What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

  “Yes, she should be grateful that people are still asking her out,” you say, and most of the people you say this to nod, pleased that you get where they’re coming from, though Susie, Paul, and a couple of the others eye you suspiciously. Susie takes to standing behind you while you’re working sometimes, and given your clandestine meddling this watchful presence puts you on edge. It’s best not to mess with Susie.

  —

  ONE LUNCHTIME Eva brings her sandwich over to your desk and you eat together; this is sudden but after that you can no longer mock others by talking shit about Eva; she might overhear you and misunderstand. You ask Eva about her diary and she says she started writing it the year she turned thirteen. She’d just read The Diary of Anne Frank and was shaken by a voice like that falling silent, and then further shaken by the thought of all the voices who fell silent before we could ever have heard from them.

  “And, you know—fuck everyone and everything that takes all these articulations of moodiness and tenderness and cleverness away. Not that I thought that’s how I was,” Eva says. “I was trying to figure out how to be a better friend, though, just like she was. I just thought I should keep a record of that time. Like she did. And I wrote it from thirteen to fifteen, like she did.”

  You ask Eva if she felt like something was going to happen to her too.

  “Happen to me?”

  You give her an example. “I grew up in a city where people fell out of windows a lot,” you say. “So I used to practice falling out of them myself. But after a few broken bones I decided it’s better just to not stand too close to windows.”

  Eva gives you a piercing look. “No, I didn’t think anything was going to happen to me. It’s all pretty ordinary teen stuff in there. Your city, though . . . is ‘falling out of windows’ a euphemism? And when you say ‘fell,’ or even ‘window,’ are you talking about something else?”

  “No! What made you think that?”

  “Your whole manner is really indirect. Sorry if that’s rude.”

  “It’s not rude,” you say. You’ve already been told all about your indirectness, mostly by despairing ex-girlfriends.

  “Can I ask one more question about the diary?”

  Eva gives a cautious nod.

  “Why do you still carry it around with you if you stopped writing in it years ago?”

  “So I always know where it is,” she says.

  —

  SUSIE gets restless.

  “Ask Miss Hoity-Toity if she’s still seeing her married boyfriend,” she says to you.

  You tell her you won’t be doing that.

  “The atmosphere in this office is so stagnant,” Susie says, and decides to try and make Miss Hoity-Toity resign. You don’t see or hear anyone openly agreeing to help Susie achieve this objective, but then they wouldn’t do that in your presence, given that you now eat lunch with Eva every day. So when Eva momentarily turns her back on some food she’s just bought and looks round to find the salad knocked over so that her desk is coated with dressing, when Eva’s locker key is stolen and she subsequently finds her locker full of condoms, when Eva’s sent a legitimate-looking file attachment that crashes her computer for a few hours and nobody else can spare the use of theirs for even a minute, you just look straight at Susie even though you know she isn’t acting alone. Susie’s power trip has come so far along that she goes around the office snickering with her eyes half closed. Is it the job that’s doing this to you all or do these games get played no matter what the circumstances? A new girl has to be friendly and morally upright; she should open up, just pick someone and open up to them, make her choices relatable. “I didn’t know he was married” would’ve been well received, no matter how wooden the delivery of those words. Just give us something to start with, Miss Hoity-Toity.

  Someone goes through Eva’s bag and takes her diary; when Eva discovers this she stands up at her desk and asks for her diary back. She offers money for it: “Whatever you want,” she says. “I know you guys don’t like me, and I don’t like you either, but come on. That’s two years of a life. Two years of a life.”

  Everyone seems completely mystified by her words. Kathleen advises Eva to “maybe check the toilets” and Eva runs off to do just that, comes back empty-handed and grimacing. She keeps working, and the next time she goes to the printer there’s another printout waiting for her on top of her document: RESIGN & GET THE DIARY BACK.

  —

  EVA DEMONSTRATES her seriousness regarding the diary by submitting her letter of resignation the very same day. She says good-bye to you but you don’t answer. In time she could have beat Susie and Co., could have forced them to accept that she was just there to work, but she let them win. Over what? Some book? Pathetic.

  The next day George “finds” Eva’s diary next to the coffee machine, and when you see his ungloved hands you notice what you failed to notice the day before—he and everybody except you and Eva wore gloves indoors all day. To avoid leaving fingerprints on the diary, you suppose. Nice; this can only mean that your coworkers have more issues than you do.

  You volunteer to be the one to give Eva her diary back. The only problem is you don’t have her address, or her phone number—you never saw her outside of work. HR can’t release Eva’s contact details; the woman isn’t in the phone book and has no online presence. You turn to the diary because you don’t see any other option. You try to pick the lock yourself and fail, and your elder sister whispers: “Try Grandma . . .”

