The Opposite House

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Chabella withdrew him from those classes after a meeting with his Gifted and Talented English Literature teacher, even though Papi pointed out that it was most curious that Tomás could hear well enough to watch Pinky and the Brain on TV before dinner. Tomás’s weekends took their old shape once again; he went back to playing striker on the local football team, a position that Jon had kept warm for him. He also resumed his post as Papi’s book assistant, lying on his back in Papi’s study shuffling through notes with a fluorescent marker, typing out references when Papi’s fingers felt too stiff.

  But even if he is Papi’s boy, there are things that Tomás will only ask of Mami. It’s the same with me. Sometimes there are things that you need to say, and you know that the right person to say them to is the person whose logic works two ways; the person who can sit through Mass without staring sardonically at the boy in the dress who waves incense in their face.

  Chabella was making guava pasteles, hands working a mass of pastry and sweetener when Tomás came back from football huffing and sweating, the collar of his tracksuit top turned up around his neck in a funnel. He looked urgent, the way he used to when he was smaller and would come to Mami during an argument with another boy, tug at her arm and say, ‘Tell him.’

  He sidled up to the counter and tore off a hunk of dough. Chabella clucked, ‘Tomás, why? You’ll only throw it up.’

  I laughed, ‘What’s the point of feeding him at all, then?’ and Tomás ignored me and said to her through a sticky mouthful, ‘Chabella, it’s getting stupid. We’re supposed to learn our names really early, no? Like, a few months after being born we’re supposed to respond to our names or whatever.’

  I was leaning on the counter, reading and breathing in Chabella’s sweetened steam. I looked up and said, ‘Are you trying to tell us you’re retarded?’

  Chabella flung a handful of sweetener at me, and she missed. ‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t say these things, they’ll come true!’

  Tomás plucked more dough out from under Chabella’s hands.

  ‘Listen, Chabella, really it’s getting . . . I don’t know. When someone nearby calls a name, I have this thing where I look round at them as if they’re calling me, it doesn’t matter what name they call out. Just now on the road this boy shouted out “Oi, Jack!” and I turned round to him and looked him in the face and he said in some properly nasty voice, “Oh, are you Jack?” And I said, “No, sorry –”’

  I called out to Tomás, ‘You should have put your hand in your pocket and said, “Who wants to know?” Or you should have said “Depends who’s asking . . .” and then put your hand in your pocket. Then you should have narrowed your eyes and made a clicking sound with your tongue.’

  Tomás rolled his eyes, ‘Yeah, standardly I should have said that. And then he would have pissed himself laughing. This boy was tonk, trust me. Anyway I said, “No my name isn’t Jack,” and this boy was all like, “Well don’t watch that, then,” and I was thinking, but this happens all the time, it happens all the time – I just keep looking round when someone calls, as if I haven’t learnt my name or something. One of these days I’m going to end up smeared into a wall.’

  Mami didn’t look up. She blew on her rolling pin, tapped it on the counter, bent over her pastries to inspect the frills she’d drawn into their edges. Only I could see, over the top of my book, the tension on Tomás’s face. Mami didn’t look; Tomás placed his palms on the counter and leant far over into Mami’s way. He kissed her cheek, he swung, he waited for Mami to look. But when Mami turned to him, her gaze got lost somewhere on the way to meet his; her eyes were guilty somehow. She fed him some guava and told him, ‘It’s OK, London baby. You must trust yourself. Tomás is not your name; it’s just a tag we gave you until you find something you like.’

  Late in the night Aya sits still, her head resting against Amy’s. She is knocked comatose by the twin thicknesses of Amy’s hair and honey.

  Tayo has dragged out a drawer from his cupboard; he lays it carefully on the floor, he bids Aya look. His eyes are full, too full, brimming.

  The drawer foams damp white; at first she thinks, snow?

  No – row after immaculate row of drowned paper flowers. They pull at her heart, these flowers, they do not ask for light the way that real flowers do. She puts her hands out to make them well again, and as she touches them, one by one, they dry out and crackle under her fingers. Rice paper.

  Aya asks, ‘They’re yours?’

  He is vehement: ‘No.’

