Eddie Signwriter (10 page)

The next day the boy found one of Celeste’s classmates during lunch and handed her a note.

“Give this to Celeste,” he said to her, and he closed her hand around the paper and held it shut. “She can decide herself to throw it if she wants.”

He ate alone, and waited at his table after lunch, hoping she would come, as the people cleared out to go to their next classes.

She did. He heard a chair scraping backwards and then she was walking briskly towards him. When she got close enough for nobody else to hear, she said, “You think she is a lady, but I think she is dirty. I think that what she is doing is disgusting.”

“What? Do you think I come to drink tea with
her?”
he said.

“I don’t care why you come,” she said sharply, and threw the unopened note on the table in front of him, and left him sitting where he was.

“I think you do,” he shouted after her.

People turned and looked.

But he did think that, and it gave him the courage to return to the rest house one more time, as awful as it felt. To drive along the road to Aburi, reach the turnoff, see the water towers appearing over the trees, covered in their vines, and get off at the door, and step down, and go through into the restaurant where so many happy things had happened, with nobody to welcome him except the one person whose welcome meant nothing to him.

He sat down with Nana Oforiwaa at the table. She looked a little better than she had the last time. She had done herself up. She was
wearing perfume, a necklace, and a bright boubou, though also she was coughing.

“You don’t look so well,” he told her.

She rubbed her temples. The dry season was almost over and the pressure was changing.

“It’s the rain,” she said. “The rain is coming.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her, lying. Really, he didn’t care.

The conversation between them started moving slowly. Mostly Nana Oforiwaa talked about herself, which made her seem old. He wasn’t concentrating. He was listening for the sound of Celeste’s presence in the rest house and so he heard her entering the verandah before she reached the table.

She stopped slightly behind Nana Oforiwaa, who wasn’t aware, and so continued talking. Then Nana Oforiwaa saw him looking, and craned her head back and also saw Celeste.

“Come,” Celeste said to him.

He got up. Celeste started walking, and he followed her.

They walked down towards the fence in silence. For a moment he turned back and saw Nana Oforiwaa watching them go, but then his thoughts were free.

Celeste was walking fast. He could hear their feet in the grass and leaves. They walked through the gardens. He remembered the first time she’d brought him there. Insects buzzed and clicked in the canopies of the rain trees. Brambles grew between their trunks and orchids flowed over their branches like streams. The birds called. They squeaked and whistled, plumbed, ratcheted, whispered, whined, and purred, and on the grass under the camphor trees and the nutmeg trees, rose into the air with the sound of sheets shaken out.

“Celeste,” he called after her, but she didn’t respond.

He could see her legs moving under her dress, which was made of cotton and had thin straps, like two pieces of string, that came down from her shoulders and held it around her body just over her shoulder blades.

He knew where he was. He knew the garden well by now. The familiar sites passed by, but where she was headed he couldn’t tell.

Still a few paces ahead, she stopped at the helicopter on the mound,
right in the centre of the garden. He stopped, too. She turned around and looked him in the eye.

Then she lifted the straps of her dress from her shoulders and let it fall to the ground.

“Is this what you want?” she said.

He looked at her standing. She was naked. Beautiful. There was nobody around, but he could hear the voices of people nearby. Children laughing. A man calling.

“No,” he started, then changed his mind; “Yes, it is.”

“Fine,” she said, “then have it.”

And that’s what happened, in the carcass of a military helicopter left to rot in a grove of candle trees, as the evening approached and another day came to an end in the hills of the Akwapim Ridge.

AFTER THAT
, everything people said about him and Celeste was true. How they shook away discipline and became uncontrollable, and were shameless and wild, and lacked modesty. And how on the day that Nana Oforiwaa died, they stole away from the garden after church, and took a car, and went down the ridge to Accra, and spent the day at the beach, at Labadi, while Nana Oforiwaa grew frantic, and later went out to join the search parties looking for them, and eventually lost her life.

That was the day the rains came.

The sea at Labadi was like a warm bath. It was the colour of a grove of cocoa—brown and green at the same time. The sky was full of heat and wetness. Groups of fishermen’s children from the Jamestown and Ushertown slums were roaming around measuring each other. The city people sat out in chairs under the trees, and the children hustled to sell fried squid and prawns and oily damp cassava stained red with pepe.

They put down the tablecloth they’d taken from the restaurant at
the back of the beach, where the shade of the trees could cover their heads and nobody was behind them to watch. He stretched out, the sun warming his feet. Celeste lay on her side, facing into him. They talked and watched the people, and later, while he was reading, she touched the side of his face with her fingers and the cup of her palm. And though he felt a rush of happiness, he also felt overwhelmed by sadness and shame for the things he could not say to her, and could not take back, and his eyes filled and his throat grew tight. She looked at him as he tried to keep his face still, but still the tears were coming out silently, giving him away.

Celeste got up to swim. He watched her walk towards the sea. Still she moved like a girl, long-limbed, gangly, her body keeping inside its new knowledge, of herself, and him.

And then the sky tore apart.

She was only a few feet away and she turned and began running towards him.

The rain came in like waves of stone, slapping the sand, whipping everyone’s bodies. It was deafening. Lightning was catching like webs all over the sky. They both raced for safety, and found cover with other people under the roof of a kiosk.

Earlier in the afternoon a troupe of drummers had been playing there, who also found cover under the roofs, and soon they started beating their drums again—one setting the rhythm and the others taking turns to weave around it.

