The Opposite House

3 unto the little

Aaron holds tube and lift doors open for people if he’s nearest, crumpling his newspaper against the hard edges as if he can stop gravity with paper. While waiting at bus stops he pulls faces at children in front of their parents. His smile has corners and a slant that no one else’s has. With no way of knowing whether I can trust him, I go on what I have to go on in the dark — when he touches me, there’s no describing the snow-blister craziness, seething quiet but large, waiting. When he whispers in my ear, I buckle under him. When we are walking, he reaches for me carelessly, holds me carefully, dips his hand into my pocket and holds it there so that I end up pulling him along. Or, his fingers hover over the nape of my neck, absent-mindedly tapping me to the pattern of my pulse, rubbing circles that make me dizzy. The whole time he talks, describes things as if we are on a clock face

(‘Ugly baby in pram at twelve o‘clock. . Maja. . I didn’t know a baby could be so ugly. . you have to look. . but don’t be blatant. .’)

as if he doesn’t feel his effect on me, as if I have no effect on him, or my effect on him is spent. I think he lives by Lewis Carroll rules, his foremost to yelp before a needle pricks him, just to get the yelping over with.

I don’t know why I can’t tell him about my son, our son.

Aaron was the ‘hang king’ at his school, which means that he has a bizarre strength that seems to live chiefly in his upper arms. One afternoon we went to the jungle gym and he hung, long body perfectly vertical, from the second-highest bar on the climbing frame, dreamily sweeping the ground with his trainers, while I sat with his camera on my lap and let it watch while we talked. He hung, muscles crackling in knotty forks throughout his arms, for a full ten minutes. He talked the entire time. I kept asking him if he was OK; he said — gravely, calmly, kissably — yes. He asked me which of the X-Men I’d be. I said ‘Rogue’, and he groaned and said, ‘Too, too obvious.’

I asked him what it had been like going to school in Ghana; he said, ‘It was OK.’

I tilted the camera upwards; sun burst off the lens and into his eyes.

‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry. So. Aaron — what was it like going to school in Ghana, being white and everything?’ I said it formally, in what I hoped was documentary style.

He said, ‘In Accra it was OK. People didn’t really fuck with each other the way I’ve heard about over here; initiations and ganging up and stuff. I mean, people would wrestle or whatever, but. .’

He faltered, but I didn’t prompt him. From the angle the camera caught him at, he was harsh — his face was formed from sharp, variant planes.

‘What’s weird is that it took another white guy to bring some crap in. He started in on me a week after he transferred, as if he had some kind of chip on his shoulder. I think his parents were colonial throwbacks who couldn’t bear to leave Ghana or something, and he couldn’t believe that my mum had set up the school. He kept talking about it and it wasn’t relevant. My mum didn’t teach. She owned the place, but she just ran administration. She could probably have stopped me from getting expelled, but that was it. Anyway, one time I was sitting in the library with this screen between me and Geoffrey, and I was doing some maths or something, and this boy comes in and sits with Geoffrey and starts joshing with him in a fake hearty way that he must have picked up from his old school, and this boy was like, ‘Aaron, yeah, he’s all right; a bit Jewish, though.’ I swear, English people — the way some of them can be sometimes. A certain type of English twat is a certain type of English twat even if he grew up somewhere else — the kind that pretends he doesn’t notice differences when really he notices, and he does care, and he does think about it.

‘Geoffrey didn’t even know what this boy was talking about, so he looked at me; this whole thing was so blatant that anyone sitting where Geoffrey and this boy were sitting could see the top of my head. Geoffrey laughed because he’s polite that way and he has this thing where he never lets a person know that he’s not interested in what they’re saying, and Geoffrey said, ‘So?’ And the guy says, in this incredibly joking way, ‘Oh, he’s a bit stingy, a bit of a hoarder, isn’t it, Levy?’ and he laughed this booming hearty laugh, which Geoffrey didn’t get. Because he hadn’t made that connection between Jewish and stingy yet. I was the only Jewish guy he knew and I don’t even talk about it and I’m not even. . I mean, it’s just my dad who’s Jewish, and not even religiously. I don’t even. . anyway, so when the guy involved me in his crappy joke it was like, either I fight this guy or I laugh. I laughed.’

