Becoming Abigail

by Chris Abani

  She liked that. Was like that. Wrapping herself each night in anecdotes about Abigail. Collected until she was suffused with all parts of her. She rolled the map up and snapped an elastic band securely around it. Leaving it in a corner, she crossed a shaft of light from the shutters and cut a swathe through the motes, leaving the room to the silence and the dirty, lazy sunlight.

  Now

  IV

  The cigarette burnt her finger as it smoked down to the filter. She threw it into the river. Following its glowing path, she imagined the hiss of its extinction as it hit the thick wet blackness. Sucking her finger she watched a train rumble across a bridge flickering light from its coaches into the water, back and forth over the Thames, carriages lighting the darkness of warehouses and tired stations. It was like the reassurance of blood. That life would go forwards and back­wards, but never stop. Not unless the tracks were snowed over.

  She pulled up her left sleeve and absently traced the healed welts of her burning. They had the nature of lines in a tree trunk: varied, different, telling. Her early attempts were thick but flat noodles burned into her skin by cashew sap. With time came finer lines, from needles, marking an improvement. But there were also the ugly whip marks of cigarette tips. Angry. Impatient. And the words: Not Abigail. My Abigail. Her Abigail? Ghosts. Death.Me. Me. Me. Not. Nobody. She stared at them.

  This burning wasn’t immolation. Not combustion. But an exorcism. Cauterization. Permanence even. Before she began burning herself she collected anecdotes about her mother and wrote them down in red ink on bits of paper which she stuck on her skin, wearing them under her clothes; all day. Chaffing. Becoming. Becoming and chaff­ing, as though the friction from the paper would abrade any difference, smooth over any signs of the joining, until she became her mother and her mother her. But at night, in the shower, the paper would dissolve like a slow lie, the red ink, warm from the hot water, leaking into the drain like bloody tears. That was when she discovered the permanence of fire.

  Fumbling about in her bag, she pulled out her purse. Opening it, she stroked the two photographs in the clear plastic pouch, the faces of the two men she loved. Her father, obsidian almost, scowling at the world. Derek, white, smil­ing as the sun wrinkled the corners of his eyes.

  “I am sorry.”

  She muttered the mantra repeatedly. Soothing.

  It was getting chilly and she wished she was wearing more than a light denim shirt. No point in catching a cold as well, she thought, sniffling unconsciously.

  Then

  V

  She stared at the thin undecided film of foam coating the surface of the beer glass on the table. It reminded her of the lake she used to swim in as a child. Not so much a lake, more of a swimming hole; a deep circular cup of rock that sat in the middle of the savanna as though a giant had put down his mug too hard, embedding it in the loose loam. Trees formed a protective circle and birds screamed rudely from the thick foliage.

  The beer in the glass sloshed from side to side as she picked it up to clear the dishes from a late reheated dinner served to her father when he got back from the pub, hungry and tired. He had been impatient, making her give him the food near cold. Catching the light, the beer reflected it. The way the swimming hole would: in a bright smile. It reminded her of happier times. That is, until the grief over her mother’s death.

  It was strange enough just to think about this as grieving. Her mother had died in childbirth—her birth. But this tradition recognized complex ways to be human, and she was allowed to mourn. It was considered harmless. Healing even. The only one who seemed bothered just a little by it was her father. He however deferred to the wisdom of the group and observed silently. Abigail often caught him looking at her and she wondered how it was for him. To watch his child, who looked so much like his dead wife, grieve. As though she was a young version of his wife, grieving her own death in advance.

