Reading the Ceiling (25 page)

Kainde challenges me about my impending marriage. ‘Are you sure you need to do this, Dele?'

I have a reply ready. It has been formulating in my mind for a while.

‘Look at the story of Uncle Sola,' I say. ‘Someone on the side hidden from your wife and family is worse than a marriage like this that is in the open.'

‘Yes, other women can do it, but can
you
?'

‘One can get used to things. There must be something to be said for a husband who, to be fair, has to spend half his nights with his other wife.' I make a joke of it. ‘After all, I'll get some time in my head that I can keep for myself.'

I don't mention the other reasons. About never worrying about having enough to pay school fees. Being able to cook a meal with meat more than twice a week. Access to a car filled with petrol every day. Comfort. Security.

*

What does my mother think? Our relations have gone way beyond discord to something bordering on constant rage. Even with my sisters around, there's an undercurrent that snatches at my shoulders and claims their muscles for its own. By mutual consent, my mother and I make a great effort not to talk to the other about anything of importance. When I bring her news of my marriage, I make sure at least two people, who are used to our family, are around. She never gets the chance to present her views directly to me, undiluted. They eventually filter through anyhow – the extended family is pretty good at circulating opinions, especially those expressed with deep emotion. So I get to know that she's not surprised I end up being a second wife. I've pretty much messed up my life.

Aunt K continues to do what she can to patch things up between my mother and I. She says, ‘I know this is a hard thing for your mother to tell you. She's relieved that you've found finally someone who can take care of you. She's heard Amadou Sisoho is a good man, a family kind of man.'

Officially the ban on contacting my sisters is lifted. I invite Taiwo to the wedding. She sends her excuses, saying, ‘You know Reuben got a promotion just this past month. He's been planning a dinner party at our Sanyang beach house. He's invited his boss as well as the regional head based in Abidjan. I need to spend time making sure everything's perfect.' I haven't given Kainde enough notice, she's off on a work tour in the Far East and won't be able to come. ‘Send me a few happy snaps,' she says over the phone.

The wedding is on a Friday. I have nothing to do with the bit that takes place in the mosque. The day feels like any other, except that I have on an expensively textured outfit and the gold earrings and necklace Amadou gives me as a present. Kweku Sola looks smart in his
mbaseng
gown but his five-year-old self cannot resist kicking a ball against a wall. By lunchtime, the gown is off and he's running around in a vest and the trouser bottoms. A few people drop in during the day – the LaFarges, Aunt K, Amadou's daughters. We eat bowlfuls of
mbahal
as the
tam tam
drummer from next door comes round to sound out our news. We give out plastic bags of
beignets
and bottles of soft drinks to the children who live along our street.

With my marriage official, I work fewer hours at the office, where everyone takes to calling me Mrs Sisoho.

Kweku Sola asks me one day, ‘You told me to call Amadou Pa, but he's not really my father is he?'

‘No, but he treats you like a son,' I answer.

He pauses and in the space, I watch him hesitate, fight his curiosity, but then ask, ‘Who is my father?' His voice is quiet. I could choose to ignore it.

I let in my own pause before replying, ‘You'll have to take Amadou as your father now. When you're older I'll tell you.'

What I should say is, ‘When you're older, maybe your face will tell me.' The secret has stayed hidden. His father's features haven't been stamped on his face. Instead, there's me all over him and nothing of his two possible fathers. There's my hairline that starts too high on my head, leaving a drift of forehead to slope to my eyebrows. There's my nose that would crowd out my face if it weren't for huge, open eyes, edged with long lashes. All of me, and nothing of either of them.

To the question that remains on his face, I try to excuse myself, ‘It's much too complicated to explain to you right now. Maybe you'll understand better when you are older.'

Trust flickers and calms some of the questions that remain in his face – but not all.

*

I know I have to work at Rohey, make an effort to befriend her somehow. I want to foster a level of mutual tolerance, I do not want a new war front. I make +nanburu  and send her a huge bowlful at Easter. At Christmas, I do likewise with chicken
benachin
. At odd times, I buy her some kitchen towels, saying I found them cheap at the stores. I never take them round to her house myself. I ask the driver to drop them off, and give him a message to pass on. He usually comes back with simple thanks.

