Reading the Ceiling (3 page)

Characteristically, she walks up to us with a sway in her hips. ‘This is me at the very end of my prime. Can you imagine what I could do with a young body?'

She makes a shape with her hands, starting from an imaginary bust, palms placed slightly upwards and flat, outlining down to a thin waist, then a bulge of curvaceous hip before narrowing again. In reality, Aunt K is wide-bosomed and big-bottomed, representing herself in a new character symbol for some odd European language, her own compacted percentage sign, a half-reflected capital B.

‘Here you are,' she says to me as she bends down to kiss my cheek. ‘Happy birthday.' She hands me an envelope. ‘I didn't know what to get you, and decided you'd probably like to choose something yourself.' I open it to peek. I've got a wad of money to spend.

‘Thank you. Hochiemy's got some new things in, I'll go and have a look,' I say.

‘So. Where are you going tonight?'

‘Ocean, the new disco on the cliff by the junction.'

‘Ah, young people, this is a good time of your lives. Staying out late. Going dancing. You know of course that I used to COMMAND the floor,' she continues.

We know the routine now and mimic the perfect body shape with our hands, and shout out ‘COMMAND' when she pauses for effect.

She loiters at our home salon, curious to know what we are up to. She watches us for a minute before launching into options for my hairdo.

‘How about hot-tonged curls at the sides with a middle parting – that would suit your face,' she says, and pulls out some of the pins Remi has just spent an hour putting in, yanking some of my hair in her enthusiasm. I yelp.

‘Hmm,' she goes. ‘Or you can make some ringlets here.'

Now she jabs at the back of my head. ‘I can see them dripping down if you hold it like
this
.' She scoops all the hair off my face now, with a ‘Got any hair slides?'

She pauses, weighing our silence.

‘No?'

We shake our heads.

‘Well then, what shoes are you wearing?'

When I asked my mother whether I could go to that first dance at Amina's where I revealed I was a woman while still a child, Aunt K had put in a word for me. She'd said to my mother, ‘Bo, Millie, you have to leave young people to find out for themselves what life is about. We can't always be watching, always advising.' My mother had been taut with indecision, ‘I don't know what kind of people will be there. She wants to stay out until
ten
o'clock.' But Aunt K had worked out the logistics, who I could go with, who would bring me home. Among my mother's circle of friends, she is someone who can be relied on.

Out in the garden, the sun cools into evening. The breeze off the sea starts to wiggle the leaves of the mango tree above our heads. We gather up our things and move inside for the final stage of preparations. I'm not very good with eyeliner yet, the pencil drifts in my hand and I never seem to be able to do the upper eyelid. Remi's better at it so she does mine for me, making my eyes look mysterious and grownup. We decide that the false eyelashes Aunt K brought back from America look ridiculous and cannot be left on. Remi laughs, ‘Allright for pop stars who need to define their eyes, but not when people will be looking at you up close.'

‘Yes,' I reply, ‘ordinary people like us have to use what we've got as well as we can.'

The phone rings and I dash to the living room to answer it. It's my sisters' friend, saying they're on their way over for the cinema pickup. When I turn around, I see Osman watching me through the side door. Without sunlight to illuminate his face, and the distance of a wall and glass between us, he's mostly shadow. He does not move.

I'm wearing my pink bra with lacey edges and a sheer pink slip. I can feel the power of my body, the twang it has been creating from when my
mampatang
-sized breasts expanded to the size where I can push them up with this special bra to create the hint of a shadow on my chest. I guess that it both scares and pulls men. I think it might be possible to learn how to call the ones I want. When I want. Should Idris come off my list and Osman come on it?

I have to think practical. I need to be sure I can make my plan work. I know both Yuan and Reuben will be borrowing cars from their parents so that should be relatively easy. I've had to think harder about the Frederick Adams option. Remi's negotiated a pickup at one. Her father said, ‘I want to make sure you get home without getting yourselves into trouble.' I will have to say I want to pick up my sports bag and kit from Remi's room so I can start to keep my new eighteen-year-old promise to stay fit. If that sounds too lame, it'll have to do. I don't have any other ideas.

