The Opposite House (13 page)

And the three Dahomeians, finding that no one would speak to them and that everyone disdained them, spoke amongst themselves in Spanish until they painstakingly relearned Yoruba. They were two males and a female, and there were no more of their kind since they came from a small, proud land whose borders were smudged away by time’s white thumb. The Dahomeians had no aspects abroad. They had learnt Spanish because they could not afford to forget or to stop speaking, but no one could see that. No one in Aya’s family, not even gentle Mama, remembered to pity the Dahomey folk. This the Dahomeians
could not forgive. Once they had relearned Yoruba to their satisfaction, they left the house too.

Nobody asked after the Dahomey folk, though the family searched high and low for Ochun who did not normally leave home just like that.

Then, one night, it happened to Aya too. She tried to lie down and sleep there, in her father’s house, but she couldn’t lie down.

Midnight boomeranged ten thousand times in the space of a second, and night slammed shut to stop day from even beginning to point out a path to the sky’s rim.

Ensoulment is never imagined as the cold terror that it is.

Snuffling, Aya packed before she knew that she’d done it.

She fled to be born. She fled to be native, to start somewhere, to grow in that same somewhere, to die there. She didn’t know just then that she wasn’t quickening towards home, but trusting home to find her.

Only Aya was to find the three Dahomeians. Only Aya was to discover what had become of Ochun and Echun. She found Ochun with her waistful of silk scraps, Echun with a guarded smile and drawers full of stubborn prayers. But by the time Aya found the Dahomeians, and by the time she found Ochun and Echun, she could not recognise them, and she did not know them by name. That is what aspects are like; they change.

6
let no pebble smile

Amy Eleni said dinner at her house was stressful. We hung around in her room and ate crap most of the time, but Amy Eleni only ever invited me to dinner once. Her parents’ house smells of church incense and is full of things like jade vases and brushed suede. It’s the sort of place where you periodically flinch, not because anyone’s raised a hand to you, but because you realise that there are things on display that many would consider worth more than you.

At the dinner table, Amy Eleni’s parents sat opposite us and said little. The silence wasn’t unfriendly, just the kind of silence that happens when there’s nothing new to say. The food was dizzying: lamb cooked in three different ways and spices; cracked wheat; meatballs; hot flatbreads. But Amy Eleni’s dad was the only one who dared to eat much. The problem was Despina, Amy Eleni’s mother, who sat completely still with a brocade shawl draped around her sharp shoulders and let no food pass her lips. Amy Eleni’s father sopped up the quiet with one arm around the back of Despina’s chair, humming more appreciatively the deeper he got into his heaped bowl. How could he eat?

Despina is so thin that you stare helplessly at her. And she knows that you can’t believe it, and she drops her heavy eyelids with a smile. Despina is thin like being naked in public – you can see the beginnings of her teeth stamped in her face; you can see them through her skin when her mouth is closed. Despina is like a star, of both the fifties film and the sky varieties – untouchable, but not beautiful. She is startling in a way that really doesn’t exist any more, only able to be present because she is preserved, delayed. Her eyes are Amy Eleni’s, but brighter. Her hair is Amy Eleni’s, but lighter, under better control, pulled back into a smooth wavy fringe and ponytail. Her skin is darker, dark gold.

From across the table Despina stapled our stomachs with a tranquil gaze.

‘Do please have some more of that, I see you like it,’ and so on.

She had a small plate in front of her that stayed completely clean throughout dinner, though she watched Amy Eleni’s plate and thoughtfully sipped at water.

Pudding was caramelised pears; golden, sticky, sweet agony to smell, greater agony to discard after a couple of nervous pokings with our spoons. Amy Eleni and I didn’t look at each other. In some of Chabella’s
apataki
, the Orishas intervene to stop a mother from ‘eating her child in spirit’. I wanted an Orisha to come and smite Despina so that I could get on with my caramelised pears.

After dinner, as soon as was decent, Amy Eleni and I went down to Whitechapel and got chocolate
rugelaches
at Rinkoffs. We sat on railings and stuffed doughy biscuit and chocolate, talking and spraying each other with food, seeing who could be the most disgusting.

I asked her if dinner was always like that, or whether it

was just because I was there. Amy Eleni clutched her hair and pulled at it. ‘Oh, truly. I’m not mad! I’m not mad! I don’t want to die!’

‘There’s someone inside of me, and she says I must die!
Jesus!’
I said.

