Eddie Signwriter (18 page)

“And still you are here,” the teacher says, smiling, when they are standing together.

The teacher’s clothes are crisply ironed, and unwrinkled. He smells of soap, smells cleaned, prepared, everything about him fresh, a man for whom leisure is a thing to dress for, not a thing to be taken idly.

“Well, I have not yet left,” Festus Ankrah replies.

“You mistake me. I am glad you have stayed.”

Festus Ankrah clicks his teeth and looks down the street.

“There’s an hour still until the light is gone,” the teacher says. “I have ordered my car. Come. It will be good for both of us,” then turns and begins to walk without waiting for Festus Ankrah.

The taxi is parked further up the road, in the shade of a ceiba tree. The engine startles into life, then purrs as they approach. Purple blossoms lie on its yellow bonnet. It has been waiting some time.

They climb into the car. The taxi driver looks over his shoulder at Festus Ankrah before they pull off slowly toward the gate. The teacher turns his head and stares through his reflection in the passenger window.

The houses, as they pass, hold the pale, uneven light of paraffin lamps. And then they are out of the town.

They pass along the road that links Akwapakrom with Aburi and beyond. Stretches of forest give way to the intermittent fields, steeples rising beyond them from the banana and palm and mango trees—stone churches built by the Anglicans, brick and tin churches of the Methodists, their windows empty, their roofs thin as gold leaf; and beyond, a hinterland of villages and hamlets, remote from modernity, from electricity and the telephone.

“Where are we going?” Festus Ankrah asks.

“To Daisy’s,” the teacher says, and when Festus Ankrah does not respond, “Nana Oforiwaa’s rest house.”

They travel on in silence.

“I guess it isn’t hers anymore,” the teacher says a few kilometers later, “though it hasn’t yet become someone else’s. Somebody bought it up but still it’s shut. Sometimes tourists find their way up there, the ones with old guidebooks,” and he laughs.

Short of Aburi, at the bottom of a dip in which a stream flows over the road, they turn off and climb slowly up the flank of a valley until they reach its crest and a row of buildings built in amongst the trees.

To one side of the road, rising between a few low clustered dwellings, stands a water tank on five steel legs, reinforced by a web of steel struts and bars, around which creepers have wound their way up to
the cylinder, where small blue flowers, and the red of the rusted steel, show between the leaves.

To the other side, where the land begins to fall away sharply, is a two-story structure, its back to the road.

The car comes to a stop and they get out.

The teacher crosses the road toward the building, Festus Ankrah following closely behind him. A low wire fence separates the house from the road. A gate leads down two steep stairs directly to a doorway.

The teacher steps off the road, a level down to the path that circumnavigates the structure.

There are claw marks in the plaster where a bougainvillea has been cut back, though it covers half the wall, and at least two small windows. The place is still neat, though dereliction hangs about it.

The teacher pauses briefly before the door, then walks round the rest house.

Festus Ankrah follows him. The two men climb onto the verandah, from which the land falls away steeply, and below them stretches a wide valley, out towards the horizon, where the distance sews the fields to the sky.

A naked light bulb hangs like an exclamation mark from a wire swaying from the ceiling in the breeze.

“Someone should really polish this floor,” the teacher says. Cracks have begun to appear like spider’s webs in the concrete.

“This is where your nephew came every day. Right here where we’re standing was a restaurant. Just behind you, your nephew and I and Celeste and Nana Oforiwaa used to take tea. Right here, in this space, where we are. It’s nothing now, but once it was grand. There was a chef that Nana Oforiwaa brought in from the kitchens of the Hilton Hotel down in Accra. The menu was written in English and priced for tourists, except for one sentence in Twi: sixty per cent discount on request.”

Festus Ankrah turns and looks down into the valley. Sunbirds dart through the branches of the giant trees at the end of the plot like ticks.

“This is a beautiful place,” Festus Ankrah says. “It is a pity that the memory of my nephew is so unwelcome here.”

