Reading the Ceiling by Dayo Forster Page B

at the door. I shout out, ‘He’s coming,’ but the noise continues.
    I shake him again. ‘You need to wake up and talk to these people. Shall I ring Musa?’
    I walk back to them and say, ‘He was sleeping.’
    â€˜If he doesn’t hurry, we’ll come and wake him up ourselves.’
    I go back to get him. Fred’s sitting up on the bed now, hands on knees, still fast asleep.
    â€˜You’ll have to go in your pyjamas.’ I’m shaking his shoulders as I tell him. ‘We can’t make them crosser than they already are.’ More sharp raps on the front door. Fred gets up and shuffles along, only just waking up enough to say, ‘But what do they want with me?’
    At the door, the young man says, as I open up, ‘Old man, you took your time. We want to ask you some questions. You’re coming with us.’
    I notice the young man’s shoes. They are black leather, buffed, with the tips of the toes curled slightly upwards. As he turns away, I can see the laces, threaded through in a classic crossover pattern. When I was six, I was taught to do mine just like that.
    Two of the three men who’d been standing behind him all this while, dressed in army fatigues and berets, step forward, each taking one of Fred’s arms. They propel him so it seems like he’s being carried.
    I shout out, ‘Where are you taking him?’
    â€˜We’ll bring him back when we’re done.’
    My toe hurts. I look down. The door lifted a flap of skin off my toe. Underneath, blood is slowly oozing out. I need to sit down. I need to clean it.
    *
    I ring Musa as soon as light breaks. It takes him three days to find Fred. He’s being held in a cell at the main police station. Fred’s been heard saying things about the government. Now they want to know where he’s getting his opinions from.
    He comes home five days after Musa finds him. There’s a darkly lined inch of healing skin high on his right cheek. His eyelid is twice its normal size, and has forced his eye half closed. His voice is slurred as if his tongue has swollen to fill up his mouth and left no space for words.
    It takes three weeks of fiery soups, fish, oxtail, and pig’s trotters to get him to stay out of bed longer and longer, until he stays up after breakfast, goes in for a nap after lunch and sits up in the evening to listen to the radio. He says little. Whenever I ask ‘How are you feeling today?’ he looks at me, steadily, then says, ‘Just fine.’
    Musa, Suni and Alhaji drop in to see him sometimes. They phone at other times. It’s not until early November, when the sun has started to bake the moisture out of the ground, that they decide its time to have another ataya session, as they used to.
    When I look at him next to his friends, with a picture of how they used to be barely three months ago, I see how Fred has lost his jaunt. His skin is stretchier, his body has shrunk in it – his jowls, rough with several days’ worth of stubble, fold over like a new definition of landscape. Air can puff in under his shirt to take up space freed by his shrinking paunch.
    Their renewed ataya  sessions are like a two-day-old balloon, not quite full, and with a skin that gives a tired thwap  rather than a high-pitched thwop . You see it if you look closely, but otherwise you won’t realise that the skin looks more like crepe than smooth enamel, that light no longer glints off it, that its bounce is a little lower.
    Musa beats Fred in a straight run of three games.
    â€˜Boy, I’m seeing better than you tonight.’ I can hear their conversation, fluttering in with the billows of the curtain by the door, and there is a ring of delight in Musa’s voice.
    Musa’s lead increases to a run of six games. I hear Alhaji’s high voice: ‘Six, man, what are  you doing?’
    I drop a splodge of thick dough into a pool of hot oil. I am