The Opposite House

1 telling it slant

Sometimes a child with wise eyes is born.

Then some people will call that child an old soul. That is enough to make God laugh. For instance there is Yemaya Saramagua, who lives in the somewherehouse.

A somewherehouse is a brittle tower of worn brick and cedar wood, its roof cradled in a net of brushwood. Around it is a hush, the wrong quiet of woods when the birds are afraid. The somewherehouse is four floors tall. The attic is a friendly crawl of linked rooms, aglister with brilliant mirrors propped against walls and window ledges. On the second floor, rooms and rooms and rooms, some so tiny, pale and clean that they are no more than fancies, sugar-cubed afterthoughts stacked behind doorways. Below is a basement pillared with stone. Spiders zigzag their gluey webs all over the chairs. The basement’s back wall holds two doors. One door takes Yemaya straight out into London and the ragged hum of a city after dark. The other door opens out onto the striped flag and cooking-smell cheer of that tattered jester, Lagos — always, this door leads to a place that is floridly day.

The Kayodes live on the third floor, in three large rooms criss-crossed with melancholic skipping ropes of gauze. All day and all night they mutter, only to each other, and only in Yoruba. The smallest of the Kayodes is a boy with eyes like silver coins. For hair he wears a fuzzy cap of skull-shaped film. He is so old that he walks about on tiptoes, his ragged heels doubtful of bearing his weight unshattered.

The second Kayode is asleep most of the time. Her braids are woven into a downy coronet. From the arms of a rocking chair by the furthermost window, the sleeping woman traces out her dreams on vellum. Kayode allows the sheets of paper to skate off her lap and meet the floor as she finishes each drawing; the figures in her dreams are dressed in witch-light. The third Kayode is tall, thick-set and bushy-headed; his silhouette cuts the shape of a round-headed meat cleaver. His eyes, black discs cast with a rising glitter, unsettle with a glance.

When Yemaya, or Aya, came to the somewherehouse, her battered trunk full of beads and clothes came too. Her bottleful of vanilla essence was wrapped up soft in the centre. And the Kayodes were already there. They had called to each other, harsh-tongued, Kayode, Kayode, Kayode, from room to room. But when Aya settled, they took flight and clustered together in their rooms.

If you were to come in through the front door of the somewherehouse, you would walk into the air born in Aya’s pans, the condensed aroma of yams and plantains shallow-fried in palm oil, or home-smoked cod, its skin stiffened in salt and chilli. The smell clings to the rough blue carpet underfoot, drifts over the holes worn into it in the corner where the shoes are stacked. The smell ropes and rubs itself against your hair and skin. You turn, and you are only disturbing the motion of this holy smoke before it settles around you again. On Sundays, Aya cooks a feast for four and takes tray after tray upstairs to the Kayodes, plates piled high with yellowed rice and beans, slivers of slow-roasted pork and escabeche. The Kayodes will not talk to her; the Kayodes don’t eat, but Aya doesn’t understand about waste.

Aya overflows with ache, or power. When the accent is taken off it, ache describes, in English, bone-deep pain. But otherwise ache is blood. . fleeing and returning. . red momentum. Ache is, ache is is is, kin to fear — a frayed pause near the end of a thread where the cloth matters too much to fail. The kind of need that takes you across water on nothing but bare feet. Ache is energy, damage, it is constant, in Aya’s mind all the time. She was born that way — powerful, half mad, but quiet about it.

His last name shall be his father’s name.

His second name shall be his grandfather’s name.

His first name shall be a name for his ownself, but unknown to him, all those fathers before his grandfather live in this name. That is something a mother has the power to do to her son. Anyhow, I am going to be a terrible mother; my son has raised the alarm. He is desperately pushing my stomach away from him.

On Monday I wake up and spend about an hour in alternation between vomiting and breathless whimpering; with tap water I rinse away far more food than I could have eaten. I am afraid to open my mouth and taste air. Air tastes like grease; air tilts my stomach until it spills yet more. I prop up my legs on the closed toilet seat and lean my head against the sink so that the bathroom is holding me. At some point Aaron comes and ties my hair up in a high knot, rinses my face, gentle, with warm water. For some reason he checks the whites of my eyes. Then he wraps himself around me and hugs me, hugs me. He goes away when I mutter ‘go away’ and vomit over his shoulder.

