Gingerbread

by Helen Oyeyemi

  * * *

  —

  WHEN HARRIET FINALLY went to fetch Ari, she found him in one of the living rooms. Music was blasting throughout the house, and she simply went to the room where it was loudest, the room where Ari and Perdita were dancing together like a pair of vagabond wizards—jerking shoulders, grinding heels, twirling fingers as a question thunders through the loudspeakers: Where do you know me from . . . WHERE DO YOU KNOW ME FROM? Kercheval House wasn’t ready for this; the windows of the room were sagging a little below the window frames—the room was thinking about sending itself down to the basement to recuperate. It couldn’t do that without dislodging Rémy and Tamar, though. They were perched on the windowsill looking on. Harriet joined them; the windowsill seemed to be the place where the grown-ups went. Rémy said something she couldn’t quite catch, so she asked him to repeat it.

  “I said: How was it?”

  “How was what?”

  “That future you were so sure you were going to have.”

  After a moment of hesitation, of trying to think what a good deception would be, Harriet shuffled over to Tamar and whispered in her ear that Gabriel was waiting to speak to her in the kitchen.

  “Me? He asked for me?”

  Once Tamar had gone, Harriet turned to Rémy, covered her mouth with her hands, and, gazing very sweetly into his eyes, proceeded to bestow a cornucopia of curses upon him, swearing repeatedly and at length, for the duration of the very loud song that was playing. She left it to Rémy to guess what she was saying, and judging from the look on his face, he was guessing fairly well.

  Meanwhile Ari screamed at Perdita: “What’s the name of the young man whose music we’re dancing to?”

  “Stormzy, Grandpa—this is Stormzy . . .”

  Aristide Kercheval switched the music off and, head tilted, listened to the last few syllables of Harriet’s swearing marathon before giving Perdita the gimlet eye. His response to being annoyed was slowing down a bit as he aged and reliance on lip-reading increased.

  “Grandpa?” he said.

  Perdita linked arms with him. “Can’t I call you that?”

  “You can call me that,” Ari decided. It was the snappiest of his snap decisions.

  (“Putty in her hands,” Rémy remarked. He’ll get along famously with the dolls named Prim and Lollipop when they meet.)

  After a decent interval, Ari Kercheval returned to the subject of Stormzy—did Perdita happen to know if anybody was currently managing this young man’s wealth? Rémy had ample opportunity to say, “Fuck this family,” but he didn’t. Not even once. Plans were afoot that morning, and they were to do with the Kerchevals’ good deed for the year.

  “I got mugged a couple of months ago,” Ari said gruffly. “In an underground car park. Nothing too violent—some boy just pushed me over and took all my stuff. Phone, cards, keys, money, all of it. And for that hour or so that I didn’t have anything, I kept asking myself if I have any relationships that wouldn’t be adversely affected by my losing everything for real. Everything in my bank accounts, for instance. And I thought of you two, Margot and Harriet—” He looked at Perdita. “I didn’t know about you yet.”

  There was a jumble of spoken responses—what, the Lees had been the first to come to Ari’s mind as people who’d stand by him in times of dire need? Tamar had walked in just in time to hear her husband say this, and she was very far from thrilled. Rémy said Ari might as well mention his “health scare” while he was busy creating an awkward atmosphere. “Me and Gabriel were actually with him at the hospital around the time I noticed someone had, er, hacked what you call my ‘gentleman detective email’ account,” Rémy told Perdita. Margot wanted to know what Ari had been hospitalized for. Ari waved a hand.

  “It was stupid.”

  “If you call a heart attack stupid—!” Tamar said. “We thought you were going to die.”

