Grandmother Knows Best

Published by: Didcot Press
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Owinye first heard the voice of his dead grandmother at work. He had been plugging numbers into a spreadsheet and fantasising about lunch when the words appeared, unprompted, inside of his head. He knew nothing had been said out loud because there was never a break in the rhythmic tapping of plastic keys and the tireless whirr of the photocopy machines, but there had been his own voice, mentally choosing sandwiches, and now there was another voice, unmistakably that of his long-dead grandmother. That man is not long for this world, she said.

Owinye knew that he must be overtired – exhausted from another long week at the office – his girlfriend Esi had been telling him for weeks that he needed to slow down; to take his foot off the gas. It was an argument they’d had countless times before, and he would bite his tongue to avoid the spiralling anger, the shouts, the smashed plates, not saying the words again that enraged her so: that it was only with this job that they could maintain their lifestyle, that without those extra hours he put in, she would have to go back to secretary work and they could kiss goodbye to that fancy car she loved to parade around town. So Owinye didn’t tell anyone about the voice inside of his head, and he had almost certainly forgotten about it, and its message, when his boss, the following week, died in a car accident.

Owinye was not a superstitious man, and for him to draw connections between these two events – a voice in his head and a tragic death – would have only fuelled potential madness – because hearing a voice was one thing, but believing what it said was something entirely different. Besides, from memory it had only been a vague prediction, the same as if the voice had said – the rains will soon come, when of course the rains would come eventually – it is easy to predict the future in sweeping gestures. An oracle vagaries do not make. But it was whilst he was having these thoughts, pushing, once again the memory of that voice out of his mind entirely to pretend that he had never in fact heard his dead grandmother say anything at all – as he watched them show one of his colleague’s a new office that this sudden death had granted her – that the voice returned and said: I told you so. It seemed that either madness was already upon him, or his dead grandmother really was inside of his head, shining a light into the darkness from beyond the grave.

Owinye had few memories of this grandmother: sweet pastries on a high table, wet kisses on foreheads, and the fabric entrance to the Fortune Room. It was here that she would toss the shells for him and tell him things like you must marry a nice local girl, and you should not live abroad, and grandmother knows best. But these were things that grandmothers said and although young Owinye would watch with fascination the way she cast a question into the universe, scattered the white shells across the woven mat and recited his fortune in her gravelly voice – this was the magic of youth, a time when he still believed in Gods and ghosts and fairies, each of which would shrivel in the harsh light of reality, as death, sex and anxiety rushed to fill the void that they had left; and so he would grow up and move abroad and date an American and ignore his grandmother’s wishes.

And yet here she was – his long-dead grandmother, never to be ignored – tossing her shells inside of his head.

With this, there will be new beginnings. And as Owinye rolled his eyes at yet more ambiguity, he felt an instant surge of guilt flood his torso, as if his grandmother were standing there in front of him. Where is your respect? For he would have never been so discourteous to her face. He thought that perhaps it was her that was goading him from within and so he apologised, and said he would try to believe it was truly her; that he would try to rekindle that wonder of youth, the suspension of disbelief. And so it was, that Owinye came to believe this death would lead to new beginnings, and it was the following day, as had been foretold, that his new boss – not twenty-four hours earlier a colleague that had shared his complaints about the weather – fired him and for the first time in seven years, Owinye was without a job.

You have the sight, said his grandmother, use it. And so, when he got home that night, he crept past the television room where Esi was watching one of her shows and climbed the ladder to the attic where he kept the old shoebox that held his grandmother’s worldly possessions. He dusted off her wooden necklace, slotting it over his head, discarded a broken burner that would have once filled the room with sweet-smelling smoke and found – on top of her expired driving license – a small, black velvet bag that held sixteen white cowrie-shells. He could not find her woven mat but remembered with horror (although the horror was not his own), that they had been using it as a table centrepiece for years. He crept back downstairs and stood over the mat, pouring the shells from the bag into his open palm and watching their hungry mouths gape up at him. Ask them a question, said his long-dead grandmother.

What should I do now? Owinye thought and his hand released the shells as if he had intended it himself, and they tumbled out, landing surely at random, some up, some down, but he could not begin to fathom what they meant, if anything. He suddenly felt foolish for ever going this far with any of this, for truly believing, even if it were only momentarily, that the voice in his head was actually that of his grandmother and not the early warning shots of mental illness. But then his grandmother said: Read the shells.

