The Opposite House

15 the king who does not speak

No Kayodes in the somewherehouse, and so Aya hears nothing but the cedar beams whispering until Mama Proserpine strides out into the hallway to find her. Because it is a mask day for Aya’s Mama, and because Proserpine is not wearing a mask this mask day, Aya averts her own gaze. Proserpine’s wooden mask is secured atop her head in bows of downy lining; her cloak fastens in tarnished bronze links at her throat. Proserpine multiplies and a carnival of cloaked women bend their fractured gazes on Aya.

But no, it is only the mirrors, mirrors everywhere Aya looks.

‘Proserpine, why did you bring the mirrors down?’

Proserpine’s sigh is refined, tolerant: ‘Proserpine is not my name.’

Aya climbs the stairs to the Kayodes’ rooms. She is slowed by flashing mirror surfaces that stir the air in an ascending chime. The house gives way to a spiky maw that snaps at Aya as she opens doors and doors and doors to take down mirrors. Her own aghast reflection runs at her, looms at her, flies from openings to toss her into foreboding until she cries, ‘Who’s that, who’s there?’

The mirrors are studded with the blunt stems of her watchmaker’s seeds, which have staggered into mahogany life; their petals all point one way. The attic, nude and luxuriating in its new dark, welcomes Aya by spattering her with moths. Aya sits with her back against the door and places her hand over her juddering heart.

But the hard flowers are here too — she didn’t forget the attic when she was planting them. The flowers point: Aya is meant to go still higher.

She puts her head out of the attic window. The branches scrabble to attention, she winces as snow scuttles across her face and eyes.

‘Yeye?’ Mama Proserpine’s call climbs from the kitchen to the rafters.

Aya looks up, sees that she has never understood the somewherehouse’s trees. Their branches brush the ground, yes, their branches fountain in twiggy brackets from earth upwards, but (their roots are buried in the sky) clouds crawl lazily away from the black suction that the roots, wide and thick as doors, drive into the blue. Snow crumbles onto Aya, snow salts her.

All of the watchmaker’s signpost flowers are straining upwards, pointing out what it is that she seeks, up, up. In shattered minutes from window ledge to rough treetrunk, she has fought her way up to the snow’s uneven red centre, a ‘v’ that looks less and less like light and more like blood. Snow unfolds itself in bolts on and around her. Inside her is a happiness that threatens to unzip her and step out singing.

Then her skin finds a limit: other skin, a cheek against her cheek. She tries to climb back down to safety, but, as if she does not own or control her hands, Aya releases the branch. She does not fall, but her tears start immediately. Compunction, for he is terrible.

Him. He leans forward to her; he is the one who has caused the trees to grow contrary, to grow from his heart. He is a great cuspate blade primed to flay her, he is a hammer bringing sun down to gloom.

He says, ‘Daughter.’

‘I cannot.’

‘Cannot —?’

‘I.’

Aya weeps and she looks for herself, but there is no one there.

Papa says, ‘What do you want of me?’

‘I.’

‘You poor child,’ her Papa says.

Her nerve a million times denies her. Papa waits and they breathe together, but Aya cannot speak. Such oppression — it pulls at her eyeballs. He releases her. Aya falls through the tree’s tentacles with her arms spread wide; she is shadowed by falls of snow. . until a new heat lances her and with trembling hands she learns that she is dangling just above her window, her stomach impaled on an ice-whitened branch. Oh, blood.

Mama Proserpine, swimming in place in an ocean of black silk, leans out of the attic window

(too far — she could fall)

to try to help her, and Aya, unable to gesture ‘no’, cannot yet say that this pain brings her ache to the front of her mind. Sleet races leaves down from the tree roots; sleet covers Aya’s shoulders, chills the hot blood she’s losing. The way her limbs are splayed now she is more honest in her agony than she has ever been before. This is what she really looks like, humble before him, her father. This is how he has always seen her.

Kneeling down before three mirrors that Mama Proserpine has fetched and propped up against the attic wall, Aya touches her lips, her forehead, her cheeks; they are daubed with blood from her fingers.

Once, she heard the word ‘welkin’ used, and ‘welkin’ became a word she loved, but did not hear again. Welkin describes old, high fascination. It describes supple colour that catches and jails the eye — blue sky in summer when it spreads itself out like a magic carpet and it seems a person could step up onto it. The welkin tint is caught in Aya’s eyes, is swept over her lips, lights her whole face. Her fingertips wind a dance of shudders down her throat, stroke whorls around her nipples. Drugged with content, her hand slides down to her lap.

‘Where are the Kayodes?’ Aya asks.

Proserpine squeezes another bloodstained rag into her bowl of water, and a green herb smell stretches its fronds over them.

‘They went.’

‘You took them home?’

Proserpine nods and flattens another rag over Aya’s stomach. Aya doesn’t feel it.

‘Are you Mama?’

‘Yeye, don’t do this.’

Aya peels off the hot rag and drops it into the bowl. ‘What happened to your face, your skin? What happened to the way you walk? Why don’t you wear your mask on a mask day?’

Mama settles herself opposite Aya. She sees Aya is uncomfortable and she pulls down her mask, adjusts it. The mask is a white hand that cups Mama’s face.

‘I was weary. So I went to your Papa, and he took my ache.’

