Reading the Ceiling (31 page)

‘Getting old, as we all do.
Osh for berring
,' he says. ‘Your mother was a fine woman.'

He shakes my hand then pats my elbow. It was all too long ago. Kweku Sola definitely does not have his mouth.

I continue: ‘Come and have something to eat and drink.'

At some point in the evening, after the guests have eaten and she's helped to tidy up the kitchen, Nimsatu slides along to me, with my feet resting on a
tara
bench on the verandah, Kainde close by, both of us unable to chat, express or accept sorrow. Nimsatu whispers, ‘You know, your mother also promised me the embroidery chair.'

Only a handful of diehard relatives and friends are still at the house. It's almost over. I prepare a plate for Ma as we say goodbye. I get portions of all the food we've had in the house that day.
Cassava fufu
and a fish-filled
Satiday
soup. I roll out a rectangular piece of
olehleh
from softened banana leaf. I add some balls of
akara
and peppery onion sauce. A feast for her that we want her to share with us. I will leave it on the table overnight.

I can hear her voice, right as if she were standing next to me and bellowing into my ear: ‘Eh
boh
, did you forget palm oil and fish give me heartburn this late at night?'

Warm pellets of moisture roll down my cheeks. My shoulders don't shake. My heart does not squeeze tight. It's the small waves that ride on several medium-sized waves. The ones that take their energy from underneath. Those are usually the ones that make it to my toes. I cry.

A certain story was told us when we were no longer little girls but also a long way from being women.

‘
Lepole
,' the storyteller would say.

‘
Leepail
,' we would chorus back.

‘
Amon Haft
,' the story-teller would continue.
There once was
. 

There once was a mermaid who lived in the crashing ocean that you see when you go walking past the beach at Fajara. She came from a tribe of mermaids that lived further south, closer to the border with Senegal, right on the edge where the Diolas of Cassamance live. You know, don't you that the Diolas can make powerful magic, incantations that can force the most strong- hearted of us to give in. Let me tell you this though: there is one thing that no incantation can force us to do. It can never force us to want something we do not already half-want.

There once was this mermaid who lived in the sea, among the huge rocks with eyes in them, where cockles live, right at the bottom where sand is made. As she grew up she learnt the names of the fish there – barracuda, sole, mbiscit and so on. She learnt to make the wind sing for her when she was happy and to force the waves to jiggle boats about when she was feeling mischievous. Her tail was silvery grey with flecks of pinkish red at the spine, with splodges of black along the rim of her tail fin.

A time comes when all mermaids have to choose where to live. The ocean is a big place. Some who hanker after different kinds of food, or a change of scenery, can choose to go far away. Others who like the comforts of home can find a cave just a few minutes away from their parents' house. It is up to each mermaid to choose.

Our mermaid, the one whose life we are interested in, cannot decide. Sometimes it seems to her that life in the sea is boring. On a night when the moon bathes the sea in silver, she kicks up her fin and swims on her back. On nights like this she wants to live in the sky. At other times, she looks at the fishermen in their tiny pirogues, with ebony backs and arms which pull in the catch and she thinks that a life on land, with the chance to visit the sea often, would be perfect.

One day, the choice is taken from her hands. The moon is peeking out a crescent of itself, leaving most of the dark to the stars, which trickle their light onto different parts of the sky. The mermaid is swimming on her back and is so lost in her imaginings that she does not see a net thrown from a boat nearby. On ordinary days, she would simply dive deeper and faster than the net and swim away. But today, her mind does not turn quickly enough. Barbs at the edges of the net catch in her tail. One sticks in her arm, another in her neck. She yelps with pain and begs the waves to smother the boat. But her song is weak, her voice is not true, and she is captured.

The fisherman is the son of one of those Diola medicine men I told you about at the beginning of this story. He has been sent out by his father to catch something in the sea whose eyes could be roasted and ground into a potion. He is to bring back the first thing he catches. The fisherman is afraid when he sees the mermaid he's caught. If he disobeys his father, he will get into trouble when the potion does not work.

