Peace

by A. D. Koboah

  “Where have you been, Peace? I...I thought something might have happened to you,” she said as fresh tears sprang to her eyes.

  “You don’t wanna know,” I said belligerently.

  A fresh wave of nausea hit me and I closed my eyes, managing to keep it at bay.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked after a few seconds.

  “I did too much…that’s all.”

  She stayed seated by the window and her hand came up frequently to wipe away the tears that continued to form.

  “That dark-skinned guy came back after you left,” she said eventually in a hoarse whisper. “He asked me to give this to you.”

  She reached for something and tossed it onto the sofa by my feet. Leaning forward, I grasped the small white envelope, tore it open and took out an old, yellowed piece of paper that had been folded into a tiny rectangle. I stared at the piece of paper that looked as if it had been scrunched up and then smoothed out a few times over the years, unfolded it and uncovered the drawing of me that had led to my first meeting with Mohamed.

  Seeing the drawing from older, cynical eyes, it looked childish and clumsy. But I couldn’t deny that it was a good likeness of her; the young, plump teenager I used to be and the innocence I once possessed that was now taunting me from the paper. On the bottom right-hand corner something had been scrawled recently in black pen and contrasted harshly against the creamy yellow paper and soft sweeping pencil marks.

  I never forgot you or our son.

  I dropped my arm, letting it dangle by the side of the sofa and the piece of paper, along with the envelope, fluttered out of my fingers and floated to the floor where it would stay until I swept it away the following morning.

  “Peace, why won’t you tell me about your son? Why are you shutting me out?”

  “I can’t talk about him,” I whispered, and it was my turn to feel tears spring to my eyes. “I can’t even begin to tell you what…what I…”

  I couldn’t finish my sentence and instead lay there listening to her occasional sniffles punctuate the otherwise tomblike silence.

  “Eva, please stop crying, just…stop,” I said after a while.

  But she didn’t stop and I was starting to feel faint stirrings of guilt penetrate my foggy-headed stupor.

  But the guilt was too far away to have any impact. It felt as if I was lying in a lake and the guilt I could feel was as harmless as ripples caused by a pebble being thrown into the water from a distance.

  “This is just like my mother all over again,” she said, looking away from me and burying her head in her hands.

  “What do you mean?” This was the first time she had ever mentioned her mother to me.

  “She was running from something as well, Peace. I never found out what it was, but I know she eventually killed herself because of it.”

  She gazed up at me again before she spoke. “It’s as if I’m watching her all over again. The only difference is that you’ve decided to kill yourself slowly, you’ve decided to kill yourself one day at a time.”

  I let her words hang in the air. The ripples of guilt reaching me were stronger now but still too far away to really touch me.

  “I’m your friend, Peace. You can tell me anything. Talk to me. Tell me about your son,” she pleaded.

  “First you can tell me why you tried to kill yourself,” I said hoping to make her abandon her futile attempts at making me talk about things I had spent the past two years hiding from.

  She didn’t say anything for the next few minutes and then abruptly stood up and walked over to the sofa. Clutching a folder to her chest, she sat down at the end of the sofa next to my feet and stared directly ahead.

  I closed my eyes, not wanting to see her tear-stained face, but her soft, pain-drenched voice soon reached me.

  “I thought I wanted to die.”

  “You thought you wanted to die?” My lips curled into a sneer.

  Anger that had nothing to do with Eva threatened to disrupt the chemically induced stillness I was floating in. I allowed my head to fall back against the armrest, tired of my anger.

  “You either wanna die or you don’t. There’s no in-between when it comes to stuff like that.”

  “Well I thought I wanted to die,” she repeated. “Then I almost did die and that was when I realised it wasn’t what I really wanted. I just didn’t want to live what I was living.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t speak straight away but seemed to be struggling to put thoughts and feelings that had probably never been uttered to another living soul into words.

  “My mum. She killed herself a long time ago,” she said simply. “She wasn’t a very nice woman. She was vain and selfish, very selfish and by the time she died, I had started to hate her.”

  She turned to look at me, anger at the memory marking her face. The skin between her eyebrows was pinched by invisible fingers and her eyes were smouldering black embers of repressed rage.

  “Killing yourself the way she did is the most selfish thing anyone can do and that’s what she did. She jumped to her death without a second thought about me, her only child, and what something like that would do to me. Can you understand what it feels like to have someone you love, someone who you worship, do that to you?

  “I was devastated. I told myself that what I felt after she died was hate and anger, but I was heartbroken and it was killing me inside. I told myself I wanted to die because my life was unbearable. Empty. But it was that way because I made it that way.”

  I was grateful when Eva faced forward again and I no longer had to look into the burning coals of anger her eyes had become.

  “I made it that way because I was empty inside,” she said stabbing at her chest once as she spoke, her fingers making a hollow sound against the folder she was holding against her. “The really depressing thing is that I don’t think many people would have even noticed I was no longer around if it had worked.” Her voice had now dropped to a low whisper. “Maybe one or two people, Peace, but I know my life, my death, wouldn’t have mattered to that many people.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut at that point. The thought of not having Eva around, of not having her sitting in this room by my feet talking to me, of not having her in my life, was a painful thought.

