Eddie Signwriter (7 page)

She’d gathered herself.

“Of what?” she said.

He had no reply.

She started to walk.

“Miss, please,” he said, “what is your name?” though already he knew it.

Her name was Celeste. She was the daughter of Nana Oforiwaa’s brother, who had died. Nobody spoke of her mother, or of her mother’s family. Celeste attended the school during the day, and would spend afternoons in one of the girls’ dormitories until her aunt’s driver would come to pick her up at around four p.m., and take her back to her aunt’s rest house.

Many times over the following weeks he would make the trip to visit Celeste at the girls’ dormitories. To get there unseen he had to pass through an overgrown garden beneath the administrative building, and down a steep embankment with a stream at the bottom. A path up the opposite embankment, through low weeds and bushes, would bring him to the regular path, lined by banana trees. From here he’d be able to see the first of the three girls’ dormitories—all of them out of bounds to boys—spread out in a single clearing.

The dormitories were neat double-story buildings with balconies that kept the rooms shaded on both floors. Trees were planted at equal distance around them. Lines were strung between them, and girls’ clothes would swell up with the shape of the wind, behind which he could hope to take some cover in his final approach.

Looking back, he’d realize that the fear of being caught with which he continued to approach the dormitories on each visit was ridiculous. His visits could never have been a secret from anyone. The wonder was why nobody ever stopped him.

He was, in fact, caught on his very first attempt, though never after that. Emerging that afternoon from behind the sixth form’s billowing skirts, he walked straight into the head of house, waiting in the dormitory doorway. He could see she’d been watching him for some time. But he was prepared for this. Before she could inform him of the rules he’d broken, he stated his business.

“I have come to see Celeste,” he said in the tone he’d heard his mother use with traders in the streets of Accra.

The girl considered, then relenting in the face of such plain foolishness, turned and led him through a corridor to a courtyard in the middle of the building, where Celeste stood taking sheets from a large red plastic basket and folding them into neat squares.

He had a couple of sentences ready about the reason for his visit, which he said more or less to plan. And then it was over and he was standing at her side. He was talking of ordinary things while she continued to work, and he watched her work, and the blood knocking in his head began to return to his heart.

It was a place he came to know well. The stone bench at which Celeste would be working, halfway along one of the inner walls of the quadrangle, in the shade of an old tree that had grown too large and wild for the square, and had already been cut away from some of the windows on the second floor.

They did not address each other by name in those first meetings, and he didn’t think she even knew his until he was formally introduced by her aunt a number of weeks later. She was very plain about him being there. She did not make him justify himself and stopped him when he tried. For his part he tried not to come too often. Once or twice a week. But he would always come at the same time. She would always be in the courtyard and the conversation would carry on until the red plastic basket was empty and all the sheets were folded. And then she would take the sheets from the table and pile them back in the basket, and she would smile at him. A kind, friendly smile, though also distant, and uncommitted—a smile she would give to an old woman or a puppy. But it did not matter, since the smile was at him.

Time, during those visits, seemed to move very slowly. It was almost as if he could see the light moving through the branches and leaves, moving along the sand floor towards them. He would see it on the edge of the sheets. And then it would rise up onto them, over the surface of her hands and her face and her hair, and for the first time he would begin to collect in his head all the small details about her. Mostly she did not look at him while she worked and so he could look at her and feel unseen. Later it reminded him—although not at the time, since he had never seen such a thing—of how a young woman
will turn her head away the first time she is naked in front of a man. Consenting to it, but still withholding her participation in the act of being seen.

Those drifting, lazy conversations, which seemed to promise so much just because they were happening, he would remember as the most intimate times of his knowing Celeste. When what they looked like was what they really were: a boy and a girl in a courtyard, talking under a tree. The girl sitting with her head bowed, the boy’s hands at his side. Nothing else around them.

