The Opposite House (25 page)

Amy Eleni chose Sophia and debated extending her given name to ‘Amy Eleni Sophia’. Her mother let her be confirmed in pearls, a black veil and a black, watered-silk dress with a stiff bustle. People in my class sniggered at her overdressing. But nobody knew what a victory that confirmation was for Amy Eleni. Her mother didn’t attend the Mass.

Now, Amy Eleni bent over the wooden prayer box, the box into which parishioners who wanted Father Gerard to pray for them had slipped their requests. She tucked it under her arm and walked out noiselessly, leaving me to tiptoe out as best and as quickly as I could.

‘I don’t know what to do next,’ she panted, when I caught up with her and cried outrage. ‘The stuff of life to knit me blew hither, here am I, right? From Cyprus à la my mother to England and school and university, there’s been a conspiracy of me, a me trying to work into a pattern. Now I feel like I’m out, graduated, so . . . what? I don’t know which way I want to go yet, but I need to know if I’ll be allowed to get there. I don’t know if I can . . . yuck. I suppose I want to know if I can trust people with my dreams.’

It wasn’t an explanation, but coming from Amy Eleni, it was enough. We opened the box in my bedroom, tipped out
a cascade of white paper slips, and read aloud to each other prayer after prayer, request after request, until we ran to the end of them. Speaking the words, I felt as if we were unsealing the wants behind them, releasing spurts of chalky tomb air with every sound. I felt as if we were granting wishes because we heard them and then they were free to be possible, the way a priest sits in a box and listens and becomes Jesus.

The sun went down and left its rays clinging to our skin. I looked out of the window and saw that our parents were still in the garden, laughing and talking and blowing dandelion petals, oblivious beneath a dark orange sky that threatened to swallow them.

It seemed like everyone in our church was praying for each other. There were so many wishes that people not be hurt, so many offerings of thanks for others, so many short pleas to save lives or offer a new grace to die with. Amy Eleni looked dizzy and small with all these slips in her hands; she had not expected this.

Near the end of our reading, I recognised Chabella’s handwriting. She had written:
Please pray for Juan Carrera to be happy. Please pray for Juan Carrera to find whatever he came to this country looking for
.

I didn’t read it aloud, but it was the first prayer I put back into the box; I had to do that so Amy Eleni wouldn’t see it. It was the only bitter prayer in there, the only prayer that betrayed its writer.

‘I’m going to go and find Sara,’ Amy Eleni told me, wriggling off the bed with the re-sealed box under her arm. I lay flat and began tracking shadows on the ceiling, pulled my polo neck up so that it covered the bottom of my chin, began my great, private worry about my life.

Amy Eleni paused at the door, turned, studied me, came back to me. She stood over me, sweetly serious, and I hauled myself up by degrees, matching her look for look; the inches between our faces grew warmer as they fell away. She dipped her head to kiss my mouth, and whispered against my lips, ‘Happy graduation.’ Her eyes were closed, and mine were wide open.

When Aya visits now, Amy’s wrists are newly, tightly re-bandaged, her eyes are crayoned round with waning purple, and she is still so pale – even her lips have shed colour. She throws her arms around Aya and hugs her, so light a pressure that Aya thinks she might be imagining it. ‘Please stay a while,’ she says. ‘I loved it when you came to see me. You seem to care.’

‘I can’t help it,’ Yemaya says, simply. Amy laughs, but Aya is serious. Amy is only laughing because she is pretending that she can switch her caring on and off, admire different books, love different people, discard her own life.

Aya moves about the somewherehouse, finishing her self-appointed task of returning all the mirrors that Proserpine brought down. The attic, reluctant to have the mirrors back, gives vent to floorboard groaning. Mama has put the Kayodes’ rooms in order; their winding cloths are unpinned from the walls and heaped onto chairs. Their chessboard is gone. Their cupboards are pleasantly bare, the shelves are free of dust and expectation.

Aya had expected to find complicated packages of newspaper, braided trails of string, or some other closed thing that the Kayodes might have used to keep their speech amongst themselves. She had not expected to miss them as much as she does. She draws a hand over her eyes and picks up a mirror that rests in the arms of the rocking chair. She has asked Tayo to follow her here, and he comes – but hesitantly. The somewherehouse’s cedar beams breathe
wheeeee
to bring their smell in after him. She wonders if the house will not keep him. Tayo hesitates, then draws her close to him, sits in the rocking chair and takes her onto his
lap, pushing her hair aside to whisper into her ear, ‘But what are those figurines downstairs supposed to be?’

