Eddie Signwriter (15 page)

“Please let me hold you,” he says.

“Why do you want to hold me?” she asks with irritation.

He looks down towards the foot of the bed, where their clothes are crumpled on the floor.

He tells her he doesn’t want to hold her anymore.

She tells him not to be mean.

He says he’s not being mean, he’s just saying what he feels: that he wanted to hold her, but that now he doesn’t want to hold her anymore.

She makes him tea. She’s making an effort. They move around their rooms, the two of them, washing, eating, cleaning, as if the air were thick as water.

She smiles at him lovingly, thoughtfully, reflectively, as he smiles at her sitting at the table.

Love. Emptiness. Emptiness. Love. And so on and so forth.

Early one morning his uncle opens the front door of the house and finds him asleep on the step. A dried trail of spit has stuck to the side of his face, drained down into a puddle of light that’s congealed around his head.

His uncle looks down at the body curled up at his feet. He prods his nephew with his foot. His nephew complains under his breath, then sinks down again into sleep.

His uncle steps back into the house and closes the door.

Inside a faucet is opened. The plumbing begins to rattle in the walls, then falls silent with a growl.

A kettle whistles.

When Festus Ankrah opens the front door again his nephew is awake, sitting up. He is rubbing his eyes.

“Take this,” Festus Ankrah says, handing him a cup of tea.

“Thank you, uncle,” he says. He takes the mug and puts it down on the stair beside him, and continues rubbing his eyes.

His uncle steps over him, avoiding the steaming mug, moves down the path, then stops. He stands in the sun, blocking the light, his hands in the small of his back, and stretches.

He watches his uncle.

“How did you sleep?” Festus Ankrah asks without turning around.

“Not well, uncle,” he says softly.

“No,” his uncle says, though he’s already thinking of something else—of who he has to meet and what he has to say and what he has to do, and his nephew knows it.

Festus Ankrah begins to walk now down the path to the gate. He says, “The second time she won’t forgive as easily as the first. Less so the third time.”

“Oh, she’ll forgive,” he says from behind his uncle, with an unexpected vociferousness, so that Festus Ankrah thinks for a moment that his nephew may still be drunk, and pauses in his stride—though only for a moment.

“All right,” Festus Ankrah says and closes the gate behind him.

He sits on the stairs drinking his tea. Between two sips he cranes his neck up to the window of the bedroom.

The things he says to her are sometimes terrible.

That people were right: that they killed her aunt. They were both of them murderers, and how did she feel?

It’s all of it unforgivable, but he cannot stop it.

He leaves her crying.

Where does it come from, this anger? He does not know.

There are things he could tell her, he says.

“So tell me,” she says, but he can’t.

She calls him a stinking drunk, but he hasn’t drunk a thing. It’s anger that makes him slur his words.

She says, “What did I ever do to you?” and she’s right.

“You? Nothing,” he says, dismissing the fact of her rightness with a wave of his hand. “It’s not your fault.”

And then she does the worst thing she can: she forgives him.

It’s her greatest strength, but to him it’s the worst of her weaknesses.

Spineless
, he thinks.

But then what then is he?

And it’s true.

“Life is a series of choices,” the teacher had once advised him in one of their talks.

Yes
, he thinks,
though not always your own
.

He steps out of his shed. He should have gone home but he’s lost track of time, and now he is hungry.

He puts his hands in his pockets and begins walking up Kojo Thompson Avenue towards Farrar Street.

The faint smell of the open sewers hugs the road.

It is evening and the boys from the villages who have not yet found a room in the city are lying out on cardboard, in the light spread by the neon glow of the Integrated Bookshop sign, a radio between them, or no radio, but just their conversation. By midnight the pavements
will be dotted with bundles of people, wrapped neatly in thin cotton sheets, too thin even for curtains, and the children of the hawkers will be asleep on benches, or against a wall, as their parents ply the night for an extra sale.

But he can sleep later, he tells himself.

He takes a seat on a bench of one of the many improvised pavement food stalls that line the street.

As he eats his meal, absorbed in thoughts, a man sits down beside him. His shirt is silver and its sleeves are black and he wears a wide flat ring with diamonds buried in its gold band like the rows of a shark’s teeth. His watch chain hangs from his wrist like a bracelet.

“How do you do,” the man greets the signwriter.

“Fine,” the signwriter says, and they exchange nods, and he thinks nothing more, until the two customers seated on the end of the bench insult the man.

“Now what black man go break his skin?” the one asks, and the two customers laugh as if they are sharing a joke with the stranger, inviting him to laugh with them.

The two customers are well-to-do themselves. They wear nice clothes. The neck of the one slopes back into his shoulders from his skull like an escarpment. They’re finishing up their meals, putting back the bones from the table onto their empty plates.

“In Ghana de black man be black,” the other laughs, running the length of the dark skin of his arm with his forefinger. The skin of the insulted man is light, and in places patchy—by chemicals, parentage or disease the signwriter cannot say.

“Let’s forget it wit’ a drink,” the insulted man says. From his language it is now clear to the signwriter that he is Nigerian.

“No, you keep your drink, friend,” the one customer laughs, and getting up wishes the Nigerian a good evening.

