Eddie Signwriter (5 page)

He slept in Leah’s room on the night before his mother’s last return. They stayed up late, talking. What had their mother said to
her
in her last letter? Would their oldest brother have a beard? What would their mother bring?

They drew and coloured in a “Welcome Mama” banner that they hung across the entrance hall.

He doesn’t know why he was afraid of that night, of what
real
thing. There was a wind, lifting the curtains up from the window—it was cold, especially early in the morning—and the bobble at the end of the curtain cord tapped against the windowpane.

(But he knew wind. He knew cold.)

It didn’t matter that the windows were closed (in the early hours of the morning the two of them got up and fastened each one in the house)—the air was coming in somewhere. The stronger gusts he
could hear in the rafters, like the sound of a sheet shaken out. Maybe that was what frightened him—not so much that the wind was there, but that he couldn’t keep it out.

At different times during the night he knew that he was still awake.

Then asleep.

The crickets started and it was six a.m. He saw the light of the sun rising over the veld, thin and cold, and come like a knife sideways into the room. He could feel the cold of the morning in his nostrils.

He wanted his sister to be awake, to share it with her. He wound the knots of the blanket tighter around his feet, pulled it up to his ears, and watched from the envelope of warmth, the regular movement of her breathing, her shoulder rising and falling. She faced into the wall—that was how they both slept.

And then he fell asleep again and somehow nobody got him up in time. When he woke up the room was full of a strong yellow light from the thin curtain, which made a transparent screen and trapped the heat of the morning. He heard his sister and got up on his elbow, his body still moist with warmth in the stuffy room. He heard the hadeda’s hard cry pitting the sky (he realized he’d been hearing it for some time in his sleep). Then the
blaf-blaf
of the city dogs. Then he lifted the curtain and saw Leah outside the window, running toward the house in thick woolen stockings under a summer cotton dress—“Papa, Papa, they’re here!”—and shortly after that the door to the room opened, and there was his mother’s shape in the doorway, and he got up and ran into her arms, and his father stood behind her, smiling as he had not for many months, saying, “Ah, very good!”

That night he sat with his siblings watching the snowy programmes on South African television. His father called him into the study, where his mother sat on the windowsill with her hands folded in her lap. His father went to sit next to her at his chair. Both of them wore the expression of people with news to deliver.

Then his parents told him that when his mother left he would be going back with the rest of the family to Ghana.

“Why, Papa?” he asked.

“To finish your schooling there,” his mother said.

“And to teach you to become a Ghanaian,” said his father.

HIS PARENTS SENT HIM
to a boarding school not far from the village in which his father had been born. Accra was an hour away. Nii Boi Town an hour more.

On his last night in Gaborone his father said to him, “When you go home it will be for all of us. That is our place.”

They were sitting on the bed in the room he shared with his sister. Then his father left the room to let him finish his packing.

He began to cry.

Partly he cried out of sadness, to be leaving the house, and his father and sister. Partly out of gratitude to his father, for giving him the thing his father wanted so much for himself but could not have—to go home, when his father could not.

“You will be so happy,” his father told him as they said goodbye.

“I will, Papa,” he’d replied.

But he wasn’t.

His first few weeks in his mother’s house, before school began, were an unexpected shock. He grew fat from the kenke at Fish Pond Drop. But most of his childhood friends had grown up and left. They’d built houses on the football pitch. His grandfather was dead. The electricity never lasted for more than a few hours. He was bored. He missed his sister and father, he missed the life they’d had, even out there in the desert where the emptiness never stops threatening and safety feels temporary even if you are with people.

When they sent him to school the water made him sick for a week. He did not speak the language well, he was used to his privacy, he was
used to quiet, and a feeling soon came over him, of disaffection and despair that softened his will and made the world lose its shape, and as a consequence many things happened at that time that should not have happened, and would not have happened except for that.

This was in the town of Akwapakrom, on the Akwapim Ridge, in the mist and the thin, crisp air, and the weather that can hide behind mountains and appear from anywhere, and is always unpredictable and forever changing. The missionaries chose Akwapim when they came to Ghana because it was too cold for the mosquitoes that killed them down on the coast. And though they’re now gone, the ridge is filled with churches and schools, and the old buildings they left behind, falling to ruin slowly.

What happened to him here, over the course of a few months, started one evening as he sat with the five hundred other students in the school hall where meals were taken. The rain was coming down, as it had been on and off for a few days. It hammered on the tin roof so hard that night that it drowned out the sound of the talking and shouting of the children gathered there, so that soon people stopped trying to speak at all, and they ate in silence, surrounded by the storm, while the smell of the wet ground began to rise up, rich and choking.

After the meal the rain still had not stopped. It was at least a five-minute walk to the closest dormitory, and so the children all gathered outside under the eaves of the dining room, pressed against the walls.

As he stood there somebody dashed out—a girl, running, laughing at her daring. He’d never talked to her before, though he’d noticed her a few times—the first, a few weeks before in one of the telecentres in town, from which his mother had made him phone to let her know he’d arrived safely. The girl had been there with a friend. They’d seen him staring, and laughed as they left.

Now, standing under the eaves, he watched the girl running out into the storm, as the rain wrapped her up in her clothes.

Something beautiful passing by, he reflected.

Then gone.

The sky was a little short of night. There was texture still in it, and
he could make out the rise of the hill that separated the school from the town, and the half-presence of electric light behind it. There was a breeze—not cold, but damp—and he felt it in his shins and through his shoes, as if it were trying to flow into him. He stood for a few moments there. And then there seemed no point in standing there any longer, and he put his hands in his pockets and stooped his head into the evening and walked through the rain the distance back to his boarding house.