‘Christmas dinner is always particularly jolly at the Lang household,’ she said, and laughed so hard that she accidentally pushed
rugelach
out of her nostrils.

Once my sets are over, Chabella, Amy Eleni and I stay at the café, relocating to the furthest circle from the stage. In the shade Amy Eleni and I snigger at the newest style of bad recital. A lot of the poems are about willow trees. A couple of the poems Amy Eleni and I debate back and forth over; they are so overwrought that they have to be po-faced comedy. Unexpectedly, Chabella likes one of them, says that that particular poet’s representation of the tree manages to both promise and conceal dark things. She compares the structure to a highly condensed version of the first simple but strong poem she ever learnt in German, Goethe’s ‘The Erl King’, a poem that neither Amy Eleni nor I can remember. We shut up and drink our Cuba Libres. Someone rests a hand on my shoulder; I turn and a sweet-faced, curly-haired girl – maybe a Hispanic Cuban, maybe a girl that I should know – leans across the table to kiss Chabella, nods apologetically at Amy Eleni and crouches down beside my chair to talk to me.

‘I loved your singing,’ she says. Before I can thank her she continues, ‘And I saw your Mami, and your name on the programme. And I remembered you.’

She smiles at me, shushes Mami, daring me to guess who she is. Her accent is strong, so she is recent, and I want to
help her out; I try not to sound too English when I reply, but I can’t help it – she isn’t family.

‘I remember your face, I think,’ I say, hesitantly.

‘I know yours,’ she says. ‘We used to play together before you left Habana. Then when you left, our mothers kept swapping photos of us. In your photos you were always in jeans. We sent you a photo of me on my
quinceanera
, but I remember we didn’t get one back from you because you said you didn’t want a
quinceanera;
you insisted that turning fifteen was no big deal, that you didn’t ask to be born. That made me laugh a lot.’

I keep looking at the girl, but I still have no idea who she is; Chabella has flashed me so many photos of Cuban girls that I doubt I could even individually identify my cousins by name. I smile to buy time, but she throws her hands up and tells me that my time is up.

‘It’s Magalys Pereira-Velázquez,’ she says, and I smile open-mouthed to show that I am glad and to hide that I still don’t have a memory to put her face and her name together with. ‘The last time we saw each other, your parents were having a leaving party,’ Magalys says, and then I do remember; I remember that she was the girl from Vedado. Magalys is the girl who was under the table with me when the woman came and sang to us. Suddenly I am frightened that she will somehow remember that I didn’t help her. I hold my arms around myself to hold Magalys away.

Chabella is fretting to call Tomás and make sure that he’s safe and snug and asleep. I point out that if he
is
asleep she’ll wake him, but she holds out her hand for my phone. Her lip quivers and I lose my nerve. Seconds later she is cooing down the line at Tomás. The only people still sprinkled
around the café tables are couples or prospective couples with their voices set to murmuring and their faces close together.

Amy Eleni has to teach tomorrow, but, late as it is, she stays and smokes and is unusually low on comments, and I know then that her break-up has been hard on her. I can’t stop glancing at the phone number that Magalys soft-pencilled onto a napkin before she left, but I don’t want to talk to her because the memory of the leaving party is mine and she doesn’t belong in it. Magalys has so much more of Cuba than I do; she proves it by walking up with her easy smile and strong accent.

The murmur around us peaks and dips, and I look up to see an old black man, grey haired with a long face sectioned up by an anxious smile, arms bearing a blizzard of white roses. He is inching up to us, and he is Papi, and his eyes are on Chabella.

‘OK, good night London baby, my little dwarf. Sleep well,’ Chabella tells Tomás weakly, and pushes a number of wrong buttons before ending the call, smiling at Papi, drawing him on.

I look around at everyone else, and everyone is looking at us. I am happy and embarrassed and stressed and I want to get up and help Papi, take his arm, but I know that he would hate that. So I wait in agony until he is directly before Mami and bends to kiss her cheek and say he’s sorry, and then Amy Eleni stomps the ground and whoops and starts the clapping. Out of the corner of her mouth, she says to me, ‘What’s going on?’

I tell her it’s an anniversary, or a long story – I tell her that she should take her pick.

* * *

When we leave the café, Amy Eleni comes to wait for my bus with me. She looks at me for a long time, her eyes a deep green, dryadic despite the cold.

‘I’m not mad, I’m not mad,’ she tries, a smile touching her lips. ‘I don’t want to die.’