On Tuesday I buy a pregnancy test, and two blue windows have me wincing; they tell me my son is coming.

He is coming, yes, out of my inconsistency, my irregular approach to pill popping, which bores me.

He is coming, my son, from inaccurately remembered chat about the rhythm method in Sex Education lessons at my Catholic school. The Church doesn’t want the rhythm method to work, of course it doesn’t. Babies — hurray, and so on. My son. I don’t even know where I got the idea of him from. When I was five I discussed him with Mami, and because I was years away from having a period, she laughed and humoured me, suggested names, until I seemed to forget about it. I didn’t forget about it, I just didn’t talk about it. I realised quickly that people would think I was crazy if I seemed too convinced that I was due a son. But I just knew. I fast-forwarded over the process of getting a son.

(I had vague ideas about one day having to do something large and bloody, put my eye out, or split my forehead open)

and instead I just had my boy, warm, alive, walking beside me, gaining strength from me. He was full of laughter and he wanted me to be happy and so I was.

My brother Tomás was born when I was nine, and I loved him straightaway, curiously and wholly in my imagination, with the kind of affection that doesn’t touch for fear of breakage. Because he was a quiet baby and gave my parents less night trouble than I had given them, I watched Tomás for cot death when my parents were asleep. Sometimes Tomás saw me. I wonder what he saw — a big face flitting over him, mouth open for suction, searchlight eyes picking out his breath. I wonder if it seemed I had come to kill him. Babies are not trusting. Tomás mewed at me the first few times I broke sleep to visit him, then he just watched me back, or slept.

Tomás was in no way my son. He designated himself Papi’s son; I think the real reason why Tomás learned to walk was because of his need to keep track of our Papi. There are photographs of Tomás determinedly weaving along behind Papi, Papi slowing down and looking back, rapt, at this tiny beauty who places a firm hand on the back of Papi’s knee, gathering the trouser material into a peak in his fingers, not as a restriction, but as a reminder. Papi would say to him jocularly, ‘Tomás, Tomás, T-boy,’ but my brother wouldn’t respond to that kind of talk.

They thought Tomás might be autistic, but he wasn’t autistic.

He was just serious. Already he was serious.

Sometimes Papi and Chabella call Tomás ‘the London baby’.

But before Tomás, when Papi, Chabella and I were in our Hamburg house, I was a sleepwalker. I went to bed with everyone else, fell asleep, tottered in circles around the house and woke up to the sound of early-morning bicycle bells and wheels soft-shooting over paved stone. I woke wherever I had dropped in exhaustion — curled in a ball under the kitchen table with my long nightie dragged down longer and wound around my numb feet.

Mami took the opportunity to ask me if we had rats; she thinks that a house at night is a kingdom of rats. I wasn’t in any position to notice rats. But when I started sleeping normally, I remembered that two silent girls had been there with me when I sleepwalked. They never let me go outside, never let me take down the bolts Chabella so fastidiously fastened every night. The girls detained me with their small, fuzzy selves, embraces, smiles, their scent; we played hide-and-seek, but they were always easy to find because they smelled of Chabella. They were completely bald, heads smooth and deep brown, small-boned faces with eye sockets like vast copper settings for their frozen amber eyes. They saw me, and their pupils dilated as if darkness had just fallen, as if I was their endarkenment.

Often the girls were wet, their clothes soaked through even when the weather outside was dry. I communicated to them about my son. I can’t remember who told what to whom. But I never said anything to my Mami about the girls — she would have had me exorcised or something. She keeps saying that when it came to being born, I was a difficult one to persuade. She miscarried twice, early in each pregnancy. When she told me about her miscarriages, I felt accused.

I said, ‘It’s not my fault,’ and Chabella shrugged.

