The Opposite House (7 page)

‘What happened to your shoulder?’ I ask.

Tomás clears his throat, squeaks unintentionally, pulls a face because his voice is breaking and he can no longer trust it. I say again, ‘Your shoulder?’

‘There’s this boy in my class whose dad is Colombian or something. He’s such a dickhead. Truly. If you met him, you would straightaway think, “What a dickhead.” It’s something about the way he talks, the way he walks, his big walnut-shaped head –’

‘You hate him,’ I say. I am laughing.

‘No, he’s a good goalie. I just think he’s a dickhead. His name is Jorge Ruiz-Cole.’

‘Jorge Ruiz-Cole,’ I repeat, obediently. ‘What did Jorge Ruiz-Cole do?’

He replies on a long, low whistle, trying to strain his voice deep.

‘Well, he thinks he knows everything about Cubans, right, because his dad’s from Colombia or whatever, so he keeps asking me things, like about food and our family in Cuba and stuff like that, and I usually don’t answer him, so yesterday he asks me how come my surname doesn’t come in two parts, like why don’t I have two parts to my surname instead of just having my father’s surname. And I didn’t answer him. But he started pushing me and saying come on, come on, why are you so quiet, what, are you a bastard, is it your mother’s name? So I said, OK, it’s because we’re black Cubans, and it’s not the same as white Cubans you know, because at first in my mother’s family and my father’s family kids had the same surname because both their parents were slaves in the same household and had the same surname, their owners’ surname. You can’t have the children called Luis Fernandez-Fernandez or Luis Carrera-Carrera, so they had to work it out so that only the fathers’ surname got passed down, right? That’s what I told him. And when I said it, all the others started booing Jorge Ruiz-Cole and telling him to leave it and saying “Picking on a slave’s son! You knew that, you fat bastard!” Because this guy Jorge is actually quite fat.’

I put a finger over the hairless stroke in Tomás’s eyebrow, filling in his gap.

‘Then what happened?’

Tomás pinches me, not to hurt, just as a reflex to my touching him. ‘He got angry,’ he says, slowly. ‘Really angry. Because I think he was trying to make them laugh, but they were all on my side, because we’d watched
Roots
in History last week. So he was all pissed off, and he punched me in the face.’

‘Your face looks fine.’

‘I know. He’s shit at punching. So I punched him in the face, and then it was a fight.’ He sighed.

‘And?’

‘And then some of his friends came in.’

‘Came in where?’

‘Into the fight. It wasn’t personal, it was just, like, they were getting into the whole fighting thing.’

I stare at him. ‘And
your
friends?’

Tomás stretches, looks around me and out of the window.

‘Esos bastardos pequeños
! No one stuck up for you? Not one of them?’

‘It’s . . . just school,’ he says.

‘It’s meant to be a Catholic school!’

We both think about that. We both dismiss it as a redundant factor.

He says, ‘Don’t tell Papi or Chabella.’

Tomás came home after his first day at secondary school and said he wasn’t going back. He said it standing up very straight by the kitchen table, as if he was making a formal report. Tomás was talking fact. Mami and Papi looked at each other; they had been prepared for the boy to say this.

(I had said the same kind of thing after my first day at secondary school: ‘Please don’t make me go any more, please, please, please or I promise you I will die of school!
Morir
! And then you’ll see.’)

Papi went to a boys’ school too. He told Tomás to approach school using game theory; identify an aim (to survive) and two key strategies to minimise losses. He had to work out who were the strongest players and count himself as a weak player until he could make enough alliances to consider himself safe.

Mami bit her lip. She had a pupil to tutor in half an hour, but she promised Tomás that afterwards she would make him the best
pasteles
he’d ever had and they would talk. Tomás stood there with the strap of his schoolbag unravelling around his hand and he shook his head, meaning No, there would be no debate on the matter.

Chabella said, ‘Tomás, come now. Is it the other boys?’

Tomás said something, but we couldn’t understand him because his teeth were clattering so loudly against each other. Papi sat and looked at Tomás; he looked and looked, his gaze became abstracted somehow. Tomás put his hand to his forehead, hid his eyes, but he stayed where he was until Papi told him, ‘Say that again?’

Tomás managed, ‘It’s so cold there.’ Papi got up and checked Tomás’s face, held Tomás to him in a rough bear hug that Tomás struggled against. Contact was gaylord.

Mami said again, ‘Is it the other boys?’

