The Opposite House

by Helen Oyeyemi

  ‘Why do you want to go?’ Papi asks me again, a hand to his forehead. This thing I want is a problem that he is trying to understand. There are no texts he can turn to for this problem.

  ‘If you were asking me about Turkey or Morocco or America or Spain, it would make more sense! Like if you were saying, why are you interested in going to Turkey, there’s nothing in Turkey for you, I’d understand. I’d still go, but I’d understand why you were asking me. But what you’re asking me now – I mean, how can you ask me why I want to go when I don’t understand what it means to have left?’

  After that he will not let me speak.

  ‘It means that you are free. That is what it means. I brought you here so that you could live in a place where the people who are in government do not affect whether or not you can eat what you want to eat, see films you want to see, read what you want to read. I brought you here so you don’t live in a place where politics can actually bust your door down, or make you disappear. Turbulent times, Chabella and I know turbulent times.

  ‘Maja, unlike your mother, I did not grow up in a nice house. I grew up in a tenement in Habana Vieja, and when I turned fifteen, I didn’t have a nice party but I was happy because it meant that I could pretend I was sixteen a little bit more convincingly and ask for a better wage when I had finished washing restaurant dishes. Why are you testing me like this? The idea of a library that I could borrow anything from seemed like a dream to me.

  ‘When those boys came around, I believed more than anyone that what Fidel, Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfugos, Juan Almeida and the others would do would be a great thing – the greatest thing for Cuba. I mean, Juan Almeida was black! A black revolutionary! My God, I thought, yes, we have a share in Cuba. They say it’s not a black man’s country, but it is! My heart overrode my mind. They were already saying suspicious things, those boys, saying things along the lines of “We don’t want to identify with any ideology because we want our worth to lie in our actions,” et cetera, but el corazón hace caso omiso de mi mente.

  ‘What they are doing now is bad, of course. Yes, go on, nod and shrug. You know, you know it all, and yet you want to go back – but just a few days ago, they detained a man just your age because he criticised the government for not doing anything about finding his schizophrenic brother who had gone missing. And they were probably the ones who got rid of his brother; after all, the brother left a note saying he was trying to leave the country via Guantanamo –’

  (Who are They?)

  ‘Papi, I know all this. I know,’ I say. Tomás has left his chair and has wrapped his arms around Mami. Tomás looks at me and shakes his head; I am to forget this. It is my job to keep the peace and hold my peace and all the peace is on my shoulders.

  ‘Look. I’m not here to fight anybody. But I have the tickets and I am going. I just thought I’d tell you.’

  ‘No, Maja. You are not going. I say you are not going. Let it stand, let what I say stand. You say you know, you know – no, you don’t know anything. Look at Cecilio Haber, only just out of jail. Why? Because he did something that would be perfectly acceptable over here in a free election –’

  We are talking over each other; my words slip into his, but I know he hears me. I’m saying:

  ‘I’m going, I’m going, I’m going, I don’t care what you say . . .’

  I sound like a person who doesn’t think. I am all fingers in my ears and la la la. It’s the hysteric doing it, or maybe just me, or maybe all along it’s just me. Today it’s hard to tell. Papi rubs his hands together – he has finished, he is certain. ‘I am sorry, querida,’ he says. ‘But let me tell you about the people of Abeokuta in Africa, where my family and your mother’s family, may once have come from.

  ‘The story goes that the township was established when a company of slaves managed to escape the slave gatherers and fled west of Lagos. They did not know where they were going, but they passed some caves in which a spirit dwelt. They were afraid of the spirit, but less afraid of the spirit than they were of losing themselves. And that spirit repaid their trust, and it took care of them and showed them fertile land where they could live. I ask, I always ask, Where is that spirit? Why did it only go with those slaves who escaped? Anyway, forget about going. You’re not from there any more.’

  He talks about the spirit. He talks about the spirit but he doesn’t know. Papi thinks ‘spirit’ and in his mouth the word becomes Geist, a train of reason that chugs on and on and drags us all behind it without our understanding. But I want to make Papi understand about my Cuba memory and St Catherine’s, that strange, safe Old Testament feeling that was there in the night, peace in the centre of a locust swarm. The sting that catches you before you have a name for it.