I don’t know how long my son has been around, but I have been eating crap. Now the boy needs seeds and fresh fruit and oily fish and folic acid and carefulness and stuff. So I am disturbed when Chabella, my Mami, brings me a plastic bucketful of pineapples and half-ripe mangoes and unripe papaya. I don’t want to tell Chabella anything, but I think she knows something, and I sit as far away from her as possible so she can’t smell me. Chabella asks after Aaron, whom she loves and calls her moquenquen, her pikin, her heart child. Of Aaron Chabella says, ‘So handsome! And, praise God, he doesn’t know it!’

Aaron knows that one of Mami’s favourite singers is Melanie Safka. He bothers with Woodstock singing more than Papi or I or Tomás do; he gets the way that the singing never moves beyond the conversational, the way the music escapes through a percussion-tiled back door into a cry of care that is meant to find a softer sigh in answer. Like Mami, who listened before she knew what the words meant, he knows exactly when the lift in voice is going to happen and breathes out — ah — when it does.

To Chabella Aaron never forgets to murmur, ‘You’re beautiful people. You look like a friend of mine. I’m afraid we’ll never meet again…’

Chabella says, ‘You.’ She smiles like a sun brought down.

He tells her, ‘Don’t let it get to your head.’

But on this visit, Chabella just sits there and eyes me and drowns seven tablespoons of sweetener in milky tea. And she criticises my hair, which is now inexplicably seeping oil from beneath the bands and clips I’ve held it up with.

I have such a head of hair that Chabella had to put aside twice the time she needed for her own hair to sit down and grapple with mine. In Chabella’s hands my hair seemed tall, thick and mysterious; her fingers got lost in it as she struggled to relocate partings she’d made seconds before. I know that my friends from my sleepwalking days have something to do with all the hair I have.

And it was my hair that told me on Monday evening that something was different in my body. As I sectioned my hair and seized strands from the root to wrap them in cotton thread, my hair told me, No. It came away in my hands in soup-spoon curls. My hair has never had anything come between it and my system before. Mami never let me have my hair relaxed — the smell of hair chemicals makes her ill, and while this is probably true, it is also political.

Sugar makes Chabella sick too; she doesn’t even want to see it. It has to do with the year Castro called for Cubans to harvest ten million tons of sugar cane to pay off Cuba’s debt to Russia. Papi’s memories of that time are brief because they are bright — Papi, who knew just as little as Chabella does about sugar-cane farming, cheerfully tried to fulfil his quota, whistling, his tongue shifting coca leaves around his mouth while he worked.

Chabella is much younger than him, so she wasn’t there in the fields. But she has stories from her aunts who struggled amongst the leaves and cut themselves on sharp stubs left from poorly harvested cane. Sugar makes Chabella cry. She hints at other memories, other sugar horrors, ancestral. Since Chabella only bakes with sweeteners, Papi sometimes complains that the texture of her cucuruchos is different from that of the ones his mother used to make. But he doesn’t complain too loudly or persistently.

From Chabella I’ve learnt how to fight anyone, man or woman, whilst sitting down completely still. It’s all in the quality, not the quantity, of the tears; the soundless shudder as if the water comes from a deep place lined with rocks. When Mami gets sick, she cries like that, and the threat of that was enough for me not to bother with hair relaxers.

Chabella tried to teach me Gelassenheit — the longing to let go and collapse under holy madness — long before I read anything by Hans Denck. I drank Gelassenheit in by the litre at the kitchen table, where I sat on Mami’s lap and watched her twist rice paper into graceful shapes whose petals were melded together with fine honey. The prayer flowers were ships built to sail nowhere — set aflame they unreeled a bitter scent and carried the tiny pleas scribbled on their petals only as far as the limits of the glass bowl before they died.

Mami recited letters to me; they were from friends she had grown up with, friends who had spread out to Granma, Camaguey and Holguin. There were letters from her cousins in Villa Clara and Pinar del Rio, photographs and notes from her sister in Matanzas reminding her how lucky she was to be abroad, how lucky, querida, beloved, not to have to constantly pit yourself against la lucha, that struggle for life! The tone of the letters wasn’t envious, only kind. In other news, people were getting married, being born, people eloping with lovers to Santiago de Cuba and getting caught and told off and given family blessings. People were winning street-wide cooking contests for the best ropa vieja; people were ripping off hapless tourists. As Mami spoke her alien litany to me, she depressed the centres of each flower with a deft thumb so that each one could host a fire in its heart. Each petal read

ayude

She was asking for help.