Papi said, ‘Don’t you hear him? He’s cold!’

He ran Tomás a hot bath, made him undress and get into it. Tomás sat in the bath with steam rising off him in blinding waves. He shivered and said, ‘Can’t get warm.’

He kept his school scarf on, looped around his neck like a boa constrictor. He wrapped his arms around himself and jolted in silence; with each shiver he almost fell out of the bath. It was like the cold had jammed itself deep into his bones and was climbing back up atop a pneumatic drill. It was only September. In the bathroom we debated Tomás’s sanity, even though there wasn’t really room for all of us in there. Chabella cradled his head and chanted prayers and wondered aloud, ‘Has someone cursed the London baby? Someone is sending him strong memories of Cuban weather so that he cannot bear it here.’

Papi said, ‘How is it that neither of these children have inherited my excellent nervous system?’

I shouted Papi down, ‘What, what?’ and Chabella said, ‘Your nervous system, your nervous system indeed.’ She cupped her hands around Tomás’s ear and blew gently, gently, warm air into his mind. Tomás’s eyes fluttered closed and he sighed, but he still trembled.

Papi shook his head impatiently and said, ‘Chabella, that’s enough. It’s obvious that he’s in some kind of shock. Though why school should send him into shock and none of the other boys, God only knows. What the boy needs is to restart his circulation.’

His voice was so fierce it made Chabella stand away to let him by. Papi sat on the edge of the bath, reached into the water and closed his fingers around Tomás’s ankle. Tomás flinched, panicked and yelled, ‘No, get off!’

Papi said, ‘Nonsense. I’m your father.’ He ran his palm along Tomás’s right foot, then his left, over and over, circle shapes, star shapes. Papi tickled Tomás’s soles, pinched his calves, rubbed the muscles there. He watched Tomás relax and lay back in the water, shoulders pillowed on soapy bubbles. Chabella closed the door then, and she didn’t ask Tomás about the other boys any more. She sent him back to school with sweet tea and extra scarves. My brother came home with an empty flask and a report: the day had been warmer.

In Aya’s Cuba, before before, a trick of silence rippled over the bleached facade of the Regla house as soon as a stranger’s voice was heard. The house teetered amongst sun-frayed baobab branches, a spoilt child proudly cradled in a multitude of arms, oblivious to danger. Yemaya, much younger then, played the way that she preferred to, hiding and seeking another pretend Yemaya amongst hill-sized tree roots.

But a red-eyed visitor, he caught Aya. He had scars on both cheeks; they hissed the name of his tribe. He seized Aya by the arm and shook her. He was so much bigger than her that his long finger and thumb encircled her wrist and left room. Under the crisp sweep of his hat brim, he snarled his face away until it was gone into a puckered muzzle.

Aya

(thought,
he wants to kill me
)

didn’t know how to appease such hate – it wasn’t that she was too young; it was that there was too much.

‘At first I thought you were one of them,’ he said. ‘But you’re just a child.’

Around the man’s neck hung a locket of size; it clunked against his chest with its mouth open and a glossy white woman smiled out. Brown hair, pink cheeks. This visitor thought the glossy woman was something to do with Mama. Aya stared; was it true?

‘Anyway,’ the red-eyed visitor said, ‘I must have something for my pains.’

He had been drinking palm wine; she smelt it. It was his drunkenness that made him try to steal her from her home, it was folly that made him lift her and throw her over his shoulder. Aya did not struggle – she was surprised. She just thought about herself, pinned over this man’s shoulder like
a sash on a costume. Her face lay against the man’s sweaty back, her knees grazed his stomach. The man stank. He clamped a hand around each of her ankles to hold her still, and he began to run. He ran fast, and Aya’s breath was almost tipped out of her.

Winded, she gasped, ‘So you like wine?’

She said, ‘You are lucky. I am for the thirsty ones.’

She spoke faintly, but she spoke plainly. She told the man, fine, keep running, keep holding on to my legs like that. Kidnap me and you shall have all your dreams. She told this visitor that if he didn’t leave go of her, he would have all the palm wine in the world to drink. Yes, she said, this I can do for you and more, but all the palm wine in the world will never be enough to kill the thirst that will draw your stomach to your throat, tight, tight and tight. How you will drink for that thirst? You will drink so much that you’ll drown inside your own body, and your last breath will slide out over a dark bubble of bloodied wine.

Finally the man set her down and he shambled away, crying out.

