Reading the Ceiling (4 page)

I feel empty. Reuben has not brought knowledge.

Remi's reaction is what I would have expected.

‘Lord have mercy! With Reuben!'

She shakes her head, covers her eyes with one hand. She opens her mouth, closes it again. She holds her chin with her left hand to ponder, and then asks, ‘What was it like?'

I twist my mouth in response. Yes. With Reuben.

‘When my dad came to pick me up, he thought you'd want a lift. He wondered who you went home with. And whether your mother knew.'

‘So what did you say to him?'

‘That I didn't know.' She pauses and scratches her nose, ‘But I thought Yuan was the one. How on earth did you end up with . . .?'

She shuts up when she sees my face.

On one of the days when I spend more of my time in my bed than anywhere else, Aunt K comes around. I hear her way down the corridor, talking to Kainde.

‘
Watin do am
? What's wrong with her? Boy trouble? You say
boy
? Let me go talk with her.'

Her footsteps accompany her comments to Kainde. ‘There are certain things in life you shouldn't hurry along. Look at Aunty Beedi – it wasn't until she was in her fifties that she found someone to settle down with. That's the kind of thing that's enough to make anyone live long. Look at her, she's just like a young girl now. Her face is fresh, she's always giggling when I meet her out shopping.'

She stops outside my door. ‘
Which borbor dis
? Which boy? You don't know? She didn't say? You're her sister – you should talk to her. I won't always be around, you know.' She raps on my door, three sharp ones. She enters my room and says, ‘
Comut dooyah
. Open up. I have something to say to you. Might as well let me in now, or I'll shout it out in the corridor. Right here where I'm standing.'

I get up to let her in. My door has been locked, key-locked, all day.

*

After Aunt K leaves, my mother delivers two weak taps on my door.

‘Yes, Ma,' my dry throat scrapes out as an answer.

She says, ‘I heard Kiki in the corridor. About you having boy trouble. I've talked to you about this kind of thing before.' Her voice sounds odd, a bit higher in pitch than usual. Ma breathes deep at the end of her sentence.

‘I'm OK. It was just Kainde telling tales.'

‘So there's nothing I should worry about? Nothing I should know?'

‘No, Ma, nothing.'

‘Don't forgot what I've told you.'

‘I know, Ma, men are only after one thing.'

‘That's right. And when they get it, they don't stay.'

At the door, she grabs the handle. She goes out but her footsteps do not go away. How can she ever begin to understand what it's like inside me? I scowl at the shadow of her legs falling in two thick lines on the little crack of air under my door. She stands there as I listen to her listening for me.

Amina barges into my bedroom the next day. ‘Why didn't you ring me back?'

Her arms move to rest on her hips, akimbo. I know what she's staring at. My hair is sticking up on end. My eyes are puffy and my cheeks ashed grey. I am in a pair of tartan flannel pyjamas.

‘What's up with you? Yuan's going stirfry crazy. And here you are looking all rough.'

‘You're good friends now, are you?'

‘We talk. He's pretty cool.'

‘I saw you kiss him at the disco.'

‘Oh. Is that what this is all about then?'

Her raised eyebrows. Her scrunched-up face with the questioning look. Her you-stupid-girl shake of her head. ‘I know you like him. There are lots of men and boys out there. I don't need Yuan.'

I burst into tears.

‘Look, you know I fool around. I kissed him on a dare that's all. It means nothing.' Amina throws herself on to the end of my bed, and leans on one elbow watching me sob myself into my pillow. ‘Pull yourself together. It's not the end of the world you know.'

**Three days later, I start to come out of my room more often to face the world with its bright shining sun. Reuben calls on a day I'm closest to the phone and I pick up.

‘Ha-hallo. That sounds like you, Ayodele,' he starts.

‘Yes, it is.'

‘I've been phoning . . .'

‘And I've got the messages.'

‘Ah I wondered whether you'd like to go for a +charwarma  or something?'

‘Not today, thanks.'

‘Perhaps another time?'

‘Perhaps.'

By Thursday the following week, my head is in a twist. I chose the guy I didn't want, and am now ignoring the one I did want. I feel stupid.

