The Opposite House (19 page)

She’s joking, but I don’t like it. I feel cold.

‘Don’t say that!’

‘What?’ Amy Eleni comes back in and hands me my Horlicks.

‘What?’ she says again, when I take it without saying anything. I sniff at the mug, as if my nose can tell me the difference between soymilk and cow’s milk, as if my nose can tell me which is better.

In the evening, I use a hand mirror to supervise my earrings. I boil tonight down to flip-switch decisions: hoops or dangly earrings; long skirt or black dress; to sing well or to sing badly; to tell Aaron now that I’m going to Cuba next month, or to put it off until I can sound sane when I say it. I’ve missed band rehearsals and Michael is pissed off at me, so I have to be early tonight. Aaron is in the kitchen cooking up a batch of
jollof
rice; I hear him hissing as the onions sizzle. He isn’t fully aware of his kitchen soundtrack, his tendency to imitate food sounds.

‘You shouldn’t cook – you’re tired,’ I tell him, watching the clock. ‘I could have made you something.’

He comes out of the kitchen expressly to point his spatula at me. ‘But I want
jollof
rice, and you can’t cook it. Anyway, you should eat some of this,’ he says, ‘it’ll be good for our boy.’

I suck my breath in, find lightness to speak with. ‘Who says it’ll be a boy?’

‘I knew you’d say that,’ Aaron sings. I am supposed to want a girl child; he is supposed to want a boy child.

The phone rings. It’s Amy Eleni, and I’m immediately stricken with guilt for not having called her first. She says, ‘Oh, hi Maja. Is Aaron around?’

She doesn’t sound cold or angry at me, just busy. I think. Or maybe she
is
angry. I pass the phone to Aaron and wander around looking for my shoes, thrown off course by the call, trying unsuccessfully to listen in.

Aaron comes back into the sitting room, hangs up the phone and sighs. ‘There goes my free Sunday afternoon – I was going to try and sleep right through it,’ he says.

‘Did Amy Eleni sound angry with me?’ I ask. I’ve just realised I’m already wearing one of my shoes – the battle is half won.

‘No?’ Aaron tries. He doesn’t want to be involved. He tries to tiptoe past me.

‘Then what? Why would she ask to speak to you before me? Are you seeing her tomorrow?’

‘Calm down. I’m her friend too,’ he says. He bends and hands me my other stiletto. ‘Maybe you should start wearing flatter shoes now. Her school’s running some mentor scheme, and she managed to get some guy from Shell – can you imagine, a Shell Oil man?! A more ethical mentor doesn’t exist, I’m sure. She got this Shell guy to agree to mentor three boys in her form and take them out tomorrow for a first meeting, but the guy pulled out, so . . .’

I pretend to be confused: ‘So why did she call you?’

‘Yeah, shut up,’ he says. ‘I’m a good role model. Excellent, in fact. If I survive this year I’ll be well on my way to becoming a psychiatrist, so shog off. Anyways, these boys are Ghanaian, so she thought I’d be perfect.’

I scrutinise him, but I can’t tell what percentage of what he just said is a joke. He must know that if he mentors these boys, he is not showing them what a Ghanaian can do with his life, but what a white guy can do who chooses or refuses Ghana at any given moment. I change the subject. What I want to say is, You are no more Ghanaian than I am Cuban. So what if you can number your memories and group them in years one to eighteen? That country will not claim you when you are broken, when you have forgotten the trick of breathing easily – and you will have to learn how to resuscitate yourself.

But if I say this, he will take offence. Because if I
do
say it I will mean it to offend.

‘Did you get to talk to Miss Lassiter about the leak?’ I ask instead.

He shakes his head. He leans his forehead against mine.

‘If I were to ask you to marry me,’ he murmurs, ‘what would you say?’

I baulk, but I think I manage to not let him feel it.

‘OK, first of all, I have to go and sing in a minute and you’re trying this? Secondly, I’d say,
querido
, I can’t marry you yet.’

I can’t be a wife yet, not even Aaron’s. I need to sit down and have a good long talk with my personal hysteric before I become a wife.

‘Why?’ he asks, very seriously.

‘Z.’

