Chapter 10: Yaw

Yaw Asante woke at five in the morning because the power had gone off at three and the fan had stopped and the heat had accumulated in the bedroom of his house in Dansoman until the air was thick enough to press against his chest like a hand.

He lay in the dark and listened to his wife Abena breathing and his daughter Akosua breathing and the neighbourhood generator three compounds away coughing its diesel rhythm and the mosquitoes that the fan had kept at bay now circling in the still air, and he thought about the electricity, which was his profession and his curse, the thing he understood better than most men and the thing that failed him with the same regularity it failed everyone in Accra, the grid shedding load in the early hours because the generation capacity could not meet the demand, the infrastructure straining, the system designed for a city of one million serving a city of three million, the gap between the design and the reality filled with generators and candles and the particular patience of people who had learned to live in the gap.

He was an electrician. He had been an electrician for twenty-two years, since he was eighteen, since the day after his father died and the responsibility of income had shifted from the dead man to the living son with the abruptness of a circuit breaker tripping, the load transferred instantaneously, no gradual transition, no apprenticeship in responsibility, just the sudden fact of it: you are the eldest, you are the man, the house needs money, the mother needs support, the brother needs school fees.

Kwame had been fourteen. Kwame had been a boy, a child, a student at Accra Academy whose school fees Yaw had paid from his first wages as an apprentice electrician, working for a contractor named Mr. Owusu who paid poorly and demanded much and who taught Yaw, in the way that harsh men teach, the discipline of the trade — the respect for the current, the caution with the voltage, the understanding that electricity was not a service but a force, a force that would kill you if you treated it casually, a force that demanded attention and rewarded precision and punished the careless with burns and shocks and, in the worst cases, with the particular stillness of a man who had touched a live wire and whose heart had stopped.

Yaw respected electricity the way Kwame, he imagined, respected the sea. They were brothers in this if in nothing else — both of them working with forces that could kill them, both of them trained to manage the danger through procedure and attention, both of them earning their living by the controlled application of energy. Yaw applied electrical energy to the wiring of houses and shops and offices in Accra. Kwame applied thermal energy to the welding of pipelines at the bottom of the North Sea. The scale was different. The setting was different. The pay was very different. But the principle was the same: you worked with power, you respected the power, you went home at the end of the day with all your fingers and your heartbeat intact.

Except Kwame did not go home. Kwame went to a flat in Aberdeen that was not home but was the place where Kwame lived when he was not in the chamber, which was the place where Kwame lived when he was not in the bell, which was the place where Kwame lived when he was not on the sea floor, the nesting of containers that Yaw could not fully comprehend despite Kwame's attempts, years ago, to explain the saturation system — the chamber, the transfer under pressure, the bell, the lock-out. Yaw had listened and had understood the words but not the experience, the way you could understand the words "three degrees Celsius" and "150 metres depth" without understanding what it meant to be in water at that temperature at that depth, the body's knowledge refusing to participate in the mind's comprehension.

What Yaw understood was the absence. The absence he understood completely, thoroughly, the way he understood a circuit — the path the current should take, the path the current was not taking, the open point, the break, the place where the connection had failed and the energy was not flowing.

Kwame was the open point. Kwame was the break in the circuit.

The money flowed. Every month, the transfer arrived in Yaw's account — a sum that varied with Kwame's rotation schedule but that averaged, over the year, an amount that Yaw calculated was approximately six times his own annual income. The money was substantial. The money paid the medical bills and the school fees and the house maintenance and the groceries and the things that their mother needed, the amlodipine and the ibuprofen and the reading glasses she had broken in March and the new gas cylinder for the stove and the repairs to the roof that the last rains had damaged.

Yaw distributed the money. He was the intermediary, the conduit between Kwame's account and the household expenses, and the role had become, over the years, a second job — the management of his brother's financial presence in the family, the conversion of Kwame's money into the goods and services that the family required. He paid the pharmacy. He paid the market women. He paid the carpenter who fixed the roof. He paid the man who came to unblock the drains. He paid and paid and paid, and the paying was a form of proxy, a substitution of action for presence, and the proxy was efficient — the bills were paid, the house was maintained, the mother was cared for — but the proxy was also a reminder, a constant reminder, that the person who should have been doing this was not here, was at the bottom of the North Sea, was inside a steel tube at fifteen atmospheres, was unreachable.