  When Aya holds the flowers close to her face, she sees that each has a black word bled into it in spidery writing. On each flower, the same word.

  ‘Then I want them,’ she says.

  He recoils. ‘They’re not meant for you.’

  She asks who gave them to him, and he shakes his head.

  ‘A her?’ Aya asks.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘And you parted?’

  ‘Not exactly. Kind of. Well, she doesn’t know.’

  ‘How can she not know that you’ve parted?’

  He shrugs.

  Aya hugs the flowers. She tries to hug all of them at once but her arms do not have enough space between them.

  ‘She knows,’ Aya says.

  In her bedroom, in the morning, Amy says, ‘Yemaya, I have the trick of crossing heaviness with lightness. I could jump in the air right now and not come down. I wouldn’t go any higher, either. I’d just stay there. They’d ring bells and tell lies: a soul has gone to heaven. Yemaya Saramagua?’

  When Amy leans over from her bed, there is no more early light; Amy’s face is desperate, her granite eyes disappearing under eddying water. She scratches at the bruises on her arms, trying to lift them away, bringing down blood instead. Aya tries to help her to lie down again, but Amy will not. ‘Amy, what is it? What is it?’ Aya asks her.

  ‘Ochun, Ochun. Please say it. Yemaya Saramagua, you must know my name,’ Amy weeps. She bites Aya to make her let go. Aya won’t let go. Finally Amy lays still and rattles out a breath that sounds like her last, sounds like her heart is broken.

  ‘I should never have left. Why doesn’t anybody know my name? Why doesn’t someone come for me?’

  13

  the hour of lead

  I offer up Saturday night for a vigil. I flip through travel brochures. The purple UV lamps hurt my eyes. According to the brochures, Habana Vieja is old and beautiful and majestically crumbling, and Miramar has great beaches. Everything is very picturesquely blue and or a very surly brown, and set on a slant that sands down the sky’s edges. Cubans are, apparently, very friendly if they feel their gestures are reciprocated. Do I count, am I like that too? I thought everybody was like that.

  I try to balance my saints’ medals on my forehead as if they are tokens that I can swap for something overhead, and I wait for Sunday morning Mass. I think, No, it is not true that Mami would try to inject me with visions. Not like that, not when I was so small. It is hard to know. I do know that Chabella loves me because she can look inside me against my will, and it seems people can only do that if they love you. But Chabella is from a different country to me; she is wound around and around with her Brigitte and my Bisabuela Carmen. I’ve had Mork and Mindy and The Cosby Show. I’ve had gaps between the things I see and the things I know, the dilemma of getting a comb through my hair on mornings when my personal hysteric makes my arms droop and refuse to work.

  I stare at the Orishas from the distance Peckham affords me, but Chabella grew up in a small white house in Querejeta, just off a ring road, where trees are sparse and the traffic makes humidity fly in low circles. From her window she could see the Hotel Nacional waving its flag to welcome small crowds of hatted, suited, feathered, colourful Americans. From the first, she swears that all she ever wanted was to be gone from there.

  There is one dog-eared photograph of Chabella at ten; we have never resembled each other physically, she and I. Light clusters in Chabella’s huge irises, and she is sitting on the marble steps
inside her house, her posture perfect, her hands clasped, her hair combed up high and tied with a ribbon. She is smiling the way a china doll smiles, and to me that means she is not happy. China dolls, their cheeks flushed vicious, always look as if they have been threatened with dismemberment and posed, their limbs arranged. They would take life if they could. A few days after that picture was taken, Chabella tried to run away from home for the seventh time, and that day her father, Damason

  (‘Your abuelo, God rest his soul,’ Chabella stares at me until I cross myself)

  lost his patience with her and beat her. But escape wasn’t meant as a personal insult to Abuelo Damason.

  Chabella was the youngest of his four children, and closer to her father than to Laline, her lawyer mother, who disappeared beneath portfolios and was preoccupied with women’s rights. Chabella and Abuelo Damason spent afternoons in his studio fascinated by feet, the whorls of taut skin. They stomped in vats of paint before dancing across vast sheets of expensive paper. He danced alone, then she danced alone, then they both danced together. They wanted to see whether the idea of dancing was contained in the feet, or, if not, what feet really meant. The tracks they made were linked, ungainly shapes, ridiculous, bright and strong, like the first images of their kind.

