Читать книгу The Wolf at Number 4 - Ayo Tamakloe-Garr - Страница 11

4

IN THE COMMON ROOM THE FOLLOWING DAY, I FOUND out why the primary school was in such a better state than the JSS.

“Have you heard of Wolfgang Ofori?” Baiden asked me.

“Yes. I’ve met him. He lives opposite my house sef. He’s an odd child.” I briefly considered telling them about the salute but decided against it.

“The boy is a genius,” said Baiden.

“I noticed.”

“The guy just wins quiz after quiz for the school. When you consider the grants and prize money he has won, it’s like he has singlehandedly renovated the school. He’s like the duck that lays golden eggs.”

“As for me, I think that boy has an evil spirit,” said Felicia, the social studies teacher.

“Hoh!” went Baiden.

Felicia turned in her seat to face us. “No, see, that child is very strange. He’s not normal.”

I frowned. “I think he’s just playing most times. He is a child, after all.”

“Why, you have also seen some of his things, eh?”

“Well, yes,” I replied slowly. “He was playing with some of his mates.”

“Aha! Did you see how much control he has over them? They fear him. You know what me I do? I never touch him in any of my classes. I pray before I even enter. Me deε, I like my life.”

“Don’t mind Felicia,” Baiden told me.

“You don’t know that some of these children are witches, eh?”

“And wizards.”

“Whatever,” she said. “It’s all the same.”

“Aren’t you even a Christian, Felicia? What are you afraid of?” Baiden asked her.

She shook her head, turned back to her desk and muttered, “Yoo. Me deε, I’ve told you.”

Baiden chuckled and said to me, “Have you heard of Wonderkids?”

I nodded. I watched it all the time back in Accra. It was a quiz program for senior secondary students. They were tested in six rounds on science, mathematics, history, English, critical reasoning, and general knowledge. It was a two-way knockout from the round of sixteen to the finals. The winners would get prestige and a large sum of money as spoil. However, if they could get a perfect score of 30,000 points, the prize was a hundred percent scholarship to an Ivy League school and a place in history for all three contestants. The highest anyone had gone was 23,500 points.

“Well, this year the Central Region will be hosting it, and our genius will be competing,” said Baiden with a smile. “Think of the recognition it would bring the school.”

“Ah. But he’s just in primary school. How old is he?”

“Eleven. He’s in class six. But honestly, the boy is good enough. They already agreed everything with his father. They’ll register him for the BECE, and he’ll write that and the SSCE as a private candidate.”

“That’s madness. It’s too big a jump.”

Baiden got up from his seat and asked me to come see something. He led me to the corner of the room, to where the file cabinets sat. He opened it and brought out a list. “This is the prize list for last year’s speech and prize-giving day.”

Every single prize that day had gone to Wolfgang.

Baiden handed me another list. “This is for the year before that.”

It was the same. He had completed a clean sweep of all the awards.

“And it’s the same going back to his first year here.”

“This is incredible, but the jump is too big. The knowledge gap is just too wide.”

Baiden closed the file cabinet. “His big brain can handle it. He knows everything he’d have to learn already. I mean he knows more than me saf. Besides, think of the history he could make, and the records he could break. His potential must be put to the greatest use. That’s what his father said.”

Gerald interrupted our conversation to tell me that Madam Fire-Eater wanted to see me.

The moment I stepped into Providencia Anaglate’s office, my tummy began to feel hollow. She sat upright as ever at her neatly arranged desk. A large portrait of her rested on the wall behind her. It looked down at me contemptuously.

“You’re welcome. Have a seat,” she said, but I didn’t feel welcome at all.

As she flipped through some papers on her desk, the harsh pencil-drawn eyes in the portrait burned into my soul.

“So,” she eventually said. “There are a few things I’d like to clarify.”

“Sure, madam. What is it?”

“The circumstances of your employment, Miss Mensah.”

The hollow in my tummy grew a little. I shifted in my seat.

“What about it?”

She touched the bridge of her spectacles. “I can’t find any documents relating to your interview. I’ve been going through Mr. Gyamfi’s work for the last six months, and there’s your job application and CV, but nothing about your interview.”

“Mr. Gyamfi didn’t interview me, madam,” I said.

That caught her interest. “He didn’t? Who did then?”

“Mr. Addison. I arrived on the eighteenth for the interview, and just as I was about to begin with Mr. Gyamfi, Mr. Addison said he would conduct it himself, so he took over.”

She wrote something down. “I see.”

“Okay then, Miss Mensah. I’ll check Addison’s documents and we’ll sort this out. That will be all for now.”

“Thank you, madam.”