But love gets in the way of her paper flowers, love keeps them secret from Papi. Chabella and Papi have ways of looking at each other, ways of touching that are full of stunned caution. They trip over each other constantly, marvel each time. When Mami sits down at the table, wiping her hands on her cooking skirt after she’s set dishes down before us, Papi takes her hand, strokes her fingers, says her name as if he’s asking it. Mami nods at him; her lips smile, her eyes smile. I grew up doubting that anyone would ever look at me in the same way. My doubt contains no great trauma; it’s casual, the way people doubt they can jump off a bridge and fly.

Papi taught at the university where Chabella was a student. He is twenty years older than Mami. And rare; they were rare, black academics in Cuba, black academics in a lot of places. I only know young-man-Papi from photographs. Young-man-Papi with his unkempt afro and tortoiseshell spectacles. Once he had finally, achingly understood that Castro’s Revolution was not his, Papi eschewed America — rather, after stints at the University of Hamburg and the Sorbonne, he brought Mami and I to London. Papi says he was ‘sent abroad by Castro’, as if Castro, having singled out the academics and bourgeoisie that he didn’t want in his revolution, had first restricted their research possibilities, then leant over and lifted them all airborne with a single puff.

I was seven years old when we came here. I’ve come to think that there’s an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away. I arrived here just before that age.

One time I needed to know an A-level essay’s worth of Kantian ethics, but the very layout of the book I was reading took the words away from me. Papi leaned over my chair. My Papi put warmth between me and the ceiling with his stubbly chin and his kind eyes and a hand on my shoulder. He explained to me some things about Kant and duty. He couldn’t make me understand what he was talking about. Mami sat with me then and told me again, with long pauses as she moved the ideas she remembered from German to English. When she prays to the saints for intercession, her Spanish is damaged and slow because she is moving her thoughts from Africa to Cuba and back again.

St Teresa of Avila was the one who brought me to St Catherine’s for the first time. In her autobiography, St Teresa of Avila tells of a meeting with the devil, and it seemed to her that the devil was a short Negro. Of course it’s funny about the devil being black; I thought it was funny, but at the same time. .

I needed to do something after I put down the Avila book; I needed to do the worst thing I could do in the world, something to call down hellfire and justice. I took my fifteen-year-old self to Chabella’s room. I took a pair of scissors to the most beautiful dress in the world, Chabella’s hoop-skirted wedding dress, so full-skirted a dress that it can stand up all by itself. I took the scissors to it, but I stopped before I could cut. I went to my best friend Amy Eleni’s house instead. When I briefly described what was going on, she took me to her parents’ loft, opened up a wooden chest and tossed her mother’s wedding dress at me.

‘Go on then,’ she said. She was laughing. But I couldn’t do anything to the dress. Despina’s dress was the second most beautiful in the world — this dress was satin, with a mist of silver mesh, the kind of dress that makes its wearer look newly wept. In the chest the dress had looked very narrow, narrower even than I thought Despina could be, but Amy Eleni wasn’t scared of getting stuck in it. Amy Eleni didn’t even care about the dress; she just put it on to show me. She flicked up the zip of Despina’s tear-dress as if it were all just jeans.

She turned to the dusty mirror sideways on, struck a pose, hands on her hips, her elbows crooked governess-style. She kicked back at the air to loosen her pose, and the dress’s seams creaked at her thigh. I couldn’t breathe, but Amy Eleni breathed. I looked at Amy Eleni in the mirror, but she didn’t see me looking. She struck another pose on tiptoe, arms held high, neck swaying as if something heavy was on her head. The skylights caught an accusing flash of sun that bypassed stacked sea-grass boxes to illuminate the dress.

The poor dress, it was too much. I stopped Amy Eleni with my hands, kept her waist straight under my palms to let her know that she shouldn’t bend any more, and I turned her in a swish of cold white as I examined the dress for damage. She drooped and jiggled her wrists, pretending to be a puppet. But before my eyes the dress’s shoulder was turning to sad, shredded cloth. Before I could even open my mouth, Amy Eleni said, ‘It’ll survive, wedding dresses survive anything. People have sex in wedding dresses. I mean, Jesus. Once I put this dress on and I climbed a tree in it! I fell, though. .’

