The Opposite House

6 let no pebble smile

Amy Eleni said dinner at her house was stressful. We hung around in her room and ate crap most of the time, but Amy Eleni only ever invited me to dinner once. Her parents’ house smells of church incense and is full of things like jade vases and brushed suede. It’s the sort of place where you periodically flinch, not because anyone’s raised a hand to you, but because you realise that there are things on display that many would consider worth more than you.

At the dinner table, Amy Eleni’s parents sat opposite us and said little. The silence wasn’t unfriendly, just the kind of silence that happens when there’s nothing new to say. The food was dizzying: lamb cooked in three different ways and spices; cracked wheat; meatballs; hot flatbreads. But Amy Eleni’s dad was the only one who dared to eat much. The problem was Despina, Amy Eleni’s mother, who sat completely still with a brocade shawl draped around her sharp shoulders and let no food pass her lips. Amy Eleni’s father sopped up the quiet with one arm around the back of Despina’s chair, humming more appreciatively the deeper he got into his heaped bowl. How could he eat?

Despina is so thin that you stare helplessly at her. And she knows that you can’t believe it, and she drops her heavy eyelids with a smile. Despina is thin like being naked in public — you can see the beginnings of her teeth stamped in her face; you can see them through her skin when her mouth is closed. Despina is like a star, of both the fifties film and the sky varieties — untouchable, but not beautiful. She is startling in a way that really doesn’t exist any more, only able to be present because she is preserved, delayed. Her eyes are Amy Eleni’s, but brighter. Her hair is Amy Eleni’s, but lighter, under better control, pulled back into a smooth wavy fringe and ponytail. Her skin is darker, dark gold.

From across the table Despina stapled our stomachs with a tranquil gaze.

‘Do please have some more of that, I see you like it,’ and so on.

She had a small plate in front of her that stayed completely clean throughout dinner, though she watched Amy Eleni’s plate and thoughtfully sipped at water.

Pudding was caramelised pears; golden, sticky, sweet agony to smell, greater agony to discard after a couple of nervous pokings with our spoons. Amy Eleni and I didn’t look at each other. In some of Chabella’s apataki, the Orishas intervene to stop a mother from ‘eating her child in spirit’. I wanted an Orisha to come and smite Despina so that I could get on with my caramelised pears.

After dinner, as soon as was decent, Amy Eleni and I went down to Whitechapel and got chocolate rugelaches at Rinkoffs. We sat on railings and stuffed doughy biscuit and chocolate, talking and spraying each other with food, seeing who could be the most disgusting.

I asked her if dinner was always like that, or whether it

was just because I was there. Amy Eleni clutched her hair and pulled at it. ‘Oh, truly. I’m not mad! I’m not mad! I don’t want to die!’

‘There’s someone inside of me, and she says I must die! Jesus!’ I said.

‘Christmas dinner is always particularly jolly at the Lang household,’ she said, and laughed so hard that she accidentally pushed rugelach out of her nostrils.

Once my sets are over, Chabella, Amy Eleni and I stay at the café, relocating to the furthest circle from the stage. In the shade Amy Eleni and I snigger at the newest style of bad recital. A lot of the poems are about willow trees. A couple of the poems Amy Eleni and I debate back and forth over; they are so overwrought that they have to be po-faced comedy. Unexpectedly, Chabella likes one of them, says that that particular poet’s representation of the tree manages to both promise and conceal dark things. She compares the structure to a highly condensed version of the first simple but strong poem she ever learnt in German, Goethe’s ‘The Erl King’, a poem that neither Amy Eleni nor I can remember. We shut up and drink our Cuba Libres. Someone rests a hand on my shoulder; I turn and a sweet-faced, curly-haired girl — maybe a Hispanic Cuban, maybe a girl that I should know — leans across the table to kiss Chabella, nods apologetically at Amy Eleni and crouches down beside my chair to talk to me.

‘I loved your singing,’ she says. Before I can thank her she continues, ‘And I saw your Mami, and your name on the programme. And I remembered you.’

She smiles at me, shushes Mami, daring me to guess who she is. Her accent is strong, so she is recent, and I want to help her out; I try not to sound too English when I reply, but I can’t help it — she isn’t family.

‘I remember your face, I think,’ I say, hesitantly.

‘I know yours,’ she says. ‘We used to play together before you left Habana. Then when you left, our mothers kept swapping photos of us. In your photos you were always in jeans. We sent you a photo of me on my quinceanera, but I remember we didn’t get one back from you because you said you didn’t want a quinceanera; you insisted that turning fifteen was no big deal, that you didn’t ask to be born. That made me laugh a lot.’

I keep looking at the girl, but I still have no idea who she is; Chabella has flashed me so many photos of Cuban girls that I doubt I could even individually identify my cousins by name. I smile to buy time, but she throws her hands up and tells me that my time is up.

