‘Go on then,’ she said. She was laughing. But I couldn’t do anything to the dress. Despina’s dress was the second most beautiful in the world – this dress was satin, with a mist of silver mesh, the kind of dress that makes its wearer look newly wept. In the chest the dress had looked very narrow, narrower even than I thought Despina could be, but Amy Eleni wasn’t scared of getting stuck in it. Amy Eleni didn’t even care about the dress; she just put it on to show me. She flicked up the zip of Despina’s tear-dress as if it were all just jeans.
She turned to the dusty mirror sideways on, struck a pose, hands on her hips, her elbows crooked governess-style. She kicked back at the air to loosen her pose, and the dress’s seams creaked at her thigh. I couldn’t breathe, but Amy Eleni breathed. I looked at Amy Eleni in the mirror, but she didn’t see me looking. She struck another pose on tiptoe, arms held high, neck swaying as if something heavy was on her head. The skylights caught an accusing flash of sun that bypassed stacked sea-grass boxes to illuminate the dress.
The poor dress, it was too much. I stopped Amy Eleni with my hands, kept her waist straight under my palms to let her know that she shouldn’t bend any more, and I turned her in a swish of cold white as I examined the dress for damage. She drooped and jiggled her wrists, pretending to be a puppet. But before my eyes the dress’s shoulder was turning to sad, shredded cloth. Before I could even open my mouth, Amy Eleni said, ‘It’ll survive, wedding dresses survive anything. People have sex in wedding dresses. I mean, Jesus. Once I put this dress on and I climbed a tree in it! I fell, though . . .’
I screamed small and checked the satin for grass stains, but Amy Eleni sniggered, batted my hand away, named a book and said I really needed to read it.
Books: I am attracted and repelled; books are conversations that are not addressed to me and I want to sneak up and listen but I also want to be invited in. If I was invited in the conversation would not be what it was.
After reading that Avila book, I scared Chabella badly. She decided that I was having ‘a moral, religious and mental breakdown’. I was only saying what was on my mind. The conversation that made Chabella decide that we were going to take a weekend retreat went exactly like this:
ME: Chabella, is it true that the Church refuses to confirm the presence of a single soul in Hell?
CHABELLA (with an enormous, proud smile): Ai, querida.
ME: Not even Hitler or Stalin or It the Clown?
CHABELLA: Not even them. Forgiveness –
ME (interrupting): What about Teresa of Avila?
CHABELLA: – is always an option. Mm, St Teresa, what?
ME: Well Teresa of Avila is a bitch, after all, so I expect she’s in Hell.
CHABELLA: (screams for three or four long seconds, while I just sit and look at her. Gasps. Holds her head with tears pouring down her face, shrinks and shakes as if I am punching her.)
Chabella said it wasn’t so much the words, but the way my face went when I said them – she said my face ‘twisted’ and she couldn’t recognise me. Chabella knows the Rites of Exorcism by heart. She is prone to exaggeration.
When Papi heard that Chabella and I were going on a retreat, he gave six-year-old Tomás a high five and said, ‘Just you and me, London baby. Show me some of those London ways.’ Papi had to give Tomás the high five very gently, it was in fact a matter of pressing his palm against Tomás’s fingers, or Tomás would have fallen down. Tomás was happy with the idea of us going away, too. He cackled, ‘Bye.’
When we actually left the following week, he said ‘Wait for me’ and ran upstairs to throw some toys into his rucksack. Mami closed the front door and he cried out: ‘No! No!’
The way Tomás said ‘No’, the way he said it.
He didn’t know what two days would feel like; he didn’t understand that he would only have to go to sleep and get up twice, and then we’d be back.
That first weekend at St Catherine’s, Chabella and I slept in the same room on low, neat white beds with scratchy blankets. We didn’t talk about Catholicism or Teresa; we were already in the Church, high up with a sweet vanilla smell and the softest hush all around. We laughed together in the night for no reason at all. We tried to be quiet because you were supposed to be quiet, and anyway, everyone was sleeping. But Mami would just look at me with her nostrils quivering and that was enough to set me off. At Mass, when I looked at my Mami, she glittered. When she sang, the song came from the wound on her tongue. While Mami slept at night, and I lay with my eyes closed,
a shadow fell, fast and from a great height it fell
it put me inside
it put me inside
the weight of it. Dark came to rest on my eyelids; strange and painful pennies. What if, what if I had opened my eyes and tried to look at what was there in that room . . .
