Eddie Signwriter Read online

  Listening, the boy stood against the back wall, playing with his toe at the peeling linoleum, beneath which he could see through the rough wood planks into the room below, where one of the old man’s girls moved about. The sound of her singing filtered up, a refrain beginning to catch in his head—something, something, tra-la-la.

  For a few moments, as Big Henry completed a particularly difficult piece of lettering, he paused. Then he stood back and shook the beads of ink gathered on the tip of his nib, streaking the floorboards like squashed mosquitoes.

  “And so one day,” he said, “I met one man in town and he said to me:

  “‘Are you a signwriter?’

  “And I said ‘Yes.’

  “So he asked me where do I stay.

  “So I showed him my house.

  “About two, three weeks later he called me to a shop he owned where they sold Nashua radios, and the managing director asked me to write Nashua Radio on their main gate on the glass—

  “In fact it’s a very difficult thing for most of the signwriters to write on the glass, some of them have to write it on the paper and then paste it on the window.

  “But I never did that—

  “I only took chalk and ruled my base line and ruled my caps line and wrote it freeeehand, which was very beautiful.

  “Then my friend the man advised me.

  “He said, ‘Henry, stop moving around, get a small apartment like a kiosk and put it at a good position, so that people will come to you and confront you.

  “‘Since when you walk around town people will think you are cheap and you won’t have a good price.

  “‘But when people come to you, you can consult them and they can give you a good price.’

  “So then one evening time, say around five thirty to six, I went to some people around the bottom of town where they sell some packing case, some plywood and some iron roofing sheets, and I started buying those things now to enable me to put up the kiosk …

  “In fact anybody you meet on your way is your angel.

  “I took the man’s advice and put up the kiosk and people come to me now and tell me what they want.

  “Me, I never reject price.

  “Whatever little something somebody wants to pay I take it.

  “Because a job is hard to come by.

  “And since I can’t manufacture money I have to work.

  “And since you want to win soooo many customers you must be more religious, more patient, very kind, and you should know how to talk to people.

  “And also, since you are serving the public, you have no business with anybody in the cemetery.

  “No business in the cemetery—the cemetery is always quiet.

  “People with whom you can do business are people who are living.

  “In fact the money comes into your hand for something. You must know how to reward that money.”

  Later he talked of other things. Of his youth in Accra. Of the glory days of the 1960s, until politics stole it all. Though even that he remembered with humour.

  “Our house,” the signwriter said, “in Acheampong’s time, they rationed the zinc for fixing roofs.

  “In the rainy season we moved downstairs. Mosquitoes lived in the bedrooms.

  “That man—he died on the beach from a bullet in his head.

  “Blessed are the dead, but I was not sad.

  “So always enjoy today,” he said, “because tomorrow there may be no roof on your house.”

  And then he laughed—first his eyes would widen, his top lip rise, his face would open and the deep, rolling sound would come out of him, his whole body on fire with laughter.

  As the weeks went by, and turned into months, the old man’s family grew used to the boy’s presence. They absorbed him into the life of the house. From time to time, when urgent work needed to be finished, the boy would sleep the night on the floor of the old man’s studio and continue early in the morning, and the signwriter’s girls would bring him breakfast as he painted in his vest and shorts.

  It was they who turned the boy from a stranger into a member of the household. The boy’s silence didn’t frighten them. It didn’t make them wary.

  “It isn’t good if people never talk,” the younger girl said to the boy one day—he was painting in the yard, and her father was upstairs, and she and her sister had been playing nearby. While they played they had slowly approached, and were now sitting a little way off, watching him.

  The older girl laughed behind her hands.

  The boy thought they were alone, but the door to the house opened and the signwriter’s wife came out and admonished the child.

  The older girl apologized. The younger girl said nothing, tracing a crack in the concrete step with her finger.

  “Leave Kwasi alone,” the signwriter’s wife said, “he’s busy,” and she turned and went back into the house.

  “You know …” the younger one started, the beginning of a question mark at the end of her wondering.

  “Maybe …”

  She looked at the boy for encouragement.

  He gave her none.

  Though she didn’t need it—“Did you do something … bad?” she whispered conspiratorially, glancing towards the door, then back at him.

  The boy left off his painting. She was squatting on the concrete, her hands around her ankles. Her little knees were scraped from playing and her dress was streaked with dirt and grass stains.

  “What’s the worst thing you ever did?” she said encouragingly.

  The boy could not keep from smiling. He wondered what the worst thing could be that she’d ever done. What she thought the world was capable of, what she was capable of herself.

  He put down his brush.

  “I cooked a child and ate her for breakfast,” he said, and lunged towards them both, and they jumped up screaming, with pleasure at being chased, and ran towards the road, glancing over their shoulders, stopping on the path, as the excitement ebbed, like an intake of breath, then lifted them up, and they turned and ran up the path, screaming again.

