The Opposite House

16 ventured all (upon a throw)

Aya and Proserpine strain and sweat and dig a shallow grave around the back of the somewherehouse, in a spot where the grass and trees dip at the same point. Proserpine weeps. Her hands claw at Aya as if she is a closing door with home on the other side. Aya is suffocated by icy leaves. She leaves that place, leaves that woman.

Aya watches Amy untie the knots that secure her handkerchiefs to her belt and spread the silken squares out, full-length, over her bed. Picking one up at the corner feels like pinching a beautiful nothing between the fingertips.

‘Do you want them?’ Amy asks.

Aya lets the handkerchief settle back onto the covers.

Amy turns her bruise-hooped back to Aya and brushes the handkerchiefs onto the floor before she climbs into bed.

‘Look what Tayo gave me,’ Amy says, after a moment. She opens her hand and a saint is in it; a medallion with dainty piecrust metalwork running round it. The saint is a woman with a long nose, hair demurely covered by a shawl, hands crossed on her breast.

‘It’s Our Lady of Mercy,’ Amy says. She closes her hand with a grim smile and draws her saint back under the covers. She gets lost in a dark memory that she doesn’t say aloud.

The handkerchiefs are waiting on the floor. On her way out, Aya wonders, for less than a moment, what it would be like to own these handkerchiefs, to leave an aftermath of honey perfume. In Tayo’s room, the white pointed tips of wet flowers spill over the tops of every drawer in his cupboard, as if the cupboard is crammed with people who are reaching their hands up and willing their fingers to escape the trap.

But early in the next day the fresh air in the room is spent, and the carpet around the chest of drawers is ringed in charcoal dust.

Amy is gone.

In her absence, Amy’s room, baring itself between hills of glass-bead necklaces, socks, books and shrugged-off cardigans, is filled with grey light. Tayo, one hand clad in Amy’s green silk handkerchief, stands at her dresser as if he is awaiting some news or appearance. He is so angry that he does not know what to do with himself, how to stay inside his skin. He shakes his head, bares his teeth to maul the air, but he doesn’t leave the room.

He says, simply, ‘Where is she?’

‘You love her?’ Aya is serene.

‘Amy,’ he says, ‘is missing. And you’re asking stupid questions.’

His smile is unguarded, also it is antique somehow

(yes, yes, who are you to me? Almost I know) his arms come down around her, draw her to him; she arcs under the pressure of his hand. His ache comes to her loudly. It comes through his chest.

‘We have to get Amy to come back.’ Tayo’s wish is spoken into her hair.

Aya closes her eyes against him. She will not go.

‘Please,’ he says.

In the attic of the somewherehouse, Proserpine is hanged. She is like a pale, black-sheathed pendulum caught on a ceiling beam, in a quiet space behind the door that will not trouble anyone. As long as they stay outside, as long as they avoid looking to the left and catching sight of a bare, dapper foot, toes achieving the perfect pirouette. The mirrors report the hanging first; they are stern and reproving, then they make eulogy in softened light. Dozens of refracted Proserpines, faces forced up by frantic throats.

Proserpine not Mama, Proserpine not Mama.

Why, then, has Mama’s face returned to this woman?

Her eyelashes, settled on her cheeks, spike the black clouds of her hair.

Tayo is downstairs — Aya hears muffled thumps, as if he is moving things around. The somewherehouse’s cedar beams whisper to her of their alarm, but she ignores them and turns away.

‘Tayo, don’t come up here,’ Aya calls, and shuts the door.

Her Papa, high, high in the roots and the snow, must know of this by now. Downstairs, the somewherehouse has thrown off its disguise. The house recognises her with a sniff — about time. Aya falls to her knees, winded. All of the running that she has ever done, all of that fleeing for freedom from the Regla house, just to find the Regla house unfolding before her again. This hallway lit with a galaxy of gas lamps.

Tayo stands in the centre of the hallway and looks up at the domed ceiling, the rich stains that form the Creation fresco. Young river, wild-eyed rooster, bulging palm kernel — poised intent on a beginning against the sky. They reach the big window at the end of the hallway and Aya leans out, touches the trees; their leaves rustle under her hands with well-fed laughter, sated by the sun and the warm earth. But Tayo is afraid. Aya tries to take his hand. She tries to bring him with her into the next room, but Tayo will not come. His smile is as hard and dark as mud clay. Aya frowns and calls Tayo’s name, gently calls on him to explain, but Tayo says, ‘No, not him.’

