Everyday People Read online

  Yao left the folded clothes on the wall so he could make a quick escape and sidled up to the first window for his momentary amusement. The old lady was still lying in the buff, the rotating fan muffling her snores. He felt his penis stir. Without the added barrier of his shorts zipper, it strained the thin cotton of his briefs, embarrassing and titillating him.

  Was he so lonely that he was seriously entertaining this old body? Was he still so inflamed at Elinam’s equivocation of persuasion and force that he would use this abiriwa to settle the matter once and for all? Was he really willing to risk going to counterback again?

  He turned to the sky. Still black as night. With dawn an hour or so away, he decided he had time to fuck her if he moved quickly. Unlike the window that looked into the young man’s room, all the metal frames bordering both sides of her window were empty of louvers. Yao gripped an edge of the net pane and yanked it toward himself, grinning with relief when it came apart neatly and quietly.

  Discounting the logistical fact that he could not have sex with her, take the laptop, and get away, he convinced himself this would end well: that the old lady wouldn’t scream, that the young man and his roommate next door wouldn’t burst in to save her, that he could fuck her and find wherever she hid her money without being caught before night yielded to light.

  He hoisted himself into the bedroom with the arm that wasn’t in pain, the intimate scent of sweat and perfume instantly filling his nose. He tugged at his erect penis, his heart beating in his ears as his eyes adjusted.

  Yao advanced to the bed, stepping out of his briefs when the old woman abruptly sat up. He stopped as she moved past him and pulled open a door in the wall, leaving it slightly ajar as she sank onto a toilet. In the fog of sleep she hadn’t seen him.

  He sighed at himself, remembering the morning the CID officers had come to his home, luring him to the Golokwati Police Station. They had come under the guise of being from Strategic Foods, looking to sell surplus bananas behind their boss’s back. He could still smell the putrid cell behind the police station reception counter, his room for the night after Elinam identified him. Sense flooding back to his brain, Yao bent to collect his underwear. He had not belonged in that cell, and he did not belong here.

  He would dart out of the room before the old lady returned to her bed, and leave the way he came. He would beg a trɔtrɔ mate at American House to let him ride to Madina Market free, and do the same at Madina for the ride home to Oyarifa.

  He started to move, but the abiriwa’s voice suddenly arrested him. Instead of the trickling or plunking sounds of toilet relief, she began to sing in tongues. Yao could not speak the heavenly language, but he recognized its repetitive cadence instantly. There was no one in Ghana who did not know the sound of tongues, diverse as they were. Many a night was pierced with the projectile shouts launched from open-air and open-plan church buildings.

  The old lady wove Ga and English into her prayer. “Oyewa’dɔ, Nyɔngmo. Thank you, Jesus.”

  Still clutching his briefs, Yao started to move again, but he smacked into a wall. The prayer paused with the sound of listening.

  Yao was scrambling off the floor when the light switched on. The old lady emerged, childlike plaits on her head, the stretch-marked and folded flesh of age telling the short story of life. She gasped, noticing his nakedness and hers, before she began to scream.

  “In the name of Jesus, Foul Spirit of Rape, I bind you. You are not welcome in my home. You will not shame me, and you will not shame this boy.”

  On his feet now, with the aid of the light, Yao ran out, but the young man who had seen him leave with his mobile hours earlier stood at the door. He looked to be about Yao’s age, twenty, and he was a twin, as there were two of him blocking Yao’s escape.

  One of them bent to take off his left chalewote and slam it across Yao’s cheek. The thong of the rubber shower slipper snapped out of its socket.

  “Leave him,” the old woman commanded, her voice hoarse from shouting or because the blow was ringing in Yao’s ear.

  “Grandm—”

  “I said leave him!” The abiriwa sank to the edge of her bed and gathered her bedsheet around herself. “The devil is already tormenting him.”

  She exhaled with the weariness of age and broken sleep. “Look at you. Fine boy. A young man hoping to rape an old woman. You see how the devil is making a fool of you?” The woman closed her eyes now. “Satan, you will not shame this boy. You will not waste his life. Take your hands off him. Release him, in the name of Jesus.”

