Eddie Signwriter (22 page)

WITH SOME DIFFICULTY
he finds the hotel, ten minutes’ walk from the station, in a side street, above a shop. He climbs the stairs to a dimly lit landing. In the back, under the stairs, is a counter, a rack of keys, a light hanging on a wire, and a bell to ring, that brings an attendant out.

“I have a room,” he says.

“What name?” the attendant asks.

He gives the name they’ve told him.

The attendant consults one of the scraps of paper on the counter-top, then brings out a key from under the counter.

“Deux jours en avance,”
the attendant says, and names an unexpectedly high rate. But he doesn’t care. He pays the money, and he takes the key, and finds his room at the end of a windowless corridor on the third floor.

For a day he sleeps. He wakes and eats and washes himself with water from the sink, cleans his clothes with soap, and lays them on the floor where the sun comes through.

The afternoon passes. He has nothing to do. He stands at the
second-floor hotel window, looking out at a strange city. He wonders which way to face. From where will the end of his waiting come?

Here he is no one. He thinks,
If I died on the street nobody would bury me
.

He imagines his mother standing on the stair leading down from the verandah. He imagines her returning into the house, getting on her knees by her bed.

He sits in his room and waits. He waits for a knock on the door. He goes down and asks whether anyone has come for him. He walks round the block so that he can ask again on his return. But it’s always the same:
“Personne. Pas encore”
—he has only to pass through the lobby for the attendant, not looking up, to tell him.

He lies on the bed and smokes cigarette after cigarette as the light comes through the drawn curtains, growing blunt.

He traces the wiring all over the walls, and the scars where the old wiring used to be, like dried rivers.

The mosquito net above the bed is tied in a large knot, hanging from the roof from its hoop. The gathered gauze is looped into a bunch and fastened round itself, so that it looks like a head resting on a shoulder, held in an embrace.

Is it possible his heart will let him off? he wonders, but knows it will not.

He shuts his eyes. He thinks of Celeste—not as he left her, but much before that.

From the first time he saw her.

Turning him into a boy, and her into a schoolgirl, sitting on the edge of a tall chair, flipping her legs while she waited her turn in the Christ Call Ventures Telecentre.

Who was that?
he asks himself.
Who was that
then?

The girl flipping her legs—what was it like
not
to know her?

And he remembers when she stood up from the chair, how he couldn’t stop watching, and missed his turn in the queue. And later, after she’d made her call, how she walked out with a friend, and they were laughing at him, because they’d seen him looking. And how her body had folded in its laughter, and he saw her shoulder blades rise
under the straps of her dress like wings, and how all her movements seemed to join so smoothly together, like a fine cursive hand, like water.

And then he slips over the border of sleep, and is no longer thinking of her at all, but of water itself. Of the sea. How for a moment he’d seen it from the train, after two days of desert, at the end of the journey. And he’d known he was almost done. It had lifted his heart and calmed him. It had made him forget.

Why do I love the sea?
he wonders.

Why? For its completeness, for its adaptability, for being capable of filling any space.

Whenever he thinks of the sea, he feels homesick, though he doesn’t know what for. For a place? For a time in his life? For a time when the sea belonged to him? And he imagines himself standing at the edge of the sea, and thinks that dying would mean no more than wading out into it forever and not coming back.

Each morning he is ready to leave. He goes through his papers, he packs, he washes—but nobody comes. He pays again for his room. A third night. And then a fourth.

Late in the evening he goes out to get supplies—cigarettes, sweets, and water. He gets back after midnight and climbs the stairs beside the concierge’s desk, passing the restaurant on his way to his room. The flowery metal door to the bar is closed. A woman is sitting in the warm room with a glass of wine in front of her. The attendant sits at a table closer to the door.

Can he get a drink, he asks.

The attendant says that the bar is closed now.

“No,” the woman says, “he can come in.” She will give him a drink.

She sounds drunk.

