Eddie Signwriter (23 page)

There is a customer sitting in the barber’s chair, waiting for a haircut. He has a piece of cloth around his neck, and is picking his teeth with a wood splinter. A second man sits on one of the chairs against
the wall, stretching his legs across the floor. His shoes almost touch the wall opposite.

“This is Eddie,” Adams says, and puts the bag down.

“Salut, Eduard,”
the tall man on the chair says and stretches his hand out. He extends his, and the tall man slaps his palm.

“Je suis Emmanuel,”
the tall man says.

The man called Emmanuel has a wide nose and the whites of his eyes are opaque, off-yellow. His skin is marked and has wide pores.

“Eddie speaks English,” Adams says, and turns his attention to the client in the chair.

“Okaaay,” Emmanuel says, his voice rising on the second syllable, “welcome. Take a seat.”

He sits.

“Welcome to Se-ne-gal,” Emmanuel says, “yes,” and he laughs.

Adams cuts his client’s hair. He tips the chair forward, and sets about his work. He shaves the head in zones, dividing the back into two hemispheres that he clears in turn, each from ear to nape. Then he moves to the top of the head, cutting from the forehead backwards, cleaning each section of exposed scalp with spirits, and a piece of foam cut from a block on top of the cupboard. When the head is complete he stands back, changes blades, and smooths the joins between the sections, pushes and brushes over the lumps and dents in his client’s scalp, until the whole head is seamless and smooth.

He thinks of speaking to Emmanuel, who all the while is tapping his feet to the music, then thinks against it.

Adams finishes up. He applies powder to the man’s head, takes off the cloth, and brushes him down.

“OK?” he asks.

The client turns his head and surveys the work.

“C’est bien,”
the client says, stands, stretches his neck and shoulders, then fetches some bills from his pocket and pays. The customer slaps hands with Adams, then Emmanuel, and nods at him as he leaves.

“Whoow,” Adams says, and he smiles, “this is a good day today. Everyone today wants barbing.”

“Everyone wants barbing,” Emmanuel repeats, and clicks his teeth.

“What time is it?” Adams asks.

Emmanuel stretches out his huge arm to find out. It is ten before eight. Emmanuel must be two meters tall at least, he estimates.

“So maybe you keep the shop now,” Adams says to Emmanuel, “and me and this boy sit outside.”

Adams takes two chairs from the shop and sets them out against the wall under the tree. It is fully night, and the voices from radios and televisions filter down from the houses, and a breeze blows over their feet and down the alley. He sees a car pass down the next road. If something terrible is going to happen to him, he thinks, this doesn’t feel like the moment.

There have been a few problems with the arrangements, Adams tells him, but everything now is fine. He, Adams, will be passing him on to the next handler, who will take him through the airport, when his papers are ready, and their man inside is in place. In a few days’ time, Adams says. That’s how long it usually takes.

“Ibrahim, have you spoken to him?” he asks.

“I don’t know who Ibrahim is,” Adams says, smiling, “but somebody does if I’ve been told to keep you in my barbing shop a few nights.”

And when Adams has finished laughing, they sit in silence.

“You know what they call this line of work?” Adams says, breaking the silence.

“What?” he asks.

“The flesh machine,” Adams says.

He wonders if Adams hasn’t had this conversation a hundred times out there on the street side.

“Well,” he says.

“Well what?” Adams asks cheerfully, in a way that he senses is intended to bring him back to the normality of Adams’s cigarettes and tired evenings.

“Well, either I’m screwed, or I’m not,” he says.

“That’s normal,” Adams says. “E-ve-ry-tin’ is normal,” and that in a few days’ time he’ll get a call from somebody he doesn’t know, to take him to the airport, and then he’ll be on his way to—?

“I’ll be on my way,” he says.

Adams smiles. “That’s quite right,” he says.

Later in the evening Adams leads him round the corner to the main entrance of the house and they climb up to the second floor to take the evening meal. The steps have been recently cast and they make their way carefully past the kitchen on the top floor, where a woman is sitting on a bucket, pounding spices. A skinless pink chicken carcass hangs over the back of a chair.

The house is still under construction, Adams tells him. A family in France owns it. They only come in the summer.

“Oh,” he says.

“I just watch it for them,” Adams tells him, answering the question he hasn’t asked.

“And they run this show?”

“I never ask who,” Adams says.

Though the house has tile floors, the walls are still raw concrete. There is a landing on the second floor, the kitchen to one side, and to the other two rooms leading off an uncovered passageway. One of the rooms is closed. In the other there are chairs against the wall, and a window with wooden bars. They have electricity there, and a television, and in the corner there is a mattress and some crumpled sheets.

“Sit,” Adams tells him, and he sits on the floor. For at least twenty minutes he waits in this room alone, watching the television, in the background the sound of cooking and low conversation.

Then Adams returns, followed by a young woman and a small girl, no more than five years old. The woman sets a cloth out over the floor. The girl throws herself onto the mattress and stretches on her stomach, wriggles round, and smiles at him.

Adams seats himself on a chair beside him and watches the television.

