Reading the Ceiling by Dayo Forster Page B

downstairs, Ade is waiting with her chin on her palms, elbows resting on the dining table. Her brothers have joined her. ‘What’s going on?’ I ask.
    Ade starts. ‘About three hours ago, the doorbell rings, and I go and answer it.’
    Olu fills me in. ‘She thought it was you.’
    I ask, ‘What time was this?’
    â€˜About three o’clock,’ replies Ade.
    â€˜And who was she?’ I ask. The rest of the telling is a fast drama, with all three of them doing the explaining.
    Tunde: ‘We don’t know – this big fat screaming woman.’
    Ade: ‘She just shouted at me – Do you have a father who can’t keep his wiggly in his trousers?’
    Olu: ‘Can you imagine that?’
    Ade: ‘I tried to shut the door, telling her she had the wrong address.’
    Olu: ‘I was halfway down the stairs.’
    Ade: ‘She put her handbag in the door and said – It’s not the wrong address. I know he lives here.’
    Tunde: ‘Then we all started screaming, Mum, Mum.’
    Ade: ‘Ma came through from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.’
    Tunde: ‘The woman at the door was really shouting now – You tell your father you want to meet the new brother or sister he’s started for you all.’
    Ade: ‘Mum said, What’s going on?’
    Olu: ‘The lady went berserk. She pushed at the door.’
    Ade: ‘She yelled at Mum – Your husband is going after schoolgirls and making them pregnant.’
    Olu: ‘Mum asked her to leave, or she’d call the police.’
    Ade: ‘She screamed at her – Call the police all you like, but tell your bastard husband to leave my daughter alone.’
    Olu: ‘And she stormed off down the path.’
    â€˜After that, I think your mum deserved a lie-down. Have you told your dad?’ I ask.
    Ade shakes her head, ‘Not yet, he’ll be home soon enough.’
    **Outside what used to be Kamal’s door, I decide to turn right instead of retracing my steps. Each time I’ve done this, deliberately walked past his door, it’s been easier. It’s just an ordinary kind of corridor, with an ordinary kind of door. Solid frame painted a hopeful green, with plywooded grubby brown door inset. On the wall to the left, straying north of the door handle and at about eye height, is a sign-board with a slidey thing to display laminated name plates. It now says: Mr Hamid Mahfouz, Lecturer, Economics and Economic Theory . 
    It used to say, barely a year ago: Dr Kamal Bensouda, Senior Lecturer, Econometrics .
    Â The first time I came by here after he’d gone, I stopped to trace over his name, scarcely believing he could have left, and done it so completely.
    Now I find it hard to believe how dread had clutched at me, scraping away bits of skin and leaving a ribbed ridge of irritation in its wake. I was marked by an ache that started – in my throat perhaps, rolling its way down past my heart, tumbling through my stomach and ending up at my leaden feet. It was as if I was stuck to the green, thin pile corridor carpeting, a bit worn where many other feet had rushed past, on their way to somewhere. I’d made up a chant:
    A toe, one foot, one leg
A finger, one hand, one arm
One head, one body, and a self.
    Â And I willed my broken parts past that door, remembering other terrors from childhood, when a different kind of dread would dog me as we went past Berring Grun, the cemetery that slouched at the entrance to Banjul. As a child, with lips scarcely moving, I would imagine water cutting into the resting holes of the dead and carting them off, sea currents restlessly cradling human bones and rubbing them against each other and rough rocks. To try to stop the fright, I used to say – unheard, breaths uneven –
    A bone, one face, one hole
A stone, one name, one being
One person, one spirit, a ghost.
    Aged eight, I could break down the