Eddie Signwriter (13 page)

As he walked an old beggar, a bundle of rags covering a man, passing in the same direction, began talking to him. In his broken mouth the words slid around like mud and stones.

“I cannot understand you,” he said to the beggar in Ga. The beggar began to speak in broken English. The boy could not tell whether it was an insult or a mistake.

The boy tried Twi, the local dialect. But the man insisted on replying in English.

The boy felt hatred well inside himself. Hatred of the man. Of his own inability to understand the man in his own language. Of the squalour and struggle and meanness of life around him.

He wanted to be out of it, he wanted the quietness and the empty space and the slow light air that he’d known from before, from another time of his life.

“Which country are you from?” the beggar asked in English, his voice curling with scorn.

The boy noticed that all the beggar’s teeth were missing on one side, from incisor to molars. His tongue flapped over the gum.

The boy had to get away.

He ran, breaking left to escape the man, down the road he had just passed, before the beggar could make even the smallest grunt of departure. He ran towards Castle Street, along the side of the road, risking traffic all the way down Tudu Street, and almost knocking down a bystander at the corner of the vegetable market.

T
HE YOUNG SIGNWRITER
stands in the door of his shop, surrounded by his paints and his boards, looking out over the yard.

It is 1996. He is twenty years old.

In the shack to his left, the locksmith is grinding keys. His eyes are pinched as he works, and there are fine specks of copper in the sweat of his face.

To his right, the shop of the stamp maker is empty, though the shutters are tied back, and pages flip over in an open receipt ledger.

The prostitutes are still asleep in the wooden lean-tos opposite, their boots on top of their zinc roof. The washerwomen have left some time before, and the passageway is wet with soap and water from the clothes they have pounded on the concrete.

From the street, which is joined to the yard by an L-shaped corridor, come the sounds of the neighbourhood. In the pavement market outside girls are selling banku and rice from pots on their heads. The barbers sit in the shade of the trees playing checkers as they wait for clients. Further on there is a school, painted yellow and gray,
from which the children’s distant voices drift like birds, and next to that are the stalls of the petrol bootleggers and mechanical-parts merchants.

All the while the locksmith has not stopped working, although he knows he is being observed. He lets a few moments pass, then lifts his eyes towards the young signwriter’s shed. He can see nothing in the darkness of the doorway, though he can hear the signwriter in the creaking wood, shifting on the balls of his feet.

“It’s a fine afternoon to be doing God’s work,” the locksmith says aloud.

There is no response.

It does not surprise him. They are all used to the signwriter’s ways.

The locksmith’s grinding wheel begins to slow. He removes his key from the vise, passes a steel brush over its new edge, and holds it up to the light for inspection. Then he slips it into a small brown envelope, on which he carefully writes some words, sits down and begins to hum.

More than a minute has passed before the signwriter’s voice comes from inside the shed: “A fine day,” it says.

The locksmith raises his eyebrows—this is more than the signwriter has said to any of them in a while—and he smiles.

Though the signwriter is part of their small corner of the district, his neighbours rarely see him and speak with him even less. What they know about him can be summed up in a short conversation. The length of time he’s been there: around eighteen months. The trade name by which he goes, painted above the lintel of his door in simple block letters: Eddie Signwriter. That his business is brisk. That he always pays his rent on time. That he grew up outside the country. That his Twi is not altogether fluent. That he lives with his uncle. That he has no friends. That some people say a young woman has been living with the two of them—him and his uncle—for at least a year, though nobody can remember seeing her.

Most of his time, when the signwriter is not away painting, he spends inside his shed, with the door closed and the windows hinged, sometimes into the late evening, well after the prostitutes have
woken up and gone off for the night’s business, and the stamp maker, the locksmith, and the washerwomen have gone back to their homes.

Though often he will come out for a few minutes just before closing time. He’ll sit on the bench outside his shed and mix paint in a tin with a stick, or write in one of his notebooks, or sometimes simply sit there with no clear reason other than to say by his presence that he is the signwriter and this is his shed, and to share with his neighbours, in the way he is capable, their company.

It is a gesture they appreciate. And because of it, they have grown protective of his awkwardness. They speak kindly of him. They do him favours in his absence, often taking messages from clients, slipping small pieces of paper under his door to let him know who has come by.

And so he is largely invisible in the life of the district. When he walks through the streets, he does so unnoticed. He is not distinctive in his looks. When he changes out of his painting clothes, and moves about with his distracted shuffling stride, he looks like any labourer, tired after a day of lifting heavy things for little money.

His signs, however, are famous across the town.

Sometimes his lettering is crisp and precise; other times loose and flowing, as if twisting itself from the paint. His figures, especially the women, are full and fleshy, like ripe fruit. In his painting he is playful. He hides jokes in his backgrounds, or tells stories across multiple commissions, with the same characters advertising hair braids here, or a telecentre there. And because he can paint excellent likenesses, his clients often find images of themselves, or of local personages, featured in their signs.

Though he never signs his paintings, everyone knows when a new one has been commissioned.

His mural of the child under a sofa.

The man in the mirror shop, torn in two by his own reflection.

The preacher woman, welcoming people to church, robes flowing down her body, rich and purple like the colour of a ripe bruise, her arms thrown back, a great generous smile, as if all her teeth are for sale, her eyes two joyful asterisks.