Yaw did not resent the money. The money was necessary. The money was the tangible evidence of Kwame's contribution to the family, the proof that Kwame had not abandoned them but had merely relocated the site of his labour, the way a river relocates its course but continues to deliver water.

What Yaw resented — and he used the word carefully, reluctantly, aware that resentment was a corrosive emotion, the emotional equivalent of the stress corrosion cracking that Kwame's welds were designed to repair — what Yaw resented was the structure. The structure in which he was the present son and Kwame was the absent son, and the present son did the work of presence — the driving to the clinic, the waiting in the pharmacy queue, the fixing of the tap, the painting of the wall, the lifting of the heavy things, the carrying of the mother up the stairs on the bad days when the arthritis made the twelve steps impossible — and the absent son did the work of absence, which was to send money and to be missed.

Their mother missed Kwame. This was the fact that Yaw carried, the fact that he could not set down, the fact that lodged in his chest the way a piece of broken electrode lodged in a weld joint — embedded, irremovable, built around rather than extracted. Their mother missed Kwame. She wrote to Kwame. She talked about Kwame. She kept Kwame's room — the room upstairs, across the hall from her bedroom — exactly as it had been when he left at eighteen, the books on the shelf, the football trophies on the dresser, the bedspread washed and folded and placed on the mattress every Monday by a woman who maintained a room for a son who had not slept in it for eighteen years.

Yaw had his own room in that house. Had his own shelf, his own memories, his own eighteen years of occupancy. But Yaw's room had been converted — first into a sewing room for their mother, then into a store room, then into the room where Akosua played when they visited. Yaw's room had been absorbed back into the house's living circulation, the space reclaimed for current use, because Yaw was here, was present, was available, and a present son did not need a preserved room. A present son had a house of his own in Dansoman and a wife and a daughter and a life that was full and real and happening now, and the room in the family house was needed for other things.

Kwame's room was a shrine. Yaw did not use this word. He thought it, sometimes, when he climbed the stairs to check on their mother and passed the open door of Kwame's room and saw the bed made and the books dusted and the trophies polished and the room waiting, waiting, as it had been waiting for eighteen years, for a son who was not coming.

Or who might come. Who said he would come. Who said, on the phone, I will come home, Yaw, I will come when the rotation is finished, when the schedule allows, when I have the time, the words always conditional, always deferred, the visit always future tense, never present, the homecoming a plan that existed in the same theoretical space as the prayers that Pastor Mensah sent under the sea — sincere, intended, directed at the right destination, but never arriving.

The power came back at 05:47. The fan resumed. The mosquitoes retreated. Abena stirred but did not wake. Akosua slept on, her breathing the soft regular rhythm of a child who had not yet learned the things that disrupted sleep — the worries, the calculations, the weight of responsibility that settled on a person incrementally, year by year, the way sediment settled on a pipeline, gradually, invisibly, until the weight was substantial and the structure beneath was altered by the carrying of it.

Yaw rose. He showered — the water cold, because the power outage had prevented the heater from running. He dressed. He made tea in the kitchen, the kettle boiling on the gas stove that Kwame's money had paid for. He drank the tea standing by the kitchen window, looking out at the compound, the yard where Abena's washing hung on the line and the neighbour's goat was tied to the mango tree and the morning light was arriving with the abruptness that equatorial mornings had, the darkness lifting like a curtain, the day appearing fully formed, the sun already warm, already assertive, already the sun of a city that did not have the Scottish simmer dim, did not have the ambiguity of northern light, did not have the between.

At seven, he drove to his mother's house in Osu. The drive was forty minutes — Dansoman to Osu, across the city, through the traffic that was Accra's particular challenge, the cars and trotros and taxis and hawkers and pedestrians all occupying the same roads in a negotiation of space and time and patience that had no equivalent in the cities Yaw had seen on television, the traffic a living system, organic, self-organising, the rules emergent rather than imposed.

