Reading the Ceiling

by Dayo Forster

  Taiwo shifts to the edge of her seat and bends forward. ‘Reuben and I were thinking maybe he should take charge of meetings and things. You know he has all the experience from work, being secretary to the Board.’

  She glances over at Reuben with a face creased with pride, ‘I could take the notes and then together we could make sure everybody does as they are supposed to.’

  There are two rows of three chairs, facing each other across the low table. I am opposite Taiwo. Reuben is next to her, their seats separated by a small stool for setting drinks onto.

  I know I am going to give in even before I form words in my head to batten down the flash of irritation inside me. He married into the family. She was our mother. A few seconds pass.

  Taiwo reaches out to pat her husband’s arm. It is a good six inches away. Her hand touches air as she says, filling in the silence, ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Over to you, then.’ I nod to Reuben. Taiwo is prepared. She reaches into her bag and extracts a brand-new lined notebook with Cahier stamped on it. A smart new Biro is already slid into the spine of the notebook. They are ready to go.

  Reuben clears his throat. ‘Well, as Ayodele was saying, we shall first need to discuss the funeral date. However, there are several other related issues. What kind of coffin for instance? Will we have a wake in this house or not? After that, we will make suggestions on the order of service. During the service, who shall we reserve seats for in the front row? We shall need someone to make sure Kainde know what we plan, so she understands what she has to do when she arrives.’

  Taiwo scribbles.

  ‘You have all those points, yes?’ Reuben addresses his wife, who nods hard enough to move her headful of bobbed weave. He continues, ‘There’s the catering, of course. We shall also need to set up a roster for who needs to be in the house, this house, I mean – your mother’s house – to welcome mourners and ensure they have refreshments. Finally, central to all our planning, we have to discuss the unfortunate business of money.’ His right hand orchestrates the air in front of him with his fingers splayed.

  His hand stays up while Taiwo makes a final full stop and raises her head. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘we have eleven items on our agenda. The first item is the funeral date.’

  For each point, it is obvious they have already conferred, and their prevailing view passes. A Saturday of course. Luckily no one else notable has died this week, so we will certainly get first dibs for the cathedral in town. ‘The day thou gavest Lord is ended’ is on the list of dirges we are to sing. Appropriate verses will be read – Corinthians – their twelve-year-old son, Modupeh, is suggested as a reader.

  ‘What a good idea,’ says Taiwo. ‘It will give him a lot of confidence in public speaking.’

  ‘Yes, my dear, put some backbone into the boy. People will talk about how the grandchildren were included in the service. Never been done before, with children as young as ours. Will make history in this town.’ Reuben’s cheeks gleam with excitement. They stand high on his cheekbones, burnished a deep mahogany. His rimless glasses fit into two dents, and twinkle back strips of fluorescent lighting.

  ‘I think we could get him to practise +O death, where is thy sting? It will be a joy to see.’

  Kweku Sola is selected as a pallbearer. I am delegated to communicate with Kainde.

  There is noise at the gate. A door slams. The metal doors shake with thumps. Aunt K’s voice booms a greeting to the watchman. I meet her at the main door.

  ‘Ah these bones,’ she says by way of greeting. ‘It’s getting harder and harder to move around. How are you all getting on?’

  ‘Made all the major decisions, but your suggestions will be useful.’ Then I shut my eyes, mouth out ‘Help’ before draping myself around her in a tight hug. ‘It’s good to see you. Come and tell us what mother would have done for food.’

  Aunt K shuffles across the room, her cane leaving dampened circles in the rug. She sits in my mother’s embroidery chair. ‘Your mother knows I can’t sit in those other ones. This is the only one my legs can get me out of,’ she says as she settles herself. She turns to pick the embroidered headrest off the chair’s back.

  ‘I remember her making this,’ she says, putting it on her lap and straightening out the edges. She touches the patterns as purples merge into blue, and dashes of yellow puncture the vine design. ‘I shall miss her very much.’ We watch, horrified, as Aunt K cries. It is the first time anyone has cried in public for our mother. Aunt K’s shoulders shiver. She bends down to fiddle in her bag to find a handkerchief. We move our gaze away, to our fingers, our toes, the floor, the centre table, anywhere but at Aunt K, crying for losing a friend.

