Eddie Signwriter (11 page)

His uncle wasted no time in fulfilling his side of the deal with his mother. Shortly after his nephew’s arrival at Castle Road, the promised apprenticeship was organized. The signwriter with whom his uncle arranged for his nephew to work had cut his teeth in the trade thirty years before, when competition was fierce and the formal economy ruled. Somewhere his real name must have been recorded, but everyone knew him by his moniker—Big Henry.

To look at, he was five-foot square of a man, wide almost as he was short, black as a seal, his whole skin sparkling with humidity. He was full of life. His flesh buckled under it. His heart was full as a wardrobe.

Though there was a suppleness about him too. He was
lithe
. In his manner, but also in his movements—the way he sprung up the stairs to his studio, agile as a goat, though the heavy stairs shook and the plates rattled in the kitchen below.

There was a kind of magnetism in that sort of bulk. People weren’t laughing at him. They were sharing in something good about the world that his existence made possible. But also there was something more serious about him, something less about joy. A solidity to his presence, that was more than simply his physical bulk. This man exuded dignity. He was graceful, generous, had the balance of things.

In his own boyhood Big Henry had painted with love. But many years had passed and now he painted not so much with love as with honesty. He took a casual interest in the beauty of the world, drew simple pleasure from the fact that a surface made of paint could represent known things, and saw as much value in the intention to suggest something beautiful with his art as to succeed in it.

Though in his time Big Henry had been successful. He had made a name for himself—not only through commissions for the large European and later Ghanaian firms, but also for the piecework he’d continued to do around the neighbourhood for next to nothing. And it was this that became the mainstay of his business three decades later, when the formal sector had turned to photography, and many
younger men, more hungry than himself, and more mobile, were plying his trade.

Still, the signwriter painted with as much skill and enjoyment as ever. Only now, for the first time in his life, he’d begun to suffer problems with his health. Even into his fifties he’d been able to drink as long and late as any man, then sing as loud the next morning in church as anyone on a full night’s sleep and a proper breakfast. He could still travel fair distances for even small commissions, happy to sleep on a shop floor with his rolled-up trousers as a pillow if an extra day was required.

But this had now come to an end. He had always been a large man—as full of guts as he was of life, his friends said. Now sixty years of carrying those guts around had made walking painful. He tired easily. Often he was out of breath, especially on hot afternoons.

Many of those same friends who had shared with him his youth had now retired—returned to their villages or their children’s compounds. But he had married late, a woman much younger than himself, and had two small girls in school. Times were hard for everyone these days, except for the rich perhaps, and he had never been rich. And so when Festus Ankrah approached him on the matter of taking on his nephew as an apprentice, Big Henry was glad of the opportunity to have somebody in the studio to help.

A day was set. Uncle and nephew arrived at Big Henry’s house. The signwriter was summoned by his wife from his studio on the second floor. He came down the stairs slowly, smiling, talking through his breathlessness, as his wife went off to get water and food for Festus Ankrah and his nephew. The signwriter’s whole body gathered with a small jerk in preparation for each step, then straightened out as he arranged his weight delicately on the pads of his soft feet.

“Yes, yes, yes, hello,” he was saying as he descended, while Festus Ankrah and the boy stood formally at the door. “Good morning to you.”

The signwriter invited his visitors to sit. Festus Ankrah hesitated, explaining that he would have to leave, but sat then nonetheless. The boy remained standing.

“As for myself, I must have some relief,” the signwriter said, lowering himself into a beaten-up old leather chair.

Then the boy’s uncle and the signwriter talked. The boy stood quietly at his uncle’s side.

Only when his uncle took his leave—“You will forgive me for not getting up,” the signwriter said to him, shrugging a self-deprecating shrug—did Big Henry address the boy.

“O-yeees,”
Big Henry sighed with gratification, then edged off his shoes and shifted in his seat exaggeratedly, as if shaking off the formality of the last five minutes. The two flat clubs of his feet began spinning slowly, like little fins propelling him lazily through the air.

It was a gesture of complicity with which he hoped to start his relationship with the boy.

The boy smiled, an uncertain smile, but did not say anything.

“Very well,” the old man said, and introduced himself.

At first the signwriter thought the boy was merely shy. Although he made many attempts to put the boy at ease in those first few days, it seemed to make little difference. The boy was quiet, spoke haltingly, uncertainly, when he had to, and in a mixture of English and Twi, since he was not fluent.

“Something is wrong with him,” Big Henry’s wife said to her husband.

“As for me, I think he is only sad,” the signwriter replied.

“What is it that he has to be sad about?” the woman asked.

The old man didn’t know.

Though there was more to it than just sadness. There was mistrust too. Not of him. Of everyone. Or everything. Somewhere along the line, the old man guessed, damage had been done. And in his way of seeing the best in people, he looked on the boy’s silence as something apart from the boy, an affliction; and so the apprenticeship continued, when others might have broken it off after a few weeks.

