The Opposite House (22 page)

I turn back to the mirror. Tomás bends over me with a blanched pearl on his fingertip, and he coasts it over my skin, gentle.

I watch my face begin to disappear under his hand.

At first I think that I will not be able to take Mami’s collar. I expect the beads to fight harder to stay with Chabella.
Pricked by the sharp reproof of her scent, I reach under the pillow on her side of the bed and open her incense box, and the collar falls out as if it is glad to go with me. No one discovers me, no one says, ‘What are you doing?’ but I jump anyway and my fingers knot into each other as I yank down the fold of my polo neck with one hand and fasten the collar’s clasp around my throat with the other.

She could just have said to Papi, ‘You don’t understand. Just like you don’t understand about my altar, you don’t understand about this.’

But she didn’t say anything, my mother, my son’s mother once removed.

I find Aaron sitting on the doorstep of the house in his big blue windbreaker. He is eating noodles out of a plastic tub, and there is sauce all over his chin. He smiles up at me, notes the face paint with his finger.

‘That was a long Mass,’ he says. ‘Are you cheating on me?’

I tweak his nose. ‘Yes. His name is Father Rodriguez. He gave me a message for you: those who wish to be saved must share all that they have.’

He motions for me to sit down with one hand, jabbing with his chopsticks to make sure that I don’t kick his camera, which is set on the step below him.

‘How was it mentoring the Ewe posse?’ I ask him. He smiles and says, ‘Not one of them has even the makings of a hang king in him.’

He feeds me a long noodle strand, and I cup my hands around his face to make it secret that I’m kissing him.

‘You’re tired,’ he says, eventually, and I say no, but my eyes feel as if they’re receding into my skull and I am
already beginning to wonder how I will pick my limbs up in order to take them inside.

Aaron snaps the lid back onto his noodle tub. ‘There was a message on the answer machine when I got back,’ he says. ‘From a Sister Perpetua.’

Sister Perpetua, who is so sure that darkness is part of heaven. St Catherine’s, where darkness comes for me and it is not hell. He looks at me, waits, as if I have to say something to reassure him that I’m staying with him, but I just say, ‘Oh.’

‘She said –’

I force myself to say it softly: ‘I’ll listen to it myself.’

He smiles unhappily; his eyes search me.

Sister Perpetua’s message is simple: she felt moved to speak to me, and she wants me to know that I am always welcome to visit, that I must come if I need space to think.

I don’t want to think. I thought I wouldn’t be one of those pregnant women who touched their stomachs, but I am touching, wondering do I still feel pregnant, trying not to let myself know that I’m wondering.

Aaron stays outside and stays outside and stays outside. It is cold out there and fast becoming night. I want Aaron to come in to me. But I just stand at the window, looking up and out into the street, and all I can see are his legs, dressed in dark jeans, stretched a long way over the grey steps.

On the window, dusk is formed into a mushy hand shape, a single print. I stare at it, then switch on a lamp and lift my hand to the print. I cannot understand why someone has pressed their hand so hard against the window. I cannot understand why there is only one handprint. The interior is solid, like a mist breathed against the glass, and there are no skin patterns, no fingerprint patterns. This
print has been left by a cold glove, a morgue glove. I tell myself that it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true. I say, ‘Aaron,’ as if he could hear me through the glass, and of course he doesn’t notice that I am calling him, and so to bed.

15
the king who does not speak

No Kayodes in the somewherehouse, and so Aya hears nothing but the cedar beams whispering until Mama Proserpine strides out into the hallway to find her. Because it is a mask day for Aya’s Mama, and because Proserpine is not wearing a mask this mask day, Aya averts her own gaze. Proserpine’s wooden mask is secured atop her head in bows of downy lining; her cloak fastens in tarnished bronze links at her throat. Proserpine multiplies and a carnival of cloaked women bend their fractured gazes on Aya.

But no, it is only the mirrors, mirrors everywhere Aya looks.

‘Proserpine, why did you bring the mirrors down?’

Proserpine’s sigh is refined, tolerant: ‘Proserpine is not my name.’