  Satisfied her order was heard, she opened her eyes and readjusted the bedsheet, looping it under her armpit again.

  “Give him some of the kenkey,” she directed the twins.

  Yao turned to the young men for confirmation of what he was hearing.

  “Grandma, we should take him to the police station.”

  “So he can sit in a jail cell not knowing his right from his left? First, he must be arrested in the Spirit.”

  “But, Gra—”

  “I said get this boy some kenkey! And fish!” She sucked her teeth as one of the boys retreated, annoyed she had had to repeat herself.

  Yao moved to leave.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Ahshhh!” Yao folded, felled by the pain that inflamed the arm he had fallen on as she reached out to yank him to stay.

  “They are bringing you kenkey. Put on your pants.” She shook her head. “Where are your clothes? Derek, go and bring him something of yours to—”

  “Madam, my clothes are on your wall.” He grimaced as he massaged his shoulder.

  “Ahh,” she said, verbalizing the breath of exhaled judgment. “Derek, go and bring his clothes.”

  “Madam, I am—”

  “Do you know it’s a demon?” she asked him. “The Spirit of Lust and Theft. You have let them both in. You have given them rest.” She threw her hands up now, exasperated.

  As Yao stepped into his briefs, Grandma continued. “Foul Spirits, I dismiss you in the name of Jesus. This home is sealed in the blood of Jesus. At my Lord’s name, you have to flee.” She paused to call her grandsons—“Derek! Eric!”—before turning to him again.

  “Where are you from?”

  He ignored her, assessing whether he could overpower her grandsons with his pained arm and escape.

  “I said where are you from?”

  “Tafi,” he said finally, ashamed of the tears that suddenly brimmed in his eyes.

  “O de suku-ah?” she asked him in Ewe, knowing now he was from the Volta Region.

  “ ’Vegbetɔ?” He swiped a tear at the sound of his language, comforted by this little piece of home.

  “I am not, but my former husband was a proud Guan.” She rolled her eyes at the memory. “He grew up in Volta and we lived there for some time.”

  “I completed BECE,” he answered her earlier question, proving it by returning to the English he had passed in the Basic Education Certificate Examination.

  “Then how did you end up here?”

  Yao inhaled as Derek and Eric entered the room with his shorts and T-shirt and a plate of food. He eyed the meal with suspicion, but hunger overtook his trepidation.

  The plate was crowded with kenkey slices, the midsection of a fried tilapia, ground green micro chilies, and a lump of black shitɔ. Saliva instantly pooled in his mouth, the fragrance of the fermented corn dough mingling with the blackened pepper, dried fish and tomato condiment, and seasoned tilapia. He hadn’t eaten since seven that night, the small waakye and two five-hundred-milliliter sachets of Special Ice pure water long burned away with the night’s action.

  A cock crowed outside, the official announcement of morning. Soon the sky would show it.

  “Eh-heh, I’m listening.”

  The boys hovered, and Grandma folded her hands on her lap as Yao bent to put the plate on the ground and step into his clothes. When he was dressed, he picked the plate up again in silence.

  “Have you attemp
ted rape or burglary before?” Grandma asked. “Because you were emboldened to come into this house naked, though Jehovah had other plans for you and me, and us.” She turned to her grandsons. “Go on. You were saying?”

  Yao sighed, pinching a piece of kenkey from the ball, dipping it in the pepper as he decided whether to tell the old lady the truth. A small part of him was curious how someone who didn’t know him or Elinam would read the situation.

  “I was falsely accused.”

  “Of rape?” Grandma leapt.

  “But I didn—”

  “Did you ask permission? Did she tell you she wanted you?” Grandma pummeled Yao with questions. “Or did you come into her chamber like you did mine, naked and full of a lustful, lying spirit?”

  “She was my girlfriend.” He overstated his friendship with Elinam for the sake of simplicity and brevity. It had taken years of flirtation and missed opportunities to get her in that sanctuary.