  In the darkness I had abruptly fallen into two years ago, she was now like a candle illuminating my world, keeping the darkness from completely consuming me. Although this light was not powerful enough to lead me out of this hell I was in, without it I knew I would truly be lost.

  “I think trying to kill myself saved my life,” she continued. “I had to look death in the face before I could find the strength to fight for my life and finally let her go. I know now that I’m supposed to be here, and even though things are still hard, they’re a lot brighter than they were before.”

  I opened my eyes to see her still staring ahead. After a while she pulled out a few sheets of paper from the folder she was holding and laid them on my chest. “I’ve wanted to give you this for a while now. It’s all the stuff I’ve researched on heroin addiction. There are a few places on here that you can go to and get clean.”

  “Stop this, Eva. Just stop it. I’m fine the way I am. I’m not one of those fucked-up people you’ve seen on TV. You don’t know anything, so stop pretending you do.”

  “I do know,” she said fiercely. “You’re an addict. A functioning addict, but an addict all the same. You can’t pretend that what you’re doing is normal and that it’s all right, because it isn’t. You love to tell me that you’re not like the people I’ve seen on TV, but how long before you do end up like that? I’ve seen all those credit cards you’ve got in other people’s names and I know what you do with them. I’ve seen the stuff you buy and sell to make money. How long do you think it’ll be before you get caught doing something like that? Or how long before you start taking bigger and bigger risks, huh? And what about your health? Can you seriously tell me the drugs you’re taking aren’t damaging
your health in some way? Can you tell me that, Peace?”

  “That’s my business, okay? It’s got nothing, nothing, to do with you.”

  “Yes it does!” she hissed, rounding on me with her eyes blazing. “You are my business. If anything happens to you it affects me too. So don’t you dare tell me that this is none of my business because it is.”

  “Shut up, Eva! I don’t wanna hear any more. You don’t know what you’re talking about. This is me. You know that. You’ve known that from day one so shut up! Shut up!”

  She didn’t say anything for a while and I was able to close my eyes and drift on away from the room until her voice broke through once again.

  “I wish I could make you understand. I don’t have anybody. You’re the only person…” The rest of her words were choked away by more tears. “You can’t do this to me, Peace. You can’t. I won’t let you do this to me. I won’t sit here and let you leave me the way she did.”

  I sat up and the sheets of paper on my chest slid to the floor. I put my arm around her slender shoulders and let her cry.

  As I sat there listening to her pitiful sobs, I remembered back to the times when I wasn’t as numb as I was now and had felt enough to cry as fiercely as she did as I held her.

  Chapter 8

  Anxiety had burgeoned into full-blown fear during the week since my return from Ghana. I now stood waiting for Mohamed, the tree I stood under leaning sorrowfully over me and offering little shelter from the rain that spat at me from mournful, grey storm clouds.

  I saw them approaching from a distance. His friend Jason saw me first and nudged Mohamed, gesturing toward where I stood waiting nervously beneath the tree. Mohamed glanced in my direction and then continued walking toward his house, forcing me to leave my shelter and run up behind them.

  “Mohamed,” I called out.

  He walked on. His body had grown rigid at the sound of my voice and his strides longer.

  “Mohamed!” I said again, growing confused at the fact that he was deliberately ignoring me.

  His friend eventually stopped, looking toward Mohamed until Mohamed, noticing that his friend was no longer by his side, stopped and turned to look at him. He then turned reluctantly to face me.

  “What do you want?” he asked, his expression like stone and his words cold, colder than the icy rain that spat at me.

  I was silent for a few seconds, taken aback by this new Mohamed. When I saw his lips curl into an irritated grimace, I found my voice and tried to ignore the feeling of impending doom that had settled itself into the pit of my stomach.

  “W-what do I want? Mohamed, I’ve been calling you all week b-but you’ve ignored my calls.”

  “And?” he said, looking at me as if I were something at the bottom of his shoe.

  “Mohamed, why are you carrying on like this?” I whimpered, fighting back tears. “I… Look, I need to talk to you. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Alone,” I said, looking pointedly at the friend.

  “For fuck’s sake, Peace, stop wasting my time. Just say what you wanna say.”

  I couldn’t speak for a moment the speech I had rehearsed having left me. I never expected that I would have to do this with him staring at me so accusingly.

  “I…I’m pregnant,” I said quietly.

  He stared at me, his expression changing to one of blind anger.

  “You’re pregnant? B-but is it mine?”

  “Mohamed!”

  The tears I had been holding back began to well up now, blurring my vision and I was thankful I couldn’t see the hard, angry expression on his face.

  “How can you say that to me, Mohamed? You know there’s never been anyone but you, ever. How can you say that to me?”