Aya walked home. The visitor had not brought her far; they had not left the forest. The sun was setting, and creatures that she could only feel made their paths through the trees.

After him Aya waited for others who had been turned away and tried to do them the favours they had come to ask of Mama and the other elders. As long as the favours were small, Aya could do them.

One day, Mama caught Aya carefully peeling away a kneeling grandmother’s cloudy-milk cataracts. She brought Aya to her bedroom, where rows and rows of her plainly cut wooden masks watched with thick smiles. The masks
hung on brackets that slid through their eyeholes with lighted candles balanced on their flattened planes. The masks bled red and purple silk linings that made puddles where they touched the floor, but Mama stepped over them with graceful economy, drawing her wrapper up over her ankle in the same motion that she used to raise her foot. Mama sat on her tied-cane chair and put Yemaya on her knee; she smilingly accepted sticky showers of guava kisses on both cheeks, but she was not diverted. She said, ‘Aya, I suggest you don’t do as these visitors ask. I think it is like telling lies.’

But Yemaya Saramagua, she wants the visitors.

On the utmost tiptoe with leaf-strewn balcony stone, a pain burnt into each over-stretched arch, Aya tells the trees, ‘It’s not that I’m lonely.’ The trees stoop over the somewherehouse with their heads fused together and they do not listen and they cannot be reached. ‘Not that.’

And the visitors come. They come with beaded collars in her favourite colours layered on their necks like second skins. They come chewing on her name; confident like teeth cracking kola nuts; sure as sure, bitterness bursts and loses its way under the sallow pinch of salt.

Once, a bad woman came.

She came in through the London door and found her way up the basement stairs with so little noise that Aya was startled. The woman was deep yellow and slightly built. An ivory comb with a whorled oval head crawled up her frizzy heap of hair. Someone had made this bad woman come here. She was not willing and she wore no beads; she had broken them because she was afraid. Her shoulders were a bad fit; the tops of them stood higher than was correct, and
they gave her the appearance of constantly trying to achieve flight. For healing she had brought her poorly only son, a wan stick-boy of twelve who she was slowly sickening with pinches of ground glass because she hated him, because she loved him, and he would not obey her or stay by her side when he was well.

The woman, on her knees beside her son

(who met the floor of the somewherehouse without question or effort – it was only then that Aya realised that the previous acts of standing and walking had made no sense to him)

murmured meek pleas. The boy, slumped at the other end of his mother’s arm, did not understand what was happening to him, now or before. When Aya lifted her veil and the boy saw her face, he mewled in panic, coughed. Then, to the stirring of a great tenderness in Aya, the boy mastered himself in ashen silence the way he thought a brave somebody should.

Aya healed him.

She led the boy toward the bath, down the wayward third-floor hallway which threw itself off into a triangular corner after a few narrow and uncertain yards. Aya took the sick boy past the closed door beyond which the Kayodes sang. She held her arms around the boy’s shoulders to keep him from stumbling and bent close to him to ask his name, but the boy’s eyelids slammed shut at the sound of Kayodes’ singing. His face suffered an unconsciously repeated twitch.

Aya pitied the boy less.

She sent a drop of her vanilla essence to the bottom of the deep bath, then rocked back, easy, easy on her heels; the bath steam knotted as her vanilla stung it, the bath steam drank weight and was left tangible.

She stroked a wisp of it and it stayed intact, moved with her, curled under and around her hand.

Air had to be taken in the tiniest sniffs.

The sick boy sat and watched her. The sick boy blinked and said nothing. Aya left him to undress and wash. Then she went downstairs and stared at the mother until the woman bent low with her fingers welded into pincers to support her head. When the son came down alone, there was life in his eyes again. He trembled in his clothes and reached for his mother, who clawed him up into her arms.

And Aya didn’t warn the son about the mother’s food.

4
henry s. foote

Amy Eleni’s hands. At first I was scared to let her wash my hair because I thought it would be too difficult for her. But really my hair is simple – once it is washed and fed with coconut oil, it sighs and falls asleep. And nobody washes my hair like Amy Eleni used to. Aaron is too gentle; he gets scared the minute he touches my scalp. But Amy Eleni puts one soft hand on my forehead and, with her other hand, rakes slippery fingers through my hair, comes back down with more air on the ends of her fingertips like seaweed fronds to breathe through underwater. But when she started seeing Sara, Sara insisted that she and Amy Eleni wash each other’s hair exclusively.