Aya climbs the stairs to the Kayodes’ rooms. She is slowed by flashing mirror surfaces that stir the air in an ascending chime. The house gives way to a spiky maw that snaps at Aya as she opens doors and doors and doors to take down mirrors. Her own aghast reflection runs at her, looms at her, flies from openings to toss her into foreboding until she cries, ‘Who’s that, who’s there?’

The mirrors are studded with the blunt stems of her watchmaker’s seeds, which have staggered into mahogany life; their petals all point one way. The attic, nude and luxuriating in its new dark, welcomes Aya by spattering her with moths. Aya sits with her back against the door and places her hand over her juddering heart.

But the hard flowers are here too – she didn’t forget the attic when she was planting them. The flowers point: Aya is meant to go still higher.

She puts her head out of the attic window. The branches scrabble to attention, she winces as snow scuttles across her face and eyes.

‘Yeye?’ Mama Proserpine’s call climbs from the kitchen to the rafters.

Aya looks up, sees that she has never understood the somewherehouse’s trees. Their branches brush the ground, yes, their branches fountain in twiggy brackets from earth upwards, but (their roots are buried in the sky) clouds crawl lazily away from the black suction that the roots, wide and thick as doors, drive into the blue. Snow crumbles onto Aya, snow salts her.

All of the watchmaker’s signpost flowers are straining upwards, pointing out what it is that she seeks, up, up. In shattered minutes from window ledge to rough treetrunk, she has fought her way up to the snow’s uneven red centre, a ‘v’ that looks less and less like light and more like blood. Snow unfolds itself in bolts on and around her. Inside her is a happiness that threatens to unzip her and step out singing.

Then her skin finds a limit: other skin, a cheek against her cheek. She tries to climb back down to safety, but, as if she does not own or control her hands, Aya releases the branch.
She does not fall, but her tears start immediately. Compunction, for he is terrible.

Him. He leans forward to her; he is the one who has caused the trees to grow contrary, to grow from his heart. He is a great cuspate blade primed to flay her, he is a hammer bringing sun down to gloom.

He says, ‘Daughter.’

‘I cannot.’

‘Cannot –?’

‘I.’

Aya weeps and she looks for herself, but there is no one there.

Papa says, ‘What do you want of me?’

‘I.’

‘You poor child,’ her Papa says.

Her nerve a million times denies her. Papa waits and they breathe together, but Aya cannot speak. Such oppression – it pulls at her eyeballs. He releases her. Aya falls through the tree’s tentacles with her arms spread wide; she is shadowed by falls of snow . . . until a new heat lances her and with trembling hands she learns that she is dangling just above her window, her stomach impaled on an ice-whitened branch. Oh, blood.

Mama Proserpine, swimming in place in an ocean of black silk, leans out of the attic window

(too far – she could fall)

to try to help her, and Aya, unable to gesture ‘no’, cannot yet say that this pain brings her
ache
to the front of her mind. Sleet races leaves down from the tree roots; sleet covers Aya’s shoulders, chills the hot blood she’s losing. The way her limbs are splayed now she is more honest in her agony than she has ever been before. This is what she
really looks like, humble before him, her father. This is how he has always seen her.

Kneeling down before three mirrors that Mama Proserpine has fetched and propped up against the attic wall, Aya touches her lips, her forehead, her cheeks; they are daubed with blood from her fingers.

Once, she heard the word ‘welkin’ used, and ‘welkin’ became a word she loved, but did not hear again. Welkin describes old, high fascination. It describes supple colour that catches and jails the eye – blue sky in summer when it spreads itself out like a magic carpet and it seems a person could step up onto it. The welkin tint is caught in Aya’s eyes, is swept over her lips, lights her whole face. Her fingertips wind a dance of shudders down her throat, stroke whorls around her nipples. Drugged with content, her hand slides down to her lap.

‘Where are the Kayodes?’ Aya asks.

Proserpine squeezes another bloodstained rag into her bowl of water, and a green herb smell stretches its fronds over them.

‘They went.’

‘You took them home?’

Proserpine nods and flattens another rag over Aya’s stomach. Aya doesn’t feel it.

‘Are you Mama?’

‘Yeye, don’t do this.’

Aya peels off the hot rag and drops it into the bowl. ‘What happened to your face, your skin? What happened to the way you walk? Why don’t you wear your mask on a mask day?’