People began to dance. It wasn’t clear who started first—perhaps it was a drunk. Perhaps it was a madman. But many years later he’d still remember the small sharp movements of that dancing, like a shock jumping through the dancer, a small series of convulsions in his legs, in his back and his arse. The dancer’s face was ticking like electricity. And then a circle formed round him. Then there were many circles, with pairs of people taking turns in the centre.

And he’d remember when the turn came for the young hustlers—the gangs who had been roaming the beaches—how they began to chant the old Ga fisherman chants. Not only them, but the ordinary townspeople too. Even those who lived abroad, in Germany and
America. The songs leaked out of them all from across the kiosks along the length of the beach.

And then it ended.

The squall passed over and the people drifted away silently. There was no acknowledgement of what had happened, or what they had shared. People who’d been touching and shaking and contorting around each other walked away as strangers.

The air was now dry and clean and cool, and the storm moved inland, heading for the ridge, where it would arrive that night. But now the evening light shone through the braided clouds. The sea was cool, flat as a piece of stretched cloth, and it all felt as if it could last forever—this moment of reprieve—as for the rest of that day it did.

A
FTER NANA OFORIWAA’S DEATH
the boy returned to Nii Boi Town, where he stayed for a short time in his mother’s house. There was talk of his finishing his studies elsewhere that came to nothing. Shortly afterwards he moved to the city to live with his uncle.

His uncle’s name was Festus Ankrah. He had a large property on Castle Street in the centre of town. He ran a fleet of taxis, which he’d funded out of cash saved over five years of wandering across the world—during which he traveled from Ghana to Jordan, through Arabia, to the Far East, and had ended up as a construction worker building cinemas in Manila for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

His uncle’s taxi fleet had done well. He employed six drivers, and no longer needed to work himself for his livelihood, though the thought of leisure had never occurred to him. Although he’d never married it is well known that he’s fathered two sons since his return to Accra—one in the old colonial slum of Jamestown, one in the new post-Independence slum of Nima.

His uncle had been living on Castle Street for a little more than
eight years when he brought him to the house. Though many people assumed as much, his uncle did not take him in out of duty, nor in observance of any rights to the care of his sister’s sons—his uncle despised tradition. Nor was it out of affection—his uncle knew him even less than he did his own two sons (which was not very well either).

His uncle brought him to the house out of a sense of kinship, but not one based on family. Rather, his uncle sensed in the boy a younger version of himself. He identified with his nephew’s disgrace—his expulsion from school and return to Accra—which, in his uncle’s eyes made his nephew as much an outsider as his uncle felt himself to be an outsider.

That, and the opportunity to thwart his sister, mother of his nephew, who—in her self-assurance, her narrow-mindedness, her cultivated respectability—stood for everything his uncle hated most about the world he’d fled when he set out on his travels and had then returned to.

And so, after the boy had returned from the school, and had spent two months already under the discipline of his mother’s household (doing nothing more than the chores of an eleven-year-old, and otherwise keeping to himself and his only interest, painting), it was his uncle who first suggested what his nephew had been secretly contemplating for a long time, but didn’t dare, in his disaffection, propose.

“If the child cannot think of anything better than to lose his time through painting,” his uncle said (repeating the words of his sister, who had been complaining for weeks about her son’s disinterest in anything else), “then let him paint and make his living.”

His mother was opposed from the start to the idea of a child of hers becoming a signwriter, and condemning himself to a life among artisans, hustlers, and small traders. But a week to the day after his uncle first made his suggestion, he arrived by car at his sister’s house, unannounced, to take his nephew away.

“Mary, I want a word with you,” he said in his soft, firm voice that had the authority of a man used to having his way.

“Come in,” his sister said, swinging the half-door open. “I thought you’d be back,” and that afternoon the arrangements were made.

To spare his sister the sight of her child’s descent into the artisan classes, his uncle suggested he stay with him in his large house in Adabraka. And to spare him the prospect of undeserved failure, his uncle offered to get him an apprenticeship to learn the rudiments of the trade, a shed in which to paint when the time came, and the benefits of his contacts with traders and businessmen, who always needed signs and billboards.

And so he moved from Nii Boi Town into the city and what would be his home for the next three years.

The house on Castle Road had been built before Independence. It had front and back balconies, thick palm trees grown knobbly as a crocodile’s back in the tall grass in what was left of the garden, a dirt-brown zinc roof, and a driveway parked with taxis in various states of repair, the most dilapidated still on bricks.

Inside it was a shell of wood and lime-washed walls, kept tidy by a woman employed twice a week. It was entirely bare, but for four rooms at the back inhabited by the boy’s uncle, away from people and the road, and those in the front, where the boy established his quarters.

Given the whole house on Castle Road from which to select, the boy chose two rooms that opened up onto the front balcony, their entry on the upstairs landing. The original function of the rooms was indiscernible. They were relatively small and connected to each other by arches that had never known doors. In the room furthest from the landing he put a mattress. This became his bedroom. A chair and table turned the landing into his living room, from which he could look down between the railings into the empty entrance hall, where shafts of sunlight—that in the morning carpeted his bedroom—caught the dust as it crept through the holes in the roof.

He and his uncle got along well. He admired his uncle, who had traveled the world and lived as he pleased. An easy affection developed between them, as between people who are alike. Although they were alone together in the house, their lives revolved only loosely around one another’s. They ate when they were hungry, together when they felt like company. His uncle said that his nephew did not need nurturing—something, in any event, that he could not have
provided him. He said that his nephew needed to be left alone, to do as he pleased.