  “And so what? Does that give you the right to take what she didn’t want to give?”

  He inhaled with fresh anger. “Excuse me to say, but she went down on me of her own accord. She admitted she did.”

  Grandma turned to her grandsons quizzically. “ ‘Went down’?”

  “She sucked my penis.”

  He waited for the old lady to get his point that Elinam was no angel, that she had indeed wanted to fuck, but Grandma twisted her head again.

  “The devil has made a fool of you, but do you know Wisdom is at work too?”

  Annoyed, he handed the plate to a twin and moved to leave.

  The young man’s eyes narrowed with knowing as Yao tried to move past. “You are the one who took my phone! Grandma—”

  Grandma stopped him, sucking her teeth. “The phone I told you not to buy to save money for your visa? ‘Wisdom cries aloud in the street,’ ” she told them all, pointing to the wall behind Yao. He turned to see she was reading from a paper taped above his head labeled “Proverbs 1:20.”

  “In the markets she raises her voice,” she continued, “at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: ‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?’ ”

  Derek and Eric scowled.

  “I spent the night in counterback because my girl regretted her own decision,” Yao cried to the old woman. “The officers of the CID call themselves Criminal Investigation Department, but there was no investigation.”

  He snorted. “They trick me into accompanying them to the police station before revealing their true identity and telling me if I say anything to them, it can be used against me in court!”

  Yao sliced the air with his hands to punctuate the officers’ next order. “They force me to go inside the station. I see Elinam standing there with her father. They ask her ‘Is he the one?’ ”—he jabbed his pointer finger in accusation—“without asking me anything! And when she says ‘Yes,’ they take me behind the counter, take my shirt and trousers, and lock me in the cell with three others, all of us in just our boxer shorts.”

  His hands instinctively gathered in a fist in front of his crotch. “If not for one kind officer who let me use her phone to call my mother, and provided food to sustain me, I don’t know how I would have survived that night. My mother had to go all the way to Ofankor to get her cousin to sign for my bail—ten million cedis.” Yao shook his head now and paused to let the sum sink in. “Now I can’t stay in Tafi, because everyone was separating themselves from me and my family. No one was buying our bananas, so I had to take my uncle’s job offer in Ofankor.”

  His explanation didn’t replace the judgment in Grandma’s eyes. Spent from the memory and the rush of anger and shame he now felt, Yao turned toward the window net he had torn. “I have to go.”

  “You can go out by the door,” Grandma told him. “Derek, show him. And,” she preempted, “don’t ask him about any phone.”

  Yao followed his angry leader, trailed by his angrier twin. They walked through a narrow terrazzo hallway, past a sitting room fat with ornate stuffed chairs. More Bible verses were taped in magnified print along the walls. He exhaled when he was finally standing outside, morning’s hazy first light flooding his eyes. He waited with restless fidgets as one of the twins fumbled with the lock at the gate.

  “If you don’t go and bring Eric’s phone—” Derek whispered.

  “Young man!” Grandma’s voice sliced through the twin’s threat. The three men turned to find the old woman filling her doorway. “Are you working?”

  “I—yes, madam,” Yao lied, exhaling again as Eric finally pulled the rusted gate from its mooring in the ground, freeing him from this house and night.

  “Doing what? Stealing and raping are not professions.”

  He rolled his eyes as Eric laughed at him now.

  “I was a seller. In Tafi.”

  “Well, I need security,” she said. “As you know. We need someone to be in the house with us day and night to deter armed robbers and help us keep the compound neat. I’ll pay you 200 Ghana a month, plus food and accommodation here. Use Wisdom,” she said before turning away.

  Yao backed out of the gate and heard it lock as he walked off. He inhaled relief that the old woman hadn’t turned him in to the East Legon Police Station, even as he regretted the meal he had left half-eaten.

  He walked down to the end of the block, turned the corner, and followed the road to Lagos Avenue. It was just after six a.m., but the thoroughfare was already busy with koko and bofrot sellers setting up respective stands for the porridge and fried sweet dough breakfast staples.

