The Opposite House (20 page)

Someone knocks on the door, knocks so hard it booms. I twitch

(it is nothing to do with the door)

and that makes Aaron twitch. He checks the sitting-room clock and tells me, ‘It’s Amy Eleni’s boys.’ He rubs my arm,
Don’t worry
. He shouldn’t do that; my hysteric is the boring girl in the corner that you ignore – if you talk to her, she won’t shut up.

The boys crowd in, these are people’s sons. Their heads are close-shaven to expose peachy nicks on their scalps. They’re wearing Timberland boots and heavy-cut jeans that crash down to their toecaps. A uniform always prepares me for a crowd, so that at first I think there must be more than three of them. They look around, elbow each other, refuse my offer of tea, and crow, ‘This is boom digs! Sonic boooooom, know what I mean?’

Aaron introduces them as Kobe, Kweku and Kevin, his voice fitting smoothly around the Ewe names. Kevin shuffles his feet and wearily insists, as if continuing an argument that started before his birth, that it’s not his fault his parents gave him an English first name:

‘The teachers jump on it as soon as they see it in the register; they ignore “Akwasi”,’ he says. ‘I think they’re a bit relieved not to have to say it, really.’

Aaron manages to locate his coat, picks up his camcorder carry case and says a few words to them in confident Ewe. They look at him with flattered, embarrassed smiles and reply with accents less certain than his. Aaron’s accent, normally a quirk unique to him, now makes a skewed kind of sense. Somehow that hurts me; better for the accent to have stayed a quirk.

When Mass is ended and we have genuflected towards God, I tell Mami I’m going back to Habana. She is confused. She waves and smiles at other friends who are trickling out of the church, presses the Father’s hand, indicates that she can’t stop to talk today. She says, ‘Oh, but Maja, you can’t go.’

I touch Mami’s face, I ask, ‘Why not?’

‘Better talk to your Papi.’

Mami and I walk home holding each other’s hands tightly. Chabella is wearing big furry gloves, and I am not. Chabella insists that my hands are cold. I say no, but she keeps lifting my hands to her mouth to blow warmth onto my cracked palms.

Chabella says of Tomás, ‘Somehow he is just too tender. I know some will think that isn’t how a black boy should be. I am afraid that the other boys will punish him for it, his tenderness.’

I can’t find it in me to tell her not to worry. She should worry.

When Tomás was nine or so, I sometimes babysat him and his friend, Jon. At that time they were intense about conker wars. They waged their wars under the kitchen table, both lying flat on their stomachs, heads bowed towards each other as they struck each other’s forces in skirmishes and temporary sorties from behind fortresses, strategising with shrivelled conker soldiers. Tomás’s strategy was probably immaculate; all his work is, his diagrams and graphs and essays. But Jon won every game because it seemed that Tomás’s overall strategy was to let him win. Jon, his hair falling into his eyes, got frustrated with winning and swung with more force, harder and harder, his conker smashing against Tomás’s knuckles. But Tomás just winced and let him win and win.

These days after school Tomás comes home with a group of raggedly uniform boys who live around the way. Tomás walks amongst them with his hands in his pockets, smiling and shaking his head as they whoop and hang off lamp posts. He is careful talking to the other boys; he is kindly.
It’s as if he’s trying his best not to let the others know that they are not real, that he is talking to himself.

Some schools think being quiet is a sign of genius-level intelligence. Last year Tomás’s school put him on the Gifted and Talented programme to help him get to a top university. His friends were annoyed; they were losing him to books and extra homework, and he was getting to be a good striker. But Tomás found that in his Gifted and Talented classes his hearing became so faulty that he couldn’t understand anything except for the end-of-lesson bell. He couldn’t hear, and he panicked and froze. Chabella worried that he would become completely deaf. I worried that he would become completely deaf. His teachers said it was frightening, uncanny,
unheimlich;
that they could shout out his name within five paces of him and, unless he was looking directly at them, he didn’t turn a hair, or show any understanding.

Chabella withdrew him from those classes after a meeting with his Gifted and Talented English Literature teacher, even though Papi pointed out that it was most curious that Tomás could hear well enough to watch
Pinky and the Brain
on TV before dinner. Tomás’s weekends took their old shape once again; he went back to playing striker on the local football team, a position that Jon had kept warm for him. He also resumed his post as Papi’s book assistant, lying on his back in Papi’s study shuffling through notes with a fluorescent marker, typing out references when Papi’s fingers felt too stiff.