Mama settles herself opposite Aya. She sees Aya is uncomfortable and she pulls down her mask, adjusts it. The mask is a white hand that cups Mama’s face.

‘I was weary. So I went to your Papa, and he took my
ache.’

This new Mama’s eyes flicker behind her mask.

Aaron wants to tell his mother about my son.

‘I haven’t even told
my
mother.’

He says, ‘Well, let’s tell her as well. What’s the problem?’

‘No problem, there isn’t a problem.’ I am sarcastic. I do not let him hold my stomach, or even brush against it. Because he performs examinations – that is what he does – when he touches me now his fingers become probes, his fingers tell me he doesn’t trust me. I reject his name suggestions: Gabriel is a stupid name, the other boys would have kicked him to pieces over that name anyway, my son, if he had lived.

I can’t get the sanitary towels out of the house fast enough. So Aaron finds out about the bleeding, about the dark syrup my son sends me. He holds up one of my scented sanitary bags between his fingertips and we both look at the sodden cotton whirling around inside it. For a moment I can see the anger he talked about before. It’s there on his face. Then the flash fades and he is left with a scared face and I am left with a nervous giggle that he doesn’t understand. Aaron wants to know why I didn’t say anything.

Is the baby . . . gone?

Have I been to the doctor?

What is the
matter
with me?

I want to know too, maybe.

Dr Maxwell has big pink cheeks. In her family I bet she is the youngest child, the well-fed child who got morsels from her mother’s fingertips whenever something special was cooking, who had her cheeks pinched into prettiness by tens of doting fingers.

Aaron takes the scare out of the visit to her. The heel of my hand, that part where the veins are most traceable –
Aaron kisses me there while she talks about our options. I wade through the ultrasound, through six glasses of water and clear, cartilage-thick gel and the probes, and my son is still there

(or some thing, a small wonderful curl that represents him – he is turned to hide his sex)

and later Dr Maxwell says that my bleeding was just an extra egg, just an extra egg, that sometimes that happens. Throughout the scan Aaron cannot catch his breath for gladness, he cannot see straight for crying – who is he fighting?

I think I am sleeping too much.

My eyes open and I think:
daytime
. Other times my eyes open and I’m certain it’s night-time. I do not say a lot, because of the leak. If I speak, the leak speaks louder. The water does not want me to be heard. Aaron wants me to know that I am exhausted. But there is no reason for me to be exhausted. I am about to ask him,
exhausted from what?
but before I can, I am asleep again. It cannot be a good thing to keep falling asleep like this, falling asleep without my choosing or my control. No dreams. But when I manage to fight into waking for long enough, the woman’s song comes back to me so clearly now

(and, yes, she did sing in Habana, she really did – Magalys has lied).

My son is strong, a greater strength of coffee than both Aaron and I. No one will be able to drink right down to the bottom of this boy, if only I let him be born.

Aaron is here again trying to feed me soup, trying to feed me tomato kedgeree, but all I see is bloodied fish. Aaron smiles, he tries to keep me cheerful. I take a long time
gathering coherence and then I ask him if he sees anything when he sleeps with his eyes open the way he does. His smile is his answer; it protects him from me and I lose him inside it. I am beginning to understand that at the end of this time there is going to be a need for strength, that as the skin over my stomach pulls tauter my centre descends, and one day I am going to have to push. I don’t know how anyone survives it, the thought
or
the happening. I will not.

I try to talk about the leak. Aaron says I need to be patient about having it fixed. That leak, it is too cruel, it bypasses me and talks to the other one who is not me. I am not being stupid or petty, and I am not playing the girl card when it happens that I cry and say, ‘Please get that leak stopped.’ Aaron says, ‘Soon, soon, I promise.’

I am trying to make sure that I live. Living is not a thing I can do alongside the leak. I have taken to crawling in my sleep. When I wake, I laugh at the carpet burns pulling at the skin on my knees. I am trying to get away from the woman who walks above me, walks from room to room even as I crawl. The leak

(Cubans are very friendly if their gestures are reciprocated – Miramar has great beaches – don’t forget to check out the Varadero – oh, look what has happened to this Cubana, if nobody told her she was Cuban would she even know? Yet
siempre el drama
)