  “Die?” Margot told Ari he wasn’t allowed to do that. Ari said he’d do as he pleased, and Perdita said Ari was right not to make a big deal out of it since the heart only makes up 1.5 percent of body mass at most. One-point-five percent, eh? And with what grim composure Harriet’s daughter stated that quantity . . . her tone implied firsthand knowledge, the kind that comes with having done all the dissection, weighing, and measuring yourself . . . What else? Harriet watched Ari blow kisses at his granddaughter and listened to Tamar telling Perdita, “You can’t call me Grandma, though,” and heard Perdita answer Tamar in tones hundreds of degrees colder than the tones in which she spoke to Ari: “That’s absolutely fine with me, Tamar” (Tamar hung her head; her penance would be long), and Harriet Lee was happy. No? Joyously giddy? What if I just say she experienced some emotion of extremely high hedonic value—like a diamond, only a feeling—and she experienced it so strongly that it . . . echoed. No? Oh, because it’s a sound word and no particular sound was singled out for Harriet’s attention? You give me a word for it, then. You tell me what it is when some sensation leaves you for the space of one heartbeat and returns at double strength. It seemed to Harriet Lee that her father must be happy too. They’d agreed that they were alike, she and her father, whether happy, cross, or sad. I’m alive, so he is too, isn’t he? Isn’t he? There’s no end to the serrated edge of this illogic; might as well press on and read the fulfillment of so many other hopes into it . . . this thing that I’m apparently not allowed to call an echo meant that Zu was happy too, ditto Dottie and Rosolio and Cinnabar and all the Gingerbread Girls, everyone at the farmstead, and . . .

  . . . Gretel . . .

  But Ari was unfolding his plan, and Harriet had to listen if she wanted to help.

  “You came to us willing to join our family, and you did it, you’re family. What we want to do now is start three new families. This was originally Tamar’s plan, actually.”

  This was to be this year’s Kercheval Good Deed: Ari proposed to begin with three houses, each house to be occupied by a group of people not necessarily related by blood who were prepared to live together as a family unit. Not some sham family, politely avoiding having to care about one another, but people who would share a surname and the task of weaving a collective meaning into that name. People who would support and protect and staunchly cherish one another.

  Margot gave Ari a sour look. “Sorry, what? Did you say this was Tamar’s idea?”

  Tamar answered before Ari could: “That’s right, and it’s better than any you’ve ever had!”

  Margot got up, stood over the seated Tamar, and pointed at her. Tamar bared her teeth and pushed Margot’s hand away, but Margot kept pointing. “Did you come up with this plan before or after the outcome of your dealings with our granddaughter?”

  “After,” Tamar muttered.

  Margot sat down. “That’s all I wanted to know! I’ve been looking for clues all this time, searching for this woman’s sense of guilt.”

  “Tamar’s guilt is my guilt,” Ari said. From the look on Tamar’s face when he said that, Harriet could see that this was how Ari got through to his wife, with words matched to deeds in exactly this way. “And her plans are my plans. I’m the one who thought of asking you Lees to advise, though.”

  “Now we, we Kerchevals and Lees, Kercheval-Lees, Lee-Kerchevals, we’ve had, er, we’ve had our tiffs, we’ve had our little disagreement, and I’m sure there’s more where they came from, but all of us here know what family’s about. Gabriel off in Beijing knows what family’s about—”

  “Hong Kong,” says Tamar. “Hong Kong . . . our son is in Hong Kong.”

  “Yes, exactly, Hong Kong . . . and Ambrose and Kenzilea off in St. Kitts know too, and if I don’t praise some of the rest of you for also knowing what family’s about, that’s because I don’t like praising people for doing exactly what they should be doing. Anyway, I’m not asking you Lees to help pick the people who’ll live in the houses—I’m asking you to help pick the actual houses. T
here are three in particular that I’ve been offered as a job lot, and at a price so low that I’m almost sure mischief is afoot . . .”

  “The estate agency is a reputable one, though,” Tamar put in. “We’ve been dealing with them for years. Miss Maszkeradi said that the thing to bear in mind about two of the houses is that they’re absolutely, definitely not haunted—”

  “Meaning she thinks they’re as haunted as fuck and wants to mention it in advance because one of the pre-sale stipulations is that a potential buyer has to spend a night in each of the houses,” Rémy said.

  Perdita liked the sound of this.

  “But apparently there’s something else to bear in mind about the third house—”

  “Yes, what is it Miss Maszkeradi said about the third house again?” Ari asked.

  “She said we can have it if we can get in,” said Tamar.

  Margot managed to establish that Miss Maszkeradi was the estate agent who’d come to them with the three-house deal, and that though the Kerchevals’ estate agency of choice did indeed have a venerable history, Miss Maszkeradi herself was new to the job. All three Kerchevals present had met Miss Maszkeradi in person, and all three disagreed on basic aspects of her physique.