  He was good. Not interfering when she decapitated all her dolls and recreated a funeral for each one. He grew uncomfortable yet still remained silent when she shot six birds from the sky with her rubber catapult and stones collected almost as a meditation from the loose gravel bordering Abigail’s grave. He was silent even when she dressed them in lace torn from the trim of her mother’s wedding dress. Collecting sticks into bundles that she arranged in geometric patterns, she placed the lace-wrapped birds on these funereal pyres, deliberately holding each one over a candle that stood like a sentinel, until they filled everything with the scent of roasting meat and the revulsion of burning feathers. She took seven photographs of her mother from the family album, tore the faces out and turned them upside down with seven candles on them while she muttered an incantation over the torn faces. Collecting with the deliberateness reserved for communion wafers, she then took the candles off the photo fragments, picked up the fragments, and held the severed photos of her mother’s face up to the light before cramming them into her mouth. As he watched her, her father decided that she had crossed the line. She had watched him then with a calm that terrified him, strong even as he unraveled like an untrimmed wick.

  The psychiatrist he took her to was overworked and underpaid and only interested in the truly mad. And there were no end of those in their town, wandering the streets naked and sometimes violent, occasionally attacking family members with machetes before settling down to eat the cleaved-off flesh as directed by some unseen deity or demon. The doctor had no time for a mildly confused and lost little girl who he felt just missed her mother, so he prescribed sweet-tasting children’s aspirin for her and sent them home.

  So her father took her to the local witch. He didn’t entirely believe that she was a witch, or that there were real witches. As far as he could tell, she was just an old woman who profited on people’s fear. The old witch smiled as she first consulted a spread of cards and then bones and then coins, before telling him to go and buy a heavy silver bracelet and earrings to match, as she needed to use them to anchor the girl in this reality. Reluctantly he did as he was told. As the old woman slipped the jewelry on Abigail, her father asked her if it was necessary.

  “Of course it is. You are a man. You know nothing about raising a daughter and buying her nice jewelry.”

  That memory made her smile and she looked at her sleeping father almost tenderly. Putting the beer glass and empty dishes in the sink, she returned to wake him to go up to bed. But he looked so peaceful that she left him there on the couch, draping a lappa over him for warmth. As she turned out the lights, she was startled by how clear the moon was. And how beautiful the lone star next to it.

  Now

  VI

  The sound of laughter carried clear across the water and she interrupted her brooding to see a brightly lit party yacht sail past. It was colder now and the water was darker. She longed for some warmth. Another fragment of poetry from Emperor Wu came to her. From the Most Distant Time/ Theyears flow like water/ Everything passes away before my eyes. The lines were loud in her head and a moan escaped her involuntarily. A passing policeman stopped and watched her for a few minutes.

  “Are you all right, miss?” he called.

  Startled, she dropped the cigarette she was lighting. Picking it up, she nodded. He hesitated, but something about the sphinxes menaced him and he moved on. She looked at the still-glowing tip. She couldn’t smoke it now. It had been on the floor. Derek would have smoked it. She smiled as she remembered him. She had only known him for two months, and even then, the actual time spent with him only came to about three and a half weeks, yet she felt like she had known him for much longer. Part of her knew that this was because she brought the intensity of first love to their time.

  And she did love him, in spite of his dirty habits. Now, here, she missed them. The way he would pick up food he had dropped, blow it off, and eat it, claiming: “It’s still good if it has only been a few seconds.” And how he wouldn’t always bathe. She knew this because of the way his penis would smell and taste when she rolled back the foreskin. Funk
y, like old earth: the taste of the loam of her mother’s grave. She liked that. I miss him, she thought. Will miss him, she corrected. Before the cigarette burned out, she pressed it against her skin. DSHND, she wrote. Death shall have nodominion. She didn’t know where it was from, but Derek liked it. He had showed it to her the first day they met. It was in a book of poems he always carried in his pocket. At least she thought he did. This thing with him was like with her mother. She wasn’t always able to tell how much she was inventing and how much was real.

  She lit a new cigarette. Sat on the back of the sphinx and watched the traffic wink past. She wondered what the people in their cars, invisible to her, would make of her perched up there, riding the sphinx. Pulling a compact out of her bag, she adjusted her lipstick. One last cigarette, she thought. Not that it mattered at this point.