We are about to go for our end-of-year, end-of-school picnic party. This is our very last time together as a class. I am late on purpose, having asked Amina and Remi to save me a seat. Although we were all allowed to bring one guest, most of us haven't bothered. Remi has invited Kojo, her boyfriend, and he will be driving up to meet us later.

Reuben finds me as soon as I arrive and comes up to grin and mumble a few words.

‘You're looking nice,' he says, but his eyes do not quite know where to look on my body. They jump from my face to my boobs, then my feet. He stares at my leather flipflops while I think up an answer.

‘Thank you' is the best I can do.

His eyes flicker back up to mine and then stare past my right ear towards the main school entrance, where our rowdy, chattering friends wait. ‘Which bus are you going in?'

‘That one. With Remi and Amina.'

His hands find his pockets. ‘Just wondered, whether. Um. You'd like us to sit together?'

‘Thanks but the others are waiting for me.'

His eyes shift past my face to a spot beyond my left ear. ‘See you then.'

Most of us are wearing jeans, khaki trousers or shorts. Amina's version of our teenage uniform is tight, tight, dark, dark drainpipe jeans with a loose T-shirt screaming ‘babe'. I see her clambering into the bus, squealing about something or other, as she usually does.

We are going to a tiny village up past Pirang. Mrs Foon, a teacher at our school, has relatives who own a farm by the river. The buses have come to pick us up on the forecourt of our school. We are waiting for the drivers to be given final instructions. Everyone is trying to find someone they'd like to sit next to. Stragglers jostle for improved bus seats. An hour later, we're crammed into the two buses. They ease out through the front gate, past COAST HIGH SCHOOL written out in red china grass against a patchy bit of lawn, onto the road to start our journey. We're taking everything we need for our party. There are plastic sacks of ice stuffed into metal bins for our drinks. A couple of car batteries to power the music and small speakers. Half a tin drum, cut lengthways, that will be our BBQ. Bags of charcoal. Lots of crates of soft drinks with a few stray ones of Julbrew beer – our teachers have acknowledged that we are, after all, now officially Grown Up. We have cane mats and +malans  to spread out on the ground. There are vats of seasoned chicken, and half a sheep, potatoes, plantains, baskets of mangoes, and drifts of lettuce leaves.

Moira, Remi and Yuan got into the bus early, and picked the best spot – the row of five seats in the back.

I sit next to Amina, who declares, ‘Could not find anyone young enough to invite who wasn't coming already, so I came on my own.'

Remi says, ‘Why am I not surprised?'

‘Yeah,' Yuan says, ‘you mix in different circles, Amina.'

‘And those friends won't want to come to a boring sixth-form party,' Moira adds.

I know Yuan senses something is different about me. He leaves his eyes on my mouth when he looks at me. I find I cannot keep my eyes on his whenever they meet.

We drive past groyned beaches and sleepy casuarinas, past huddles of stalls by the roadside at Serrekunda, and newly built Amadiya mosques. The road is fine until we get past Brikama, when it becomes dusty tarmac with many generous potholes, accompanied by two parallel lanes of laterite carved out on either side by weary drivers. Rain-worked ravines hurry across the road. The bus tilts over each bump.

There's talk of university, some drifting towards us at the back before being snatched away by wind through the open windows.

‘I've had enough of studying,' says Remi. ‘Kojo will have to earn all the money.'

‘So he becomes a doctor and you become a wife?' asks Amina.

‘Any problem with that?' Remi asks, her voice sharp.

Moira sighs and asks, ‘And you, Yuan, what will you do?'

‘I've applied to a couple of universities in America to please my parents, but as I keep telling them, Europe will be a lot closer. I'd rather go to England.'

‘I know I won't be able to go to England without a scholarship, even if I get the university place,' I say.

‘All this England, England. Why not try further afield? I want to go somewhere where no one else is going, like Italy or Singapore,' says Amina.

‘I want to work, start earning some real money,' says Moira.

‘I wonder where we'll all end up,' I say.

Elsewhere on the bus, there are occasional bouts of laughter, raucous shouts across the aisle. ‘Pipe down,' says Mrs Foon, ‘you're almost grownups.'