A giant mattress for a bedding shop, floating out on the sea, two figures seated on the fully made bed, their feet distorted in the still water, each looking away.

People will walk across a suburb to see such murals and signs. Children will stand on the pavement in groups. Old ladies will pause on their rounds. And dogs will be beaten if they try to piss against the walls where his latest work has gone up.

Some think he must have grown rich from his signwriting. If it’s true, he doesn’t show it.

“The money comes into your hand for something,” he says. “You must know how to reward that money,” and he continues to work hard, and live his modest life, without anyone knowing much more about him than what they see.

IN THE FIRST LETTER
he received she wrote that she hoped he had not forgotten her so soon, and that he still thought of her from time to time, and that he didn’t mind her contacting him again.

In his letter back he apologized for not responding immediately. He said that he was sorry for the trouble he must have caused her. He was sorry about what had happened to her aunt. He hoped she could forgive him, and that she was with people who cared for her and that she was happy.

In her response to his letter she said that she did not blame him, and that she never had. She said that it was a great sorrow to lose her aunt, but the sorrow in fact was for a loss that she’d suffered before Nana Oforiwaa died. She said that she lived with elderly cousins in Kumasi. That the conditions were quite poor. She said that she’d lost a year of her schooling, but had started her final year again at St. Margaret’s Convent School for Girls and that she had graduated. She said that she was working as a seamstress for a woman in the church.

Again he apologized for the delay in his response. He wrote that he was not surprised that she had finished school, and that she was very smart, and that he hoped she would continue to study. He himself had never been one much for learning, but it did not stop him from admiring those who were. He told her that he lived in Accra with an uncle and that he still saw his mother and his brothers and sisters, but the things that had happened had brought shame upon the family, and it was difficult for them to accept him now, and that it was fairer to them to stay away. He said that he had a job, that he enjoyed it, that it paid well enough, and that it meant a lot to him to be able to make for himself and depend on nobody.

She sent a photograph in the next letter. She’d cut out the image of herself from a larger photo, from which he could make out that she was sitting at a table with a group of people. She was looking beyond the camera, a little to the left of the photographer, a pensive smile on her face. Her long delicate hands were folded calmly, the one over the other. She explained that the picture was taken at her workplace. She said a few words about the people she worked with, who were connected to the church in various ways. She said they were kind, but that they were all much older than her. She said that most evenings she returned to her cousins’ house, and that after dinner and prayer they went to bed early, and how boring this must sound to him, who was living in the capital, and did he like it, and did he go out a lot?

In his response he said that his job allowed him to move all around the city, which gave him the opportunity to know it very well, and that in fact he loved it. He said that from a distance the city all looks the same, but that every area was different, and because of his job nobody bothered him much and he saw a great deal, and that, in fact, was what he really wanted to do—to see the world, to see what was in it. He thanked her for the photo. He told her that seeing her photo reminded him of the crazy things they had done together. He said that he hoped it was not wrong to look back on those times with some fondness, which he could not help doing when he saw her face again. He wished her well. He told her he hoped that she too could take with her something good from the past.

In her letter back to him she thanked him for his kind words. She hoped that he did not mind her speaking openly with him, that her instinct told her not to, but she could not stop herself. Yes, she too thought about the past. Sometimes with happiness, and other times with sadness because it felt to her as if she had been cheated. If he’d loved her then, why had he not tried to contact her, or at least send her word, or in any way enquire about how she was? She knew that the time they had been together before probably did not seem significant to him now—now that he had a fancy office job and was a man about the town, but it had been significant to her. How could it not? She apologized if she sounded angry, and assured him that she was not, that she didn’t want anything from him. Only it was important for her to know that what meant so much to her meant as much to him, or
had
meant as much to him. “Your dear friend,” she wrote, “Celeste.”

His letter dated 13 June, which he sent after three months of silence, read in full, “Dear Celeste, are you well I hope you
ARE
well. I am wishing you a very happy birthday for 3 July. I never say the right thing, I don’t do the right thing either, to you or anyone but my intentions are good. Edward.”

The letter contained a photograph of the side of an office building, on which there was a one-story-high mural. The lettering at the top read: “Selma Flowers, party decoration, travel agent. Best Deal.” The image of the woman in the mural, holding a large bunch of red flowers, and dressed in an orange boubou, was unmistakably that of Celeste that she’d sent him in the mail, down to the last detail—the uncertain smile, the upturned chin, the same faraway look.

In her letter back to him she thanked him for the most beautiful present anyone had ever given to her. She said she kept it with her always. That during breaks at work she took it out and looked at it. That she looked at it before she went to sleep. She said he did not need to answer her question. She understood. She too had been overwhelmed. Had done as she was told. Did they try to make him feel ashamed? Well, he shouldn’t feel ashamed. She had wanted it. She had wanted everything. She was telling him, and she still did. Did he?

A month later he sent a single business card inside an envelope. The card read:
Eddie Signwriter, painter of sign, purveyor of art
. Underneath was his address, and a telephone number. On the back of the card he’d written, “You choose.”

THE DAY SHE ARRIVED
was a Tuesday. It was the afternoon, warm and humid as a wash rag, just another day in a string of other days, and then there she was as he came down the street, sitting on her bag on the pavement on the corner.