What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

  —

  BEFORE GREG AND PETRA none of the people who’d invited Jacob to “make himself at home” had really meant it . . . wanting to mean it didn’t count. The Wallaces gave Jacob a front door key and one day Jill had temporarily confiscated it, just to see how disconsolate Jacob would be at the prospect of a delay in getting home. She’d found that Jacob Nunes, a boy who was usually up for one more three-legged race, one more game of knock down ginger, one more WWF SmackDown!, was now very disconsolate indeed at having to endure one more anything before hometime. And the Wallaces were so jolly it seemed bad manners not to like them back. Jacob’s Labor Party membership probably saddened his parents more than they could say, but you can’t have everything . . .

  —

  AT TWELVE-THIRTY Jill went into the bathroom, found some shampoo, and washed the sweat out of her fringe. She used the hot tap and saw the water steaming but it splashed her skin blue instead of pink. Never mind; she couldn’t feel any of it anyway. She was a bit peckish, though. Gherkins. She’d seen a jar of them in the cupboard when she was putting the shopping away. She fetched them, walking carefully so as not to slip on the water she was dripping. “Yaaaay, gherkins!” But she couldn’t get the jar open. She heard a voice in the next room (Jacob’s again, after she’d told him to leave?) and went to have a look. It was only the TV. She surfed channels, since it was on. “Remember when almost everybody on TV was older than us, Jacob?”

  She wrote these things down in her notepad, hurrying because it was almost twelve-thirty, bedtime, darkness, instant and complete, another head on the pillow beside her, maybe she grew one more in the night and that’s why the night sleep was so deep, it was a matching pair of sleeps.

  —

  A NEIGHBOR BANGED on the door and woke her to complain about wailing coming from her flat. The neighbor was a middle-aged brown man in an unusually close-fitting dressing gown, and she didn’t even need to warn him not to try to come in—he stood well away from the front door. He felt the cold. His beard was attractive; it was clear he took good care of it.

  “Were you playing some kind of world music or do you need an ambulance, or . . . ?”

  “Or,” she told him. “Or.” And she apologized, and promised the noise would stop, though she wasn’t sure it actually would. It must have, because she didn’t hear from him again.

  —

  AT TWELVE-THIRTY she got up again, to go to the toilet. The TV was on again (or still?) so she switched it off. She walked past the kitchen and then went back and looked at the kitchen counter. There was the jar of gherkins, where she’d left it. But now the lid was off. Good! She ate a gherkin and checked the room temperature, which had dropped even further. She’d forgotten to find out whether Presence was potentially life-threatening. It looked nice outside; she’d go out soon. Maybe at twelve-thirty. Rain fell through sunlight. This was what Sabine Akkerman called fox rain. In her mind’s eye Jill’s mother shook iridescent raindrops off her umbrella and said: “Wolves are hosting wedding feasts and witches are brushing their hair today.”

  Presence certainly met its objective but perhaps the objective itself was flawed and warranted adjustment. Jill wrote that down in her notebook.

  —

  THE NEXT TIME she went into the kitchen there was a boy sitting at the table eating toast. Twelve years old, maybe twelve and a half. He looked like Jacob and he looked like Jill, and he had mad scientist hair that looked to be his own invention. She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless. From head to toe he couldn’t be equaled, the son she and Jacob hadn’t had time to have, their postwar baby. Having a kid of your own, yes, now she saw what all the fuss was about. “Thanks for opening the gherkin jar, my strong man,” she said, taking his other piece of toast. He could make more. He flexed his puny biceps and said: “You’re welcome.”

  He was so new that all his clothes still had price tags attached; they looked the price tags over one by one: “Oh my god, how much? Thieves and bandits! This isn’t even going to fit you five minutes from now.” Her son rubbed her hands until they were warmer. She liked that, didn’t matter if he was just sucking up in the moments before he asked her for something. He wanted a skateboard, and launched into a list of reasons why she should let him have one, but she just said: “Yes. Stay there.” There was a fifty-pound note in her purse, and she went to get it. When she came back he was still there but a bit older now, about fifteen and a half, and he didn’t want a skateboard anymore, he wanted some video game console or other. She gave him all the cash she had on her and told him he’d have to get the rest from his dad.

