Becoming Abigail

by Chris Abani

  She stood on the line that cut the earth into two time zones, feet inches apart, marveling at how true to life it all was. That one could be only a small step away from another world, another time, and yet caught firmly in one or the other, or as in her case, trapped forever between two. The graffiti, painted and scratched into the wall that curved around the flow of the faded copper line set into the dirt, surprised her, though she couldn’t say why. He kissed her then and looked into her eyes with an infinite sadness.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Cupping his big face between her small hands, a pair of rare, black butterflies sitting on an outcrop of chalk, she said: “No, no.”

  He just smiled and rubbed the amber pendant around her neck as though it held the promise of a genie, or as if he were trying to erase something. And they walked through the green of the park. What they walked up was more a rise than a hill, a gentle bumping in the ground. Not unlike what she felt for him: an unassuming tenderness.

  Like what she had felt for her father. At least before he died. Before his daily ride on Abigail’s coffin became permanent. The rope he had hung himself from, cut, dropped him, not back into this world, but through the floor, and it seemed as though the hard of concrete yielded like the soft of loam. She hadn’t cried then, feeling instead his release. And now here he was again, in this stranger’s tender fumbling. She touched his face: Derek’s. Beneath them the lights of Greenwich flowed into the lights from the Queen’s house, running into the Thames. She shivered and he mistook the intent.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  She smiled in the dark and pulled him close. They stood there awhile. Then she unbuttoned his shirt and hers. Her breasts, her nipples hard, pressed into his softer chest. This feeling wasn’t the familiarity she had expected. Instead she felt passion enveloping her, and she gave into the safety, the warmth, looking up into his eyes, eyes blue as the sea she had never seen except on television, eyes looking at her, wanting no more than was here. This was love? To be seen. No turning away. No turning toward. Just there.

  Later that night, in Derek’s home, while his wife slept in their floral wallpapered bedroom under the warmth of bedclothes, they made love on the sofa. And Abigail was giving. For the first time, she wasn’t taken. And she wept for her joy and for the loss of Derek’s wife upstairs dreaming the dreams of love amidst all that floral wallpaper, as though in an English country garden. Abigail, this Abigail, only this Abigail, always this Abigail, felt herself becoming, even in this moment of taking. Later, as Derek dozed on the sex-rank sofa, stained with their smeared secretions, she stole into the kitchen and finding the needle Derek’s wife used to sew all her love into the turkey at Christmas, she held it over the naked flame of the gas range. And in the cold reflection of the microwave’s window, she burned two points onto her breasts, one on each. Each one. One on one. Then one in the middle, the hard of her sternum pressing back against the needle. One on her stomach. On each thigh. Each knee. Several round each ankle until they were wearing a garland. Then in the blindness of faith, dots on the back of her thighs, running desperately up to the rise of her buttocks. Then one on her pudenda, dead center. Her fingers followed the needle’s point, popping each blister as it rose in heat, as it rose in its hot desire, like dough rising to the love of the flame, rising to the need of the bread, to the unspoken desire of a child in the blue light of predawn hugging the warmth of a loaf against the cold. And each bubble of hope wept salty water running cool and delicious in its sting. And in the tears running down her face she tasted herself for the first time. For the first time tasting the end.

  And when she returned to the sofa, he was sitting up smoking, each flare in the dark punctuating his waiting. Sitting, she took the cigarette from him and smoked it. He ran his hands over her, stopping as his fingers encountered the bubbles of Braille. He bent and looked closer, looked at her. She caught his eye and pulled back into the shadows. She knew this look. This wasn’t the look in the park. This was the familiar look of men wanting her to be something they wanted.

  “What is this?” and his voice carried all the fear of one losing himself in the salt of a woman.

  She held his fingers against her. Against her dots.

  “This one,” she said, touching the ones on each breast, first one, then the other. “This one is you, this, me. In the middle is Greenwich. Here,” and she was down on her stomach, “is my hunger, my need, mine, not my mother’s. And here, and here and here and here, here, here, here, me, me, me. Don’t you see?” and she showed him the words branded in her skin. How had he missed them when they made love? But he had. “This is my mother,” she was saying. “This is my mother. Words. And words. And words. But me? These dots. Me, Abigail.”

  And he traced her in that moment, the map of her, the skin of her world, as she emerged in pointillism. Emerging in parts of a whole. Each. Every. He wondered what would form should he draw a line between each dot. Connecting. And what would he use for ink? Blood? Semen? He held her. Held her and cried. While upstairs his wife slept. Held her, this man-child who was her social worker.

  His tears felt cool on the hot of her skin. And she smiled as his release cooled her. Like finely worked metal. And she smiled. In the dark.

  Standing here, now, at The Needle, face turned to Greenwich as if seeing the memories play against the dark sky, she rubbed the amber pendant still around her neck furiously. There was nothing more that could be done. Now that she had been found she realized the deeper joy was to be lost. And the amber pendant burned a deeper dot, a deeper mark, invisible though it was. No, the deeper joy wasn’t being lost. But it wasn’t being found. It was being seen. And now that she could not feel that gaze on her, she was more lost than ever.

