Eddie Signwriter (6 page)

“That’s bad,” the teacher said, and he thought that was the end of it. But then the teacher added, “especially for her.” And he was surprised by that, because it seemed that the teacher was laughing and inviting him to laugh with him at what happened to this woman, as children laugh about cruelty, and he didn’t know the teacher to be that way.

But he didn’t laugh. He said: “It was very bad. I felt sorry for her.”

The teacher said, “Not the destiny she would have preferred for herself.”

“I don’t know what she thought about herself,” he said, and although he tried not to show it, he was confused, because he didn’t
know what the teacher meant when he said the word
destiny
like that, as if the whole idea were a joke that the teacher was contemptuous of himself.

And he thought the teacher noticed his confusion, because he turned his head away suddenly, as if struck by an unconnected thought. When the teacher turned back to him he was himself again.

“A person has to learn to live with their life,” the teacher said, and that this was the advice he was giving him. The teacher said, “Try to own what happens. Try to have a view on things.”

But maybe he didn’t have any ideas about how things should be, he said. Or maybe he hadn’t yet come across a view that made much sense to him, and didn’t have one of his own, unless having no view itself constitutes a view.

He said, “Maybe it’s easier to let things happen to you. That’s what they’re going to do anyway. It’s easier than being worried all the time.”

“Do
you feel
worried?” the teacher asked.

He told the teacher that he didn’t, that in fact he felt nothing.

“You don’t have goals?” the teacher asked, “Ambitions?” and there was that mocking tone again in his voice.

“Of what?”

“Of how you’d like your life to turn out,” the teacher suggested.

He shrugged.

The teacher did not respond.

It seemed to him then that what he had said to the teacher had saddened and exhausted him. First the teacher looked at him and then he looked away again. The teacher was very still. He could see his breathing. He sensed at first that the teacher was making up his mind. That he had decided something important about him, or possibly himself, and so he waited for the teacher to finish thinking, and say something. But the teacher didn’t say anything, and when he looked up again he saw that the teacher had not moved. And he’d remember very distinctly what it was he thought he was seeing in the teacher, and how surprised he was to see it. As if the teacher had found himself caught out, and wanted to hide himself in silence.

All of this was very long ago. Not much later he met Nana Oforiwaa, the aunt of the girl he saw running through the rain, and many things happened after that to dull his memory of the time before.

But he’d often come back in his mind to that conversation he had with the teacher about chance. He’d wonder what the thing was that the teacher gave away, then tried to hide. Were the things he said too much like what the teacher believed himself? Did his own weaknesses illuminate weaknesses that the teacher knew were also his own?

That, at least, was the opinion that he formed at first and held for a long time. Though later he began to wonder something different: that really the teacher had not been trying to teach him anything at all, as much as he’d been testing him. To see how far he might let things go in his life. How far he could be taken, before there’d be a story to pull him back.

THE FIRST TIME HE MET
Nana Oforiwaa it was early in the evening at the rest house she owned near the Botanical Gardens. Some time before in the afternoon he’d received a message from the teacher to prepare himself for an outing. The teacher wanted him to meet her. Nana Oforiwaa was rich and a senior person on the ridge and a friend of his, from the way the teacher talked.

The journey by taxi from Akwapakrom took twenty minutes. It was the first time he’d driven on the ridge road since he arrived. He was dressed in a jacket, and long trousers which were tight in some places, and his shoes were polished. The teacher sat up front. At the back he drew the window down and let the air come in over him.

They drove through the fields and small towns. Nobody talked. In Mampong he saw the old men with their chairs out in the shop fronts. All along the road outside Obosomase wine tappers were heading into the hills with their jerry cans and machetes. He could feel the
engine through the body of the car. He closed his eyes and felt all right.

Just short of Aburi they came to a road with a wire fence, beyond which he could see trees, sheds, and a water tower. The taxi turned right and after the fence ended there was a building. The entrance was a set of wide wooden doors that were shut. Closer to the fence there was a smaller door.

The taxi stopped and the teacher climbed down and knocked on the door. He stayed in the car as the engine idled. There was no answer. The teacher motioned for him to get out.

“We will have to go through the gardens,” the teacher said. “She is in the front and cannot hear us.”

The teacher paid the taxi driver, who watched them walk a few paces before driving off.

“Do you know this place?” the teacher asked.

He said he did not.

“This is Aburi,” the teacher said. “We are at the Botanical Gardens. There is every kind of tree here. You will see it is very beautiful.”

They walked the length of the fence. He looked in, at the trees and the palms and a solid wall of bamboo. Then the road and the fence separated, and there were buildings between them and the gardens. They turned into the town. They passed a taxi rank which he recognized as the staging post down to Accra, where the buses stopped. Women were selling pineapples under the telephone poles. It wasn’t rush hour and there was little action. Music came from a parked tro-tro, its door open, its driver chewing a match.

They walked up a path beside a steep bank, and passed the Methodist boardinghouses. The last in the row was abandoned. Part had collapsed and rooms were open to the air. At the gates to the gardens the teacher had a word with the guard and they were let through.

Emperor palms, twenty feet high, lined the graded sand path up which they walked. Grass stretched to the side into the garden. There were hills, and trees, on their own and in groves. They stayed close to the boundary fence. The sound of a lawn mower buzzed somewhere.
They approached a series of sheds. One of the groundsmen saw the teacher and joined them. The groundsman and the teacher spoke. The groundsman led them to a gate in the fence. He opened a large padlock and let them pass through. The boy could see that the building separated from them by a stretch of grass was the same one they had tried to enter from the road.

They approached. It was a low structure, but with a tall pitched roof made of zinc. They walked up a set of red stairs and through a covered portico onto a restaurant floor, the other side of which was open through a series of large ceiling-high windows to a verandah out front with a view over the flank of a deep, long valley. A waiter was arranging glasses at a bar as they passed through the rest house. The waiter nodded at the teacher. He ignored the boy’s nod.