He backs away from her, holding his arms out to her; she follows him step for step, down, down into the dust, the basement. Step for step, she tries names, old names, newer names, until she remembers her Mama’s tale of the trickster who left the family for change.

She asks, ‘Elegua?’

‘No!’

‘Echun. .’

He is crying hard now, the shape of his face buckles as if under blows.

‘Oh, Echun,’ Aya says. ‘Echun, why? What’s wrong?’

‘Yeye,’ he says. ‘I know who I am. Shhh, I know. I know. But I have to be different. I have to be stronger. Needles and drowning; your Papa is trying to make me kill myself. But. . but I can’t let him take my ache, no, no, he cannot have it all, he must leave my ache with me.’

He opens the door for London — the Lagos door is nailed shut. And he has matches. The basement cloth is slippery underfoot, he has wet them with something moss-smelling, something unordinary. Aya goes to him, but he holds her away with terror, as if she is a chemical rag that will stain him. He keeps saying he wants her, but that she is her father’s eye. It is funny how afraid he is. Aya stops fighting him. She wants to spit at him, she wants to scratch him and hurt him, she wants him to die, she wants to go with him. She is drawn to him, sure and true, by her own instinct, the instinct of the runaway to be away, always away, always leaving, and running, running, running for home, hoping never to get there. Echun is beautiful, she sees that again. Of course it is because he is a trick.

‘Give me the matches,’ Aya says.

He does not trust her — he only gives them up to her slowly. He is ready to fight her. Without taking her eyes from his, Aya strikes and lights a match.

‘Go,’ she says, and drops it. Heat throws a swift and screaming shape between them. Aya strikes more matches. These flames are hungry, glad, lean. They move in colourless crests.

‘Shut the door,’ she says.

She does not see his face as he does; from behind the fire she cannot be certain whether he closes the door quickly or slowly. She thinks, Poor Echun. It doesn’t matter that he wants to keep his ache; her Papa will take it back. What matters is that Echun doesn’t want her enough to risk being found.

Greedy Echun. There is much that Aya would have risked for him.

Aya climbs higher to escape the noise of wood breaking beneath the flames. She dreams of what happens next, after the fire has taken her bones. She squints through veils of smoke, follows the trail to the top of the house, lies down under the sweeping glass ceiling. And Amy is there, Amy in her baggy dungarees, but she has changed. Aya pauses long and looks her fill at Amy in the Kayodes’ rocking chair: Amy’s Ochun-lips take a straight and sober line; her Ochun-skin, newly hazelnut, glows; her open eyes contain only the tenderest blessings of darkness; her hair is plaited into thick, shimmering vines. Aya doesn’t touch her — she leaves her be.

Fire climbs the stairs.

There is more time, but not much.

If you are lucky, you lose a mother to get another.

If you are lucky, you shed a body to climb inside another.

Sometimes a child with wise eyes is born. And some people will call that child an old soul. And that is surely enough to make God laugh.

This morning I wait for the plumber. I wait and wait and the plumber doesn’t come, and while I wait I try to mend the leak with my calm.

Indoor rain. It does not stop, I don’t know what it means — something has opened somewhere and the rain is just there. Raintalk.

I phone Aaron. He answers so quickly that I barely realise I’ve finished dialling and I think he’s called me. He says, ‘What’s wrong?’

I pace the sitting room, heel to toe. ‘Did you call?’

‘Did I. .?’

‘Aaron, did you call a plumber?’

He says, very slowly, ‘This is why you’re calling me?’

He is too loud. I wince and hunch my shoulders; my eyes are fixed to the phone pad, the imprints my writing has left on the paper beneath.

‘The plumber isn’t here yet. How come?’ I say.

‘Maja,’ he says. Disbelief brings him down to baritone. But I walk myself into the bedroom, asking him, asking him. He says, ‘Listen, I forgot to call. I forgot. I’ll do it tonight. I’m bringing back some stuff about Lamaze classes. I think you dismissed them too quickly when Dr Maxwell suggested them.’

I have found Aaron’s jeans, folded into his top drawer. He is talking about birth pain management, and in my palm I have my crumpled list of phone numbers from his pocket, the figures so small that they disappear into the crinkles. I have had to work at the paper with my fingernails to open it out. Aaron has folded and rolled my list of plumbers until it has taken on the hard, round unity of a shell.