  As if he knows what I want to say, Papi tells me, ‘I did not want to raise . . . “spiritual” children. Spirituality doesn’t protest injustice, it just bears it. I don’t want that. I want you to think.’

  It must be something in my expression that makes him reach for me now. But I stand up.

  To Mami I say, ‘Why don’t you tell him? Why don’t you tell him about all your flowers and your crying?’

  Mami covers her mouth with her hand and says nothing. She looks sick.

  I sit at Tomás’s dressing table with all his tiny paint tubes in front of me, and my tears have dried on my face. I look at my brother’s reflection in the mirror. His hands are on my shoulders. When he sees what I’m looking at, he self-consciously touches the wound on his lip and hisses, ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You should leave that school,’ I say. ‘Tell Chabella and she’ll find another school.’

  He picks up one of the paint tubes. ‘You want some on?’

  It scares me, the thought of him choosing his armour already, the thought that already he is hiding. Tomás balances a tube on his palm, squints at it with one eye closed.

  ‘I run almost twice as fast with this stuff on, you know. I run like no one knows me, like no one can hold me.’

  I turn back to the mirror. Tomás bends over me with a blanched pearl on his fingertip, and he coasts it over my skin, gentle.

  I watch my face begin to disappear under his hand.

  At first I think that I will not be able to take Mami’s collar. I expect the beads to fight harder to stay with Chabella. Pricked by the sharp reproof of her scent, I reach under the pillow on her side of the bed and open her incense box, and the collar falls out as if it is glad to go with me. No one discovers me, no one says, ‘What are you doing?’ but I jump anyway and my fingers knot into each other as I yank down the fold of my polo neck with one hand and fasten the collar’s clasp around my throat with the other.

  She could just have said to Papi, ‘You don’t understand. Just like you don’t understand about my altar, you don’t understand about this.’

  But she didn’t say anything, my mother, my son’s mother once removed.

  I find Aaron sitting on the doorstep of the house in his big blue windbreaker. He is eating noodles out of a plastic tub, and there is sauce all over his chin. He smiles up at me, notes the face paint with his finger.

  ‘That was a long Mass,’ he says. ‘Are you cheating on me?’

  I tweak his nose. ‘Yes. His name is Father Rodriguez. He gave me a message for you: those who wish to be saved must share all that they have.’

  He motions for me to sit down with one hand, jabbing with his chopsticks to make sure that I don’t kick his camera, which is set on the step below him.

  ‘How was it mentoring the Ewe posse?’ I ask him. He smiles and says, ‘Not one of them has even the makings of a hang king in him.’

  He feeds me a long noodle strand, and I cup my hands around his face to make it secret that I’m kissing him.

  ‘You’re tired,’ he says, eventually, and I say no, but my eyes feel as if they’re receding into my skull and I am already beginning to wonder how I will pick my limbs up in order to take them inside.

  Aaron snaps the lid back onto his nood
le tub. ‘There was a message on the answer machine when I got back,’ he says. ‘From a Sister Perpetua.’

  Sister Perpetua, who is so sure that darkness is part of heaven. St Catherine’s, where darkness comes for me and it is not hell. He looks at me, waits, as if I have to say something to reassure him that I’m staying with him, but I just say, ‘Oh.’

  ‘She said –’

  I force myself to say it softly: ‘I’ll listen to it myself.’

  He smiles unhappily; his eyes search me.

  Sister Perpetua’s message is simple: she felt moved to speak to me, and she wants me to know that I am always welcome to visit, that I must come if I need space to think.

  I don’t want to think. I thought I wouldn’t be one of those pregnant women who touched their stomachs, but I am touching, wondering do I still feel pregnant, trying not to let myself know that I’m wondering.

  Aaron stays outside and stays outside and stays outside. It is cold out there and fast becoming night. I want Aaron to come in to me. But I just stand at the window, looking up and out into the street, and all I can see are his legs, dressed in dark jeans, stretched a long way over the grey steps.

