My arms had shaken as I bought the wood; they juddered all the way to the church, and I believed that I would be trembling until I handed the thing in. Part of me thought I could still save my degree if I behaved myself and played to the system. One of my teachers at Sacré Coeur, upon being asked whether he thought exam passes could be obtained through diligent prayer, had looked as if he was thinking very hard and then said, ‘Yes.’
I half-sat, half-fell into a pew. The choir and their director, a sister in a blue and cream habit, ignored me. Aaron’s voice soared, naked, clear, but unsure of its strength:
Veni, veni Emmanuel,
Captivum solve Israel!
The others rose a beat later and clustered his tinsel call, and I felt December coming with footsteps that shook the pavements, and all Decembers before, and the way that, at Midnight Mass, Christmas sometimes seems so sad to me, a giant bedecked with crosses and stars and berries and robins frozen to death.
Qui gemit in exilio,
Privatus Dei Filio.
Gaude, gaude! Emmanuel
Nascetur pro te, Israel.
When the rehearsal had finished, Aaron came over, slightly shamefaced, and I hugged him until he wheezed because he was more beautiful to me for having raised his voice alone.
‘I know why you don’t like to sing in front of me,’ I said in his ear. He put his arms around my shoulders and drove me out into the street before him.
‘Because I’m not very good?’ he hazarded, as if the reason I was trying to guess was not his own.
‘Nope.’
‘You tell me then.’
‘Because you look and sound exactly as if you really mean it, as if you believe in every word.’
Aaron said politely, ‘Is that right?’ and burped, and I screamed ‘disgusting’ and stamped in a puddle to splash his windbreaker. We stood at the bus stop, looking out into brown slush and crawling traffic, and, because he knew that I was still shaking with cold, he opened up his wind-breaker and drew me in against his chest and buttoned us both up into it. There was room for him, me and my sandalwood under that monster of a coat, and there was his heart. It was kicking in his chest, so strong and steady I felt it pushing me. By the time he said, ‘Stop it,’ I had been lulled into such confusion that I thought he was talking about his heartbeat. That wasn’t it; he wanted me to stop standing on his feet. That was why I had been feeling so tall.
8
peaces
To escape Proserpine, Aya slips through the Lagos door of the somewherehouse and hurtles through faded green rooms, past speckled electrical fans that wheeze dust; she bangs the mosquito-netted screen door of the Lagos house open as she bursts out. It must be a Sunday; she shoulders her way through throngs of church-dressed women hastily swapping ornate hats for headwraps to balance trays packed with fried and baked wares. They head for the motorways, to swarm at the sandy sides. Lithe, chirpy boys with baskets of bread and popcorn flock around cars stopped by other cars, tin beads in a necklace of traffic.
Between the gates of a decrepit compound, a man in white rests his arm on the rim of a well. He looks the sun askance. Aya stops by him and drinks some water. The empty main house collapses into its own baked torpor and ignores her. The man nods at her. He is her watchmaker from Habana. Aya wants to embrace her watchmaker and make him tell about the seeds he gave her so long ago, the ones that wouldn’t grow. She speaks first, in Yoruba: ‘Peace, Baba. Is all well?’ His wheeze is as jagged-soft as shaved coconut: ‘You find me in peace; my ancestors have not forgotten me.’
Aya is suddenly unsure of him.
‘Do you make clocks?’ she whispers.
Aya’s watchmaker takes her palm and hides it between his own for a moment. When he takes his hands from hers, there is a thick glass bottle on her palm, ‘Drink Me’ size from Wonderland when Alice was too big.
‘That is different water,’ he tells her. ‘If you have seeds that told you “No” before, they will agree to this.’
She nods, looks back as she walks away.
He has forgotten her already. He squints at the sun now, and raises hands dripping with well water to his mouth. Aya juggles the watchmakers’ seeds in her palm, juggles them all the way back to the somewherehouse, where she paces, watched by Proserpine.
Aya thinks.
Proserpine is still; her delicate elbows rest on her knees.