‘Oh.’

I let out my breath, disappointed, but trying not to let Aaron see. He saw. He grimaced, dropped off the bars, stretched, then came and sat beside me on the bench, turning the camera off with an easy click.

He said, ‘Yeah, but. .’ and he draped himself over the other end of the bench, miles away from me. ‘The thing is I was so pissed off; so pissed off I can’t explain, and it got worse because I had to act like I didn’t even remember what he said. And after a month it was so bad I couldn’t look this boy in the face without feeling myself slipping, like maybe I’d headbutt him or something. So one night he went swimming with some of the others and I went through his things and took all his money. I took, I mean, literally everything, including his small change. Then I went into town and flushed some of the money down various café toilets, and I kept some of it.

‘Then. . well, he was desperate for some money and he wouldn’t be seeing his parents for another two weeks, and none of the teachers could find out who’d jacked him, and blah blah. So I lent him his own money and charged him thirty per cent interest. Just to take some of that bitterness out of me. And when he tried to argue with me about the interest, I laughed, and I wanted him to know about me, so I said, “Well, it’s money. And I’m just too fucking Jewish about money, you know?” He couldn’t prove a thing. He didn’t say anything anyway, so maybe he didn’t get it. He probably didn’t even remember that he’d been talking crap about me. I don’t know why I was so pissed off. It was excessive; that reaction was excessive. I should have just punched him in the face instead of creeping around plotting.’

(Like some kind of girl.)

‘Stop analysing yourself,’ I said. ‘It was a prank. You did what you had to do in order to calm down.’

Aaron didn’t answer me. Stealing from someone as a substitution for laying their head open with a hammer does not count as a prank.

I switched the camera on again, and we watched Aaron, the camera and I, until he loosened his palms and let his hands lie on the bench between us.

I’m to pick up Tomás from sports-day practice, so I cross the road to wait for a bus. Cars thread past the traffic lights like an outpour of lost buttons.

Concealed beneath yards of dilapidated denim, my brother has hard-muscled calves, near-elastic knees that can hew a scissor bend, heels that are separated from his toes by a lofty arch that is never firm on the ground. It is easy to forget the Tomás who howls and throws punches at the air as soon as his quicksilver sprint releases him. Because almost everywhere else, careful thought creases his face like a dark orchid opening its petals.

When he was six, I was fourteen, and I wanted to be thin, so I learnt to live for a while on the smells of things — orange zest, wheat-bobbled crusts of bread. I licked ice and the cold lay on my tongue the same way that food might. When Chabella showed me recent pictures of my dimpled, glossy-haired cousins in Habana Vieja who were the same age as me, I rejoiced. Because, yes, they might have lighter skin than me and be hailed ‘Chica caliente!’ and they might always have boys hanging around on the stretch of street outside the houses they lived in, but I was really more beautiful

(thinner)

than them.

I became expert at guiding Tomás, who muttered weak protestations in his rumbling baby-bear voice, away from his colouring books and upstairs so that I could dress him in my old clothes. He was small for his age. Papi still calls him el enano, the dwarf, even though he stands taller than all of us now. But back then my brother was swamped in my clothes — the bottoms of my jeans dragged after him like double wedding trains.

One day I poured my Holy Communion dress over him and cajoled him to take a few steps, and he tried, tottered and was catapulted to the ground in a felled tarpaulin of white beads and satin. I laughed myself dizzy. I went to help him up; he lay completely still, his face buried beneath the dress’s sequinned sweetheart collar. He was so lean I could hardly find his body to pick him up and set him aright; he didn’t even have a little child’s pot belly. Tomás’s body was drawn together, hunched, as if the holding space allotted by his skin was too cramped and bones and breath couldn’t coexist. I thought, my God, to be so narrow, to be nothing more than a thought. He had no contour; it was straight down with him, sculpted bone that made muffled clatter against the fingertips, straight down from shoulders to thighs. I didn’t believe that this boy would ever grow. I wished that this was my body, my simple cage. I pushed the dress three-quarters of the way up and clasped both hands around his thigh with a ring of room to spare, and I stared and stared. Material rustled, and Tomás’s head emerged from out of the dress’s neck. He lay still, encased in my dress and my hands. In his gaze I came to know that something was not right in this kind of play.

