Mama dropped me at Uncle Larweh’s house the next day. DJ and I spent most of the morning working quadratic equations. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he said he was bad at maths but I didn’t mind tutoring him. At lunch time we went to the kitchen for a meal of akple and fetri detsi. It was a good thing that Mama wasn’t there to see all the palm oil floating on the top of the soup.

When I saw DJ’s ball of akple (it was thrice the size of mine) I asked him if he would be able to finish it. He only grinned and said, “With God all things are possible.”

I’m not as picky as Mama, so I enjoyed the meal thoroughly. In addition to meat and smoked herrings, Auntie Cee had added oysters, shrimps and crabs to the soup. After helping DJ with the dishes, he volunteered to take me on a tour of the town. We ended up wading in the river because I was terrified of riding behind him on his motorcycle. He didn’t even have a helmet.

When it got too hot, he took me to a spot where we had some ice cream. We stayed there until it grew dark but no one asked us to leave. DJ said we were waiting for the kebab guy. He swore that the guy’s kebabs were the best in the entire South Tongu district. When I noticed a waiter coming our way, I asked DJ how to say ‘Please, where is the washroom?’ in Ewe.

DJ told me to say, “Medekuku me lor wɔ.”

When the waiter approached our table I said, “Medekuku me lor wɔ.”

“Sorry?” the waiter said. I turned to look at DJ whose face was expressionless.

“Medekuku me lor wɔ,” I repeated stupidly thinking there was a problem with my pronunciation. The waiter looked from me to DJ. Then he looked back at me and then at DJ. It was only then that I saw that DJ was trying very hard not to laugh.

The waiter turned to me, smiled and said, “I love you too but I already have a girlfriend.”

It took me a minute to process everything. By then DJ was laughing so hard that he nearly fell off his chair. My face grew hot. “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . . I had no idea what I was saying . . .”

“Charley long time, how be tins?” DJ asked bumping fists with the waiter.

“We just dey. How we for do am?” the waiter replied. I couldn’t believe they knew each other. I sat there with my mouth hanging open.

“My cuson dis, e no know the Ewe.”

“Me naa I see. Why we see you kyɛɛ like so?”

“No be my ol’ man? He say my grades no good so, charley, I no fi spin again.”

“Yawa o. You for mow the book.”

“E no be easy o.”

“Nothing be easy. Charley, I have job do, I go see you ron.” They bumped fists again. He took our empty bowls and was chuckling when he walked away. I leaned over to hit DJ but he grabbed my hand and started laughing all over again. Then he pointed the way to the washroom and I went to pee. When I came back he was still laughing.

“I’ll get you for that. You just wait and see,” I said.

“You should have seen the look on your face—it was priceless. I should have taped it.”

We were the first to order the goat meat kebabs when the kebab guy came and DJ was right, they were very good. He even let me take the extra stick the guy gave us. “I used to spin there on weekends,” he said as we walked to the trotro station. “The manager hasn’t got anyone to take my place yet. I’m hoping if I do better this term, Dad will let me go back to spinning.”

He bought us some kelewele and fried groundnuts while we waited for the taxi that would pass in front of the hospital to finish loading. “Thanks for teaching me,” he said when the last person sat in.

“Thanks for taking me round. I had a good time,” I heard myself say and was even more surprised to find out that I meant every word of it.

“What are we doing for your birthday?” Mama asked three weeks later as we were driving home from church. The Pastor had preached a sermon on treasures in clay pots. I’d liked it very much.

My birthday was the next day. I had thought Mama had forgotten about it. It was six weeks since we had moved to Sogakofe. Six weeks. I’d been so busy helping Allison out with her blog that I had hardly noticed the time fly. We had spent one weekend making posters and flyers to whip up interest. It had taken her forever to decide on a name. She had thought ‘Campus Filla’ was too dry and ‘Eyes and Ears’ sounded like a tacky gossip column. She had finally settled on ‘Musings of a Sogascan’. It didn’t sound bad to me either and so the name stuck. She had so far published two articles. The first was ‘What is your cross?’ and was dedicated to me like she promised. She was always running to the computer lab to check how many hits she had.

“Do you want to send a cake to school? I could also order food for you and your friends.”

“Mom, I’m not in primary school anymore,” I said. I could imagine the looks on Sefakor, Maureen and Nadya’s faces if my mother appeared on campus with a cake and food. There was no way I’d live down their teasing and taunts. I turned to Mama with a stricken look on my face, “Please promise that you won’t come to school with a cake or food or drinks or anything.”

“Hey, okay, okay.”

“Promise,” I insisted.

“I promise,” she said.

“We could go to the spa for the weekend. There are two of them by the river you know? One of them is a health spa.”

I groaned.

“It’ll be fun, you wait and see.” I sighed. Spending a weekend with my mother eating whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables and doing ‘fun exercises’ was not my idea of fun.

***

On my birthday, I wore lip gloss and a put some face powder on my face. I washed it all off when I looked in the mirror. The face powder just drew more attention to the scars. I reapplied the gloss. Rules were made to be broken after all. My phone beeped. I was reading the WhatsApp message from Dede when it beeped again.

Dede’s message read: HBD. May all ur hrts desires come true. Hv a gud day. ttyl, aight? Sofi’s read: May u increase lyk bofrot in H2O May any evil plans against u go bak 2 sender. May joy n peace n hapiness be urs now & always. Hapi 17 bday. Luv u.

Mama was in a very good mood. She even fried an egg for herself, after she made an egg sandwich for me. She hardly ever eats egg. “You look pretty. Happy birthday.”

“Thanks,” I said sitting down to eat. She disappeared into her bedroom and came back with a box.