  The door of the house swung open, and the old man’s wife came out once more, ready to raise hell. She watched the girls disappear, then turned toward the boy.

  “It’s fine,” the boy said.

  The signwriter put his head out from the upstairs window. “My children,” he said, laughing, and then his head returned and he went back to his work, and the boy did too.

  “People don’t eat each other,” the younger girl said to the boy a few days later. The boy was painting again in the yard, as he often did when the afternoons were too hot.

  “Why not?” he said. Now that they were friends, he liked to tease the girls.

  “They do all the time,” he said. “Big people get hungry.”

  She looked at him uncertainly. She didn’t like the possibility. She never knew when to take him seriously.

  “You’re funny,” she said.

  “You’re funny, too,” he said.

  She smiled and went off to think and left him to work.

  She knew her father didn’t like the boy to be disturbed. As time had passed the signwriter had been giving the boy more and more responsibility. The boy was taking over much of his work. It had not taken long for the old man to notice the boy’s talent. The boy could copy his work so closely that not even he could tell the difference. And the boy’s own paintings were so skillfully drafted, and so clever and imaginative, that the signwriter wondered if the repetitive themes of their usual commissions would not hold back his talent.

  Though it was the old man’s wife, not the old man, who ever said anything about it.

  It was past midnight, and the boy was staying over to finish a number of boards that needed delivery the next day, and she’d come to the door, and watched him as he painted.

  “You draw like an angel,” she said.

  The boy hadn’t realized she was there. Everyone else had gone to bed, he thought. He’d been working alone with a kerosene
lamp and the radio.

  “I paint like Big Henry taught,” he said.

  “In some ways,” she said.

  He stopped what he was doing and wiped his hands with a rag.

  “My husband wonders if really he has anything to teach you anymore,” she said.

  The boy thought about this.

  “Does he want me to leave?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “We want you to stay. We like you here.”

  “You are kind,” the boy said.

  She shrugged.

  “My husband wonders if people have not been very kind to you in the past,” she said.

  “As for myself, I have also not been kind,” the boy replied, and she looked at him, and she smiled—a thin crease of acknowledgement—and wished him a good night.

  The signwriter had nothing to worry about. The boy enjoyed the mercantile themes. He enjoyed making things for the real world. And when Big Henry started proposing exercises unrelated to the staples of the business—telecentres, hair salons, beauty salons, chop bars, church functions, general dealers—the boy soon lost interest.

  That suited Big Henry well. While he knew that the days in which he could claim to be teaching the boy any new skills would soon pass, he was glad of the boy’s presence. He liked having the boy in the house. Increasingly he passed on to him the major responsibility for new work and was glad of the extra time it made available to him. To concentrate on the business side of things, but more and more, to let the world pass by, and enjoy what was most important to him—being in the house that he himself had made through his labour, being with his thoughts, and his wife and girls.

  This is how things went for six months.

  It was now September and the city was waiting for the rains. The sky was the colour of gunmetal. The air was still, and the fronds of the trees hung down in the torpor of the sticky afternoon. It had turned out to be a busy period. Eight boards were set out in different stages of completion, some in the studio, some in the yard downstairs.

  The boy was already in the house by the time the signwriter woke. The old man lay in bed and let the sun come in through the window onto him, or did not stop it, once he knew he was awake, and it spilled across his chest and his face, through the leaves of the tree that grew in the yard.

  It was past nine probably, but the old man did not feel the need to rise. His wife had already gone to work and his girls were at school and he knew that when he got downstairs the boy would be in the yard, and his breakfast would be set on the low table in the sitting room.

  The old man closed his eyes again and felt unhurried. He concentrated on everything that was happening at that moment—the light, and the breeze over the sheets, and the sound of the boy’s humming in the yard as he worked, and it all felt good.

  For the rest of the morning, he had the boy run various errands—buying materials, delivering messages to his clients and suppliers—while he stayed at the house to work on the signs.

  The boy arrived back from his errands a little before noon. He saw that the old man was not in the yard, though the rags and paper were out on the sand, two tins of paint and various bottles on the verandah ledge, and three boards standing against the step in the shade of the mango tree.

  The heat has driven him out today, the boy thought to himself. He went to look at the boards: a hairdressing salon (one of the signwriter’s specialties), a pawnshop and a spare-parts dealer. The sign for the pawnshop was fairly close to completion, while the other two were still rudimentary—a caps and base line for the lettering, sketches of the composition penciled in over the primed wood.

  We will work outside this afternoon, the boy thought, and was glad. He preferred to be outside. He liked the smell of city mixing with the paint and the turpentine and sweat. Upstairs it was too stuffy.

  He put down the white plastic bags, filled with supplies, beside the boards and went round the side of the house, where he expected to find the old man rinsing a brush at the tap.

  But the old man was not there.

  He came round again and into the house. The kitchen was empty, and so the boy came outside, took off his shoes, and entered by the front door.