  “If you’re pregnant, then you’ve got a problem ’cos I want nothing to do with this.” He took a few steps away from me before adding, “How you choose to get rid of it is your business!”

  “G-get rid of it?” I stammered, my vision clearing probably for the first time since I had known him. Seeing that the man I thought he was had been a figment of my imagination and that I didn’t really know him at all.

  He turned to face me again, anger and fear distorting his features and I was truly looking at a stranger.

  “Are you trying to tell me you’re thinking of keeping it?” he bellowed. “Are you fucking crazy?”

  “I…I’ve been thinking about this all week, Mohamed and I know I can’t do that. I can’t kill our baby,” I said softly.

  He came hurtling toward me and grabbed me by the front of my coat, pulling me up until my face was inches away from his.

  “You stupid bitch—”

  “Mo,” I heard his friend say quietly, his soft tone belied by the quiet warning in his voice.

  Mohamed looked over at his friend, watching him for a few moments with seething anger. His friend’s gaze met his steadily and it seemed as if an unspoken battle of wills was waged in those seconds that they stood staring at each other.

  Mohamed eventually backed down and slowly let me go. Breathing heavily, he took a step back.

  “Do you wanna know why I ain’t called you?” he asked me through clenched teeth. “I’ve got a girlfriend now…yeah that’s right, a girlfriend. She’s slim, she’s pretty...”

  He laughed when he saw the expression on my face. His friend turned away, his jaw clenched as I stared at Mohamed in pain and confusion.

  “Y-you don’t mean that, Mohamed. You can’t mean any of that. W-what about all the things you said to me? What about all the things you said about us and how we’re meant to be together. You...you can’t mean what you just—”

  “You dumb bitch! Did you really think there was something between us? Did you really think there was something between me and you?” His expression revealed more and more fear the longer he talked. “I’m only gonna tell you this once,” he continued, taking another step toward me until his face was inches away from mine again. “Fucking get rid of it!”

  He walked off then, turning before he got to his front door to add, “And you’d better not let me catch you around my house again!”

  He opened his front door and after a short pause, his friend followed him inside.

  The sound of that door slamming shut on me, forever shutting me out of Mohamed’s world brought an ache in my chest that felt as if it could choke me.

  I had walked back to my shelter and stood there crying as the rain continued to pour down, thinking back to the times I had spent with him when he had told me I was special, that I was the only person who understood him and that he didn’t know what he would do without me. How could all that change so quickly?

  I was too scared to try and speak to him again and even more afraid of going home to face the storm that my news would no doubt unleash on my household, a storm that was likely to be far worse than the one that had left me devastated and leaning against a tree weeping.

  Twenty minutes later, his friend came out of the house with his face flushed. He paused when he saw me standing against the tree and then took a few steps toward me.

  “Come on,” he ordered and began to walk away from the house.

  I hesitated and then followed him, watching him take sharp angry strides to a small blue car and open the passenger door. “Get in, I’ll take you home.”

  I got into the car, trying to gain some kind of control over my emotions. I noticed that his eyes, which were usually so expressionless, were burning with anger and I was sure that he must have felt the same contempt for me that Mohamed had just shown.

  When he got into the car, he didn’t drive off straight away but sat staring blankly at the scene on the other side of the windscreen without actually seeming to see anything beyond his own thoughts. He sat like that for maybe half a minute before he started the car and pulled away from Mohamed’s house.

  My tears were still falling as heavily as the rain that splattered the car windscreen when we arrived at my ho
me. He parked the car and I sat staring at the front door, wishing I didn’t have to go inside.

  “Have you told them yet?”

  I looked over at him, seeing what seemed like disdain in his eyes. I shook my head.

  He faced forward and sighed heavily.

  “This is none of my business,” he began, talking slowly as if he was choosing his words carefully. “And I don’t know you; I only know what Mohamed’s told me about you. But from what he’s said, you wanna make something of yourself, like I do, so think about what you’re doing. Having a baby now will mess up your life. And Mohamed…” He paused, anger seeming to cloud his face again at the mention of Mohamed’s name. “Mohamed won’t help you, so don’t have this baby.”

  I tugged at a box of tissues on the dashboard of the car until I managed to free a few. Then I dabbed at my face and opened the car door.

  “Thanks for driving me home,” I said before I left the car and entered the house.

  My sister Barbara poked her head around the kitchen door as soon as she heard the sound of my footsteps in the corridor.

  “Peace, Nicola’s here. She’s waiting in your room.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, rushing up the stairs and into my bedroom.

  I had called Nicola a few times since I got back but she hadn’t returned any of my calls. She now stood before me in my bedroom.

  “All right, Peace?” she said with a smile. The detachment I had observed over the past six months seemed to have vanished. “What d’you think of my hair?”

  She was now sporting a weave that hung below her shoulders, the same length my hair was when straightened.

  “It looks nice,” I said distractedly.

  “It does, don’t it?”

  Although she appeared to have gone back to her usual self, something was still different. Something about her expression seemed closed to me as she smiled a smile that told more than I could have guessed at that time.