This is how small my hysteric makes me; this is how far she takes me from speech when it is important that I speak. This is why she must be dissolved.

It is early, or late — 4 a.m. I watch Aaron shaving at the bathroom mirror; he hums the guitar undertow of a Kofi Amese song. And he is careful; his lip wrinkles thoughtfully as he stops after every scrape to consider his chin. It was Papi who gave me the impression of shaving as an early-morning dare-devil ritual, the will-he-won’t-he-slit-his-throat in a wash of soapy lather. Papi winked at the mirror-me, then turned his head from side to side, judging what work was needed. Then he tilted his head upwards, and flashed his razor up and over his jaw, flaying hair from his face in two or three simple strokes. I was certain that he would bleed — it was impossible for his skin not to open up under such provocation. He laughed when I squeaked and jumped high, holding out my hands with a will to catch his life and throw it back into him that way. Then he told me — in a deep African accent that I never tired of his assuming — that my mother had worked a very strong juju for him so that his throat might be cut but he would never die.

When Papi’s hands began to knot up and loll heavy on his lap, he said that he’d decided to accept the dignity of facial hair. His razor rusted in the bathroom cabinet because Papi wouldn’t let Chabella throw it away.

Aaron says to me, ‘That plumber’s coming back tomorrow.’

With one hand to his face, preparing his cheek for the razor, he laughs at me. He begins to say something else, but starts whistling another highlife song instead. When I come to kiss his other cheek, he smiles at the mirror-me as if he knew that that was what I was going to do all along.

Last night Aaron came home with a single nappy pressed flat in its plastic wrapping. It was tiny. I said, ‘There’s a child in the newborn bay that’s missing that.’

Remorse came into his eyes with a speed that made me suspicious. ‘I should give it back?’

There being nothing for me to say to that, he opened the pack and widened the nappy’s waistband with his thumbs. When he looked at me and held the nappy up for me to see properly, his gaze was sceptical.

I laughed at him. ‘What? You thought a baby wouldn’t be that big, or that small?’

His thumbs were still hooked into the elastic. He stretched them wider and said, ‘Maja, come on. To come to this from the womb, where there wasn’t enough space to properly wave your arms and legs about in the first place. I mean, look at this thing. Look at the shape of the leg-holes. And the way you have to tape the waist in. He’ll think he’s been moved to a higher-security prison. He’ll make frequent escapes and we’ll have to lock him up again.’

I remembered to tell him about the kick my son gave me in exchange for a song. He lay his head on my lap and murmured things to my son, things in Ewe not meant for me. Everything was still; everything in the room, every part of me was trying to listen to Aaron’s words and wanting to understand. I took his hand, ready to travel my stomach. But he sat up and said gently, ‘Maja.’ He meshed my fingers with his, touched his lips to mine.

I go home because Papi and Chabella want me to go to Tomás’s sports-day race with them. The first thing I do when I get home is go upstairs to my black and white bedroom. I stand at the window. What I like best about my room is that in the late afternoon, if I am tired, I only have to wait. Then, sunset. Since light refuses to waste itself, it slips onto me, all over me. I lie down on my bed and I don’t have to do anything else. Something else breathes for me. But Chabella will not let me stay in my bed. It is hard to know what is important to Tomás, so we should not take this risk, we should not miss his race.

Chabella sits by me and insists I rise. That’s exactly how she says it: ‘Rise.’ Her hands caress my face; her voice is thinner than tracing paper.

‘Tomás told me that you’ve lost your collar,’ I tell her finally, because it is either that or cry. I remember how heavy she told me the collar was, and how in my hand it weighs hardly anything.

At the running track, Mami sits between Papi and me and links our arms through hers. No one else’s parents have come. The swing seats behind us are aswarm with kids in PE kits, some of them splashing water over their faces and gurgling loud encouragement to their friends in other events. The long-jump competition, at the far right of the track, is made mysterious by its distance — a boy with impossibly long legs wades the air and lands with a stiff snap. When Tomás’s race starts, we lean forward as one, peering into the dense pack of boys sprinting two hundred metres. Chabella and Papi can’t pick out Tomás until I tell them that he’s the one with the white zigzag masking half of his face. Tomás’s head is lowered; he is ready to ram the whole world. He hurtles straight through the centre of the boys keeping pace with each other, his feet blur as he peels back space with his legs. Tomás is the most beautiful black boy there, the most beautiful boy there. Chabella and I scream for him, Papi stamps his feet, but we are lost beneath the school crowd who are chanting with one fast-fermenting voice for someone called Joseph. Tomás, two other boys at his heels, lifts his head to look at the stands. He over-steps, kicks out too far, swerves and folds onto his knees. The other boys buffet him as they swarm past, and he is on his feet in an instant, but an instant too late, and he is fifth to the finish line.