. . . with sleepy awe I felt it: I am loved. And outside there were tall trees that had other people’s sleep caught in their branches, dreams like white lights, that first time Mami took me away to save my soul.
Now it’s 4 a.m. and I’m still awake with my fingers splayed over my neck and its old loop
of pain
(and I am at St Catherine’s again,
at the window again
amazed again
at the way a steep hill holds growing green on its swerve when it will support nothing else).
On the wall is St Catherine of Siena, sheets of chestnut hair floating in heaven-driven winds, Catherine who I always fail to love when I remember that she is not the Catherine of spiked-wheel martyrdom. Catherine of Siena looks at me with all of her soul in her soft smile; she looks at me, glad that I will not be staying. I think about the mothers I know or have seen or have heard of. My mother, Amy Eleni’s mother, mothers in books, mothers in Chabella’s apataki, her stories about the gods. Twenty-four not being old enough, I want to tell my son, Not now, please.
For six days I have been praying, really praying, a state of angry joy that I fell into through a crack in the bottom of my heart. I have not been able to close my eyes for longer than it takes to blink. I am back to childish bargaining with God for explicit support of my son, as if my son is special, or for advance pardon for the swift ending of my son, as if I am special. Or anything, anything, God give me anything.
Food: everything I eat, my mouth lets it go, my stomach heaves painful, sour streams. My breasts are rotten lumps hooked into my ribcage, and I can’t touch my body at all, I can’t. I keep holding my hands away from myself, or holding my hands together. But the afternoons ripen here in radiant languor as forty women draw a little more breath into their black and white cassocks so as to continue dying slowly from love. When it rains the sisters, capes heavy with water, rotate in fragrant clusters through the slate walkways of the chapel.
At the door, Sister Perpetua takes both my hands and looks at me from beneath the clean borders of her cowl. Her ‘hello’ smile is the same as her ‘goodbye’ smile. She lets me come, lets me go my way, looks at me now the same way that she did when I arrived a week ago. I tottered in on six-inch wedges with the meekest look that I could give her over the top of a pair of oversized sunglasses, the crown of my floppy brown hat settled around my ears and Aaron’s discarded khaki jacket, longer and looser than the black dress I wore beneath it, flapping open despite my best efforts to belt it in several places. She brusquely tells me that this time I came on retreat from a joyous heart, that I was here with her at St Catherine’s because I am being slain by the Holy Spirit.
‘Jesus is in your life,’ Sister Perpetua says again, while I look at her and do not think of Jesus at all because Sister Perpetua’s beauty is bewitched: her lips are a frozen red that thaws out into pink at the corners; her eyebrows climb to tapered peaks above dark chocolate eyes. Sister Perpetua has the face that Snow White’s mother had wished upon her. But it isn’t that something is keeping her young, just that something is keeping her beautiful. I love Sister Perpetua for stupid reasons: she does not whisper in Chapel but talks for
God to hear; she has seen me crying and she just lets me cry; when she wants me to pray with her she covers my hands with her soft ones.
The first time I came she found me in the Chapel and told me about an African priest who the Church had confirmed was in heaven. She did not tell Chabella; she only told me, as if she knew that I needed it. I told her about the shadow at night, and she talked about the Cloud of Unknowing, how when God is near, you are driven into the darkness outside of reason and it is a good, sweet rest. I tried to explain that it wasn’t unknowing. But mystics are difficult to argue with.
I’m still not used to Aaron’s flat, even though I moved in four months ago, even though he calls it ‘ours’. The house is in the middle of a semi-detached row; always at attention, jutting straight up with a windowed stare that holds sleepy intelligence near its base, as if the right command could send it leaping sideways. I approach it with caution. I feel like an interview candidate arriving to be considered for tenancy by the house itself. I lose myself so far as to raise a hand to knock at the door though the keys are already dangling on their ring from the index finger of my other hand. We live in the bottom half of the converted two-floor house that Aaron’s dad, a man made thin by nerves and neatness and ownership of a real-estate agency, gave him for his twenty-first birthday.
