The Opposite House (3 page)

I’m still not used to Aaron’s flat, even though I moved in four months ago, even though he calls it ‘ours’. The house is in the middle of a semi-detached row; always at attention, jutting straight up with a windowed stare that holds sleepy intelligence near its base, as if the right command could send it leaping sideways. I approach it with caution. I feel like an interview candidate arriving to be considered for tenancy by the house itself. I lose myself so far as to raise a hand to knock at the door though the keys are already dangling on their ring from the index finger of my other hand. We live in the bottom half of the converted two-floor house that Aaron’s dad, a man made thin by nerves and neatness and ownership of a real-estate agency, gave him for his twenty-first birthday.

The streets around the house are misted with trees and re-edged with cut-out-and-colour delis and small, glass-fronted restaurants whose clientele don’t seem to do lunch, or dinner, or anything other than beautifully hued cocktails.

Inside the house is a middle floor forced between the green-carpeted staircase that leads up to Miss Lassiter’s flat and the peeling wooden steps that lead down to Aaron’s. I am wary here; I remember that Miss Lassiter’s envelope is due today. Miss Lassiter is now Aaron’s tenant, though she used to be his father’s. She leaves monthly envelopes outside Aaron’s door without knocking. Aaron doggedly maintains that she’s shy, but I don’t enjoy Miss Lassiter. When I meet her on the stairs, she thrusts her walking stick out before her like a probe. The outlines of her face are buried in clasped whorls of wool; she wears stiff black gloves, and holds her fingers together so that her thumb is a loner. The gloves make her hands look like blunted hooks.

I tiptoe downstairs and open the front door of the flat. Immediately Aaron is filming me. Kente cloth is threaded into a vivid print belt for his jeans, his socked feet slip on the floorboards. I make a face at him; he lifts his eye away from the viewfinder and, smiling, directs me with his hand, showing me which slats of space I can walk in without damaging his angle.

‘So, Maja,’ he intones, and I know that he’s making a close-up of my face. ‘Who wins? Aaron or . . . GOD?’

I hang up my coat and spread my hands in the shade; he frantically indicates that I should come forward and turn a little more to the right. I do.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘What am I
talking
about?’ He walks backwards, ignoring
my attempt to try and get the camera off him. ‘My girlfriend goes off to a nunnery four times in as many months, and I’m not supposed to worry that she’s about to marry Jesus . . .’

I stop at the kitchen door; Aaron is inside now, shored up against a crumbling wharf of green tile, stacked plates and opened jars. I look into the camera for what feels like forever – I look until I forget that I am seeing anything and my eyes spill over with tension water, and he is abashed and nervously shifts the camera.

When he puts the camera down on the kitchen table I see how tired he is, see the caved-in yawn lines around his mouth and the panda patches around his eyes. He comes to me and rests his forehead against mine. I only really notice the notations that exhaustion leaves on his face when I’ve been separated from the reasons for it: the broken braying of his pager; the fifty-six-hour cover shift at the hospital that upends us into a fraught, airless rectangle of calling each other at the wrong time, not answering calls from each other when it’s most important, me wondering what it means when he forgets to say ‘I love you’ before saying goodbye. His hair is getting too long. He is beginning a beard, and it’s in an awkward adolescent phase, bristling in patches despite itself.

I don’t want dinner, but he starts pounding steaming boiled yams for fresh
fufu
at the kitchen counter. The only help he lets me give is simple; heating up a chicken stew he’s already made. I like watching Aaron burn like this, his body clock hopelessly awry, forehead wrinkled as he revolves around the steel cog of his own nervous energy. I think he likes it when I try to sing him to sleep, although he doesn’t fall for it – he just looks at me with the covers wadded under
his chin, wearing a smile of melting gold like a child’s. Sometimes he wakes up in the night asking what time it is and asking whether someone else finished the tourniquet job he started because he’s forgotten to go back, or asking who collected the X-rays. When he sees that it’s only me, he laughs and curls up against me and falls asleep again.

He eats dinner; I watch him skimming balls of dough-like
fufu
into a rich, dense stew. He asks if I want to talk about the retreat. With the question put as formally as that, I say I don’t. He’s relieved – almost immediately he changes tack and asks whether I’m singing tonight. I’m not, and he’s not on call tonight, so he says, ‘We should go and see a play or a film or something.’