This new Mama’s eyes flicker behind her mask.

Aaron wants to tell his mother about my son.

‘I haven’t even told my mother.’

He says, ‘Well, let’s tell her as well. What’s the problem?’

‘No problem, there isn’t a problem.’ I am sarcastic. I do not let him hold my stomach, or even brush against it. Because he performs examinations — that is what he does — when he touches me now his fingers become probes, his fingers tell me he doesn’t trust me. I reject his name suggestions: Gabriel is a stupid name, the other boys would have kicked him to pieces over that name anyway, my son, if he had lived.

I can’t get the sanitary towels out of the house fast enough. So Aaron finds out about the bleeding, about the dark syrup my son sends me. He holds up one of my scented sanitary bags between his fingertips and we both look at the sodden cotton whirling around inside it. For a moment I can see the anger he talked about before. It’s there on his face. Then the flash fades and he is left with a scared face and I am left with a nervous giggle that he doesn’t understand. Aaron wants to know why I didn’t say anything.

Is the baby. . gone?

Have I been to the doctor?

What is the matter with me?

I want to know too, maybe.

Dr Maxwell has big pink cheeks. In her family I bet she is the youngest child, the well-fed child who got morsels from her mother’s fingertips whenever something special was cooking, who had her cheeks pinched into prettiness by tens of doting fingers.

Aaron takes the scare out of the visit to her. The heel of my hand, that part where the veins are most traceable — Aaron kisses me there while she talks about our options. I wade through the ultrasound, through six glasses of water and clear, cartilage-thick gel and the probes, and my son is still there

(or some thing, a small wonderful curl that represents him — he is turned to hide his sex)

and later Dr Maxwell says that my bleeding was just an extra egg, just an extra egg, that sometimes that happens. Throughout the scan Aaron cannot catch his breath for gladness, he cannot see straight for crying — who is he fighting?

I think I am sleeping too much.

My eyes open and I think: daytime. Other times my eyes open and I’m certain it’s night-time. I do not say a lot, because of the leak. If I speak, the leak speaks louder. The water does not want me to be heard. Aaron wants me to know that I am exhausted. But there is no reason for me to be exhausted. I am about to ask him, exhausted from what? but before I can, I am asleep again. It cannot be a good thing to keep falling asleep like this, falling asleep without my choosing or my control. No dreams. But when I manage to fight into waking for long enough, the woman’s song comes back to me so clearly now

(and, yes, she did sing in Habana, she really did — Magalys has lied).

My son is strong, a greater strength of coffee than both Aaron and I. No one will be able to drink right down to the bottom of this boy, if only I let him be born.

Aaron is here again trying to feed me soup, trying to feed me tomato kedgeree, but all I see is bloodied fish. Aaron smiles, he tries to keep me cheerful. I take a long time gathering coherence and then I ask him if he sees anything when he sleeps with his eyes open the way he does. His smile is his answer; it protects him from me and I lose him inside it. I am beginning to understand that at the end of this time there is going to be a need for strength, that as the skin over my stomach pulls tauter my centre descends, and one day I am going to have to push. I don’t know how anyone survives it, the thought or the happening. I will not.

I try to talk about the leak. Aaron says I need to be patient about having it fixed. That leak, it is too cruel, it bypasses me and talks to the other one who is not me. I am not being stupid or petty, and I am not playing the girl card when it happens that I cry and say, ‘Please get that leak stopped.’ Aaron says, ‘Soon, soon, I promise.’

I am trying to make sure that I live. Living is not a thing I can do alongside the leak. I have taken to crawling in my sleep. When I wake, I laugh at the carpet burns pulling at the skin on my knees. I am trying to get away from the woman who walks above me, walks from room to room even as I crawl. The leak

(Cubans are very friendly if their gestures are reciprocated — Miramar has great beaches — don’t forget to check out the Varadero — oh, look what has happened to this Cubana, if nobody told her she was Cuban would she even know? Yet siempre el drama)

the leak is out of proportion and out of control. The leak is tears. And tears are prayers, but I think Mami only says that because she is best at tears.

St Catherine’s: that place with its bell tower and sweet, long-spaced chimes; its trees; the sisters; the way the light there is different. Having someone who knows me a little see that place could be worse than letting someone read a book or hear a song that has worked witchery on me. St Catherine’s is the kind of place that someone could use to suddenly know me a lot better, and against my will. Amy Eleni is driving me up there, because with Amy Eleni I don’t mind so much. I wouldn’t want Aaron to see that place.

Today Amy Eleni is wearing a terrible hat I bought her for Christmas years ago — she calls it that, ‘the Terrible Hat’. It’s a patchwork fleece hat, as ugly as sin, but warm, which I knew she’d like. I sit beside Amy Eleni in the front seat of her car and hold my seat belt a little bit away from me so that I don’t feel so restricted. London slips away and is not missed; trees and sky begin to gently blend, there is more air. Amy Eleni plays Billie Holiday and we listen to her blessing that child that’s got his own. Also, we quote lines from Vertigo. We swap so that neither of us has to be Scottie for longer than is fair; Judy gets all the best lines.

‘That film is cleverer than either of us,’ Amy Eleni says when she runs out of quotes.

‘Yeah,’ I say. I have run out, too.