  She coughed through the harsh tobacco, tears stinging her eyes. The coughing fit caused her to drop her bag and it fell at the foot of the needle, contents spilt: a compact, lipstick, some tissue, a purse, and a book Derek had given her by an African writer, to make her feel at home, he said. The book, Fragments by Ayi Kwe Armah, was one of his favorites, he said. She wasn’t sure if he meant from Africa or in general. Back then those details didn’t matter; now she wished she had asked. Staring at the purse and its contents, she made no move to retrieve them, looking away instead to the river, as the poetry grew louder in her head, forcing its way out of her mouth.

  “. . . Think of the days/ When we were happy together/,” she quoted from Su Wu’s poem. “If I live I will come back/ If I die,remember me always/”

  Then

  VII

  An abandoned truck filled the frame of her window. It had been there since she was a child and she couldn’t remember to whom it had belonged. Green moss grew over the left side and bougainvillea draped down from an adjacent building to stroke it in the evening breeze; purple flowers against the burn of rust.

  A shrub grew out of the truck’s roof, rising straight up from the floor of the cab like an impatient passenger. Birds nested in its open trunk and, judging from the noises issuing from it at dusk, it was home to other creatures too.

  Grass grew thick around its wheels and you could almost imagine that they were a pit crew eagerly changing tires. That was the way it was here sometimes. A thing was left where it broke and the land, the forest, soon claimed it back, giving it new meaning, until one day you simply forgot that it was the rusting carcass of a once red truck.

  And yet even staring out at that truck, thoughts of Abigail filled her world. By all accounts she had been a tall, thin woman whose eyes held a power beyond the black pools of her irises. Tall, thin, and dark, she, this Abigail, looked so much like the other that her father had named her the same. She was more ghost than her mother, however, moving with the quality of light breathing through a house in which the only footprints in the dust were those of her dead mother. Even her laughter, at once wild and reigned in, was all Abigail.

  It remained unspoken between her and her father, but as with all silences, it had all the well-worn familiarity to it of an over-loved pet, shedding fur everywhere it went, leaving faint traces of its animal scent on the hands. And always in that smell, the possibility of danger, of an edge untamed, like a knife unseen in the suds of a washbasin, nicking a finger painfully. Yes, this thing was like that. The shadows under the smiling eyes that said over and over—you killed her. You. Why her? I loved her.

  So she was always Abigail. Yet not. How could she be? How could she live up to the reputation of a woman who was known to confront wife beaters and explain to them, quietly and politely, that if they didn’t change she would cut off their penises? A woman who was feared by most men for her independent spirit; who at thirty-five became a judge, and set up the first free women’s advocacy group. The shape of that Abigail was so clearly marked, the limits traced out in the stories that filled the world around this Abigail, that it was hard to do anything but try to fill the hollowed-out shape.

  Insatiable for her mother, she would seek out anyone who had known Abigail and offer to trade a chore for an anecdote, trying to create memory, make it concrete, physical. She collected vignettes about Abigail, hoarding them fiercely. Then late at night, when all was silent apart from the occasional call of night birds and dogs baying at the moon, she would unwrap them in her mind and feast, gorging herself. Sated, she traced their outlines on her skin with soft fingers, burning them in with the heat of her loss, tattooing them with a need as desperate as it was confused. She tried to talk to her father about this need to see herself, but he couldn’t understand what she meant. Or maybe he just pretended not to. The desire to be noticed for herself didn’t go away though. She couldn’t be the ghost he wanted her to be.

  One night, she dyed her hair a bright purple and slapped a thick coat of makeup on, before approaching him as he sat in the kitchen at the old table. The wood was worn and nearly white from all the scrub-downs with warm water and abrasive natural soap. There were knife marks, as fine as paper cuts, in the top. She ran her fingers along them meditatively as she sat down at the other end of the table, opposite him. Some of the cuts she recognized, others she didn’t. Perhaps Abigail had put them there as she cooked dinner for him. Abigail, this Abigail, hated cooking and was surprised to hear that her independent and fierce mother had still found it in her to tend to her husband in this way. Looking up, her father smiled.