‘It’s Magalys Pereira-Velázquez,’ she says, and I smile open-mouthed to show that I am glad and to hide that I still don’t have a memory to put her face and her name together with. ‘The last time we saw each other, your parents were having a leaving party,’ Magalys says, and then I do remember; I remember that she was the girl from Vedado. Magalys is the girl who was under the table with me when the woman came and sang to us. Suddenly I am frightened that she will somehow remember that I didn’t help her. I hold my arms around myself to hold Magalys away.

Chabella is fretting to call Tomás and make sure that he’s safe and snug and asleep. I point out that if he is asleep she’ll wake him, but she holds out her hand for my phone. Her lip quivers and I lose my nerve. Seconds later she is cooing down the line at Tomás. The only people still sprinkled around the café tables are couples or prospective couples with their voices set to murmuring and their faces close together.

Amy Eleni has to teach tomorrow, but, late as it is, she stays and smokes and is unusually low on comments, and I know then that her break-up has been hard on her. I can’t stop glancing at the phone number that Magalys soft-pencilled onto a napkin before she left, but I don’t want to talk to her because the memory of the leaving party is mine and she doesn’t belong in it. Magalys has so much more of Cuba than I do; she proves it by walking up with her easy smile and strong accent.

The murmur around us peaks and dips, and I look up to see an old black man, grey haired with a long face sectioned up by an anxious smile, arms bearing a blizzard of white roses. He is inching up to us, and he is Papi, and his eyes are on Chabella.

‘OK, good night London baby, my little dwarf. Sleep well,’ Chabella tells Tomás weakly, and pushes a number of wrong buttons before ending the call, smiling at Papi, drawing him on.

I look around at everyone else, and everyone is looking at us. I am happy and embarrassed and stressed and I want to get up and help Papi, take his arm, but I know that he would hate that. So I wait in agony until he is directly before Mami and bends to kiss her cheek and say he’s sorry, and then Amy Eleni stomps the ground and whoops and starts the clapping. Out of the corner of her mouth, she says to me, ‘What’s going on?’

I tell her it’s an anniversary, or a long story — I tell her that she should take her pick.

* * *

When we leave the café, Amy Eleni comes to wait for my bus with me. She looks at me for a long time, her eyes a deep green, dryadic despite the cold.

‘I’m not mad, I’m not mad,’ she tries, a smile touching her lips. ‘I don’t want to die.’

I should do what? I should smile, or I should respond.

There’s someone inside of me, and she says I must die.

But something is happening here, something that doesn’t fall into good, OK, or bad. The hysteric isn’t appealing to me; there is no need to beat her. I keep thinking, maybe if I could just know what my son looks like, who my son is, then I will be all right. I have strangeness in my family, a woman who was a priest when she wasn’t supposed to be. I have delicacy in my family. I think. I don’t know, am I delicate? I know by now that I am not going to be one of those pregnant women who touches her stomach in public; even when I am heavily pregnant I will keep my hands by my sides and keep a circumspect eye on the situation.

I tell Amy Eleni I am pregnant. I just say it. She winces, and I need to know why she did that, but immediately afterwards she says, ‘Maja, that’s wonderful. Aaron must be. . Maja, that’s. .’

We hug; her hands dig into my shoulder blades as our heads bump. ‘He doesn’t know,’ I say into her ear.

Amy Eleni’s frown is full of needles; to donate eggs you are screened for

HIV

cystic fibrosis

hepatitis B

hepatitis C

cytomegalovirus

and they do a chromosomal analysis too.

All this I saw underlined in her leaflets; Dr Maxwell screened me for them when I saw her. Amy Eleni’s frown is full of test results printed on thin crackly paper with hole-punched edges. It’s bloated with daily hormone injections, her frown. It goes on forever.

‘What, is it not his kid or something?’

That’s not really a question, so I just stare at her.

‘Then tell him. Duh,’ she says.

As I let myself back into the flat Aaron shouts, ‘My mum called; she wants to have lunch with you on Saturday. .’

I scowl at the ceiling. Aaron’s mother, Rebecca, keeps saying things like, ‘Where are the go-getters? Where are the people who are going to make a difference?’

She doesn’t sound accusing, just encouraging; she wants me to look around, then look into myself and see that the go-getter is me. Under a thatch of grey-black hair, Rebecca has Aaron’s misty eyes, and she uses them to far more oppressive effect than he does. Over lunch we will not have a conversation; she will be attempting to enlist me for some cause.

In the bedroom, Aaron is kneeling by the dresser with his camcorder trained on his head. He is parting his hair with his fingers. I pull my dress up over my head, change into one of his T-shirts, hang the dress up. I refuse to ask him what he’s doing. He’s bare-chested and his jeans are slung low to reveal the top of his boxer shorts. He says sadly, ‘I’m getting old.’