The streets around the house are misted with trees and re-edged with cut-out-and-colour delis and small, glass-fronted restaurants whose clientele don’t seem to do lunch, or dinner, or anything other than beautifully hued cocktails.
Inside the house is a middle floor forced between the green-carpeted staircase that leads up to Miss Lassiter’s flat and the peeling wooden steps that lead down to Aaron’s. I am wary here; I remember that Miss Lassiter’s envelope is due today. Miss Lassiter is now Aaron’s tenant, though she used to be his father’s. She leaves monthly envelopes outside Aaron’s door without knocking. Aaron doggedly maintains that she’s shy, but I don’t enjoy Miss Lassiter. When I meet her on the stairs, she thrusts her walking stick out before her like a probe. The outlines of her face are buried in clasped whorls of wool; she wears stiff black gloves, and holds her fingers together so that her thumb is a loner. The gloves make her hands look like blunted hooks.
I tiptoe downstairs and open the front door of the flat. Immediately Aaron is filming me. Kente cloth is threaded into a vivid print belt for his jeans, his socked feet slip on the floorboards. I make a face at him; he lifts his eye away from the viewfinder and, smiling, directs me with his hand, showing me which slats of space I can walk in without damaging his angle.
‘So, Maja,’ he intones, and I know that he’s making a close-up of my face. ‘Who wins? Aaron or . . . GOD?’
I hang up my coat and spread my hands in the shade; he frantically indicates that I should come forward and turn a little more to the right. I do.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘What am I talking about?’ He walks backwards, ignoring my attempt to try and get the camera off him. ‘My girlfriend goes off to a nunnery four times in as many months, and I’m not supposed to worry that she’s about to marry Jesus . . .’
I stop at the kitchen door; Aaron is inside now, shored up against a crumbling wharf of green tile, stacked plates and opened jars. I look into the camera for what feels like forever – I look until I forget that I am seeing anything and my eyes spill over with tension water, and he is abashed and nervously shifts the camera.
When he puts the camera down on the kitchen table I see how tired he is, see the caved-in yawn lines around his mouth and the panda patches around his eyes. He comes to me and rests his forehead against mine. I only really notice the notations that exhaustion leaves on his face when I’ve been separated from the reasons for it: the broken braying of his pager; the fifty-six-hour cover shift at the hospital that upends us into a fraught, airless rectangle of calling each other at the wrong time, not answering calls from each other when it’s most important, me wondering what it means when he forgets to say ‘I love you’ before saying goodbye. His hair is getting too long. He is beginning a beard, and it’s in an awkward adolescent phase, bristling in patches despite itself.
I don’t want dinner, but he starts pounding steaming boiled yams for fresh fufu at the kitchen counter. The only help he lets me give is simple; heating up a chicken stew he’s already made. I like watching Aaron burn like this, his body clock hopelessly awry, forehead wrinkled as he revolves around the steel cog of his own nervous energy. I think he likes it when I try to sing him to sleep, although he doesn’t fall for it – he just looks at me with the covers wadded under his chin, wearing a smile of melting gold like a child’s. Sometimes he wakes up in the night asking what time it is and asking whether someone else finished the tourniquet job he started because he’s forgotten to go back, or asking who collected the X-rays. When he sees that it’s only me, he laughs and curls up against me and falls asleep again.
He eats dinner; I watch him skimming balls of dough-like fufu into a rich, dense stew. He asks if I want to talk about the retreat. With the question put as formally as that, I say I don’t. He’s relieved – almost immediately he changes tack and asks whether I’m singing tonight. I’m not, and he’s not on call tonight, so he says, ‘We should go and see a play or a film or something.’
‘OK,’ I say, pretending to leaf through Time Out, knowing that he’ll fall asleep before he even finds his shoes.
On the sofa he begins to drowse with his head on my lap, mumbling, ‘Sorry I’m so crap,’ into the fabric of my jeans. I draw my fingers through his hair and tell him to shut up. He sleeps with his grey eyes half open and intent on some object at floor level.
