Eddie Signwriter Read online

  He means every word he’s just said. But at the same time he feels sick with unhappiness. Something has happened. How, why, he cannot tell; only he knows he cannot forgive her the distance he feels between them. Her absence. Her insubstantiality.

  Sometimes when they sit together he feels a need to touch her, to assure himself that she is there, assuage the sense of loneliness that he often feels in her presence.

  It isn’t always like this. But as soon as he senses it might be, he finds a way to force the moment. Why? To prove it again to the part of himself that doesn’t want to believe it; that tries to convince him that nothing is wrong.

  And to show it to her.

  Look, he is saying, you see.

  He doesn’t want to be alone in his misery. He wants sympathy.

  “I love being outside at this time of night,” he says with a gentleness he is trying hard to feel, “I love the people coming out to sell things, and the pavement becoming a completely different place. Going along is like being caught in the sea. And I love the smell of the smoke, in the cool air. It’s like pieces of smell floating.”

  She squeezes his arm again. But it’s not what he wants. He wants her to say something.

  “Don’t you think it’s lovely?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says quietly.

  “What do you find lovely?” he asks, looking straight ahead as they walk.

  They go on in silence, the two of them winding their way along the pavement, like people going somewhere.

  Her hand drops away from him as they approach a telephone pole in the middle of the pavement, to walk on either side. When he reaches again for her as they pass the pole she refuses to take his hand and bursts into tears. She turns into a side street that will take them home another way—an empty alley pervaded by the smell of food and shit. He runs after her, gets alongside her, and walks with her in silence.

  How dare she cry, he thinks to himself angrily.

  As they approach the busy main road that runs parallel to the one they’ve just left, he grabs her by the shoulders, and he looks at her face that is covered with tears and he says, “Stop crying like this. Why are you crying?”

  She says, “I am crying because I can’t just walk with you enjoying myself. I have to think a thought for you. I can’t bear it.”

  As he looks at her he is filled with tenderness and remorse. He hates himself for making her fail him, for letting her realize it. And he’s struck by the reality of her, and the fact that she feels what’s she’s feeling so strongly, and he forgets about his own despair.

  “O love,” he says, “I’m so sorry. Let’s do something nice. Let me buy some food to eat and go stand by the bridge.”

  And he feels that there is no more uplifting a feeling in the world than the strength of the love he has for this woman, as her sadness disappears, and they laugh and have long conversations of gentle teasing and private words and jokes—intimate and meaningless, though now he doesn’t want meaning anymore, he wants love.

  On a wall near Amaamo he paints a bed, floating out on a great flat gray sea.

  He is lost. But not in the way he expected.

  He did not wake up one day and find that things were different. What happened is that he woke up one day and found that things had always been different.

  The past was gone. Their stories had fled.

  His, of a boy falling out of love with the world, who loved a girl instead, and how that would save him, except it didn’t.

  Of Celeste’s he has no idea—and worse than that, doesn’t believe he ever did.

  And yet the thought of being without her fills him with terror.

  How is that possible? To be empty, yet full of love at the same time?

  Late at night, after painting, he comes home. She is lying in bed, her eyes closed. He can tell she is not asleep.

  “Will you wake up?” he says, gently shaking her shoulder. He wants to talk.

  About what?

  His day. A story. An idea he had.

  She tells him she wants to sleep. They can talk tomorrow.

  He tells her he hasn’t eaten, leaves the house to buy food at one of the kiosks on the pavement outside, and as he walks in the street again works himself into a quiet rage.

  When he returns she is sitting up in bed.

  He begins to feel ashamed of his impetuousness. He tells her he’s sorry.

  She tells him it’s all right. She tells him she loves him. She makes an effort to ask him the questions he has wanted her to ask, to show the interest he has wanted her to show.

  He kisses her on the forehead and turns out the light.

  He comes to bed himself after she is asleep.

  In the night he dreams of endless machine movements—not really dreams: more like flimsy images flashing on a screen. The next morning he realizes he is awake, and an image is clearing itself from his head, an image of his hand writing a letter (the words are written backwards, as if in a mirror—a secret message to himself), “Please let me go,” and because the message is in his dream, he has to fall asleep again and then return to understand the story.

  In his dream they are meeting, except both of them are different people meeting for the first time. Only he knows who they are. And while he is enjoying the prospect of falling in love with her all over again—as he saw her jumping over a puddle in the rain—he hears his own voice calling out to him, and it wakes him up, saying, “You cannot go back,” and he hears his mind thinking, Please let me go …

  He thinks to himself: You know what I’d really like to do?

  To find a calm spot on the sea somewhere, even if he felt a bit lonely, and to look at the waves and read the book that she gave him on the first night they made love—the book he read the beginning of on the beach at Labadi, while she played woaley with a small child sitting next to them on the sand, and the storm clouds drew in, and he’d thought to himself, If I try really hard will something of me stay here forever?

  Outside the morning starts. He is fully awake now. She continues to sleep. Lying beside her he reflects how unremarkable this feels. To have lost everything. To feel nothing.

  The same twenty-four hours pass. The same breaths and exhalations. Nobody, to look at him, would know a thing.

  Her waking disturbs his reflections. Instinctively he turns to hold her. She tells him she has not slept well. She does not want him to touch her. She is irritable. She looks for a long time at the ceiling, and then turns to look at him. He reaches out to her with his hand. He can feel the tear coming out of his left eye.

  She says, “I know that look.”

  “What look?” he asks her.

  “The look you get when you overhear a conversation that makes you reflect on something about your life. Something sad.”

  “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 t
he 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 i
n 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.