  “Abigail,” she called softly to the dark. The cold. The water. “Abigail.”

  And with the hum of traffic behind her, it was as though she hadn’t spoken.

  As if the wind was merely passing through her.

  Then

  IX

  She was in a bus on her way home from school. Early. Her cousin Peter was home from London and her father had sent for her. She already knew why. Something lying in the middle island of the freeway caught her eye, diverting her attention. It looked to her like the body of a baby, perhaps tossed from the window of a speeding car by a teenage mother unable to cope. It wasn’t an unusual thought in this country where the dead littered the streets of big towns and cities like so much garbage. But as they drew closer it was simply an untidy pile of rubber from a blown tire. Even though she knew it wasn’t the corpse of a baby, somehow the thought of death stayed with her. It should have been an omen, especially on this day, when she knew Peter and her father were talking about her going back to London with him.

  Thinking of London and her cousin Peter reminded her of her father’s funny stories about his time there. He seldom told them because it invariably meant talking about Abigail. They had gone together. In 1950. Once or twice, though, he would share a story. Like the time he had gone round to look at a bedsit to rent. Not much more than a room with an oil stove for cooking and warmth.

  White landlords, reluctant to rent to blacks, put up signs that read: No Blacks. No Irish. No Dogs. So he had been careful on the telephone when he called up, speaking in the most modulated accent he could summon, somehow managing to pass. He was counting on it being harder for the landlady to turn him down if he and Abigail were standing on the front step.

  They arrived promptly at four p.m. as asked and stood clammy hand in clammy hand while they waited for the landlady to answer the bell. It was winter and the street lamps were already on to light the darkness that had fallen suddenly and densely at three. Her father cleared his throat and smiled reassuringly at Abigail as they heard footsteps approach the door. It swung open to reveal a white woman of indeterminate age—she could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy. She took in the grinning black faces on her stoop and with a short scream fell into a faint.


  Terrified that she had died of a heart attack and that they would be held responsible, they took off at a fast trot down the street and didn’t stop for a good mile. Of course, he was laughing as he told her the story, and Abigail laughed along, imagining her mother and father running down a winter-dark London street. But she could still see the sadness haunting the corners of his eyes, and she was unsure if it was for Abigail, the humiliation of that day, or both.

  When she arrived home after the bus ride, he was sitting on the front veranda supervising Anwara, the local carpenter, who was building a small house. That had been four years before, when she was just ten.

  “What is it, Dad?” she asked as she fetched him a cup of cold water.

  He accepted it gratefully and drank it in one long gulp. Snapping the dregs to the floor with one fluid arm movement, he asked her to fetch another one for Anwara before he answered. She did, and as Anwara drank, she walked back to her father.

  “So what is he building? A dollhouse?”

  “A dollhouse, humm?” he replied. “No, darling, it is a doghouse.”

  “A doghouse?” she asked, surprised. She had never heard of a doghouse and had really hoped it was a dollhouse for her. What did Pedro, their three-legged dog, need a house for anyway? He had slept on the veranda under her father’s chair very happily for as long as she could remember. Mistaking her resentment for confusion, he explained how all the dogs in London had doghouses and since Pedro was getting old he thought it might be a good idea to build him some shelter from the elements. She didn’t respond and he went on to tell her how women in London sent their husbands to the doghouse if they misbehaved and assured her that as the woman of the house, she could do the same to him. She knew he was joking, but somehow it reassured her. That had been about a month ago. Pedro, however, never took to his new residence, preferring his spot under the chair on the veranda, and so a noisy hen and her brood occupied the doghouse.

  Now

  X

  Sometimes there is no way to leave something behind. Something over. We know this. We know this. We know this. This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten. Yet not left over. She knew this. As she smoked. She knew this. This. This. This. And what now?

  Then

  XI

  Peter wasn’t really her cousin, but was married to her cousin Mary. A few years before, at twelve, Abigail had been a bridesmaid at their wedding. She had loved every minute of it. The ceremony, the flower petals strewn everywhere, even the ugly chiffon dress and having to dance with Uncle Ekwi, who stank of decay in the way even the cleanest old people did.

  Peter had cornered her in the bathroom. She didn’t shrink away like other girls her age might have at being sur­prised in the bathroom with her underwear halfway down her legs and the skirt of her dress gathered in a bunch as she squatted over the hole. Nor did she seem impressed that he was a Johnny-just-return. She just held her dress up and peed, not taking her eyes off his. Surprised at her fearlessness he kissed her, his finger exploring her.

  Later, when he was back at Mary’s side, she caught him sniffing his finger occasionally, a smile playing around his lips. If she had felt it was anything special, she certainly didn’t show it, and in time it simply faded into the distance, like an old wine stain on ivory muslin. Even at that young age she knew what men were like.