Things are more serious than Amy Eleni and I realised. We are not equal to this pregnancy thing.

‘So what’s been the matter with you lately? Do you think you’re the first woman ever to get pregnant or something?’

Amy Eleni keeps her eyes on the road, doesn’t waver as I look at her and tell her plainly, ‘It’s the hysteric. You know. Everything’s become absolute. I get this feeling that either I or this baby is going to die.’

(‘OK,’ says Amy Eleni, ‘that’s why we need to get rid of the baby.’ She brakes so hard that the tyres scream and I bounce in my seat, fall forward, and the top of my head is numb, numb because I’ve smashed through the windscreen and the noises my brain makes, the noises, for almost a full second I am blind)

No, I’m fine. My belt, my seat-belt thing. I’m fine. Except Amy Eleni is staring at me, her eyes like rounds of bottle glass. Except I heard Amy Eleni speak, but she did not speak, or it was not she who spoke.

I am beginning to understand something about the hysteric, how sneaky she is, how she can repeat in Mami’s voice, ‘A white girl is never your friend, she works to a different system.’ I can see how my personal hysteric and I could conspire and do something to my son and make it Amy Eleni’s fault. This thing, this mistrust I did not know I had, it could go far, too far. Hysteria has got nothing to do with an empty womb.

‘Calm down! Something ran out across the road. A stray or something. I didn’t hit it,’ Amy Eleni says, starting up again once she is sure that I am all right.

‘Please turn back,’ I whisper.

‘No, I’m taking you to St Catherine’s. You wanted to go.’

Nothing but trees and the cold outside.

‘I’ve changed my mind! I don’t want to be in the car with you!’

Amy Eleni’s eyes narrow, but she checks her rear-view mirror and turns the car round, she turns the car round, thank God.

‘You think I don’t understand this pregnancy thing, and you’re right, I don’t understand it. But please do me the courtesy of thinking it’s because I’ve never been pregnant, not because I’m gay, not because I’m not going to have any kids. I saw your face when you found out I’m an egg donor,’ Amy Eleni says, flatly.

I don’t say anything to her. I look out of the window. I want to drown her out in case she says anything else; I would turn up the volume of the music, but I don’t want to touch anything in her car. I just want us to be safe. I don’t know what ‘us’ means; there are combinations — me and my son, me and Aaron. And there’s me and Amy Eleni, the friend who came and made it so that I needed no other friend. Green changes back into grey, the pavements return.

When she drops me off outside Aaron’s flat, I get out and say to her, very carefully, ‘I can’t see you for a while. And we can’t talk about this baby any more. It’s not your fault — it’s mine.’

She just nods and rolls up the window.

Sleep, get up, et cetera.

I want my Papi to come for me. But if he comes with reason I will turn him away. I don’t want the everyday Papi who lives out of a suitcase of ideas and cigars and woollen slippers. I want my Papi of emergencies, the Papi that I can reach when we’re both quiet and straining to catch each other.

Papi caught chickenpox when I was twelve. Tomás was three, and Mami’s main concern was keeping Tomás away from Papi so that no one died. I hadn’t had chickenpox yet, but I volunteered to be chief nurse and snuck into Mami and Papi’s bedroom to check on him even when Mami banned me from doing so. Papi was very quiet, very patient. His eyes, peering out from the tufts of camomile-soaked cotton wool that Mami had left on his face, were pale red. I loved him so much more because he didn’t have anything to say about his chickenpox, my brave silent sufferer; I sat up beside him in bed and hugged him carefully. I wanted to catch the pox from him because I thought it would help him by dividing the spots in half. I took his temperature with increasing daring, leaving my hand against his forehead for so long that I thought I was sure to succeed. His fever ran so high that entire week that it seemed certain he would spontaneously combust. But when I knelt by his pillow and told him so, he laughed breathlessly and asked me what I knew about spontaneous combustion. So I showed him books — the best picture was of a man’s leg resting at the foot of a chair, a few inches away from a hill of ash. The leg, dressed in a knee sock and training shoe, looked jaunty in its independence, as if it was about to launch itself towards the ash and kick it in every direction. ‘There’s a man who spontaneously combusted,’ I said. ‘I bet he didn’t say anything when it was about to happen. I bet he knew what was going on, though. He must’ve felt hot.’

Papi agreed with me.

The next morning I woke up before the sun did, gagging with thirst, feeling as if my tongue had been scraped with a rusty spike. I kept spitting dazedly into my hand to see if there was blood. My pillows were sucking me in.

‘Papi, Papi,’ I shrieked, and he came. When he saw me, he tutted as if it was my fault I felt sick. He said, ‘Oh, Maja.’

I tried to stop spitting into my hand. I knew it was ugly, but I couldn’t help it; my hands were seamed with glassy, bitter-smelling bubbles.

Papi ran his fingers over the red rash on my forehead and kissed me all over my face, and said, very low, very serious, very kindly, ‘Gracias, m’hija, gracias,’ until I settled against his shoulder, content that he was grateful. Papi comes to conclusions suddenly and works backwards, once he’s there at the beginning of a thought he understands.

