Reading the Ceiling

by Dayo Forster

  When I am half pushed out of the Church of Christ Brethren for overquestioning authority, I go. My leaving gouges a hole in me, making me feel as light as a sunbird’s feather, all iridescent and flashily pretty, but weightless, able to be pushed any which way. I do normal things – go to the office, shop, arrange what to cook. Inside, I am angry. I find I cry easily. I droop around the house on Sunday mornings, unable to place myself anywhere. I feel alone, cut off. After nine Sundays, I go back to the church my mother took me to as a child, the one where they have flowers on Easter Sundays, where breezes blow wave-soaked wind through the louvred windows, and there I make my kind of peace.

  Away from books and films, what would love feel like if it happened in real life, my life? Superlative sex? A guaranteed Song of Solomon type heaven?

  Instead of the daily reading suggested in my Food for the Soul guide, I pick up my Bible and find myself wanting to read the Song again. I want to prove to myself that earthly love is but a reflection of the love that exists between a creator and the created.

  Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth / Your name is like perfume poured out.

  I tried to imagine how it would feel to be intoxicated with the smell of someone you want to melt into. An intensity I have sometimes sniffed at. I have dreamed, I have wondered, but I have not felt.

  Just as well I have my God, and this desire to seek ecstasy with my body can be safely locked away. The texture of my faith has changed. I no longer expect everything of it, I no longer let it swirl me up the way it used to in Brother Paul’s church. Yet I find I still believe.

  I set my breakfast table for one. Perky brown birds chirrup and hop about on the guava tree outside. I hear pedestrians talking in descants to each other as they walk past my open windows. My Sony radio is on. To the background of the ills in the world and the slow death dance being played out in Israel and the West Bank, I get a bowl and some cutlery. The drawer sticks in its wooden frame, sliding out jerkily as I tug at it. The news is sliced into chunks and delivered by a voice trying to make me understand how it all fits together. Today there is no shocking tragedy – no typhoons in Bangladesh or starving children in Ethiopia – but peace talks have gone stale and the Dow and the Footsie are jiggling up and down, the euro and the dollar are heading for all-out war.

  Yesterday, several giant grapefruits fell off my tree. I slice into a chilled yellow one and concentrate on separating the skin from the tears of juice. The news roundup fails to hold the shreds of my thoughts together. Instead my mind runs off with a skittish skip. Words drift through it.

  My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.

  To have a scent stuck between breasts constantly keeping your Other in your thoughts. You think about him without pause and carry his scent as you move through the day, doing normal things. What did Amadou and I have? It started off being this exchange of his comfort for my skill. That bred familiarity. We ate together when he stayed with me, chatting about this and that over supper. We hardly ever quarrelled. When he was at Rohey’s I had space in my head for myself. It seemed balanced – that kind of life, that kind of sharing. I never wanted our lives to be so entwined that we suffocated each other. We made our marriage work, and that was enough. All this scent carrying never crossed my mind then.

  I hear Bintou at the door. I walk over to let her in. She and I know the curves of each other’s mornings now. With Kweku Sola gone, and less and less to do around the house, we have adjusted our hours. She comes in later now, and leaves earlier. That’s why I have all this extra time to sit around thinking and making myself yearn for things I could never have had anyway, even when I was young.

  With relief, I find something else to shunt these thoughts away. I discuss food.

  ‘You could do me some fish mbahal today,’ I say.

  ‘If you’re going to the market, I’ll need some parsley and garlic for the stuffing. How many cups of rice should I cook?’

  ‘Four. Might as well. Kweku Sola will be coming later and people may drop in.’ I open the fridge to check on the tomato paste.

  ‘That boy can eat – remember how high he used to pile his plate with my benachin?’

  I turn round to look her up and down before reminding her, ‘And who needs two extra cups when we do mbahal bu tilim, as a late-evening snack?’

  Bintou laughs with a bubbly gruff from her middles which makes her upper arms jiggle. She slaps her thigh loudly and says, with a touch of pride, ‘I have an excuse, I need the fat. It helps to pad my knees for scrubbing floors.’

