The Opposite House (11 page)

‘Get a
cleaner!
And you just equated this hypothetical cleaning woman with a mop!’ Chabella’s eyes filled with tears.

Papi kissed her, sweat and soap suds and all. ‘I was joking. Forget it.’

He didn’t know that mostly the cleaning was fun once we’d started; it was only the idea of it that made me sigh and drag my feet. We were never very thorough and it was more like play-acting, down on the floor with soapy rags
and cleaner rags on our heads as we mimed to The Supremes and The Drifters and Melanie Safka’s ‘Brand New Key’.

Cedelka said to me, half-jokingly, ‘Please don’t try and teach my daughter Spanish! Black people ain’t meant to speak Spanish!’

‘Black people ain’t meant to speak English, neither, then. Or French Creole,’ I said, using exactly the same tone.

Cedelka swatted at my head. ‘You must get that big brain from your big-brain parents.’

I remembered what Cedelka said when I was in Year 9, when the most popular girls in my and Amy Eleni’s form were those with African parents; girls with perfectly straightened hair and mellow gospel voices that changed the sound of the sung school Mass; girls who had (or pretended to have) Igbo, Ewe, Yoruba, Chiga, Ganda, Swahili. They built a kind of slang that was composed of slightly anglicised words borrowed from their pool of languages. The code sounded impossibly cool if you had the right turn of the tongue for it, which I didn’t, although some of the white girls did. Lucy, who started up the slang, was Ugandan; she had a pretty heart-shaped face and a rabidly intent method of marking her netball opponent.

At school a lot of the other girls brought flags out on their countries’ independence days. With permission from the teachers, they tied them around their upper arms or waists and tied their hair up with ribbons in their flags’ colours. On Nigerian Independence Day, one girl did a special assembly on her country and passed around an overwhelming amount of fried Nigerian snacks. Amy Eleni and I were at the back. Amy Eleni put her hand up and said, ‘Can I just ask you what you think of this
idea: if your parents taught you to be so proud of Nigeria, how come they’re over here?’

The girl stammered and fiddled with her tie-dyed head wrap. People started hissing disagreement with Amy Eleni. Amy Eleni and I hissed back. Isn’t living in your country the best way to show that you think it worthy of love? You choose to live in a country because there’s something there that makes it better than anywhere else. You set your daily life down regardless of the restrictive conditions. It’s the same sort of thing Clarence talks about in
True Romance
– he says real love is remaining loyal when it’s easier, even excusable, not to.

The talk about Nigerian independence continued. Amy Eleni sighed and wrote a long note in small letters on her hand. The note was so long that she had to take my hand to write on, too, and we could only read her note to me by placing our biro-splotched palms alongside each other. The note said:

You know what, if you want to talk about your original country, if you want to be serious about it, fine. But you don’t need to pretend that you love the place. People need to stop using love of some country that they don’t live in as an excuse for their inability to shut up about it
.

We kept the note on our hands all day, smiling enigmatically and turning our hands palms-down when other girls wheedled, ‘Let me see.’

Dominique was at home sick the day Lucy came up to me at registration, peeped at me through heavy lashes and said, ‘You know, a lot of the others have been saying that out of you and Dominique, we like you better. You’re all right. You’re roots.’

I must have seemed stupid to her. I said, ‘Huh?’ I thought a black girl was a black girl. Why did it come down to a choice between me and Dominique, and not any of the other girls? Then I got it; we were both black without coming from the right place. We were the slave girls from Trinidad and Cuba; not supposed to speak Spanish, not supposed to speak English either. I wanted to curse Lucy Cuban-style, but I was afraid she’d understand; she was predicted an A star for GCSE Spanish.

Tonight I am singing a set at a café whose poetry-night theme is ‘Solitude’. They’ve asked me to start with my three least-favourite songs: ‘In my Solitude’, ‘Black Coffee’ and ‘Misty Blue’. When Michael from the band called to tell me about it last week, he anticipated my response, chanting ‘Oh, whine, whine, whine,’ along with me. ‘Don’t worry about it – next week it’s Ronnie Scott’s, with our own songs . . .’

