The Opposite House

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Amy lives on the top floor of a tall house with stairs that go apologetically naked after their third rotation. Inside, Amy’s warm honey smell drugs every hollow; the immediate inside rectangle of doorways, the cracks in the corners of window cases. This place is more of a home for books than it is for people; scruffy paperbacks lounge in heaps on the sofa, rickety shelves host a gap-strewn gallery of faded titles. The light, when it comes, will be full and frank; the night sky heaves against square windows wider than Aya’s outstretched arms. When Amy pleads with her to stay, Aya curls up in the contours of the armchair to wait. If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.

  In the morning comes the man that Amy lives with, and Aya feigns sleep to watch him. He is beautiful. He might be from Abeokuta, where the essence of the Ewe poet stirs and causes cool-faced people to be born, cool-faced people whose hearts are self-stoked furnaces, great anger and great love. He stows his trunk into a space at the foot of the television. His gaze lingers on Amy who, still asleep, has curled up on the sofa so tightly that she is no more than a patch of denim topped with a tangle of brown hair, and then he bends over the trunk and snaps its locks open. The trunk is filled with ash, or grey sand, and he hunkers down beside it and makes a small, distressed sound, running his fingers through it, watching the grains whirl together into twisted fronds as they touch his hand.

  When Tayo straightens, his eyes find Aya. Aya stays still, but she fears her face will crack under the pressure of keeping her eyes open to just this degree. Then, as the fear grows strongest in her, Tayo turns away. He softly tells the air, or Amy, ‘She’s very ugly.’

  Amy surfaces from sleep for him, says, ‘Tayo.’

  Blood mists her face in tiny, diamond buds.

  Tayo kneels by her and says her name with sorrow and they lay their heads together and are hidden there in Amy’s pain and in her hair. When Aya comes to take Amy’s face in her hands, there is the bruise. It stains Amy’s cheek in dull blue and brown veins, starbursting as if a finger has punctured a pressure point in her cheek and opened other tunnels.

  Amy touches Aya’s hand then, and smiling rigidly, she rolls up the sleeves of her long T-shirt, rolls socks down, brings daylight to bruises burnt old and deep purple, bruises clicking together around her arms like connected bangles, or another skin. Amy’s blood runs and will not turn back, though Aya counters it with water, with her vanilla. Tayo watches her. A smear of ash is on his temple. She cannot bear his gaze.

  ‘Have you come to help us?’ he asks Aya, and his laughter is so sudden and so quickly spent that it divides Aya from her nerve, sends her to the door, hauls her out.

  10

  presentiment (that long shadow on the lawn)

  Magalys and her older brother Teofilo are the only people in the studio, and they are dancing together between the mirrored walls; he promenades her, then draws her to him, pretends to back away from her, beckons her on. They step slow, quick, quick, slow, quick and quick, to a Xavier Cugat song. It’s the kind of music I laugh at when Mami and Papi dance to it. But Magalys and Teofilo move and I see that inside this song there is something even, something near to perfection; there is a rhythm that a dance keeps.

  Magalys in dance-teacher mode is scary-looking; she has added some drama by wearing a black flamenco skirt and bodice, hiding her hair beneath a black headscarf and daubing her lips with red lipstick. Teofilo, who has no place at all in my blurred memories, is half a head taller than Magalys and three years older, brown-skinned and curly haired. He smiles with sharp-looking teeth when he sees me, but he and Magalys dance the song to the end. I clap, and Magalys comes to embrace me. Teofilo holds out his arms in an invitation to dance. We consider each other. I say, ‘No, thank you,’ and forget to soften my refusal with a smile.

  Teofilo laughs; the tape rolls on to the next song. ‘You’re Cuban? And you can’t dance El Son? Not even the basics of it? Nobody taught you El Son?’

  His English accent is better than Magalys’s.

  ‘She should know it in her bones,’ Magalys gasps, pretending shock from her place on the floor, where she is changing her dance shoes for trainers. I feel attacked, so I smile. He takes my hand. ‘Come, I’ll show you.’