  She wipes her eyes. She blows her nose. ‘Now, then, how can I help?’

  Aunt K is given responsibility for catering.

  And the awujor pot is gone.

  I choose not to sleep in my mother’s house. I have not made peace with her. I do not want to feel her absence, her emptiness. I do not want to hear her slam the door of her bedroom and slap her slippers in the corridor as she walks past my room. I do not want to hear her voice telling us how we are arranging everything wrong.

  Amina phones me at home late. ‘Osh for berring. I am sorry to hear about your mother.’

  ‘You know how we were, Amina. I haven’t been able to cry.’

  ‘Remember she wasn’t all bad. Maybe life happened to her, and she just coped.’

  ‘Even if I could ever forgive her that, look at what she’s gone and done now. Left me next in line to die in our family.’

  ‘Give it time. And let me know whenever I can help.’

  Under Any Other Business, I was assigned two jobs. I am to contact the priest, Foday Sillah, and discuss our order of service. I am also to look through mother’s things and log ‘anything of significance’ – that all the siblings should see or might be interested in keeping. I am to be fair, referring anything that can be quarrelled over to the company of sisters.

  Knowing which I’d find easier, I phone Foday to ask whether he’d mind meeting to discuss the service. I explain about needing to be around my mother’s house in case people call to give their condolences.

  I sit on the verandah drinking my sixth cup of tea, having the next item on my list piled like a truck-load of rubbish in the middle of life’s road. I would rather choose to lie down under the wheels of a Massey Ferguson tractor than put my hands into what I am sure will only bring up muck.

  Eventually I make my way to my sisters’ bedroom and stop at the door. My mother turned it into a guest room – it has two single beds, with a tara mat set between them. The walls are painted white – an old indifferent white. She had reused the old sitting- room curtains from our childhood – which hang in stiff lines of purple and blue. There is little else in the room except for my sisters’ dressing table. I open a few drawers. They are swollen from disuse, and the two I eventually prise open are empty.

  I walk out and stand outside my bedroom door. It became a storeroom in which she kept old things, things she did not use on a day-to-day basis. I try the handle. It is locked. Panic, then relief floods me. But Nimsatu comes up the corridor and says, when she sees me standing there, ‘I’ll get you the key. Your mother used to keep it in her bedroom.’

  When she pushes the door open, damp air flutters out, laced with the dust of memories that have been laid down. The room is tinted by two slices of light let loose by the curtains to bang against the wall. A fresh-faced yesterday puts me back in here, scheming about how my life would go. Now, all that is left of that time are the walls, murky with dust, and the sunny yellow curtains I’d chosen when I was sixteen. My bed is gone. There are the traces of where my popstar posters used to be, a grinning David Bowie, wild Grace Jones and moody Marvin Gaye.

  My mother started to keep her unwanted furniture in here, at least that’s what Taiwo had said. I see a few stacked chairs she might have hoped to mend, and the new sofa that came with the set of chairs she
had in her sitting room. She never used it, preferring people to sit singly, not forced into an artificial cluster on a shared seat. The furniture is stringed along the left wall, and on the right I find the trunks and the cartons marked with Marlboro in which she put her keepsakes.

  I stand there, unable to decide where to start, unable to move. Nimsatu forces me to turn around. ‘I don’t know whether, as you are looking through things, you could remember to give me your mother’s jewellery case. It’s not much, but she used to say that even though all her gold and silver would go to you girls, she did not think you’d have any use for the case.’

  ‘Fine. Yes.’

  She hovers, expecting me to say more.

  ‘If I find it, I will keep it aside.’

  ‘But it won’t be here. It will be in her bedroom. That’s where she kept all her important things.’

  ‘All right.’ I repeat myself. ‘If I find it when I look through her room, I will keep it aside.’

