The Opposite House (14 page)

‘Her cousin Ama moved into this flat in Croydon, and everything was fine for a week or so; she got on well enough with the neighbours, settled in, made a few personal touches with the decoration – it was all fine. Then this leak started, ruining her carpets, making a cold winter wet and worse, and it went on and on and on for weeks. She talked to the council about it but the council wouldn’t come and take a look because the council are shit. She asked all her neighbours about the leak, but nobody knew what was happening –’

He stops. Why has he stopped? Checking me. He is such a neurotic storyteller; he never trusts that I am still listening. I think he works on a model of the first stories he learnt to love; Ghanaian call and response stories, tales as an eager echo thrown back and forth amongst the same people. ‘Yeah?’ I prompt him, muffled by my pillow. I am so tired I am drooling.

‘Well, then Ama noticed something. She noticed that the leaks had an extremely regular starting and stopping time. On Monday mornings, for example, the leak would dry up completely, but on Tuesday afternoons, the leak would get going at 3 p.m. or thereabouts.’

I giggle. ‘Say it again,’ I say. I love it when he says ‘thereabouts’ – he can’t avoid saying it with the grandiloquence a semi-Ghanaian accent bestows on mashed-together English vowels. Aaron refuses to indulge me.

‘So Ama had a proper look at her ceiling, and she found that the leak was coming from a perfectly round, perfectly drilled hole, quite a large hole, like the biggest setting on a Black and Decker.’

I stop laughing. ‘Oh my God,’ I say. ‘Is this a true story?’

‘It was the guy who lived directly above her, the same guy who passed on letters which had been mistakenly delivered to him, the same guy who’d smiled at her and shaken his head in confusion when she mentioned her problems with the leak. He’d drilled a hole in his floor, then sat himself down and drawn up a little timetable. Then, in consultation with that timetable, he would pour a couple of jugfuls of water down the hole. Either Ama had offended him in some obscure way, or this guy was mad, or both.

‘Geoffrey’s mum told us “If you take a hen’s egg from under her and she just looks at you and doesn’t do anything, put that egg back.” Peace and quiet is a sign that something’s wrong. Peace and quiet is like a broken response, a sign of people in pieces.’

I look at the dark, I look at the ceiling and at the bowl, the bowl that is filling, that is nearly full. I think of Miss Lassiter, shrouded face bent intently over a bare patch on her floor. I switch on my bedside lamp and hit Aaron, almost crying.

‘Why did you tell me that? What’s
wrong
with you? Why did you tell me that?’

Aaron laughs and restrains me with embarrassing ease; he turns off my lamp and holds me until I fall asleep again.

The second time I wake, I hear the television and the leak together. I get out of bed to empty the bowl and find that it’s already been emptied. Aaron is lolling on the sitting-room sofa, remote control in hand, eating cold plantain.
He’s watching an old video; in it I am moving in with him and am instantly unnerved by the camera. On-screen I look as if I just left school; my hair is in box-braids that flip over into fuzzy buds at their ends, and I’m wearing dungarees and a red jumper. I’m hauling a suitcase behind me on wheels. When I see him I squeak, ‘Please turn that off,’ and from behind the camera he laughs.

‘You should go to sleep,’ I tell Aaron from where I stand. He doesn’t look round but keeps watching me on-screen as I go into the bathroom, followed at a shaky angle, and triumphantly slam my toothbrush into the cup on the rim of the sink that held only his.

I go and find Chabella’s fruit bucket beneath the kitchen table and pick out a papaya, turning it over in my hand, checking for ripeness, feeling the slight slippage of fruit beneath its skin and knowing that it’s time to eat it. The smell topples me in. Rind, fruit and seed mesh on my tongue, become as dense and sweet as cake. I’m not the one who wants the papaya, but I need all of it. I fall into a chair.

Aaron leans on my shoulder and reaches for the rest of the papaya in my hand, but I say, ‘Don’t.’

Pulp spills down my chin. I’m not angry, but serious, and he feels it. He backs away, exaggeratedly slow, his hands up to show he’s not going to take the fruit. He takes another papaya from the bucket and methodically prepares it with a knife, evacuating whole clusters of seeds with a single flick.