We turn to stare out of the back windscreen. An outrider in a blue security service uniform speeds towards us flashing blue. His motorbike steadily gains on us, stirring up a blanket of red dust. It appears he wants us to get off the makeshift laterite road, and stop on the potholed tarmac. The driver turns the engine off in protest.

The outrider pulls up next to the driver. ‘Get off the road, the president's coming.'

‘I'm already off it, so he can stay in the middle.'

‘Don't be cheeky. The president needs a smooth ride. Get back on the tarmac.'

‘That's not so easy here – look at that huge hump at the side.'

‘Get off soon, and show proper respect. Or the next outrider will make sure you're sorry.'

We crowd on the driver's side of the bus, gawping at the leather-booted man in a moonscape helmet.

Amina stands up on her seat, her tight-packed rounded bum hovering north of Yuan's spiky head. She yells out of the window, ‘Is Mr Bojang in the car with the president?'

The outrider turns to her and replies, ‘What's it to you?' before gunning his engine and giving us a blast of processed petrol.

‘How do you know a Mr Bojang, in with the president?' Yuan asks.

‘I get around.'

It doesn't take long to get the story out of her.

‘I met him at Landing's a couple of months ago. He happens to like schoolgirls.' She puts on her cheeky grin and her eyes spray sparks of merriment. ‘He thinks his power and money will buy him anyone.'

‘But you showed him otherwise, right?'

‘You bet. Men are so stupid – not you, Yuan, you are perfect. They think a flash of dalasi and a flag with the president's seal on it are all it takes to sniff a girl's underwear.'

‘You should be careful. What if he'd turned nasty?'

‘Nasty? In a place as public as Landing's? No chance. I teased him a bit, let him buy me a drink and then went off to close-dance with someone else. Soon enough, some skinny girls were on to him. They looked young, so I think they diverted his attention from me.'

‘All these stories, Amina!'

‘I bet you have a few of your own. Go on, tell.'

‘I'm sure our lives will never be as exciting as yours,' says Yuan, looking at me.

**We have arrived at the farm, and hauled our communal picnic into the shade of an enormous mango tree, off season, with huge glossy leaves and coarse-thighed buttresses off its trunk. Remi and Moira start to spread out mats and pillows, trays and cups.

A few fishermen are offering boat rides off a shaky-looking jetty – built of planks made from the insides of coconut palm, sodden with brackish water. Tongues of river lick the sides of the canoes, hollowed-out trunks that can take three or perhaps four slim people at a time. Amina and Yuan dare me to join them. We leave the other two to the unpacking.

The boat trip itself is without incident. The fisherman uses a long pole to ease us away from the bank. Stretches of bare mangrove roots above the surface of the water breathe in air without a shudder. Once we are in the little tributary, with the mangrove on both sides, voices from our picnic site get rubbed away by our distance. All we can hear are bird noises. Clusters of river oysters have crusted onto the mangrove. The fisherman splashes his paddle past a group of women up to their waists in water. They wield large blades, prising the oysters off with hands thickened from years of doing the same thing.

Even Amina falls silent, letting her hand trail through the water.

‘Watch out, it might be sweet enough for crocodiles,' Yuan says to her.

‘Don't be silly,' she replies, but she takes her hand out, sprinkling the river water at Yuan.

She makes it all look so easy, this mucking about with boys, this ease at being around them.

When we get back to the jetty, the others get out first as they are nearer the front. When I stand up, the canoe suddenly tips to one side.

‘
Togall,
' shouts the boatman.

‘Move your weight,' yells Yuan.

Do I sit, stand, move or keep still? In the seconds it takes me to decide I don't quite know what to do, the boat loses its balance under me. I fall backwards, away from the jetty, into deep water. It is thickly brown. I cannot feel which way is up. I cannot see the bubbles I blow out. I thrash about at first, and manage to bring my head above water, but when I open my mouth, all it seems to do is swallow. I know I can swim, but it takes a full sharp-edged minute before I can convince my body it needs to let the water carry it. Then my foot touches something hard and slimy. A scream boils free from my body. My arms start to punch the water again, my feet kicking.