‘OK,’ I say, pretending to leaf through
Time Out
, knowing that he’ll fall asleep before he even finds his shoes.

On the sofa he begins to drowse with his head on my lap, mumbling, ‘Sorry I’m so crap,’ into the fabric of my jeans. I draw my fingers through his hair and tell him to shut up. He sleeps with his grey eyes half open and intent on some object at floor level.

Aaron knows Amy Eleni from a church choir they both used to sing in before Amy Eleni dropped out. I think they must have recognised something in each other, some poorly concealed intensity that other people find nerve-wracking. The first time I met him, when he joined me on a tinsel-strewn sofa at Amy Eleni’s birthday party, Aaron drifted into sleep the way he is drifting now. Then it was because he trusted the swell of skin-longing that drew us together in a searching curve, had us asking each other with our eyes and our small, ironic smiles,
Can I touch you?
His head sought my lap as if he had every right to claim me for his pillow. And I, I drew my knees up a little higher, feeling his soft hair
slipping as he moved with me, feeling his eyes on my lips, drinking in his face; in that way we kissed before we kissed.

Aaron has a strange accent, unevenly crammed with tonality. Some words he sings, others he says so flatly that they’re lost. I thought at first that he might be one of the more outlandish white South Africans until he told me that he had been born and raised in Ghana. When I remember, my accent is as firm and clean as I can make it; it bears unabbreviated sentences with all their rich vowels gutted out by a sharp tip of mindfulness. I speak like this because my parents – their voices smoothed to calm, placeless melody through academia – speak English like this. And I speak like this because it is important that I’m understood. In a country where ears are attuned to courteous, clipped white noise, being asked to repeat myself batters down the words in me, makes my tongue fall down my throat.

At the party, Aaron seemed to be listening to more than just my words; when he dropped his gaze I heard our breathing – his breath absorbed mine and took wings and fluttered shallow, weak, confused at its suddenly expanded span. I was so obviously talking about nothing that I stopped to ask him a question, and it was only when he answered thickly and after a long pause that I realised he had been snoring lightly.

His mouth is maddeningly soft and full; I draw my thumb lightly over his lips and he nips at me.

I hear feet dragging on the steps outside, and the sound has my heartbeat jumping in the palm of my hand, even though I know it’s only Miss Lassiter. It’s only Miss Lassiter, and her envelope is due today. But it holds me still when she takes so long to put the envelope down, waits so long silent outside the door before she shuffles away
(it’s just that she’s old, it’s just that she’s old, she can’t move so quickly)

I have to wait. I have to wait until I feel that Miss Lassiter has gone. It takes a long time to feel that Miss Lassiter has gone. She is only really gone when Mami calls.

Mami is in the payphone down the road from her and Papi’s house.

‘I’m never going back in there again,’ Chabella whispers. I imagine her in the phone box, her fingers holding on to the receiver around one of the disposable handkerchiefs that she reserves for public toilets and public telephones. I close the sitting-room door and sandwich the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I pull my coat on. That pang around my throat comes back, it comes like a guillotine.

‘Do you want to stay here?’ I ask, automatically. ‘Shall I come and get you? What happened?’

Mami’s sob – one sound, arrested because it is so rageful. The words that follow can only tread softly over that sound.

‘He’s broken it.’

‘What?’

‘My altar.’

Mami is a Santero. She constantly tells me that I don’t know what that means. I soon outgrew Mami’s evening flower ceremonies. After a while, the flowers that seemed to answer Chabella’s questions in raptures of hush and smoke revealed themselves to be limp rice paper. What is it that’s holy about those flowers? Is it that they burn? Or that they burn so readily? But you can burn a cross, a witch, a piece of toast . . .

Chabella’s Papi was not a believer in anything much, and believers in Habana were suspicious that Chabella wanted
to be one of them. They did not know her or her father, and they had to be careful, so Mami had to make her own Santeria. When I think of her Santeria initiation I see her surrounded by her Orishas – her guardian Yoruba gods. I see my Mami kneeling with her eyes turned ecstatically upwards into the wet curtains of her eyelids as her priest cuts two bars, each one as thick as a slug’s trail, into the flesh of her tongue. Her altar is a series of four interlinked shrines, grooved pentagons of painted wood and brass threaded with flowers and rosaries and shells and stones and candles and saucers, all of fidelity’s sparse jewellery.