In the beginning Big Henry would start the morning with the boy at Amaamo timber market, where he’d give instruction in the selection of wood. As they made their way together through the winding alleys of the market, barrow boys would maneuver through with
boards stacked on their heads. The air was filled with the sound of bargaining and shouting and the animal howl of wood being torn by metal, and as they walked, and the signwriter talked, sawdust would fall like snow from the board saws, and gather in piles like river sand at their feet.

The merchant from whom they bought their boards had his shop at the back of the market. He was a small man with little brown teeth and a scrubby head—an immigrant from Niger in a political suit that was cut from a piece of purple cloth so thin that the collars and lapels hung as loose and flimsily as a shirttail.

There they would find him standing outside his shed, in a row of identical sheds with tall frontages opening to a passage. All around his merchandise was piled up in stacks, like folded tablecloths, on which the night-shift machinist and porters lay asleep. From a distance the merchant would watch the signwriter and the boy approach, and the boy too would watch the merchant, clearing his ears with the head of a two-inch nail, from which he collected the yellow crust with his teeth and spat into the sand.

To the doorframe of the wood merchant’s shed a monkey was tied by a rope attached round its waist. It was a pale gray creature with dangling limbs and sky-blue testicles that bounced between its legs like berries. It would take a banana with both hands gently, but it would also bare its teeth and shriek soundlessly at the porters and assistants who harassed it, hopping around the frame of the shack looking for a door in the plank wall where there was none.

After the lessons of the timber market, the signwriter taught the boy to sand and prime. Later they went through the mixing of colour. The composition of a board. The disciplines of the different fonts, varnishing finishes, and installation.

The boy followed instructions well. He seemed to take pleasure in his work. The signwriter noticed that having a task to do, with its specific requirements set and understood, gave the boy contentment. Perhaps a lack of structure had been part of his problem, the old man thought. That before there’d been nothing that necessitated the world being one way or another.

But at the studio there were always things that needed doing. And as time passed Big Henry found the boy a very useful assistant. He treated the boy kindly. The boy’s presence became part of the signwriter’s daily routine. And because the signwriter loved his life—his wife, his girls, his house, his job—the boy became part of his generalized sense of rightness and contentment.

He began to feel a fondness for the boy, as he noticed in his girls a fondness for anything that was familiar. “Hello sky, hello birds, hello sandy yard,” the younger one, who was six, would say as their mother took them out to school.

It was something like that for him too—
Hello boy
.

The signwriter knew that to try to coax the boy into conversation would only make him withdraw further. But it did not stop him from speaking himself through the long days they spent together. He did not think the boy minded. Having somebody around to whom he could pass on his experience brought out of Big Henry all kinds of reminiscences and half-articulated philosophies.

He talked of the kindness of strangers, and the coincidences that had brought him into the trade, and why he had stuck with it.

“Long ago,” he told the boy, “when I was young I started reading books about people that have died.

“The way they started, what they were performing.

“And one day in a little magazine I read that the former world boxing champion Cassius Clay, the father was a signwriter—

“Now I say if the father was a signwriter, a prominent man like that, why can you not also follow in his footsteps.

“Ahaaaaa?

“Ah!

“And so what I had to do was to make a small box and put my little paints inside, and then get my brushes and put them into my hair.

“And moreover the clothes that I wore had to be full of paint so that the people see that you belong to paint.

“Now when I started I was walking in the street, and somebody would see me and say, ‘O let me call this man.’

“Then he’d say, ‘Are you a painter or are you an artist?’

“And I say, ‘I’m an artist.’

“And then he asks me can I write on his shop for him?

“Then I have to put my paints down and we talk of price, and if the price is good then I start doing something.”

It was late one afternoon that the signwriter told the boy this story. The boy had finished for the day, had washed up and had come to the old man in the room above the house where the old man had been continuing with the day’s work. Naked to his waist, the signwriter stood painting at his easel, filling in certificates for the African Bible College for Christian Resurrection.

The old man’s face was crumpled in concentration. Seams of sweat formed in the creases of his skin. Sweat rolled round the socket of the eye, gathered in the hollow between cheek and ear where the flesh folded inwards like rubber, then back under the pressure of its own weight. His flesh hung from his arms in solid blocks, like hot-water bottles. His forearms were large and thick, growing over the wrists. His chest hair curled like burnt spiders. The meat of his back fell away from the spine like the folds of gathered curtains.

All around there were planks of wood piled against the walls, some salvaged, some primed and washed, others half completed. There was an old clothes cupboard against the wall, two rusted trunks, tins full of paint—coffee and milk tins, brands just distinguishable beneath the paint drippings—bottles, rags, string, brushes, sandpaper, a lathe held to a nail against the wall.

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
freeee
hand, 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.