The Opposite House

by Helen Oyeyemi

  (Herr Doktor please die as I cannot have you think of me this way.)

  I am so ashamed of my tears that I am going away, not up and out, not inside, I don’t know where, just away. My shame brings me escape velocity, brings me Gelassenheit. I love my son, so when Aaron is gone, I do not throw up to spite him. I let the soup stay. I let us have the soup.

  Aaron has to go when there is a cardiac arrest and he is on night cover; he has to go for fourteen hours at a time on a lot of days. He has to be gone full stop.

  Amy Eleni has tousled her hair up with gel. I peek into the sitting room and watch Aaron wrap his arms around her; she nips his cheek, talks to him for a moment

  (the first thing she says is, ‘this place smells worse and worse all the time.’ I think he offers her words about the plumber, or time, or something, because the second thing Amy Eleni says is, ‘she will lose her mind in this smell, you know.’ I don’t hear the third thing)

  then she comes through to me.

  She has brought me an armful of coffee-table books about Cuba, two torches and a grab bag of salt and vinegar crisps. I refuse to let the books remain in the bedroom.

  ‘But these are good, I promise,’ she says. ‘I meant to give them to you for your birthday, but this is an emergency. Anyway, shut up.’

  Amy Eleni has inscribed the inside of the first book: ‘Friends make the world strong and beautiful – Jose Marti’

  We crawl under the covers with torches, Amy Eleni lies flat on her stomach, I lie on my side. Our breath tickles the pages, and we stare at Cubans and the words that they have said to the photographers, the words printed alongside the monochrome and sepia images of bearded men waving out of the windows of long brown cars, houses with tiled floors and open wooden shutters and pictures of Che Guevara beside pictures of Jesus, leathered women in aprons churning butter, a queue of uniformed girls following a nun down the street with their buckle-shoed feet caught in variations of the cha-cha-cha, each grabbing the other by the ponytail.

  My fingers turn the pages to salt and vinegar, but they stay on a page where a black Santero woman strewn with the beads of her gods lets her laughter throw her head right back. She is a big woman, and a diamond-patterned headscarf covers even bigger hair in a turban wrap. Behind her on the wall, in blurry focus, is a wooden crucifix, and the words next to her picture don’t matter.

  I decide to be proactive about the leak. I take pen, paper and the Yellow Pages and sit down on the floor by the phone to find and write down the telephone numbers of four plumbers in the area. Understanding what I am reading takes longer than it should because something seems hilarious to me, but I don’t know what it is. The laughter is there and there’s no bottom to it. I try strategies. I try to dissect what could be making me laugh; I try to remember if I’ve just seen anything or heard anything or there’s anything in the room that I’m not fully registering. I put the phone book down and I search the sitting room for hilarity. The sitting room is nothing but books and lamps and videotapes. At the window I see that the day is recovering from rain and I see that Aaron has left a plantain skin on the windowsill.

  I try to stop smiling because smiling is another way for this laughter to seethe out from between my teeth. I try to outrun the grin and I go to the front door and back again, but when I stop, the world whirls and the sloshing in my ears tells me my water levels have gone awry. There is already too much water inside – my son swims as he sleeps; when he is awake he surges towards a sound. I want my son to try at leaving me a little, so, for him, I found my voice this morning and sang. I think my son likes my voice. It disordered me to track his movement with my thumb. My voice came differently this morning – there was a raspy range to it before that has gone away. Now I’m sounding impossibly light and singing nonsense lullabies that very quickly seem as if they had never been, like bubbles blown and broken at second breath. But my son heard, and he swelled his walls in one smooth rush. He strained so eagerly that I understand that he doesn’t know that his walls are me. I wanted Aaron to know. I called out, ‘Oh my God! Aaron!’ and then I remembered that he had already left for the day.

  Still believing that I am about to start laughing, I look at phone numbers, but each number stands independently of the others, smug mathematical symbols. Today my handwriting comes out so small that when I try and call one of the numbers I misread my ‘5’s for ‘6’s and my ‘6’s for ‘5’s and call the wrong number. The second time, I call the right number. But there is some problem with the way that I’m describing the leak, and the man I’m talking to gets exasperated and hangs up.