I let seeds slide down the inside of my cheeks to wait, pooled in sticky juice, under my tongue. I know that he does that too. We look at each other and smile, lips wet, faces bulging. ‘Come on, spit,’ he gurgles. ‘You can’t win this.’ He needs to sleep. He needs to sleep. It comes to me the
power that I have, that I can do something to Aaron that goes beyond us. I could make myself take a bad fall; I could drink something noxious. I could go to a clinic and have ‘it’ taken away. Even if I never tell him, I would have proved that I can deny him, that I can make my son wait. Panicked, I choke. Panicked, I spit. Aaron spits too, and shouts, ‘Yes! I won!’ We laugh.

In the somewherehouse, amidst the faded cloth of their rooms, the smallest Kayode plays the fierce-eyed one at chess.

‘Here she is again,’ the fierce-eyed Kayode mutters to the small one when he sees Aya.

The chessboard is missing knights, so the Kayodes are attacking each other’s squares with their thumbs. It makes for a game complicated both to play and follow.

Next door the woman Kayode rocks with her sleeping eyes open, darting, scanning. She lets her hand fill pages with lines. Her knuckles crack. On top of the pile of that dreamings’ sketches, Aya sees her Mama’s thickly lashed black eyes. Mama is behind the grille of a confessional. The black lattice is garlanded with blank, long-stemmed lilies. The beginnings of a shadow scrape the pale diamond spaces behind her.

Aya tries to shake the Kayode woman awake. But the other two Kayodes come and hold Aya’s hands away from their kin. They mutter fearfully.

‘A visit,’ they chant at their sleeping woman, ‘a visit, see? What is to be done?’

Aya is marched out of the Kayodes’ rooms and deposited on the stairs to greet the visitor. She watches a woman wearing her Mama’s favourite green
bubi
step out of the basement.

She is not Mama.

Her dark eyes are like gracefully tinted glass, but her eyelashes aren’t long enough to trail into her hair when she lies down.

This woman gives off an electrical
shhhhhh
. Without saying she says,
You may not touch me
.

She is not Mama. Aya has never seen her before.

‘Yeye my own,’ the woman says, smiling a secret smile. Her voice is Mama’s. She does not spread her arms.

‘Go away,’ Aya says. ‘You were not sent for.’

Her eyes travel the gown that is Mama’s and the face that is not.

‘You don’t know your Mama? Strange day.’

The woman believes herself to be repeating the truth; her mouth is relaxed, her words gently brisk. She sets her foot on the step to come up. Angered, Aya shouts and marks her with a finger.

‘Proserpine, I see you!’

But Proserpine does not stop; Proserpine keeps on coming.

The Kayodes are behind Aya, all three, arms linked; if she wants, she could take one step back and be in their midst.

But, ‘Welcome, Ma,’ the Kayodes call to Proserpine, who has come in through the London door with almost no luggage, her fingers threaded through the handle of a shopping bag, a patina of expensive sunshine.

Mama Proserpine settles in a first-floor bedroom, a room that Aya has never chosen to sleep in because it sticks out of the house’s side. The male Kayodes move around her, careful not to spoil Proserpine’s new clothes. They fold and pat lightweight flared skirts and crisp shirts, slipping them into drawers with haste, as if some divided sylph that lives in them will waken, regroup and fly out of the window. From the window seat, Mama Proserpine gazes out into the alleyway of trees and submits to the woman Kayode’s hands, allows her hair to be pinned up into a ruffled stalk.

7
playing at paste (till qualified for pearl)

A while ago Aaron wanted us to swap books that we loved; he wanted to read with me, read me. I said, ‘I don’t read.’

He asked again, and on this asking he was so close to me that our eyelashes brushed each other; his lips struck mine but didn’t stay. I agreed to swap some books.

He gave me Saki short stories with a cracked spine, Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim, The Great Gatsby
. I didn’t read the books; I didn’t need to. I could have told him that these were the books he would give me. Instead of reading them I smelt them, let them fall open at random pages to look for forehead – or fist-shaped pressure. I walked around wearing a pair of his jeans and put
Gatsby
in the back pocket the way the teenaged Aaron did – Volume I of Freud’s
The Interpretation of Dreams
in one pocket,
Gatsby
in the other so that his backside was rectangular and intense and learned. In his jeans, which I had to hold up with braces over a T-shirt, my backside became a saggy jigsaw puzzle. I worried that people who walked behind me were staring at my behind and trying to make the pieces fit together. But I
didn’t worry enough to stop my experiment. The books’ pages smelt of Aaron and another low, nutty smell that Aaron said was Accra.