  Big Henry was in the front room with his back to the door. He was holding on to the banister that led up to the office, his weight slumped forward onto his left foot. He was shirtless, but the sweat had already dried, and the pattern of sand on his back showed where he’d fallen backwards in the yard. His ribs moved heavily under the flesh of his back. Slow wheezing noises came out of him.

  The boy came forward and put his hand questioningly on the old man’s back, while he stooped to see his face. Big Henry folded at his touch. The boy put his hands round Big Henry’s trunk to stop him falling forward and managed to wrest him round so that they fell together against the wall, the boy half on the first step, with the man on his side on the floor.

  There was a moment of silence until anything happened.

  “So now you are here,” Big Henry said, wincing. “What was taking you?”

  “I was getting the paint and the other things, as you asked,” the boy replied into the old man’s shoulder. Big Henry was heavier than he’d thought, which was saying something.

  “Of course,” Big Henry said, and paused to get his breath.

  The old man shifted his weight and turned his head to look at the boy. The boy’s face was frozen in an expression of shock, and it made Big Henry want to laugh, though he knew if he did it would hurt.

  “So was there any change?” he asked, smiling painfully.

  The boy looked at him for a moment, as if he had not understood, then tried to move to get his hand into his pocket.

  “No, no,” Big Henry said, “I am joking.”

  The boy stopped trying to get to his pocket.

  “Do you think you could manage?” the old man asked.

  “We must go to the clinic?”

  “Good boy,” the old man said and then he passed out.

  Five neighbours helped him carry Big Henry to a taxi. The boy went himself to the post office on Lutterodt Circle where the old man’s wife worked. A relative picked the girls up from school and brought them to their mother at the hospital of Korle Bu.

  At two in the morning the woman returned to the house with the children. In the yard she found the boy working from the light of the kerosene lamps. Seven signboards were set out in the sand to dry, the eighth nearing completion. She was not an expert in these things, but they looked like her husband’s best work.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked.

  The boy had not.

  “I have not eaten also,” she said. “I will try to find some food.” And then she asked whether it would it be possible for the boy to stay over that evening. That what she really wanted was to let things be for just a while longer, and would that be all right?

  And so the girls were put to bed, and the boy and the signwriter’s wife ate dinner together at the dining room table, as the boy had many times with the family. They were both hungry and ate well. After the dishes had been taken away the boy went out into the yard and finished the remaining sign. He slept briefly in Big Henry’s studio, and left soon after sunrise to deliver the signs to their owners, while Big Henry’s wife watched from her bedroom window, since she had not slept.

  By the time the boy returned in the afternoon there was little left for him to do. News of the signwriter’s death had spread around the neighbourhood. The house was full of women. There were plenty of hands to take care of the signwriter’s daughters.

  And so the boy left the house. He walked into Adjaben Road, then turned into Nkrumah Avenue. He walked and walked, without a destination in mind, with his pencils and his notebooks, which over the next months and years he would fill with sketches and drawings, covering the empty space of every page, because unless he could see himself feeling—unless he could see the colour and the shape of things, their susceptibility to light and shadow, unless in some form he made them again—he
couldn’t believe they were there.

  He wasn’t going to be cheated. He wanted the world on his own terms.

  For what?

  To redeem it. To forgive it. To hold it to him. To laugh at it. Kick it in the teeth. Cry with it. Tell its story.

  The path he took brought him down to Jamestown, past the old department stores, broken down to their grand steel frames, cracked bricks and boarding, with their backs to the cliff edge. He walked onto the beach down the rotting cliffs, to which the houses clung. Past the fishermen’s boats, over the sand strewn with muck.

  Then he returned up Kojo Thompson Avenue, past the Grand Market and the bus terminus, through the crowds fighting and fighting, with each other, with the world, to sell their batteries and fruit and caps, their plastic bags, their secondhand clothes, their electrical parts, their children’s toys.

  As he walked an old beggar, a bundle of rags covering a man, passing in the same direction, began talking to him. In his broken mouth the words slid around like mud and stones.

  “I cannot understand you,” he said to the beggar in Ga. The beggar began to speak in broken English. The boy could not tell whether it was an insult or a mistake.

  The boy tried Twi, the local dialect. But the man insisted on replying in English.

  The boy felt hatred well inside himself. Hatred of the man. Of his own inability to understand the man in his own language. Of the squalour and struggle and meanness of life around him.

  He wanted to be out of it, he wanted the quietness and the empty space and the slow light air that he’d known from before, from another time of his life.

  “Which country are you from?” the beggar asked in English, his voice curling with scorn.

  The boy noticed that all the beggar’s teeth were missing on one side, from incisor to molars. His tongue flapped over the gum.

  The boy had to get away.

  He ran, breaking left to escape the man, down the road he had just passed, before the beggar could make even the smallest grunt of departure. He ran towards Castle Street, along the side of the road, risking traffic all the way down Tudu Street, and almost knocking down a bystander at the corner of the vegetable market.