And so Owinye leaned over the shells and suddenly he saw the patterns – he saw that they made a picture, that they made words, that each shell told a story and through his eyes his grandmother read this story to him and said: Now, use your gift.

Owinye was elated because he now had a way to talk directly with her – to manage these sporadic prophecies. He asked then a question that had been keeping him awake at night for months: Should I marry Esi? He released the shells and immediately the response came: I never liked her. She will seek pleasure elsewhere. And Owinye suddenly felt her scorn, believed her disgust, understood what was to happen if he did not act, and although the feelings were not his own, it became hard to distinguish where his grandmother’s distaste ended and his own apathy began. From that moment, it was impossible to shake the feeling whenever he saw Esi, a dark stain that he could not rub out. He was suddenly jealous of her wayward glances at other men, suspicious if he was to return home to her already made-up and smelling of floral perfume, and he grew tired of their arguments, because he no longer had the energy or resolve to weather them. And so, after another day spent sitting in a cafe to avoid telling Esi he had been fired, he summoned his grandmother’s anger and he walked into the television room – switching off her series to shocked protestation – to tell her that the two of them were through and that she needed to leave immediately. A fight ensued and she beat at his chest and wept but he already knew the future and so he knew that pain now would prevent what was to come.

There was silence in her wake. Sadness. But also relief. He sat in his chair in the empty kitchen and pushed the shells with his finger, the image of Esi already beginning to fade in the shadow of this unimaginable power he now wielded. Because it was with this gift that he would make his fortune, and with that he would travel the world; he would be advisor to Presidents, to Kings, he would steer the world in righteous directions, averting disaster, spreading joy.

What does my future hold? he said out loud, for now there was no one around who might cause him shame.

Death, said the shells. It is not safe here. You must return home. But Owinye was already home, for this had been his home for many years, one of the few things he owned in this country. And then he remembered that it was his grandmother who spoke through his eyes and so he understood that home could only mean her own home – the country that he had been born in. So because he knew the future, he sold his things, sold his house, sold the dresses and the shoes and the car, for he knew that Esi would never return, and he bought a ticket home, to the village where he had grown up and there he bought a plot of land. He paid local labourers to build him a great house that sat atop the faded footprint of his grandmother’s old home, long-since demolished and cleared for farm land. He knew when he saw the spot that this was what his grandmother had meant by home.

Sitting in the darkness of this new house – for the power was out across the village and he was yet to install a back-up generator – he tossed the shells again and by the light of the candle he heard the voice that read the signs and it said You must find a nice local girl to father your children. Although Owinye protested, asking if the time was not now to use his gift to see the world – to change the course of history – he was reminded by the voice inside of his head that thanks to her he had escaped death already and that because of this he should trust her. Listen to your grandmother. And so he went out into the village and asked the elders if they knew of any unmarried women and to his surprise, despite being far beyond the age of desirability in the city he had left, the prospect of this man from over-the-water attracted a wealth of families who laid out a buffet of brides for him to choose from. Although he had not cast the shells, the voice in his head said that one and so he picked a shy-looking girl with wide hips who he came to wed.

They had little to say to each other and she was meek and frightened where Esi had been empowered and spontaneous. On their wedding night he bedded her with his eyes clamped shut – saving himself the shame of his grandmother witnessing the act – and afterwards, as he lay beside this woman, he knew that his new wife would bear him a child. She bore him two more children after the first, in quick succession – a single night spent together between pregnancies and he would close his eyes and he would know before he had even left the bed to shower that an infant would flower in this girl’s womb. At intervals, when the children were asleep upstairs, he would ask the shells whether now was the time – whether now was the moment for him to share his gift with the world – but the answer would always be the same: Build your life here.

And so Owinye came to have a job in a local shop – the same shop in fact that his grandmother had worked – and he tossed his shells at night as she had done before him, in a small tent in the yard; but he received little in the way of money and the fortunes he offered were vague. It was after the birth of his fourth child, a little boy, that the voice of his grandmother finally stopped.

He was sitting at the kitchen table, his exhausted wife upstairs, the new baby swaddled beside her, the other children asleep in their rooms, when he thought the words – I am not happy – and although it was not a question he tossed the shells nonetheless and for the last time the patterns aligned themselves and his dead grandmother, from deep inside his skull said: Stop this complaining at once, you have everything I ever wished for you.

And with that, she left.