Rohey allows her daughters to visit on Saturdays, even when their father isn't around. She has to let them come so she is not regarded as a poor loser. The girls sit stiffly in perfect clothes in the sitting room the first few times. As the months pass, they take to skipping outside, playing
paginyadi
on a rough chalk-drawn diagram in the courtyard. Rohey and I learn to live with each other. So do our children.

One wet Sunday evening, raindrops pelt a dance of marbles on the roof. Amadou is in Dakar to clear some Peugeot orders from the port and won't be back for a week. Rohey rings me with a sob in her voice: ‘
Walai
, Dele, they've taken it all.'

‘Who? And what have they taken?'

‘How can I explain all this to Amadou? How can people be so wicked? God will have to pay them back.'

She dissolves into tears on the phone. She was out with the girls all day and they have just come back home.

‘Do you want me to come over?'

‘Yes, come and see what these wicked people have done.'

Kweku Sola and I drive to Rohey's. The rain thins but the car sloshes in scattered puddles. When we arrive, there's a minicrowd at her metal gate. Snippets of incredulity catch my ear as I +salaam  and walk past.

‘Nganeh!'

‘Yaype?'

‘Walai!'

I want to hear the news from Rohey. She is sitting on the steps leading up to her verandah. Her children are next to her in a protective triangle, one on each side and the littlest on the step below, right in front of her mother.

‘What happened?' I ask.

‘Go in,' Rohey replies. ‘Go in and see for yourself.'

There's no furniture in the sitting room. There are no curtains on the rails. No rug on the floor. No vibrantly green plant on a corner stool. I come back outside.

‘But, what happened?' I repeat.

‘That's not it. There's more. Go through. Go into my bedroom. Look at the kitchen.' Rohey's voice is smothered by the arms covering her head which is now settled into her lap.

I walk into the corridor and peer into the rooms. The bed frames are there, but nothing else. Wardrobe doors are open. Windows are bare. In the kitchen, the fridge groans and shudders. It and the cooker had been too heavy to carry so they'd left those behind. There are no pots on the shelves. There are no groceries in the tiny store off the kitchen.

Back outside, I ask Rohey, ‘Who could have done this? How did they get in?'

‘It was Kikoi, my gardener, and Kumba, the girl from my village who my mother sent to help me.'

‘How do you know?'

‘The children next door. They saw them. Go and ask them.'

I walk down the steps, across the cleared slab of concrete, past the mango tree to the metal gate that swings itself shut weighted by a Peugeot axle. Outside, I throw a question to the assembled crowd,

‘Who saw what happened?'

A babble of voices. A truck. A pickup. White. A Peugeot. No, a Toyota. Twelve o'clock. Possibly five.

‘Let me go and ask next door,' I say, leaving the voices behind. I do not have far to go. A woman is in the front yard, tending a charcoal stove on which she is roasting cobs of corn.

‘The children saw them,' she says. ‘In a white pickup. They came twice, and loaded up high each time.'

‘Did you see anything?'

‘Not much. I popped out to the Amet shop to buy some matches, and the pickup was half full. But I didn't think much of it at the time. I thought it a bit odd that Rohey had not mentioned she'd be moving, but that was all.'

All Rohey's clothes are gone – her grand boubous, her shoes, her gold, everything. The space under the children's bed, which had their new Koriteh things in suitcases, is empty. Everything movable is gone.

The next morning, I pause outside Kweku Sola's bedroom instead of bustling in as I usually do to wake him up for breakfast. With weak daylight edging the curtains at his windows, I can see the tip of his dark head poking out beyond the pillow he uses to cover his ears at night. I move in, walk past his bed and the shadowy triangles formed by his elbows on the white sheets. I push his curtains apart, drenching the room with early sunshine.

