Eddie Signwriter Read online

  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.

  Ibrahim has grown familiar with the boy, who brings him a mug of mineral water with his chicken. He calls to the boy’s mother and she comes to him, leaving her cooking. She wears a pair of gold earrings now with emerald-coloured teardrops.

  The Nigerian never seems completely at ease despite the confidences he shares with the cooks. He eats as if he is alone. He never observes the faces of the other eaters, never shares in their conversations.

  He always waits until a seat is vacant. If he arrives and finds the tables full he disappears down the road and returns once a customer has got up to pay. Or sometimes he will stand across the road and wait, taking a mineral as he cleans his teeth with a toothpick.

  Only because the signwriter hears his own voice saying it does he know that the Nigerian has bought the place.

  “Nigeria-man,” he says one evening to the Nigerian, when the Nigerian takes his seat at a space at the table that has opened up; and he asks him to tell him what other shops he owns.

  The Nigerian smiles. He tells the signwriter that he owns a shop called Awusi Unisex Beauty International in Asylum Down.

  “I know it,” the signwriter says.

  He tells the Nigerian to come by his sign-painting shop in two weeks. He will have something for him, and he gives him directions to his shed.

  The rest of the meal passes in silence.

  It is all worked out—his escape. It’s a simple plan.

  He is to present the Nigerian with a sign for his shop, something very large and elaborate and expensive.

  “What do I owe you?” the Nigerian will ask him.

  “Nothing,” he will tell the Nigerian, but that he needs his help.

  And then the Nigerian will help him. He will put his ear to the ground. The signwriter will stop eating in Farrar Street. In a week the Nigerian will come back to him at his shed.

  “There’s a place for you,” the Nigerian will say.

  “Where to?” he will ask.

  “Europe,” the Nigerian will say.

  “How?”

  “Go to Dakar,” the Nigerian will say, he has people there to take him onwards.

  “And I must go to Dakar myself?”

  That is easy. The Nigerian can get him the papers, connect him along the way. The way out is through Dakar.

  No, stop …

  He wakes himself in the middle of the night. His heart—is it his? This black, hard thing in the middle of him, cold and dark as a nugget of coal. What is he thinking? What is he doing? This is insanity. Is this just a dream?

  This is a woman lying beside him, breathing. This is warm, loving flesh—this giving thing, this holding thing, this desiring thing, this woman whose face faces him, asleep on her pillow, her breath on his back—this is a human being.

  But this was got dirtily and is therefore dirty.

  No, he wants to say, it is I who am dirty.

  He prays: Celeste, whose name was taken down from the sky by men sailing the sea for money, be my guide. Wake up. Save me. Save me again and again and again.

  But what can she do?

  He turns and puts his hand on her face.

  “Hmm?” she asks in her sleep.

  “Celeste,” he says—he does not know what to say—“Celeste,” he says. No more than her name.

  When his uncle, returning home along Kojo Thompson, sees the smoke rising over the roofs towards the east, he thinks nothing of it. He goes into the house and washes, and afterwards pours himself some milk and finds some cassava, which he’s just begun to eat while listening to the radio, when he’s disturbed by a knock on the door.

  He looks at his watch. He is expecting nobody. On Tuesdays his friends come to pick him up for a night of cards at a chop bar they like in Nima. But today is Monday.

  He gets up.

  The person standing on the step is familiar, though he cannot remember from where.

  Then he does—it’s the locksmith from the shop next to his nephew’s.

  When Festus Ankrah and the locksmith get to the passageway off Tudu Street, a crowd has gathered. The concrete is covered in water. Some of the neighbours, the passersby, the local householders who all came to help, are wet from the water they helped carry and throw. One man whose shirt was once white is covered in soot.

  The sharp, choking smell is unmistakable.

  Festus Ankrah steps out of the car and goes up into the yard.

  “It’s a miracle only one shed was burnt,” the locksmith says, trying to keep up with him.

  “Yes.”

  “Praise be to God,” the locksmith says.

  “Yes, blessed be He,” says Festus Ankrah dryly, under his breath.

  The locksmith is right. The only shed to have burnt is the signwriter’s. The fire must have been very hot—probably from the paint and other chemicals—even if it was quick. The zinc from the roof is brittle as sand. It has caved in over the remains of a concrete wall at the back. The shack itself is a pile of charred beams, eviscerated tins, burst glass jars, nails and hinges. Smoke is still rising from it.

  Festus Ankrah sees his nephew sitting on the steps of a shed on the other side of the yard, being fussed over by three women who look to be prostitutes.

  He goes over to his nephew. The prostitutes step away deferentially, one about to smile though thinking better of it just in time.

  “Are you hurt?” Festus Ankrah asks his nephew.

  “No,” he says.

  “Is everything lost?”

  “Yes,” he replies.

