After our first encounter I woke often in the half-light to find the boy seated on the stool, watching me. His eyes seemed a kind of climate, wild and busy, with flecks of red spoking inward, each pupil merging into its dark iris, so dark I thought they were of the same black pigment. He looked. I looked. We looked at one another looking. And I began to feel that I was emerging from my emptiness. No longer did I wish to return to the womb. I could not deny it; I was beginning to like life better. Outside, a hot wind blew. The shutters stirred. I reached slowly through the bars to still the boy’s trembling leg; I felt how bony his knee was and how soft the skin. For a moment the leg rested; when I withdrew my hand it resumed its shaking. He looked harder; he was interested in my fingers with their tiny pink nails. He knew I had done wrong, I think, which fascinated him; he got a strange satisfaction from it. Now and then the Lagos clock would strike, and he, who was always moving, but whose gaze rarely faltered, would look up for a moment or two.
Ade was four years my senior. He wore blue shorts and a jumper from which Iffe, his mother, had cut the sleeves. Mornings he spent with Iffe at Jankara market, where she traded onions. She brought him back in the afternoon, to their compound at the side of the house, where he was cared for by his father Ben, our cook. But he was spending longer and longer in my room and eventually started to return after his evening meal.
It was 1949. The rainy season had begun. I was nearly three years old and still did not have a name. If besotted, grieving, hard-working Father identified me with one, I did not know it. In semi-darkness Ade sat on his stool. Beside me, on a bedside table, stood a hurricane lamp, which threw a circle of light on to the wall. In this light the silhouettes of a thousand insects danced. The scene — accompanied by the rain, which beat a rapturous applause on the roof — absorbed us completely. At one point Ade raised his arm, and his hand, having moved in front of the lamp, was transformed into an enormous shadow on the wall. I laughed. Ade saw the effect, and his other hand joined the first; I watched the shadows: sometimes they came together and leaned, and leaned further and swayed, frequently they divided and spun, the movement effortless, dreamily pelagic. I stood up in my cot, fed my arm between its bars and thrust my hand in front of the lamp. We began to play, Ade tilting his hand to one side, me taking the opportunity to dip beneath them. It was then, I don’t know why, as the insects circled, and our shadows danced, the thought came to me that had we not discovered this game, then we — Ade and I — might have quickly grown apart; but now we had made a surer connection.
For several evenings the shadows of our hands danced on the wall. Yet I found I missed our previous contact, face to face, on either side of the cot’s bars. Something had changed in me. And something had changed and developed between us. And I knew this change was because of the game. Taiwo seldom noticed our animated wall; she dozed in her room or decorated herself or read spiritual pamphlets. Neither Ade nor I thought to fashion an object with our hands. Perhaps this was because the shadows themselves were imitations, and it did not occur to us to form an object — Pisces, a swan — and have it represented itself by a likeness. Or perhaps it was simply that we did not have time to develop the game, for not long after something happened to end it altogether.
The evening we played the game for the last time, Father returned early from work and invited a colleague for backgammon and drinks. His colleague laughed in shrill bursts that did not impart mirth, a mad laugh that unsettled me and kept us from our own game. My father lost badly that night. He was very low. The two argued. A glass was smashed. The colleague walked off. Father poured himself another drink, and for several minutes we heard his footsteps pacing the veranda floor. Ade and I returned to our game, the silhouettes of our hands danced on the wall. Soon we heard my father’s footsteps growing louder. He entered the house and crossed the hallway. The footsteps grew louder still, stopped, my door drifted wide, and there stood Father. We withdrew our hands from the circle of light. Father’s face was worn, the blond hair bound in crested tufts. Neither Ade nor I moved or spoke. At that moment Taiwo drifted or flowed into the room. She had painted her eyelids purple; I thought she looked magnificent. At that moment Father saw the crucifix hanging from her neck. He went to her and unhooked her necklace. He held the crucifix before his eyes, then walked to the lamp and let it fall in front of the shade. We all turned our eyes to the wall. There, framed by the circle of yellow light, hung the shadow of Christ, fixed to the cross. The shadows of insects swarmed all around him. No one spoke. We all looked at Christ and the insects. There was a silence. Then Father addressed us directly for the first time that evening.
‘Here is Christ on the Cross,’ he said. ‘All kinds of insects are flying up to him, in order to torment him. When he sees them his spirit fails him. At the same time a moth is flying around Christ … Kill him, the insects shout to the moth. Kill him for us!’ Father’s voice became very quiet. ‘That I cannot do, says the moth, raising his wings above Christ, that I cannot do, for he is of the house of David.’
After the incident with Christ and the insects, Ade and I never again performed our shadow dance. Surprisingly, I did not suffer on account of the end of the game, although I regretted the change that came over the house, the dubious way Taiwo regarded Father, whom she seemed thereafter to consider idolatrous. And I too had found it strange, the story of Christ and the insects, could understand neither its origin nor meaning, and for many years believed it a symptom of his grief-cracked mind. But some three decades later, when we were living in Scotland, shortly before my father died, I came to understand, if not the significance of the incident, then at least its origin.
10. Taiwo Meets Her End
Tonight, the attic is quiet. Beyond my skylight the beech tree sways. It is late, cold, luminous. The sun falls or rotates, flames and dies. Whenever I finish a page of my history now I print out a fine white sheet with black type. It never ceases to thrill me, when the sheets fall from the printer on to the floor, echoing my words. Not my words: sounds — yes, those printed words are echoes of the sounds of my past. That is not right either. They are not echoes, but translations, mutations.
As I add the sheets to the stack in the wardrobe, where I keep the completed pages of my history, I ask myself: Who will read this? If someone were to look into the wardrobe, what would they think? Perhaps they would not read my history but wonder if I was preparing for a crisis. Stacked up on the back wall are my provisions: paper, napkins, bottles of water, tins of beans, etc. I have found it convenient to store them here since my meals now are more like snacks, taken at odd times; I never know when those will be. And these not being full meals, it is hard to justify a trip down to the kitchen. All that way for a spoonful of beans! Yes, it suits me to have a tin constantly to hand. It has come to me that my life or engagement with the world is diminishing with my needs. Sometimes I go three days and nights without leaving the house, the attic even. In a moment, then, I will take a walk on the beach, before I press on with my history.
…
After the incident with Christ and the insects the game ended and with it the first phase of my early life, the thrall and insouciant ties of infancy, the lovely mutual gaze. I was nearly three. The rainy season was over. The days were long, the sun large in the sky and hot.