Aya hesitates at the somewherehouse’s side door and looks out at the trees, their tangled mass of leaves and fruit. She decides that the grass outside has plenty. She turns and runs tracks around bewildered Proserpine, sowing seeds that skip and bump across the somewherehouse’s floorboards. She chases the seeds with long shots of water that smells of fusty spice.
All the way to Papi and Chabella’s I watch my shadow, try to step on it, feed it into every hungry, unlucky crack in the pavement. Nobody looks at me strangely. In Mami and Papi’s part of Peckham, jerk chicken, Obalende suya and shops stocking Supermalt and Maggi sauce are seconds away. Neighbours mind their own business, get their shopping done and fix their eyes on something safe until they’re indoors and can bolt up against the evenings, against the rowdies and the graffitists that sit on low walls and smoke and call out smart comments.
When I still lived at home, Chabella – both alarmed and pleased that those boys never seemed to bother me – made me escort Tomás around the area as often as I could. Once she asked me, ‘Why don’t they pick on you? Which one is your boyfriend?’ She didn’t believe me when I told her that it simply seemed to be a matter of smiling a lot and making sure not to ignore them whenever they asked me something.
At home, Mami sits at Papi’s feet, dictaphone in hand, setting German listening exercises in a high voice while Papi watches a programme about the Pharaohs with the sound turned off. The reel of flame-haloed faces in the altar looks away from them and flickers at the ceiling.
Mami asks if I’m singing tonight; I am, and she is excited for me. But Papi, though he hears what we are talking about, says nothing, which is what he usually does when he is asked a challenging question that he needs time to think about. At dinner a month ago, Aaron asked Papi whether he missed Cuba, and Papi remained silent until Chabella turned it into a discussion of Che Cola versus Coca-Cola. Che Cola lost miserably – Papi summed it up as ‘tasting like shit. And not even shit that’s good for you.’
But days later, Papi phoned and asked to speak to Aaron; he answered the question belatedly, the way people who think too much will. He told him, ‘No, I don’t miss Cuba. I’m not sure that I knew what it was when I lived there. I know now from the outside.’
Aaron was holding the phone between us, and he and I shook our heads at each other because that didn’t sound honest to either of us. Aaron said to Papi, ‘I don’t get it.’
Papi said, ‘Of course you get it. A white man in Ghana? The entire time you lived there, you had one foot outside its borders.’
Aaron said firmly, ‘I really think you are wrong to say that, Juan. I am Ghanaian. I was born there.’
I wish that Papi could give me his response to my singing, something that I can say ‘No, you are wrong to say that’ to. I wish he would give me something other than a gently bemused teasing: ‘Why do you like to sing so much? It is too much. Even your Aunt Lucia, she was just crazy for singing, but she calmed down and became an engineer.’
I go upstairs and tiptoe into Papi and Chabella’s bedroom. Chabella’s vanities are all to do with her heart. On top of her dresser, photos of me and Tomás and Papi and Aaron and her cousins and her favourite pupils and all the living that she prays for; all these photos jostle with small, mysterious tasks that she has begun and neglected to finish – a plastic half-bottle of holy water from Lourdes stands beside a full crystal bottle of rose water; both stand on top of a rectangle of ruched silk with a threaded needle dangling from one corner. Handfuls of seeds are strewn amongst wooden beads. Scraps of rice paper, maybe the beginnings of paper chains, are stuck to the side of the de
sk.
In Mami’s top drawer are her photo albums, and I open one at random, my fingers blunt on the stiff pages, finding her again and again. In all of the pictures, Papi looks at Mami with tender concern, as if he has forgotten that it’s his wedding too.
I find Chabella not just in her tense, happy bride’s face
(she told me that for the entire day she was so happy that she thought she must faint, or die – nothing happened except that her heart grew fuller)
but in the people she left behind her; the way they smile from beneath the impression of her thumb pressed painfully over their faces.
On the phone, Amy Eleni says, ‘You know what I read about rats? I read that if they lived uninterrupted lives, they never stop growing. Imagine! You could get a rat as big as a dustbin. As big as a house.’
(So what, I think. I am painting my nails and thinking of boys’ names.)