The mermaid looks back at him and thinks about how she need not fight. She can let herself be taken. She need not choose.

‘Now,' the storyteller would say, ‘what do you think should happen? Will the son of the medicine man win because he is scared of his father? Will the mermaid let her world be taken from her without her approval?'

The story did not always end the same way. Sometimes the mermaid realises at the last minute what she could lose, and she opens her throat and lets out the most soulful of the songs she knows of the sea. And the wind comes to help. The boat sinks, the boy drowns, the mermaid goes free.

At other times, the fisherman hauls the mermaid in and takes her to his father. His father does incantations that change her fish legs to human legs that never learn to walk. He needs to make a potion for a powerful chief and so he uses her eyes, after begging her pardon. She marries the fisherman, she lives on land and can hear the sea, but she can never take herself down to it and swim with the freedom she once had.

The moral of the story is, if you want something, don't halfwant it. Either want it properly and go and get it, or forget about it so you will not be drawn into someone else's magic and get the decision taken out of your hands.

‘It's us next isn't it?' says Kainde on the day before she leaves for a Montreal she describes as stupidly expensive, and misty grey.

She chews off the tip of the nail on her little finger and flicks a curl of hardened calcium off her lower lip and onto the floor, like an irritating insect.

I nod. Without parents, we are next in line to die. There's no other generation to insulate us against death. It's us next.

 

‘Why do I stay there? Do you think it's only the money?'

‘Life isn't all sugar cubes here either. Visiting is different from living here,' I reply.

‘Life in Montreal feels unreal sometimes. I'm a tiny cog in this huge organisation, where little gets done and everyone wants to hang on to their jobs and their benefits. We're supposed to be helping the world, but all we're doing is helping ourselves.'

‘I can feel petty here too, when life is a constant stream of unwanted interruptions. People want things around you, off you, all the time.'

‘Nimsatu and the embroidery chair didn't help, did it?'

‘And the thing is, she couldn't understand why we didn't just give it to her. How could Aunt K's need be greater than hers? She thought we were being mean.'

‘What a time to choose to get annoyed over a chair. After working with Ma for forty years too. Perhaps being greedy is what defines us. We want and we take, without permission if necessary.'

We are quiet as we mourn the halves of our lives that have smothered our youth, and the other half that is stretching into a grave just like our mother's.

Most of the people I meet again at my mother's funeral quickly fade back into a mist of acquaintances, who will be occasionally sighted in the supermarket. We will kiss then and exclaim about how long it's been since we last saw each other. We will promise to keep in touch. We will say goodbye and then let busyness redo what it did before – blanket our lives with activity. There are exceptions. Remi tries to build on our teenage friendship. Perhaps she finds that, like me, there is comfort in keeping a link with a youth that we want to remember as long as we can.

*

Ma was buried a week ago. My sisters and I are trying to make some decisions. Already, the morning's heat is creeping across the sky, about to jump on and munch the last of the night's clouds. We're at the dining table, with tea, cubed sugar in a dark blue cardboard box, a tin of Peak evaporated milk sitting with two gashes in its top, and a large bowl of coos pap.

‘I'm not sure what I want to keep. Maybe one of her dresses and one of the bags she left in the trunk. They'll help me think of her in happier times,' I say.

‘I'll go through the kitchen and take whatever will be useful in mine,' says Taiwo.

‘I'd like a dress too, and when we divide the jewellery, could I please have the silver shell. Remember how Ma used to wear it at Christmas saying a shell made far more sense to her than a star. And that if she'd been one of the wise men, she would have given the most perfect shell she could find on the beach,' says Kainde.

‘We can look through the clothes in the trunk and the jewellery before you leave. If you do the kitchen next week, Taiwo, I shall go through her bedroom and pack it up to give away. I think her memories are in the storeroom; she did not leave them where they could nudge her every day.'

‘What do we do with the house itself?' asks Taiwo.