  She hadn’t seen him since that incident, though he returned to the village from London once a year. She had been away at boarding school and so missed him. She might have missed him this time too, had she not transferred to a local school and become a day student because her father had dropped into depression so serious, he needed her to take care of everything for him. His sudden summons had been something of a treat for her, because it signaled an improvement on his part. She was grateful to Peter for that at least.

  Peter was apparently a successful businessman in London and was very generous to the villagers when he came home, paying for a hospital bill here, new glasses there, some child’s school fees over there, and so forth. Her father really liked him and had often told her about Peter and his trips when she got back from boarding school on breaks.

  “He always takes one young relative back to London as well,” he used to explain. “Imagine how lucky those children are!”

  Now

  XII

  The dog sniffed at the sphinx. At first, Abigail thought it was unaccompanied. But following closely, at the end of a long red leash, was an old woman. Abigail smiled as the dog lifted its leg and peed on the sphinx. The old woman waited patiently while the dog, a fluffy pink poodle, took care of business. All the while she stared at Abigail, though she said nothing. When the poodle was done, they shuffled past, the old crone and the dog, each leading and following alternately.

  Overhead, a plane traced light across the dark. Abigail read in Reader’s Digest that all plane landings were controlled crashes. Like the way we live our lives, she thought. Bumble through doing the best we can and hoping that some benevolence keeps us from crashing. Lighting another cigarette, she wished the plane bring­ing her and Peter to London that day had crashed.

  She felt a raindrop on her skin and looked up into the night. She couldn’t see any rain clouds and there had been no mention of rain on the weather report. She would have remembered. She always checked the weather before she went out. Smiling to herself, she realized how stupid it was to check the weather before coming here. Another raindrop fell, triggering old memories.

  There was a time, it seemed to her, that she lived purely for the pleasure of rain. The way it would threaten the world gently, dropping dark clouds over the brightness of an afternoon, wind whipping trees in dark play. Then the smell; carried from afar, the lushness of wet, moisture-heavy earth, heralding the first cold stabs of water that seemed to just be practicing for the torrent that was about to come. And she, sitting on the dry safety of the veranda, wrapped in a sweater, watching the world weep as the Beatles in the background, tinny and small in the soundscape, asked, Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?

  Glancing at the sky worriedly, she wondered if it was really going to rain. So far there had been nothing more than the first few drops. Well, can’t worry about that now, she thought, as she lit another cigarette and blew the smoke into the empty eye socket of the sphinx.

  Then

  XIII

  Peter was sitting in her father’s favorite chair. An old leather thirties armchair that was comfortable and smelled of the dreams of everyone who had sat in it. She wasn’t sure why, but Abigail felt a surge of anger at this when she walked in from school. Her father smiled at her from the sofa and she felt Peter’s eyes on her body when she passed by in the short skirt of her uniform. She went upstairs and changed into a pair of sweats. Coming back downstairs, she re-entered the sitting room. A quick glance revealed the men had already helped themselves to beer.

  “Are you hungry, Dad?” she asked, pointedly ignoring Peter.

  “Abigail, where are your manners? Offer our guest food first,” her father replied.

  “It’s okay,” Peter said smiling. “I’m sure she didn’t mean any­thing by it. But thank you for your offer, I am kind of hungry.”

  Shooting him a look, she went into the kitchen and soon the sound of pots banging carried through to them. In no time at all, she had made a big plate of eba and a steaming bowl of egusi soup.

  “Lunch is ready,” she called as she set the kitchen table. Bringing their drinks in with them, the two men sat down and looked surprised when she joined them. They had expected her to eat later, or simply take her food to her room, while they discussed important things.

  “You’re joining us?” her father asked. But it wasn’t a question. More a reprimand.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “That’s just fine, because I am here to talk about you,” Peter said. “Mary has asked that I bring Abigail back on this trip to come and live with us in London. She can finish school the
re.”

  “But my father needs me,” she said. “Besides, won’t it get crowded with the other relatives you’ve taken to live with you already?”

  Mary needed her, Peter explained. All the other kids he had taken back had fallen in with bad crowds and run away. Abigail’s father wanted her to go back with Peter.

  “Your life will be better,” he said, voice quiet. “London will give you a higher standard of education and living.”

  She felt his sacrifice knowing that he was fighting his heart the urge to beg her to stay. But there was also the faintest shadow in his eyes, one that revealed rather than occluded. She shivered and crossed herself, arms and legs locked.

  Now

  XIV

  “Dreadful about Chechnya,” Abigail repeated over and over as she watched Bridget Jones’s Diary for the tenth time.

  “Dreadful about Chechnya,” Abigail said to the sphinx, smiling at the memory. She had been trying to perfect her English accent. She realized pretty quickly, from the way she was treated at the shops and in the doctor’s office, that the English could forgive you anything except a foreign accent. The flat was silent other than the contortions of her voice.

  She heard the key in the lock and paused the film as Mary came in. Abigail got up to help with the grocery bags. Chatting away in the kitchen as they put away the food, Abigail wondered absently if this was how it would have been if her mother lived. There was comfort in this simple task. The ordering of life in cupboards and refrigerator shelves.