“Open the door,” she says happily from her table, “pull it.”

He tries to pull it but it won’t open.

“No, it is closed,” the attendant says.

He tries to push it and it gives a centimeter or so but no more. The woman gets up and comes to the door. She wears a black jacket and a dress that shines like metal.

She opens the door with a hard pull. Her eagerness startles him momentarily. A man comes out of a door marked “Private” a small distance down the corridor behind him. He turns back to look at the man. They look at each other. The man’s face is saying nothing, not interfering.

“No,” he then decides to say, “I see you are closed. I will come back tomorrow.”

“Yes, we are closed,” the attendant says.

“Never mind,” says the woman, and she steps out of the bar. “Come and sit, I want to talk to you,” she says.

Her hair is braided into slick ringlets.

“What is your name?” she asks. “I am Janet.”

She is smiling and laughing as if she is shy and flustered and overwhelmed. They exchange such facts as where they are from.

“You are alone?” she asks.

He tells her that he is and she laughs.

“You don’t want to have me?” she asks, as if he’s already refused her.

“I cannot,” he tells her.

“And tomorrow?” she asks.

“No,” he says, laughing with embarrassment. “Janet, it cannot happen,” and he pats her leg and gets up and goes to the stairs and starts climbing to his room.

When he turns back he can hear his heart beating in his ears. She has climbed two steps up from the landing, following him.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

He looks at her, and she holds his look, and then drops it and laughs shyly.

They don’t talk again until they are in his room. He sits on the bed and opens his trousers and pushes her head onto him. She runs her mouth along the length of his penis.

Then he suddenly grows fearful that he doesn’t want to do this anymore, but pushes the thought to the back of his mind. How could he say no now? He tells her to stop and to take her dress off and not to bother with anything else.

He stands behind her, reaches down, to his surprise finds her wet, and enters her. Later he comes out of her and he pushes her back down into an arch and enters her anus.

She says “no” softly, but does not try to move. He is holding her lightly. He can feel the resistance of her flesh, but he carries on, lifting his hands up her body and holding her buttocks and pushing her abdomen into the bed.

He starts noticing the tears and flakes in the plaster and buttons in the fake leather bed rest, like small coated chocolates, and then out of the window, the light flashing in the building two blocks away, and then it is all filtered away, and he comes inside of her, and feels his blood banging against his forehead like alcohol.

As he withdraws from her the condom comes off and is left inside her, unpeeling off him as if it were a stocking. The warm smell of her shit rushes up to him, and he begins to weep.

He climbs over her as soon as he can and curls into the corner where the bed meets the wall. She lies there, still, as if she is asleep.

Then he hears her begin to move. Nervously she asks if he is all right. He ignores her. A while later he hears her dressing.

“There is the money on the dresser,” he tells her, and that she must take her price.

He hears her at the dresser and then he hears her close the door behind her, her first few steps, and then her laughter on the stairs.

He is filled with shame. And terror at the thought of her walking around, a packet of his semen buried deep in her body.

It takes a day before he can return to the hotel bar. He arrives early, and watches the Lebanese family that owns the hotel at their table closest to the television. They talk among themselves. The woman and her two sons do their accounts and update the menu prices with black and red pens on pink cards.

It gets dark and people come in, filling the room from the back. They call the waiters and the waiters bring them beers and they talk quietly among themselves.

One waiter stands behind the bar, laughing softly with a man in a shiny shirt. Another sits on the edge of a table, his face looking so
weary. He is surveying the room, waiting like a man waits for boats to return from the sea, waiting and waiting.

He tries to catch the second waiter’s eye. Can the waiter not see that he is just like him? But the waiter will not hold his stare.

Maybe the waiter knows about Janet. Does everyone know about her? But then why do they let her in?

He sees Janet in a corner with a glass of wine. She won’t catch his eye either. He knows that to apologize to her would be absurd, yet that is what he wants to do.