‘I'm not ready to let it go yet,' says Kainde.

I nod. ‘I agree. There's too much of us bound up in it still.'

‘Shall we rent it out then?'

‘Perhaps. We'll need to tidy up the house, disturb our history a bit, but it will let in some fresh air, so that the next time you come,' I say to Kainde, ‘we will be able to talk about it again.'

‘Will you two sort it out when I'm gone?'

‘I think Reuben might be able to help us here. He knows people from work who might need to rent a house. And he's able to tell us how much to charge,' offers Taiwo.

The stray cat I sometimes feed comes streaking past us. From her favoured position on my doorstep soaking up the sun, it heads for the kitchen. As it leaps out through the gap in the flimsy bars I have on my windows to protect me from night-time burglars, a plate slides off my dish pile straight for the floor.

After the crash, Taiwo says, ‘That was definitely Ma, saying she's heard us talking about her.'

There are sharp, quick footsteps on the driveway. Amina walks in with high-heeled slippers.

‘Hope I'm not disturbing anything serious. I heard the noise of something breaking. You're not throwing things at each other, are you?'

We laugh. Kainde says, ‘Taiwo says that was Ma who got the cat to push the plate over.'

‘Might well have been. I came by to drop off something for Kainde to take back.' She turns to Kainde. ‘You were saying at the funeral how hard it is for you to remember home, right? Here's something you'll be able to use it every day. It will keep home closer to you, tugging at you, urging you to visit more often.'

The leather bag, burnished a deep brown, has the simplest of decorations around the clasp and the ends of its long straps.

‘What about us, the ones who stay behind the whole year round?' I protest.

‘You live, breathe and see this all the time. She doesn't.'

As she hands it over, she notices the coos pap. ‘If you don't mind me, can I join in the breakfast, I'm in no hurry.'

I take the serving bowl to the kitchen to pour back into the saucepan and heat it up.

When I get back with it steaming again, Amina says, ‘And look, all that time you spent running away from the kitchen. Did you +\rawoo  yourself? Or buy it?'

‘Did it myself, in that large calabash over there.'

‘You know life never ends – if you still want a husband I'm sure there's someone out there who would treasure a wife who taught herself to cook so well.'

Taiwo has started to fuss around the table, clattering together our used bowls, collecting the spoons, loading up a tray for the kitchen.

‘Don't be silly, Amina,' I protest.

‘Silliness has nothing to do with it. It's just the way life is.'

‘I have to be going,' interrupts Taiwo. ‘I promised Reuben I'd get him some +chereh  for lunch tomorrow. I'll let myself out through the kitchen door.'

‘Watch out for any bits Ayodele missed when she swept up the broken plate,' says Kainde as Taiwo hurries into the kitchen with the loaded tray and shoves it next to the sink.

‘Sorry, don't have time or I'd do it myself to make sure. But must rush,' she replies. The key turns in the kitchen door, and she pushes the door open.

‘Whatever will I do without this kind of talk on a quiet Saturday morning to liven up my life?' says Kainde.

I ask them: ‘Do you remember the story about the mermaid? Do you remember how Aunt K would change the ending when she told us her version?'

‘She even changed the beginning didn't she?'

‘Hers went:
Una siddon goodwan?
And we'd all go:
We siddon goodwan
.'

 ‘Then she'd continue:
Una yais opin
?'

‘
We yais opin.
'

 ‘And her magic came from the Mende, not the Diola.'

‘You remember how we'd all gasp when he fell into the water, or click our tongues when she stayed on land.'

‘How did it make you feel?'

‘Dreamy. It seemed as if the story warned against being too dreamy, about wanting what you shouldn't be wanting. Yet that is exactly how it made me feel.'

‘I loved the idea that it was all in the mermaid's hands. She could decide what she wanted to do. And it meant my life could be full of possibles too.'

Talk meanders through the late afternoon. Kainde has to pack. I feel like a walk on the beach.

‘Come with me, Amina,' I say.