Papi: ordinary boy or extraordinary boy? When Mami used to corn-row his hair for him he would think of something and get impatient halfway through and wander around the house looking for the book with the paragraph that was perfect for that starburst of thought. Even if Mami worked quickly she could only get half of his head done at once, then for the rest of the day he would go around with his fingers marking several places in several books, one half of his head neatly plaited, the other half a mass of curls with an afro comb quivering in it. He looked like a retired rapper in denial. Eventually he’d stop in front of a mirror, tut and say, ‘Chabella, I thought you had finished? Somebody needs to take these plaits out.’

Chabella started enlisting me to corn-row the other half of Papi’s head so that we had a better chance of making his hair presentable. But one day he defied us. He went out and came back with his head shaved. He stood dramatically in the doorway and crowed, ‘Ha!’

My Papi loves salt so much he can eat it sprinkled over thinly sliced tomatoes; if he feels his blood pressure rushing he reaches for more salt in case it’s his last. My Papi is so fond of conclusions that he reads the last three chapters of a novel before he reads the first. My Papi dreams of small children who will call him their abuelo. But all that means is that if I want revenge I will have them call him ‘Grandsire’, curtsey or bow, and ask if he will take one lump or two.

Only with Papi can I forgive at the exact moment that he hurts me. It is as Chabella said: there is nothing wrong with my father except that he stopped listening to me. But Awe is not my mother, Chabella is, and she is not on my side. I thought she was fighting Papi and sugar and England with her tears and flowers, but really she has been fighting me, too.

The doorbell rings so urgently and so many times that it wakes me. I go to the main door barefoot, rumpled, and disoriented. Papi has sent Tomás to pick up my plane tickets. When Tomás comes in, I see that he’s surprised by how dark the flat is. He draws in a deep breath and says, ‘Why does it smell so damp in here?’

I could tell him about the leak, but instead I say, ‘Because it is England.’

He is abashed, as if it’s his fault that I’m not going to Habana. He shuffles his feet while I go through my bag for the tickets. I am slow finding them, but I do not think to withhold the plane tickets because I do not think. When I find them, I hand them to Tomás without taking them out of the envelope.

Tomás says, ‘Maja, I did try to talk to him for you.’

I hug him and he resists at first, then he folds into me.

I say, ‘Why couldn’t Mami talk to him for me?’

Tomás lets go of me and says, ‘Mami’s ill.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’

He pauses, fumbles for the root of the problem.

‘She can’t find her Santeria beads.’

I am laughing now. I can’t give a reason for it, but my brother wants to know why. His face comes very close to mine and his hands form fists; I press a hand down on my chest as if somehow that will silence me, but instead my hand falls onto my stomach, and we both look, we both look at the bump. Tomás eases away. His voice is shaky. ‘She’s lost her beads. It’s not funny. Papi and I talked about getting her some more, but apparently they’d have to be consecrated and all this stuff and you know that’s enough to send Papi mad because he doesn’t trust babalawos. But this thing with Chabella. . oh. You should come. She’s. . I don’t know. She tutors and she cooks and she makes those paper flowers and she just sits there and she’s so sad. It doesn’t sound like anything. But. . you should come.’

I cross over into the bedroom and bring Tomás the collar. When he sees it, he sits very still and looks as if he has forgotten how to breathe. He thinks I am heartless to still be holding the collar after what he has told me. He doesn’t understand that Chabella and I are fighting. I hold the collar out to him, draw it back.

Tomás whispers, ‘Please give it back. You don’t know how sad Mami is.’

(No.)

‘Why are you blaming her? It was Papi who said you couldn’t go.’ When I don’t reply Tomás says ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you. Why didn’t you say anything to us?’

I will not answer him.

‘Hormones,’ Tomás says, to goad me.

Tick, tick, no answer. But as soon as he leaves, I call home. Mami answers and her voice is hoarse and thin, and I think, Fight me better than this.

And she does. Chabella says that she is fine. She does not talk to me about the collar. I say I have been tired lately, and of course she is concerned and of course she thinks she has something that will help. Should she bring it over? I say ‘No’ louder than I mean to.

Amy Eleni is brusque with me when she calls. ‘Now, tell me what’s the matter, Maja.’

I am sitting up in bed with my head against the head board; the phone is pinned between my shoulder blade and my ear. My arms feel weak. I didn’t want to speak to her, but Aaron gave me such a look when he handed me the phone. I tell her, ‘Nothing. I’m pregnant. Nothing. I’m going to die.’

‘Shut up! Aaron’s worried sick. You tell me you don’t want to see me, you act all fucked up, but because I’m your best friend you know I can’t just let that stand. Another thing: you sleep all the time.’

‘OK, it’s sleeping sickness.’

‘Didn’t I just tell you to shut up?’

I shut up.

Amy Eleni says, ‘I read my class a wonderful poem, a stunning poem, the Elizabeth Jennings love poem about stargazers, and the only comment I had was anonymous — it came from the back, and it was “I don’t get it, man.” They think they have to “get” it. When I talk about Shelley, this same kid at the back shouts out, “Who’s Shelley?” When I talk about Marvell or Donne, this boy or deep-voiced girl shouts out, “Who’s Marvell? Who’s Donne?” When I talk about Shakespeare, this little shit at the back shouts out, “Who’s Shakespeare?” I look and look but there’s about eight of them with their hands over their mouths. Their last teacher was male, and he cracked after someone spat on his head; he couldn’t identify the culprit and everyone thoroughly denied it, so maybe they’re expert liars or maybe they got this man so nervous he imagined saliva. They’re trying to. . well, anyway, I won’t do it, you know?’