“As you said, the people blame him,” the teacher says, “but that is because they are afraid of what else to blame.”

Festus Ankrah’s silence is an invitation to continue.

The teacher says, “They are afraid to blame Nana Oforiwaa, although they know they should. People saw. They knew. How she was careless of her duties. Forgetful of her position. They want to blame her for her carelessness. But since they also love her, they can’t, and so hate your nephew more.”

The teacher stops. He examines his hands, the soft light flesh of his palms.

“And I too feel something of that,” he says, his voice soft now, “even if I was something of a party to it…. Nana Oforiwaa, she was obsessed with those children. I see that now. She always wanted to be near them. She seemed so strong but really she needed other people.”

“For what?” Festus Ankrah asks coldly.

“Why do we ever need other people?” the teacher says, but knows himself, as the words come out of him, that the question is far more easily evaded than answered, just as he is evading it now.

But what would he say if he had to say?

He tries to think what he thinks.

That he himself had wanted to confront Nana Oforiwaa. That he sensed in her a danger, he sensed in her a desire to own, a covetousness, though what she coveted he could not quite tell. That he wanted to stop her, but did not know what to stop her from.

“Why are we doing this?” he wanted to ask, though always he knew the response he’d receive: Why are we doing
what?

And then he would not be able to answer, because there was no answer that did not incriminate him as well. After all, had it not all happened on his watch too? Was it not he who brought the boy to the rest house in the first place, and soon every day? It was under the supervision of both of them that the children left together, it was both their authority that the children were allowed to defy—the long disappearances, the immunity to school timetables and routines, the silent shaking off of discipline, the known immoralities.

“Your niece …” he gathered the strength to say one day, after they’d seen the children disappear together into the long grass near the southern fence of the rest house, where they would not be able to follow.

Nana Oforiwaa had cut him off: “And your student.”

It had sounded more harsh than she’d intended. She attempted quickly to reassure him, taking his hand in hers, as she had months before on the evening on which they’d made their decision to leave the children to their affair, without so much as speaking a word.

“Life is so empty,” she had said at last, as they’d stood in silence, the wind going through the grass, and then she’d turned away.

“But that is how we know when it is full,” the teacher had replied.

“Yes,” she said, “but I am not sure that for us it will ever be full again,” and began the long slow walk back to the rest house where more than three years later the teacher now stands alone with the uncle of that boy.

“But come,” the teacher says, turning to face Festus Ankrah, “now you have seen this place. It is the scene of many times that were happy in your nephew’s life. Here, at least, your nephew
was
happy.”

Festus Ankrah seems stuck for words.

“You say,” he says at length.

“I do,” the teacher says, and stepping now towards Festus Ankrah, “so let us try to leave as friends.”

Festus Ankrah takes a step back himself.

The teacher says, “What is it?”

“The way you talk,” Festus Ankrah says—hesitates—“what you say, but don’t. It makes me fear that something very wrong has happened here.”

The teacher says, “That is nonsense. Now you sound like the people we have talked about. The ones who blame your nephew,” and Festus Ankrah, seeing the shadow of a smile pass across the teacher’s face, knows he’s been outsmarted.

Without another word he turns and makes his way towards the car.

The teacher watches him go, then walks to the edge of the lawn, now long and mixed with stray plants.

Hands in his pockets, shoulders squared, he looks over the valley,
remembering how from up here he and Nana Oforiwaa had sometimes watched the storms approaching from a distance. First the smell, then the diagonal sheets of rain, then the darkness coming from all around.

Though on the day that Nana Oforiwaa died the sky had started clear. The sky had been beautiful, completely unaware of what it soon would become.

THURSDAY MORNING
.

Eating a meal of bread and jam and coffee at the small table under the window, Festus Ankrah faces the prospect of defeat. Why is he here? Why has he stayed? His nephew is gone. Nobody here can help him find the boy. Would they, even if they could?

He thinks:
What do I know? What could I ever know? How much more than the daily acts of being me, not some other me; what more can I claim as my own?