The floor was made of polished gray concrete, and their shoes made a squeaking sound above the heavy fans in the ceiling, turning the slow cool air round. The verandah had chairs and tables arranged on it. All of them were empty except for one, at the front, where a woman was seated with her back to them. She was large, and the boubou flowing over her made her seem even larger. That’s what he noticed first, and the elaborateness of her braids, which were woven in patterns in her hair.

The teacher approached. The boy followed a few paces behind. Before the teacher reached the table Nana Oforiwaa turned and saw the teacher, and she smiled and she said, “John.” He had not ever heard anybody call the teacher by his name before, nor address him with the warmth that there was in her voice.

“Nana Oforiwaa,” the teacher said, and there was a shuffling of his feet, and it looked for a moment like the teacher was bowing to her from the waist.

From behind the teacher he looked at Nana Oforiwaa. She had a high, wide forehead and large eyes that curved exceptionally.

“Oh, John,” she said, laughing.

The teacher gave a small smile, and introduced the boy.

The woman continued to laugh. They were still standing. Then she put out her hand to him. It was warm and strong and she held his
hand firmly, and there was a lot of power in this woman, he knew it immediately, in the strength of her hand, and in the strength of her presence.

“This is Nana Oforiwaa,” the teacher said, “a very important woman.”

He said, “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

“Hoowh,” she said, the end of her laughing coming out in a breath.

Then they sat down.

He had no part in the rest of the visit. The teacher briefly said who the boy was, that his father had sent him here into the care of the community, and that this was why he had brought him to visit. Nana Oforiwaa asked the boy a few questions about himself, nodding as he answered, as if he were confirming what she already knew, but soon she and the teacher were talking of things that did not concern him.

When he understood that he would not be called on to say anything more, he grew more relaxed. He watched Nana Oforiwaa and the teacher talking. He drank a cold drink. He liked being in such a fancy place, with the view, and the tables, and all the fine things inside. He turned to his own thoughts as he looked around and observed for the first time things at the rest house that would later become very familiar.

It seemed, from the lip of the spur where the rest house stood, that they were poised on the crest of a wave. The rise of earth from which they’d been lifted trailed back beneath them in a shifting patchwork of greens crossed by olive shadow. The sound of insects around them seemed at once to rise from the valley and the earth itself and flow up into the small garden planted on the rise, up onto the verandah and into the rest house.

The good part of half an hour had already passed when his drifting thoughts were disturbed by a movement from behind him, of somebody passing by. He looked round. It took only a moment to recognize the figure of the person who had entered the restaurant as that of the girl from the telecentre, and later the rainstorm. He followed her progress as she walked, stopped self-consciously, then walked on again.

Then everything was over very quickly. The teacher looked back,
pausing in midsentence, and saw her too, and smiled in her direction. The girl moved out of the room. The teacher turned back to Nana Oforiwaa and continued talking.

“Aha,” Nana Oforiwaa was saying, though the boy could see that his reaction had not been lost on her.

He felt his face go hot and lowered his eyes, and sat still, looking into his lap. He wished they could leave.

They didn’t stay much longer. It was growing dark and people were beginning to come to the restaurant. Candles appeared on the tables behind and soft music started to be played.

“I am sorry we did not get the opportunity to talk properly,” Nana Oforiwaa said to him as he and the teacher were leaving. “I hope you will return. John will organize that.”

“Of course, Nana,” the teacher said.

“May God keep you,” Nana Oforiwaa said, holding each of their hands in hers.

TWO DAYS LATER
, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the girl again leaving the hall after lunch. She was at the other end of the room. There were many people between them. He almost didn’t see her. But his eyes saw, despite himself, the image of the beautiful girl which, still vague and unfocused in his mind, would otherwise have dissipated into the shifting surfaces that were the background to his state of near constant dreaminess. Except his eye was too quick. The image of her sharpened. There she was. It was the background that began to dissolve. Suddenly there was something rather than nothing.

He got up from his table and followed her the short distance from the path to the trees as she returned to the dormitories. She did not hear him, so that when he touched her arm he startled her, though it had not been his intention.

He heard his own voice talking with its own volition.

He said, “It’s me, from Aburi. I came with the teacher. I visited on Tuesday.”

She was smaller than he’d remembered, somehow not the girl at all who’d laughed at him in the telecentre. She seemed fragile, younger than him, which she was.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

He was gripping her hand, though he didn’t know how it had happened. He let it go. The places where he’d been squeezing were a paler colour for a moment, before fading back into the brown of the rest of her arm.

And then his nerve was gone, or perhaps just his indifference to humiliation. He was suddenly afraid. He was afraid of having touched her and of leaving a mark, and afraid of wanting what he did.

Which was what?

Her? An idea? For the ache of loneliness to release?

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he was, for what he’d done, but also for becoming overcome by her and himself and not being able to hide it, and he waited for the rebuke that would make him feel as powerless as he knew himself to be.

But she didn’t say anything. She looked at him square in the face. He could tell she wanted to get away, that she was alarmed. Yet she didn’t move, and it occurred to him suddenly that without her friend she was unsure of what to do, or how to do it.

He noticed her close the fingers of her other hand round her wrist, where he’d taken hold of her, and raising his eyes from her wrist to her face he thought suddenly of the woman the teacher had taken him to visit. Nana Oforiwaa.

He could see it now, very clearly. They were made from the same flesh, these women, except the the girl was more beautiful. She was unformed. She had youth, sweetness—but no power.

He said, “Miss, please, don’t scream.”

“I’m not going to,” she said.

“I didn’t mean for you to be frightened,” he said.