I screamed small and checked the satin for grass stains, but Amy Eleni sniggered, batted my hand away, named a book and said I really needed to read it.

Books: I am attracted and repelled; books are conversations that are not addressed to me and I want to sneak up and listen but I also want to be invited in. If I was invited in the conversation would not be what it was.

After reading that Avila book, I scared Chabella badly. She decided that I was having ‘a moral, religious and mental breakdown’. I was only saying what was on my mind. The conversation that made Chabella decide that we were going to take a weekend retreat went exactly like this:

ME: Chabella, is it true that the Church refuses to confirm the presence of a single soul in Hell?

CHABELLA (with an enormous, proud smile): Ai, querida.

ME: Not even Hitler or Stalin or It the Clown?

CHABELLA: Not even them. Forgiveness –

ME (interrupting): What about Teresa of Avila?

CHABELLA: — is always an option. Mm, St Teresa, what?

ME: Well Teresa of Avila is a bitch, after all, so I expect she’s in Hell.

CHABELLA: (screams for three or four long seconds, while I just sit and look at her. Gasps. Holds her head with tears pouring down her face, shrinks and shakes as if I am punching her.)

Chabella said it wasn’t so much the words, but the way my face went when I said them — she said my face ‘twisted’ and she couldn’t recognise me. Chabella knows the Rites of Exorcism by heart. She is prone to exaggeration.

When Papi heard that Chabella and I were going on a retreat, he gave six-year-old Tomás a high five and said, ‘Just you and me, London baby. Show me some of those London ways.’ Papi had to give Tomás the high five very gently, it was in fact a matter of pressing his palm against Tomás’s fingers, or Tomás would have fallen down. Tomás was happy with the idea of us going away, too. He cackled, ‘Bye.’

When we actually left the following week, he said ‘Wait for me’ and ran upstairs to throw some toys into his rucksack. Mami closed the front door and he cried out: ‘No! No!’

The way Tomás said ‘No’, the way he said it.

He didn’t know what two days would feel like; he didn’t understand that he would only have to go to sleep and get up twice, and then we’d be back.

That first weekend at St Catherine’s, Chabella and I slept in the same room on low, neat white beds with scratchy blankets. We didn’t talk about Catholicism or Teresa; we were already in the Church, high up with a sweet vanilla smell and the softest hush all around. We laughed together in the night for no reason at all. We tried to be quiet because you were supposed to be quiet, and anyway, everyone was sleeping. But Mami would just look at me with her nostrils quivering and that was enough to set me off. At Mass, when I looked at my Mami, she glittered. When she sang, the song came from the wound on her tongue. While Mami slept at night, and I lay with my eyes closed,

a shadow fell, fast and from a great height it fell

it put me inside

it put me inside

the weight of it. Dark came to rest on my eyelids; strange and painful pennies. What if, what if I had opened my eyes and tried to look at what was there in that room. .

. . with sleepy awe I felt it: I am loved. And outside there were tall trees that had other people’s sleep caught in their branches, dreams like white lights, that first time Mami took me away to save my soul.

Now it’s 4 a.m. and I’m still awake with my fingers splayed over my neck and its old loop

of pain

(and I am at St Catherine’s again,

at the window again

amazed again

at the way a steep hill holds growing green on its swerve when it will support nothing else).

On the wall is St Catherine of Siena, sheets of chestnut hair floating in heaven-driven winds, Catherine who I always fail to love when I remember that she is not the Catherine of spiked-wheel martyrdom. Catherine of Siena looks at me with all of her soul in her soft smile; she looks at me, glad that I will not be staying. I think about the mothers I know or have seen or have heard of. My mother, Amy Eleni’s mother, mothers in books, mothers in Chabella’s apataki, her stories about the gods. Twenty-four not being old enough, I want to tell my son, Not now, please.

For six days I have been praying, really praying, a state of angry joy that I fell into through a crack in the bottom of my heart. I have not been able to close my eyes for longer than it takes to blink. I am back to childish bargaining with God for explicit support of my son, as if my son is special, or for advance pardon for the swift ending of my son, as if I am special. Or anything, anything, God give me anything.

