Soon after Auntie Dee Dee’s burial, in sleep and wakefulness, a new buzz hovered over my existence, a filmy sub-ocular glaze of super sensitivity. I didn’t tell anyone what was happening, but my father saw me taking pictures of a dead lizard with my bright yellow battery-less camera from China. “Ebo, what are you doing?” “I want to compare it with the picture in the Encyclopaedia,” I lied. Since I spent my entire youth flipping through volumes of the 1979 World Book Encyclopaedia, it was a safe lie. “Oh, I see. Come to me if you need help, OK?” “OK.” In the next few weeks I took pictures of an endless collection of dead creatures: shy geckos, almost transparent with hunger; rats, still in the rigour of greed; fleabitten dogs, dust-beaten cats, startled rainbow dragonflies, and a face-making toad. I had no sympathy for dead animals generally – especially not rats and lizards. They were always encroaching on strictly human territories, like kitchens. One of my older cousins even told me that some of the boys in boarding school had the soles of their feet gnawed by rats sometimes. I felt sorry for the toad though. It was the victim of one of our random playground challenges. Spotted while we were in the land by the local garbage dump playing a football game called four corners, it immediately became the fifth target. Four corners was played by four persons with each one defending a small target. You got two touches of the ball: one to defend your goal, and one to shoot at someone else’s. I was playing with Yaw a.k.a. Table-head, a short, wide-shouldered boy with a flat
head and tooth-packed grin; Ato, who we called Tom Brown because his hair always faded to brown as soon as it grew beyond half-an-inch; and Kofi. Kofi used to be called Silas Marner because he always seemed to have more money than us and never wanted to share, but the name Silas Marner ebbed out of use after Ato named him Fagan and it stuck. We actually called him Kofi Fagan; it sounded nicer. Most of us were named after characters from the English books we were made to read at school. I was sometimes called Pip because I loved Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations so much. Soon after the toad was spotted, all our shots started to head in Yaw’s direction as he was closest to the toad. Ruffled by the unfair attention, he exclaimed, “I won’t play anymore!” “OK Table, let’s stone the toad,” suggested Kofi Fagan grabbing a handful of pebbles. “First person to hit it wins the game.” It was a ploy by Kofi Fagan to turn the game in his favour. He was lethal at throwing stones. He could rescue a ripe mango from its tree with a single shot. Tom Brown grimaced. “OK.” Table flung a smooth brown pebble towards the toad as he spoke. He caught the toad as it was reaching its pink tongue out to catch a fly. The pebble flew across a suspended haze of dust, sneaked into the toad’s mouth and choked it; with its long tongue still out, decorated with a live fly. I ran home to get my camera. In secondary school I would show this picture to Mrs Obogu – my Nigerian biology teacher – when she remarked how rare it was to see a toad with its tongue out.
In addition to pictures, I had a single mounted creature. A giant spider. I had an illogical fear of spiders. Size was irrelevant. Once a creeper made the transition from six legs to eight, insect to arachnid, it had me shitting in my shorts. I accomplished many remarkable physical feats when confronted by spiders. Tom Brown, Table and Kofi Fagan often testified to that. I hurdled fences, jumped down trees, and outran cars. This spider, I caught because of the dreams that followed Auntie Dee Dee’s funeral. To confront my fear. I even wrote instructions for it.
1. Locate your fear 2. Find a suitable glass 3. Trap your fear under the glass 4. Lifting the glass slightly, spray perfume into it 5. Watch from a distance until your fear dies
I mounted it on a round piece of yellow card and labelled its body parts in a scrawl with sharper edges than my usual handwriting. Testament to the fact that I had perhaps not fully conquered my fear. I had learned more about it, but it lay beneath the surface ready to stump me if I didn't remain vigilant. In the dreams, black and red spiders swarmed the food that was served to me by dancing cadavers. I had to swipe them away to eat, but they kept multiplying and making a webbed playground of my body. My body became a living interpretation of Miss Havisham’s wedding room in Great Expectations.
