Eddie Signwriter (14 page)

He dropped his box with his paints. They fell on the curbstone, where some of the colour spilled out, so that every time they walked past that spot they remembered—how he’d run, bounded towards her, so fast that she took a step back, and the force of him swept her up, and momentarily she felt, in the closeness of his embrace, herself disappearing.

He held her a long time, her head tucked beneath his neck. He smelled her hair. Felt his collar grow wet from her tears.

He put his hand over the side of her face, her eyelid, and ear. He felt the warmth of her head in his hands, the warmth of her tears over his fingers, and suddenly all his past uncertainties and anxieties and regrets dissipated, that he’d felt even to the minute he’d seen her as he rounded the corner.

What were these things compared with the immediacy of a human body? What was more real than the physical sensation of holding Celeste in his arms? And in that moment he heard his own voice saying to him in his head:
This body will redeem me
—because that’s what love can do if you only do it well enough. Love can make amends for anything.

Then, smiling, he held her out to get a good look at her.

She sniffed, lifted her chin, letting him take in the features of her newly adult face.

The curving eyes.

The cheekbones of her aunt.

SHE MOVES
into the house. For a week he doesn’t work. They lie in bed all day, smoking and talking, and having sex. To leave her for half an hour to go round the corner to the shops is unbearable. What if she’s not there when he gets back? But she is. She’s gotten up and is walking around naked—not a sheet about her, not a piece of underwear, not a hint of shyness. She turns and looks at him. Her tummy curves outwards gently like the back of a spoon. She has a pout on her lips. “What?” she says, laughing. “Stop eating flies.” His mouth must be open. He goes to her. Lifts her up from the ground, one arm under her knee. Her body opens up like a pod.

CELESTE
, in a maroon dress, comes out of the door of the house in Adabraka and moves towards the gate in the low fence. She walks briskly. Full figure beneath the loose dress. A fold of flesh already between back and upper forearm.

He stands in the second-floor window—shirtless, square-faced, with closely cut hair, skinny, sharp-shouldered, ribs showing through his chest.

Celeste holds a straw bag, which she is swinging, causing the large wooden bangles on her right hand to slip down over her wrist.

Upstairs, cup in one hand, toothbrush in the other, he shifts his weight from his left to his right hip.

At the gate Celeste raises her arm so that the bangles slide back
down her forearm. She puts the empty straw bag under her arm and begins to unfasten the gate.

Still at the window, he turns his head into the room. Somebody is calling him from another part of the house. He shouts over his shoulder—a vein in his neck strains—then turns back.

Celeste, standing at the gate, is looking down the street.

A foot back from the window, invisible, he follows the direction of her regard as he brushes his teeth.

Celeste turns towards the house and waves.

He spits into the glass and wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist, puts the brush in the glass, and the glass on the window sill.

Celeste begins to walk to the main road. She stops to speak to a street seller on the pavement. She buys two loose sweets, unwraps and eats one, and puts the second, together with the wrapper, into the bag.

He steps forward towards the window, palms on the sill, leaning, his forehead against the window pane.

Celeste gets to the end of the street, turns into the main road, then is gone.

He watches the empty street, for a moment rubs with the palm of his hand at the smudge on the pane left by his forehead against the glass.

He draws the curtains, locks the door. Waits to hear his uncle leave.

The things you want are easy
, Nana Oforiwaa said.

He undresses.

Sits on the bed.

SHE LIES
across a chair, reading a newspaper. He watches her. He looks at the way her jaw fits into her neck, how smoothly the bone flows into its soft curve.

She, the bare room with their few scattered things—what more can a human being expect of the world?

But by the afternoon an uneasiness comes over him. They have not talked of anything all day. Has she nothing to say?

Restlessly he watches her as she lies on their bed on her stomach, reading, kicking her ankles. He goes to the window, pulls aside the curtain. It’s still there, the street, the houses. Little girls in their best dresses stand with their mothers, waiting against a wall facing the road. Older children, nearing an open shopfront blasting music into the street, turn a few steps of their lazy walk into a dance. A woman is asleep on her bench beside her table of oranges.

He turns back and looks at her. The clam of her. Where is she when she’s so silent?

“Knock knock,” he says.

“Who’s there,” she replies absently.

His uncle, on his way to Farrar Street, comes by.

“Aren’t you kids going to go out to do something?” he asks.

“Hello, Mr. Ankrah,” Celeste says, turning round from her stomach, then sitting up on the bed, smoothing her skirt over her knees.

“What do you want to do?” he asks her hopefully.

“Nothing,” she says. “This is just fine.”

She smiles.

He smiles back.

But
nothing
is not enough for him anymore.

In the evening he gets her to come out.

They make their way uptown. The electricity is out. People move about with candles sheltered in the palms of their hands. The weak flames trace their slow, careful journeys through the side streets, along the pavements through the dark.

When they reach the main road the cars are driving slowly, their headlights pushing shafts of blunt light through the dust.

“It’s nice walking with you for no reason,” he says.

She squeezes his arm—they are intertwined at the elbow and his hand is in his pocket as they walk.

He wants to believe that the gesture means a deep, silent understanding.
But he knows that it doesn’t. All that it means is that she loves him.

“You make me very happy,” he says to her. “I love you very, very much.”

