The Opposite House

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Tomás is crying now, and he doesn’t care if I hear it.

  * * *

  The house is silent in the early afternoon. I look at Bisabuela Carmen in her place at the centre of the family altar, behind flickering candles – I lose myself in looking at her. She appears to be watching the Holy Child of Atocha very suspiciously from the corner of her eye. How blood works, the things that pass across. I’m not sure what there is of Carmen in me, and I worry about what she, a babalawo who could read messages in blood and salt, might tell me if I really opened my heart to her and asked. She might fill me. Candle flame heats my fingertips as I run my fingers along the rows of faces.

  Mami has been cooking the way she does when she is nervous. She has made an enormous batch of chicken ajiaco, more than Tomás and Papi and I could ever want to eat – this is a catering-sized pot. It sits, squat and morose, still bubbling on the back hob, covered only slightly so it can cool. I feel as if we are beginning here again, and if I step out through the back door and into the garden I will find my brother, four years old, bundled up in scarves, kicking up leaves and happily colouring in bear shapes.

  Upstairs, Papi and Chabella are asleep. Papi’s breathing barely disturbs his chest; Mami sleeps with a glow on her. I am smoke, the sign of her fire. She doesn’t know that she’s alight.

  I am staying overnight for Tomás, as if I’m back to watching him for cot death.

  His door stays closed – he doesn’t come out for dinner; he doesn’t come out for the pasteles that Chabella has made especially for him. Papi said that we must call him once, then leave him be. The boy is not a drama queen – if he’s hungry, he will eat.

  I watch late-night television, listening out for the stairs to creak, nodding sleep away until my chin dips in and out of my glass of lemonade. On-screen, two hamsters begin to chase each other around a maze. Tomás looms behind me in a mushroom cloud of blankets and touches my elbow. I don’t jump. Ever since I left those two sleep-girls behind me in Hamburg, I keep thinking that they will come back. Ever since Hamburg I have been ready.

  I take my blanket and wind it around me. Tomás and I pad through the kitchen, a tight squeeze through the doors because we are holding hands and mashing into each other. Tomás fetches Mami’s black lanterns from the shed, and even though the cold night knifes us, we fall into the garden deckchairs. We wrap our legs in our duvets; we tuck our hands inside our dressing gowns. The wind knocks my hair lopsided.

  We watch the lanterns scattered around us, the tea-tinted wax inside them holding up their flames against all-comers. The wind comes, some rain comes, two murders for our light. But the flames stay so we can see each other’s faces. I smile because Tomás is smiling. He looks exhausted, cosy, as if he has come in from some long journey and collapsed in front of a fireplace, but the candle flame isn’t enough to warm us. What warms us is the way the light stays and stays, dances limbo, touches the bottom of the glass then shimmies up again.

  Mami’s collar is in my pocket, working itself loose from old string and old care.

  Tomás says something. His voice is hoarse and I don’t catch his words. I ask him, too loudly, what he said. He puts a finger to his lips and we quieten, in case we disturb them, our guardians and guides, our Orishas in the house, the ones upstairs asleep.

  Acknowledgements

  E.D.

  Thank you Bente Lodgaard for That Chat In Oslo.

  Yay (and much love to) Ali Smith.

  Yay (and much love to) Sarah Wood.

  Yay (and much love to) Loa/Lorna Owen.

  Boogie/J/Jason Tsang, best friend to be had anywhere in the world, and father of TOH at T Street. Boogie . . . I don’t know what to tell you, man. Thank you.

  Anita Sethi, thank you for the support and the ultra-late-night chit chat.

  Ptah Hotep, thank you for the transatlantic cheerleading, best of Ps.

  Thank you Robin Wade for keeping everything together.

  Thank you Juliet Lapidos for your attentive reading, especially re Aaron.

  Thank you Alexandra Pringle, you are the king, the king.

  Beatrice Monti della Corte Rezzori, thank you . . .

  Thank you for feedback and general jest, Antosca.

  Pam Hirsh and Lorraine Gelsthorpe; it probably wasn’t apparent on my face at our supervisions, but I think you’re both awesome and idiosyncratic teachers. You helped me to finally find value and interest in SPS. I’ll remember that. Thank you.

  Choop/Rupert Myers, re your removable E drive – I’m much obliged. Also thanks for the very sight of your Florentine jumper.

  Claude Willan, shut your face and you better don’t open it again EVER (also . . . um . . . thank you for the support, the feedback, the sarcasm, the rallying insults).

  With equal measures of love and dread, my thanks to

  Alex Shilov, Ray/Rachel Douglas-Jones, Hazel Cubbage, for bringing jokery to Third Year.

  Thanks and love to ’Tony Babatunde Oyeyemi.

  Thanks and love to Mummy and Daddy.

  All remaining thanks and love (lots!) to Mary Biola ‘We don’t pick up the phone after seven . . . a.m.’ Oyeyemi.

  A Note on the Author

  Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London when she was four. She is the author of a highly acclaimed novel, The Icarus Girl, which she wrote while she was still at school, and two plays, Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese, both published by Methuen.

  Also Available by Helen Oyeyemi

  The Icarus Girl

  ‘This is a beautiful, haunting story . . . compelling’ Daily Mail

  Jessamy is a sensitive, whimsical eight-year-old. As the child of an English father and a Nigerian mother, Jess can’t shake off the feeling of being alone, and other kids are wary of her terrified fits of screaming. When she is taken to her mother’s family compound in Nigeria, she encounters Titiola, a ragged little girl her own age. It seems that at last Jess has found someone who will understand her. TillyTilly knows secrets both big and small. But as she shows Jess just how easy it is to hurt those around her, Jess begins to realise that she doesn’t know who TillyTilly is at all.

  ‘A sharply chilling mystical story’ Independent

  ‘The Icarus Girl is an astonishing achievement’ Sunday Telegraph

  Praise for The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi

  ‘I read The Opposite House with a rare happiness. The voice in it is so sure, the risk it takes is so good and the intelligence in it a sheer relief’ Ali Smith

  ‘Beautiful . . . The poetry of displacement that plays itself out here is powerfully opaque . . . It has the ring of truth’ The Times

  ‘The Opposite House is original, memorable and written in a strong voice’ Scotsman

  ‘A powerful tale of migration, memory and dislocation’ Red Magazine Book of the Month

  ‘Her gift for language, her emotional intelligence and most of all her ability to pull you right into the souls of her characters don’t allow the reader to step away . . . Here is language that does justice to the suffering of gods’ Kamila Shamsie, Guardian

  ‘Lyrical and deeply textured . . . It repays slow, careful reading, and your copy may, like mine, end up with underlinings and scribbles highlighting juicy phrases’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Oyeyemi has a lovely feel for the sweet, sticky intimacy of family and partnership’ Observer

  ‘Oyeyemi delicately evokes the endless debate between religious myth and intellectual fact that shapes Maja’s family life’ TLS

  ‘Oyeyemi deals in wonderfully unsettling images . . . Her raw style is great’ Time Out

  ‘A poetic, meandering tale about cultural displacement’ Financial Times Summer Books

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

  Copyright © 2007 by Helen Oyeyemi

  First published 2007

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford
Square, London WC1B 3DP

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Quotes from a letter from Emily Dickinson to T. W. Higginson, January 1874 reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958, 1986, The President and Fellows of Harvard College; 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960 by Mary L. Hampson.

  Lines reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

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  eISBN: 978-1-4088-4825-8

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