After I mounted my fear, and learned to distinguish the cephalothorax from the abdomen, the spiders disappeared with a single swipe into the dark subworld of the tables around me. I was often the only guest at a cadaver cabaret with four faceless waiters to attend to my needs. On a green stage of knitted vapour, cooking and singing, was Auntie Dee Dee, her face still stuffed with the cotton wool the embalmers used to fill her cheeks. “Dad, when you die, do you stop breathing first or does your heart stop beating?” If I weren’t so curious nobody would have guessed that my interest in death was growing at the speed of sickness. I had done everything as I used to except for the pictures, which I had a good excuse for, and reading Great Expectations over and over again; wondering why, if there were so many cobwebs in Miss Havisham’s house, no spiders were ever mentioned. I later found that all the books we had read at school were obscure abridged versions produced locally. The full version – the one produced based on the serialised tale Charles Dickens published in his weekly journal All The Year Round – had “speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies.” My father raised his eyes from his shop’s inventory list, crinkling his forehead in the process. He studied me with unwavering eyes – a spider contemplating a daring fly. “It depends son. I guess if you die from a heart attack your heart stops beating first. If you drown you stop breathing first. The only way to know for sure in to ask a doctor…” “…Or a dead person,” he added laughing. “They don’t talk about it.”
“What?” The fly was webbed. The room was suddenly too small. I felt like all the photos on our living room wall were watching me: My sister holidaying in Trafalgar Square with pigeons pecking her feet out of view; Grandma fanning flames under last year’s family feast, the entire Oppong-Ribeiro clan – my family – squinting and smiling at the Odwira festival… What year was that? Why wasn’t I in the picture? A photo of my father with his right arm lawfully draped over his Datsun iterated his silent authority. It was too late to change what I had said. "What did you say?" My father persisted, his voice softer. “They don't talk about it; I asked them.” The creases in my father’s forehead deepened. “Who?” “The dead people.” “You’ve been talking to ghosts?” “No, dead bodies.” “Dead bodies?” It sounded really silly once I had said it. I tried to make it sound better. “In my dreams.” He inclined his head slightly to the right. “I don’t speak to anyone I don’t know. Just Auntie Dee Dee…” “… and sometimes the waiters.” “No, no, no.” My father sensed my fear of punishment. He had large rough palms that he rarely used on us, but, when he did, we felt the ridges of his rage on our buttocks for days.
“I’m not angry. Tell me about the dreams. Can you tell me?” I told him about the cabarets and the food; platefuls of steaming jollof with the rice enlivened with colourful vegetables and geometric invasions of meat; endless bowls of oil-speckled groundnut soup; delicious fried plantain streaked red, orange and black by a ridged saucepan, accompanied by a bean sauce that climbed all over your senses in tracks of spiced palm oil, mouthfuls of tiger nuts – crunchy and juicy; yam and cocoyam graffitied with strips of chicken and kontomire; silver spoonfuls of strawberry ice cream; trays full of groundnut and coconut brittle; palmwine, “I didn’t drink it, Daddy”; and mangoes, mangoes, mangoes… Then I told him about the spiders and why I had to mount one. “I had to eat. It was Auntie Dee Dee’s cooking.” My father listened. Then he cried. Silver rivulets of sorrow that made him look old. He reached for me. Watching my father cry pulled a cord inside me and I began to sob. “I’m sorry son.” He shook. His dark skin felt like a minor earthquake beneath my hands. “I’m sorry son.” He wiped his face and looked at me through glistening lashes. “Death is difficult for everyone.” I never made sense of the dreams, nor did I understand why my father apologised, but the dreams stopped. They came back once. This time the food was devoured by the spiders before the plates got to me. The only evidence of the food’s existence was the intricate brown tracks left by the spiders, like dust patterns. I woke up with an acute hunger. It was early 1983.
In the same year there was a terrible food shortage in Ghana. Everything was rationed. The queues of people waiting to buy their provisions lasted for hours and criss-crossed the city. Brown patterns as intricate as a dust-stained spider web. Still, we were invisible. The West was reluctant to help a Ghanaian government that was sending its students to Castro’s Cuba to study. People begged. You can’t afford pride when you have children. The head of state called us comrades. He was thin too. We learnt to make a single meal last an entire day. A stillness enveloped the entire nation. School suddenly seemed difficult. We lacked the energy for endless football games and I soon forgot the spider dreams in the vortex of hunger.