Suddenly I am telling Amy Eleni about Magalys and Papi and Mami. I talk for a long time.

Amy Eleni says with certainty, ‘Listen Maja, I think you’re pulling a Vertigo on me with this distraught chat about oh, something missing in your Cuba memory and how you feel so trapped by your dad not letting you go. The reason why you’re not going is that you know it’s not what you need — what you need is here. If you really needed to go back, you’d come to the regretful conclusion that it’s none of your dad’s business and you’d go anyway. Wouldn’t you? There’s nothing between you and yourself. If Madeleine Elster or Judy really needed to kill herself, then between that person inside her telling her that she had to go and Scottie saying, “Hey you’re pretty and I like you so don’t die,” Scottie didn’t stand a fucking chance. The Elster chick, or Judy, or whoever, she could have just shot herself in the head if it all got too much. But she didn’t. She let Scottie get in the way.’

I listen to Amy Eleni breathing on the other end of the line, and I listen to the leak. I listen to the African news channel that Aaron is watching next door; I don’t listen to what the newsreader is saying, but to how she is saying it, her tone of perpetual astonishment.

I sleep. I wake and put Chabella’s collar back on to make my sleep uncomfortable, to give me a better chance of waking. Sometimes Aaron is there. More often he is not there. When he speaks on the phone to Geoffrey, he speaks in Ewe because he doesn’t want me to know what he is saying. The smell of damp collects in my bones.

I warm myself up some tomato soup and before I can sit down to drink it I’ve become carbon, the black before a diamond shows itself. My senses turn crystalline and abrade each other until I lay down my spoon. If this spoon should scrape against the bottom of the bowl just once, and I should hear it scrape, I am not sure of the result. I am not sure where the hysteric and I are going to go when that bad sound comes. I hold the spoon away and I breathe and do not eat.

Aaron looks at me over the top of his own bowl of soup, and the circles around his eyes are so dark that I begin to think I am reflecting him.

‘You have got to eat,’ he says. His voice is very hard. It hurts. He stands over me and drags my wrist so that I have to put soup into my mouth. I let him; with his hand over mine there is less risk of the bad sound coming. A spoonful at a time, we do it. The cold in this kitchen never ends, the steam off the soup is nothing. Whenever I think I am going to spit soup in Aaron’s face, he knows, and he warns me with his eyes.

I say I’ve had enough, and Aaron looks into the bowl. It is still more than three-quarters full. Aaron says, ‘Don’t be selfish.’ He jams the sloppy spoon into my mouth. It isn’t deliberate when the metal strikes my teeth — but the metal does strike. I take the spoon myself and continue the work. Aaron watches me swallow; he is sad that he has to do this, but he is strong. In his eyes I am a throat working down red juice, I am a shaking hand and a spoon and beyond that his baby.

(Herr Doktor please die as I cannot have you think of me this way.)

I am so ashamed of my tears that I am going away, not up and out, not inside, I don’t know where, just away. My shame brings me escape velocity, brings me Gelassenheit. I love my son, so when Aaron is gone, I do not throw up to spite him. I let the soup stay. I let us have the soup.

Aaron has to go when there is a cardiac arrest and he is on night cover; he has to go for fourteen hours at a time on a lot of days. He has to be gone full stop.

Amy Eleni has tousled her hair up with gel. I peek into the sitting room and watch Aaron wrap his arms around her; she nips his cheek, talks to him for a moment

(the first thing she says is, ‘this place smells worse and worse all the time.’ I think he offers her words about the plumber, or time, or something, because the second thing Amy Eleni says is, ‘she will lose her mind in this smell, you know.’ I don’t hear the third thing)

then she comes through to me.

She has brought me an armful of coffee-table books about Cuba, two torches and a grab bag of salt and vinegar crisps. I refuse to let the books remain in the bedroom.

‘But these are good, I promise,’ she says. ‘I meant to give them to you for your birthday, but this is an emergency. Anyway, shut up.’

Amy Eleni has inscribed the inside of the first book: ‘Friends make the world strong and beautiful — Jose Marti’

We crawl under the covers with torches, Amy Eleni lies flat on her stomach, I lie on my side. Our breath tickles the pages, and we stare at Cubans and the words that they have said to the photographers, the words printed alongside the monochrome and sepia images of bearded men waving out of the windows of long brown cars, houses with tiled floors and open wooden shutters and pictures of Che Guevara beside pictures of Jesus, leathered women in aprons churning butter, a queue of uniformed girls following a nun down the street with their buckle-shoed feet caught in variations of the cha-cha-cha, each grabbing the other by the ponytail.

My fingers turn the pages to salt and vinegar, but they stay on a page where a black Santero woman strewn with the beads of her gods lets her laughter throw her head right back. She is a big woman, and a diamond-patterned headscarf covers even bigger hair in a turban wrap. Behind her on the wall, in blurry focus, is a wooden crucifix, and the words next to her picture don’t matter.