Though later he would question this vision of privacy, replacing it in his mind with a different image, in which they were not alone, but were surrounded by people, as in fact they must have been during those visits. By one, two, a hundred other girls. All of them like her, though none of them her precisely. And in the knowledge of that certainty, he would have to fight hard to keep Celeste there with him—sitting at the bench folding sheets. To stop her floating up to join the watchers. He would have to fight to justify there being her and not somebody else. To give her reality independent of himself, when he had left that place so long before and so many others had been at his side.

ALL THROUGH THE TIME
he was visiting Celeste alone in the courtyard of the girls’ dormitory he continued to see the teacher. Though they talked about many things, the boy did not mention her, nor her aunt, nor the visit they’d made together to Nana Oforiwaa’s rest house. It was the teacher who first brought them up.

This was eight weeks or so since their first visit. They were sitting in the teacher’s living room. The teacher had tea. The boy had a cup of orange juice.

“I was thinking we could visit the rest house again,” the teacher said. “What do you say?”

“Why not,” he said, watching the teacher.

“Tomorrow then. Friday,” the teacher said. “I’ll let you know.”

And he did the next morning. A small boy brought a message to him to meet the teacher after classes. Later that day they took the taxi to Aburi as they had five weeks before.

It was all the same as the first time they’d gone there. The silent ride along the ridge road, the towns, the forest, the churches—except this time the rest house was open. They entered from the front, walking through to the verandah overlooking the valley. Immediately the boy could see that Nana Oforiwaa, seated at her table, was not alone. Her niece stood beside her.

As they approached, Celeste bent down to whisper in her aunt’s ear, her hands held together in the small of her back, bent at her waist, her head tilted. She spoke a few words, and Nana Oforiwaa turned towards them. As Nana Oforiwaa stood up Celeste took a small step backwards, her eyes lowered. He did not see Celeste’s face until they were all standing together, and the teacher greeted her, and she looked up to return his greeting.

“Edward,” Nana Oforiwaa said, “do you know my child, Celeste? You are students together. In the same year.”

“I do know her,” he said.

Celeste had changed out of her school clothes and wore a loose patterned dress, a necklace of wooden beads, and nothing on her feet. It was the first time he’d seen her in anything but her regulation brown pinafore.

They exchanged greetings.

He wondered if Celeste had known he would be coming. It was the greeting of strangers, except that he could see her hands were shaking as they all sat down.

Nana Oforiwaa poured lemonade from a jug. They drank, and things were said that didn’t mean a whole lot, and after a while Nana Oforiwaa suggested that her niece show him the gardens, which was a thing she was sure he had not seen before, so that she and the teacher could attend to issues that didn’t concern them.

Nana Oforiwaa was right. He had never seen such a place before. Big and quiet, with its hills, filled with trees from around the world—
so many that when the wind blew it sounded like a storm. Most were identified on small plaques, with names in Latin and English, and a brief description: fan palms from Guinea and Kenya, fishtail palms from Burma, spine palms from South America, with their toothpick fronds, cane palms from India, a Malagasy traveler’s tree.

In the middle of the gardens was the rusting shell of a military helicopter, placed on a mound in a clearing, and used by the visiting children as a jungle gym. Its nose was split open like a pod, and birds and lizards the size of a person’s hand scurried round its carcass. Its shell was broken and peeling away, and its rotors were sagging, and its frozen hydraulics were cracked by the rust.

Many of these things he saw for the first time that day, walking round the grounds with Celeste, over the hills, into the groves, past the destroyed helicopter. The garden was her backyard. It was where she’d grown up, and as they walked she talked of the time she’d spent here, and the memories it was filled with. A childhood fall near the southern gate that cut her chin. The grass where she’d played in the shade of the Japanese cypress as her aunt would sit reading. The carcass of the helicopter she knew better than her own closets. The silk cotton tree, where she’d read to herself, hidden in the tresses of its giant roots.

It was, he realized, a childhood spent on her own. She mentioned no playmates. The only company she spoke of was her aunt’s. But she never was lonely, she said. She needed nothing else.