But even if he is Papi’s boy, there are things that Tomás will only ask of Mami. It’s the same with me. Sometimes there are things that you need to say, and you know that the right person to say them to is the person whose logic works
two ways; the person who can sit through Mass without staring sardonically at the boy in the dress who waves incense in their face.

Chabella was making guava
pasteles
, hands working a mass of pastry and sweetener when Tomás came back from football huffing and sweating, the collar of his tracksuit top turned up around his neck in a funnel. He looked urgent, the way he used to when he was smaller and would come to Mami during an argument with another boy, tug at her arm and say, ‘Tell him.’

He sidled up to the counter and tore off a hunk of dough. Chabella clucked, ‘Tomás, why? You’ll only throw it up.’

I laughed, ‘What’s the point of feeding him at all, then?’ and Tomás ignored me and said to her through a sticky mouthful, ‘Chabella, it’s getting stupid. We’re supposed to learn our names really early, no? Like, a few months after being born we’re supposed to respond to our names or whatever.’

I was leaning on the counter, reading and breathing in Chabella’s sweetened steam. I looked up and said, ‘Are you trying to tell us you’re retarded?’

Chabella flung a handful of sweetener at me, and she missed. ‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t say these things, they’ll come true!’

Tomás plucked more dough out from under Chabella’s hands.

‘Listen, Chabella, really it’s getting . . . I don’t know. When someone nearby calls a name, I have this thing where I look round at them as if they’re calling me, it doesn’t matter what name they call out. Just now on the road this boy shouted out “Oi, Jack!” and I turned round to him and looked him in the face and he said in some properly nasty voice, “Oh, are you Jack?” And I said, “No, sorry –”’

I called out to Tomás, ‘You should have put your hand in your pocket and said, “Who wants to know?” Or you should have said “Depends who’s asking . . .” and
then
put your hand in your pocket. Then you should have narrowed your eyes and made a clicking sound with your tongue.’

Tomás rolled his eyes, ‘Yeah, standardly I should have said that. And then he would have pissed himself laughing. This boy was tonk, trust me. Anyway I said, “No my name isn’t Jack,” and this boy was all like, “Well don’t
watch
that, then,” and I was thinking, but this happens all the time, it happens all the time – I just keep looking round when someone calls, as if I haven’t learnt my name or something. One of these days I’m going to end up smeared into a wall.’

Mami didn’t look up. She blew on her rolling pin, tapped it on the counter, bent over her pastries to inspect the frills she’d drawn into their edges. Only I could see, over the top of my book, the tension on Tomás’s face. Mami didn’t look; Tomás placed his palms on the counter and leant far over into Mami’s way. He kissed her cheek, he swung, he waited for Mami to look. But when Mami turned to him, her gaze got lost somewhere on the way to meet his; her eyes were guilty somehow. She fed him some guava and told him, ‘It’s OK, London baby. You must trust yourself. Tomás is not your name; it’s just a tag we gave you until you find something you like.’

Late in the night Aya sits still, her head resting against Amy’s. She is knocked comatose by the twin thicknesses of Amy’s hair and honey.

Tayo has dragged out a drawer from his cupboard; he lays it carefully on the floor, he bids Aya look. His eyes are full, too full, brimming.

The drawer foams damp white; at first she thinks, snow?

No – row after immaculate row of drowned paper flowers. They pull at her heart, these flowers, they do not ask for light the way that real flowers do. She puts her hands out to make them well again, and as she touches them, one by one, they dry out and crackle under her fingers. Rice paper.

Aya asks, ‘They’re yours?’

He is vehement: ‘No.’

When Aya holds the flowers close to her face, she sees that each has a black word bled into it in spidery writing. On each flower, the same word.

‘Then I want them,’ she says.

He recoils. ‘They’re not meant for you.’

She asks who gave them to him, and he shakes his head.

‘A her?’ Aya asks.

‘Mm.’

‘And you parted?’

‘Not exactly. Kind of. Well, she doesn’t know.’

‘How can she not know that you’ve parted?’

He shrugs.

Aya hugs the flowers. She tries to hug all of them at once but her arms do not have enough space between them.

‘She knows,’ Aya says.