  His uncle puts his hand on his nephew’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” Festus Ankrah says. “Was it a lot of work?”

  He shrugs.

  Festus Ankrah, noticing that people are watching, withdraws his hand. He leaves his nephew and goes over to look again at the smouldering ruins. Already he’s started to calculate in his mind the replacement cost, the lost hours of work—maximum, minimum, likely.

  The locksmith comes to stand at Festus Ankrah’s side.

  “It was just after closing time. Many people were here. We got here fast,” the locksmith explains.

  “Where was my nephew?”

  “He was here in the morning. And then he was away until … three or four. Where he went I don’t know. I myself walked with him to the station. He was very upset when he came back.”

  “Thank you,” Festus Ankrah says.

  “Not a good way to end a bad day,” the locksmith says.

  “No,” Festus Ankrah says, and looks back at his nephew, surrounded again by the prostitutes, with his head in his hands.

  Late at night he lets himself into the room. The cloth is pulled across the window, but the light comes in in slants at the side. She has left the room closed for too long. It is full of the smell of blankets and dust. She’s lying in the bed, beautiful and sleepy, and as he comes down to her he smells the scent of her body on her shoulder blades and neck. It is a very intuitive motion to sit beside her and stroke and touch her head.

  Since the fire he has been strangely calm. Not a cross word has passed between them.

  He asks
her how she is.

  “Fine,” she says, “now.”

  He carries on stroking her head.

  He says that things have been bad between them.

  She says that she knows.

  He says that it is because of him, and that he is sorry.

  She says that she too is sorry.

  He asks her whether she would be able to forgive him.

  She sighs and turns over.

  Smiling, she says that she might, and then, for just a moment, as he looks down at her, he believes that there is nothing more he needs in life than this beautiful girl. He believes he understands perfectly well what it is to be happy.

  “Why don’t you get into bed?” she asks him, and he slips beside her and she turns onto her front and he holds her with his arm under her stomach as they make love—she like shallow water that takes the weight of him gently like a boat.

  “God, love,” she says and falls asleep.

  And as he lies there he calls on all his strength.

  The next morning he is gone.

  FESTUS ANKRAH

  TWILIGHT. Tuesday.

  The taxi turns off the main road just short of the town of Mamfi, onto a track through a field of grass. The single passenger steadies himself against the doorframe as the car rattles over the corrugations in the road, made by the rain, set by the sun.

  A house, half-finished, emerges out of the mist, disappears.

  Then they are there.

  The sign on the wall says “Rolex Hotel.”

  The man gets out of the taxi uncomfortably. His shirt is damp with sweat. He isn’t used to the ridge, the mist and heat together. Fifty kilometers from Accra, but it feels like another country.

  The boy behind the desk asks him how long he’ll stay.

  “One night,” he says. “I will leave tomorrow.”

  He signs his name in the register: Festus Ankrah.

  From the window in his room there is nothing to see: the light is almost out now, the moon a dull stain, the mist covering everything.

  Both single beds, with their loose slatless frames, are too uncomfortable to sleep on. He puts the thin foam mattress of the one on the floor.

  He unpacks his clothes, undresses, and lies down on the floor between the frames of the beds. As soon as he closes his eyes he feels the sudden and strong urge to get up, pack his bags and flee the room, the hotel, the ridge.

  Still he has time to catch the last bus from Aburi and be in his own house before morning. What is stopping him? The shame of running, as his nephew has run? The knowledge of what will be said if he does? Or fear of what awaits him in Accra, the accusation of his own empty house, where there is nothing to do but wait?

  He lies on the mattress, turns towards the wall and waits for sleep to take him.

  And then, as if on their own, his eyes snap open and he knows what is coming, this thing about to overtake him for the first time since his nephew’s disappearance: anger—fierce and adult and raw.

  His nephew has left. Pushed off. Why does he insist on imagining his nephew in his helplessness, as the victim of his own disappearance?

  If I could only get my hands on him, if I could only grab him, hold him …

  Hold what?

  He stirs in his half-sleep.

  “What have you done, you bastard?” he mutters under his breath, and sinks back.

  Events of the last two weeks compete with each other for his attention like nagging children. Confused images shuffle over each other in his state of semi-wakefulness.

  Since his nephew’s disappearance his mind has been making a grotesque circus of itself. He is embarrassed by its need, its insistence, its unremitting self-accusations.

  He closes his eyes.

  This time it takes longer, but still it comes: the memory of standing in his nephew’s room, before the empty shelves, Celeste, head bowed beside him, like a child confessing a sin. Again he turns away—he cannot help it: such deep pain disgusts him.

  He opens his eyes, choosing consciousness over this.

  To remember gives him some control. In his dreams he is at the mercy of himself.

  Among the images to return, despite his vigilance, is the keening of his sister for the loss of a child she had lost so long before, of a child that was never hers. While all that he could do was to sit, as that sound came from her throat—beyond comfort, beyond rationality, an animal sound, until he couldn’t sit anymore and went to stand in the garden while the neighbours came running past.