He means every word he’s just said. But at the same time he feels sick with unhappiness. Something has happened. How, why, he cannot tell; only he knows he cannot forgive her the distance he feels between them. Her absence. Her insubstantiality.

Sometimes when they sit together he feels a need to touch her, to assure himself that she is there, assuage the sense of loneliness that he often feels in her presence.

It isn’t always like this. But as soon as he senses it might be, he finds a way to force the moment. Why? To prove it again to the part of himself that doesn’t want to believe it; that tries to convince him that nothing is wrong.

And to show it to her.

Look
, he is saying,
you see
.

He doesn’t want to be alone in his misery. He wants sympathy.

“I love being outside at this time of night,” he says with a gentleness he is trying hard to feel, “I love the people coming out to sell things, and the pavement becoming a completely different place. Going along is like being caught in the sea. And I love the smell of the smoke, in the cool air. It’s like pieces of smell floating.”

She squeezes his arm again. But it’s not what he wants. He wants her to say something.

“Don’t you think it’s lovely?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says quietly.

“What do you find lovely?” he asks, looking straight ahead as they walk.

They go on in silence, the two of them winding their way along the pavement, like people going somewhere.

Her hand drops away from him as they approach a telephone pole in the middle of the pavement, to walk on either side. When he reaches again for her as they pass the pole she refuses to take his hand and bursts into tears. She turns into a side street that will take them
home another way—an empty alley pervaded by the smell of food and shit. He runs after her, gets alongside her, and walks with her in silence.

How dare she cry
, he thinks to himself angrily.

As they approach the busy main road that runs parallel to the one they’ve just left, he grabs her by the shoulders, and he looks at her face that is covered with tears and he says, “Stop crying like this. Why are you crying?”

She says, “I am crying because I can’t just walk with you enjoying myself. I have to think a thought for you. I can’t bear it.”

As he looks at her he is filled with tenderness and remorse. He hates himself for making her fail him, for letting her realize it. And he’s struck by the reality of her, and the fact that she feels what’s she’s feeling so strongly, and he forgets about his own despair.

“O love,” he says, “I’m so sorry. Let’s do something nice. Let me buy some food to eat and go stand by the bridge.”

And he feels that there is no more uplifting a feeling in the world than the strength of the love he has for this woman, as her sadness disappears, and they laugh and have long conversations of gentle teasing and private words and jokes—intimate and meaningless, though now he doesn’t want meaning anymore, he wants love.

On a wall near Amaamo he paints a bed, floating out on a great flat gray sea.

He is lost. But not in the way he expected.

He did not wake up one day and find that things were different. What happened is that he woke up one day and found that things had always been different.

The past was gone. Their stories had fled.

His, of a boy falling out of love with the world, who loved a girl instead, and how that would save him, except it didn’t.

Of Celeste’s he has no idea—and worse than that, doesn’t believe he ever did.

And yet the thought of being without her fills him with terror.

How is that possible? To be empty, yet full of love at the same time?

Late at night, after painting, he comes home. She is lying in bed, her eyes closed. He can tell she is not asleep.

“Will you wake up?” he says, gently shaking her shoulder. He wants to talk.

About what?

His day. A story. An idea he had.

She tells him she wants to sleep. They can talk tomorrow.

He tells her he hasn’t eaten, leaves the house to buy food at one of the kiosks on the pavement outside, and as he walks in the street again works himself into a quiet rage.

When he returns she is sitting up in bed.

He begins to feel ashamed of his impetuousness. He tells her he’s sorry.

She tells him it’s all right. She tells him she loves him. She makes an effort to ask him the questions he has wanted her to ask, to show the interest he has wanted her to show.

He kisses her on the forehead and turns out the light.

He comes to bed himself after she is asleep.

In the night he dreams of endless machine movements—not really dreams: more like flimsy images flashing on a screen. The next morning he realizes he is awake, and an image is clearing itself from his head, an image of his hand writing a letter (the words are written backwards, as if in a mirror—a secret message to himself), “Please let me go,” and because the message is in his dream, he has to fall asleep again and then return to understand the story.

In his dream they are meeting, except both of them are different people meeting for the first time. Only he knows who they are. And while he is enjoying the prospect of falling in love with her all over again—as he saw her jumping over a puddle in the rain—he hears his own voice calling out to him, and it wakes him up, saying, “You cannot go back,” and he hears his mind thinking,
Please let me go …

He thinks to himself:
You know what I’d really like to do?

To find a calm spot on the sea somewhere, even if he felt a bit
lonely, and to look at the waves and read the book that she gave him on the first night they made love—the book he read the beginning of on the beach at Labadi, while she played woaley with a small child sitting next to them on the sand, and the storm clouds drew in, and he’d thought to himself,
If I try really hard will something of me stay here forever?

Outside the morning starts. He is fully awake now. She continues to sleep. Lying beside her he reflects how unremarkable this feels. To have lost everything. To feel nothing.

The same twenty-four hours pass. The same breaths and exhalations. Nobody, to look at him, would know a thing.

Her waking disturbs his reflections. Instinctively he turns to hold her. She tells him she has not slept well. She does not want him to touch her. She is irritable. She looks for a long time at the ceiling, and then turns to look at him. He reaches out to her with his hand. He can feel the tear coming out of his left eye.

She says, “I know that look.”

“What look?” he asks her.

“The look you get when you overhear a conversation that makes you reflect on something about your life. Something sad.”