I go to him then, wrap my arms around him, tuck my chin over his shoulder so that I’m peeping up into the camera as well, but he wants me to inspect his hair. Mixed in with the black are minute strands of grey. I am not certain that I know what form the fear of turning into an old man takes. In my memory Papi seems always to have been grey, but always strong, never winding down his inner speed. I don’t think anything of Aaron’s hair, but because I have to say something I tell him I think it looks distinguished, and he groans. ‘It’s the hospital.’

Aaron switches off the camcorder. He stands to show me a bowl he’s placed on a damp patch of carpet beside the mirror. Fat, sluggish drops of water fall from a discoloured part of the ceiling.

‘There’s a leak as well, and I can’t sleep, but I’ve got to get up fucking early tomorrow, and I’m getting old.’

‘And thin. Eat!’ I say, crashing onto the bed and bringing him, laughing, down with me. His ribcage is gaining definition beneath his skin, but a small pad of fat, a downscale of a kwashiorkor belly, is sticking out over the top of his waistband. His arms tighten around me, and I close my eyes and pretend to draw his face anew; I draw what is already there, and it is exactly as I would have it.

‘You smell good,’ he says in my ear. His fingers lightly trace letters on my inner arm with his thumb. I can’t tell what they spell; I’m not following their curves and lines, but the way his voice starts a sweet hum at the base of me.

I keep waking up and thinking that it is raining. I keep waking up with my fingers spread to protect my hair, but every time it is only the leak in the ceiling, dripping in a pattern intrinsic to itself, a self-orchestrated, maddening musical score for after dark. Aaron isn’t sleeping; it’s like he’s waiting to be able to drag me into his vortex. The first time I wake Aaron says, ‘When we were still living in Accra, Geoffrey’s mum told us what happened to a cousin who was living in London. I was. . I couldn’t even connect what she was telling me with what was around me right then, the way people were relaxed and warm and sat out in the street and minded each other’s business. Geoffrey’s mum kept telling us, “Londoners! They are mad, o!”

‘Her cousin Ama moved into this flat in Croydon, and everything was fine for a week or so; she got on well enough with the neighbours, settled in, made a few personal touches with the decoration — it was all fine. Then this leak started, ruining her carpets, making a cold winter wet and worse, and it went on and on and on for weeks. She talked to the council about it but the council wouldn’t come and take a look because the council are shit. She asked all her neighbours about the leak, but nobody knew what was happening —’

He stops. Why has he stopped? Checking me. He is such a neurotic storyteller; he never trusts that I am still listening. I think he works on a model of the first stories he learnt to love; Ghanaian call and response stories, tales as an eager echo thrown back and forth amongst the same people. ‘Yeah?’ I prompt him, muffled by my pillow. I am so tired I am drooling.

‘Well, then Ama noticed something. She noticed that the leaks had an extremely regular starting and stopping time. On Monday mornings, for example, the leak would dry up completely, but on Tuesday afternoons, the leak would get going at 3 p.m. or thereabouts.’

I giggle. ‘Say it again,’ I say. I love it when he says ‘thereabouts’ — he can’t avoid saying it with the grandiloquence a semi-Ghanaian accent bestows on mashed-together English vowels. Aaron refuses to indulge me.

‘So Ama had a proper look at her ceiling, and she found that the leak was coming from a perfectly round, perfectly drilled hole, quite a large hole, like the biggest setting on a Black and Decker.’

I stop laughing. ‘Oh my God,’ I say. ‘Is this a true story?’

‘It was the guy who lived directly above her, the same guy who passed on letters which had been mistakenly delivered to him, the same guy who’d smiled at her and shaken his head in confusion when she mentioned her problems with the leak. He’d drilled a hole in his floor, then sat himself down and drawn up a little timetable. Then, in consultation with that timetable, he would pour a couple of jugfuls of water down the hole. Either Ama had offended him in some obscure way, or this guy was mad, or both.

‘Geoffrey’s mum told us “If you take a hen’s egg from under her and she just looks at you and doesn’t do anything, put that egg back.” Peace and quiet is a sign that something’s wrong. Peace and quiet is like a broken response, a sign of people in pieces.’

I look at the dark, I look at the ceiling and at the bowl, the bowl that is filling, that is nearly full. I think of Miss Lassiter, shrouded face bent intently over a bare patch on her floor. I switch on my bedside lamp and hit Aaron, almost crying.

‘Why did you tell me that? What’s wrong with you? Why did you tell me that?’

Aaron laughs and restrains me with embarrassing ease; he turns off my lamp and holds me until I fall asleep again.