‘I mean, what if foetuses were like rats? Say a foetus stays in the womb longer than nine months, what if it went on a growth bender? What if a baby got as big as its mother?’
‘Amy Eleni,’ I say, ‘shut up.’
Why is she saying this? She knows about the hysteric, how she beats me by making things seem funny when they’re not, by finding pain in speculation. But she can’t know how it gets when I think about my son, so when she says, ‘What?’ I just ask her if she still has my purple nail varnish.
Amy Eleni says Despina is not anorexic. She doesn’t say it defiantly; she just says it, because she is sure. According to Amy Eleni, her mother ‘doesn’t give a shit about her weight’. Emily Brontë probably didn’t care that much about her weight either, but she died hungry, with food in the house. I can’t forget Despina’s mint-tea cupboard from the times I went over to Amy Eleni’s house to drink mint tea with all the lovely sugar that Chabella wouldn’t let me have.
The first time, Amy Eleni opened a kitchen cupboard and said, ‘This is the mint-tea cupboard.’ She said it formally, as if the cupboard was a person she was introducing me to. Inside sat one tiny, thick-spouted silver teapot. Behind the teapot was an organic wall of sugar, forty to fifty kilo bags of it, all packed so tightly together that it looked as if a giant fist had punched them into the back wall; the packets had lost their edges and ran into each other.
(I thought, maybe Despina likes her mint tea sweet, maybe she’s a hoarder, maybe she’s an anorexic.)
Amy Eleni looked at me and said, ‘I think it’s more of an aesthetic thing than anything else.’ We were sixteen. Aesthetic was Amy Eleni’s favourite word that week.
I recognised the sugar wall, its jigsawed threat. I know that in this world something really is trying to stop me from having a large milkshake with my large fries. This suspicion emerges like a spasm in my jaw whenever what’s crammed in there tastes too well. I used to think that the only reason Chabella could weep copiously and at the same time eat slabs of steak in stewed tomato sauce was that she was not complex. Cubans are cheerful, Cubans are resilient, Cubans are collectivist. In my mother’s country, I thought, la lucha is such that people are not equipped to understand when they are unhappy. It’s a situation-specific kindness from God – Cubans are born lacking; they have no internal ‘off’ switch, and so it is that they go on and on and on.
But look at the British! Their government had to have some of the suffragists force-fed through tubes because each one of them had located her ‘off’ switch and leant her entire weight against it. These women were pissed off. And not a word about it being hard to eat; they did not see the joke in being weak. They did not want to take their place in el drama, or the tender masquerade of scented handkerchiefs and faintness and tears.
When the hysteric saw what the suffragists had done – the way that, en masse, they’d turned starvation onto its side – she must have been surprised. Her shock must have brought her close to speech. Here, in grey climates, are people mocking the things that happen in places that the sun loves more, those places where hunger herds people ahead of her and into blindness, where hunger makes a person run their tongue along their bottom lip to claim the wilted wings shed by dead flies. Suddenly so clear, or clearer, that people will use all of their frailty to hold out for more, that people go into sickness as a signal test.
Two months ago a woman drove her car off the end of a pier in Blackpool and drowned. But first, cloaked in deepening water, she smoked two cigarettes whilst waiting for the people milling around on the mainland to realise that they weren’t going to be able to get help to her in time. People tried to get the woman’s attention; they tried to reassure her. She refused to look their way. She was from Cameroon, which is why at first there was some confusion over whether she had accidentally driven off the pier or whether this was a suicide attempt.
People who actually knew this ‘pier woman’ might not have described her as sensitive. They would probably have said she was ‘tough’ or ‘loud’ or ‘pushy’, all the while thinking: ‘black’. One eyewitness maintained that the entire thing was an accident. With her thumb Amy Eleni jabbed the offending lines in the Fortean Times: ‘Yeah right, eyewitness! If it was an accident why wasn’t she making eye contact or looking for help? Why wasn’t she asking for reassurance that she wasn’t going to die?’
The pier woman was in the kind of trouble that calls for a material defence. Two unhurried cigarettes, a reminder to her body that breath can be made visible. Trouble: a thing heard on the air and in my headphones when my favourite song plays. It climbs inside and puppeteers until I echo. Maybe the hysteric is my mystic signal test, a way of checking, asking:
Who’s there?