  Satisfied, she announces, ‘I’ll go and tidy the kitchen. Check that food isn’t going bad.’

  ‘You do just that.’

  With her gone, and me alone in my remembering, I sit down on the floor and push the door halfway closed. Here in my old room are all the things my mother wanted to keep. I pick out stuff with my eyes, a rolled-up rug, a pair of tapestried slippers. The facts of her living, how she lived, stacked up in the things that held either memory or hope at some future use. There are the marks still on the ceiling, but there’s less of a future to read now, less I need to know about what life could be. Cats on my shoulder – my story is more than half told.

  Nimsatu comes back a couple of hours later, exclaiming, ‘You haven’t even started! The priest is here.’ Her eyes scan the room, take me in, take in how nothing has been touched. ‘Shall I get him something to drink? I asked him to wait in the sitting room.’

  *

  ‘Ah Ayodele,’ he says as I come into the room. With one look at my face, he asks, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I am trying to go through my mother’s things.’

  There is a moment of silence while he does what religious people with a skill for helping others can do, stretches out and touches my feelings, testing, finding out how far he should go./p>

  ‘Would you like to review the service now,’ he continues, ‘or would it be best to leave it for another time?’

  ‘Now is as good a time as any.’ I sit down, ‘Um, one of the issues is where to have the service.’

  ‘You want it at the cathedral, I understand.’

  ‘My sister and her husband do.’ My eyes flick to his face. I hope he understands what I am trying to say. ‘But I think, without being sure of the numbers of people who will attend, that it will be best to have it at a smaller church. It’s not like we’re having a state burial or anything.’

  ‘To make sure the church does not seem empty, you mean? That can be arranged. Is this something you’d like me to suggest to the others?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  After that, it’s easy. I do not mind the hymns, the organ music, the bible readings, or the people chosen to read. As I didn’t mind when Taiwo and Reuben decided on who is going to arrange the flowers, or what dress Ma will be buried in.

  At the end, after my tenth cup of tea of the day, and his third during his visit, I feel ready to tackle anything. It seems that the calm, the laid-back energy all came from him. When I say goodbye, I grab his right hand in my two hands and shake it hard. My eyes stay dry, but my hands stay on his as I say ‘thank you’ several times over.

  *

  I open the curtains and encourage a decade’s worth of dust to play with the sun’s rays. The motes seem to hold the light, furrily soft as they dance about in yellow air.

  I take down the first Marlboro box. In it are exercise books in various tones of dull – blue, green, beige. My sisters’ names are scrawled on the covers. I pick one out of the pile and leaf through. The circumference of a circle is 2nr. I pick up another. A ghost story that starts: It all began the day she knew she could hear things others could not. The handwriting gets larger, more uncertain, as I make my way through until half the box is empty and there is a wobbly pile of books next to me on the floor. In a large envelope I find a sheaf of my school reports, ordered, intact – each term, from the year I started school to the year I left.

  The second box has things we made at school – My wooden pickup truck which could be wound by an elastic band connected to the axles. There’s the baby cardigan Kainde crocheted out of thin blue wool with one sleeve noticeably shorter than the other. She’d tried to give it to me for Kweku Sola, but Ma had refused. Taiwo had made a set of linen napkins with decorative edging.

  There is more. A box full of photographs and albums. Weddings of cousins, our school photographs. Visitors. Christmases. Church outings. I come across an album with a cream fabric cover, cushioned, and shot through with drifts of silver thread. It is inscribed:

  To Millie,

  for you to start remembering us together,

  Love Bankole.

  I leaf through black-and-white photographs, mostly of the two of them, my mother and father standing together in a studio somewhere in Banjul, with a painted background of sea, beach and palm tree. There are some photographs of themselves younger, with brown tinges at the scalloped edges of the print. A few from the time they went to Italy for my father’s agricultural extension course. Another time when he went to Dakar for a conference. Then me, an open-eyed baby with large cheeks and a frilly dress, on my father’s knee as he sits in a studio chair. Half of the wall behind is panelled with wood, and the rest is wallpapered. Neither looks quite real. On the floor is a roll of loud diamond-patterned linoleum. The pictures stop. The album has six unused pages, their stripes of sticky adhesive crinkly against the polythene cover protector. The memories end.

