The Opposite House (4 page)

Like every girl, I only need to look up and a little to the right of me to see the hysteria that belongs to me, the one that hangs on a hook like an empty jacket and flutters with disappointment that I cannot wear her all the time. I call her my hysteric, and this personal hysteric of mine is designer made (though I’m not sure who made her), flattering and comfortable, attractive even, if you’re around people who like that sort of thing. She is not anyone, my hysteric; she is blank, electricity dancing around a filament, singing to kill. It’s not that there are two Majas; there is only one, but she can disappear into her own tension and may one day never come back.

My second ever boyfriend was five years older than me, frizzy, blond-haired and rugby-player-built, a postgraduate student when I was a first-year undergraduate. He seemed to prefer my personal hysteric to me. He told me over and over that I was beautiful, sweet, so clever.

In his mouth, on his tongue, those words were not safe.

And he said these terrible things earnestly enough to make me sit on my hands when I was across from him at dinner. In his mouth, on his tongue, those words cast a spell which conjured me into the things he kept insisting I was.

Luke was always pleading with me to calm down before I even realised that I was unsettled. I stopped daring to raise my voice at him, or smile too much, even. Luke made bedtime drinks for me, mugs brimful with creamy white, warm Kahlua and milk. When I sipped them sleepily from the enfoldment of his arms, I became convinced that I was ill, and that it was terminal. There was no other reason for such care, for the way he laid hands on me so lightly that it seemed I was already disappearing. One night, drunk, drunk, drunk, I dropped my empty shot glass and a full
one for Luke, sat down beside the pieces and arranged them in my skin, twisting clear flowers planted to grow from my soles, my arms. It hurt. But wearing my hysteric, it became a matter of art and pain and so on. It was extreme, it was because of tension. Luke took me to Accident and Emergency and spoke to me richly, quietly, held me for as long as he could while I cried and put my sight away from my torn skin.

We went to a girls’ school, Amy Eleni and I. We know about subtle, slow murder, the way that glances and silences and unnecessarily kind words can have a girl running into traffic trying to get hit so that she doesn’t have to turn up the next day. When Amy Eleni arrived at the hospital she was in no mood for pleasantries. She took Luke aside and told him to ‘Fuck
right
off. Immediately.’

Luke became typical; he called her a man-hating dyke, and she made some movement towards him, some movement that scared him. It was as if she was going to pincer his testicles and he thought she’d do it, so he shrank. When she told me about it her voice rose and fell, bitter and sad. Amy Eleni told me gossip about Luke as I waited to be allowed to go home. One girl had said to her, ‘Luke only goes out with nutters. But he’s never been out with a black girl before, so she must be extra psychotic.’

My hysteric smells foreign, like perfumed sand, but maybe that’s how she’s supposed to smell. She is not part of me, but part of my store. In times of need she converts into my emergency image of Chabella, a poorly done portrait that I can show people when I need to ask, ‘Have you seen this woman?’

I have no natural sensitivity; I am forced to it.

For a boyfriend from the Ivory Coast, handsome and
strong like a mined mineral, I cut off all my hair. Because he said he preferred me like that, all long neck, bare ears and hopeful eyes. I hated my hair like that, hated it almost too much to live. When I wasn’t with him I spent a lot of time crying. Chabella, who sometimes is my mind outside of me, said, musingly, ‘You look like a boy with that haircut. Your nose . . . it takes over the middle of your face when there’s no hair to look at. It’s strange, because in actuality your nose isn’t that big.’

Amy Eleni only said, ‘It’ll grow. Your hair always grows really fast.’

But I had to keep cutting away new growth with scissors. When he broke up with me, he said he was unhappy that I didn’t seem to love my hair in its natural state. I asked him, Is its natural state short? He just said he had to go. I ran a bath; the hysteric came and I was persuaded to try and drown myself. But Amy Eleni phoned and I realised I wanted to answer the phone just a little bit more than I wanted to die.

Amy Eleni gets it. When I first tried to describe the hysteric to her, she snorted and said, ‘You can’t speak for all of us.
My
personal hysteric walks three paces behind me at all times, and when it’s all a bit much, I kind of hang back and she kind of hurries forward, and she jumps on my back and takes me down. Then she stands up in my place.’

I said I didn’t like that idea. I said it sounded like a denial of responsibility, a denial that Amy Eleni was underneath her hysteric.