  “Oh, diary locks are easy,” your grandmother says reproachfully (what’s the point of a protégée who can’t pick an easy-peasy diary lock?). She has the book open in no time. She doesn’t ask to read it; she doubts there’s anything worthwhile in there. She tells you that the diary looks cheap; that what you thought was leather is actually imitation leather. Cheap or not, the diary has appeal for you. Squares of floral-print linen dot the front and back covers, and the pages are featherlight. The diarist wrote in violet ink.

  Why I don’t like to talk anymore, you read, and then avert your eyes and turn to the page that touches the back cover. There’s an address there, and there’s a good chance this address is current, since it’s written on a scrap of paper that’s been taped over other scraps of paper with other addresses written on them. You copy the address down onto a different piece of paper and then stare, wondering how it can be that letters and numbers you’ve written with a black pen have come out violet-colored. Also—also, while you were looking for pen and paper the diary has been unfolding. Not growing, exactly, but it’s sitting upright on your tabletop and seems to fill or absorb the air around it so that the air turns this way and that, like pages. In fact the book is like a hand and you, your living room, and everything in it are pages being turned this way and that. You go toward the book, slowly and reluctantly—if only you could close this book remotely—but the closer you get to the book the greater the waning of the light in the room, and it becomes more difficult to actually move, in fact it is like walking through a paper tunnel that is folding you in, and there’s chatter all about you: Speak up, Eva and Eva, you talk so fast, slow down, and So you like to talk a lot, huh? You hear: You do know what you’re saying, don’t you? and Excuse me, missy, isn’t there something you ought to be saying right now? and You just say that one more time! You hear: Shhh, and So . . . Do any of you guys know what she’s talking about? and OK, but what’s that got to do with anything? and Did you hear what she just said?

  —

  IT’S MOSTLY men you’re hearing, or at least they sound male. But not all of them. Among the women Eva can be heard shushing herself. You chant and shout and cuckoo call. You recite verse, whatever’s good, whatever comes to mind. This is how you pass through the building of Eva’s quietness, and as you make that racket of yours you get close enough to the book to seize both covers (though you can no longer see them) and slam the book shut. Then you sit
on it for a while, laughing hysterically, and after that you slide along the floor with the book beneath you until you find a roll of masking tape and wind it around the closed diary. Close shave, kiddo, close shave.

  —

  AT THE WEEKEND you go to the address you found in the diary and a gray-haired, Levantine-looking man answers the door. Eva’s lover? First he tells you Eva’s out, then he says: “Hang on, tell me again who you’re looking for?”

  You repeat Eva’s name and he says that Eva doesn’t actually live in that house. You ask since when, and he says she never lived there. But when you tell him you’ve got Eva’s diary he lets you in: “I think I saw her on the roof once.” His reluctance to commit to any statement of fact feels vaguely political. You go up onto the rooftop with no clear idea of whether Eva will be there or not. She’s not. You look out over tiny gardens, big parking lots, and satellite dishes. A glacial wind slices at the tops of your ears. If you were a character in a film this would be a good rooftop on which to battle and defeat some urban representative of the forces of darkness. You place the diary on the roof ledge and turn to go, but then you hear someone shout: “Hey! Hey—is that mine?”

  It’s Eva. She’s on the neighboring rooftop. She must have emerged when you were taking in the view. The neighboring rooftop has a swing set up on it, two seats side by side, and you watch as Eva launches herself out into the horizon with perfectly pointed toes, falls back, pushes forward again. She doesn’t seem to remember you even though she only left a few days ago; this says as much about you as it does about her. You tell Eva that even though it looks as if her diary has been vigorously thumbed through you’re sure the contents remain secret. “I didn’t read it, anyway,” you say. The swing creaks as Eva sails up into the night sky, so high it almost seems as if she has no intention of coming back. But she does. And when she does, she says: “So you still think that’s why I locked it?”

  acknowledgments

  Thank you, Piotr Cieplak, thank you, Marina Endicott, thank you, Tracy Bohan, thank you, Jin Auh, thank you, Bohdan Karásek, thank you, Sarah McGrath. And Kate Harvey—thank you.

  Kenneth Gross’s absorbing Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life has also been influential here.

  about the author

  Helen Oyeyemi is the author of five novels, most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.

  1This is Grainne’s self-perception. If you can overlook her narcissism you may come to care for her one day.—M.A.

  You sayin’ you care for me, Marie?—G.M.

  2At least that’s what Grainne Molloy imagines Rutherford said. This is not verifiable!—T.A.

  Bah, history students.—G.M.

  3Again with the unverifiable exchanges, Grainne . . .—T.A.

  Leave me alone, Theo . . .—G.M.

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