I decide to be proactive about the leak. I take pen, paper and the Yellow Pages and sit down on the floor by the phone to find and write down the telephone numbers of four plumbers in the area. Understanding what I am reading takes longer than it should because something seems hilarious to me, but I don’t know what it is. The laughter is there and there’s no bottom to it. I try strategies. I try to dissect what could be making me laugh; I try to remember if I’ve just seen anything or heard anything or there’s anything in the room that I’m not fully registering. I put the phone book down and I search the sitting room for hilarity. The sitting room is nothing but books and lamps and videotapes. At the window I see that the day is recovering from rain and I see that Aaron has left a plantain skin on the windowsill.

I try to stop smiling because smiling is another way for this laughter to seethe out from between my teeth. I try to outrun the grin and I go to the front door and back again, but when I stop, the world whirls and the sloshing in my ears tells me my water levels have gone awry. There is already too much water inside — my son swims as he sleeps; when he is awake he surges towards a sound. I want my son to try at leaving me a little, so, for him, I found my voice this morning and sang. I think my son likes my voice. It disordered me to track his movement with my thumb. My voice came differently this morning — there was a raspy range to it before that has gone away. Now I’m sounding impossibly light and singing nonsense lullabies that very quickly seem as if they had never been, like bubbles blown and broken at second breath. But my son heard, and he swelled his walls in one smooth rush. He strained so eagerly that I understand that he doesn’t know that his walls are me. I wanted Aaron to know. I called out, ‘Oh my God! Aaron!’ and then I remembered that he had already left for the day.

Still believing that I am about to start laughing, I look at phone numbers, but each number stands independently of the others, smug mathematical symbols. Today my handwriting comes out so small that when I try and call one of the numbers I misread my ‘5’s for ‘6’s and my ‘6’s for ‘5’s and call the wrong number. The second time, I call the right number. But there is some problem with the way that I’m describing the leak, and the man I’m talking to gets exasperated and hangs up.

After that I sit and hold myself very tightly in case I start to laugh. The leak is making me laugh; the sound, the way the water droplets smack each other, like clown shoes. Someone will fall over soon, and even if it’s me, it will still be funny. I snort and stuff my fingers into my mouth so that the joke doesn’t come loose. I should go to sleep. At least that way I will not be laughing. I don’t want Aaron to have to come back and find me laughing and make me stop. It’s as Amy Eleni says, there’s nothing between me and myself and I may have to end up letting Aaron intervene.

No, I should go to bed. I leave the numbers on the notepad by the phone and I write to Aaron, very carefully, that he should please call TODAY.

In bed, by accident, I say, ‘Ha ha.’

And then it’s all over and it’s rhythmic, it’s

ha ha ha

ha ha HA HA HA HA

HA ha

HA ha

and again.

I cannot hear the leak while this ‘ha’ is being forced out of me.

I laugh until I’m bent almost in half and the bones in my knees bounce against my stomach. My mouth is dripping because I haven’t had enough time to swallow. I’m upside down, I can’t understand what I’m seeing and I think I need to climb over my knees somehow if I want to be in an upright position. But there is a living end to the laughter after all — this is good news. Maybe the laughter is my son’s. He is a serious event, but not all that serious. He is not the first baby that was ever born. I take Chabella’s collar in my hand and it corrugates my fingertips, hard wood in a trickster’s colours. Elegua’s humour is inscrutable.

Carmen, you are born again, but you are born without your tongue. Find it. Be who you were before before.

But Elegua doesn’t go backwards, he makes things change when they need to. Chabella trusts what the German language has enabled her to call her spiritsoulmind; Chabella takes any risk that involves it. But if she should fail. . what poverty! The goal is that Carmen is not born again. The goal is that the lost tongue stays lost, but new tongues grow. No one need be maimed.

I am asleep when Aaron gets back, but he moves around and it wakes me. The dark is too thin. Aaron has the bedroom door wide open and all the lamps in the sitting room are on. His face keeps escaping the light, but I think he’s looking at me.

He says stiffly, ‘Maja. Do you not want this baby? Is the problem that you don’t want it?’

I sit up with a hand over my eyes. Aaron’s question has pushed him to me straight from washing up in the kitchen; his hands are still dripping soapy water and he is holding one of our soup bowls.

He says, ‘Just tell me.’

‘Why do you think I don’t want the baby?’

He says, ‘Just tell me, just say something about it.’

A tremor comes through his hands and he can’t hold the bowl any more, he bats it towards the ground as if he thinks it is a ball that will come back up to him. There is not much sound, but I flinch as the china shatters. Some of the pieces roll, then rest. Automatically he says, ‘Shit, sorry,’ and he bends to pick pieces up with his bare hands. Automatically, I say, ‘Use tissue, you’ll cut yourself.’

He does not listen. He balances a row of brittle blue claws on his palm before taking them away, coming back to rescue more. His hair is in his eyes. He does not get cut.

I say, ‘The leak. Please call the numbers, get a plumber here tomorrow. Call the numbers.’

Crouched on the carpet, Aaron tilts his head and says, ‘What numbers?’

I lie down again.

‘I left them on the pad.’

‘Those are numbers, eh? They look like a series of decimal points.’

I get up to rewrite the phone numbers so that he can see them, so that he can make the phone calls for me. But my note has already been ripped away from the pad.