  “I told you,” she said, she gasped, “they shamed us all, and still you gave them a home.”

  Later, before his visits stopped, before he could no longer bear them, came the outrage. The mad, dangerous, uncontrollable outrage he saw in his sister’s eyes.

  “How was he to know?” he pleaded. How was he to know anything about his nephew’s past? Though he knows that he did, even if nobody ever told him: about Celeste, the accident, the woman found upside down in a stream, and his nephew to blame because of his indiscipline and selfishness.

  The family tried to hide the details, in particular the names; but the girl—he knew it the moment he saw her, when his nephew came to him; knew it the day she arrived at his house.

  And now they are both gone. First the boy, and afterwards Celeste.

  She could not stay. She knew it first, and saved him having to ask her to go. All through the evening on the day that his nephew left, Festus Ankrah sat on the lower verandah, smoking cigarettes, while above him, from the room she and his nephew had shared, he heard the sounds of her packing.

  Then she came down and stood at the door. Her bag was at her feet.

  “I’m going, Mr. Ankrah,” she said.

  “I know it,” he replied, turning round, but he didn’t get up.

  She came over to the chair where he sat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She stood there, the light breeze blowing her dress round her legs.

  Then she picked up her bag and went down the path and turned towards the main road.

  Only once she was out of sight did it occur to Festus Ankrah that she hadn’t told him where she was going, nor where to find her when his nephew returned.

  Wednesday morning.

  Festus Ankrah lies on his mattress, the last traces of his dreaming still vaguely in him—singing, the sound of singing, his nephew’s singing … Something, something—some phrase, a few words of a song—and then it’s gone.

  Daylight is outside. Sounds and voices filter in, of workmen in the fields, a steel grinder, girls’ voices, children coming from a school.

  It looks like a sugar in a plum. Tra-la-la—that was it, what his nephew used to sing. Everyone knew the tra-la-la was stupid, old-fashioned, totally misplaced, but still he sang it, he liked that bit best, the voice inflected with irony.

  The thought reminds Festus Ankrah how they used to sit, all three of them together at the beginning. Celeste and his nephew would talk, and it was talk of the small things, the words quick, overlapping sometimes, happy, he guessed. And when his nephew finished a point, or thought he’d got the better of Celeste, he would sing it, tapping the last refrain on the table with his fingers.

  But his nephew had been at the house less and less, that was true. He and Celeste would eat together, mostly in silence, and the door would not open with the boy coming back from his work.

  Though Festus Ankrah noticed it, he had not asked. His nephew was there, his nephew wasn’t there. That was the deal.

  It looks like a sugar in a plum …

  Were there other signs? Probably there were—something that might have been caught early—not by him, that he knows, but by somebody else, more—he looks for the words … connected to the lives of other people.

  In Adabraka, in the days after his nephew disappeared, people actually stopped outside Festus Ankrah’s house—two or three a morning, standing outside the gate, looking; he saw them as he came and went.

  They said, “That is the hou
se.”

  They said, “It happened there, a boy who turned from his people lived there, and this is important, listen to this: It’s a terrible thing to lose a child, nothing more terrible. And there he goes, coming and going—the one who lost his child.”

  And even the area boys stopped and stared, who drugged and swindled and stole, but still had cousins they sent through school, and old people they housed, and gave at the end of the month. No matter how tough, there was always some woman who’d brought them into the world who could beat them over the ear, and there was nothing to do but take it.

  And he was the one who lost a child.

  He wants to hate his nephew for it—for changing him into something defenseless and despised.

  He tries but cannot.

  And instead he hears the refrain in his head: It looks like a sugar in a plum. Tra-la-la—and what does that mean anyway, these words snatched away from somewhere into his living room? If he could only understand them, the little secrets to those passing, lost moments …

  At half past six he sets out on the walk to his appointment, declining the waiting taxi parked outside. Still the mist is everywhere.

  He walks for ten minutes through the field. The taxi passes him before he reaches the main road. Then he turns left toward the town. He crosses a bridge over a valley, the stream beneath hidden in deep vegetation. He passes a series of old bungalows on his left, weathered and bleached, doorways open, through which he can see right through to the open back doors, to a papaya plantation falling down the other side of the hill.

  To his right a sign indicates the driveway to the school, though it’s more like a road, which disappears through a gate, down a hill and into the mist.

  A group of children approach from the other direction.

  “Is this the way to the school?” he asks them.

  The children take him on a shortcut through the bush, that crosses a stream, and passes up the side of a hill. They arrive through a plantation of bananas at the main administrative building.

  He is taken to the teacher’s office and is asked to wait. The window has a view of an expanse of grass, the open hall, and behind it the jungle climbing up the hill.