The Orishas came into Cuba on the ships of 1500, which were built as temporary coffers for black gold. The Yoruba gods discovered their Cuba in the dark, hidden in bigger emergencies and cries of warning as patrol ships tried to intercept the cargo. The gods were hidden in the fear of being drowned. They were hidden in the unseen smack, smack, smack of the next man’s head on the ship’s boards as he tried to damage his brain and decrease his market value. The gods were not afraid, but they wept.

On arrival, the Orishas became beloved in secret. Slaves had to be Catholic and obedient or they’d be killed, or worse. The Word ‘slave’ is a big deal to Chabella and Papi; neither of them can get out from under it. It is blackness in Cuba. It is sometimes bittersweet, for such is the song of the
morena;
it is two fingers placed on a wrist when a white Cuban is trying to describe you. Papi tries to systematise it and talk about the destruction of identity and the fragility of personality, but he is scared of the Word. Mami hides inside the Word, finds reveries in it, tries to locate a power that she is owed.

The slaves in Cuba learnt to recognise their gods when
they saw ripped white bed sheets, forked scraps of wood, overturned tin buckets. These things marked places where mass could be celebrated. If you still knew who you were, you had to keep it a secret. The gods hid among the saints and apostles and nobody perceived them unless they wanted to; it didn’t take as much as people had thought for Catholicism and Yoruba to fuse together. The saints intercede for us with God, who must despise us to let us suffer so. The Orishas intercede for us with Olorun who, being a darker side of God, possibly despises us more. A painting of a saint welling holy tears and the story of an Orisha teach you the same thing – if you cry for someone, it counts as a prayer.

2
mama proserpine and her aspects

In the Cuba house, before before, Aya and her Mama loved so fiercely. For noonday naps they lay entangled in the centre of the bed, fingers tearing tracks in each other’s hair. When awake, Aya followed where her Mama went, shoes clacking on bamboo tiles. Perched on an outcrop of their greeny-gold garden, Aya and her Mama were so close together that they heard the water slewing down the rocks with the same ear. And Aya’s Mama warned: Beware Proserpine, since she is the murder that walked from my heart.

Before Aya was born, Proserpine came and caught Aya’s Mama unawares. Proserpine came when Aya’s Mama was still carrying baby Aya in her stomach, ripe, ripe, and feeling it. Every step Mama took she felt in her stomach, through Aya. Steps became sharp teeth – they bit. They tried to pull baby and mother asunder. Temper was the only way to be higher. One day, because she had raised her voice against him

(with Mama’s full voice comes fear, oh, fear to split you open and make you pour out good gold like yolk)

Papa caused Mama to fall to the ground. Mama fell hard and, as Papa had wanted, as he had needed, she fell quiet.
She lay. She lay under minutes like fingers, and after a handful Aya did not move in her mother’s stomach.

The stillness brought the thought:
I’ve lost this baby
.

Then transparency.

Mama became as a season is; she felt weather in her, she felt empty heat. Slowly she came to understand that she wasn’t alone, that she had some secret help inside her. They got up, Aya’s Mama and her help, and they took a bone-handled cutlass, and they went to the next room to kill Aya’s Papa.

When they came, Aya’s Papa saw two women and one face – the face was small and faraway, and it looked on him with laughter.

Aya’s Papa said, ‘Who is that? Who’s there?’

Mama and her helper didn’t answer – they cut Mama’s fingertip to make sure the knife was sharp enough. The blood rushed well, and quickly. They accused him. They said to him, ‘You’ve made her lose her son.’

Aya’s Papa said, ‘Not a son, daughter. And you haven’t lost her, you couldn’t have.’

But still these two accused him and turned their tiny eyes on him as if his death was already a lens that they looked through.

‘Who is that? What’s there?’ Papa called. ‘Name it – name her.’

Mama said later, It was too much temptation for my help; he was giving her a chance to be. So she broke away from me to name herself – Proserpine – and a name was all he needed to take her from me.