So this man’s name became detached from him and used for all sorts of other things. And in the end he stopped being whoever he had once been and became all the things they said about him.
Ya Sallay laughed when she told me this story. But I didn’t laugh. Rather I worried for Babatunde. I didn’t care that he was a scoundrel. I felt sorry. I wondered where he was and what had become of him. I thought about him living far away, among strangers, without his name, not knowing who he was any more.
Once I went to live among strangers and I learned what it was like to lose yourself. To feel the fragments flying off you. As if your soul has unhitched itself from your body and is flying away on a piece of string like a balloon. Lost in the clouds. You think, I only have to catch the end of the string. But though it hovers within sight, you cannot grasp it. You try and try. And then there comes a time when you are too tired. You no longer care. So you say: ‘Let it go. Let me just fall down here on the soft grass and go to sleep.’
I left home on the day our new President ordered everybody to drive on the opposite side of the road. In the crowded bus there was panic, because every time we looked up a car was hurtling towards us on the same side of the road. Unwary pedestrians stepped in front of vehicles. Drivers honked their horns. Cars swerved around each other. Our driver drove too close to the verge, skimming the wooden stalls. And when the bus reached the stop we all had to climb down into the traffic, because now the passenger door was on the wrong side.
By the time I reached the quay all I could think was how glad I was to be leaving. I showed my ticket, paid for by the Christian Mission who had given me a scholarship to study in England, to the man in a buttoned uniform who stood at the end of the gangplank. As the ship sailed off into the silence, some of the passengers, the Africans who had never left home before, gathered on the deck to wave goodbye to everything we were leaving behind. The sea swelled up and the sky stretched downwards. In front of our eyes the city disappeared and the coast shrivelled into a wavy line. And all of us saw how small our country really was.
A girl on her way to the United States boasted she would soon be seeing the cowboys and indians for herself. Foolish girl! Still I said nothing because although I knew in England women no longer wore bustles and carried parasols, there were no horse-drawn carriages or steam trains, no hot-air balloons, and no white rabbits with fob watches — I could not imagine what I was going to.
In England the air was flat and colourless; sharp to breathe like broken glass. The pavements came up hard and struck the soles of my feet. The people walked fast, but spoke quietly. And skimmed past, never touching each other. Everybody went about and minded their own business. Even when they spoke to you, they seemed always to be looking at something outside the window or on the other side of the room.
In the hostel where I stayed we lived in rooms on top of each other and next to each other. Names on the doors: Bidwell, Holt, Pichette, Clowes, Schenck, Buchan, Bersvendsen, Wilkinson. And I saw that was how people lived all over the land. Like colonies of the blind. On top of each other and next to each other, but without ever seeing each other.
A girl from Ghana was assigned to help me settle in. Emma. Without her I would have been lost straight away. I liked her. I wished she had been there for longer. Maybe, if she had, things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. She would never have let it happen. Together we went shopping for warm clothes. The freezing air seeped through the fibres of my cotton clothes. Emma walked as swiftly as all the people in this place. Weaving in and out of the crowd like a needle through silk, and me a thread trailing behind her. In the shop she fingered woollen pullovers piled high on tables. Never had I laid eyes upon anything so luxurious, though the colours struck me as lifeless and dull.
‘Pah! Made in Hong Kong. And look at these prices!’ She wrinkled her nose, dropped the pullover as though it gave off an offensive odour and talked in a loud, loud voice. ‘Come on!’ She marched out past the security guard whose eyes followed her from the shadows beneath the peak of his cap.
‘They think we all steal,’ she told me out in the street.
‘Why would they think that?’ I said. To my mind nothing had happened. I didn’t understand why we were suddenly standing outside the shop.
‘Just the way they are. Suspicious minds.’ I was silent, I didn’t know what to say.
Emma watched the television news a great deal. Every evening, jumping up to change channels to listen to the same things repeated by a different person, deaf to the complaints of anybody else who happened to be in the common room. I remember pictures of an aeroplane with a bent nose, that flew faster than the speed of sound. One day everybody would travel the world in this way. The Chinese put a satellite in orbit and joined the space race. I had never known such things were happening. I watched it all with wonder. I had never even seen a television before. I thought of our new President and how the only thing he had done was order everybody to drive on the other side of the road. Then another day a jet flew into a mountain. Two days later a second one smacked down on to the runway, like a tethered bird that had tried to fly. On the news they played the last words of the co-pilot taken from the flight recorder. ‘Oh! Sorry, Pete.’ A moment later every single person on that plane was dead. A week later a third aeroplane did the exact same thing, only this time the people were luckier and mostly survived.
I stared at the terrible images of rescuers picking over debris. In my dreams I saw fizzing, flashing pictures like the images on the television. I saw planes bellyflop out of the sky, smash nose first into mountainsides. I wondered if the people on the ground could hear the screams of the passengers. Or even if they screamed at all. Or just said ‘Oh!’ And were gone.
Emma whooped with joy when a black man punched a white man so hard in a boxing match he knocked him out. In South Carolina black children were driven to school in buses with armed guards. I saw the expressions on the faces of the crowds at the boxing ring. And I saw the looks upon the faces of the white people as they threw stones at a bus-load of small children. And I saw how similar they were.
Somewhere along the line I started to become confused. Missionaries had brought me here. Given me a scholarship so at last I could qualify as a teacher. I must be grateful. Of course, I was grateful. Emma, on the other hand, didn’t seem grateful at all. If anything she seemed to be angry a great deal of the time. Though once, when she was short-changed by a stall holder over a bag of plums, she laughed like it was a huge joke.
‘What would my mother say?’ she asked me, holding the coins up under my nose on the flat of her palm. ‘She thinks an English man’s word is his honour.’ And when she saw my nonplussed face she laughed all the more until the tears welled in her eyes. ‘Oh, Mary!’ Shook her head and put her arm around my shoulders.
Later, how I wished I had asked her all the things I wanted to know. At the time all I cared was that she wouldn’t think me stupid. I didn’t even know what the questions were, the answers to which I needed so much. Just ask, people would say. But how do you know what it is you don’t know? When I needed someone to tell me, Emma was gone. Back to Ghana. At the end of her sabbatical she stopped by to wish me farewell.
‘Take care. Don’t think you can go behaving the way the girls here do. One of our sisters was murdered like that, out alone at night. They found her body, but they never found who did it to her.’ She kissed my cheek and squeezed my arm and was gone.