  Abuelo Damason also had a lot of women back then. Sometimes Laline let her smooth veneer chip, and at night she would scream at Chabella’s father that he’d better stop making a fool of her with his girlfriends. They were ‘the kind of women who cluster around when a black Cuban becomes successful – all kinds,’ Mami said. Women who hated her, smiled at her, gave her sweets, and stole the hair from her combs so that they could have roots people work spells to make Chabella leave hold of her father’s heart. Chabella’s first real memory was of falling off the swing in the house’s back garden and cutting her knee, and then crying because her father wasn’t there. My pretty, light-skinned Tia Dayame, the next sister up from Mami, was combing her hair in front of the sitting-room mirror – when she saw the wound she simply shrugged and said, ‘Good.’

  Maria, the family’s maid, cleaned Chabella’s knee with something special, and told her that she’d better be more careful. ‘If you leave your blood on the earth, it gets hungry for more,’ Maria told her, and then when six-year-old Chabella trembled, she reassured her by saying that there were at least three spiritual protectors observing her; one of them was an ancestor, another one was an Orisha. Maria told Mami that she was lucky. In those circumstances, it was true.

  I grow so tired that my head droops and my mouth opens and I begin to think that I am my Chabella and that I am the woman who was singing the song that made the garden in Vedado so wild. St Bernadette and Jeanne d’Arc fall heavily into my lap and I try to make merciful Mary, the Mother of God, appear to me through the strength of my own heart.

  I don’t want anything from her. I just want to know that I am the one that brought her.

  My neck aches, and lines run straight up from that pain to my temples. Another line makes a trampoline from my stomach to a place above my head.

  The pages of the brochures feel like money to me, brittle, symbolic – if I tear a page even slightly, I will not be able to go. Outside on the street, people are drunkenly cock-crowing. They sound close. I keep expecting to see faces imprinted on the window. Aaron tells me I need to rest, and he tries to make me lie down with him. When I won’t, he says, ‘OK wait, I’m just going to get my Jung, then I’ll be right back. I’ll stay up with you.’

  He’s lucky that he didn’t promise; he doesn’t come back. I know he’s spread out over the bedcovers, staring, sleeping, with The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious beside his lax hand. The leak has grown louder, but he is able to sleep through it.

  Sophie calls and softly asks me if I know when I’ll be able to sing again. I tell her I’m not sure, and that it’s fine if they want to find someone else until I’m ready. She doesn’t argue. When I put the phone down I walk back to the sofa slowly, tracking liquid with my fingers; warm, gelatinous arrows of blood are running down my thigh. But my period shouldn’t come. There is no reason for my period to come when I am pregnant. I am bloating, my stomach is touching my lap like sacking, and there is a smell that maybe Chabella would recognise. It is a bad, natural smell; logical, like rotting.

  Amy’s dress is a plum divided; the deep-red taffeta skirts are the leathered skins, and the gleaming bodice is a layered tapestry of rich fruit flesh. The dress suits her completely, despite – or because of – the belt she’s slung at hip level, heavy with multicoloured scraps of silk. With every step she takes, a billow of her honey scent rises. Outside the day is chill and gloomy; cold sits still on the ground and in the air and sticks frosted leaves to the earth.

  Amy wants Aya to know:

  that she had thought she had settled for being just Amy,

  that if it wasn’t for . . .

  (she rubs at a bruise, at her bandaged arm)

  she wouldn’t know that this was a lie.

  Tayo leans over the bathroom sink, fingers curled around his torso, incubating agony. He spits out a string of needles; the pain is irregular, but larger than his mind. Afterwards, he rinses out his mouth to lose the metal tang and mumbles in the bath, knees drawn to his chest. Water slams his curls flat against his head.

  Another time he plugged up the sink and ran the tap until it overflowed. Then he lowered his face into the water – first just grazing it, a dip as if he were simply rinsing. Then, after a moment of shallow breathing, he dived for full, jerky immersion, clamping one hand onto the back of his head, fighting. As he drowned, Aya felt the water scuff her lungs. But before she could go to him he had already lost against himself. He surfaced, coughing liquid, to lay his head down on the side of the basin as the water dripped onto his bare feet.