I hastily assemble my things so that they’re in the general vicinity of the full-length bedroom mirror – make-up bag, a selection of black stiletto heels, armfuls of dresses on hangers, hair tongs tangled in their own plug lead, sheer tights that are to the best of my knowledge unladdered. Aaron’s side of our dresser is analytically tidy: a small city of glass-bottled gift colognes and sable-backed hairbrushes, mostly unused, alongside a depleted bundle of the tough, dried-wood chewing sticks he swears by – my teeth ache just looking at them. The only things on his bedside table are a water glass and a photograph of him and his best friend, aged ten. In the picture Geoffrey is cola-dark, with astonishing, vine-like sideburns. Aaron is defiantly pale and chubby-cheeked; his hair is slicked into some attempt at a
Jheri curl. They both have carelessly gappy smiles; they stand together in a heaving Accra sidestreet swept with umber dust, against a battered blue backdrop that says ‘PepsiCo’.

I have yet to meet Geoffrey, who still lives in Accra. But the fact that Aaron always refers to him as ‘Geoffrey’, never ‘Geoff’ or ‘G’, makes me think of him as diffident and kind and slightly stuffy. A boy who felt the pressure of being a cabinet minister’s son and tried his best to behave himself, growing up into the kind of man who rolls his English around in his mouth as plummily as he can.

I strip to my underwear and study myself in the mirror; it is a bronzed sorrel woman with a net of curly hair who looks back, and she does not look Jamaican or Ghanaian or Kenyan or Sudanese – the only firm thing that is sure is that she is black. Mami says only Cubans look like Cubans; put three Cuban girls together – white, black Latina, whatever – and you just see it. It is as if you could take away my colouring and I would be a white Cubana – a white Cubana not being, after all, particularly white.

My eyes are long rather than wide, meagrely lashed and slanted unhurriedly upwards at their corners. In my blood is a bright chain of transfusion; Spaniards, West Africans, indigenous Cubans, even the Turkos – the Cuban Lebanese. My shape is that of a slightly distorted heavy pear; slender, Chabella-like shoulders and a gently rising collarbone cast lines that soften and swell past a high waist to what Amy and I refer to as ‘loot in the boot’ – hips that escape spread fingerspans – then the line returns.

I prod my thigh and, standing on one leg, run my hand down my calf. I sink to the floor, sink to the middle of this slew of things that are supposed to tease out, bejewel,
enhance, improve on what I have. I coat my hands with cocoa butter and slowly, slowly start to reconcile myself with my skin, inch by inch. I am scared to touch my stomach, not because it is tender, but because it has begun to swell beyond the point where it can be comfortably rubbed with one hand. If I cup it with both hands the bump might rise to the space I allow it.

When Amy Eleni calls I am fiddling, trying to adjust the V-neck of my black dress so that it falls away from my shoulders and skims the arms left bare by my sleeveless polo neck.

‘Hey, Maja. I’m coming to hear you sing tonight after all,’ she says.

‘Good. How’s Jenny?’

‘I don’t know; we broke up.’

‘Oh?’

‘That’s all you’re getting on the phone. What of Aaron?’

‘He’s . . . tired a lot, and out a lot.’

‘Can I place the first bet on when he’s going to pack the trainee-doctor thing in?’

‘Come on, Amy Eleni.’

‘No,
you
come on. It’s not like he needs to work. His dad is like,
ker-ching.’

Before I can object, she asks, ‘What’s tonight’s theme?’

‘Of make-up, or the café?’

‘Both –’

I tell her: make-up, purple; café, solitude.

‘Solitude?’

Amy Eleni teaches A-level English Language and Literature; she has nothing but murder in her heart for amateur poets. She keeps telling me that most of them don’t read anyone’s poetry but their own, and that’s why
they always think they’re doing something new, and why it’s always so appallingly not. I keep telling her that the people in her class are seventeen and eighteen and that she should give them a break. I remind her of her own amateur poetry at seventeen and eighteen and am told ‘Shut up! My poetry was never amateur!’

I hold my tights up to the light. They are laddered after all, and I have to hang up and look for another pair. Mami slips into the room with good-luck kisses for me and an opalescent white gardenia on a coiled green stalk. Before I can thank her she starts jabbing at my polo neck:

‘What is this? Why are you wearing this? That’s such a lovely dress, and you’re spoiling it –’

I am just trying to protect my throat. Before I realise what I’m doing I have taken her hands and pushed them back at her hard, too hard; she stumbles and laughs, astonished. I catch myself and take the flower from her.

‘Chabella,’ I say, ‘I can’t wear this . . .’

Mami throws up her hands. ‘Your brother chose it. I
told
him it was ugly.’