He's covered the cork board on the wall above his desk with his still-life pencil drawings. When I suggested he should try to do portraits, he looked at me steadily and said, ‘Ma, people don't keep still, they move. When I put things together the way I want them to look, they stay where they are until I am finished.' I look at some of his recent drawings: a bowlful of mangoes, the dining room chairs in a tangle, cups and saucers after dinner. If we'd still been stuck in a mud-and-wattle, he could never have had this. I haven't forgotten how we got to where we are.

My househelp Bintou sits in my living room, legs splayed out, a huge chunk of bread in her hands with oil dribbling onto her fingers.

‘
Mangai aingh rek
. I'm eating now.
Ham nga tei si suba mburu amout on
. There was no bread this morning.' She says it as if I really shouldn't mind. She gets up to amble towards the kitchen. I let my eyes pass over her stout frame, watching her fleshy arms jiggle.

‘I've got some fish in the car for Amadou's dinner this evening. Ask the driver to take them round to the kitchen for you.'

She turns around at the door to ask, ‘And what do you want me to do with them?'

‘I'm making some
chereh
 this evening. You know how he likes his
bonga
. Make sure you season it with fresh chillis. And you need to make a salad to go with it.'

‘I'll get started right away.'

I plop into an armchair and get out a notebook from my bag, meaning to continue with the list of things to do that I'd started earlier. Instead, I let my eyes wander about. I'm proud of this house, and how I've made it feel a home for all of us. I like my armchairs – they're solid, yet comfy. I pull a leather pouffe closer to rest my legs on. The rug takes up a fair amount of floor space. Cleaning it is a bit like picking stones out of rice, but I like the close weave, the deep wines, the swirls of pattern in it. At this time of day, with the windows open, there's a crossbreeze blowing through the verandah and in through the front door.

Next thing I know, there's a
Salaam aleikum 
and Rohey's here.

‘Ayodele, sorry to wake you up. It's so hot today, I'm not surprised you fell asleep.'

‘Come in. Kweku Sola said you might pop in sometime today.'

‘I'm here to ask a favour. Before I start, shall I tell Bintou to make us some tea?'

To my nod, she heads for the kitchen and I hear the murmur of their exchange. When she returns, she takes a little brown plastic bag from her bag. ‘I got some
churrai
from my neighbour Saffiatou who has just come back from Mecca. It's a new incense she found there.'

I sniff at it. ‘Smells good, as if it's got cinnamon in.'

‘I thought you'd like some,' she says as she flaps her light blue gown about, her thin gold bangles rearranging themselves on her wrist as she settles in her seat. ‘Since Saffiatou came back as an
Ajaratou
, she's always dropping into our conversations how this or that person called her Aji Saffi. I must do the
hajj
myself, or I'd never hear the last of it from her. Ayodele, I need you to speak to Amadou for me.'

‘But Rohey, you could always ask him yourself.'

‘I've already tried. He thinks all I want to do is spend his money. That I can't go shopping in Dakar for Koriteh and also go to Mecca. The
hajj
is different – people take you seriously afterwards, and anyway it's a good thing for all Muslims to do. Do talk to him for me, I know he will listen to you.'

‘But . . .'

‘Look, if the topic comes up, put in a good word for me. There are lots of gold jewellers in Mecca. I'll buy you some nice gold as a thank-you.'

‘I'll see what I can . . .'

‘This is a hard thing for a first wife to say but, you know what, you've been good for him. You've helped him in his business more than I ever could.'

Bintou brings in some tea, only narrowly avoiding spilling the sugar all over my rug.

When she leaves, Rohey continues, ‘You know about Amadou's other wife, Zainab, don't you? His second marriage that didn't see the year through?'

‘Well, not exactly . . .'

‘Zainab left school at Form Five, so she had O levels and all. She was pretty, but
goggg
!' Rohey rolls her eyes and puts her hands on her waist, expressing Zainab's feistiness. ‘Anyway, Amadou would spend and spend on her, take her wherever she wanted to go. But she wanted more. At first, I didn't believe what people were telling me, and it wasn't right to carry rumours to Amadou. One day, he found out for himself when he got back from a business trip.'

She takes a sip of her tea. ‘There she was, in
his
house,
their
bedroom, with one of those guys who do the tourists on the beach.'