“Where you come from in Nigeria?” he asks the man after the others have left.

He can’t tell whether the Nigerian is humiliated or disconcerted—he’s keeping it all behind his face. But his gold looks as rich on him as it did when he sat down. Nothing has been stripped from his body.

The Nigerian’s answer is short.

The two men drive by in their 4×4 with its tinted windows and chrome. “You have a good evening now,” the one laughs, waving out the driver’s window.

He leaves the Nigerian to his wounded silence, which eventually the Nigerian breaks by telling the small boy serving at the table to bring him water.

“I beg gimme dat ting,” he says, pointing.

The small boy brings the cup and the plastic packet of water, jiggling like silicone.

“Put in da glass,” he commands the boy with irritation.

The boy doesn’t seem to understand. The Nigerian takes the bag in his teeth and tears the corner off, then hands it to the boy. The boy fills the cup with the water.

They sit in silence.

Behind them on two tables on the pavement the cooks prepare food. One cleaves chicken carcasses through their ribs. He cuts the leg in two, freeing meat from the joints. Embedded in the flesh the shards of bone shine like stones. The other cuts salad. A woman with a black shirt and an apron stirs the mixed vegetables on a gas-fed wok.

The Nigerian starts talking to her in tones he cannot quite make out. The flames hover under the pan.

The Nigerian turns to the boy and asks whether the woman is his mother. They talk a while. It is not clear what he is saying to the boy, but he can see the Nigerian is forming a confidence. The boy smiles.

The Nigerian makes parting words with the woman and leaves a tip.

“I de go now,” the Nigerian makes a point of saying to the signwriter as he leaves.

He watches the Nigerian turn the corner into an unlit passage between the stalls.

He hears a voice, his own voice, talking to him: Anybody you meet on your way is your angel, it says.

One afternoon he climbs up on a wall to paint an open, primed section. But the ladder is unbalanced, and begins to slide, and though he steadies himself the brush slips as he does, leaving a misshaped, panicked scrawl across the wall to where he got his balance back.

He climbs down and inspects the damage.

A scribble, a mess, though he can fix it simply.

He begins to work around the error, filling in space, adapting the shapes he’s left, and as he does, the attempt at recovery begins to take on form. The possibility of a figure appears. An arm, a head turned sideways.

And he suddenly has a feeling, as he balances on a chair on the tin roof where the scaffolding won’t reach, of being accompanied. That in all this madness, the swirl of survival, he is not alone.

That maybe the world is still with him.

The world talking back at him through his own shabby gift.

Nine in the evening. He’s alone in his shop, the door open. A fresh breeze is up off from the sea, that clicks together the pods in the tree that overhangs the prostitutes’ shed.

This week he has a big commission—a billboard for Makola Circle, so large he has to do it in pieces, spreading the panels over the yard and painting by night.

Lamps, their wicks cut long, stand all around, on stones, on the low wall beside the stamp maker’s shop, thinly illuminating the panels spread out over the ground. Black smoke flutters upwards from the flames like string.

Everyone’s gone, the daylight city folded up and put away for the night.

Inside his shed he’s mixing paint, pouring turpentine into a tin to thin the pigments. Beside it his brushes soak in a jar.

The boards outside have the forms drawn on, ready to be filled in. He’s painting a road safety advert. His brief is a car, driven recklessly, striking a pedestrian.

As he pours and stirs the mixture the fumes from the tin make his head feel light. The nerves in his brain throb behind his eyes.

He tries to calculate how many panels he can get done by four a.m. How many by five?

He wonders,
What time can I get home? Seven? Eight? Will Celeste be up? Will she fight me, or be kind?

He brushes the thoughts from his mind, and without thinking rubs his eyes, which immediately begin to sting.

He runs to the tap, scoops the water onto his eyeballs.

The room starts to spin with the motion of his hands flapping against his cheeks. The bottles on the shelves want to lift into the air, the doors unhinge and shift to another wall.

Try to own what happens
, he thinks in a familiar voice.

Thinks, or hears?

“Who said that?” he says aloud.

Nobody.

Nothing.

The paint.

“Are we not all responsible for our own actions?”

He sits down on the bench beside the wall.

“Isn’t a person allowed to have a little need every now and then?”

He stumbles out into the yard. The cool air wraps around him.

Over the noise of the insects he hears the soundtrack of a film from the open-air Rex cinema, the people’s laughter, the catcalling of the young boys, the women trying to hush them up.

He goes back into the shed and comes out with his tin and brush.

He gets down on his knees and begins to paint.

Faces first: the woman driving the car; the man and the girl in the back; the boy being hit.

He looks at his watch.

If the prostitutes come back around three or four, he thinks, then maybe he’ll stop for a break to drink tea with them.

He smiles.

That will be good. They’ll drink tea, share some food, laugh and chat—about neighbourhood gossip, local politics, the prices of meat and taxi fares, as each girl waits her turn for the bathroom inside, to
wash off the city’s muck from their legs and their mouths and their guts.

He starts eating more often on Farrar Street. He sees the Nigerian many times again before they next speak—arriving in a taxi, climbing out of other people’s cars, always alone. The Nigerian’s name is Ibrahim.