He starts to take his coffee and sees Janet go away with the man in the shiny shirt. The bartenders begin returning glasses to the glass cabinet. The restaurant owner turns the television on and people watch the news.

Later Janet slips back into the restaurant and sits at a table with her back to him.

Should he talk to her? No, leave her.

He finishes his coffee and goes to see if anyone has come for him.

Personne. Pas encore
.

He returns to his room.

He reaches into his trousers. Two eggs in a silk purse. He hears a cat, and a child screaming, happy, gleeful screaming, fearful screaming—he cannot tell—and the sound of a motor turning, dull and repetitive.

AND THEN
the waiting ends. There is a knock on the door. The attendant is standing there. He tells him that somebody is there for him, he should go down. A man is waiting in the lobby, standing against the counter. He is wearing track-suit bottoms and a vest. His head is shaved. There is a scar across his forehead and a blankness in his expression, as if the man has not yet seen him, though he stands
squarely before the man. Then the man extends his hand, which is rough, the grip firm when he takes it. The man guides him with his other hand to the door of the hotel, so that they are standing on the step looking towards the street.

“You are Eddie?” the man asks, in English, not releasing his hand.

“Yes,” he says.

“From?”

“From Accra,” he says. “I am Eddie from Accra.”

He feels the man’s grip relax. “Very fine,” the man says. “I am Adams. I was sent for you.” The man smiles now, there is warmth in his voice, as if they are old friends.

“OK,” the man says, “so get your things.”

When he returns with his bags there is a taxi parked in front of the hotel. The man called Adams sits in the passenger seat, looking towards the door. Adams gestures towards him. He climbs into the back seat and Adams talks to the driver. He catches the French word
aéroport
.

The car begins to move through the traffic. Adams and the driver stare silently ahead. There is no radio in the car. Blue and yellow buses pass by. They skirt the sea, and he realizes how close he has been all that time. The street lights don’t work, and the road is filled with long shadows, as the shapes of people appear in the dusty headlights, and shopfronts flicker past in the light of kerosene lamps, or sticks of pale fluorescent light. Then the traffic thins, and the street lights stop, and they are out of the centre.

He says, “Adams …”

“Yes.”

“We are going to the airport?”

“Somewhere near.”

He waits for Adams to add more, but he doesn’t.

“Ibrahim sent you?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Adams says, then corrects himself to keep him quiet: “Something like that. Why not.”

They travel on, and get caught in the traffic. A slum is on the side of the road. He watches boys playing football in the dusk light,
on a sandy open field crisscrossed by tracks. There are two telephone poles in the middle of the pitch. The cars edge patiently past a cart attached to a donkey that won’t move. Its owner stands above it, beating it.

Then they are past the slums, and the houses grow bigger. There is electric light coming from out of them, there are compounds under construction, and billboards beside the road.

Between a row of houses, he catches a glimpse of what must be the airport. He hears the sound of an idling jet engine. He turns and watches the airport disappear as they pass.

They move off the main road, and come to a row of shops next to a building site, walled by metal sheets. The car stops. Adams pays the driver and opens his door and takes his bag. He follows Adams down the road.

“I am sorry,” Adams says, smiling. He is walking fast, slightly ahead of him. “It is better not to speak too much English in the taxi.”

He tries to keep up with Adams.

“You are Senegalese?” he asks.

“No,” Adams says.

They are in a good neighbourhood. Some houses have tile walls with doorbells, and gardens, and walls. There are very few people on the street. They turn left into an alley. He sees four blocks of houses stretching down the road, bathed in fluorescent light. The only sound is their feet moving over the sand road, and music from a radio, growing closer. They come to a door in the wall, beside a tree, on the left of the alley, on which the lettering on a mural reads “Coiffure Chez Émile,” above a painting of a large electric razor painted in red and black.

A gauze curtain hangs over the door.

“We will talk,” Adams says, and pulls the curtain aside and walks in, and he follows Adams into a barber shop, not much bigger than a cupboard.