  Hugs, kisses; ah good, they’d raised him to be tactile. “You’re the best, Mum.”

  “Yeah, yeah . . .”

  He dried her sudden tears. “Don’t cry while I’m out, Mum.”

  “You’re really coming back?”

  “Yeah, but if you send me away I won’t.”

  “I’m bloody well not sending you away.”

  “Great. Bye for now then.” He threw his plate into the sink—more at the sink, no, really he threw the plate as if it were a Frisbee. But it did land in the sink. Sheer luck.

  “Hang on . . . what’s your name?”

  “Alex, innit.”

  “Have you got friends? Who are your friends?”

  He rolled his eyes, showed her a few photos on his phone, scrolled past certain other photos at lightning speed. “Mum, it’s almost twelve-thirty so . . . see you later, yeah?”

  She didn’t bother listening for the front door this time. She wanted to say something to her husband about their son. She switched on her laptop and drafted an e-mail to Jacob with the subject line Have you seen what we made??? and plugged her headphones in instead of sending it. She played the third conversation they’d filmed. One question and one answer.

  What’s the hottest time of day?

  The answer, known only to them and hundreds of thousands of disciples of a certain K-pop band, was 2PM.

  On-screen, Jacob waited for her question.

  “Hey Jacob, what’s the hottest time of day?”

  His reply: “The hottest time of day is 2PM.”

  That niggled at her. Jill frowned. Actually two things bothered her—his having said, “The hottest time of day is 2PM” when the usual answer was simply “2PM,” and then there was the appearance of Vi’s hand in the shot. It was only there for a moment before it was withdrawn from the space in front of the lens with a barely audible “oops,” but Jill could see now that the waving hand was probably the reason why Jacob laughed a little as he talked his way back toward the answer (could be that he’d momentarily forgotten the question): “The hottest time of day is 2PM.”

  Alex returned before she could replay the third conversation again. He was in his early twenties now, and was sporting chin stubble and red chinos. He didn’t grumble as much as she expected when she made her request that they just watch some telly together. He quite happily complied, putting his arm around the back of the sofa and keeping her warm that way. She didn’t have a clue what they were watching, but took the time to absorb every detail of his face so that later, when he was gone again and it was twelve-thirty at night, the man who looked like her and Jacob was superimposed on the darkness.

  —

  IN THE MORNING Alex came back in his late thirties with photos of his wife Amina and her granddaughter. Jill went down to the corner shop to try and prepare herself for her son’s arrival in her own decade of life. She hadn’t looked into the mirror before going out of the front door—Darren at the corner shop was shocked and asked her if she was OK. She told him she was fine, and asked about the date and time. It was four p.m. in the outside world, and a week and five days had passed since she’d begun testing Presence. Fox rain was falling (still?) and Jill said: “Time flies, time flies.” Darren asked her if s
he was OK again, and this time she asked him how he was. Darren was fine too, or so he said. Can’t complain . . . She bought some lip balm and went home.

  —

  SHE’D MISSED Alex’s forties: “I’m in my fifties, now, Mum . . .” He didn’t look it . . . maybe he was lying, maybe your baby’s just always your baby. But she didn’t feel able to stay at home with her son who was now older than her. There was a lot she could’ve learned from him, she knew, but that would’ve meant staying in that flat where the temperature was so far below zero that the numbers were now meaningless. She didn’t feel able to send Alex away either. She washed. Not just her fringe, she washed all over. And she took a different outfit out of her suitcase and put it on. She didn’t say good-bye to Alex, but left him sleeping on a mattress they’d set up in the second bedroom, between the puppet stages, still makeless, though by twelve-thirty his presence would have faded away altogether. Jill locked the front door behind her and made two journeys: first stop work, to ask after her boys, the ones she still had hope for. The front desk warden made a few phone calls in a low voice with her back turned, then told her they were fine, nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and wasn’t it tomorrow that she was due back?

