The Opposite House

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Aya

  (thought, he wants to kill me)

  didn’t know how to appease such hate – it wasn’t that she was too young; it was that there was too much.

  ‘At first I thought you were one of them,’ he said. ‘But you’re just a child.’

  Around the man’s neck hung a locket of size; it clunked against his chest with its mouth open and a glossy white woman smiled out. Brown hair, pink cheeks. This visitor thought the glossy woman was something to do with Mama. Aya stared; was it true?

  ‘Anyway,’ the red-eyed visitor said, ‘I must have something for my pains.’

  He had been drinking palm wine; she smelt it. It was his drunkenness that made him try to steal her from her home, it was folly that made him lift her and throw her over his shoulder. Aya did not struggle – she was surprised. She just thought about herself, pinned over this man’s shoulder like a sash on a costume. Her face lay against the man’s sweaty back, her knees grazed his stomach. The man stank. He clamped a hand around each of her ankles to hold her still, and he began to run. He ran fast, and Aya’s breath was almost tipped out of her.

  Winded, she gasped, ‘So you like wine?’

  She said, ‘You are lucky. I am for the thirsty ones.’

  She spoke faintly, but she spoke plainly. She told the man, fine, keep running, keep holding on to my legs like that. Kidnap me and you shall have all your dreams. She told this visitor that if he didn’t leave go of her, he would have all the palm wine in the world to drink. Yes, she said, this I can do for you and more, but all the palm wine in the world will never be enough to kill the thirst that will draw your stomach to your throat, tight, tight and tight. How you will drink for that thirst? You will drink so much that you’ll drown inside your own body, and your last breath will slide out over a dark bubble of bloodied wine.

  Finally the man set her down and he shambled away, crying out.

  Aya walked home. The visitor had not brought her far; they had not left the forest. The sun was setting, and creatures that she could only feel made their paths through the trees.

  After him Aya waited for others who had been turned away and tried to do them the favours they had come to ask of Mama and the other elders. As long as the favours were small, Aya could do them.

  One day, Mama caught Aya carefully peeling away a kneeling grandmother’s cloudy-milk cataracts. She brought Aya to her bedroom, where rows and rows of her plainly cut wooden masks watched with thick smiles. The masks hung on brackets that slid through their eyeholes with lighted candles balanced on their flattened planes. The masks bled red and purple silk linings that made puddles where they touched the floor, but Mama stepped over them with graceful economy, drawing her wrapper up over her ankle in the same motion that she used to raise her foot. Mama sat on her tied-cane chair and put Yemaya on her knee; she smilingly accepted sticky showers of guava kisses on both cheeks, but she was not diverted. She said, ‘Aya, I suggest you don’t do as these visitors ask. I think it is like telling lies.’

  But Yemaya Saramagua, she wants the visitors.

  On the utmost tiptoe with leaf-strewn balcony stone, a pain burnt into each over-stretched arch, Aya tells the trees, ‘It’s not that I’m lonely.’ The trees stoop over the somewherehouse with their heads fused together and they do not listen and they cannot be reached. ‘Not that.’

  And the visitors come. They come with beaded collars in her favourite colours layered on their necks like second skins. They come chewing on her name; confident like teeth cracking kola nuts; sure as sure, bitterness bursts and loses its way under the sallow pinch of salt.

  Once, a bad woman came.

  She came in through the London door and found her way up the basement stairs with so little noise that Aya was startled. The woman was deep yellow and slightly built. An ivory comb with a whorled oval head crawled up her frizzy heap of hair. Someone had made this bad woman come here. She was not willing and she wore no beads; she had broken them because she was afraid. Her shoulders were a bad fit; the tops of them stood higher than was correct, and they gave her the appearance of constantly trying to achieve flight. For healing she had brought her poorly only son, a wan stick-boy of twelve who she was slowly sickening with pinches of ground glass because she hated him, because she loved him, and he would not obey her or stay by her side when he was well.