He let himself in with his key. The house smelled of the morning — the kerosene stove Auntie Mercy used for her early cooking, the bread from the bakery on the corner, the particular smell of the house itself, the compound of wood and plaster and age and the accumulated years of occupation, the smell of a place that had been continuously inhabited since 1972, when their father had bought it with a loan from the bank and the help of their uncle and the determination of a man who believed that a house was the foundation of a family and that a man without a house was a man without a foundation.

Their mother was in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table — the table where she wrote her letters, the table where she ate her meals, the table that was the centre of her daily life, the command post from which she managed the household that had contracted over the years from a family of four to a woman alone, the table that was, Yaw sometimes thought, less a piece of furniture than a companion, the surface she touched most often, the presence she spent the most time with.

She looked up when he came in. Good morning, Yaw, she said.

Good morning, Mama, he said.

He sat across from her. On the table was a blue aerogramme, half-written, the pen resting on the fold. She was writing to Kwame. She was always writing to Kwame. The writing was as much a part of her morning as the tea and the bread, a ritual performed at the same table at the same time with the same pen and the same blue paper, the constancy of the practice a form of devotion, a daily office, a small act of faith that the letter would be written and posted and delivered and read.

Yaw looked at the aerogramme. He could see his mother's handwriting — the small, precise letters, the words aligned on the unlined paper with a straightness that spoke of care, each sentence a construction, each paragraph a considered unit of meaning. She wrote the way she lived — deliberately, with attention, each action completed before the next was begun.

He said: What are you telling him this week.

She said: The market. The price of yam. Pastor Mensah's daughter's wedding. The tap.

The tap, Yaw said.

It is still dripping, she said. She looked at him. Not a reproach — his mother did not reproach. She observed. She noted. She placed the facts on the table the way she placed the bread on the table — here they are, make of them what you will.

I will fix it, Yaw said. Today.

She nodded. She returned to her letter. Yaw watched her write. The pen moved slowly, the ink flowing onto the blue paper, the words forming under her hand with the deliberate pace of a woman who composed her sentences before she wrote them, who held the words in her mind and examined them and arranged them and only then committed them to the page, the writing an act of precision, the precision of a woman who had learned that words on paper lasted longer than words in the air and that the lasting required care.

He wanted to say something. He often wanted to say something when he watched his mother write to Kwame. The something he wanted to say was not a single thing but a compound, a mixture of observations and frustrations and love and the particular ache of being the son who was here, the son who fixed the tap and drove to the clinic and paid the pharmacy and carried the mother up the stairs, the son whose presence was so constant that it had become invisible, the way the foundation of a house was invisible — essential, load-bearing, but unseen, unnoticed, un-written-about.

His mother wrote to Kwame. She did not write to Yaw. She did not need to write to Yaw. Yaw was here. Yaw was across the table. Yaw was the son she could touch and talk to and see, and the seeing was enough, was more than enough, was the thing that letters tried to substitute for and could not.

But Yaw sometimes wished — and the wish was small and shameful and he kept it in the place where he kept all the things he did not say — he sometimes wished that his mother would write to him too. Not because he needed the letters — he did not need the letters, he had the real thing, the actual mother, the living presence. But because the writing was where his mother put her best words, her most considered thoughts, her deepest feelings. The writing was where she was most herself, most articulate, most present. And that version of his mother, the writing version, the version that composed sentences and arranged paragraphs and folded her love into blue paper and sent it across the world — that version was Kwame's. That version was for the absent son.

The present son got the daily version. The version that said good morning and asked about the tap and noted the price of yam. The functional version. The version that operated in the practical register of the household, the register of needs and tasks and schedules, the register in which a mother and a son communicated when the son was here and the communication was ongoing and the words did not need to carry the weight of distance because there was no distance, just the table, just the kitchen, just the ordinary closeness of two people who saw each other every day and who had, perhaps, exhausted the words that closeness required and were now operating in the efficient shorthand of long familiarity.

Yaw did not begrudge Kwame the letters. He begrudged Kwame the need for the letters — the absence that made the letters necessary, the distance that converted their mother from a woman who spoke to a woman who wrote, the transformation of her presence from the immediate to the epistolary, the shift from the daily to the weekly, from the table to the page, from the son who was here to the son who was not.