  “Good, yes, that’s right . . . see you tomorrow.”

  —

  JILL’S SECOND JOURNEY ended at home in Holland Park. On the train she thought about the likelihood that Vi would be there with Jacob. She’d been there in the camera shot with Jill and Jacob, however momentarily. His answer had still come to her, and when she got home the front door was unlocked and she found the house as dark and as cold as the flat she’d left earlier; it was twelve-thirty and she found Jacob slumped over the kitchen table with his headphones on. She took them off and asked him again: “What’s the hottest time of day?”

  The answer, without verbal deadweight this time: “2PM . . .”

  His arms around her, and hers around him, knots and tangles they could only undo with eyes closed. “You’re so warm.”

  “About Presence,” she said. “Scrap it. Don’t do this to anyone else.”

  “Agreed.”

  —

  JACOB MENTIONED ALEX once, as they were comparing notes. “I wish we had a picture, at least,” he said, and Jill knew what and whom he was referring to. She didn’t agree, but neither did she contradict his wish. It was his own, after all.

  a brief history of the homely wench society

  From: Willa Reid

  To: Dayang Sharif

  Date: November 12th 2012, 18:25

  Subject: JOIN US

  Dear Dayang,

  Among Cambridge University’s many clubs, unions, academic forums, interest groups, activist cells and societies, there’s a sisterhood that emerged in direct opposition to a brotherhood. What this sisterhood lacks in numbers it more than makes up for in lionheartedness1: The Homely Wench Society. The Homely Wenches can’t be discussed without first noting that it was the Bettencourt Society that necessitated the existence of precisely this type of organized and occasionally belligerent female presence at the university.

  The Bettencourt Society has existed since 1875. The Bettencourters are also known as “the Franciscans” because a man gets elected to this society on the basis of his having sufficient charisma to tame both bird and beast. Just like Francis of Assisi. Each year at the end of Lent term the society hosts a dinner at its headquarters, a pocket-sized palace off Magdalene Street that was left to the university by Hugh Bettencourt with the stipulation that it be used solely for Bettencourt Society activities. If you’ve heard of the Bettencourters you may already known the following facts: No woman enters this building unless a member of the Bettencourt Society has invited her, and no Bettencourt Society member invites a woman into the building unless it’s for this annual dinner of theirs. And getting invited to the dinner is dependent on your being considered exceptionally attractive.

  The Homely Wench Society has only existed since 1949. The women who were its first members had heard about the Bettencourt Society and weren’t that impressed with what they heard about the foundational principles of these so-called Franciscans. As for their annual dinner . . . hmm, strangely insecure of intelligent people to spend time patting each other on the backs for having social skills and getting pretty girls to have dinner with them. But people may spend their time as they please. No, the first Homely Wench Society members didn’t have a problem with the Bettencourt Society until Giles Rutherford (Bettencourt Society President, 1949, Ph.D. Candidate in the Classics Faculty) was writing a poem and got stuck. What he needed, he said, was to lay eyes on a girl whose very name conjured up the idea of ugliness the same way invoking Helen of Troy did for beauty. Luckily for Giles Rutherford’s poem, the first wave of female Cantabs working toward full degree certification were on hand to be ogled at. Rutherford sent his Bettencourt Society brethren out into the university with this task: “Find me the homeliest wench in the university, my brothers. Search high and low, do not rest until you’ve sketched her face and form and brought it to me. Comb Girton in particular; something tells me you’ll find her there.”2 The Bettencourters looked into every corner of Newnham and Girton and found many legends in the making. They compiled a list of Cambridge’s homeliest wenches, a list which later fell into the hands of one of the women who had been invited to the Bettencourt’s annual dinner. This lady stole the list and sought out other women who’d accepted invitations to this dinner. Having gathered a number of them together she showed the list of homely wenches around and asked: “Is this kind of list all right with us?”