The hollow in my tummy didn’t fade when I left her office. It stayed with me the entire day. I was keenly aware the bones of my past were not buried deeply enough. The moment the closing bell rang, I picked up my bag and left.

This time there was no herd of sheep under the mango tree. It was just Wolfgang. He was engrossed in a book which lay open on his lap.

“Hello, Wolfgang. How are you?” I asked him.

He sighed. “It’s Wolf.”

“Oh, sorry. What are you reading?”

He shut his book and rose, dusting off his shorts. “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Oh! I love it. It’s such a beautiful and powerful story.”

I remembered acting it out for the drama club all the way back in school. I was Juliet and tall and handsome Kojo was Romeo. He had such an enchanting smile and eyes that seemed to caress your soul every time he stared. Everyone said we worked well on stage. That was likely because he was my boyfriend off stage.

“I just finished it, and it’s rubbish,” said Wolf.

“What? Romeo and Juliet? How can you say that?”

He kicked a stone. “The writing is drawn out and tawdry at best. And the story is dumb. True love and all that? It’s so corny and cliché. It makes my skin crawl.”

I laughed. “I’m sure there’s a lot you’re glossing over. Don’t you like the idea of true and pure love?”

He pretended to vomit. “Nothing is true and pure in this world. Human love is inherently selfish.”

I laughed again. “One day you’ll understand what love is.”

“I certainly hope not!” he cried. Then he asked, “Are you in love?”

I shook my head. “No. My last relationship didn’t go so well.”

“That’s not uncommon. What happened?”

I sighed. “He wanted too much from me. And too little at the same time. What about you? Have you ever had any crushes on your classmates?”

Something about that was incredibly hilarious to him. “No, no,” he managed to say through his laughter. “Not at all. Although there was one girl with the potential to pique my interest, Korkor. She shared her kelewele with me in class two.”

“That’s nice.”

“She’s dead.”

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

“We’ll all die someday. And besides, she was human. I could never love a human.”

He stopped walking and looked at me for a moment with mischief glowing in his eyes.

“Do you want to know what I will do when I grow up?” he asked.

“What?”

“I will drive the human race to extinction,” he said with a grin.

“Herh! Why?”

“Think about it. I’d be doing every other organism on this earth a favor. Humans are the worst species to walk this planet. You know why? Because they are subjective. All I’m saying right now is being filtered and biased by your mind. How can you empathize if what you hear is not what I say? Humans are solitary animals because they cannot be objective. They all want to be ‘the greatest sufferers.’” He paused for a moment. “How does that make you feel?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. But it certainly doesn’t make me want to get rid of everyone. That sounds evil.”

“Humans fight wars and hurt each other because they can’t keep their subjectivity in check. We can’t eliminate subjectivity. But we sure can eliminate humans. We wipe out humans, no wars and no evil and no pain. Simple.”

“And so how do you think you’re going to go about this?”

He touched his lip. “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe I can do that through a world war. I’ll need to rise to power, raise Ghana to a world superpower, become an evil dictator, start World War 3, and let nuclear fallout, disease, famine, and climate change do the rest.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“It’s for the best. Or I could use an engineered supervirus. But that would require much biology, and biology is a lesser science. Or maybe an antimatter bomb of some sort would do.” He was talking to himself now, and his voice faded into an undertone.

“I think it’s going to be hard to tear all of this down,” I said. “I think you’ll meet some resistance.”

He chuckled. “Hard? Even without me all this is going to end. You see, only some sort of divine intervention can save humanity from the precipice. Humans think they are so great, but civilization is really the greatest and most elaborate mass suicide the universe has ever seen. You humans, for all your flaws, have a wonderful eye for drama.”

With every word he spoke, I felt a sadness grow within me. This was too much cynicism for an eleven-year-old.

“Tell me, Wolf,” I said. “Do you want to be on the show? Wonderkids?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Are you sure?”

“I’d love it. It would be fun. And there’s a nice scholarship waiting for me at the end.”

I laid my hand on his shoulder and drew him closer to me. “To get the scholarship, though, you’re going to have to jump the entirety of JSS and SSS, right?”

He lifted my arm off his shoulder. “I don’t do physical contact. It’s not behavior befitting a wolf.”

“Oops. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re just a human.”

“So do you think you’re ready?”

“Well, Daddy taped the show without the answers and made me go through the entire six rounds. And I scored 16,200 points.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“And that was without any preparation or anything. So I should be able to reach the 30,000 score without too much trouble if I set my mind to it. In fact, one of the categories that let me down was English. Daddy says I read too many rubbish books about teenage space vampires.”

“Oh really? Your English seems good. And didn’t you even receive an award—”

“I told Daddy that you’ll tutor me.”