  The woman, on her knees beside her son

  (who met the floor of the somewherehouse without question or effort – it was only then that Aya realised that the previous acts of standing and walking had made no sense to him)

  murmured meek pleas. The boy, slumped at the other end of his mother’s arm, did not understand what was happening to him, now or before. When Aya lifted her veil and the boy saw her face, he mewled in panic, coughed. Then, to the stirring of a great tenderness in Aya, the boy mastered himself in ashen silence the way he thought a brave somebody should.

  Aya healed him.

  She led the boy toward the bath, down the wayward third-floor hallway which threw itself off into a triangular corner after a few narrow and uncertain yards. Aya took the sick boy past the closed door beyond which the Kayodes sang. She held her arms around the boy’s shoulders to keep him from stumbling and bent close to him to ask his name, but the boy’s eyelids slammed shut at the sound of Kayodes’ singing. His face suffered an unconsciously repeated twitch.

  Aya pitied the boy less.

  She sent a drop of her vanilla essence to the bottom of the deep bath, then rocked back, easy, easy on her heels; the bath steam knotted as her vanilla stung it, the bath steam drank weight and was left tangible.

  She stroked a wisp of it and it stayed intact, moved with her, curled under and around her hand.

  Air had to be taken in the tiniest sniffs.

  The sick boy sat and watched her. The sick boy blinked and said nothing. Aya left him to undress and wash. Then she went downstairs and stared at the mother until the woman bent low with her fingers welded into pincers to support her head. When the son came down alone, there was life in his eyes again. He trembled in his clothes and reached for his mother, who clawed him up into her arms.

  And Aya didn’t warn the son about the mother’s food.

  4

  henry s. foote

  Amy Eleni’s hands. At first I was scared to let her wash my hair because I thought it would be too difficult for her. But really my hair is simple – once it is washed and fed with coconut oil, it sighs and falls asleep. And nobody washes my hair like Amy Eleni used to. Aaron is too gentle; he gets scared the minute he touches my scalp. But Amy Eleni puts one soft hand on my forehead and, with her other hand, rakes slippery fingers through my hair, comes back down with more air on the ends of her fingertips like seaweed fronds to breathe through underwater. But when she started seeing Sara, Sara insisted that she and Amy Eleni wash each other’s hair exclusively.

  Sara was an Art History student and she looked like a storybook pixie. She had a pointed nose and quirky eyebrows and there was always the slightest hint of glitter near her mouth. She would take half a lace curtain and a ribbon and tie it around herself over jeans and say, ‘Yeah, it’s a top.’ Apparently that was charming. Either way, the glass bottle of foamy aloe in Amy Eleni’s cabinet disappeared and was replaced with some shampoo with fruit and silk extracts, stuff that would break my simple curls in half.

  The shampoo was the first thing to go when Sara broke up with Amy Eleni. But I couldn’t rejoice; the break-up was too bad for that. Sara had decided to do her postgraduate degree outside London

  (‘______________ Uni’, Sara carefully drew dashes instead of a place name, as if worried that Amy Eleni might stalk her down there)

  and it was over in a note. We found the note just as we were about to watch Vertigo again. The viewing was a celebration; Amy Eleni had only been living in her new flat for a week. She sighed and chewed her thumbnail when she read it. She looked as if she was at the counter in a café, trying to decide what to have.

&
nbsp; To me she said, ‘Don’t worry; I’m not going to cry all over you.’

  The Sara-shampoo went out in a black binbag; we watched Vertigo, ate baklava and sneered at Sara’s glitter-mole. Amy Eleni was fine.

  But later in the evening she couldn’t mark the essays she had to mark, because her right hand felt broken. Amy Eleni laid her hand on her notebook and we both looked at it very carefully. I straightened out her fingers and let them curl up again; they were limp but strangely tough, like peeled prawns. Amy Eleni didn’t say anything while I stretched her fingers, but her whole body said ‘Don’t’.

  I asked, ‘Where exactly does it hurt?’

  Amy Eleni looked at me with eyes so honest that I couldn’t look back and found a spot on her temple to look at instead. She laid her head against my arm and said, ‘It’s the whole hand. I smell the broken bone. Can’t you? The smell, like potted beef. Get a knife and cut out the broken bone, cut it right out – this you can do. I don’t mind as I have another hand.’