In her bedroom, in the morning, Amy says, ‘Yemaya, I have the trick of crossing heaviness with lightness. I could jump
in the air right now and not come down. I wouldn’t go any higher, either. I’d just stay there. They’d ring bells and tell lies: a soul has gone to heaven. Yemaya Saramagua?’

When Amy leans over from her bed, there is no more early light; Amy’s face is desperate, her granite eyes disappearing under eddying water. She scratches at the bruises on her arms, trying to lift them away, bringing down blood instead. Aya tries to help her to lie down again, but Amy will not. ‘Amy, what is it? What is it?’ Aya asks her.

‘Ochun, Ochun. Please say it. Yemaya Saramagua, you must know my name,’ Amy weeps. She bites Aya to make her let go. Aya won’t let go. Finally Amy lays still and rattles out a breath that sounds like her last, sounds like her heart is broken.

‘I should never have left. Why doesn’t anybody know my name? Why doesn’t someone come for me?’

13
the hour of lead

I offer up Saturday night for a vigil. I flip through travel brochures. The purple UV lamps hurt my eyes. According to the brochures, Habana Vieja is old and beautiful and majestically crumbling, and Miramar has great beaches. Everything is very picturesquely blue and or a very surly brown, and set on a slant that sands down the sky’s edges. Cubans are, apparently, very friendly if they feel their gestures are reciprocated. Do I count, am I like that too? I thought everybody was like that.

I try to balance my saints’ medals on my forehead as if they are tokens that I can swap for something overhead, and I wait for Sunday morning Mass. I think,
No, it is not true that Mami would try to inject me with visions. Not like that, not when I was so small
. It is hard to know. I do know that Chabella loves me because she can look inside me against my will, and it seems people can only do that if they love you. But Chabella is from a different country to me; she is wound around and around with her Brigitte and my Bisabuela Carmen. I’ve had
Mork and Mindy
and
The Cosby Show
. I’ve had gaps between the things I see and the things I know, the dilemma of getting a comb through
my hair on mornings when my personal hysteric makes my arms droop and refuse to work.

I stare at the Orishas from the distance Peckham affords me, but Chabella grew up in a small white house in Querejeta, just off a ring road, where trees are sparse and the traffic makes humidity fly in low circles. From her window she could see the Hotel Nacional waving its flag to welcome small crowds of hatted, suited, feathered, colourful Americans. From the first, she swears that all she ever wanted was to be gone from there.

There is one dog-eared photograph of Chabella at ten; we have never resembled each other physically, she and I. Light clusters in Chabella’s huge irises, and she is sitting on the marble steps inside her house, her posture perfect, her hands clasped, her hair combed up high and tied with a ribbon. She is smiling the way a china doll smiles, and to me that means she is not happy. China dolls, their cheeks flushed vicious, always look as if they have been threatened with dismemberment and posed, their limbs arranged. They would take life if they could. A few days after that picture was taken, Chabella tried to run away from home for the seventh time, and that day her father, Damason

(‘Your
abuelo
, God rest his soul,’ Chabella stares at me until I cross myself)

lost his patience with her and beat her. But escape wasn’t meant as a personal insult to Abuelo Damason.

Chabella was the youngest of his four children, and closer to her father than to Laline, her lawyer mother, who disappeared beneath portfolios and was preoccupied with women’s rights. Chabella and Abuelo Damason spent afternoons in his studio fascinated by feet, the
whorls of taut skin. They stomped in vats of paint before dancing across vast sheets of expensive paper. He danced alone, then she danced alone, then they both danced together. They wanted to see whether the idea of dancing was contained in the feet, or, if not, what feet really meant. The tracks they made were linked, ungainly shapes, ridiculous, bright and strong, like the first images of their kind.

Abuelo Damason also had a lot of women back then. Sometimes Laline let her smooth veneer chip, and at night she would scream at Chabella’s father that he’d better stop making a fool of her with his girlfriends. They were ‘the kind of women who cluster around when a black Cuban becomes successful – all kinds,’ Mami said. Women who hated her, smiled at her, gave her sweets, and stole the hair from her combs so that they could have roots people work spells to make Chabella leave hold of her father’s heart. Chabella’s first real memory was of falling off the swing in the house’s back garden and cutting her knee, and then crying because her father wasn’t there. My pretty, light-skinned Tia Dayame, the next sister up from Mami, was combing her hair in front of the sitting-room mirror – when she saw the wound she simply shrugged and said, ‘Good.’