The second time I wake, I hear the television and the leak together. I get out of bed to empty the bowl and find that it’s already been emptied. Aaron is lolling on the sitting-room sofa, remote control in hand, eating cold plantain. He’s watching an old video; in it I am moving in with him and am instantly unnerved by the camera. On-screen I look as if I just left school; my hair is in box-braids that flip over into fuzzy buds at their ends, and I’m wearing dungarees and a red jumper. I’m hauling a suitcase behind me on wheels. When I see him I squeak, ‘Please turn that off,’ and from behind the camera he laughs.

‘You should go to sleep,’ I tell Aaron from where I stand. He doesn’t look round but keeps watching me on-screen as I go into the bathroom, followed at a shaky angle, and triumphantly slam my toothbrush into the cup on the rim of the sink that held only his.

I go and find Chabella’s fruit bucket beneath the kitchen table and pick out a papaya, turning it over in my hand, checking for ripeness, feeling the slight slippage of fruit beneath its skin and knowing that it’s time to eat it. The smell topples me in. Rind, fruit and seed mesh on my tongue, become as dense and sweet as cake. I’m not the one who wants the papaya, but I need all of it. I fall into a chair.

Aaron leans on my shoulder and reaches for the rest of the papaya in my hand, but I say, ‘Don’t.’

Pulp spills down my chin. I’m not angry, but serious, and he feels it. He backs away, exaggeratedly slow, his hands up to show he’s not going to take the fruit. He takes another papaya from the bucket and methodically prepares it with a knife, evacuating whole clusters of seeds with a single flick.

I let seeds slide down the inside of my cheeks to wait, pooled in sticky juice, under my tongue. I know that he does that too. We look at each other and smile, lips wet, faces bulging. ‘Come on, spit,’ he gurgles. ‘You can’t win this.’ He needs to sleep. He needs to sleep. It comes to me the power that I have, that I can do something to Aaron that goes beyond us. I could make myself take a bad fall; I could drink something noxious. I could go to a clinic and have ‘it’ taken away. Even if I never tell him, I would have proved that I can deny him, that I can make my son wait. Panicked, I choke. Panicked, I spit. Aaron spits too, and shouts, ‘Yes! I won!’ We laugh.

In the somewherehouse, amidst the faded cloth of their rooms, the smallest Kayode plays the fierce-eyed one at chess.

‘Here she is again,’ the fierce-eyed Kayode mutters to the small one when he sees Aya.

The chessboard is missing knights, so the Kayodes are attacking each other’s squares with their thumbs. It makes for a game complicated both to play and follow.

Next door the woman Kayode rocks with her sleeping eyes open, darting, scanning. She lets her hand fill pages with lines. Her knuckles crack. On top of the pile of that dreamings’ sketches, Aya sees her Mama’s thickly lashed black eyes. Mama is behind the grille of a confessional. The black lattice is garlanded with blank, long-stemmed lilies. The beginnings of a shadow scrape the pale diamond spaces behind her.

Aya tries to shake the Kayode woman awake. But the other two Kayodes come and hold Aya’s hands away from their kin. They mutter fearfully.

‘A visit,’ they chant at their sleeping woman, ‘a visit, see? What is to be done?’

Aya is marched out of the Kayodes’ rooms and deposited on the stairs to greet the visitor. She watches a woman wearing her Mama’s favourite green bubi step out of the basement.

She is not Mama.

Her dark eyes are like gracefully tinted glass, but her eyelashes aren’t long enough to trail into her hair when she lies down.

This woman gives off an electrical shhhhhh. Without saying she says, You may not touch me.

She is not Mama. Aya has never seen her before.

‘Yeye my own,’ the woman says, smiling a secret smile. Her voice is Mama’s. She does not spread her arms.

‘Go away,’ Aya says. ‘You were not sent for.’

Her eyes travel the gown that is Mama’s and the face that is not.

‘You don’t know your Mama? Strange day.’

The woman believes herself to be repeating the truth; her mouth is relaxed, her words gently brisk. She sets her foot on the step to come up. Angered, Aya shouts and marks her with a finger.

‘Proserpine, I see you!’

But Proserpine does not stop; Proserpine keeps on coming.

The Kayodes are behind Aya, all three, arms linked; if she wants, she could take one step back and be in their midst.

But, ‘Welcome, Ma,’ the Kayodes call to Proserpine, who has come in through the London door with almost no luggage, her fingers threaded through the handle of a shopping bag, a patina of expensive sunshine.

Mama Proserpine settles in a first-floor bedroom, a room that Aya has never chosen to sleep in because it sticks out of the house’s side. The male Kayodes move around her, careful not to spoil Proserpine’s new clothes. They fold and pat lightweight flared skirts and crisp shirts, slipping them into drawers with haste, as if some divided sylph that lives in them will waken, regroup and fly out of the window. From the window seat, Mama Proserpine gazes out into the alleyway of trees and submits to the woman Kayode’s hands, allows her hair to be pinned up into a ruffled stalk.