Tomás, a pencil behind his ear, comes to look at me. ‘What’s wrong with it? Billie Holiday used to wear one, didn’t she? I thought you liked her? Are you off her now?’

I try to put the corsage box back into Mami’s hand, but she skips away, giggling.

‘It’s just that, you know, she’s . . . I can’t explain. She’s . . . well, it’s just not right to wear her flower. And this is not a big-deal occasion. Even if it was a big-deal occasion, it still wouldn’t be right to wear her
flower.’

Tomás rolls his eyes and withdraws. Mami stamps her foot. ‘Am I a bad mother?’ she demands.

‘Chabella.’

‘I said, am I a bad mother? Didn’t I always tell you how beautiful you are and what a good singer you are? Who is Billie Holiday, anyway?’

‘Mami! She’s –’

‘Yes, I know. Anyway, you’re better at singing than she is. She just growls. And you’re better looking, too, even if you spoil your dresses with strange tops. So put that flower on.’

I turn to the mirror and comb my hair into an upsweep so that I can clasp it, but Chabella dives at me with the gardenia and fixes it at the back of my head with a hairclip. She puts her hands on my shoulders, her face a little behind mine, and looks at us in the mirror. We smile.

‘When are you going to make up with Papi?’ I ask. I have to ask while her gaze is on me.

‘Is my altar back yet?’ she asks. It is not a rhetorical question; she is not being stubborn, she looks so hopeful. And that’s worse. I close my eyes because I had not expected to be taken by this feeling of steam, angry like a new player in a game where someone has suddenly changed the rules.

The wood-panelled café is low-lit and arranged like a fifties speakeasy, with tables ranged in concentric circles around a makeshift stage with a microphone stand. Chabella’s pretty hair is driven back with minuscule black pins so that it tickles her shoulders from high up, like a long feather. She clasps her hands and looks around, enraptured.

‘They’ll have a spotlight on you, and you’ll look like a princess, except for that purple lipstick,’ she tells me.

Having blown Amy Eleni kisses and pointed out to Chabella those seats that I consider safe for her to sit in,
I am the last of our band to arrive in the box room behind the café. Michael is there, tense as ever, waiting with one arm curled around his propped-up saxophone, drinking water in tight swallows that don’t even wet his lips. When he sees me, he nods and smiles, but I know he’s only pleased to see me because now we can start our sound check. Maxwell, dreadlocks swaying in the rush of their own weight, body bumps me, and Sophie, our tall, prettily spoken cellist, gracefully offers her cheek to be kissed. She is from Senegal, and she is, just as Maxwell (who has been trying to ask her out for six months) says, sexy like chocolate.

When we go out to warm up on the stage I am happier than I thought I’d be, my foot tapping as Maxwell’s taps, but it’s always that way when I allow the song to come to me without question. Maxwell’s face is serene as he drums, never airless, never strained. He beats time for himself and Sophie – and for Michael, who sways as his fingers ride his saxophone’s polished stops. They are letting me take my own time, letting me fall in after them, but they know that I’m with them.

Really it’s Michael’s band; he cares most, he’s the one who calls for all-day rehearsals, he’s the one who helps us to understand where we’ve gone wrong when we fail to move together. I joined the band mainly because, after graduating, everyone became anxious that I should find something to do. Papi handed me weekly sheaves of job listings and told me to ‘start my life’. Tomás said, ‘It’s cool that you’re home, but you’re disturbing my growth.’ I kept beating him at Nintendo; he didn’t like it, I knew. Chabella found me a post as an assistant librarian – one of her friends ran the local library. That roused me in a way that Papi and Tomás
had been unable to. I screamed at Mami, ‘A books job! Chabella, are you mad?’

Amy Eleni came by with some cassettes for me; Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. With no real interest in the answer, I asked her how her teacher training was going. With no real interest in answering, Amy Eleni shrugged and said, ‘It’s going.’ I wanted to defer the future indefinitely, and I sort of wished that Amy Eleni would too. But I listened to the cassettes. And I started singing in a way that I hadn’t before, a kind of singing that made Mami and Tomás say, ‘Waaah, didn’t know you could do that!’ though Papi said nothing.

I sang to Amy Eleni. She didn’t say ‘Waaah’, but she came back with a bunch of ads put out by instrumental groups who wanted singers. I auditioned for Michael’s because his ad was the shortest and the least demanding. He wanted someone to do standards, no particular look or age, and he’d added ‘No divas’.