“You must be close,” he said.

“Yes,” she told him, “we have been.”

He thought she was going to say something more, but when she spoke again it was to tell him the properties of the medicinal plants where he was standing, as the groundsmen had taught her many years before.

So the afternoon passed. The light began to fade and though he was conscious of the time he sensed she was not. He said nothing, letting her take him on through the grounds, further and further from the rest house. The longer his walk, the more she’d say, and the more, he thought, she’d make herself his.

And then, unexpectedly, they came round through a grove of trees
and he realized they’d been returning all the while. A few paces off was the gate through the garden fence, exactly where they’d started a few hours before. Celeste moved to unfix the lock, which she’d left half-closed.

“Well done,” he said.

She opened the gate, and as he passed through, smiled.

By the time they were back in the rest house night had already settled in. The lights in the restaurant hung down from the ceiling on wires, casting shadows round the verandah. Nana Oforiwaa was waiting for them. His untouched glass still stood on the uncleared table where they’d sat.

“You two must have had a lot to say,” Nana Oforiwaa said. She had her reading glasses on.

“Yes, Nana,” Celeste replied softly.

The teacher had already gone, Nana Oforiwaa told them. “My driver will take you home,” she said to the boy.

And then Celeste realized she’d forgotten the long-sleeve shirt she’d taken with her, and he remembered her draping it over the back of the bench close to the gate where they’d sat at some point in the afternoon. He offered to go get it back, and Nana Oforiwaa thanked him, and so he retraced his steps to the gate.

Though closed, Celeste had left it unlocked, and he went through alone into the garden, which the night had turned into a series of dark shapes retreating into the distance. It was cooler and only the sound of insect wings and wind in the leaves remained. He found his way to the bench and returned as quickly as he could.

When he came up the stairs ten minutes later, relieved to be back, the two of them were standing, waiting for him. He was happy, he could feel himself smiling as the two women watched him climbing the stairs. The expressions on their faces, he hardly noticed—whether they were smiling, or one was smiling and the other wasn’t, or whether something completely different was happening.

Only when he got to the top of the step did they begin to move: Celeste turned and walked into the house without looking at him or saying a word. Nana Oforiwaa stepped forward. And though it was
only her hand that touched him—guiding him at his elbow as she turned him towards the driveway, and the waiting car—he felt her presence close round him like an embrace.

SOON HE BEGAN
to receive regular invitations to join the teacher on his trips to the rest house. No reasons were given and he had no intention of questioning his good luck. At first there were messages from the teacher, which were brought to him wherever he was by a younger boy. Later Nana Oforiwaa started inviting him herself, always to join them for the afternoon, though inevitably the visits would extend into the evenings, or the whole day on a weekend.

As time passed he grew used to the routines of the rest house. The long slow afternoons when he usually arrived, when the tablecloths had just been laid out on the grass to dry—it was something to see, if you passed by from the main road, with the purple and green batiks covering the slopes of the garden leading to the forest.

Then, in the late afternoons, preparations would begin for the meals. Ingredients would be delivered, and the chopping would start, the tables were laid, and the smells of the spices and the sound of pounding and frying, and the gossiping and laughter of the cooks would drift over the empty balcony.

Guests started coming at six p.m. Often there were tourists. They came in busloads, with their foreign currency and their taste for soft drinks and local beer, which Nana Oforiwaa overpriced scandalously and became relatively rich by.

But most of the clientele were from the towns around, in which there were many prominent people with interests, and retired teachers, and civil servants with pensions. Or else—especially on the weekends—from Accra: the pleasure seekers escaping the heat, who came to visit the garden, stay in the hotels, drink the palm wine, and see the waterfalls
and streams that were all around the region, and often would stay at the restaurant until after closing time, when Nana Oforiwaa had them pile up their dishes in the sinks out back as they left, leaving the rest for the lizards and birds.