  14

  floods served to us in bowls

  I don’t think my son is there any more. I killed him by being so jealous, by wanting him before I understood what he is. Or I ate too much crap. Or my body is built like Chabella’s and I must lose as much as twice before I can begin.

  I keep mistaking my heartbeat for his.

  My heart

  (his heart?)

  my heart?

  (mine)

  my own heart,

  beating me down like a belt.

  I am still bleeding.

  Shhhhhh. God already knows.

  I am not special. Maja you are not special.

  Sleep, then get up again, and so on.

  The kitchen smells of toasted coconut; Mami has been baking before church. At the table, Papi has drawn up a chair and is sitting at Tomás’s shoulder, leaning his chin onto his fist as he watches Tomás write his homework. Usually Tomás fidgets and shrinks if someone is in his space for longer than a few minutes. But Tomás’s arm, spread over his paper to shield it, is gently touching Papi’s. Papi nods at us, and when Chabella and I come at him and Tomás from separate sides to kiss them, he says, ‘And how are my Kingdom Kids?’

  Tomás looks at me directly and I see that his lip is swelling under a deep pink cut. There is bruising on his temple. I narrow my eyes at him, but Papi pulls me awkwardly onto his lap and asks, ‘How are you and Aaron? You know, last night I had a dream that I was in a big, cosy den in Lapland or somewhere, smoking my pipe –’

  (Mami shouts and flaps a napkin at him)

  ‘– and it was snowing hard outside, so hard. But suddenly there was this tiny rap on my door, and I thought, Who could that be? So I opened up, and there were two beautiful children, one little boy and one little girl – the boy was sturdy, curly-haired, a little older, and quite a lot taller than the girl, who was so beautiful I couldn’t look at her for long. She was wonderful; a princess. If you’d seen her, Maja! Anyway, I let them in, and they warmed themselves, and I gave them cucuruchos and hot tea, and they said some very intelligent things about Communism, and then I said, “Now, who do you belong to?” and they said, “What do you mean, abuelo?”
Abuelo! Imagine! “So,” I said. “So, so, so.” They called me abuelo! They were my grandchildren . . .’

  I hold myself very still. I am wrapped in layers, long jumper over long skirt, scarves, but any motion might bring Papi that smell that is all over me.

  ‘Hey, yeah, right, keep dreaming,’ I tell him.

  Papi says, ‘You are breaking my heart. And you’re disturbing Tomás’s homework. You and Chabella need to clear out and let Tomás’s discovery of his love of history continue as before.’

  ‘History makes me want to kill myself,’ Tomás mumbles.

  I take the seat next to Papi and look from him to Mami. ‘Papi, I have tickets to go back to Habana next month, but Mami says you don’t want me to go.’

  Papi looks at Mami as well, as if my going is her suggestion and her fault. Papi taps Tomás on the shoulder to make him look up. ‘Tomás, I want you to listen to this as well.’

  Tomás looks at me as if he wouldn’t mind if he died right now. Tomás looks at me like, stop this, but I won’t.

  Papi turns his eyes to me.

  ‘Why do you want to go back?’

  ‘What’s wrong with me going back?’

  I see Papi’s hands; they are quivering.

  ‘Do you think I brought you here for a joke?’ he asks me. His voice is very low. ‘Do you think that I just brought you over to England for a long holiday? There are reasons why we are not living in Cuba, Maja.’

  ‘And these are?’

  ‘That it’s not safe; that staying there is accepting the lies of a regime that in its aimlessness will destroy the country,’ Papi says. His tone is that of the teacher soothing a gormless pupil.

  ‘You want me to stay away to make a statement? A statement that doesn’t affect anyone, that doesn’t reach anyone’s notice but mine?’

  Mami wrings her hands.

  Papi says to her, ‘I suppose you want to go, too?’ He says it with too much calm, and maybe that is why Chabella doesn’t reply. Out of respect for Papi, Tomás is not writing, but he is not looking our way either.