Food: everything I eat, my mouth lets it go, my stomach heaves painful, sour streams. My breasts are rotten lumps hooked into my ribcage, and I can’t touch my body at all, I can’t. I keep holding my hands away from myself, or holding my hands together. But the afternoons ripen here in radiant languor as forty women draw a little more breath into their black and white cassocks so as to continue dying slowly from love. When it rains the sisters, capes heavy with water, rotate in fragrant clusters through the slate walkways of the chapel.

At the door, Sister Perpetua takes both my hands and looks at me from beneath the clean borders of her cowl. Her ‘hello’ smile is the same as her ‘goodbye’ smile. She lets me come, lets me go my way, looks at me now the same way that she did when I arrived a week ago. I tottered in on six-inch wedges with the meekest look that I could give her over the top of a pair of oversized sunglasses, the crown of my floppy brown hat settled around my ears and Aaron’s discarded khaki jacket, longer and looser than the black dress I wore beneath it, flapping open despite my best efforts to belt it in several places. She brusquely tells me that this time I came on retreat from a joyous heart, that I was here with her at St Catherine’s because I am being slain by the Holy Spirit.

‘Jesus is in your life,’ Sister Perpetua says again, while I look at her and do not think of Jesus at all because Sister Perpetua’s beauty is bewitched: her lips are a frozen red that thaws out into pink at the corners; her eyebrows climb to tapered peaks above dark chocolate eyes. Sister Perpetua has the face that Snow White’s mother had wished upon her. But it isn’t that something is keeping her young, just that something is keeping her beautiful. I love Sister Perpetua for stupid reasons: she does not whisper in Chapel but talks for God to hear; she has seen me crying and she just lets me cry; when she wants me to pray with her she covers my hands with her soft ones.

The first time I came she found me in the Chapel and told me about an African priest who the Church had confirmed was in heaven. She did not tell Chabella; she only told me, as if she knew that I needed it. I told her about the shadow at night, and she talked about the Cloud of Unknowing, how when God is near, you are driven into the darkness outside of reason and it is a good, sweet rest. I tried to explain that it wasn’t unknowing. But mystics are difficult to argue with.

I’m still not used to Aaron’s flat, even though I moved in four months ago, even though he calls it ‘ours’. The house is in the middle of a semi-detached row; always at attention, jutting straight up with a windowed stare that holds sleepy intelligence near its base, as if the right command could send it leaping sideways. I approach it with caution. I feel like an interview candidate arriving to be considered for tenancy by the house itself. I lose myself so far as to raise a hand to knock at the door though the keys are already dangling on their ring from the index finger of my other hand. We live in the bottom half of the converted two-floor house that Aaron’s dad, a man made thin by nerves and neatness and ownership of a real-estate agency, gave him for his twenty-first birthday.

The streets around the house are misted with trees and re-edged with cut-out-and-colour delis and small, glass-fronted restaurants whose clientele don’t seem to do lunch, or dinner, or anything other than beautifully hued cocktails.

Inside the house is a middle floor forced between the green-carpeted staircase that leads up to Miss Lassiter’s flat and the peeling wooden steps that lead down to Aaron’s. I am wary here; I remember that Miss Lassiter’s envelope is due today. Miss Lassiter is now Aaron’s tenant, though she used to be his father’s. She leaves monthly envelopes outside Aaron’s door without knocking. Aaron doggedly maintains that she’s shy, but I don’t enjoy Miss Lassiter. When I meet her on the stairs, she thrusts her walking stick out before her like a probe. The outlines of her face are buried in clasped whorls of wool; she wears stiff black gloves, and holds her fingers together so that her thumb is a loner. The gloves make her hands look like blunted hooks.

I tiptoe downstairs and open the front door of the flat. Immediately Aaron is filming me. Kente cloth is threaded into a vivid print belt for his jeans, his socked feet slip on the floorboards. I make a face at him; he lifts his eye away from the viewfinder and, smiling, directs me with his hand, showing me which slats of space I can walk in without damaging his angle.