He doesn’t want to smile, but he smiles because he has to be grown up about it.

Tonight there is no choice between singing badly and singing well. I cannot sing at all.

Onstage, in the smoky dark, I shut my eyes, place my fingers around the microphone as if in prayer, and I cannot remember anything – not just my Cuba, but even the words to the song and my place in the music. The band realises what is happening. They change temperature; they ease down from standard swing and into a mellow instrumental, and Sophie begins a gentle, improvised solo. I scramble offstage as quickly as I can. I do not cry until I’m outside, and even then I fumble for the tears, as if this crying is just something I’m doing in a blackout while I’m waiting for the light to come back.

Aaron follows me into the bedroom when I get back. He fiddles with my things. He slaps my hand when, in retaliation, I reach for one of his chewing sticks. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I am concerned. I look as haggard as I feel.

‘I am very ugly these days, aren’t I?’ I say.

Aaron looks at me; he makes a good job of his surprised expression. ‘Ah, you don’t know how you look to me.’

I stay out of his reach, smiling tiredly. ‘Is that a direct quote from a Drifters song?’

Aaron groans. I peel off my jumper, turning away a little so he can’t see my stomach. I step out of the skirt I reserve for fat days; it drops to the floor like a flattened pom-pom. Aaron hasn’t gone away.

‘This isn’t a striptease,’ I say.

He is still waiting. ‘What?’

‘This is the first day off I’ve had in ages where I’m not half-dead,’ he says.

I don’t look at him. I do not want to talk. I want to rest first of all, and then I want to try to sing again, try to find a
tone that my vocal cords and my aching throat will let me stay with. Or maybe I want Amy Eleni with me under a tent made of blankets, chin in hand, talking to me with her clear eyes narrowed. I don’t want Aaron – he doesn’t know.

‘You don’t want to spend any time together?’

He is flinching a little, as if we are having a fight. We’re not having a fight.

‘I keep thinking you’d rather go back to St Catherine’s or something,’ he says reluctantly, when I don’t reply. ‘You’ve put something down between us. It’s invisible, but it’s very strong.’

He comes to hold me then, and I realise that I can’t reply because I’ve been weeping those easy tears that Chabella passed down to me. He doesn’t hold me any differently – I thought he would have care for my stomach, but he is as sure as ever that his touch is good for me and my son.

‘Tell me why you keep wearing this,’ he says. He runs his thumb lightly, lightly down the ridge of my polo neck, and I hold still and I let him.

But I can’t say. What do I say, ‘My mother . . .’? Do I say, ‘The hysteric . . .’?

Gelassenheit
.

I lift my head from his shoulder and touch my lips to the skin that crinkles over his Adam’s apple. My teeth latch onto him and I clamp down hard, so hard that my teeth find each other again through his skin

(he
shouts
)

and I am not thinking anything in particular, just that I have to hurt him.

It’s to do with Magalys, who said there was no singing in the garden in Vedado. Such words are surgical; a pole separates a man’s brain and he survives, but no one knows
him any more. With my Cuba cut away from under me, without that piece of warm, songful night, I am empty of reasons. Aaron’s hand smacks my forehead, instinctively batting me away from him, and I fall away like he wants me to, painfully sucking at my teeth. Which are laddered with blood. He stares at me with his hand to his neck; my own hand is at my neck. He is breathing hard; I am breathing hard.

‘What is wrong with you?’ he asks me.

I wipe my mouth.

Aaron rubs his neck, puts me into strong focus, and I am so nervous, too nervous, as if I am fourteen and this is the first time I have ever talked to a boy about anything serious. He draws me back to him, and when I bite him this time, he clenches his fists around me, but he doesn’t let go, and he doesn’t cry out.

Mami and her habit of unhappiness. Mami dazzled and shaded in a strip of kitchen tile and flowered tablecloth, candlelight prising her gaze open for the dark. In the kitchen she makes some more of her prayer flowers.

‘What, you think I don’t make them any more? You think I’d forgotten?’ she asks me. ‘I make them on the third day of each month, on the day that should be given to Elegua.’

The blinds are drawn down against a night storm that screams black noise and thorny rain. Chabella shivers and says quietly, ‘This house will blow away.’