  After that I sit and hold myself very tightly in case I start to laugh. The leak is making me laugh; the sound, the way the water droplets smack each other, like clown shoes. Someone will fall over soon, and even if it’s me, it will still be funny. I snort and stuff my fingers into my mouth so that the joke doesn’t come loose. I should go to sleep. At least that way I will not be laughing. I don’t want Aaron to have to come back and find me laughing and make me stop. It’s as Amy Eleni says, there’s nothing between me and myself and I may have to end up letting Aaron intervene.

  No, I should go to bed. I leave the numbers on the notepad by the phone and I write to Aaron, very carefully, that he should please call TODAY.

  In bed, by accident, I say, ‘Ha ha.’

  And then it’s all over and it’s rhythmic, it’s

  ha ha ha

  ha ha HA HA HA HA

  HA ha

  HA ha

  and again.

  I cannot hear the leak while this ‘ha’ is being forced out of me.

  I laugh until I’m bent almost in half and the bones in my knees bounce against my stomach. My mouth is dripping because I haven’t had enough time to swallow. I’m upside down, I can’t understand what I’m seeing and I think I need to climb over my knees somehow if I want to be in an upright position. But there is a living end to the laughter after all – this is good news. Maybe the laughter is my son’s. He is a serious event, but not all that serious. He is not the first baby that was ever born. I take Chabella’s collar in my hand and it corrugates my fingertips, hard wood in a trickster’s colours. Elegua’s humour is inscrutable.

  Carmen, you are born again, but you are born without your tongue. Find it. Be who you were before before.

  But Elegua doesn’t go backwards, he makes things change when they need to. Chabella trusts what the German language has enabled her to call her spiritsoulmind; Chabella takes any risk that involves it. But if she should fail . . . what poverty! The goal is that Carmen is not born again. The goal is that the lost tongue stays lost, but new tongues grow. No one need be maimed.

  I am asleep when Aaron gets back, but he moves around and it wakes me. The dark is too thin. Aaron has the bedroom door wide open and all the lamps in the sitting room are on. His face keeps escaping the light, but I think he’s looking at me.

  He says stiffly, ‘Maja. Do you not want this baby? Is the problem that you don’t want it?’

  I sit up with a hand over my eyes. Aaron’s question has pushed him to me straight from washing up in the kitchen; his hands are still dripping soapy water and he is holding one of our soup bowls.

  He says, ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘Why do you think I don’t want the baby?’

  He says, ‘Just tell me, just say something about it.’

  A tremor comes through his hands and he can’t hold the bowl any more, he bats it towards the ground as if he thinks it is a ball that will come back up to him. There is not much sound, but I flinch as the china shatters. Some of the pieces roll, then rest. Automatically he says, ‘Shit, sorry,’ and he bends to pick pieces up with his bare hands. Automatically, I say, ‘Use tissue, you’ll cut yourself.’

  He does not listen. He balances a row of brittle blue claws on his palm before taking them away, coming back to rescue more. His hair is in his eyes. He does not get cut.

  I say, ‘The leak. Please call the numbers, get a plumber he
re tomorrow. Call the numbers.’

  Crouched on the carpet, Aaron tilts his head and says, ‘What numbers?’

  I lie down again.

  ‘I left them on the pad.’

  ‘Those are numbers, eh? They look like a series of decimal points.’

  I get up to rewrite the phone numbers so that he can see them, so that he can make the phone calls for me. But my note has already been ripped away from the pad.

  I took a third-class degree. It was better than I’d expected, especially considering that I had handed in my dissertations on a block of wood. But I didn’t know how to tell my parents about my results. I had misled them from an early age: I had given them to understand that I was clever. And they were both first-class students.

  So I completely lost my nerve.

  ‘It’s . . . a 2:3,’ I said, when it was time to tell them.

  Chabella, who had clasped her hands in anticipation of good news, lowered them again and frowned.

  I didn’t back down, there was no point now. ‘A 2:3,’ I insisted.

  Papi threw up his hands. ‘What in God’s name is a 2:3?’