  On the window, dusk is formed into a mushy hand shape, a single print. I stare at it, then switch on a lamp and lift my hand to the print. I cannot understand why someone has pressed their hand so hard against the window. I cannot understand why there is only one handprint. The interior is solid, like a mist breathed against the glass, and there are no skin patterns, no fingerprint patterns. This print has been left by a cold glove, a morgue glove. I tell myself that it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true. I say, ‘Aaron,’ as if he could hear me through the glass, and of course he doesn’t notice that I am calling him, and so to bed.

  15

  the king who does not speak

  No Kayodes in the somewherehouse, and so Aya hears nothing but the cedar beams whispering until Mama Proserpine strides out into the hallway to find her. Because it is a mask day for Aya’s Mama, and because Proserpine is not wearing a mask this mask day, Aya averts her own gaze. Proserpine’s wooden mask is secured atop her head in bows of downy lining; her cloak fastens in tarnished bronze links at her throat. Proserpine multiplies and a carnival of cloaked women bend their fractured gazes on Aya.

  But no, it is only the mirrors, mirrors everywhere Aya looks.

  ‘Proserpine, why did you bring the mirrors down?’

  Proserpine’s sigh is refined, tolerant: ‘Proserpine is not my name.’

  Aya climbs the stairs to the Kayodes’ rooms. She is slowed by flashing mirror surfaces that stir the air in an ascending chime. The house gives way to a spiky maw that snaps at Aya as she opens doors and doors and doors to take down mirrors. Her own aghast reflection runs at her, looms at her, flies from openings to toss her into foreboding until she cries, ‘Who’s that, who’s there?’

  The mirrors are studded with the blunt stems of her watchmaker’s seeds, which have staggered into mahogany life; their petals all point one way. The attic, nude and luxuriating in its new dark, welcomes Aya by spattering her with moths. Aya sits with her back against the door and places her hand over her juddering heart.

  But the hard flowers are here too – she didn’t forget the attic when she was planting them. The flowers point: Aya is meant to go still higher.

  She puts her head out of the attic window. The branches scrabble to attention, she winces as snow scuttles across her face and eyes.

  ‘Yeye?’ Mama Proserpine’s call climbs from the kitchen to the rafters.

  Aya looks up, sees that she has never understood the somewherehouse’s trees. Their branches brush the ground, yes, their branches fountain in twiggy brackets from earth upwards, but (their roots are buried in the sky) clouds crawl lazily away from the black suction that the roots, wide and thick as doors, drive into the blue. Snow crumbles onto Aya, snow salts her.

  All of the watchmaker’s signpost flowers are straining upwards, pointing out what it is that she seeks, up, up. In shattered minutes from window ledge to rough treetrunk, she has fought her way up to the snow’s uneven red centre, a ‘v’ that looks less and less like light and more like blood. Snow unfolds itself in bolts on and around her. Inside her is a happiness that threatens to unzip her and step out singing.

  Then her skin finds a limit: other skin, a cheek against her cheek. She tries to climb back down to safety, but, as if she does not own or control her hands, Aya releases the branch. She does not fall, but her tears start immediately. Compunction, for he is terrible.

  Him. He leans forward to her; he is the one who has caused the trees to grow contrary, to grow from his heart. He is a great cuspate blade primed to flay her, he is a hammer bringing sun down to gloom.

  He says, ‘Daughter.’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘Cannot –?’

  ‘I.’

  Aya weeps and she looks for herself, but there is no one there.

  Papa says, ‘What do you want of me?’

  ‘I.’

  ‘You poor child,’ her Papa says.

  Her nerve a million times denies her. Papa waits and they breathe together, but Aya cannot speak. Such oppression – it pulls at her eyeballs. He releases her. Aya falls through the tree’s tentacles with her arms spread wide; she is shadowed by falls of snow . . . until a new heat lances her and with trembling hands she learns that she is dangling just above her window, her stomach impaled on an ice-whitened branch. Oh, blood.

  Mama Proserpine, swimming in place in an ocean of black silk, leans out of the attic window

  (too far – she could fall)

  to try to help her, and Aya, unable to gesture ‘no’, cannot yet say that this pain brings her ache to the front of her mind. Sleet races leaves down from the tree roots; sleet covers Aya’s shoulders, chills the hot blood she’s losing. The way her limbs are splayed now she is more honest in her agony than she has ever been before. This is what she really looks like, humble before him, her father. This is how he has always seen her.