  I try to back away but he is busy positioning me, straightening and extending my arm so that it matches his, wrapping his other arm around my waist to try and make me sway. I know that I cannot do this dance – there is something inside me that is slow, something that rises slowly, dips slowly. Something that does not talk back to a drumbeat.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I say, too quiet. He steps to show me how to step, and I am dragged along with him. I see myself in the mirrors; I am wide-eyed and tight lipped, and where Teofilo is not holding me straight, I flop like a dummy.

  ‘Please! I don’t want to!’ I say, and I am louder than the music. Teofilo lets me go, shrugs at Magalys and turns away to switch off the cassette player. To Teofilo’s back, and to Magalys, I say, ‘I just don’t really feel this kind of music.’

  Magalys tucks her arm through mine, pats my shoulder reassuringly and tells me, ‘No te preocupes, no es nada, no es nada. But you should know that, though it is not quite your jazz singing, it is really not all that different.’

  We walk to the coffee shop across the street without saying anything else to each other, listening to the conversations around us and the traffic humming nearby and looking at each other without embarrassment, as if we are content to let the traffic be our speech.

  We find a corner table and settle, carefully rolling our mugs of coffee over our palms to counteract the cold. We chorus, ‘So how are you?’ Magalys answers first.

  ‘I am doing well,’ she tells me. ‘Teofilo has a lot of students, so we share them and it means he gets to have longer breaks.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’ I ask her.

  Magalys looks at me blankly, waits for me to elaborate.

  ‘Did you want to come here to teach dance?’

  Magalys shakes her head, her curls bounce. ‘Oh, no. I just came over here to see what it is like. To see if I miss Cuba. I certainly don’t miss la lucha. I certainly don’t miss having to be clever every day and having to smile at ugly men who have ranking and can allocate me more meat than I’ve been allocated, or more fish than I’ve been allocated, or a new kettle.’

  She sips her mocha, blows on it, sips again, says, ‘But,’ at the same time as I say it for her, as a question. She looks around the coffee shop, at the casement-framed paintings and the people chattering on the purple sofas, as if the whole shop will fall down on her if she is not grateful to be here.

  ‘I don’t know, sometimes it just doesn’t really feel like anywhere over here. I look at maps and stuff and none of the places seem real. I think that’s what happens when you don’t belong to a country, though – lines are just lines, and letters are just letters and you can’t touch the meaning behind them the way you can when you’re home and you look at a map and you see, instead of a place name, a stretch of road or an orchard or an ice-cream parlour around the corner. You know. It’s OK, though. I didn’t expect to know this place. You haven’t told me how you are doing.’

  I say, ‘I’m fine.’ There is an awkward silence because we both know that I don’t want to give her any more than that.

  ‘You really scared me at that Vedado party, you know,’ Magalys says, eventually.

  My heart hammers in my chest and there is no room in there for me to be louder than my heart and tell her that I’m sorry about what happened to her. I drink my coffee, drink it down as if it’s going to save my life, and say nothing.

  Magalys says, ‘I thought about you a lot when you went away. I used to worry without really knowing why. I felt as if I knew you well because I had seen you fall ill.’

  ‘Fall ill?’ I examine Magalys’s face; she is frowning.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ she says. ‘We w
ere under the table, and –’

  ‘A woman came and started to sing,’ I interject, but Magalys only skips a beat before waving my words away: ‘You don’t remember? We were under the table, playing dominoes, and all the grown-ups were at the table eating and drinking and some of them were asking where we were, and we started laughing, but then you said “shush”, and put a finger to your lips. You started shaking, and I knew it wasn’t normal shaking, I straightaway knew. Your eyes were rolling so much, and you were biting your tongue, and you were . . . I don’t know – but you were staring at me and I felt as if you’d closed the world or something. I yelled so loud that everyone looked under the table at almost exactly the same time. And your Mami took you away. You don’t remember?’

  I need to think – I try to smile and think at the same time. I close my eyes and try to fetch back that lantern-lit night, the singing, and the other girl, rosy Magalys, flailing the air. But now there are gaps ripped through the image and the singing has turned to a mashed, static whine. I want to ask Magalys what she has done to my one whole memory. Instead I say, still smiling, ‘That’s not how it happened, Magalys.’

