Helen Oyeyemi - The Opposite House

Chabella, laughing and beautiful, cradles Tomás’s head and kisses the tip of his nose and opens her arms a little wider for me, and even though I am supposed to be on my way to see Papi, I throw my arms around them both.

I didn’t know how many cycles of egg donation Amy Eleni had gone through before she told me. At some point I noticed that she was wearing her sleeves excessively long. And I feared the hysteric,

(of course I forever fear the hysteric)

she who no longer manifests herself in screaming and fainting and clinging to walls but gets modern and hides herself in a numbness of the skin that demands cutting. There was no way to find out without making a fuss, so I just watched Amy Eleni. We went for manicures together; I reached out and snatched up her sleeve, quickly, let it fall back quickly. She was amused, but I had seen yellowing puncture marks, fastidiously spaced bruises fading back into her skin tone. The manicurist asked me if I could just keep my hands still for a minute.

I mouthed, ‘What are you shooting up on?’ I tried to put on an expression that said I knew something about shooting up on drugs.

Amy Eleni said, ‘For heaven’s sake.’

Afterwards we went walking through Regent’s Park, through sunlight and sprays of raw green. Amy Eleni handed me information sheet after information sheet from her bag. They were crumpled, studded with thumbprints, as paper gets when you carry it everywhere. Even a passport must get like that if you take it out to look at it often enough. Lots of thank yous, lots of details, lots of drug names, advice: Expect bloating as you produce more than one egg per cycle; Make sure you have comfortable clothes with elastic waistbands .

All I could say, all I could think, was, ‘You’re selling your eggs?’

Amy Eleni turned very white; either I was making her angry or she was about to throw up. ‘I’m not selling them, all right? The clinic pays expenses, but they’re not allowed to pay donors for the eggs.’

I nodded. I said, ‘That’s. . wow. I could never do something like that. Giving infertile couples a baby and stuff. That’s. .’

( You’re giving your eggs away, just right out from inside you like that? )

‘I don’t mind clinics.’

I tried to make Amy Eleni sit down on a bench with me, but she kept walking, fast, almost at a jog. I barely managed to keep up with her.

‘You remember when I was going out with Sara? Well, when I told my mum about her, my mum just gave me this look, like. . ugh. I don’t know. That look. It was kind of disgusted and kind of resigned. As if she’d eaten something that she knew she wasn’t going to like and she was thinking, ‘Yeah, nasty, but I knew it.’ Then the first thing she said was, ‘So you think you’re a lesbian. But what are you going to do with your fertility? You’re just going to waste your fertility like that?’ And I didn’t have an answer for her. I had answers for almost everything else, like if she started crying and saying she raised me wrong, then I could have given her a stupid hug or something. Or if she tried to send me to church, we could have had it out. But she didn’t even seem to give a shit. It was like, Oh, my daughter, the lesbian, the waste of time.’

I put my hand on Amy Eleni’s arm, to make her slow down and, also, to be touching her.

The Elegua head on the coat stand is pitching forward a little. Papi must have tried to take it down. I set it aright

(something rattles inside its hollow),

I am careful and lift my hands away as soon as it is safe. The Elegua head has a clammy feel, like wet clay, or skin beginning to perspire.

I find Papi on the sitting-room sofa, crumpled and bemused in the same white shirt and brown trousers Chabella and I left him in, and I know that he has slept the night there facing the pale bubble of wallpaper left in the wake of Mami’s altar. The bedrooms are upstairs, and with no one around to pretend full health to, Papi has not bothered to attempt the stairs. He blinks at me sadly. ‘Maja,’ he says. ‘No es justo.’

I throw myself down beside him and put an arm around his neck to nuzzle him just beneath his earlobe, where his jawbone begins; that’s a part of him that has never changed, and with my eyes closed I imagine him as a much younger man, surprised, thinking, Who is this girl near me, older than me and younger? I imagine him unable to understand what it is to have a grown daughter.

‘I know it’s not fair. But just think, Mami hasn’t given you trouble like this before.’

‘So what?’ Papi retorts. ‘When trouble comes, you don’t sit around thinking, Oh, but at least I haven’t had trouble before. The point is that you forget all other times. That’s what’s so bad about trouble, that’s what makes it trouble — you can’t see your way around it.

‘When I met her, mi Dios , such a woman. You could see. . good, just good, all soul — she was studying German but she also went to lectures that had nothing to do with German. Like my lectures. If you knew someone like that you’d call them a boffin or nerd or geek or neek or something, wouldn’t you? You think it’s so wonderful not to know anything. But your Mami, she came up to me with a copy of my book on the Cuban conquistadors and a list of questions. And she just listened to me with her face like someone who has not lived and is trying to begin.

‘You, Maja, you wonder why the people who have to teach you never like you; it’s because you sit there looking at them as if you don’t believe a word they’re saying. That parents’ evening when you sat beside me and yawned while your History teacher was praising your mock exam results. If I had been your teacher, at that moment I would have taken a big red pen and drawn a line through the results and said, ‘My mistake — she failed. Her problem is a lack of interest.’ You are lucky that you have been educated in a country where you’re supposed to act uninterested. You’re very lucky that you’ve been educated in a country where it is not necessary to get out. Imagine if the only way you could have a good life was to learn your books! Would you yawn then? No, indeed, you would grin and say, thank you Mr Englishman, please tell me how I may continue to improve.’

‘I yawned because I was tired! I have manners,’ I protest. ‘Anyway, Mami —’

‘Chabella,’ said Papi, ‘would never in a million years have yawned. In fact she was too focused. She looked at me and I spoke rubbish. She was. . I mean. . all of those years I spent building my intellect and here comes this woman and throws it all away. Why did she have to wait until I’m retired and settled and, and. . satisfecho de mi mismo before poisoning me?’

We study each other. I know that he forgave Chabella approximately two seconds after he realised what had happened.

‘How is your body now?’ I ask.

Papi nods, waves me off, fumbles down the back of the sofa and pulls out a pouch of Cohiba cigars. He lights one with a match. Chabella is desperate to know where Papi hides his cigars so that she can throw them away and save his life, but he changes his hiding place every week or so.

Papi used to smoke pipes. Ages ago Amy Eleni and I smoked his pipes too, when he and Chabella were out; we stuck our heads out of my bedroom window to send away the clotted scent of apple tobacco. We wore chequered flat caps and grumbled about immigrants while we smoked. ‘Bloody Africans, Pakis, bloody Cubans, soap dodgers,’ Amy Eleni muttered in a maniacally off-kilter Cockney accent. ‘Send ‘em away, or they’ll have the whip hand over us, mate. There’ll be rivers of mud. Yeah, that’s right, that’s what I said, rivers of mud. You cut one of those darkies and you’ll see; they bleed stinkin’ river water.’