He fixed the tap. It was a simple repair — a worn washer in the kitchen faucet, the rubber compressed and cracked by years of use, the water finding the gap and dripping through. He replaced the washer with one from his toolbox, the toolbox he kept in his car because the houses he serviced often needed small repairs that were not strictly electrical but that he performed anyway because the clients trusted him and because the repair was quick and because turning away a dripping tap because it was plumbing rather than electrical seemed a failure of competence, a refusal to do what was needed because it did not match the job description.

The tap stopped dripping. His mother said thank you with the brevity of a woman who had expected the repair and was grateful but not surprised, the thank you a social form rather than an expression of wonder, the efficiency of a relationship in which the help was assumed and the gratitude was constant and low-level, like a background hum, like the sound of a fan that you only noticed when it stopped.

He sat with her while she finished the letter. He drank tea. He ate bread. He watched her fold the aerogramme into thirds and seal it with a strip of tape — the gum never held in the humidity, she had told him this many times, the repetition a ritual in itself — and write the address on the front in her careful hand: Mr. Kwame Asante, 14b Crown Street, Aberdeen, AB11 6JN, Scotland, United Kingdom.

She knew the address by memory. She had written it hundreds of times. The address was as familiar to her as the house she sat in, the letters of the street name and the postcode as legible as the walls and doors of her own home, the address a second home, a textual home, the place where her words went when they left her hand.

I will post it, Yaw said. He always posted them. His route to his next job took him past the post office on Oxford Street, and he stopped there two or three times a week, dropping his mother's letters into the international mail slot, the blue aerogrammes slipping through the slot and into the system, the system that would carry them across the Atlantic to London and then north to Aberdeen and then to the letterbox at 14b Crown Street, where they would fall through the stiff flap and land on the floor and wait.

His mother gave him the letter. Their hands touched briefly — her hand dry and warm, the skin rough with age and work, the knuckles swollen with the arthritis that was advancing with the steady inevitability of a condition that could be managed but not reversed. He felt the bones of her hand through the skin, the structure beneath, the framework that had held and carried and cooked and washed and written for sixty-four years and that was now, gradually, announcing its limits.

He took the letter. He put it in his shirt pocket. He kissed her forehead — a gesture that she accepted with the composure of a woman who had been kissed on the forehead by her sons for forty years and who received the kiss as a fact rather than an event, a small daily confirmation that the circuit was still closed, the connection still live, the current still flowing.

He drove to his first job of the day — a shop on the Osu Oxford Street that needed a new distribution board, the old one undersized for the load the shop was drawing, the circuit breakers tripping at peak hours, the owner losing business. Yaw assessed the installation. He quoted the job. He began the work — running new cable, mounting the new board, connecting the circuits, testing the connections.

He worked with the attention of a man who respected the current. He worked with the tools his father had used — the same wire strippers, the same insulated screwdrivers, the same multimeter, the tools passed from father to son with the implicit instruction: these are the tools, this is the trade, this is how you provide.

His father had provided until the day his heart stopped. His father had worked every day, had wired and rewired the houses and shops of Accra, had come home each evening to the house in Osu with the particular tiredness of a man who had spent the day handling a force that could kill him, and had sat at the table and eaten the food his wife prepared and talked about the day's work and gone to bed and risen and gone out again, the cycle unbroken until the day it broke, the day the circuit opened, the day the current stopped.

Yaw carried the tools. Yaw continued the trade. Yaw was the son who had inherited not the scholarship but the responsibility, not the escape but the staying, not the distance but the proximity, the daily closeness to the mother and the house and the neighbourhood and the city that was home, that had always been home, that would always be home because Yaw had made the choice — or the choice had been made for him by the accident of timing, by the death of a father when one son was eighteen and the other was fourteen, the elder inheriting the obligation and the younger inheriting the opportunity — the choice to stay.