I took a third-class degree. It was better than I’d expected, especially considering that I had handed in my dissertations on a block of wood. But I didn’t know how to tell my parents about my results. I had misled them from an early age: I had given them to understand that I was clever. And they were both first-class students.

So I completely lost my nerve.

‘It’s. . a 2:3,’ I said, when it was time to tell them.

Chabella, who had clasped her hands in anticipation of good news, lowered them again and frowned.

I didn’t back down, there was no point now. ‘A 2:3,’ I insisted.

Papi threw up his hands. ‘What in God’s name is a 2:3?’

‘You know,’ I quavered, holding my certificate behind my back. ‘You can get an upper second class, a middle second class, and a lower second class. A 2:1, a 2:2, a 2:3. .?’ Papi and Mami surrounded me, hugging me, kissing me, cackling.

‘So it’s a third-class degree, then,’ Chabella said.

Papi said, ‘Thank God — at least it’s finished. All the drama, all the crying, all the painting things black, the praying of the rosary instead of revising. A degree. You’ve got a degree, Maja Carmen Carrera! You passed! You are to some extent educated! And you didn’t even notice while it was happening!’

Amy Eleni was very flushed when she showed me her certificate. She had taken a first-class degree. I thought, Of course.

‘Please don’t give me any shit about this,’ she said, before I’d even opened my mouth.

When we got back to my house on graduation day, Amy Eleni, mortar board in hand, kicked off her high-heeled shoes and put them in her handbag so that the black toes peeped out of the top.

Our parents were in the back garden drinking Pimm’s and lemonade; Amy Eleni’s mother looked vaguely astonished by the drink in her glass. I told them we were going to church, and Chabella beamed. Amy Eleni’s father looked at us, his eyes that special shade of blue that Amy called ‘accusing ultramarine’, and was entirely unable to hide his pride. We almost changed our minds about going to church.

When we got out onto the street, Amy Eleni walked beside me barefoot, gowned, her hair in her eyes — people around us kept looking for cameras, as if we were on a photo shoot. We stared at the people who stared at us, caught them in our double headlights, stared with the conviction of newly educated, non-crap-taking female youth — they always looked away first.

The church ceiling seemed higher because of the incense, grey arms uplifted to exalt. Except for Father Gerald at the front, who sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded over a missal on his lap, the church was empty. He didn’t turn round. We had had our baptisms, our Holy Communions, our confirmations here. This church, from window to window, from wall to wall, seemed tied in for me with a desperate battle to avoid the Spirit — to be holy, but not yet.

For my confirmation name I had struggled to find the saint that God might love the least. The list was whittled down according to time and manner of the saint’s death — early, gory deaths were sure signs of excessive favour — stigmatic-yes-or-no, mystic-yes-or-no and whether or not that saint’s corpse had been exhumed and found to be uncorrupted. I wanted God to know the situation: I wanted to be more than just good friends, but nothing heavy until I was ready. I settled for being St Ignatius Loyola’s namesake, and suffered a few weeks of hearty laughter and being addressed as ‘Sister Ignatia’ by everyone in our confirmation class.

Amy Eleni chose Sophia and debated extending her given name to ‘Amy Eleni Sophia’. Her mother let her be confirmed in pearls, a black veil and a black, watered-silk dress with a stiff bustle. People in my class sniggered at her overdressing. But nobody knew what a victory that confirmation was for Amy Eleni. Her mother didn’t attend the Mass.

Now, Amy Eleni bent over the wooden prayer box, the box into which parishioners who wanted Father Gerard to pray for them had slipped their requests. She tucked it under her arm and walked out noiselessly, leaving me to tiptoe out as best and as quickly as I could.

‘I don’t know what to do next,’ she panted, when I caught up with her and cried outrage. ‘The stuff of life to knit me blew hither, here am I, right? From Cyprus à la my mother to England and school and university, there’s been a conspiracy of me, a me trying to work into a pattern. Now I feel like I’m out, graduated, so. . what? I don’t know which way I want to go yet, but I need to know if I’ll be allowed to get there. I don’t know if I can. . yuck. I suppose I want to know if I can trust people with my dreams.’

It wasn’t an explanation, but coming from Amy Eleni, it was enough. We opened the box in my bedroom, tipped out a cascade of white paper slips, and read aloud to each other prayer after prayer, request after request, until we ran to the end of them. Speaking the words, I felt as if we were unsealing the wants behind them, releasing spurts of chalky tomb air with every sound. I felt as if we were granting wishes because we heard them and then they were free to be possible, the way a priest sits in a box and listens and becomes Jesus.

The sun went down and left its rays clinging to our skin. I looked out of the window and saw that our parents were still in the garden, laughing and talking and blowing dandelion petals, oblivious beneath a dark orange sky that threatened to swallow them.

It seemed like everyone in our church was praying for each other. There were so many wishes that people not be hurt, so many offerings of thanks for others, so many short pleas to save lives or offer a new grace to die with. Amy Eleni looked dizzy and small with all these slips in her hands; she had not expected this.

Near the end of our reading, I recognised Chabella’s handwriting. She had written: Please pray for Juan Carrera to be happy. Please pray for Juan Carrera to find whatever he came to this country looking for.

I didn’t read it aloud, but it was the first prayer I put back into the box; I had to do that so Amy Eleni wouldn’t see it. It was the only bitter prayer in there, the only prayer that betrayed its writer.