  “No it jolly well isn’t,” the others replied. “This is Cambridge, for goodness sake—if a person can’t come here to think without these kinds of annoyances then where in this world can a person go???”3

  They hesitated to involve the women whose names they’d seen on the list. Some of the Bettencourt dinner invitees were friends with the homely wenches, and didn’t want to cause any upset. Who wants to see their name on such a list? But in the end they decided it was the only way to gather forces that would hold. Honoring delicacy over full disclosure only comes back to haunt you in the end. Moira Johnstone, the first of the homely wenches to be informed of her place on the list, had to suspend a project she’d been working on in her spare time—the building of a bomb. She’d been looking for an answer to a question she had regarding the effects of a particular type of explosion, but the temptation to test her model on a bunch of fatheads was too strong. The others had similar responses, but soon settled on a simple but emphatic riposte. As they worked through this riposte, the Bettencourt dinner invitees and the homeliest wenches discovered that, by and large, they liked each other and were interested in each other’s work; they thereby declared themselves a society and gained the support of new members who hadn’t been featured on either list. Nonetheless the members of this new society dubbed themselves Homely Wenches one and all.

  The 1949 Bettencourt Society Dinner began pleasantly; lots of champagne and gallantry, flirtation and the fluent discussion of ideas. They were served at table by waiters hired for the evening, and whenever a Bettencourter disagreed with one of the guests he made sure he mitigated his disagreement with a compliment on his opponent’s dress, thereby reminding her what the true spirit of the evening was. Fun! At least it was for the boys, until a great crashing sound came from the next room as the waiters were preparing to bring in the first course. Rutherford called out to the head waiter for the evening; the head waiter replied that “something a bit odd” had happened, but that service would be up and running again within a matter of moments. Waiting five minutes for a course was no great hardship—more compliments, more champagne—but when the head waiter was asked to explain the delay he asked jocularly: “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  The lights in the kitchen had been switched off and then switched on again as the food
was being plated, and then the waiters had heard footsteps in the next room, and then the portrait of Sir Hugh Bettencourt in that very same room had fallen off the wall. The Bettencourt boys laughed at this, but their guests turned pale and went off their food a bit. Who could say what might have happened to it when the lights had gone out? The Bettencourt boys laughed even more. Even the cleverest woman can be silly. When the same sequence of events occurred between the first and second courses—footsteps and falling objects, this time all along the floor above the dining room—the Bettencourters stopped laughing and looked for weapons that would assist them in apprehending intruders, spectral or otherwise. Their guests were one step ahead of them and already had a firm hold on every object that could conceivably be used to stab or whack someone, including cutlery. “Do you want us to go and have a look?” asked Lizzie Holmes, first-ever Secretary of the Homely Wench Society.

  “No no, you stay there, we’ll take care of this,” Bettencourt President Rutherford said, adding a meaningful “Won’t we?” to his patently reluctant brethren.

  “Yes, yes of course . . .” The Bettencourters had to go forth unarmed, since the frightened women refused to release even one set of ice tongs. Up the stairs they trooped, with no light to guide them (“We’ll just wait in the kitchen,” the waiters said) and they searched each room on the first floor and found no one there. When they filed back into the dining room, however, it was full of uninvited women, each of whom had taken seats emptied by the Bettencourters and were tucking into the platefuls of food the Bettencourters had temporarily abandoned. “Sit down, sit down, join us,” cried Moira Johnstone, number one Homeliest Wench. The Bettencourters looked to Rutherford to see how they should proceed; he decided the only sporting response was a good-natured one, so he and his brethren had another table brought into the room, had the waiters set places at it and sat there and ate alongside all the Wenches. Their plan had been just as you must’ve guessed by now: Earlier that evening the last of the “most attractive” women to enter Bettencourt headquarters had lingered at the door and let the first of the “homeliest wenches” into the building.