‘I
am
underneath her,’ Amy Eleni said. ‘She has her fucking stilettos digging into my spine.’

When Amy Eleni isn’t doing well her thoughts ignore her and come out exactly the way they want to. One summer
her mother went to Cyprus without her. Even though Amy Eleni wanted to go, so much. But Despina was punishing her because of a bad school report. We were in her bedroom at her parents’ house, and she was sitting on the broad window ledge with her curls squashed against the glass, her hands clawing the window as if she was trying to hold her house upright. She said insistently, through gritted teeth, ‘Do you aid me with my pulse which is gone away.’ She said it a few times before I heard the words. I can’t remember her expression; instead I think of redness. But if she had punched the window she would only have hurt herself.

When we were fourteen Amy Eleni decided that she and I should be friends. Before that, she wouldn’t talk to anyone she didn’t want to talk to. She was a bit dangerous. She ate lunch by herself – as if lunchtime for the packed-lunch students wasn’t all about setting up a circle of chairs in the school hall for your group, as if lunchtime wasn’t all about showing that you had a group. She placed her chair near the centre of the hall so that she faced outwards, looking toward the door, and she sat cross-legged on it, eating interesting-looking food that didn’t match her precise, English features; flat pita sandwiches filled with grilled chicken, cold stuffed vine leaves, squares of honeyed pastry, pomegranates. She ate daintily and with a calm that said she couldn’t be bothered with the likes of us.

At lunchtime I always struggled with Chabella’s sandwiches. Like all her food, Mami’s sandwiches are works of slow-cooked love. They’re ostentatious and difficult to eat in public – by the time you curl your fingers around one and take a bite, the marinated pork or chicken has already spilled out from atop the onion- and tomato-stuffed cocoon
of wheat-rich bread, and a shower of sandwich and salsa sauce spatters your hands and your lap. You can’t even lick your fingers as you would leaning on the table at home because you feel guilty, you feel embarrassed, you feel mad to have brought in such a luxury bed of a sandwich when everyone else is making do with the equivalent of string hammocks.

Amy Eleni was probably equal to the challenge of a Chabella sandwich – I had never seen her blush. She made no attempt to customise her uniform; she just let it hang off her in limp monochrome. Her hair was longer, then. She let it all curl into a big, burnt-yellow shock, thick enough for me to pile up on her head later in a crown of Senegalese twists. But at that time everyone, including me, ignored her insistence on being addressed at all times as ‘Amy Eleni’. We just kept calling her ‘Amy’, which sometimes forced her to shout ‘Die before your parents do!’ and slap her rump in the direction of the person who was disregarding her wishes. The rumours about her were numerous, but the predominant one was that Amy had three boyfriends and was having sex with all of them on a timetabled basis.

One day Amy Eleni, her most devastating smile in place, beckoned me away from the centre of my lunch circle, where I had been sitting with one foot up on the edge of another girl’s chair laboriously washing pink varnish over her fingernails. I went over to Amy Eleni with the nail varnish still in my hand, and she took it from me and screwed the lid back on. The first thing she told me, with breathtaking serenity, was that we should be best friends because we were both pretty, and pretty girls always found it difficult to make real girlfriends who wouldn’t turn Judas on them. The second thing she told me was that I absolutely
had to call her Amy Eleni; Eleni was her middle name but she took her Cypriot heritage seriously and found it hard enough to keep up when she looked like a common-or-garden variety English kid and had a surname like Lang. Then she mentioned that at her Holy Communion she had spat out the Host into her hand because she didn’t believe in all that Jesus crap, and that the following Saturday she had snuck back into the church while the priest was taking confession and had tried to make the figurine of the baby Jesus beat upon a drum to prove his reality. She’d then broken the figurine because it hadn’t. I stared at her and smiled, timid, aghast. She burst out laughing. She named a book and said I really needed to read it.

Our favourite film is
Vertigo
. Amy Eleni and I must watch it seventeen or eighteen times a year, and with each viewing our raptness grows looser and looser; we don’t need the visuals any more – one or the other of us can go into the kitchen halfway through and call out the dialogue while making up two cups of Horlicks. From the minute you see empty, beautiful, blonde Madeleine Elster, you know she is doomed because she exists in a way that Scottie, the male lead, just doesn’t. You know that Madeleine is in big trouble because she’s a vast wound in a landscape where wounds aren’t allowed to stay open – people have to shut up and heal up. She’s in trouble because the film works to a plan that makes trauma speak itself out, speak itself to excess until it dies; this film at the peak of its slyness, when people sweat and lick their lips excessively and pound their chests and grab their hair and twist their heads from side to side, performing this unspeakable torment.