  The road that fed Lagos Avenue to George Bush Highway was beginning to fill with peddlers hawking P.K. chewing gum, pure water, MTN and Airtel phone credit, car floor mats, and the daily newspapers. Cars and trɔtrɔs were starting to pile up, the hawkers taking advantage of the captive consumer traffic.

  With rush hour beginning, Yao doubted a mate would let him ride to Oyarifa for free, so he walked. Past A&C Mall, along the dirt that skirted Adjiringanor Road, he passed former president Rawlings’s mansion, the luxury housing development Trasacco Valley, and Cahaya Lounge. When he reached the Allied Oil filling station, hunger taunted his decision to abandon the kenkey Grandma had served him.

  He detoured at the sight of the convenience grocery store beyond the petrol pumps, walking into the air-conditioned cool of the empty supermarket. His mouth went dry from the artificial blast and sudden thirst. He had no food at home. He would have to steal something to eat, and a bottle of water.

  Yao wandered the aisles, blinking in exhaustion from the multitude of choices. Whole milk. Skim milk. Almond milk. Coconut milk. Ah!

  He wanted an egg. How he wanted an egg. But he couldn’t take just one. If he stole a carton, he would have to pay his roommate both to use his stovetop and for space in his refrigerator. Everything was a transaction in Accra, an extraction of the little someone could take, yet he was the supposed djulɔ.

  Bread was the only thing that made sense to take. Yao swiped a small bar of butter and pushed it into his pocket. Where would he hide the bread, though? He sighed, staggering out of the store breadless and squinting for a corner provisions shop. He could taste the fresh-baked sweet bread delivered every morning across the city.

  He continued down the increasingly crowded street, giving way to parents and uniformed schoolkids, workers, and cars, the sun blistering his path with rising intensity. By the time he reached Halima’s Breadbasket and Provisions, the pain in the arm he had fallen on throbbed in his feet too. He was too tired to plot.

  “Auntie, I don’t have money.” He must have said it so pitifully, because the proprietress handed him two loaves without question or comment.

  He cradled them in gratitude before tearing the plastic casing from the end of one and ripping a piece to eat. The soft flour was like blades in his dry throat, but his gag reflex quickly followed with just enough moisture to lubricate his swallow. He ate half of the loaf in the short dist
ance between Halima’s and his home.

  The gate that hedged his house materialized ahead of him, shimmer-floating like an oasis. He walked up to the structure of exposed beams and rods, past the hills of silvery gravel, stacked cement bags, and planks of wood, to the back, where six rooms were finished.

  He shared a room with one Titus Benyarko. Though Titus would charge him to use his fridge or stovetop, he would happily eat Yao’s bread if he left it on the box at the head of Titus’s bed. Yao buried the whole and half loaf in his suitcase before unfurling his sleeping mat.

  • • •

  “My guy! You for get phone!” Titus woke Yao to tell him. “I find some job give you, but I no fit give them your number. They already take give someone else,” he continued. “You for buy phone.”

  Yao inhaled and rolled over. When he woke up again, Titus was gone and the room was hot with the flatulence of sleep.

  He sat up, strength returning to his body, noticing a blot seeping through his shorts. He sucked his teeth, remembering the butter.

  He scanned for his bucket in Titus’s corner, where it usually lay, but it wasn’t to be found. Fucking Titus. He walked out to see if any of his neighbors were home to borrow one of theirs. Unusually, they were all out and he remembered vaguely now that one of them had mentioned a death in the family—that they would all be journeying to their village for the funeral.

  Perhaps, instead of stealing in Shiashie, Yao mused, he should take what he could from his housemates. He had lived there a month without incident. No one would suspect him. He tried a doorknob absently, knowing it would be locked, but thinking of what he could use to jimmy the door quickly.

  Sucking his teeth, he abandoned the door for now, and took his towel and Titus’s shower caddy to the tap at the back of the house. Squatting naked under the nozzle, he lathered with Titus’s fragrant soaps, sounding out the French labels to himself as A Traição floated in surround sound. “Silvia, you have to tell him what your father made you do!”