The crowd says, ‘Joseph, Joseph,’ but when Tomás shouts out, they hear him. Two girls behind me loudly agree that Tomás is a sore loser.

It’s as if Tomás comes home separately from us; his body sits next to me on the tube, but when I try to hug him, he is like a mannequin, his half-face cool and incurious.

At home, I knock on his door.

‘Ask him if he wants dinner,’ Chabella hisses from below.

‘Tomás? Do you want dinner?’ He doesn’t answer.

I sit down outside his door and tap, low, to let him know where I’m sitting. A long second, and then he taps back, just a little higher.

He tries to talk to me but his voice won’t let him. The school was screaming, ‘Joseph,’ and after all he is not Joseph. If they were quiet, or if they had just made wordless noise, Tomás could have soared through on his own call.

Disappearing: Tomás is the kind of boy who can do it if enough people tell him to. I don’t know why Chabella and Papi keep calling him the London baby. If you put a name to this boy he’ll die. Chabella and Papi mustn’t do it any more — it bothers him, it’s different from calling him el enano and they know it.

Tomás is crying now, and he doesn’t care if I hear it.

* * *

The house is silent in the early afternoon. I look at Bisabuela Carmen in her place at the centre of the family altar, behind flickering candles — I lose myself in looking at her. She appears to be watching the Holy Child of Atocha very suspiciously from the corner of her eye. How blood works, the things that pass across. I’m not sure what there is of Carmen in me, and I worry about what she, a babalawo who could read messages in blood and salt, might tell me if I really opened my heart to her and asked. She might fill me. Candle flame heats my fingertips as I run my fingers along the rows of faces.

Mami has been cooking the way she does when she is nervous. She has made an enormous batch of chicken ajiaco, more than Tomás and Papi and I could ever want to eat — this is a catering-sized pot. It sits, squat and morose, still bubbling on the back hob, covered only slightly so it can cool. I feel as if we are beginning here again, and if I step out through the back door and into the garden I will find my brother, four years old, bundled up in scarves, kicking up leaves and happily colouring in bear shapes.

Upstairs, Papi and Chabella are asleep. Papi’s breathing barely disturbs his chest; Mami sleeps with a glow on her. I am smoke, the sign of her fire. She doesn’t know that she’s alight.

I am staying overnight for Tomás, as if I’m back to watching him for cot death.

His door stays closed — he doesn’t come out for dinner; he doesn’t come out for the pasteles that Chabella has made especially for him. Papi said that we must call him once, then leave him be. The boy is not a drama queen — if he’s hungry, he will eat.

I watch late-night television, listening out for the stairs to creak, nodding sleep away until my chin dips in and out of my glass of lemonade. On-screen, two hamsters begin to chase each other around a maze. Tomás looms behind me in a mushroom cloud of blankets and touches my elbow. I don’t jump. Ever since I left those two sleep-girls behind me in Hamburg, I keep thinking that they will come back. Ever since Hamburg I have been ready.

I take my blanket and wind it around me. Tomás and I pad through the kitchen, a tight squeeze through the doors because we are holding hands and mashing into each other. Tomás fetches Mami’s black lanterns from the shed, and even though the cold night knifes us, we fall into the garden deckchairs. We wrap our legs in our duvets; we tuck our hands inside our dressing gowns. The wind knocks my hair lopsided.

We watch the lanterns scattered around us, the tea-tinted wax inside them holding up their flames against all-comers. The wind comes, some rain comes, two murders for our light. But the flames stay so we can see each other’s faces. I smile because Tomás is smiling. He looks exhausted, cosy, as if he has come in from some long journey and collapsed in front of a fireplace, but the candle flame isn’t enough to warm us. What warms us is the way the light stays and stays, dances limbo, touches the bottom of the glass then shimmies up again.

Mami’s collar is in my pocket, working itself loose from old string and old care.

Tomás says something. His voice is hoarse and I don’t catch his words. I ask him, too loudly, what he said. He puts a finger to his lips and we quieten, in case we disturb them, our guardians and guides, our Orishas in the house, the ones upstairs asleep.