Helen Oyeyemi - The Opposite House

(‘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.