  She waddles off to get the bucket and cloths from the broom cupboard, and I hear her bustle into the bathroom as her workday begins.

  I walk to the market. On the way, I wave to people I know in the cars going past, and several stop to offer me a ride. Each time, I insist that I need the walk to strengthen my bones. I wish greetings on family, household and assorted relatives and continue on.

  The market is full of activity – and flies. It’s ten o’clock and the women who dry fish for a living are gutting the morning’s catch. I edge past stacks of rancid beige fish curled into irregular cardboard. My mother would have said: ‘Oh, look at you – without gayja, your mbahal will lack that undertone. Just put perfume on your wrists before you go. Hold your breath if you need to, but just buy it, you hear?’ Now I can choose to cook gayja-less mbahal, changing her recipe to suit my nose.

  I bump into Reverend Sillah at the market, idling by a fishmonger’s stall.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he says, ‘what the difference is between squid and octopus, and whether it matters which one I get for supper tonight.’

  I dither about the amount of detail I should get into. He has been a widower for five years, and several members of our congregation regard that as time enough for his heart to have mended.

  ‘It really does not matter,’ I assure him. ‘Get whichever is cheaper by the kilo.’

  I have noticed that he often sits next to me at our church’s social events and I’m not yet sure what I think about that. Especially as church members have been dropping hints as plentiful as a swarm of flying termites after the rain.

  ‘Do you think I should fry, or grill?’

  ‘Squid pockets are easier to clean and quick to grill.’ Seeing that he may well stretch out our discussion, I excuse myself with: ‘In a bit of a hurry. I need to get my fish home, fresh without ice.’ I move with a speed and purpose that make me grateful for healthy bones.

  Kweku Sola does come to visit, just as he always does on Fridays after work. While we eat, we usually chat about politics, goings- on at his office, how my business is doing. Today, as I dish out a mound of glistening rice onto his plate, he’s quieter than usual. Eventually I ask, ‘What’s the matter?’

  He lets his fork clatter onto the table, takes in a wide breath and lets it puff out again. ‘Ma, do you remember after you got married and you said I should call Amadou Pa?’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘You also said there were things you couldn’t explain then but would explain when I was older.’

  ‘And now you’re ready to ask your questions again?’

  He nods.

  ‘Who’s my father?’

  We both wait for the years from long ago to come crashing into the present.

  ‘I made certain choices when I was young, younger than you. That choice created you.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I want to know whose face I’ve got.’ ‘You’ve got my eyes,’ I say and touch one of his. ‘If your ears were just a bit smaller they’d be exactly like mine. I see nothing of anyone else in you.’

  ‘You’re not giving me a straight answer, Ma’

  I pause. And think about how a little wanting to know what a skin that was allowed to sing felt like. And how wanting to know how much rougher it could be standing up behind a watchman’s hut. Not things I can explain, not now.

  ‘Once you make some choices, they stick – you can’t shake them off. They clin
g and shape you.’

  His face is full of questions. My head has no better answer. The call for prayer from the mosque a mile away rises and fades.

  ‘I’m no longer a child, Ma. I can handle the truth.’

  Truth. What truth?

  ‘Amadou was your father. He brought you up.’

  ‘When, if, I have my own children, what do you want me to tell them? That Amadou is their grandfather, even though I know it’s a lie?’

  ‘What could your father have done for you that he didn’t do?’ ‘Ma, do you remember when I refused to draw people’s faces?’ I nod.

  ‘I did a charcoal drawing of myself once. I know the distance between my eyes. I know the shape of my ears. I remember faces. There’s nothing in mine that came from Amadou.’

  It’s my turn to shake my head. ‘Not today, Kweku Sola. I made one choice, and it still affects many lives, not just yours.’

  ‘Amadou is dead, Ma. Nothing you say will hurt him.’

  I shake my head again. No. No.