He has to close his eyes for her so that, with a fingertip, she can spirit ash away from those spaces where he is softest.

‘What figurines?’

And after all people are sitting in the basement

a boy, a man, a woman,

withered, rheumy-staring from a carousel of spider webs.

Aya looks at Tayo and lets him see in her eyes what is happening. He says feebly, ‘Yeye, it’s all right. They’re not real.’ He is far more frightened than she is.

High-heeled footsteps clatter above; Proserpine has come in through the front door.

Aya decides quickly. She breaks an old chair, catches its leg up in her hand and goes to put an end to Mama Proserpine.

‘Yeye!’ Tayo grasps her wrist and tries to follow her, but she eludes him and the basement door is locked tight as she passes into the hallway – she makes it so.

Proserpine turns a pale stare of appeal to Aya. In her arms, caught up in her cloak, a rooster tramples air in a fright of feathers.

‘Yeye, listen –’

The rooster escapes Proserpine’s arms as Aya comes at her. Aya is like thunder. Blood wells from Proserpine’s lip; she is dazed, delayed.

Aya cries to her, ‘You told me you took them home. But you killed them.’

‘Yeye –’

Aya says, grimly, ‘Shut your mouth. Don’t ever address me that way. Proserpine, I saw you from the first.’

Aya has the chair leg to Proserpine’s throat. Proserpine has not cowered, though one of her eyes has swollen shut. The gaze of the other eye, the bulge of surprise in it – that drives Aya outside of herself. Aya’s hand is a hot-red clutching; the wood splinters it, and she doesn’t care. Her next blow snaps the chair leg clean in two.

‘Yeye,’ Proserpine wails. ‘Don’t you know how long it took you to find this place? When you got here, the Kayodes had only just arrived.’

‘Which Kayodes? The ones you killed?’

Proserpine spits a messy tooth into her cupped hand.

Aya asks, very quietly, ‘When?’

Proserpine smears down the wall until she is crouching, the heels of her shoes broken. Aya bends to hear her, her face knitting itself ready to spit. And Proserpine tells her about the Kayodes now, Proserpine tells and tells. With each repetition the story is truer.

By the time Aya asked her where the Kayodes were, the Kayodes were already dead. Because while Aya was gone through the London door, the Kayodes began starvation. But they didn’t know what the feeling was – they didn’t know that the ache meant ‘eat’.

Proserpine cooked for them, so many desperate meals: she cooked
amala
and
ewedu, eko, moin-moin, bistecca, ajiaco
, fish and chips.

The Kayodes tried to feed on the smell; they breathed in until their lungs let the scent escape. But then one of them always said to the other, ‘Proserpine must not waste this food. Proserpine must give this food to someone who needs to eat.’

Soon the Kayodes grew too weak even to talk to each other.

In the basement they sat and stared and waited for Aya’s Papa.

They were certain that Aya’s Papa would not forget them.

Then they were less certain.

Then they grew bitter.

And then they died, one immediately after the other, click, click, click, like three switches breaking a circuit. How afraid the third one was when he saw the dying moment begin in the first.

16
ventured all (upon a throw)

Aya and Proserpine strain and sweat and dig a shallow grave around the back of the somewherehouse, in a spot where the grass and trees dip at the same point. Proserpine weeps. Her hands claw at Aya as if she is a closing door with home on the other side. Aya is suffocated by icy leaves. She leaves that place, leaves that woman.

Aya watches Amy untie the knots that secure her handkerchiefs to her belt and spread the silken squares out, full-length, over her bed. Picking one up at the corner feels like pinching a beautiful nothing between the fingertips.

‘Do you want them?’ Amy asks.

Aya lets the handkerchief settle back onto the covers.

Amy turns her bruise-hooped back to Aya and brushes the handkerchiefs onto the floor before she climbs into bed.

‘Look what Tayo gave me,’ Amy says, after a moment. She opens her hand and a saint is in it; a medallion with dainty piecrust metalwork running round it. The saint is a woman with a long nose, hair demurely covered by a shawl, hands crossed on her breast.

‘It’s Our Lady of Mercy,’ Amy says. She closes her hand with a grim smile and draws her saint back under the covers. She gets lost in a dark memory that she doesn’t say aloud.

The handkerchiefs are waiting on the floor. On her way out, Aya wonders, for less than a moment, what it would be like to own these handkerchiefs, to leave an aftermath of honey perfume. In Tayo’s room, the white pointed tips of wet flowers spill over the tops of every drawer in his cupboard, as if the cupboard is crammed with people who are reaching their hands up and willing their fingers to escape the trap.