  (Magalys please see my smile see it is not a happy one and agree with me just shut up and agree with me)

  Magalys stares at me. ‘I remember your mother just picked you up and took you away, and almost as soon as she’d gone, some people started whispering about her and you and saying that she’d asked a babalawo to give you visions, to see how it would go with you abroad. The fit seemed like a bad sign.’

  I am not the one who had the fit – how could it have been me? Or, if I had the fit, then I had already left that place and it was you who were caught fast in illness like glue, while elsewhere the woman sang.

  I need my Cuba memory back, or something just as small, just as rich, to replace it; more food for my son, for me. I think I will pretend that I am not from Cuba and neither is my son. The boy and I started a race from that other country, and I got here first.

  I walk up the street from Aaron’s flat to the travel agent’s, and I take time during the journey to stand still and gape at nothing; I don’t care who sees – I do it because I need to. If I don’t protest my skin will destroy me. When I rubbed cream into my skin today, the cream layered, then scratched away to show me that I am a gourd, bound in crisp servility to my insides.

  With plane tickets in my bag I call Chabella, maybe to tell her about a thing that I will soon be unable to hide. When she picks up the phone, I say that I have called by accident.

  On a dais in a London church, the Virgin Mary sits surprised by a rough crest of candlelight. The discomfiture isn’t in her expression, but in the fluid form her carving takes, the way peaceful eyes rest in sockets that threaten to release them. Either the wood is eccentrically soft, or this sculpture remains a tree, alert

  (despite careful varnishing and a wide, warning ring of sacred space around it)

  to a propensity to burn. The rest of the church is dim and all of a piece; russet floors nascent with insubstantial pews, Stations of the Cross boarded to the tops of the very last row. Incense knots in Aya’s nostrils. Her hands shake as she leans over and puts a candle to the Virgin’s rigid blue shawl, willing her to catch fire. Varnish turns to smoke.

  But Tayo speaks a greeting into Aya’s ear, slips his arm around her waist and reaches up, gesture joined to hers, to capture the candle’s metal base from her hand. He blows the flame out. She side-steps him and he follows, plucking her away from the bank of candles when she backs too close to them. His hair is done all over bumps, plaits dragged in on themselves.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ they ask each other. Outside it is calm. The sun’s gift to the day is the most benevolent yellow Aya has ever seen. Today is bright yellow like waking well after a long illness; the heart’s tinny hymn post-crisis. Gold.

  They walk; the wind is polite and dusts the playthings of other days from their path. Tayo lights a cigar and blows smoke at the ground. High on his cheeks, his eyelashes form fringed crescents. Aya asks of Amy, and Tayo lets his cigar fall and by so doing murders it; its battered head smoulders and collapses. Amy is in hospital, he says, because she tried to die.

  * * *

  The beds on the ward are narrow and high. Iron bedsteads. Everybody lies down obediently and in exactly the same way; people who slept on their sides or their stomachs at home lie on their backs here, stiff. No bed is near a window, no one has a view. A giant Pinocchio lopes in red, yellow, pink and brown along the back wall, interrupted by a heavy door that stands, unperturbed, in his stomach.

  Amy, her hair dropping in a multitude of coils from a single, burnished bun, beams from amongst her pillows when she sees Aya and Tayo, though she could be smiling at the gifts – a carton stuffed to overflowing with red grapes, and sunflowers whose tawny heads double the size of her palms.

  Amy hugs Tayo, Aya, the fruit and the flowers simultaneously. The pain on her cheeks, her forehead, her hands, stands out blackly, as if her veins are delicately weeping poison and her skin is a cloth placed over it to soak up the damage. The girl in the bed next to Amy’s is asleep. She has a sharp little face, like a baby bird’s, and she cannot walk because her spirit does not want her body and bids it disappear. Beneath the girl’s covers, atrophied muscle makes her legs lithe and kneeless. The girl’s mother sits beside her, reading the newspaper to herself.