Nothing? Or something yet?

He waits for the answers to come.

Something in between.

To have seen a place, lived a little in a place, know the shape of the land and the smell of the air, to have the same things inside you as somebody else—is this not also knowledge? Is this not also sharing?

He thinks of what he can do. What clues has his nephew left him?

Then he remembers the Presbyterian church and the reading room next door—the only place he can recall his nephew mentioning specifically from the days they’d lived together. They used to meet there—his nephew and Celeste, where all the children of the school used to get away to meet, on the pretext of needing to consult a book that wasn’t available in the school’s library.

He sets out to find it, and later that afternoon does.

To an outsider there is nothing grand about the church. But he
tries to imagine it as people would in whose lives it is part of the daily geography: the prefabricated concrete fence, gray with rain and moss, the neat enclosed yard, the tall blunt steeple nudging the sky, with its clock face like a child’s wristwatch.

And then the rain strikes, and he realizes how caught up in his own thoughts he must have been not to see it coming.

At the first gust people scatter, heading for cover. People are shouting, calling each other toward shelter, laughing at their helplessness in the rain, at the rain itself, but no one calls to Festus Ankrah, and nor does he expect it.

Still, he too starts running in the direction of the plantation and the hill down which he’d come on his way earlier in the afternoon—not because it would make a difference to him now, but so the people do not see him walking and know why.

When he reaches the plantation he stops running. The sand has turned to mud, but the stones and gravel keep the path firm, and he makes his way slowly up the steep hill, the steam now rising from him, rivulets about his feet and the deafening sound all around as the rain pounds on the trees and bows the palms and gathers and flows down the fleshy stems from the reservoirs of the banana leaves.

He’s heard it said, but now he knows for himself the suddenness of the weather in the hills. He’d seen the clouds come over, hard, blue-edged, then the sky turn to milk, though still he thought there’d be an hour or so in it. But with hardly a warning the storm had come in—just a single gust of wet choking air before it hit.

So now I know
, he thinks—how easy it is for somebody to be caught in such a storm, to lose their footing on a muddy river bank, to fall down the side of a hill, to strike a rock with their head and drown.

By now the rain is streaming over him, warm to the skin as long as he moves. He can feel the suck and release of the soles of his feet against the leather of his shoes as his feet lift from the ground.

Steadily he makes his way on through the rain. The gradient of the hill is now in the muscles of his thighs, and the back of his throat is raw and tastes of copper, and he concentrates on maintaining the rhythm of his walking so as not to think of either.

At last he nears the bungalows that separate the plantation from
the road. He can see it fifty paces above, with a fine mist of raindrops dancing on the macadam. When he gets there he will turn left, and by that route return back to the hotel. This is what he is thinking when a voice calls out to him.

“This way.”

It is a woman’s voice, an old voice.

He stops, and when he stops the rhythm of his walking is broken, and it feels as if he can go no further. He looks to where the voice has come from. He stands beside a balcony, closed on three sides with the fourth open to the alleyway. In the dim light cast by the fire lit in an old liter tin, he can see the shapes of people. He approaches, and as he does, his eyes adjust, and he sees that it is only one person—an old woman, sitting on a concrete bench built into the back wall.

“I am saying you should come this way from the rain.”

He hesitates. He thinks:
I can be in my room in twenty minutes
—but already he is climbing up the stairs. As he does it occurs to him that he is not doing this for himself at all, but for the woman, whose voice seems to want his presence. He thinks how absurd it is—it is merely an offer of kindness, the tone of asking a formality—and how absurd he is. And how he really wanted to say no, but somehow feels a responsibility to a stranger who seeks to give him shelter.

As he approaches he sees that the woman is not alone. She is seated, and a child stands against her knees, and a dog the size of a sack of potatoes lies with its back to the burning tin, warming itself, asleep.

The woman nods at him.

The bench is L-shaped, and Festus Ankrah takes a seat facing the woman and the child. The woman, watching him sit, gestures to a piece of cloth on the balcony wall.