But early in the next day the fresh air in the room is spent, and the carpet around the chest of drawers is ringed in charcoal dust.

Amy is gone.

In her absence, Amy’s room, baring itself between hills of glass-bead necklaces, socks, books and shrugged-off cardigans, is filled with grey light. Tayo, one hand clad in Amy’s green silk handkerchief, stands at her dresser as if he is awaiting some news or appearance. He is so angry that he does not know what to do with himself, how to stay inside his skin. He shakes his head, bares his teeth to maul the air, but he doesn’t leave the room.

He says, simply, ‘Where is she?’

‘You love her?’ Aya is serene.

‘Amy,’ he says, ‘is missing. And you’re asking stupid questions.’

His smile is unguarded, also it is antique somehow

(yes, yes, who are you to me? Almost I know) his arms come down around her, draw her to him; she arcs under the pressure of his hand. His
ache
comes to her loudly. It comes through his chest.

‘We have to get Amy to come back.’ Tayo’s wish is spoken into her hair.

Aya closes her eyes against him. She will not go.

‘Please,’ he says.

In the attic of the somewherehouse, Proserpine is hanged. She is like a pale, black-sheathed pendulum caught on a ceiling beam, in a quiet space behind the door that will not trouble anyone. As long as they stay outside, as long as they avoid looking to the left and catching sight of a bare, dapper foot, toes achieving the perfect pirouette. The mirrors report the hanging first; they are stern and reproving, then they make eulogy in softened light. Dozens of refracted Proserpines, faces forced up by frantic throats.

Proserpine not Mama, Proserpine not Mama.

Why, then, has Mama’s face returned to this woman?

Her eyelashes, settled on her cheeks, spike the black clouds of her hair.

Tayo is downstairs – Aya hears muffled thumps, as if he is moving things around. The somewherehouse’s cedar beams whisper to her of their alarm, but she ignores them and turns away.

‘Tayo, don’t come up here,’ Aya calls, and shuts the door.

Her Papa, high, high in the roots and the snow, must know of this by now. Downstairs, the somewherehouse has thrown off its disguise. The house recognises her with a sniff – about time. Aya falls to her knees, winded. All of the running that she has ever done, all of that fleeing for freedom from the Regla house, just to find the Regla house unfolding before her again. This hallway lit with a galaxy of gas lamps.

Tayo stands in the centre of the hallway and looks up
at the domed ceiling, the rich stains that form the Creation fresco. Young river, wild-eyed rooster, bulging palm kernel – poised intent on a beginning against the sky. They reach the big window at the end of the hallway and Aya leans out, touches the trees; their leaves rustle under her hands with well-fed laughter, sated by the sun and the warm earth. But Tayo is afraid. Aya tries to take his hand. She tries to bring him with her into the next room, but Tayo will not come. His smile is as hard and dark as mud clay. Aya frowns and calls Tayo’s name, gently calls on him to explain, but Tayo says, ‘No, not him.’

He backs away from her, holding his arms out to her; she follows him step for step, down, down into the dust, the basement. Step for step, she tries names, old names, newer names, until she remembers her Mama’s tale of the trickster who left the family for change.

She asks, ‘Elegua?’

‘No!’

‘Echun . . .’

He is crying hard now, the shape of his face buckles as if under blows.

‘Oh, Echun,’ Aya says. ‘Echun, why? What’s wrong?’

‘Yeye,’ he says. ‘I know who I am. Shhh, I know. I know. But I have to be different. I have to be stronger. Needles and drowning; your Papa is trying to make me kill myself. But. . . but I can’t let him take my
ache
, no, no, he cannot have it all, he must leave my
ache
with me.’

He opens the door for London – the Lagos door is nailed shut. And he has matches. The basement cloth is slippery underfoot, he has wet them with something moss-smelling, something unordinary. Aya goes to him, but he holds her away with terror, as if she is a chemical rag that will stain
him. He keeps saying he wants her, but that she is her father’s eye. It is funny how afraid he is. Aya stops fighting him. She wants to spit at him, she wants to scratch him and hurt him, she wants him to die, she wants to go with him. She is drawn to him, sure and true, by her own instinct, the instinct of the runaway to be away, always away, always leaving, and running, running, running for home, hoping never to get there. Echun is beautiful, she sees that again. Of course it is because he is a trick.