When things are serious and either Amy Eleni or I need to
beat our personal hysteric, the informal code is to seize your head and twist coils of your hair around your fingers and groan, ‘I’m not mad! I’m not mad! I don’t want to die!’ And if you have a friend who knows, then the friend grabs her head too and replies, ‘There’s someone inside of me, and she says I must die!’ That way it is stupid, and funny, and serious.

Our hysteric is the revelation that we refuse to be consoled for all this noise, for all this noise, for the attacks on our softnesses, the loss of sensitivity to my scalp with every batch of box-braids. Sometimes we cannot see or hear or breathe because of our fright that this is all our bodies will know. We’re scared by the happy, hollow discipline that lines our brains and stomachs if we manage to stop after one biscuit. We need some kind of answer. We need to know what that biscuit-tin discipline is, where it comes from. We need to know whether it’s a sign that our bones are turning against the rest of us, whether anyone will help us if our bones win out, or whether the people that should help us will say ‘You look wonderful!’ instead.

Why can’t we kill this panic, or do the other thing and make it mute?

My heart bounces on the end of a string whenever I hear the names of Chabella’s Orishas. Those gods who trip us up, then haul us up, then string us up, who understand that it hurts, but also understand that it needs to. They’re deadly friends from stories, their names braided into explanations for the heavy nights edged with uncertain light like dull pearls, the nights when Chabella would wake me up at hourly intervals, pleading with me to sip a little, just a little, of one herbal tincture or another. Nights when I protested
with all my soul to be allowed to sleep instead. That is how the Orishas are real to me: Olorun, the father god, greatest of gods, god without a face; Ochun the beautiful, fertile dancer; wise man Orumbila; Yemaya of the ocean; fiery Chango; wily Echun-Elegua; reaper Iku; Ogun, the man of iron.

They make Papi impatient. ‘Those are Yoruba gods,’ he tells Mami. ‘And you are not Yoruba. You are a black Cuban. There is a difference. For an intelligent person, you really surprise me. To us, these gods are historical artefacts.’

Papi rubs his head bemusedly with both hands and tries not to laugh during the midnight Masses and Easter vigils Mami drags us to. He’s not entirely in the wrong; it’s easy to laugh at Mass in a Catholic Church where everyone is so straight-faced and ceremonious, even if they’re just shaking a stick or something. Once when Mami, overcome with tears as a sung Gloria confirmed that Christ has risen, whispered to Papi did he feel something, he squeezed her hand with both of his. He muttered to me, instead of to her, ‘I’m seventy-four, yes, but I’m still lucid.’

Papi’s irritation must begin as soon as he steps inside the house. Where there would usually be a lump of shaped brass, Mami and Papi’s coat stand has a host grinning from its top – a concrete skull, eye sockets filled with dull shells. The shells are eyes for Elegua to look through – Echun-Elegua, the trickster god, who protects us from the works of other, inferior tricksters. He hides behind the door of his ramshackle, crazy-beamed house, watching the people who hurry up and down his crossroads like so many dusty-backed beetles. Some people are speeding past so quickly, so intent on their maps, that they don’t even notice Elegua’s house rocking nonchalantly on the heels of its stilt-feet like Baba Yaga’s hut getting ready to run.

Mami says of Elegua, ‘If you know anything about him, you fear his kindness.’

When Chabella first became a Santero, Elegua chose her for his own – unusual that he should have chosen a woman. But then perhaps my mother’s family is favoured. My great-grandmother, Bisabuela Carmen, was a female
babalawo, a
Santeria priest.

My middle name is Carmen.

I like to sleep with the washed-out, monochrome, passport-sized photo of Bisabuela Carmen under my pillow – the only other copy of it is slotted into Chabella’s altar. In the pictures, Bisabuela Carmen’s skin doubles in on itself in a river of wrinkles; her mouth and nose are washed away. Her gaze is bright, tough; she looks as if she doesn’t care and not caring is a statement – really, I don’t
care!