I ask her if there are hurricanes in Cuba; her reply is simple silence.

I talk to her softly, talk secrets to her, but she won’t answer me. So I keep talking anyway, to keep myself awake for her, because I see how the muscles in her long neck are
strained, how she bites down and swallows even though there is nothing in her mouth. The window frames bounce against the gales. Chabella says, ‘Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth,’ without looking up. She is just as fleet at her prayer-making as she’s always been, just as expert, squinting at the paper heaped between her spread elbows, selecting a piece and swiftly folding, twisting, pinching the crisp layers between her honey-soaked fingertips to form broad petals topped with fractured spires.

When her flowers burn, she stretches and sighs.

‘It still works,’ she says.

I watch the petals curl under the blaze that takes them to the centre of the bowl, and I don’t know what she had expected. Did she think that rice paper was no longer flammable? Take a prayer and put it in a photocopier, collect the copies and smile because you have more to go around, cry because when you lifted the lid of that machine, something blank and coarse fell out.

Chabella outstares her flames.

‘My father was kind to people because he didn’t expect them to be good, only interesting. And people are always that, no? If somebody stole from him, he didn’t mind as long as the thief was impeccably audacious. If someone lied to him, he didn’t mind as long as the lie was too wild to be believed, or too subtle to be suspected. Your
abuelo
, God rest his soul, was so tall that he couldn’t sit down on buses because there was really no room for his legs. But he was good about it; he stood up instead and lowered his head so that it didn’t slam against the bus roof, and he just smiled and watched people like a big bent hook in a paint-spattered T-shirt.

‘My father allowed me to throw tantrums and flounce
and switch moods, and I never had to explain. When I announced that on Mondays I was going to eat only green things and on Tuesdays only brown things and on Wednesdays only yellow things, he said, “Fine, you must do what you feel,” even though my Mami frowned and said, “You are making her strange, you will let this girl run mad.” His girlfriends said to each other that he was spoiling me and that he would get no one to marry me. But he was just letting me contradict myself while I still could.

‘My father was almost perfect. The only thing wrong with him was that when he didn’t understand, he got angry. And he didn’t understand me because he stopped listening to me. I was the “feelings” child. Everything I did was a feeling, and it did not count. It is so difficult to talk about demons and gods and spirits without it seeming that you are mad, or sarcastic, or simple, or talking in pictures, or trying to confuse. Or trying to be interesting. It is difficult to talk about demons and make it understood that even if “spirit” is the best word available, it isn’t the right word.

‘Maja, let’s talk like mystics: let’s say I never had a mother. “I always ran home to Awe when a child, when anything befell me. He was an awful mother, but I liked him better than none.” Who wrote that?’

I stare at her. ‘Is this a quiz?’

She laughs at me. ‘No,
querida
, I only mean that I can’t remember who wrote it.’

I lay my head on my outstretched arms and Mami strokes my hair. Honey from her fingers webs behind my ears, but I don’t move. So what if my hair gets messed up; Mami has stayed still for worse. She told me that once, at a Santeria Mass, she sat with open eyes while rooster blood mapped her face.

Chabella was brave because she didn’t have a plan. She isn’t a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anything or anyone whose life and death makes noise. All she knew was that the words she loved were not all. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells that make your skin real. It’s too late now – even if we could say ‘Shut up’ or ‘Where’s my dinner?’ in the first language, the real language, the words weren’t born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really say ‘stay’ are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough.

12
The soul selects her own society

There is a leak in the hallway too; from a dim green patch the ceiling is crying a thin stream of tears. Miss Lassiter has said that she doesn’t know where the leak is coming from. Aaron, not being a plumber, has tapped her pipes, has said ‘Hm,’ has made a phone call. All we understand from what the plumber tells us is that this is an old house

(AARON: ‘Yes?’)

and that the repair is going to cost over five hundred pounds.

(AARON (jovial): ‘No! Come on, no no no.’)

He laughs pleasantly and tells the plumber that he’s going to get another quote. I say ‘Aaron,
please
, I need the leak stopped now, now,’ but Aaron is intractable. He doesn’t know that the leak is killing me. Haggling is fine in Accra, but he can’t do it to me – not here.