  Margot’s opinion: “She sounds . . . well, I’ve never heard estate agents talk about houses they’re supposed to be trying to sell in this way . . .”

  “Doesn’t mean she’s not on the level,” Perdita said.

  “Well, let’s see . . . we’ll set up viewings . . . first house weekend after next . . . Harriet and I have to do a bit of work. And, Perdita, you should get back to school. I think I’ll call my tattoo artist friend too.”

  “Your tattoo artist friend?” Tamar asked.

  “Yes—he has some very good patterns that ward off spirit possession.”

  “Make it an appointment for four,” said Tamar.

  Ari wanted the Lees to stay the night, wanted them to move back in, actually. Not a chance. For the Lees, home was somewhere else—they’d visit again very soon, though. Yes, there’d be lots of visits, and he must visit them too . . . and they caught the last train back to London with Tamar in tow.

  15

  The tattoo made Harriet’s heart ache for days. She liked it, but it was drawn on to a sensitive place, the place between her breasts where it seemed to her that the skin was thinner. Thinner and itchier, but also more easily soothed with a fingertip dipped in lotion. As for the device Margot’s friend chose, it was seven crisscrossed swords—or seven arrows—the sharp points curlicued as though twisted at gale force. Perdita didn’t end up getting tattooed. “Any spirit that wants to have a go at possessing me is welcome to try,” said she, and out came the jack-o’-lantern grin, along with a few exclamations from both her grandmothers, who’d never seen it before. For Tamar, Margot, and Harriet, though, the tattoo was a reassuring precaution to take. Especially once they’d read up on the house they were going to view. The Baker House. Its bad reputation wasn’t due to its being a very old house, though it was very old. Nor was the bad reputation due to reports of ghostly apparitions or supernatural occurrences. A sad, strange, and nefarious scheme had been conceived of and carried out in the rooms of this house a decade ago. There was no ghost, not a ghost, but there was something there. So people reasoned that the house must be haunted by all the goings-on. It was a shame, because most people who spent a little time in the house agreed that it was a nice house and could not help gathering the infamous Baker family’s dreams and memories and belongings up in its bricks and mortar; the house was only doing what it had been built to do. So it did that, and remained empty. This was Harriet’s assessment when she looked through photos and documents pertaining to the house, the facade of which she felt some low-key rapport with. She’d walked past this house many a time, she didn’t remember doing so, but she must have done. She was often in Camden.

  As for what had happened: high-achieving Jackie Baker and her similarly high-achieving youngest daughter, Tara, had got together and evaluated the other members of their family and found their flaws too detestable and their endearing qualities too insignificant to be borne. Tara and Jackie Baker had no choice but to reject all association with these scroungers and finalized this rejection by engineering accidents for them all: mostly electrical accidents, taking care to factor in a few shocks and spills for themselves too. Family friends thought at first that the Bakers were simply . . . clumsy? Unlucky? Tara Baker and her mother didn’t manage to kill anybody, but mentally, emotionally, and atmospherically speaking, the house became a madhouse. So many accidents, and nobody who could openly be blamed for them . . . all this had been systematically brought to light by the best friend of one of the targeted siblings, who turned Sherlock not even in the pursuit of justice, necessarily, but out of sheer disbelief that his mate kept denying that he’d been subject to at least three instances of attempted murder. Confessions having been secured, one thing Ma Baker said in a newspaper interview stuck in Harriet’s mind: They didn’t even love us. Harriet imagined that this was said casually, with equally casual subtext: So we couldn’t let them live.

  The Bakers dispersed—some to lead lives that sounded ordinary enough, others to full-time care facilities. Perdita thought there might yet be a ghost in their house. In one of her printouts of the newspaper interviews there are three parts Perdita’s underlined in red—Jackie Baker’s three answers to the same question: How many children do you have, Mrs. Baker?

  Jackie Baker’s first answer is that she gave birth to five children, but only one is really her child—the rest are leeches.

  Jackie Baker’s second answer is that she gave birth to six children, but only one is really her child—the rest are leeches.