‘I’m going to go and find Sara,’ Amy Eleni told me, wriggling off the bed with the re-sealed box under her arm. I lay flat and began tracking shadows on the ceiling, pulled my polo neck up so that it covered the bottom of my chin, began my great, private worry about my life.

Amy Eleni paused at the door, turned, studied me, came back to me. She stood over me, sweetly serious, and I hauled myself up by degrees, matching her look for look; the inches between our faces grew warmer as they fell away. She dipped her head to kiss my mouth, and whispered against my lips, ‘Happy graduation.’ Her eyes were closed, and mine were wide open.

When Aya visits now, Amy’s wrists are newly, tightly re-bandaged, her eyes are crayoned round with waning purple, and she is still so pale — even her lips have shed colour. She throws her arms around Aya and hugs her, so light a pressure that Aya thinks she might be imagining it. ‘Please stay a while,’ she says. ‘I loved it when you came to see me. You seem to care.’

‘I can’t help it,’ Yemaya says, simply. Amy laughs, but Aya is serious. Amy is only laughing because she is pretending that she can switch her caring on and off, admire different books, love different people, discard her own life.

Aya moves about the somewherehouse, finishing her self-appointed task of returning all the mirrors that Proserpine brought down. The attic, reluctant to have the mirrors back, gives vent to floorboard groaning. Mama has put the Kayodes’ rooms in order; their winding cloths are unpinned from the walls and heaped onto chairs. Their chessboard is gone. Their cupboards are pleasantly bare, the shelves are free of dust and expectation.

Aya had expected to find complicated packages of newspaper, braided trails of string, or some other closed thing that the Kayodes might have used to keep their speech amongst themselves. She had not expected to miss them as much as she does. She draws a hand over her eyes and picks up a mirror that rests in the arms of the rocking chair. She has asked Tayo to follow her here, and he comes — but hesitantly. The somewherehouse’s cedar beams breathe wheeeee to bring their smell in after him. She wonders if the house will not keep him. Tayo hesitates, then draws her close to him, sits in the rocking chair and takes her onto his lap, pushing her hair aside to whisper into her ear, ‘But what are those figurines downstairs supposed to be?’

He has to close his eyes for her so that, with a fingertip, she can spirit ash away from those spaces where he is softest.

‘What figurines?’

And after all people are sitting in the basement

a boy, a man, a woman,

withered, rheumy-staring from a carousel of spider webs.

Aya looks at Tayo and lets him see in her eyes what is happening. He says feebly, ‘Yeye, it’s all right. They’re not real.’ He is far more frightened than she is.

High-heeled footsteps clatter above; Proserpine has come in through the front door.

Aya decides quickly. She breaks an old chair, catches its leg up in her hand and goes to put an end to Mama Proserpine.

‘Yeye!’ Tayo grasps her wrist and tries to follow her, but she eludes him and the basement door is locked tight as she passes into the hallway — she makes it so.

Proserpine turns a pale stare of appeal to Aya. In her arms, caught up in her cloak, a rooster tramples air in a fright of feathers.

‘Yeye, listen —’

The rooster escapes Proserpine’s arms as Aya comes at her. Aya is like thunder. Blood wells from Proserpine’s lip; she is dazed, delayed.

Aya cries to her, ‘You told me you took them home. But you killed them.’

‘Yeye —’

Aya says, grimly, ‘Shut your mouth. Don’t ever address me that way. Proserpine, I saw you from the first.’

Aya has the chair leg to Proserpine’s throat. Proserpine has not cowered, though one of her eyes has swollen shut. The gaze of the other eye, the bulge of surprise in it — that drives Aya outside of herself. Aya’s hand is a hot-red clutching; the wood splinters it, and she doesn’t care. Her next blow snaps the chair leg clean in two.

‘Yeye,’ Proserpine wails. ‘Don’t you know how long it took you to find this place? When you got here, the Kayodes had only just arrived.’

‘Which Kayodes? The ones you killed?’

Proserpine spits a messy tooth into her cupped hand.

Aya asks, very quietly, ‘When?’

Proserpine smears down the wall until she is crouching, the heels of her shoes broken. Aya bends to hear her, her face knitting itself ready to spit. And Proserpine tells her about the Kayodes now, Proserpine tells and tells. With each repetition the story is truer.

By the time Aya asked her where the Kayodes were, the Kayodes were already dead. Because while Aya was gone through the London door, the Kayodes began starvation. But they didn’t know what the feeling was — they didn’t know that the ache meant ‘eat’.

Proserpine cooked for them, so many desperate meals: she cooked amala and ewedu, eko, moin-moin, bistecca, ajiaco, fish and chips.

The Kayodes tried to feed on the smell; they breathed in until their lungs let the scent escape. But then one of them always said to the other, ‘Proserpine must not waste this food. Proserpine must give this food to someone who needs to eat.’

Soon the Kayodes grew too weak even to talk to each other.

In the basement they sat and stared and waited for Aya’s Papa.

They were certain that Aya’s Papa would not forget them.

Then they were less certain.

Then they grew bitter.

And then they died, one immediately after the other, click, click, click, like three switches breaking a circuit. How afraid the third one was when he saw the dying moment begin in the first.