  ‘You know,’ I quavered, holding my certificate behind my back. ‘You can get an upper second class, a middle second class, and a lower second class. A 2:1, a 2:2, a 2:3 . . .?’ Papi and Mami surrounded me, hugging me, kissing me, cackling.

  ‘So it’s a third-class degree, then,’ Chabella said.

  Papi said, ‘Thank God – at least it’s finished. All the drama, all the crying, all the painting things black, the praying of the rosary instead of revising. A degree. You’ve got a degree, Maja Carmen Carrera! You passed! You are to some extent educated! And you didn’t even notice while it was happening!’

  Amy Eleni was very flushed when she showed me her certificate. She had taken a first-class degree. I thought, Of course.

  ‘Please don’t give me any shit about this,’ she said, before I’d even opened my mouth.

  When we got back to my house on graduation day, Amy Eleni, mortar board in hand, kicked off her high-heeled shoes and put them in her handbag so that the black toes peeped out of the top.

  Our parents were in the back garden drinking Pimm’s and lemonade; Amy Eleni’s mother looked vaguely astonished by the drink in her glass. I told them we were going to church, and Chabella beamed. Amy Eleni’s father looked at us, his eyes that special shade of blue that Amy called ‘accusing ultramarine’, and was entirely unable to hide his pride. We almost changed our minds about going to church.

  When we got out onto the street, Amy Eleni walked beside me barefoot, gowned, her hair in her eyes – people around us kept looking for cameras, as if we were on a photo shoot. We stared at the people who stared at us, caught them in our double headlights, stared with the conviction of newly educated, non-crap-taking female youth – they always looked away first.

  The church ceiling seemed higher because of the incense, grey arms uplifted to exalt. Except for Father Gerald at the front, who sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded over a missal on his lap, the church was empty. He didn’t turn round. We had had our baptisms, our Holy Communions, our confirmations here. This church, from window to window, from wall to wall, seemed tied in for me with a desperate battle to avoid the Spirit – to be holy, but not yet.

  For my confirmation name I had struggled to find the saint that God might love the least. The list was whittled down according to time and manner of the saint’s death – early, gory deaths were sure signs of excessive favour –stigmatic-yes-or-no, mystic-yes-or-no and whether or not that saint’s corpse had been exhumed and found to be uncorrupted. I wanted God to know the situation: I wanted to be more than just good friends, but nothing heavy until I was ready. I settled for being St Ignatius Loyola’s namesake, and suffered a few weeks of hearty laughter and being addressed as ‘Sister Ignatia’ by everyone in our confirmation class.

  Amy Eleni chose Sophia and debated extending her given name to ‘Amy Eleni Sophia’. Her mother let her be confirmed in pearls, a black veil and a black, watered-silk dress with a stiff bustle. People in my class sniggered at her overdressing. But nobody knew what a victory that confirmation was for Amy Eleni. Her mother didn’t attend the Mass.

  Now, Amy Eleni bent over the wooden prayer box, the box into which parishioners who wanted Father Gerard to pray for them had slipped their requests. She tucked it under her arm and walked out noiselessly, leaving me to tiptoe out as best and as quickly as I could.

  ‘I don’t know what to do next,’ she panted, when I caught up with her and cried outrage. ‘The stuff of life to knit me blew hither, here am I, right? From Cyprus à la my mother to England and school and university, there’s been a conspiracy of me, a me trying to work into a pattern. Now I feel like I’m out, graduated, so . . . what? I don’t know which way I want to go yet, but I need to know if I’ll be allowed to get there. I don’t know if I can . . . yuck. I suppose I want to know if I can trust people with my dreams.’

  It wasn’t an explanation, but coming from Amy Eleni, it was enough. We opened the box in my bedroom, tipped out a cascade of white paper slips, and read aloud to each other prayer after prayer, request after request, until we ran to the end of them. Speaking the words, I felt as if we were unsealing the wants behind them, releasing spurts of chalky tomb air with every sound. I felt as if we were granting wishes because we heard them and then they were free to be possible, the way a priest sits in a box and listens and becomes Jesus.