I should do what? I should smile, or I should respond.

There’s someone inside of me, and she says I must die
.

But something is happening here, something that doesn’t fall into good, OK, or bad. The hysteric isn’t appealing to me; there is no need to beat her. I keep thinking, maybe if I could just know what my son looks like, who my son is, then I will be all right. I have strangeness in my family, a woman who was a priest when she wasn’t supposed to be. I have delicacy in my family. I think. I don’t know, am I delicate? I know by now that I am not going to be one of those pregnant women who touches her stomach in public; even when I am heavily pregnant I will keep my hands by my sides and keep a circumspect eye on the situation.

I tell Amy Eleni I am pregnant. I just say it. She winces, and I need to know why she did that, but immediately afterwards she says, ‘Maja, that’s wonderful. Aaron must be . . . Maja, that’s . . .’

We hug; her hands dig into my shoulder blades as our heads bump. ‘He doesn’t know,’ I say into her ear.

Amy Eleni’s frown is full of needles; to donate eggs you are screened for

HIV

cystic fibrosis

hepatitis B

hepatitis C

cytomegalovirus

and they do a chromosomal analysis too.

All this I saw underlined in her leaflets; Dr Maxwell screened me for them when I saw her. Amy Eleni’s frown is full of test results printed on thin crackly paper with hole-punched edges. It’s bloated with daily hormone injections, her frown. It goes on forever.

‘What, is it not his kid or something?’

That’s not really a question, so I just stare at her.

‘Then tell him. Duh,’ she says.

As I let myself back into the flat Aaron shouts, ‘My mum called; she wants to have lunch with you on Saturday . . .’

I scowl at the ceiling. Aaron’s mother, Rebecca, keeps saying things like, ‘Where are the go-getters? Where are the people who are going to make a difference?’

She doesn’t sound accusing, just encouraging; she wants me to look around, then look into myself and see that the go-getter is me. Under a thatch of grey-black hair, Rebecca has Aaron’s misty eyes, and she uses them to far more oppressive effect than he does. Over lunch we will not have a conversation; she will be attempting to enlist me for some cause.

In the bedroom, Aaron is kneeling by the dresser with his camcorder trained on his head. He is parting his hair with his fingers. I pull my dress up over my head, change into one of his T-shirts, hang the dress up. I refuse to ask him what he’s doing. He’s bare-chested and his jeans are slung low to reveal the top of his boxer shorts. He says sadly, ‘I’m getting old.’

I go to him then, wrap my arms around him, tuck my chin over his shoulder so that I’m peeping up into the camera as well, but he wants me to inspect his hair. Mixed
in with the black are minute strands of grey. I am not certain that I know what form the fear of turning into an old man takes. In my memory Papi seems always to have been grey, but always strong, never winding down his inner speed. I don’t think anything of Aaron’s hair, but because I have to say something I tell him I think it looks distinguished, and he groans. ‘It’s the hospital.’

Aaron switches off the camcorder. He stands to show me a bowl he’s placed on a damp patch of carpet beside the mirror. Fat, sluggish drops of water fall from a discoloured part of the ceiling.

‘There’s a leak as well, and I can’t sleep, but I’ve got to get up fucking early tomorrow, and I’m getting old.’

‘And thin. Eat!’ I say, crashing onto the bed and bringing him, laughing, down with me. His ribcage is gaining definition beneath his skin, but a small pad of fat, a downscale of a kwashiorkor belly, is sticking out over the top of his waistband. His arms tighten around me, and I close my eyes and pretend to draw his face anew; I draw what is already there, and it is exactly as I would have it.

‘You smell good,’ he says in my ear. His fingers lightly trace letters on my inner arm with his thumb. I can’t tell what they spell; I’m not following their curves and lines, but the way his voice starts a sweet hum at the base of me.

I keep waking up and thinking that it is raining. I keep waking up with my fingers spread to protect my hair, but every time it is only the leak in the ceiling, dripping in a pattern intrinsic to itself, a self-orchestrated, maddening musical score for after dark. Aaron isn’t sleeping; it’s like he’s waiting to be able to drag me into his vortex. The first
time I wake Aaron says, ‘When we were still living in Accra, Geoffrey’s mum told us what happened to a cousin who was living in London. I was . . . I couldn’t even connect what she was telling me with what was around me right then, the way people were relaxed and warm and sat out in the street and minded each other’s business. Geoffrey’s mum kept telling us, “Londoners! They are mad, o!”