Aaron asked me what I thought of
Gatsby
. I said, ‘Yeah, it’s really good.’ He waited for more, so I said, ‘It’s short, though.’ Aaron kissed me and wanted to know what I’d been doing with his books since I hadn’t been reading them.

When it came to my part of the swap, I hovered over my shelves at home. I panicked at the last minute and gave him Spanish books; Lorca’s
La Casa de Bernarda Alba;
Alejo Carpentier’s sensational voodoo stories that make Chabella and me laugh; Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s book
Sab
, about the strong slave who falls in love with a white woman and learns that love makes him better than everyone. When Aaron saw that the books were in Spanish, his brow creased and he opened and closed his mouth, then simply said, with his eyebrows raised, ‘Thank you.’

For a week they sat on his bedside table, the books, and Aaron didn’t go near them. I checked them when I visited him; I had keys to his flat and twice I let myself in just to see if the books had moved. They hadn’t. We didn’t talk about the books; they were just there, faded titles sneering quietly. I didn’t know why I’d done it to him when he was fair with his choices, so the second time I let myself in, when I heard him coming back from the hospital, I collected up the books and went to him to say sorry.

He listened, nodded, shrugged and threw his satchel onto the sofa. The bag coughed up its contents in one abrupt jangle; mints, keys, pens, Post-it pads, English translations of the books I’d given him. He said, ‘Yeah, they’re quite good. Light reading. You know, tube reading . . .’

I dropped the books, rushed at him, snapping my teeth to
bite. He lifted me off the ground, high so I squealed, and we fell together in a tangle. With a startled laugh he let the wall hold him upright on one side and held me to him with one big, square hand fitted perfectly to the small of my back. I felt how gentle he wanted to be with me, and I realised then, my nose buried in his jumper, that we smelt the same. Not just that he smelt of my perfume, but that he smelt of me. Good perfume on a clean body is a diaphanous membrane that changes and glows and grows on the skin so that each person smells slightly but vitally different wearing it. So the perfume that smelt of spicy patchouli on Amy Eleni floated high, white musk into the air around me, and around him, too. The smell of us scared me.

‘What?’ said Aaron. He knew that something was wrong, or right, or something. I closed my eyes to concentrate on smelling him – does he
really
. . .?

He held still. My lips followed the musk along the length of his wrist, where familiarity – the exact same blank between acid and alkali – danced; where I knew my kingdom. I smiled, blind, pushed his sleeve away with my nose as I travelled up his arm.

He told me, without embarrassment but without ease, that he wore my perfume so that he could smell me sometimes. He tilted my face so that I met his eyes squarely, and he said, ‘Do you think that’s creepy?’

I said, ‘Is it a habit, wearing girl’s perfume?’

He said, ‘Shut up, it’s not,’ and the way he said it and the way he looked at me then made me think that he was trying to get to me before I could get to him, as if it was some kind of race.

Later I examined myself from four different angles in the mirror and thought,
Why? Am I dangerous? Does the hysteric show?
I don’t shine like my mother does. I am not a pretty princess. We went out for cocktails and at the bar he spun my stool under me. All I could think of was contact, the static inches between his hand and my thigh. It was like a Peggy Lee song, smoky joy; what to order – cyanide or champagne? Anyway he got to me first, he definitely got to me first.

Aaron is different when he’s at the hospital; brittle, swift – the rare times that we actually get to talk while he’s there, his words tumble over each other.

It is so late. He has Jung’s
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
on his lap, and once I’ve chosen another cassette and put it into the video player, I slide the book onto the arm of the sofa so that I can take its place.

‘You’ve been reading this book for about two years,’ I tell him.

He shrugs and nuzzles my cheek. ‘You should see it as a pleasing example of fidelity,’ he says. ‘What you don’t notice is that it’s not that I’m getting through it slowly, but that I’m reading it over and over and not getting bored.’

The tape flickers and stalls, flooding the television screen with fine-grained grey; I get up to try the tape again, which involves giving the video player a thump with my fist. The problem with living in the basement half of a thick-built house is that everything works slightly less well: the radio has a scratchy signal; the television – aerial or no aerial – is temperamental about which channels it will let us see clearly; and the light is poor – our only windows are high and emerge at street level.