  The third time the question is put to her, Ma Baker counts on her fingers, counts again, adds, subtracts, counts again: Why do you keep asking me this! It’s the only part of the published transcript in which Jackie Baker loses composure.

  The Lees and Tamar agreed that it seemed as if the interviewer had had some sort of tip-off that seemed credible to her but, being unable to secure factual evidence, had hit upon the child inventory as a way of trying to shake a little more of the full Baker family story loose. Harriet had intended to ask the estate agent Miss Maszkeradi what she thought of this the afternoon the five of them met outside the Baker House, but there was too much unease, so she forgot. The primary source of the unease was realizing that the rapport she felt for the Baker House only came from looking at photographs of it. Standing outside it, there was no memory of having been there before. The connection she felt to this house was due to a photo she’d seen, a photo that differed from the estate-agency portfolio photo in only one respect—the inclusion of two blurry figures approaching it, the old woman and the young woman Harriet and Gretel had joked were them. And now, was Harriet to go into this house and find that her friend Gretel was in some way the basis of this house’s bad reputation? She preferred to wait outside while the others had a look around and decided whether they felt able to stay the night—but she hadn’t factored in the wishes of Miss Maszkeradi. Miss Maszkeradi, it has to be said, was a secondary source of Harriet’s unease, with her beehive-shaped turban and her sunglasses worn over an eyepatch and the creased cuffs of her sleeves that didn’t look quite right. You looked a little closer and saw that they were bandages in the process of slowly unraveling. Miss Maszkeradi was a woman somewhere around Harriet’s age and somewhere around her height, and her skin tone and coloring were somewhere in the Kartvelian region, but for all this somewhere nearness, when you looked away from her the accessories she donned were the only things that felt likely to still be there when you looked again.

  “You’re Drahomíra Maszkeradi?” Margot asked, with some skepticism, but Tamar said, “Yes, of course it’s her,” and the lady herself said, “That’s right . . . and isn’t it a lovely day for viewing a definitely-not-haunted house?”

&
nbsp; Harriet said she didn’t feel like going in after all. “Don’t be silly; you’re going to love it—” The trill in Miss Maszkeradi’s voice was loud and clear, and Harriet followed them all into the house for fear that the estate agent would add FA LA LA. A loud burst of song at that moment would’ve been all it took to finish Harriet off.

  Aside from having at one time been a madhouse, the Baker House was a heritage house, the interior of which couldn’t be altered without permission from and consultation with various cultural bodies that ensured any changes made were historically accurate restorations. It pleased Miss Maszkeradi to point out to them some features that immortalized the thriftiness of the house’s first owners, the Dalhousies. “As you see, here’s a hearth but no chimney—that was removed to dodge the Hearth Tax of 1662. And kindly note the sparing natural light . . . a number of windows were bricked up in order to avoid paying the Window Tax of 1696. And see here, beneath this staircase, ladies, what do you think this handsome hollow may have once housed?”

  “Handsome hollow may once have housed,” Perdita murmured under her breath; never mind answering, the words had to be processed first.

  “Grandfather clock,” Margot volunteered. Miss Maszkeradi beamed. “Correct! Of course the clock was removed and sold in 1797 so as to avoid paying the Clock Owner Tax of 1797 . . .”

  Even after all this, the Baker House hadn’t given up on the dream of being a pleasant home someday. Margot touched the walls and made comforting little clucking sounds; she told the Baker House what she planned to do for it if the council would let her, and Tamar opined that the council would allow about a quarter of the plans to go through if they were really pushed, which they certainly would be. Perdita said she thought a quarter would be enough. Harriet stood in the gentle gloom of one of the bedrooms and fought the mesmerizing effect of ugly wallpaper, the patterns that recur, not as one would wish a pleasurable visual event to be repeated, but recurrence for the sake of filling space. Blob blob blob . . . Harriet only broke free of the wallpaper—with a synaptic snap that was almost painful—when she heard Miss Maszkeradi’s voice in the hallway: “See you in the morning, girls!” She slammed the front door, and they all heard her lock it, the grinding of mechanisms, like a great maw chewing iron. The crafty woman had locked the back door too; they hadn’t seen when she’d done that.