Aaron knows Amy Eleni from a church choir they both used to sing in before Amy Eleni dropped out. I think they must have recognised something in each other, some poorly concealed intensity that other people find nerve-wracking. The first time I met him, when he joined me on a tinsel-strewn sofa at Amy Eleni’s birthday party, Aaron drifted into sleep the way he is drifting now. Then it was because he trusted the swell of skin-longing that drew us together in a searching curve, had us asking each other with our eyes and our small, ironic smiles, Can I touch you? His head sought my lap as if he had every right to claim me for his pillow. And I, I drew my knees up a little higher, feeling his soft hair slipping as he moved with me, feeling his eyes on my lips, drinking in his face; in that way we kissed before we kissed.
Aaron has a strange accent, unevenly crammed with tonality. Some words he sings, others he says so flatly that they’re lost. I thought at first that he might be one of the more outlandish white South Africans until he told me that he had been born and raised in Ghana. When I remember, my accent is as firm and clean as I can make it; it bears unabbreviated sentences with all their rich vowels gutted out by a sharp tip of mindfulness. I speak like this because my parents – their voices smoothed to calm, placeless melody through academia – speak English like this. And I speak like this because it is important that I’m understood. In a country where ears are attuned to courteous, clipped white noise, being asked to repeat myself batters down the words in me, makes my tongue fall down my throat.
At the party, Aaron seemed to be listening to more than just my words; when he dropped his gaze I heard our breathing – his breath absorbed mine and took wings and fluttered shallow, weak, confused at its suddenly expanded span. I was so obviously talking about nothing that I stopped to ask him a question, and it was only when he answered thickly and after a long pause that I realised he had been snoring lightly.
His mouth is maddeningly soft and full; I draw my thumb lightly over his lips and he nips at me.
I hear feet dragging on the steps outside, and the sound has my heartbeat jumping in the palm of my hand, even though I know it’s only Miss Lassiter. It’s only Miss Lassiter, and her envelope is due today. But it holds me still when she takes so long to put the envelope down, waits so long silent outside the door before she shuffles away (it’s just that she’s old,
it’s just that she’s old, she can’t move so quickly)
I have to wait. I have to wait until I feel that Miss Lassiter has gone. It takes a long time to feel that Miss Lassiter has gone. She is only really gone when Mami calls.
Mami is in the payphone down the road from her and Papi’s house.
‘I’m never going back in there again,’ Chabella whispers. I imagine her in the phone box, her fingers holding on to the receiver around one of the disposable handkerchiefs that she reserves for public toilets and public telephones. I close the sitting-room door and sandwich the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I pull my coat on. That pang around my throat comes back, it comes like a guillotine.
‘Do you want to stay here?’ I ask, automatically. ‘Shall I come and get you? What happened?’
Mami’s sob – one sound, arrested because it is so rageful. The words that follow can only tread softly over that sound.
‘He’s broken it.’
‘What?’
‘My altar.’
Mami is a Santero. She constantly tells me that I don’t know what that means. I soon outgrew Mami’s evening flower ceremonies. After a while, the flowers that seemed to answer Chabella’s questions in raptures of hush and smoke revealed themselves to be limp rice paper. What is it that’s holy about those flowers? Is it that they burn? Or that they burn so readily? But you can burn a cross, a witch, a piece of toast . . .
Chabella’s Papi was not a believer in anything much, and believers in Habana were suspicious that Chabella wanted to be one of them. They did not know her or her father, and they had to be careful, so Mami had to make her own Santeria. When I think of her Santeria initiation I see her surrounded by her Orishas – her guardian Yoruba gods. I see my Mami kneeling with her eyes turned ecstatically upwards into the wet curtains of her eyelids as her priest cuts two bars, each one as thick as a slug’s trail, into the flesh of her tongue. Her altar is a series of four interlinked shrines, grooved pentagons of painted wood and brass threaded with flowers and rosaries and shells and stones and candles and saucers, all of fidelity’s sparse jewellery.
The Opposite House Page 2