He did not regret staying. The staying was not a sacrifice. The staying was his life — Abena and Akosua and the house in Dansoman and the work and the clients and the mornings with his mother and the tap repairs and the clinic drives and the pharmacy queues. This was his life and it was good and it was enough and he did not wish for a different life, did not wish for Aberdeen or the North Sea or the diving that Kwame did.

What he wished for — and the wish was specific, pointed, aimed — was for Kwame to come home. Not to stay. He did not expect Kwame to stay. He understood that Kwame's life was in Aberdeen, in the diving, in the work that paid six times what an Accra electrician earned. He did not expect Kwame to give up the money or the career or the particular competence that Kwame had built over twelve years of working at depth.

He expected Kwame to visit. To come for a week, two weeks, to sit at the kitchen table with their mother and drink the tea and eat the bread and let her see him, let her touch his face, let her hear his real voice — not the phone voice, not the helium voice, not the unscrambled approximation, but the voice, the actual voice of the son she had raised, the deep voice, the Kwame voice, the voice she had memorised the way she had memorised his address, the voice she was waiting to hear the way she was waiting for the letters to be answered.

A visit. A week. Was that too much? Was that more than a man who earned what Kwame earned could afford — not in money, which Kwame had in abundance, but in time, in attention, in the willingness to cross the distance and sit in the chair and be present?

Yaw thought about this as he wired the distribution board, his hands moving with the automatic precision of twenty-two years of practice, the cables stripped and connected and tightened and tested, the work proceeding in the steady rhythm of a man who knew his trade, who had learned it from his father and refined it through repetition, the way Kwame had learned his trade from their uncle and refined it at the bottom of the sea.

They were the same, in this way. Both of them tradesmen. Both of them skilled. Both of them competent with their hands and cautious with the forces they worked with and proud of the work in the way that men who worked with their hands were proud — not boastful, not declarative, but quietly assured, the confidence grounded in the evidence of the work itself, the circuit that functioned, the weld that held.

They were different in the distance.

Yaw finished the distribution board. He tested each circuit — voltage, current, earth continuity. All within specification. He gave the shop owner the certificate. He packed his tools. He drove to the post office on Oxford Street and parked and walked in and took the aerogramme from his shirt pocket and dropped it into the international mail slot.

The letter made a small sound as it fell — the sound of paper against paper, the sound of one letter landing on the others that were already in the bin, the accumulated correspondence of Accra's diaspora, the letters going to London and New York and Toronto and Houston and Amsterdam and Aberdeen, the words of mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and friends travelling outward from the city like signals from a transmitter, carrying the news of home to the people who had left and who received the news the way you receive a radio signal — as information, as evidence of transmission, as proof that the transmitter was still broadcasting, still alive, still sending, even if the receiver was too far away or too deep or too sealed inside steel to answer.

Yaw stood in the post office and thought about his brother at the bottom of the North Sea, breathing gas that was not air, hearing his own voice at a pitch that was not his own, welding in the dark at pressures that would kill an unprotected man in seconds, living a life so extreme and so foreign that it could not be imagined by the people who loved him, could only be accepted, the way you accepted the weather — as a condition, a fact, a thing you could not change and could only endure.

He drove to his next job. The traffic was heavy. The sun was hot. Accra moved around him with the energy and disorder and persistence that was the city's character, the compound of ambition and improvisation and resilience that made the city function despite the power cuts and the traffic and the infrastructure designed for a population that had been exceeded by a factor of three.

He thought about the letter he had posted. He thought about the words his mother had written — the market, the price of yam, Pastor Mensah's daughter's wedding, the tap. The tap he had fixed. His name would be in the letter — Yaw fixed the tap — and the sentence would travel four thousand miles and arrive at Crown Street and wait on the floor for twenty-three days and then be read by Kwame, who would see the sentence and know that his brother had fixed the tap and think, perhaps, Good, the tap is fixed, and move on to the next sentence without pausing on the fact that the tap was fixed by Yaw because Yaw was there and Kwame was not, that the fixing of the tap was an act of presence, a small proof of the theorem that Yaw had been proving for eighteen years: that he was here, that he had stayed, that the circuit was closed on his end, that the current was flowing from his side, that the break was not his.