  That note. Sara shouldn’t have done it. If she knew Amy Eleni at all she would know that Amy Eleni’s hysteric punches walls inside. I told Amy Eleni I’d mark the essays. She just had to come back together enough to tell me what marks she wanted me to give. Amy Eleni sat up straight and frowned and said, with dangerous civility, ‘I told you, a knife please; a rotten egg spoils the world.’

  I got her aspirin, bandaged her hand, and put her to bed with the weak promise of a knife later. She didn’t believe me. She turned her back on me. She lay there as quiet as church. I stayed up for a long time, marking essays on Amy Eleni’s sofa, trying to work out what Amy Eleni would have thought of each pupil’s answer to the question ‘Why did Hamlet delay his revenge?’

  I let Tomás into the flat, and we find Chabella trying to make Aaron’s video camera work – she is pressing and wrenching at the boxed slot that holds the camera battery, and that makes me nervous, so I take it away from her. She says, ‘You know, I looked in the cupboard. All that ground cassava, all that rice. I bet you eat it plain. You eat too much colourless food, do you know that? If you’re not careful, when you have a child it will be an albino; yes, laugh, go on, but I don’t babysit albinos . . .’

  I give her Tomás; he allows himself to be enveloped in Chabella and her patchouli and ylang-ylang scent. He answers all her questions and lets her sit on his lap and be his tiny Mami. He agrees to be cooked for. I know that Chabella finds Tomás easier. The Tomás Project has a clearer direction: Bring the boy out of himself! Make sure he’s not hungry! Make sure he understands that he is handsome! But don’t let him think he’s too handsome! And Chabella must also make sure that Tomás does his homework. Papi is too trusting with Tomás’s homework; he waves his hand and says, ‘The dwarf will get it done sooner or later.’

  Tomás starts his maths at the kitchen table, clearing away my song sheets and gummy food wrappers without comment. Chabella, dicing yellow squash on the chopping board, announces that she wants to spring-clean the flat.

  ‘Mami, no, we like it like this,’ I tell her.

  ‘I will ask Aaron,’ Mami replies, hacking steadfastly at an old carrot. I wince; it looks as if she’s slicing up a knobbly orange finger. ‘He will agree with me.’ He probably will.

  ‘He’ll go straight to sleep when he gets back anyway,’ I say, jangling my keys in my hand.

  ‘Is that what happens? He goes to work, comes back, goes to sleep? Last night you didn’t even let him get into the bed. He-ye-ye, the way these young women are caring for their men . . .’

  Tomás gets up from the table and disappears into the sitting room. From inside the sound system, Prince Nico Mbargo’s electric guitarist lets loose a miracle riff and the Prince shouts his mother’s name. ‘Ah! SUSAN! Presenting you with . . . Sweet Mother!’ Tomás one-two-steps into the kitchen and, to Chabella’s delight, into her outstretched arms. He mouths, ‘Sweet mother I no go forget you.’

  Chabella, laughing and beautiful, cradles Tomás’s head and kisses the tip of his nose and opens her arms a little wider for me, and even though I am supposed to be on my way to see Papi, I throw my arms around them both.

  I didn’t know how many cycles of egg donation Amy Eleni had gone through before she told me. At some point I noticed that she was wearing her sleeves excessively long. And I feared the hysteric,

  (of course I forever fear the hysteric)

  she who no longer manifests herself in screaming and fainting and clinging to walls but gets modern and hides herself in a numbness of the skin that demands cutting. There was no way to find out without making a fuss, so I just watched Amy Eleni. We went for manicures together; I reached out and snatched up her sleeve, quickly, let it fall back quickly. She was amused, but I had seen yellowing puncture marks, fastidiously spaced bruises fading back into her skin tone. The manicurist asked me if I could just keep my hands still for a minute.

  I mouthed, ‘What are you shooting up on?’ I tried to put on an expression that said I knew something about shooting up on drugs.

  Amy Eleni said, ‘For heaven’s sake.’

  Afterwards we went walking through Regent’s Park, through sunlight and sprays of raw green. Amy Eleni handed me information sheet after information sheet from her bag. They were crumpled, studded with thumbprints, as paper gets when you carry it everywhere. Even a passport must get like that if you take it out to look at it often enough. Lots of thank yous, lots of details, lots of drug names, advice: Expect bloating as you produce more than one egg per cycle; Make sure you have comfortable clothes with elastic waistbands.

