouth. She giggles, she stutters, she points with her index finger. She
squeaks with merriment, bending over with the pleasure of her laughter, clutching her side. Her face looks alive, with crinkled eyes, flashing teeth, uplifted cheeks. The laughter can stay for five minutes or be slashed away in a few seconds. Aunt K and I learn to sit and laugh with her, laugh at the joke of life, the inconsistency of memory, the cruelty of language. We laugh.

  She likes to have some noise. The radio stays on and she mutters along to the news to Fula, Jola and Serahuli. The light always needs to stay on.

  One evening, when I am sitting outside on the verandah with her nurse to discuss my mother’s care, the power goes out. Ma is in bed, asleep. Haddy, the nurse, has gone inside to get a candle. We hear a loud crash, then an almighty thump. Then a scream: ‘I cannot seeeeeee. Alone in the world. All alone. I cannot seeeeee.’

  My mother’s scream is a lament, a screech to rail against the holes in her mind that she can see reflected in the world around her. Dimmed, with hulking shadows that hide memories that might leap out and consume her.

  Haddy comes from the kitchen with a lit candle and we meet at the door of my mother’s room.

  When we open the door she is not in the bed or on the floor by the bed. My eyes find her in the corner in her room where we installed the sink. Ma must have walked over to where the glint of moonshine shows through the curtains. Her foot snagged under the stool we leave by the sink, she lost her balance. As she fell, she caught hold of the sink with her right arm. It did not hold her weight. She’s pulled it halfway off its metal struts and is now half lying under it, with her red Colgate toothbrush on her chest, the toothbrush holder by her head and the tube of toothpaste flung halfway across the room.

  Haddy pushes the candle into my hand. ‘Hold that please.’ She kneels next to my mother and holds her thumb against Ma’s wrist. ‘A bit irregular. Leave the candle on the sill. Get some more.’