  Tayo slowly kneads Amy’s hands between his own; it reminds Aya of her Mama. But Amy turns away from him, turns into her pillow. Her body curls up, foetal. She hides in her hair and quietly, quietly coughs out gummy streams of pale green. The nurses gently move her to a new bed. Amy’s silk handkerchiefs still cluster over and under the brown leather belt she’s tightened around the waist of her nightie, but Aya gives her a tissue; she dabs feebly at the sores that now show starker beside her mouth.

  Aya asks her, ‘Amy, why?’

  (How can you know my name and want to die?)

  Amy says, ‘I don’t know. It was just an idea, really.’

  Aya cannot stop looking at the beautiful bird-girl in the bed next to Amy’s; the girl sleeps even though the blankets are too heavy for her, even though her mother’s sad hand on her pillow is too heavy for her.

  Aya cannot stay. This place is not a place that she understands, and Amy knows that. She kisses Aya and says to her, ‘It has been good to see you again, Yemaya Saramagua.’

  11

  1% thanatos instinct, 99% air

  Amy Eleni’s flat is a deconstructed chest of drawers – all on one level, all as is to be expected. The medium-sized sitting-room box sits in between the medium-sized kitchen box and the bedroom, with its high double bed and the black television and VCR on the table beside it. In the sitting room is a non-scent, a pale, clean sofa, light curtains. There is waiting-room magic here, a polite insistence that these rooms are in fact a space you pass through on your way to somewhere else. You’re not to trouble yourself to look at the walls, since there are no pictures there. You’re to wipe your feet, but keep your shoes on.

  You would never guess that Amy Eleni is a teacher. Actually, you wouldn’t guess anything about her; you’d think she was suicidal and had given most of her stuff away.

  Amy Eleni doesn’t buy books; she buys shoes instead. She takes books out from the library – ten at a time – and lives on them, around them, all over them. She spilt coffee all over a library book and said to me, ‘See? Me and books – I’d better not even try to live with them. Life is over there, behind the shelf.’

  Amy Eleni doesn’t have a shelf in her flat. So, because I had no idea what she was talking about, I was immediately suspicious that her hysteric had her. But before I could say anything, Amy Eleni jumped on me, smothered me with her hands and shouted, ‘Why are we friends? You really need to read –’

  I surfaced and covered her face with my hand.

  ‘Shut up! I’m not taking any more recommendations!’

  Melded together on her sofa, drunk
on Fragolino and watching TV, Amy Eleni caught me peering around, in a mood to dismiss, thinking, How bare this place is.

  She said, ‘Look, I just don’t have a lot of things.’

  For this week’s showing of Vertigo, Amy Eleni is wearing a smooth grey pencil suit and heels, entertaining me with the reminder that, apart from the fact that they’re both blonde, she looks nothing like Madeleine Elster, the doomed woman in the film. Madeleine Elster is sleek and taut, like one long nerve at red alert, and Amy Eleni is short and of far softer stuff, all whirls and coils and curves, her hair, her body, the gradations of colour in her irises. Madeleine Elster looks a little more like Amy Eleni’s mother. Amy Eleni goes to make us some Horlicks, calling from the kitchen that she’s adding soymilk to mine because it’s supposed to be good for developing bones and teeth and stuff.

  ‘I would’ve thought that would be cow’s milk,’ I say, watching the opening scenes of the film: Scottie’s fall; his resulting trauma; the way it seems he can’t even look down at his own feet without seeing swirls.

  ‘I teach English . . .’ Amy Eleni reminds me.

  ‘Give me cow’s milk, woman.’

  In the voice she reserves for creepy coincidences, Amy Eleni says, ‘Imagine if that baby wasn’t a baby at all, and that this is one of those strange pregnancies you read about in the Fortean Times? What if all you’ve got in your stomach is this limp piece of dough and it just keeps expanding until – boom?’

  She’s joking, but I don’t like it. I feel cold.

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘What?’ Amy Eleni comes back in and hands me my Horlicks.

  ‘What?’ she says again, when I take it without saying anything. I sniff at the mug, as if my nose can tell me the difference between soymilk and cow’s milk, as if my nose can tell me which is better.