I put on my sunglasses and stared out the window as Mama drove. It took fifteen minutes for us to move from McCarthy Hill to Tetteh Quarshie Circle. We spent another forty minutes getting to the motorway from the Tetteh Quarshie Circle. I bought a jumbo-sized bag of plantain chips from a hawker on the street, silently daring Mama to comment. She looked straight ahead as if she hadn’t seen me, but to show her disapproval her lips remained in a straight line. I ripped the bag open and began munching.

Three months was not so long. By the time the first term was over, Bobby would realize just how much he had missed me and everything would be back to normal.

Don’t people say absence makes the heart grow fonder? Besides my birthday was in six weeks, I was sure he’d call me then. Maybe he’d even make us get together as my birthday present. On the other hand if he was freaking out because of my face, who knew what he would do if he found out about the colostomy. I sighed in despair. Mama mistook it for impatience. We’d got stuck in traffic again at the Tema motorway roundabout.

“We’re making haste slowly,” she said as the traffic began moving. I pretended I had not heard her. I wasn’t ready to play the oxymoron game with her. It was something special between Daddy and me. Her attempt at playing it with me felt like a violation of some sort. Mama wouldn’t give up though. “Can you give me an exact estimate of how long we’ve been stuck here?”

“I don’t feel like playing okay?”

She nodded but I could tell she was disappointed. She switched on the radio and

Didn’t make any more attempts at talking to me until we got to the police barrier at Tsopoli.

“Do you want to pee?”

“No.”

The police stopped us at the barrier. One officer came up to us.

“Madam Doctor, are you moving?” he asked, as he glanced at her windscreen and checked her vehicle insurance and road worthiness stickers. Her medical association sticker was right beneath the other two.

“Yes, to Sogakofe.”

“District hospital or Comboni?”

“The district hospital,” Mama said.

“My wife comes from there. It’s a nice town,” he said waving for her to proceed.

“Safe journey.”

“Thank you,” she said and continued driving. The movers were long gone. I couldn‘t see their truck. Most of the drivers who were behind us over took her. She slowed even more when cars approached from the opposite lane. I knew she was doing this for me. I’d been terrified of sitting in a moving car the first month after I’d been discharged from the hospital. A part of me wanted to thank her; a second part just pushed it aside. She was my mother; it was her job to take care of me.

I spent most of the journey looking out the window. Not that there was much to see—it was just grass, grass and more grass with a tree or two in between. We hardly saw people until we got to the small towns, Dawa, Sege, Koluedor, but even then there still wasn‘t much to see—just trotro stations and container-stores, a school, a church or two, sometimes a mosque and many small atakpame huts and a few cement block buildings.

We had been on the road for about an hour when a boy aged no more than seven or eight walked right into the middle of the road and held up his hand for us to stop. Mama slowed down reluctantly and kept peering into the bushes. I think she was afraid we were going to be robbed or something. There had been news reports of groups of armed men who pounced on travellers when they stopped on the roads.

The boy disappeared into the bushes and reappeared seconds later leading a herd of cattle. Mama visibly relaxed. The boy and two dogs guided the cows across the road. The dogs nipped at the heels of any of the cows who appeared to be straying.

When the boy whistled a command to them, they either disappeared into the bush to guide more cows out or went ahead of the herd to the bushes on the other side of the road. After about five minutes when all the cows had crossed over, the young boy waved his thanks. Mama continued driving. I dozed off.

When I woke up, we were parked by the side of the road. Mama was by the roadside examining a pile of watermelons for sale. The woman selling them cut one open and offered Mama a slice. Mama was nodding at something the woman was saying as she bit into thefruit. Her eyes opened wide in surprise and she took another bite.

I could tell the watermelon tasted good. Mama must have commended the woman because shebeamed with pride. Mama pointed at three big ones. The woman picked them up and followed her to the car.

“Do you want a slice?” Mama asked when she noticed I was awake.

“No.”

“It has lots of fibre.”

I rolled my eyes. She took that as a no. She found space for them at the back and reached into her bag for her purse. The woman ran back to the heap and returned with a smaller watermelon.

“Madam, your ntosuo,” she said.

Mama thanked her and we left. For the next stretch of the journey instead of abandoned grassland there were fields of watermelon on both sides of the road.

They were different sizes, most oval or round, some were deep green others were a lighter green with white stripes. They just lay there, with no fence or guard or anything just a bunch of scarecrows, some of which looked almost human with their billowing trousers, flapping shirts and floppy hats.

Other fields had pepper plants with long, red peppers hanging from them. They looked beautiful and added more colour to the green landscape. Some of the peppers had already been harvested and had been spread to dry on black plastic sheets by the roadside. There were more piles of watermelon and more sellers by the roadside the further we moved from Accra. They flagged us each time we passed by. Other sellers had tables that had baskets of juicy yellow mangoes, red and purple saloon mangoes, bundles of shallots, crates of red, ripe tomatoes and sacks of rock salt. We drove past two boys who were unloading a wagon of watermelons by the road.

“Remember how Da-”

“Yes,” I snapped before Mama could finish her sentence. She looked at me and sighed. I continued looking out the window. I couldn’t believe that Mama didn’t know that it was because I remembered everything about Daddy that letting go of him was so difficult. She had been about to ask if I remembered how Daddy used to chew the watermelon seeds. He never spat them out. He said they were the best part of the fruit. He said it tasted like eating watermelon with roast groundnuts. I tried it once. The seeds were crunchy I admit but to me they had no taste.

“I’m trying my best. I really am,” Mama said quietly.

She didn’t speak to me after that. Not even when we got to Ada. I saw her glance at the turn-off that led to the beach. She gripped the wheel tightly and bit her lip. I knew she remembered the last time we had gone there. It had been right after we won the National Maths and Science Quiz. We had spent the weekend at a resort by the Ada beach. We had had a lovely time. The beach was clean; cleaner than any beach in Accra that I’d been to. We’d hired a boat that had taken us on a tour of the river. We had gone as far as the Sogakofe Bridge, but at that time none of us had known Sogakofe would come to play a major part in our lives. From the bridge we had gone to the estuary. Being at the estuary had been scary. It was almost as if the river and sea were fighting. The waves were turbulent and loud. The tour guide said the river and the sea both had spirits and that the sea spirit didn’t like the river spirit entering it. He told us fisher folk had to offer regular sacrifices to the sea spirit to appease it. He told us stories of fishermen who had seen Mami wata and Papa wata relaxing on the beach while they took their canoes to sea.

We had gone back to Accra on a Sunday. Bobby had been on his way out of our yard when we arrived. Bobby. I tried to keep the tears away when I remembered we were ‘on a break’. He had come to congratulate me. As the only junior who had joined the senior team I had suddenly become famous in school. People who had never said one word to me had all started acting like we had been best friends for ages. Even people who had teased me about my name, asking “You and who are lost?” anytime I said my name, were civil to me; even Nana Ama Attakyia who had called me ‘Losty’ since my first day in senior high. Bobby had invited me to watch a movie with him at the mall. I had rushed inside to ask Daddy and Mama if

I could go. They had both agreed. One outing had led to another and then to another and by the time school had reopened for our second year, Bobby and I were officially a couple and I had had my first and only kiss with him by our garage door. Two months after school reopened Daddy and I had had the accident.

I had been out of school for the rest of the school year. Now, Bobby, Dede and

Sofi were all my seniors and I was about to begin my second year with a group of juniors in a place I didn’t know.

***

Tell us what you think: Why do you think people who had never said a word to Yayra suddenly wanted to be her best friends? What kind of ‘friends’ are they?