‘So, Maja,’ he intones, and I know that he’s making a close-up of my face. ‘Who wins? Aaron or. . GOD?’

I hang up my coat and spread my hands in the shade; he frantically indicates that I should come forward and turn a little more to the right. I do.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘What am I talking about?’ He walks backwards, ignoring my attempt to try and get the camera off him. ‘My girlfriend goes off to a nunnery four times in as many months, and I’m not supposed to worry that she’s about to marry Jesus. .’

I stop at the kitchen door; Aaron is inside now, shored up against a crumbling wharf of green tile, stacked plates and opened jars. I look into the camera for what feels like forever — I look until I forget that I am seeing anything and my eyes spill over with tension water, and he is abashed and nervously shifts the camera.

When he puts the camera down on the kitchen table I see how tired he is, see the caved-in yawn lines around his mouth and the panda patches around his eyes. He comes to me and rests his forehead against mine. I only really notice the notations that exhaustion leaves on his face when I’ve been separated from the reasons for it: the broken braying of his pager; the fifty-six-hour cover shift at the hospital that upends us into a fraught, airless rectangle of calling each other at the wrong time, not answering calls from each other when it’s most important, me wondering what it means when he forgets to say ‘I love you’ before saying goodbye. His hair is getting too long. He is beginning a beard, and it’s in an awkward adolescent phase, bristling in patches despite itself.

I don’t want dinner, but he starts pounding steaming boiled yams for fresh fufu at the kitchen counter. The only help he lets me give is simple; heating up a chicken stew he’s already made. I like watching Aaron burn like this, his body clock hopelessly awry, forehead wrinkled as he revolves around the steel cog of his own nervous energy. I think he likes it when I try to sing him to sleep, although he doesn’t fall for it — he just looks at me with the covers wadded under his chin, wearing a smile of melting gold like a child’s. Sometimes he wakes up in the night asking what time it is and asking whether someone else finished the tourniquet job he started because he’s forgotten to go back, or asking who collected the X-rays. When he sees that it’s only me, he laughs and curls up against me and falls asleep again.

He eats dinner; I watch him skimming balls of dough-like fufu into a rich, dense stew. He asks if I want to talk about the retreat. With the question put as formally as that, I say I don’t. He’s relieved — almost immediately he changes tack and asks whether I’m singing tonight. I’m not, and he’s not on call tonight, so he says, ‘We should go and see a play or a film or something.’

‘OK,’ I say, pretending to leaf through Time Out, knowing that he’ll fall asleep before he even finds his shoes.

On the sofa he begins to drowse with his head on my lap, mumbling, ‘Sorry I’m so crap,’ into the fabric of my jeans. I draw my fingers through his hair and tell him to shut up. He sleeps with his grey eyes half open and intent on some object at floor level.

Aaron knows Amy Eleni from a church choir they both used to sing in before Amy Eleni dropped out. I think they must have recognised something in each other, some poorly concealed intensity that other people find nerve-wracking. The first time I met him, when he joined me on a tinsel-strewn sofa at Amy Eleni’s birthday party, Aaron drifted into sleep the way he is drifting now. Then it was because he trusted the swell of skin-longing that drew us together in a searching curve, had us asking each other with our eyes and our small, ironic smiles, Can I touch you? His head sought my lap as if he had every right to claim me for his pillow. And I, I drew my knees up a little higher, feeling his soft hair slipping as he moved with me, feeling his eyes on my lips, drinking in his face; in that way we kissed before we kissed.

Aaron has a strange accent, unevenly crammed with tonality. Some words he sings, others he says so flatly that they’re lost. I thought at first that he might be one of the more outlandish white South Africans until he told me that he had been born and raised in Ghana. When I remember, my accent is as firm and clean as I can make it; it bears unabbreviated sentences with all their rich vowels gutted out by a sharp tip of mindfulness. I speak like this because my parents — their voices smoothed to calm, placeless melody through academia — speak English like this. And I speak like this because it is important that I’m understood. In a country where ears are attuned to courteous, clipped white noise, being asked to repeat myself batters down the words in me, makes my tongue fall down my throat.