Through the park’s trees a race has begun, and I squint short-sightedly, trying to differentiate Tomás from the other two tall, short-haired black boys lashing the ground with trainer-clad feet. I spot him as I wend my way through the rows of low metal benches, stepping over seats. On the track, Tomás is second, arms pumping, neck muscles straining as he tries to get near the boy ahead of him. But the boy in front, his face laced on one side with a frothy comma of white paint, is leaping far, far ahead like a blank signal, so unreachable that only Tomás and he actually finish — near the finish line, the third boy curses, kicks off his shoes so that they fly wide, and jogs disconsolately off the track.

Two girls are sitting near me; their hair is in ponytails and they’re wearing the claret-coloured uniform of my old school. One is a West African girl, the other vaguely Jamaican-looking with that chill cast of the lips. They cheer and smile and wave their school scarves. They call out, ‘Tomás! Tomás!’ and I smile at them.

‘Do you know him?’ the shorter of the two calls to me. She’s the West African girl, pretty, snub-nosed and wide-eyed, and I hope that if she has a crush on Tomás he is paying her some kind of attention. I nod encouragingly at her, tell her he’s my brother and check the track, where Tomás and the white-faced boy are standing with their hands on their hips, puffing and stretching and listening to their PE teacher. Then the white-faced boy vaults over the barrier between the benches and the track and jogs toward us — he is Tomás, and I should wear my glasses more often. With the face paint, though, Tomás is different. The eye set in the white is cold and black and bright to excess, as if it contains him. He sits down between me and the girl, grins at the questions I’m wearing on my face, kisses my cheek. He licks his finger and draws it down his own cheek. Paint peels off like icing chipped with a knife. ‘It’s edible paint,’ he says. ‘Vanilla.’

‘And why is it on your face?’

He shrugs. The girl beside him wraps her scarf around his neck and unconvincingly garrottes him. He has taken to shaving a forward slash into his eyebrow, and I think I would like that in any male but my younger brother. Under his vest, the skin around his shoulder blade is swollen, with a shiny purplish tinge. I touch it; it’s still tender. Tomás pulls away and gets up to leave. Once we’re out of the girls’ sight he swerves and asks me what I’m doing here.

‘Chabella wants you —’

‘I know. I heard her fussing last night.’

‘She asked me to come and pick you up —’

‘Just in case I got lost on the way to your flat, isn’t it?’

‘Was that sarcasm?’

‘Nooooo,’ he says, pulling his rucksack straps tighter on his shoulders. His stance tells me nothing.

I follow behind him and ask, ‘Was that sarcasm?’

Nothing, so I say, ‘You were so fast today. I didn’t even know you could run that fast. What’s up, Speedy Gonzales?’

He doesn’t look round, but he takes a handkerchief from his pocket, wets it with his tongue and starts wiping off the face paint with even, practised dabs.

‘So, that short girl’s pretty,’ I try. ‘Is she your girlfriend?’

‘No, man!’

‘Ex-girlfriend?’

‘No, man!’

I see the problem. ‘Why don’t you just ask her out? I think she likes you.’

He doesn’t say anything until we get to the bus stop. He looks blankly at the bus timetable, then at me. ‘Do you think so?’

I try to keep a straight face. ‘Think what?’

He looks hopelessly circumspect. Girls are wearying him already.

‘That she, you know, likes me or whatever.’

‘Yes, man.’

On the top deck of the bus, he sits beside me and leans on me so that his elbow digs slightly into my side; he corners me with thermal weight.

‘What happened to your shoulder?’ I ask.

Tomás clears his throat, squeaks unintentionally, pulls a face because his voice is breaking and he can no longer trust it. I say again, ‘Your shoulder?’