My life needn't unroll in the way my mother's did. None of her friends seem to have ended up with the version of man they originally wanted, judging from their shared complaints. They suffer the poor specimen they landed with, as if none of them had figured out that their bodies could be wielded without leaving it all to chance. Clearly, they never saw that in the midst of trying to find out who they could become, they could aim beyond what they saw around them. They were satisfied with the usual end point of women, the finale of man-searching: a rubbing-along marriage or, at best, a partner you could occasionally talk to about the children. I want different.

I turn away and head back to my bedroom to put on my clothes. Remi looks stunning in a tight-fitting shift dress with tiny little silver sequins all over, making her seem all shimmery. She's small and compact with good curves – bum and boobs all perfectly proportioned. She's jolly, smiles a lot, everyone likes her – from great-grandfathers to children. I put on my clingy velvet trousers over legs I think are a bit too thin, then ease my sheer top over my underdeveloped chest. As I twirl around I catch my eyes in the mirror. Serious, large, dark-rimmed. Almost overpowering my face, which today co-operates with the smooth flicked bob that Remi styled.

We use the corridor as our catwalk. Taiwo and Kainde sit with their backs to my door and knees drawn up close to their chests.

Kainde says, ‘Can I borrow that top when we go to the fifth- form dance?'

Taiwo says, ‘How do you know Ma will let us go?'

I tell them going out at night is a privilege to fight for. ‘I was fifteen before Ma let me go to my first dance.'

Kainde says, ‘We'll be fifteen in a couple of months. Aunt K said she'll talk to Ma.'

‘Well then you'll have to wait and see,' I say. ‘Check this out.'

Remi and I lengthen our strides and put some sway in our walk. Our audience watches and claps.

**I am ready and waiting for Remi to finish her final touches in the bathroom. I lie back on my bed, forming support for my head with my hands to protect my hair, my elbows sticking out.

Remi already has a proper boyfriend, and is sure she wants to get married soon and run her own household. She can cook and clean, and does not seem to mind doing either. We've known each other since we began stealing cashews together when we were six. She's always loved the drippy juicy part, which stained our clothes unless we ate with care. I liked the planning part, the thinking through of probable exit routes from newly discovered cashew tree sites. She knows pretty much everything about me. Yet in this, we are different. I'm ready now. I long to . . . lose something I've always felt was valuable, and exchange it for . . . well, I'm not quite sure exactly, but for something else. Not with any dour, mysterious, handsome men who need to be won over by my charm. Instead, I have to choose from a ragtag of misaligned teeth, pot bellies, turn-the-best-side-for-the-photographer kind of men-boys. I don't need them to promise commitment or anything, I just need someone to show me It. And move me from where I am now to the other side of knowing.

My eyes play on the ceiling. I find myself picking out patterns, just as we used to when my sisters and I were little. My ceiling's boards have been repainted white, but rainwater, eager to leave behind a memory of itself, has sploshed new stains on it. I can see a bra, straps wriggling, with enormous cups. Also a leg, with well-toned thigh, bent at the knee, lying open, suggesting the other leg is also flung sideways, welcoming entry. A mouth in a grimace. An eye wide open in shock. All my fears, worries, traipsing across my ceiling, watching me watch them.

A life beginning has many paths before it; but older people – women like my mother – they can only see the one path that brought their lives to the now. Cats on my shoulder. I can choose to be the hunter or the lion. What will my story be?

The sudden change from the warmth of bodies, noise and gaiety to a brash ocean wind squeezes my skin closer to me. I rub my hands over my arms, flattening the landscape of hair-tipped bobbles, only to have them peek up again in protest at the cold. My toes cling to each other for warmth as I crunch my way past the dread-topped coconut palms, past a few occupied benches shrouded in capsules of shadow. The bathrooms are at the back of the club.