  I leave the album open at the first page, at that very first photograph of them together. The two of them turning towards each other for the brief seconds it took for the flash to blink and the darks and lights be written onto film. A few seconds on film that defined a start to their life. There’s an energy in their shared look, but it had only a little fizz, and it soon burnt itself out.

  In a trunk with some of Ma’s clothes, I recognise the dress in the picture. It is a tight-waisted dress with a wide skirt, and an underskirt with some ruches and soft cotton lace at the fringe. In the photo, her eyes turn towards my father who looks down at her. Her shoes have heels and one of her legs is angled in front of the other as she grasps my father’s right hand.

  The trunk has two other dresses, three pairs of shoes, three bags brimming with sequins and beads, and three scarves. Ma has kept one of everything for each of her daughters, her things, her young things that had all her hope for life – kept for us.

  The air is suddenly too stale in the room, the scent of camphor too overpowering. The dust I disturb make me want to sneeze. I need to leave.

  *

  At the tiny church on top of the cliff, where the sea waves throw themselves over the hard brown-black rocks, we sing:

  The day thou gavest Lord is ended / The darkness grows at thy behest.

  There are wreaths made of thorny bougainvillea, with taped areas for handles. Clumps of purple flowers with tiny heads of white stems inside them cluster together. There are some plain green ones, made of young casuarina stems, twisted together. Others have bell-shaped yellow flowers shot into them. I made my wreath from the trail of jasmine that grows outside my front door, twined around a woody stem shorn of leaves and forced into a circle. The flowers are white, with pink undersides. The wreaths lie on top of each other, busily lining the length of the coffin, which has been burnished a dark brown and trimmed with two brass handles.

  Foday Sillah asks the congregants to make a Corridor of Condolence. Kweku Sola provides one of the shoulders that carry the coffin outside. We follow it, our faces quiet, walking past a wall of people, all the way out of the chu
rch. The coffin goes into the hearse. The three of us sisters sit in the back of the lead mourning car, a black Mercedes estate I borrowed from an old client who keeps several in his garage. Reuben sits in the front seat, next to the driver borrowed with the car.

  I feel like I do when I stand on the wet sand on the beach, when the tide is turning, and try to guess which of the waves will reach my toes before their weight pulls them back. I often guess wrong. It’s not the obvious ones, not necessarily the big ones that ride by themselves. More often than not, these waves never touch my toes.

  People drop by the house in the evening, after the burial. Remi, Kojo and Frederick Adams arrive around eight. Remi says, ‘Osh for berring. I am so sorry to hear about your mother.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I reply. Then I pause the requisite number of sad seconds.

  ‘Kojo and I came back last week. Every time he gets fed up with the country, he asks the bank to find him a job somewhere else. All of us get uprooted, but at least we get to see Africa.’

  ‘Where have you come back from?’

  ‘Swaziland. Far, high, cold. My father hopes we will stay behind this time. He says he’s old and needs looking after now my mother’s gone.’

  I find nothing to say in reply, but Remi continues, ‘Now, we’re both the same – motherless.’

  I remember how we used to be. So close we’d pretend we were twins, just like my sisters. We’d pretend we could transfer thoughts. We showed each other everything. Until I decided on my path of knowing.

  I smile back at her, then past her to her father. ‘How are you?’ I ask.

  ‘Getting old, as we all do. Osh for berring,’ he says. ‘Your mother was a fine woman.’

  He shakes my hand then pats my elbow. It was all too long ago. Kweku Sola definitely does not have his mouth.

  I continue: ‘Come and have something to eat and drink.’

  At some point in the evening, after the guests have eaten and she’s helped to tidy up the kitchen, Nimsatu slides along to me, with my feet resting on a tara bench on the verandah, Kainde close by, both of us unable to chat, express or accept sorrow. Nimsatu whispers, ‘You know, your mother also promised me the embroidery chair.’