  The sun went down and left its rays clinging to our skin. I looked out of the window and saw that our parents were still in the garden, laughing and talking and blowing dandelion petals, oblivious beneath a dark orange sky that threatened to swallow them.

  It seemed like everyone in our church was praying for each other. There were so many wishes that people not be hurt, so many offerings of thanks for others, so many short pleas to save lives or offer a new grace to die with. Amy Eleni looked dizzy and small with all these slips in her hands; she had not expected this.

  Near the end of our reading, I recognised Chabella’s handwriting. She had written: Please pray for Juan Carrera to be happy. Please pray for Juan Carrera to find whatever he came to this country looking for.

  I didn’t read it aloud, but it was the first prayer I put back into the box; I had to do that so Amy Eleni wouldn’t see it. It was the only bitter prayer in there, the only prayer that betrayed its writer.

  ‘I’m going to go and find Sara,’ Amy Eleni told me, wriggling off the bed with the re-sealed box under her arm. I lay flat and began tracking shadows on the ceiling, pulled my polo neck up so that it covered the bottom of my chin, began my great, private worry about my life.

  Amy Eleni paused at the door, turned, studied me, came back to me. She stood over me, sweetly serious, and I hauled myself up by degrees, matching her look for look; the inches between our faces grew warmer as they fell away. She dipped her head to kiss my mouth, and whispered against my lips, ‘Happy graduation.’ Her eyes were closed, and mine were wide open.

  When Aya visits now, Amy’s wrists are newly, tightly re-bandaged, her eyes are crayoned round with waning purple, and she is still so pale – even her lips have shed colour. She throws her arms around Aya and hugs her, so light a pressure that Aya thinks she might be imagining it. ‘Please stay a while,’ she says. ‘I loved it when you came to see me. You seem to care.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ Yemaya says, simply. Amy laughs, but Aya is serious. Amy is only laughing because she is pretending that she can switch her caring on and off, admire different books, love different people, discard her own life.

  Aya moves about the somewherehouse, finishing her self-appointed task of returning all the mirrors that Proserpine brought down. The attic, reluctant to have the mirrors back, gives vent to floorboard groaning. Mama has put the Kayodes’ rooms in order; their winding cloths are unpinned from the walls and heaped onto chairs. Their chessboard is gone. Their cupboards are pleasantly bare, the shelves are fr
ee of dust and expectation.

  Aya had expected to find complicated packages of newspaper, braided trails of string, or some other closed thing that the Kayodes might have used to keep their speech amongst themselves. She had not expected to miss them as much as she does. She draws a hand over her eyes and picks up a mirror that rests in the arms of the rocking chair. She has asked Tayo to follow her here, and he comes – but hesitantly. The somewherehouse’s cedar beams breathe wheeeee to bring their smell in after him. She wonders if the house will not keep him. Tayo hesitates, then draws her close to him, sits in the rocking chair and takes her onto his lap, pushing her hair aside to whisper into her ear, ‘But what are those figurines downstairs supposed to be?’

  He has to close his eyes for her so that, with a fingertip, she can spirit ash away from those spaces where he is softest.

  ‘What figurines?’

  And after all people are sitting in the basement

  a boy, a man, a woman,

  withered, rheumy-staring from a carousel of spider webs.

  Aya looks at Tayo and lets him see in her eyes what is happening. He says feebly, ‘Yeye, it’s all right. They’re not real.’ He is far more frightened than she is.

  High-heeled footsteps clatter above; Proserpine has come in through the front door.

  Aya decides quickly. She breaks an old chair, catches its leg up in her hand and goes to put an end to Mama Proserpine.

  ‘Yeye!’ Tayo grasps her wrist and tries to follow her, but she eludes him and the basement door is locked tight as she passes into the hallway – she makes it so.

  Proserpine turns a pale stare of appeal to Aya. In her arms, caught up in her cloak, a rooster tramples air in a fright of feathers.

  ‘Yeye, listen –’

  The rooster escapes Proserpine’s arms as Aya comes at her. Aya is like thunder. Blood wells from Proserpine’s lip; she is dazed, delayed.