Everything is as it was. The couch with the waterfall back and pleated arms, still fraying and peeling in the same places. Progression is sameness, sameness is progression, just look with one eye closed, and then the other. Open the other. We’re lying on it, sixteen years before this, Akuba on her back with her eyes shut, on her back with her mouth clamped shut, but I am patient. I say, do you remember that episode, what they were doing, Nicolas and Aymar? and she shakes her head and covers her eyes but lies there all the same, sameness an invitation, and so I say, don’t worry, I’ll show you, I always show you, and I hitch up her skirt, the checkered one we wear on Fridays over our belly buttons so the boys would notice our bare legs, which they do, and when the teacher is not looking, slide broken mirrors under our tables and shout ɔbaa kata wo twɛ, kata wo twɛ. I hitch up her skirt. I close my eyes. I shove my tongue hard as adwe into her mouth. My mother comes home and takes one look at the couch and knows I have sinned. She says, can’t you just be good?
The bamboo cane is as it was. It stands in the green corner vase behind the armchairs, for quick action, so my mother can reach her arm over the chair when need be, and need always is. She comes home from Happy Heart School near Ante Mary Bus Stop, where she strikes another bamboo cane on the children’s hands and thighs and backs, takes one look at the couch and knows I have sinned, reaches her arm over the chair for the bamboo cane in the green corner vase behind the armchairs, lashes my hands and thighs and back and buttocks and face and hands, is still lashing me like odwan one year forward when they find I am a thief.
I am a thief at nine because Kuffour has knocked off all the zeroes and the notes are sweet in my hands. My mother slides new cedis between Bible pages, marks her favourite sections, sings the gospel of the time, from July 2007, our money will change. I take five cedis from Caesar, wrest ten from Job’s emptying hands, twenty from Solomon. Afriyie the ofiri gyato comes to me at school and says, I hear you’re rich now, so I’ll bring fifty pesewas, and you’ll bring five Ghana, and at break time we’ll buy Angelo and fried rice from Maayaa, divide it equal equal, and I say yes, yes, I want to be loved, I want to be loved, and I am loved every day at break time, when we hold up the queue and call out our shopping list, arm and arm linked, sugar toffee ten, ice cream six, spring roll ne shitɔ four, and we eat under the aluguntugui tree and play ampe to tamp down the greed, until August comes and Afriyie asks my mother, why don’t you give Adwoa fifty? The Bible is as it was, worn from pleas to a tongue-tied god. It rests on her plastic chair which fades now, chipping, chipping, Gye Nyame.
The burn in the linoleum is as it was. I am ten and there is new blood between my legs. I’m running across the living room and a clot smites the floor, curious thing I’ve never seen, and I scoop it with my fingers and wedge it in TomTom wrapper and hide it under my mattress. I burn a hole in the floor where it first fell and my mother comes home, and she gives me an egg and I swallow it whole and she says, you’re a woman now, a woman now. I put the clot to my nose every night before bed. The rot is sweeter by the passing day. My mother pries it from my sleeping hands an evening in June and says, can’t you just be good? and she calls Pastor Jude and he takes me away to be good.
In the seminary for troubled children we learn to be good so we can have mothers again. We say, Luke 8:2, and some women who had been healed of evil spirits, from whom seven demons had gone out, may we be like them, and we say, consecrate our souls, o God, for we have sinned, and we pray, haribiribiribiyesurakashalafreemeforgivemeribiribi please, and we pray, for one harmattan, and for five, and for seven, and for sixteen, and Pastor Jude’s voice is as it was when he decrees that I am good.
The creak in her bedroom door is as it was. She walks into the hallway and says, it’s you, and I say, yes, it’s me, and she says, are you good? and I say, yes, no, I don’t think so, and she laughs, and I laugh, and she says, you know I love you, you know I do? and I say, yes, no, I don’t think so, and she laughs, and I laugh, and we sit in the couch with the waterfall back and pleated arms, still fraying and peeling in the same places, sameness a mercy, and the dimple in her nose is as it was, the jerk in her frantic wrists, the gulfs and gulfs between us, the good.