  Kneeling down before three mirrors that Mama Proserpine has fetched and propped up against the attic wall, Aya touches her lips, her forehead, her cheeks; they are daubed with blood from her fingers.

  Once, she heard the word ‘welkin’ used, and ‘welkin’ became a word she loved, but did not hear again. Welkin describes old, high fascination. It describes supple colour that catches and jails the eye – blue sky in summer when it spreads itself out like a magic carpet and it seems a person could step up onto it. The welkin tint is caught in Aya’s eyes, is swept over her lips, lights her whole face. Her fingertips wind a dance of shudders down her throat, stroke whorls around her nipples. Drugged with content, her hand slides down to her lap.

  ‘Where are the Kayodes?’ Aya asks.

  Proserpine squeezes another bloodstained rag into her bowl of water, and a green herb smell stretches its fronds over them.

  ‘They went.’

  ‘You took them home?’

  Proserpine nods and flattens another rag over Aya’s stomach. Aya doesn’t feel it.

  ‘Are you Mama?’

  ‘Yeye, don’t do this.’

  Aya peels off the hot rag and drops it into the bowl. ‘What happened to your face, your skin? What happened to the way you walk? Why don’t you wear your mask on a mask day?’

  Mama settles herself opposite Aya. She sees Aya is uncomfortable and she pulls down her mask, adjusts it. The mask is a white hand that cups Mama’s face.

  ‘I was weary. So I went to your Papa, and he took my ache.’

  This new Mama’s eyes flicker behind her mask.

  Aaron wants to tell his mother about my son.

  ‘I haven’t even told my mother.’

  He says, ‘Well, let’s tell her as well. What’s the problem?’

  ‘No problem, there isn’t a problem.’ I am sarcastic. I do not let him hold my stomach, or even brush against it. Because he performs examinations – that is what he does – wh
en he touches me now his fingers become probes, his fingers tell me he doesn’t trust me. I reject his name suggestions: Gabriel is a stupid name, the other boys would have kicked him to pieces over that name anyway, my son, if he had lived.

  I can’t get the sanitary towels out of the house fast enough. So Aaron finds out about the bleeding, about the dark syrup my son sends me. He holds up one of my scented sanitary bags between his fingertips and we both look at the sodden cotton whirling around inside it. For a moment I can see the anger he talked about before. It’s there on his face. Then the flash fades and he is left with a scared face and I am left with a nervous giggle that he doesn’t understand. Aaron wants to know why I didn’t say anything.

  Is the baby . . . gone?

  Have I been to the doctor?

  What is the matter with me?

  I want to know too, maybe.

  Dr Maxwell has big pink cheeks. In her family I bet she is the youngest child, the well-fed child who got morsels from her mother’s fingertips whenever something special was cooking, who had her cheeks pinched into prettiness by tens of doting fingers.

  Aaron takes the scare out of the visit to her. The heel of my hand, that part where the veins are most traceable – Aaron kisses me there while she talks about our options. I wade through the ultrasound, through six glasses of water and clear, cartilage-thick gel and the probes, and my son is still there

  (or some thing, a small wonderful curl that represents him – he is turned to hide his sex)

  and later Dr Maxwell says that my bleeding was just an extra egg, just an extra egg, that sometimes that happens. Throughout the scan Aaron cannot catch his breath for gladness, he cannot see straight for crying – who is he fighting?

  I think I am sleeping too much.

  My eyes open and I think: daytime. Other times my eyes open and I’m certain it’s night-time. I do not say a lot, because of the leak. If I speak, the leak speaks louder. The water does not want me to be heard. Aaron wants me to know that I am exhausted. But there is no reason for me to be exhausted. I am about to ask him, exhausted from what? but before I can, I am asleep again. It cannot be a good thing to keep falling asleep like this, falling asleep without my choosing or my control. No dreams. But when I manage to fight into waking for long enough, the woman’s song comes back to me so clearly now