  ‘The bank have offered me a trainee manager’s post in Ghana.’ I can’t blame him for this. He’s free to choose himself out of my life.

  ‘Will you go?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  We sit at the table while the mbahal goes cold.

  Amina comes as the sun is layering longer shadows on hard- packed brown earth. Her wine-coloured lipstick unreliably edges her mouth.

  We clatter in the kitchen heating up the mbahal. Amina chatters away, bringing me up to date with local gossip, including a summary of the recent turn of events in a long-standing marital dispute in which husband and wife have not exchanged a word for over fifteen years.

  When we sit down to eat, she tosses her wig onto a nearby chair and massages her weathered hairline. ‘I need to let my head breathe. Should I get my hair braided for the wedding?’

  ‘I’m not sure. What does Jainaba think?’

  Amina’s youngest daughter, Jainaba, is about to get married. ‘She said I should do what I want. I ask her for advice and she gives me backchat. Oh, modern children. She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have me as a mother.’

  ‘Has she decided on her wedding dress?’

  ‘Doesn’t care what I think. Yellow she says. Girls in Spain marry in yellow apparently. I said how would she feel if I wore black?’

  ‘And what did she say to that?’

  ‘That if I wanted to mourn at her wedding, I was welcome to. This silliness has to stop somewhere, why doesn’t she listen?’

  ‘Better to let her marry as she wants’

  She screws her eyebrows together and sends a slanted, slightly hurt, look my way.

  ‘Don’t you think she should let me enjoy being the mother of the bride?’

  At this point, we are tucking into Bintou’s excellent mbahal, which Amina comments on. ‘This Bintou of yours, she learned in the end, didn’t she? How to cook, and clean.’ Without pausing for much breath, Amina picks up her previous topic. ‘We came back here for nothing. I thought it would calm her wildness. All that effort I spent trying to get her to respect her elders.’

  ‘Jainaba is very much like you were. She knows her own mind.’

  ‘But just once in a while, to listen? I have some good ideas for the wedding.’

  ‘I’m sure you have, but you’ll have to give in this time.’

  She moues her mouth as she considers what I’ve said.

  ‘You’ve been so lucky with Kweku Sola. He’s sensible and, I hear, doing well at Standard Chartered Bank. You’ve done well by him.’

  I blurt out, ‘He wanted to know who his father is when he came round earlier.’

  Amina’s spoon stops halfway to her mouth.

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘You know something, Dele? Lie.’

  When Amina leaves, she leaves a space empty of air, as if her energy has sucked it all up, carving her shadow where she had been sitting moments before.

  To allow myself to ignore her airless shadow, I put on some of my old music. What should I tell him? The whole truth or a slice of it? If a slice, what do I leave out? I lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. It is white, not a single rain-blemished dot. It can tell me nothing.

  I try to write out a note to him: ‘I think your father is dead. He used to work for my mother.’

  My lover thrust his hand through the latch-opening; / My heart began to pound for him.

  ‘There was no love. His name is Osman Touray. He came from Mansakonko. I never had anything else to do with him.’

  I stare at the words. I scratch out ‘I think’. At the beginning I add, ‘This is not easy for me to say’.

  I keep the rest of the slices of truth to myself. It is best to be certain, best not to dangle two possibles before him. Best not to say how I chose. And how it led to him.

  I take a clean sheet of paper and start all over.

  Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you: / Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.

  These driftings breed discontent. They bring memories of being a girl. Being eighteen and full of hope. I should rest easy – passions like these would never have worked in my kind of life. Better this way, this kind of living, grabbing at contentment whenever I can. The phone rings and creates diversion. It’s Reverend Sillah.

  If the Church of Christ Brethren never noticed my departure, my mother’s old church has certainly noted my entrance.

  He says, ‘When I saw you at the market, I forgot to mention the new fund raising for refugees.’

  ‘How is it going?’ I ask, stirring up some inner bravery but not really wanting to know, at least not right now.