‘There’s this boy in my class whose dad is Colombian or something. He’s such a dickhead. Truly. If you met him, you would straightaway think, “What a dickhead.” It’s something about the way he talks, the way he walks, his big walnut-shaped head —’

‘You hate him,’ I say. I am laughing.

‘No, he’s a good goalie. I just think he’s a dickhead. His name is Jorge Ruiz-Cole.’

‘Jorge Ruiz-Cole,’ I repeat, obediently. ‘What did Jorge Ruiz-Cole do?’

He replies on a long, low whistle, trying to strain his voice deep.

‘Well, he thinks he knows everything about Cubans, right, because his dad’s from Colombia or whatever, so he keeps asking me things, like about food and our family in Cuba and stuff like that, and I usually don’t answer him, so yesterday he asks me how come my surname doesn’t come in two parts, like why don’t I have two parts to my surname instead of just having my father’s surname. And I didn’t answer him. But he started pushing me and saying come on, come on, why are you so quiet, what, are you a bastard, is it your mother’s name? So I said, OK, it’s because we’re black Cubans, and it’s not the same as white Cubans you know, because at first in my mother’s family and my father’s family kids had the same surname because both their parents were slaves in the same household and had the same surname, their owners’ surname. You can’t have the children called Luis Fernandez-Fernandez or Luis Carrera-Carrera, so they had to work it out so that only the fathers’ surname got passed down, right? That’s what I told him. And when I said it, all the others started booing Jorge Ruiz-Cole and telling him to leave it and saying “Picking on a slave’s son! You knew that, you fat bastard!” Because this guy Jorge is actually quite fat.’

I put a finger over the hairless stroke in Tomás’s eyebrow, filling in his gap.

‘Then what happened?’

Tomás pinches me, not to hurt, just as a reflex to my touching him. ‘He got angry,’ he says, slowly. ‘Really angry. Because I think he was trying to make them laugh, but they were all on my side, because we’d watched Roots in History last week. So he was all pissed off, and he punched me in the face.’

‘Your face looks fine.’

‘I know. He’s shit at punching. So I punched him in the face, and then it was a fight.’ He sighed.

‘And?’

‘And then some of his friends came in.’

‘Came in where?’

‘Into the fight. It wasn’t personal, it was just, like, they were getting into the whole fighting thing.’

I stare at him. ‘And your friends?’

Tomás stretches, looks around me and out of the window.

‘Esos bastardos pequeños! No one stuck up for you? Not one of them?’

‘It’s. . just school,’ he says.

‘It’s meant to be a Catholic school!’

We both think about that. We both dismiss it as a redundant factor.

He says, ‘Don’t tell Papi or Chabella.’

Tomás came home after his first day at secondary school and said he wasn’t going back. He said it standing up very straight by the kitchen table, as if he was making a formal report. Tomás was talking fact. Mami and Papi looked at each other; they had been prepared for the boy to say this.

(I had said the same kind of thing after my first day at secondary school: ‘Please don’t make me go any more, please, please, please or I promise you I will die of school! Morir! And then you’ll see.’)

Papi went to a boys’ school too. He told Tomás to approach school using game theory; identify an aim (to survive) and two key strategies to minimise losses. He had to work out who were the strongest players and count himself as a weak player until he could make enough alliances to consider himself safe.

Mami bit her lip. She had a pupil to tutor in half an hour, but she promised Tomás that afterwards she would make him the best pasteles he’d ever had and they would talk. Tomás stood there with the strap of his schoolbag unravelling around his hand and he shook his head, meaning No, there would be no debate on the matter.

Chabella said, ‘Tomás, come now. Is it the other boys?’

Tomás said something, but we couldn’t understand him because his teeth were clattering so loudly against each other. Papi sat and looked at Tomás; he looked and looked, his gaze became abstracted somehow. Tomás put his hand to his forehead, hid his eyes, but he stayed where he was until Papi told him, ‘Say that again?’

Tomás managed, ‘It’s so cold there.’ Papi got up and checked Tomás’s face, held Tomás to him in a rough bear hug that Tomás struggled against. Contact was gaylord.

Mami said again, ‘Is it the other boys?’