At the party, Aaron seemed to be listening to more than just my words; when he dropped his gaze I heard our breathing — his breath absorbed mine and took wings and fluttered shallow, weak, confused at its suddenly expanded span. I was so obviously talking about nothing that I stopped to ask him a question, and it was only when he answered thickly and after a long pause that I realised he had been snoring lightly.

His mouth is maddeningly soft and full; I draw my thumb lightly over his lips and he nips at me.

I hear feet dragging on the steps outside, and the sound has my heartbeat jumping in the palm of my hand, even though I know it’s only Miss Lassiter. It’s only Miss Lassiter, and her envelope is due today. But it holds me still when she takes so long to put the envelope down, waits so long silent outside the door before she shuffles away (it’s just that she’s old, it’s just that she’s old, she can’t move so quickly)

I have to wait. I have to wait until I feel that Miss Lassiter has gone. It takes a long time to feel that Miss Lassiter has gone. She is only really gone when Mami calls.

Mami is in the payphone down the road from her and Papi’s house.

‘I’m never going back in there again,’ Chabella whispers. I imagine her in the phone box, her fingers holding on to the receiver around one of the disposable handkerchiefs that she reserves for public toilets and public telephones. I close the sitting-room door and sandwich the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I pull my coat on. That pang around my throat comes back, it comes like a guillotine.

‘Do you want to stay here?’ I ask, automatically. ‘Shall I come and get you? What happened?’

Mami’s sob — one sound, arrested because it is so rageful. The words that follow can only tread softly over that sound.

‘He’s broken it.’

‘What?’

‘My altar.’

Mami is a Santero. She constantly tells me that I don’t know what that means. I soon outgrew Mami’s evening flower ceremonies. After a while, the flowers that seemed to answer Chabella’s questions in raptures of hush and smoke revealed themselves to be limp rice paper. What is it that’s holy about those flowers? Is it that they burn? Or that they burn so readily? But you can burn a cross, a witch, a piece of toast. .

Chabella’s Papi was not a believer in anything much, and believers in Habana were suspicious that Chabella wanted to be one of them. They did not know her or her father, and they had to be careful, so Mami had to make her own Santeria. When I think of her Santeria initiation I see her surrounded by her Orishas — her guardian Yoruba gods. I see my Mami kneeling with her eyes turned ecstatically upwards into the wet curtains of her eyelids as her priest cuts two bars, each one as thick as a slug’s trail, into the flesh of her tongue. Her altar is a series of four interlinked shrines, grooved pentagons of painted wood and brass threaded with flowers and rosaries and shells and stones and candles and saucers, all of fidelity’s sparse jewellery.

The Orishas came into Cuba on the ships of 1500, which were built as temporary coffers for black gold. The Yoruba gods discovered their Cuba in the dark, hidden in bigger emergencies and cries of warning as patrol ships tried to intercept the cargo. The gods were hidden in the fear of being drowned. They were hidden in the unseen smack, smack, smack of the next man’s head on the ship’s boards as he tried to damage his brain and decrease his market value. The gods were not afraid, but they wept.

On arrival, the Orishas became beloved in secret. Slaves had to be Catholic and obedient or they’d be killed, or worse. The Word ‘slave’ is a big deal to Chabella and Papi; neither of them can get out from under it. It is blackness in Cuba. It is sometimes bittersweet, for such is the song of the morena; it is two fingers placed on a wrist when a white Cuban is trying to describe you. Papi tries to systematise it and talk about the destruction of identity and the fragility of personality, but he is scared of the Word. Mami hides inside the Word, finds reveries in it, tries to locate a power that she is owed.

The slaves in Cuba learnt to recognise their gods when they saw ripped white bed sheets, forked scraps of wood, overturned tin buckets. These things marked places where mass could be celebrated. If you still knew who you were, you had to keep it a secret. The gods hid among the saints and apostles and nobody perceived them unless they wanted to; it didn’t take as much as people had thought for Catholicism and Yoruba to fuse together. The saints intercede for us with God, who must despise us to let us suffer so. The Orishas intercede for us with Olorun who, being a darker side of God, possibly despises us more. A painting of a saint welling holy tears and the story of an Orisha teach you the same thing — if you cry for someone, it counts as a prayer.