There is water on Adams’s face. He notices the skin around his collarbones has begun to go soft and fold. He wonders if Adams isn’t sick.

“Astou,” Adams calls out to the girl, who wriggles with glee, and Adams smiles, and he knows what it is the girl is delighted by—the
solidness of this man, his warmth and strength and handsomeness. He thinks,
She must be in love with him
.

The woman brings a bowl of yassa poulet and places it between them, and they eat it together, as she and Adams ask him about where he is from and what it is like in his hometown, and the girl called Astou jumps all over them, or plays by herself with a nail clipper, and for the first time in a while he does not feel unhappy.

There is kindness in their questions, solidarity. They too no longer own the lives they lead, he realizes.

He looks at the woman and the child. He looks at Adams, and he thinks that if there were more time, it would be good to understand this man better, to know something about him. How he makes a life for himself here, how he makes it beautiful for other people.

Later, after dinner, as everyone prepares to sleep, he climbs with a cup of tea and a cigarette to the top floor of the house, which is still just an open platform without walls yet, or a roof.

There is still the breeze. Lightning that isn’t going to become rain stutters in the distance like a fluorescent bulb. Blades of light from passing cars sweep through the alleys beside a distant road, and from the dark houses comes the chanting of the dahiras, and it feels to him that everything in that darkness is a mystery, everything is an unknown place.

To have survived the heat, to have survived another day, feels like something.

Over the dark minaret of the mosques, between the half-built villas and the steel rising from the concrete, he can see the airport, white with light. He watches the movement on the runway, the thunder and scream of the big 747s, the airbuses headed for Europe.

He thinks to himself how close he now is. How soon the future is going to begin.

And then he goes down again into the house to prepare himself for sleep.

T
HROUGH A WINDOW
, a forest. Trees. Vines. A gray, stringy sky behind. Foliage moves in the wind that the eye can’t see, but the smallest vibration, a shift in pressure, tenses in the glass that catches the light, which the eye
can
see.

The teacher is standing at the window.

His ear comes into view.

His neck.

A collar.

Gray in the hair.

In the glass the view begins to blur, refocus.

He’s not looking at the view at all, but at his face’s own reflection.

Studying shapes, lie of the flesh, as if for the first time.

Back further still.

The figure of the man at the window, in the foreground a desk, papers on top, neatly stacked, a glass, a pen, a package—paper wrapping, tied with string.

The teacher turns, looks towards the desk, and the package on it.

•  •  •

A woman’s hands.

Black hands, fingers laced, full of lines.

Mrs. Dankwa’s hands in prayer.

A bedspread underneath.

Nails neat, filed, square, white as gravestones.

Forehead descends, a crest of hair.

Momentarily, lips.

Lips upon the hands in prayer.

A middle-aged lady gets up heavily from the bed.

Through the open door, her husband watches over his paper from his chair.

•  •  •

An empty room.

Bed stripped.

Cupboards bare, door ajar. Mirror dull, mottled with rust. On the glass, corners of tape where a page once stuck, long torn away.

Circles on the floorboards where a cup once stood.

Dust on the sill.

Dust on the floor.

Dust on the flat fins of a ceiling fan.

A chair turned towards the bed.

Two wire hangers on the seat.

Down.

Through the floorboards.

Through the ceiling below.

Into the room downstairs.

Festus Ankrah at table. In his vest.

Radio beside.

A bowl.

Cereal finished.

Hand moving still from bowl to mouth.

Eating milk with a spoon.

•  •  •

Meat-threaded sticks, cooking on a grill.

Coal glowing red.

Light and heat between.

Smoke.

Fat popping like bubble wrap.

Tables on the street, benches.

Customers eating, drinking water from plastic cups.

A woman cleaving cabbage on a board.

A child collecting plates.

A man, watching from across the road, hair wet with light, gold around his wrists, waiting for a space to clear.

The woman cutting cabbage looks up. Sees him on the other side. Smiles secretly, looks down.

He smiles back.

An A-frame sign beside the grill.

“Ibrahim’s Snack Shack.”

In cursive hand beneath:

Where da black man is black
.

•  •  •

Leaf spinning over itself.

Blowing across the ground.

Over grass.

Sand.

Edges scratch the dust.

For a moment catches, shelters in the crook of bark.

Root of a tree like knotted wool.

Jumps again.

Comes to rest against the smooth side of a carved stone.

A view down a hill.

Graves all the way.

Beyond, the view—valley stretching, all the way out to the milky sky.

A
PARCEL
was delivered to Festus Ankrah’s post office box at Lutterott Circle. It waited for a while. Other letters piled up on top of it. When Festus Ankrah came to get his mail he saw the parcel but first went through the other envelopes. He opened a few while standing in front of the row of post office boxes, his eyelids dipped in shallow u’s as he sifted through them.

Then he put the other envelopes under his arm and pulled the parcel out. He turned it over. He looked at the return address, the stamp. He put the parcel back and closed the post box door and went away.

The parcel waited a week. Two.

The door opened. Festus Ankrah’s hand came in quickly, found the parcel, and took it out. The door closed.

Festus Ankrah got a taxi up Kojo Thompson and walked the rest of the way home.