Papi said, ‘Don’t you hear him? He’s cold!’

He ran Tomás a hot bath, made him undress and get into it. Tomás sat in the bath with steam rising off him in blinding waves. He shivered and said, ‘Can’t get warm.’

He kept his school scarf on, looped around his neck like a boa constrictor. He wrapped his arms around himself and jolted in silence; with each shiver he almost fell out of the bath. It was like the cold had jammed itself deep into his bones and was climbing back up atop a pneumatic drill. It was only September. In the bathroom we debated Tomás’s sanity, even though there wasn’t really room for all of us in there. Chabella cradled his head and chanted prayers and wondered aloud, ‘Has someone cursed the London baby? Someone is sending him strong memories of Cuban weather so that he cannot bear it here.’

Papi said, ‘How is it that neither of these children have inherited my excellent nervous system?’

I shouted Papi down, ‘What, what?’ and Chabella said, ‘Your nervous system, your nervous system indeed.’ She cupped her hands around Tomás’s ear and blew gently, gently, warm air into his mind. Tomás’s eyes fluttered closed and he sighed, but he still trembled.

Papi shook his head impatiently and said, ‘Chabella, that’s enough. It’s obvious that he’s in some kind of shock. Though why school should send him into shock and none of the other boys, God only knows. What the boy needs is to restart his circulation.’

His voice was so fierce it made Chabella stand away to let him by. Papi sat on the edge of the bath, reached into the water and closed his fingers around Tomás’s ankle. Tomás flinched, panicked and yelled, ‘No, get off!’

Papi said, ‘Nonsense. I’m your father.’ He ran his palm along Tomás’s right foot, then his left, over and over, circle shapes, star shapes. Papi tickled Tomás’s soles, pinched his calves, rubbed the muscles there. He watched Tomás relax and lay back in the water, shoulders pillowed on soapy bubbles. Chabella closed the door then, and she didn’t ask Tomás about the other boys any more. She sent him back to school with sweet tea and extra scarves. My brother came home with an empty flask and a report: the day had been warmer.

In Aya’s Cuba, before before, a trick of silence rippled over the bleached facade of the Regla house as soon as a stranger’s voice was heard. The house teetered amongst sun-frayed baobab branches, a spoilt child proudly cradled in a multitude of arms, oblivious to danger. Yemaya, much younger then, played the way that she preferred to, hiding and seeking another pretend Yemaya amongst hill-sized tree roots.

But a red-eyed visitor, he caught Aya. He had scars on both cheeks; they hissed the name of his tribe. He seized Aya by the arm and shook her. He was so much bigger than her that his long finger and thumb encircled her wrist and left room. Under the crisp sweep of his hat brim, he snarled his face away until it was gone into a puckered muzzle.

Aya

(thought, he wants to kill me)

didn’t know how to appease such hate — it wasn’t that she was too young; it was that there was too much.

‘At first I thought you were one of them,’ he said. ‘But you’re just a child.’

Around the man’s neck hung a locket of size; it clunked against his chest with its mouth open and a glossy white woman smiled out. Brown hair, pink cheeks. This visitor thought the glossy woman was something to do with Mama. Aya stared; was it true?

‘Anyway,’ the red-eyed visitor said, ‘I must have something for my pains.’

He had been drinking palm wine; she smelt it. It was his drunkenness that made him try to steal her from her home, it was folly that made him lift her and throw her over his shoulder. Aya did not struggle — she was surprised. She just thought about herself, pinned over this man’s shoulder like a sash on a costume. Her face lay against the man’s sweaty back, her knees grazed his stomach. The man stank. He clamped a hand around each of her ankles to hold her still, and he began to run. He ran fast, and Aya’s breath was almost tipped out of her.

Winded, she gasped, ‘So you like wine?’

She said, ‘You are lucky. I am for the thirsty ones.’

She spoke faintly, but she spoke plainly. She told the man, fine, keep running, keep holding on to my legs like that. Kidnap me and you shall have all your dreams. She told this visitor that if he didn’t leave go of her, he would have all the palm wine in the world to drink. Yes, she said, this I can do for you and more, but all the palm wine in the world will never be enough to kill the thirst that will draw your stomach to your throat, tight, tight and tight. How you will drink for that thirst? You will drink so much that you’ll drown inside your own body, and your last breath will slide out over a dark bubble of bloodied wine.