  ‘Excellent. Excellent.’ I can see him rubbing his cheek in enthusiasm. ‘At this rate, we’ll be able to support twenty of them in all.’

  ‘You’ve worked hard on it. Well done.’ I give credit where it is due.

  ‘I was wondering whether you have time to come round and see the petition I am sending to the United Nations refugee office. My grilled squid turned out really well. I could cook you some more.’

  How do I say no? Is it impossible to say yes?

  I am a wall to some in this community. I am a wall because I choose to contribute to as many causes as I can, sit on the many committees I am asked to join. With all this love talk and wedding talk and Solomon thinking, today I see myself as a mirrored wall, where others see their own reflection but think it’s me. Or maybe a tinted pane in one of those high-bumpered four-wheel drives in which the passengers can see out, but no casual passer-by can see in. Glass, anyway, because I know better than anyone else the many times in the past when I could have shattered myself into tiny little pieces, unglueable, destroyed.

  18

  Death

  Tea works best at times like these, and I have in my hand an old mug, old from my thirteenth birthday. All of thirty years later, it has only one chip on the rim above the handle, and a tiny crooked crack down the side. The handle is white, the inside navy blue. My hand curves around it, and it returns diluted heat. On the outside, white polka dots puncture dark blue. My mother died today. It is evening and I am sitting on her verandah drinking tea.

  Sprigs of golden showers hang heavy on the vine that has worked its way over the verandah roof and down each pillar. As I breathe in and out, a cluster of the tube-shaped flowers, orange and free, moves slightly with my breaths. In. Out. I don’t hear the househelp Nimsatu as she comes close. The tiles in the house have got used to her hardened bare feet traipsing up them several times a day. She stands at my shoulder and speaks. Her first words bite into my collarbone and some tea jerks into my lap.

  ‘Missis said there were some things I could have. That big awujor pot in the kitchen. I was wondering whether I could take it home with me tonight.’

  I turn to stare at her. Her words don’t make sense. My mother’s body was taken to the mortuary at lunchtime. We are having a family meeting at seven to discuss the funeral. />
  ‘What did you say?’

  She repeats herself. ‘There is a large awujor pot in the kitchen that your mother used when she needed to cook food for many people. It was one of the things she promised I could have when she died. I want to take it home now.’

  Some words trickle in. There is a pot. For cooking for many people. To be taken home now. My mother has promised this. A pot?

  ‘You mean that heavy pot? The metal one on three legs? The one she always used to cook benachin at Christmas?’

  Nimsatu touches her headscarf and pushes it forward. There are tiny knots of hair at the back of her head, skimmed with grey.

  ‘Yes, that’s the one I’m talking about. She keeps it in the store beside the dining room. I mean she used to keep it there. But it’s still there. Right on the bottom shelf, because it was too heavy to lift if we put it any higher.’

  She has two malans on. The brown one underneath has the beak of a yellow duck peeking out under the scrunched flowers of the one on top.

  ‘And you want to take this home with you tonight. You mean right now?’

  Her hands move up again to her headscarf.

  ‘Yes.’

  There’s a pot on three legs, desired by Nimsatu for many years, that she wants to take home.

  ‘What if we need it for cooking here?’

  ‘I can always lend it back to you. As long as everyone knows it’s mine.’

  ‘Why can’t everyone know it’s yours if you leave it here until we’ve finished with it?’

  ‘There are many people who’ll be coming and going. I’ve heard Aunty K talk about how well that pot cooks rice, because it moves the heat all the way to the middle. You know your mother bought that pot from an old man from Cassamance who worked metal. He died.’

  And she’s died too.

  There is a low table in the middle of the room, squat atop a busy brown and white tufted rug. On it is a square of white cotton, embroidered at each corner with a convoluted nest of greens, oranges and reds. We are all sitting on thin-sponged cushions stuck into the low-legged, long-bottomed, wood-framed seats.

  ‘I guess we should discuss funeral dates first. Once we’re agreed, we can decide on the format of the service.’