Something old? Someone holy . . .?
Amy Eleni longed for a knife to slit away the webbing between her stiff fingers. I chased my vein lines with glass. Maybe we were having conversations so intense we couldn’t hear them. If we could have heard what we were saying, Amy Eleni and I, we’d have cringed the way we do when we think of someone using prayer to bargain, cramming extra requests in on the back of the usual one-request-per-rosary-bead transaction. But the hysteric, she makes us able to say without knowing. She makes us able to say to this trouble that comes: Wait! Please don’t go. Just in case you’re holy after all. Really I’m like you. I can be strange and deep-flowing too. See?
Despina frightens me with her cold eyes and her measured voice and the long, lost time she spends standing before the bright Orthodox icons in the hallway when she gets back from work. I don’t know what I’d do if Despina was my mother. She is the tallest silence. Despina is no Jacob. Neither is she Bisabuela Carmen that she would lay hands on her god and try to break him and make him stay. It’s the reason why she’s still alive; religious people know their place. I wonder does Chabella fit that pattern.
9
clandestine spiritual warfare
One of the first things that really felt like a London episode happened when Papi was away at a conference. I was ten. Papi called at 3 a.m. and Mami spoke to him in a cute, bright chirrup and woke me up to speak to him too. She pinched me to stop me from begging him to come home.
Chabella’s English was still really bad then; it embarrassed me. The teachers at school always asked to speak to Papi instead of her. I couldn’t understand why she was able to understand English but couldn’t speak it the way that she spoke German. It was too embarrassing, standing in between Mami and someone else, translating words Mami threw at them in Spanish when they had questioned her in English.
After Papi’s phone call, Mami made her paper flowers and cried over them for a long time – she wet her flowers so that they wouldn’t catch fire, she cried until she couldn’t talk. I hugged her and kissed her. I hugged her and kissed her religiously, like a ritual; I kissed and hugged her medically, like a life-saving technique. The flowers drowned anyway.
Chabella was still, and I was still. Outside someone, a woman, was crying; she was asking for help, gave a muffled scream, gulped back louder tears, cried Rape. I looked to Mami, and Mami put a finger o
ver her lips and went to the sitting-room window; we looked out carefully, carefully from under the hem of the net curtain.
Neat and narrow; the street had broken itself off into a chunk of shadowed road and bin and diamond-shaped lamplight – it looked painted on the air. Watching the road and the man and the woman in the road, I knew we’d never be able to touch what we saw, even if we went down and stood there.
The woman was white. She cried Please, and a white man yanked at her ponytail so that she teetered on her spiky heels. It wasn’t playful tugging, but the man was straining to look amused, to look as if he were at play. He locked an arm around her throat and walked away; she came with him in degrees. He was so casual that it didn’t look as if he intended to drag her away, but just to walk with her held against him like a suit he was trying on for size. If it hadn’t been for the involuntary sounds she made. Her lungs convulsed and spoke loudly for her, over and over, puh puh puh puh.
Around the corner a group of people laughed in a hard, ragged burst, but it took a second to realise that there were other people out on the road; the laughter was somehow like traffic, a noise that was not really sound, but city liquefied. Mami and I shrank up against each other, shrank into each other. Beneath the curtains there was a shadow-strained forever that fell from ceiling to floor and roped us round in its folds.
Mami whispered, ‘Puedo no,’ – I can’t – before I even told her that she had to call the police.
‘Mami, you’re not going to call the police?’ I asked loudly.
The man and the woman were gone. Nothing and no one moved on the street. I knew that you didn’t call the police for just anything. I was not sure what rape was then, but if it made a woman cry out like she was dying, and made me feel, me too, anything like that was serious enough for the police.
‘Mi inglés, mi inglés es tan malo, ellos no me entenderán,’ Mami said, and there were so many tears from her that I couldn’t dry them with my hands. She wanted me to understand why she wasn’t going to help, but I couldn’t understand.
The Opposite House Page 12