Finally the man set her down and he shambled away, crying out.

Aya walked home. The visitor had not brought her far; they had not left the forest. The sun was setting, and creatures that she could only feel made their paths through the trees.

After him Aya waited for others who had been turned away and tried to do them the favours they had come to ask of Mama and the other elders. As long as the favours were small, Aya could do them.

One day, Mama caught Aya carefully peeling away a kneeling grandmother’s cloudy-milk cataracts. She brought Aya to her bedroom, where rows and rows of her plainly cut wooden masks watched with thick smiles. The masks hung on brackets that slid through their eyeholes with lighted candles balanced on their flattened planes. The masks bled red and purple silk linings that made puddles where they touched the floor, but Mama stepped over them with graceful economy, drawing her wrapper up over her ankle in the same motion that she used to raise her foot. Mama sat on her tied-cane chair and put Yemaya on her knee; she smilingly accepted sticky showers of guava kisses on both cheeks, but she was not diverted. She said, ‘Aya, I suggest you don’t do as these visitors ask. I think it is like telling lies.’

But Yemaya Saramagua, she wants the visitors.

On the utmost tiptoe with leaf-strewn balcony stone, a pain burnt into each over-stretched arch, Aya tells the trees, ‘It’s not that I’m lonely.’ The trees stoop over the somewherehouse with their heads fused together and they do not listen and they cannot be reached. ‘Not that.’

And the visitors come. They come with beaded collars in her favourite colours layered on their necks like second skins. They come chewing on her name; confident like teeth cracking kola nuts; sure as sure, bitterness bursts and loses its way under the sallow pinch of salt.

Once, a bad woman came.

She came in through the London door and found her way up the basement stairs with so little noise that Aya was startled. The woman was deep yellow and slightly built. An ivory comb with a whorled oval head crawled up her frizzy heap of hair. Someone had made this bad woman come here. She was not willing and she wore no beads; she had broken them because she was afraid. Her shoulders were a bad fit; the tops of them stood higher than was correct, and they gave her the appearance of constantly trying to achieve flight. For healing she had brought her poorly only son, a wan stick-boy of twelve who she was slowly sickening with pinches of ground glass because she hated him, because she loved him, and he would not obey her or stay by her side when he was well.

The woman, on her knees beside her son

(who met the floor of the somewherehouse without question or effort — it was only then that Aya realised that the previous acts of standing and walking had made no sense to him)

murmured meek pleas. The boy, slumped at the other end of his mother’s arm, did not understand what was happening to him, now or before. When Aya lifted her veil and the boy saw her face, he mewled in panic, coughed. Then, to the stirring of a great tenderness in Aya, the boy mastered himself in ashen silence the way he thought a brave somebody should.

Aya healed him.

She led the boy toward the bath, down the wayward third-floor hallway which threw itself off into a triangular corner after a few narrow and uncertain yards. Aya took the sick boy past the closed door beyond which the Kayodes sang. She held her arms around the boy’s shoulders to keep him from stumbling and bent close to him to ask his name, but the boy’s eyelids slammed shut at the sound of Kayodes’ singing. His face suffered an unconsciously repeated twitch.

Aya pitied the boy less.

She sent a drop of her vanilla essence to the bottom of the deep bath, then rocked back, easy, easy on her heels; the bath steam knotted as her vanilla stung it, the bath steam drank weight and was left tangible.

She stroked a wisp of it and it stayed intact, moved with her, curled under and around her hand.

Air had to be taken in the tiniest sniffs.

The sick boy sat and watched her. The sick boy blinked and said nothing. Aya left him to undress and wash. Then she went downstairs and stared at the mother until the woman bent low with her fingers welded into pincers to support her head. When the son came down alone, there was life in his eyes again. He trembled in his clothes and reached for his mother, who clawed him up into her arms.

And Aya didn’t warn the son about the mother’s food.