The break was Kwame's. The open point was in Aberdeen, in the flat on Crown Street, in the chamber, in the bell, at 150 metres, wherever Kwame was. The circuit ran from Osu to Aberdeen and the break was at the Aberdeen end, and Yaw could not fix it because the break was not a worn washer or a tripped breaker, not a technical fault that could be diagnosed and repaired with the tools in his box. The break was his brother. The break was Kwame's choice, or Kwame's inability, or Kwame's fear — Yaw did not know which, because Kwame did not say, because the phone calls were short and the letters were nonexistent and the silence from Aberdeen was a silence that Yaw could not interpret because silence, like an open circuit, gave you no data, no signal, no information about the state of the connection.

Was the wire broken? Was the wire intact but disconnected? Was there current waiting to flow if only the connection were made? Or was the wire dead, the circuit permanently open, the brother in Aberdeen no longer the brother who had left Accra but someone else, someone the pressure had made, the way pressure made diamonds from carbon — the same element, rearranged, hardened, no longer the thing it had been?

Yaw did not know. He drove through the traffic. He worked his jobs. He went home to Abena and Akosua. He ate his dinner. He helped Akosua with her drawing — she was drawing the mango tree in Grandmama's compound, the tree she could see from the upstairs window, the tree that was thirty-six years old, the age of the uncle she had never met.

He put Akosua to bed. He sat on the sofa with Abena and watched the television and did not watch the television, his mind in the post office, in the mail slot, in the bin where his mother's letter sat among the other letters, waiting for the morning collection, the van, the airport, the plane, the sorting facility, the van again, the postman, the letterbox, the floor, the flat, the waiting, the reading, the silence.

Abena said: You are thinking about Kwame.

She knew him. Eleven years of marriage, and she knew him the way he knew a circuit — by the flow, by the resistance, by the small signs that indicated the state of the system.

Yes, Yaw said.

He will come, Abena said. She said it the way she said most things — calmly, with a certainty that was not evidence-based but that served the same function as evidence, the certainty of a woman who believed in the eventual rightness of things, the eventual closing of circuits, the eventual return of sons.

When, Yaw said.

When he is ready, Abena said.

When he is ready. The conditional tense again. The future tense that Kwame lived in, the tense that deferred everything to a later time, a time after the rotation, after the decompression, after the schedule allowed, after the conditions were right, the conditions that were never right because the conditions for returning were not external — not weather windows or tidal streams or compression schedules — but internal, the conditions of a man who had left at eighteen and built a life at depth and who could not, or would not, or did not know how to, surface.

Yaw turned off the television. He went to bed. He lay in the dark and listened to the fan and the neighbourhood and the city and the night, and he thought about his brother in the chamber at the bottom of the North Sea, and he thought about the letter in the post office, and he thought about the tap he had fixed and the stairs he climbed and the clinic he drove to and the pharmacy he queued at, and he thought about the word that described what he felt, the word he had been avoiding, the word that sat in his chest like a piece of broken electrode in a weld joint.

The word was not resentment. The word was loneliness. The loneliness of the present son, the son who was here, the son who was so close that he was invisible, the son whose presence was so reliable that it had become a fixture, a piece of the house, as unremarked as the walls and the floor and the fan and the tap that dripped and was fixed and would drip again.

He was lonely for his brother. He was lonely for the boy who had lined up his food and played football in the compound and run up the twelve steps two at a time and been here, been present, been the other half of the circuit, the second son, the younger son, the son who had filled the house with the particular noise and energy of a boy who was always doing something, always building, always making, the boy who had been, before the scholarship and the welding and the Aberdeen and the sea, his brother.

Yaw closed his eyes. The fan turned. The night held its heat. And somewhere in the North Sea, in a chamber at fifteen atmospheres, his brother lay in a bunk and breathed helium-oxygen and did not sleep and did not write and did not call and did not come home, and the distance between them was the distance it had always been — four thousand miles, measured in geography — and the distance between them was greater than it had ever been — unmeasurable, unmappable, the distance between a man who stayed and a man who left, the distance between a present son and an absent son, the distance between the end of the circuit that was closed and the end that was open, the break in the wire, the gap in the connection, the silence where the current should have been.