A girl is leaning against the row of sinks. Her cigarette is tucked into a holder and her hair is pulled back off a face you would want to look at again. She holds and moves her body in a way that would make you want to look at her again. She drags her eyelids down and, keeping them closed, turns her back to me. Smoke wisps upwards and she says clearly, to the occupants of the first cubicle, ‘You'd better hurry up in there. Someone's come in.

I had started the beginnings of a smile but now it's shrinking. What it would have been is paused and reversed, so I can regain my face, keep it to myself, carry myself past her to a cubicle at the far end of the room. I walk past tiny scuffles, and little unhs.

The door won't shut. My pee seems to come out all in a rush, too quick, too loud. The tap gushes out when I open it and splashes onto my dress. I look at the girl out of the edge of my eye. She has not moved. The cigarette is almost at the filter. The grunting has not stopped.

Outside, one of the capsules of shadow splits into two. I cannot see who it is at first. Then the girl says, ‘It's getting a bit cold. Let's go back in.'

Remi's voice.

He says, ‘Let's sit out here for a bit longer. I'll keep you warm. Stay close.'

By the time I walk past them, they are locked into each other again, like a self-involved octopus. They do not notice me.

When I walk in, I cannot see anyone I know. I move into the shaded dark, edging along the wall, past clumps of people, with a few scattered pairs, all with parts of their bodies touching. The song changes and I hear Amina's whoop as she drags Yuan to the dance floor. It's not a tune that needs close contact.

Oh. I'm going to Barbados
.

Oh. Going to see my girlfriend
.

She flings her arms around Yuan's neck, pulls his head down, and kisses him on the lips. He's not pulling back. He's not struggling. They stay intertwined for a long time. My heart squeezes itself tight and my eyes drum. Sadness, anger, bitterness, rage, all flash by, strobing with the disco lights – black, shiny, acid blue, blood red. Using my hands behind me as a guide, I find the rough wall to lean on, to watch from.

I attract the attention of a few beer-stuffed young men, who detach themselves from their gang only to stumble towards me and my frosty cracked smile, and then stumble back towards a raucous re-welcome into their group.

The song ends. Amina drags Yuan off, leading him by the hand. Why? She can choose whoever she wants. Surely she must know. Why? He's told me before he doesn't fancy Amina. And today of all days!

I know what I have to do today. I will choose and I will do it.

Reuben can drive. I direct him all the way. Will you take me home? Why don't you stop here for a bit? Shall we move to the back seat? I have the good sense to take out the condom in my disco bag.

I sleep through much of the next day, getting up late in the afternoon to have a second shower. I think about taking a walk, but when I go outside, Osman is sitting there on his little stool, with his radio pressed to his ear. The newsreader is announcing in Wollof, ‘The president will be leaving soon for the second leg of his meet-the-people tour. He will be visiting Mansakonko . . .'

‘
Nanga deff
,' I say as I walk past him towards the gate.

‘
Jama  rek,
' he replies.

I catch his scent as I walk past – it's the roughness of old palm wine ground into stale, unfiltered cigarettes. Reuben's had been straight out of a bottle. Outside the gate, the idea of trudging through the dust, up to the shop for a Coke and a breath of fresh air does not appeal any more. I turn around and go back to my room.

When Reuben rings, I don't want to speak to him. I don't want to speak to Yuan or Amina either. They leave messages with my sister Kainde:

Remi rings but does not leave a message.

While the phone rings and Kainde collects my messages, I stay in my bedroom. The curtains are still flowery blue. The walls are still yellow. And the stupid sun is still washing the air with heat.

‘What's wrong?' asks my mother the next morning.

‘Just tired,' I reply.

‘What's up with you?' says Taiwo.

‘Mind your own business,' I answer.

Kainde continues to write down my messages. She knocks with a murmur of explanation, and then shoves pieces of paper under the door.

‘Thank you,' I reply to each one.