“Here you go, happy birthday.” I put down my mug of Milo and opened the box. In it was a simple gold chain with a tiny heart-shaped locket. Inscribed on the locket were the words ‘To the one I love’. “That was the first gift your dad ever gave me.”

“I know,” I said, caressing the locket. “Thank you.” I clasped the chain around my neck and slipped it under my shirt.

“I thought your school had a no jewellery policy.”

“No one will see it,” I said.

Mama sat down and picked her mug of herbal tea. Out of the blue she said, “The first time I noticed him was in the dissection room in medical school.”

I’d heard the story of how they met over a hundred times from Daddy. This was the first time I was hearing it from Mama.

“We knew we were going to be cutting up dead bodies but I guess it never really sunk in till we walked into the dissection room. There were eight cadavers on the dissection tables—two female and six males. We were assigned tables and we stood around them. The head of the anatomy department came in to talk to us about respecting the bodies, about how the people had given themselves to advance the spread of knowledge.

He was still speaking when this tall boy, or man I should say started sweating. I saw him wipe his face with a handkerchief and fan his face with his fingers. The next thing I knew he had fallen on top of me.”

I giggled. “He said it was love at first sight, when he opened his eyes and saw you.”

“He lied,” she said chuckling. “They laid him on one of the empty cadaver tables and gave him a bottle of coke to drink. I had to be sent to the sick bay. I had a bump the size of a fist on my head.” She took a forkful of scrambled eggs. “He felt really bad about it. He came to see me in my room at the hostel that night. Then we began saying ‘hi’ to each other at lectures. He fainted two more times. Again in the dissection room and another time in the haematology lab when blood was being drawn for an experiment we were doing. The head of the department called him and had a talk with him. Turned out blood made him squeamish and he didn’t really want to do medicine; it was what his family wanted. He loved mathematics. He wanted to be a maths teacher. He dropped out of medical school and went to read maths at Legon.

We kept in touch. When I graduated I invited him to my party. We started dating, got married and had you.” We finished our breakfast in silence. This was the longest talk we had had about my father. I knew she had done it so I wouldn‘t feel his absence so much it being my birthday and all. I wanted to tell her I appreciated the gesture; that I was glad she had made us talk about him but I didn’t. She got up, rinsed out her mug and plate and the moment passed.

*****

At break that day I told Allison that I wasn’t feeling well. She went for break alone. I wanted to play a video of Daddy but Komi Mensah also hadn’t gone for break and I didn’t know if he would report me if he saw me with a phone. I remembered what Miss Naa had said about keeping the ceramics studio open and went there instead. I sat at one of the corners at the back and played the video of Daddy dancing to Kojo Antwi‘s Tom and Jerry awareɛ. I don’t know where the tears came from but they started pouring down my face.

“Hey, are you okay?” I was so scared that I dropped the phone. I hadn’t heard Jamal Abdullah enter the classroom. He picked up the phone, glanced at the screen for a moment and gave it back to me. I fumbled with the off button. “Are you okay?” he repeated. I wiped the tears off my face. “Stupid question, obviously, you‘re not okay. Should I call someone for you? Allison? DJ?”

I shook my head. He sat down at the desk next to mine. “Are you going to report me?” I asked when I found my voice.

“For what? For crying?”

“The phone.”

“Of course not. That‘s an irrational rule. I wonder what made Mari Jata come up with that one.”

I didn‘t know what else to say.

“Do you mind if I stay? I want to practise on the wheel.” I shook my head.

“Are you sure? I mean if you want to be alone, I can come back another time.”

“It‘s okay,” I said.

He walked up to the corner of the room where some balls of clay had been kept in a plastic bowl and covered with a plastic sheet. He picked up a ball and kneaded it on a slab the way Miss Naa had taught us to do. In no time at all his hands were muddy. He took the piece of clay, sat behind the potter’s wheel and placed the ball on the wheel. I think he forgot I was in the room. He had really taken Miss Naa’s words to heart. It was just him and the clay. The ball of clay wobbled on the wheel. He took it off the wheel and slapped it down again. Then he leaned forward and cupped it with his hands. His forearms remained firmly planted on his thighs. His eyebrows furrowed in concentration. He wet his hands in a bowl of water at his side and forced the clay down. Then he cupped it with both hands and forced it up. He forced it down again and made a hole in the centre with his thumb. I don’t know how he managed to pedal with his foot and work with his hands at the same time. When he was satisfied with the size of the hole he placed both hands into the opening and opened it up further. The next stage happened like magic. He kept one hand in the pot and the other on the outside, and the pot just began growing.

I really don’t know what he did next, the wheel was spinning really fast and his hands were all over the place, but I could see a vase take shape. It had a well- rounded base, a tubular neck and a flared mouth for the opening. “Wow,” I said. I must have startled him because his hand slipped and one wall of the vase fell in. He looked up and seemed surprised to see me. He stopped pedalling and the wheel ground to a stop.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It‘s okay. I was almost done anyway,” he said and crushed the rest of the clay.

“I thought everyone in the class was a beginner.” In our extracurricular class, we were still struggling with pinching the clay to get something which would pass for a pot. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the walls to be even. When Miss Naa had demonstrated it had looked so easy.

He shrugged. “I‘ve worked with clay before.”

I wondered if that was before he’d dropped out of school. He must have guessed what I was thinking because he frowned and turned away from me. He took the lump of clay back to the bucket in the corner and washed his hands.

Then he picked up his bag and left.

“Jamal wait,” I called after him. It had occurred to me that this was where he had been coming all along. He hadn’t been going to smoke wee or anything of that sort. He stopped, turned and raised an eyebrow in question.

“Can I come and watch you tomorrow?”

“No,” he said and walked away.