Becoming Abigail. Chris Abani

IX

      Now X

      Then XI

      Now XII

      Then XIII

      Now XIV

      Then XV

      Now XVI

      Then XVII

      Now XVIII

      Then XIX

      Now XX

      Then XXI

      Then XXII

      Now XXIII

      Then XXIV

      Then XXV

      Then XXVI

      Now XXVII

      Then XXVIII

      Now XXIX

      Then XXX

      Now XXXI

      Then XXXII

      Now XXXIII

      Now XXXIV

       Acknowledgements

       Also by Chris Abani

       Novels

       Masters of the Board

       GraceLand

       Poetry

       Kalakuta Republic

       Daphne’s Lot

       Dog Woman

       Hands Washing Water

       For Blair.

       And my nieces: Chinwendu, Nkechi, Natasha, Ibari, and Kelechi.

       Lay It As It Plays

I

      And this.

      Even this. This memory like all the others was a lie. Like the sound of someone ascending wooden stairs, which she couldn’t know because she had never heard it. Still it was as real as this one. A coffin sinking reluctantly into the open mouth of a grave, earth in clods collected around it in a pile like froth from the mouth of a mad dog. And women. Gathered in a cluster of black, like angry crows. Weeping. The sound was something she had heard only in her dreams and in these moments of memory—a keening, loud and sharp, but not brittle like the screeching of glass or the imag­ined sound of women crying. This was something entirely different. A deep lowing, a presence, dark and palpable, like a shadow emanating from the women, becoming a thing that circled the grave and the mourners in a predatory man­ner before rising up to the brightness of the sky and the sun, to be replaced by another momentarily.

      Always in this memory she stood next to her father, a tall whip of blackness like an undecided but upright cobra. And he held her hand in his, another lie. He was silent, but tears ran down his face. It wasn’t the tears that bothered her. It was the way his body shuddered every few moments. Not a sob, it was more like his body was struggling to remember how to breathe, fighting the knowledge that most of him was riding in that coffin sinking into the soft dark loam.

      But how could she be sure she remembered this correctly? He was her father and the coffin held all that was left of her mother, Abigail. This much she was sure of. However, judging by the way everyone spoke of Abigail, there was nothing of her in that dark iroko casket. But how do you remember an event you were not there for? Abigail had died in childbirth and she, Abigail, this Abigail, the daughter not the dead one, the mother, was a baby sleeping in the crook of some aunt’s arm completely unaware of the world.

      She looked up. Her father stood in the doorway to the kitchen and the expression she saw on his face wasn’t a lie.

      “Dad,” she said.

      He stood in the doorframe. Light, from the outside security lights and wet from the rain, blew in. He swallowed and collected himself. She was doing the dishes buried up to her elbows in suds.

      “Uh, carry on,” he said. Turning abruptly, he left.

      The first time she saw that expression she’d been eight. He had been drinking, which he did sometimes when he was sad. Although that word, sad, seemed inadequate. And this sadness was the memory of Abigail overwhelming him. When he felt it rise, he would drink and play jazz.

      It was late and she should have been in bed. Asleep. But the loud music woke her and drew her out into the living room. It was bright, the light sterile almost, the same florescent lighting used in hospitals. The furnishing was sparse. One armchair with wide wooden arms and leather seats and backrest, the leather fading and worn bald in some spots. A couple of beanbags scattered around a fraying rug, and a room divider sloping on one side; broken. Beyond the divider was the dining room. But here, in the living room, under the window that looked out onto a hill and the savanna sloping down it, stood the record player and the stack of records. Her father was in the middle of the room swaying along to “The Girl from Ipanema,” clutching a photograph of Abigail to his chest. She walked in and took the photograph from his hands.

      “Abigail,” he said. Over and over.

      “It’s all right, Dad, it’s just the beer.”

      “I’m not drunk.”

      “Then it’s the jazz. You know it’s not good for you.”

      But she knew this thing wasn’t the jazz, at least not the way he had told her about it on other countless drunken nights. That jazz, she imagined, was something you find down a dark alley taken as a shortcut, and brushing rain from your hair in the dimness of the club found there, you hear the singer crying just for you, while behind her a horn collects all the things she forgot to say, the brushes sweep­ing it all up against the skin of the drum. This thing with her father, however, was something else, Abigail suspected, something dead and rotting.

      “Shhh, go to bed, Dad,” she said.

      He turned and looked at her and she saw it and recognized what it was. She looked so much like her mother that when he saw her suddenly, she knew he wanted her to be Abigail. Now she realized that there was also something else: a patience, a longing. The way she imagined a devoted bonsai grower stood over a tree.

      Now & Then

Now

       II

      She thought it might rain but so far it hadn’t and though a slight breeze ruffled the trees, it wasn’t cold. Even down here on the embankment, the night was as crisp and clear as a new banknote. She suddenly wished she had seen a London fog, the kind she had read about; a decent respectable fog that masked a fleeing Jack the Ripper or hid Moriarty from Sherlock’s chase. She stopped walking. She was here.

      The sphinxes faced the wrong way, gazing inward con­templatively at Cleopatra’s Needle rather than outward, protectively, but Queen Victoria had ruled against the expense of correcting the mistake. The obelisk, an Egyptian souvenir, had been a gift from Mohammed Ali. She wasn’t sure who he was, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t the boxer. Abigail looked at the cold smiles of the sphinxes. Like them, she was amused at the ridiculous impotence of the phallus they stared at. A time capsule was buried beneath the stone tumescence containing, among other things, fashion photos of the most beautiful women of the nineteenth century.

      She stood gazing out at the dark cold presence of the Thames. Breaking open a packet of cigarettes she fumbled clumsily to light one. She didn’t smoke. With her first drag she imagined she could see the ghosts of those who had also ended it here. At the Needle.