By morning he had a fever. He spent the next four days in bed. On the first night he was given an extra blanket. Meals were brought down to him, then taken away untouched. He lay in his bunk during the day while the other boys were in classes. He slept, and when he was tired of sleeping, stared at the ceiling and thought.

He thought about many things. He thought about what had happened. He thought about how his life was now, and how it had been before, and why his father had sent him back, and why he felt so alone, and how these things were connected.

And then he was so tired he could no longer think. He could hardly go to the other side of the room to get water. Noise came in through the windows all the time, but he was defenseless against it. The fan above him was catching, crinkling like plastic, throbbing in the ceiling, but he needed the breeze to keep his temperature down.

And as he lay in bed, sweating and distracted and wishing for things to be different, he suddenly felt a lightness—which at last was calming, and felt like sleep, so that he gave into it, and when he woke he no longer felt agitated at all, but rather disconnected from himself, as if he’d become an observer, a mere witness, removed from events that were happening in his own life.

While his body recovered, he continued to feel this strange feeling of absence. He continued to attend classes. He continued to speak to people. Complete distance was impossible. They slept ten to a room at that place, on double bunks, and woke, and washed and ate together, worked, then slept again, and the physical living of their lives was very closely bound. But he did not join in with other children.
He had no friends. Friends did not interest him. And nor, after a while, was anyone interested in befriending him.

Though undisturbed, he did not go unnoticed. His aloofness attracted the attention of his teachers, and eventually the head teacher, who took an interest in him, saw him as a challenge, and so invited him to visit him in his quarters after class.

The head teacher’s quarters were on the school property, near the water tanks on the hill. His house had two stories, and large empty rooms, and only him to fill them, except for the old woman who was his cook and stayed until the evening. Inside, the house had a wooden staircase and smelled of tobacco. On the walls there were original artworks—paintings and drawings done by artists from around the area—which he had not seen before in a house, and thought of at the time as being very beautiful.

The head teacher was a small man. But also he was very self-possessed and calm and thoughtful, and difficult to raise to anger. There was something impressive about that. He had a lot of authority and respect in the eyes of people because of it and the boy respected him too.

If other children visited the head teacher in his quarters, or he was the only one, he did not know, and he never asked. Maybe seeing the teacher became another of the routines he fell into. But also the teacher had known his father once. They’d attended training college together in Cape Coast, before the boy was born. The teacher liked asking about his father and he liked answering the teacher’s questions. About how his father was. How it had been to live in Botswana.

In some ways his father and the teacher were alike—in their seriousness, in the way that it was often difficult to guess what they were thinking. Also, like his father, the teacher had traveled. He read and had interests, judging by the books that he took out from the library at Legon. About history and painting, and the biographies of generals and politicians. Napoleon. Churchill. Martin Luther King.

After a time he and the teacher established a friendship. He told the teacher about what he felt without it seeming like an effort. He
told the teacher about the things that were important to him and the things that disappointed him. About returning to his mother’s home, and finding everything so much smaller and different from what he remembered, and how his homecoming didn’t feel like homecoming at all. The teacher listened to these things, and he offered advice. Although mostly the teacher just listened, which was all that the boy wanted.

Also the teacher was kind. The teacher took an interest in him, encouraged him. Sometimes with books, or with ideas, or through conversations in which the teacher tried to challenge him to think, to draw him out.

It was late one afternoon, as he was leaving the teacher’s house to go back to classes, that the teacher first mentioned his idea of chance. He was standing on the step of the teacher’s door, and outside the mists were beginning to draw in for the evening, and the lamps that had already been lit were surrounded by milky halos.

“Do you think you’re lucky?” are the words the teacher used.

The teacher had a way of slimming his eyes when he asked a question and was already anticipating the answer, which was how the teacher looked at him then.

“Sometimes,” he said.

“But what if there isn’t such a thing as chance?” the teacher said. “What if chance is a choice. What if you choose to be lucky?”

The teacher was talking fast now. He was excited because of his idea and it was difficult not to be drawn into his excitement.

What the teacher said was that people believe too easily in chance. They believe that chance has power over them. That chance explains why things turn out or don’t. But what if we choose not to believe in chance? What if we banish the idea of it? This, he said, is what great people in history have done, perhaps even without knowing it.

“What?” he asked. “They haven’t been lucky?”

“No,” the teacher said, “they have been lucky, but not by accident. Their wills are so strong that their own luck is a choice.”

He thought he saw what the teacher was trying to say to him and it seemed all right to him then. Not that he knew too much about
great people in history—about Napoleon and Churchill and Martin Luther King. Though he did know for sure that he wasn’t going to be one of them. And so the fact that many things seemed to happen accidentally in his life was no argument against the teacher’s. But it set him thinking, and the next time he was at the teacher’s house he told the teacher about something that had happened when he was younger and living in Botswana. Not to him, but to a neighbour who was murdered by South African soldiers, who came across the border looking for somebody from the ANC but threw a grenade into the wrong person’s yard, and killed a man’s wife, and how afterwards they all came and saw the cotton dress flapping round the body like a chocolate wrapper, and the rest of the woman’s flesh hanging in a thorn tree.

And he asked the teacher, “What kind of luck was that, to be the wife of the wrong person?” And was there something not great enough about her that this is what happened to her? And he told the teacher about something he often felt was true: that things didn’t have to happen for a reason, that they happen for nothing, as that woman was dead for nothing.

The teacher was quiet for a while, and then he said, “Do you think about that a lot?”

He said, “Not until last week,” although that was not true. He lied because he thought the teacher was sorry for him and he didn’t want him to be.