  “Hey, baby, can I get you anything?” he asked.

  “No, Dad, I just wanted to talk.”

  “What about?” he asked, folding the newspaper he had been reading into a neat square, which he placed on the table, under the beer mug he had been drinking from. He hadn’t been back from work that long and hadn’t made it to the bedroom to change.

  “About my period,” Abigail began. “About being a woman.”

  He looked away uncomfortably. “Abigail! How can you bring that up, eh? I was just about to ask you to make dinner.”

  “But Dad.”

  “Your mother would never have talked like this, you know? She knew the right way to conduct herself,” he said. Then, noticing her hair for the first time, he let out a long sigh. “What have you done to your hair? What have I done to deserve this? And why are you wearing all that makeup?”

  “What do you care!”

  “Abigail!”

  “Which one, Dad?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is me, Dad. Me!”

  “I know that. How could I not?” he asked. “You look just like your mother. Now, how about making dinner while I go and change?”

  The chair made a scraping sound when he pushed back from the table and stood up. As he left the room, he patted her arm and smiled.

  It happened while she was cooking. She looked up and out of the window over the sink. In the soft light of dusk she saw a stranger’s face reflected back at her: a full head of hair, mascaraed eyelashes, and a red gash of a mouth. She was so shocked she dropped the plate she was washing.

  “Are you all right?” her father called out.

  “Fine,” Abigail mumbled, reaching for the sharp paring knife in the ornately carved wooden rack by the side of the sink. Grabbing a fistful of her hair, she hacked it off. She kept hacking, the hair piling up by her feet, until she had a rough crew cut. Then, reaching into the cupboard above her head, she took out her mother’s set of ten glass dishes with lids and placed them carefully on the table.

  Rushing upstairs, she grabbed a tampon, some cherry red lipstick, a pair of frilly panties, nail polish, and a picture of Tom Cruise torn out of a magazine. Returning to the kitchen, she put each of the items into a separate dish and covered it. Then she put some locks of her hair into another, some whole dried chilies into another, rice, a washing glove, and nail clippings that looked like drops of dried blood into the last one. Then she arranged the dishes on the kitchen table in a pyramid. When he came down for dinner a few minutes later, her father took in her wild look and t
he insane display on the table. He looked all crumpled and creased like an empty cigarette packet.

  “Those were your mother’s marriage dishes,” he said finally, as though this desecration was too much.

  Now

  VIII

  Of course she realized that there was the flow and the intent, hers and the river’s, and that no amount of thought, or nos­talgia, could change this thing at the center of her desire. And how many ways can you describe a landscape? As though the quantities would somehow add up to a math of possibility, a chance even. But such things lay in the realm of luck and were available only to horses and their antagonists.

  The neon tower of the Haywood Gallery flashed at her from across the water, part of the ugly South Bank Arts complex. It had never looked so beautiful. The millennium wheel, or the London Eye as it had been officially christened, sat dark and towering like a birthday wish grown too big and abandoned by some child.

  She and Derek had taken a ride down the river to Greenwich, from the pier less than five minutes up river, near the cart that sold plastic scale models of The Needle and the sphinxes. They ignored the tour guide’s monologue, just happy to be together in the incredible joy of a spring day. Getting off at Greenwich, they explored the Cutty Sark. The cutter, retired from its days as a trade ship carrying spices and tea between India and London, was now a museum. They had stumbled into each other in the narrow gangways giggling like a pair of school kids. Derek led her through the magic of Greenwich’s famous market, every bit as romantic as an Arabian souk. Carefully, as if more rode on the decision than was visible, Derek chose an antique-looking silver necklace with a large amber pendant. Against the old tarnished silver, the amber looked like a blob of honey melting on dirty ice. She let him put the necklace on her and lead her up through Greenwich Park, past trees that looked older than the ghost stories they had spun, up the hill to the observatory. Below them, on a clear summer’s day, the river and London were visible for miles, he told her, as he pointed away to the distance.