“Hmm . . .”

“Would you?”

“I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t think I like the idea of you skipping so many years.”

“I don’t understand why it’s a big deal.”

“The gap will be just too far for you to bridge. It’s impossible. Even if you have a good grasp of the academic work, you won’t be able to handle the social changes. You won’t be ready emotionally.”

He scoffed at my last word. “I’m not prone to such afflictions. And ‘impossible’ is the word we use when we aren’t determined enough. My brain has limitless potential. You have no reason to worry.”

My words struggled on my lips. I remembered my own struggles with being jumped twice. Thirty minutes into my first paper at Legon, I broke down in tears. Apart from my name and index number, my answer sheet was blank. But it seemed almost criminal to tell a child that they couldn’t do it all. So I just sighed.

He looked up at me and smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t let you down. Just watch. The competition will be a cakewalk.”

His words stimulated a smile in return. “I believe you and in you,” I said.

“So you’ll come and teach me every Sunday morning?”

I nodded. “Okay. That’s fine.”

We were close to number 4 now, so I bade him farewell.

But he said, “Come, I want to show you something.”

I hesitated, but there was no pickup in the driveway, so I followed.

We went in through the garage, and he told me to wait in the kitchen.

I looked around. The dishes were washed. The napkins were folded and neatly stacked on the counter, which gleamed in the sunlight. The floor was probably clean enough to lie on. As there was nothing to catch my interest, I began to hear soft music drifting in from the living room.

Thinking that was what Wolf had wanted to show me, I swung open the kitchen door. There I found, not Wolf, but Junior and an older woman who looked like she was his mother. He had an arm around her waist, while he held her hand with another. They made little squares as they danced around the room.

“That’s all there is to it, Ma,” he said to her.

She was smiling from ear to ear. “I like it. It’s nice. I should follow you one day.”

I tried to step back into the kitchen, but Wolf emerged from the corridor, banging the door behind him. That made them turn.

“Oh, hello,” Junior said with a smile.

“Hi,” I replied with a wave. And then I turned slightly to his mother. “Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon,” she replied. “Please, you are?”

“My name is Desire Mensah,” I said. “I just moved into number 3, and I teach at your son’s school.” I pointed to Wolf.

“Oh so you’re our new neighbor!” she exclaimed. “I’m Adjoa, Adjoa Ofori. It’s nice to meet you.”

I smiled. “It’s nice to meet you. Your son said he had something to show me, so I came over.”

“Oh, that’s okay. We’re happy to have you over.”

Wolf tugged at my arm. “Come, come, come,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I told his mother. “Your son wants me to follow him.”

She laughed. “That one, that’s the way he is. He’s so insistent when he wants something. You let him show you what he wants to.”

“Thank you,” I said. Then I allowed Wolf to pull me into the kitchen.

“Look at this,” he said, and placed a large sheet of cardboard on the counter. “Look what I made.”

It was a mosaic of a house on a hill. “Oh, this is nice, Wolf,” I said.

He beamed with pride.

I took a closer look. “You made the image out of little colored paper triangles.”

“Yes,” he nodded. “I got the idea while reading about how 3D images are rendered on computers, and I thought it would be nice to try something like it with the mosaic.”

The mosaic had a blue sky, an orange sun, and white clouds over the house. The house itself was made out of rust-red triangles, and beside the house stood two stick figures holding hands.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There was this old white lady who visited our class one day. And she had a similar mosaic with her that she showed to the class, and there were two people in it. So I made two people.”

“Oh, okay. Who was the old lady?”

“Her name was Lavinia. She was an artist.”

“That’s a lovely name.”

“She died a few months after visiting us.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“‘So it goes,’” he said with a giggle.

I saw the joke and laughed along.

“What’s so funny?” asked Junior, stepping into the kitchen.

“Nothing,” Wolf said. He picked up his mosaic and held it to his chest. “It’s between just me and Desire.”

Junior chuckled as he reached into the fridge and picked a bottle of water. “Okay, young man. Nobody bore.”

“Go back and dance like a little girl,” grumbled Wolf.

Junior and I laughed and caught each other’s eye. “You can waltz, I see,” I said to him.

“I’m now learning,” he replied.

“Okay.”

“The classes are every weekend. They teach the waltz, the tango, salsa, and even the jive. We could go together if you want.”

He was selling, but after what had happened with Addison, I was in no mood to buy.

“Thanks, but I’m not much of a dancer,” I said.

“Oh, some of them are really easy to learn. I’m a beginner myself.”

I shook my head. “That’s nice, but I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Well, I’m going to continue teaching my mother. I’ll see you.”

“See you.”