  All I could say, all I could think, was, ‘You’re selling your eggs?’

  Amy Eleni turned very white; either I was making her angry or she was about to throw up. ‘I’m not selling them, all right? The clinic pays expenses, but they’re not allowed to pay donors for the eggs.’

  I nodded. I said, ‘That’s . . . wow. I could never do something like that. Giving infertile couples a baby and stuff. That’s . . .’

  (You’re giving your eggs away, just right out from inside you like that?)

  ‘I don’t mind clinics.’

  I tried to make Amy Eleni sit down on a bench with me, but she kept walking, fast, almost at a jog. I barely managed to keep up with her.

  ‘You remember when I was going out with Sara? Well, when I told my mum about her, my mum just gave me this look, like . . . ugh. I don’t know. That look. It was kind of disgusted and kind of resigned. As if she’d eaten something that she knew she wasn’t going to like and she was thinking, ‘Yeah, nasty, but I knew it.’ Then the first thing she said was, ‘So you think you’re a lesbian. But what are you going to do with your fertility? You’re just going to waste your fertility like that?’ And I didn’t have an answer for her. I had answers for almost everything else, like if she started crying and saying she raised me wrong, then I could have given her a stupid hug or something. Or if she tried to send me to church, we could have had it out. But she didn’t even seem to give a shit. It was like, Oh, my daughter, the lesbian, the waste of time.’

  I put my hand on Amy Eleni’s arm, to make her slow down and, also, to be touching her.

  The Elegua head on the coat stand is pitching forward a little. Papi must have tried to take it down. I set it aright

  (something rattles inside its hollow),

  I am careful and lift my hands away as soon as it is safe. The Elegua head has a clammy feel, like wet clay, or skin beginning to perspire.

  I find Papi on the sitting-room sofa, crumpled and bemused in the same white shirt and brown trousers Chabella and I left him in, and I know that he has slept the night there facing the pale bubble of wallpaper left in the wake of Mami’s altar. The bedrooms are upstairs, and with no one around to pretend full health to, Papi has not bothered to attempt the stairs. He blinks at me sadly. ‘Maja,’ he says. ‘No es justo.’

  I throw myself down beside him and put an arm around his neck to nuzzle him just beneath his earlobe, where his jawbon
e begins; that’s a part of him that has never changed, and with my eyes closed I imagine him as a much younger man, surprised, thinking, Who is this girl near me, older than me and younger? I imagine him unable to understand what it is to have a grown daughter.

  ‘I know it’s not fair. But just think, Mami hasn’t given you trouble like this before.’

  ‘So what?’ Papi retorts. ‘When trouble comes, you don’t sit around thinking, Oh, but at least I haven’t had trouble before. The point is that you forget all other times. That’s what’s so bad about trouble, that’s what makes it trouble – you can’t see your way around it.

  ‘When I met her, mi Dios, such a woman. You could see . . . good, just good, all soul – she was studying German but she also went to lectures that had nothing to do with German. Like my lectures. If you knew someone like that you’d call them a boffin or nerd or geek or neek or something, wouldn’t you? You think it’s so wonderful not to know anything. But your Mami, she came up to me with a copy of my book on the Cuban conquistadors and a list of questions. And she just listened to me with her face like someone who has not lived and is trying to begin.

  ‘You, Maja, you wonder why the people who have to teach you never like you; it’s because you sit there looking at them as if you don’t believe a word they’re saying. That parents’ evening when you sat beside me and yawned while your History teacher was praising your mock exam results. If I had been your teacher, at that moment I would have taken a big red pen and drawn a line through the results and said, ‘My mistake – she failed. Her problem is a lack of interest.’ You are lucky that you have been educated in a country where you’re supposed to act uninterested. You’re very lucky that you’ve been educated in a country where it is not necessary to get out. Imagine if the only way you could have a good life was to learn your books! Would you yawn then? No, indeed, you would grin and say, thank you Mr Englishman, please tell me how I may continue to improve.’