Helen Oyeyemi - The Opposite House

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.

A while ago Aaron wanted us to swap books that we loved; he wanted to read with me, read me. I said, ‘I don’t read.’

He asked again, and on this asking he was so close to me that our eyelashes brushed each other; his lips struck mine but didn’t stay. I agreed to swap some books.

He gave me Saki short stories with a cracked spine, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, The Great Gatsby . I didn’t read the books; I didn’t need to. I could have told him that these were the books he would give me. Instead of reading them I smelt them, let them fall open at random pages to look for forehead — or fist-shaped pressure. I walked around wearing a pair of his jeans and put Gatsby in the back pocket the way the teenaged Aaron did — Volume I of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in one pocket, Gatsby in the other so that his backside was rectangular and intense and learned. In his jeans, which I had to hold up with braces over a T-shirt, my backside became a saggy jigsaw puzzle. I worried that people who walked behind me were staring at my behind and trying to make the pieces fit together. But I didn’t worry enough to stop my experiment. The books’ pages smelt of Aaron and another low, nutty smell that Aaron said was Accra.

Aaron asked me what I thought of Gatsby . I said, ‘Yeah, it’s really good.’ He waited for more, so I said, ‘It’s short, though.’ Aaron kissed me and wanted to know what I’d been doing with his books since I hadn’t been reading them.

When it came to my part of the swap, I hovered over my shelves at home. I panicked at the last minute and gave him Spanish books; Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba; Alejo Carpentier’s sensational voodoo stories that make Chabella and me laugh; Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s book Sab , about the strong slave who falls in love with a white woman and learns that love makes him better than everyone. When Aaron saw that the books were in Spanish, his brow creased and he opened and closed his mouth, then simply said, with his eyebrows raised, ‘Thank you.’

For a week they sat on his bedside table, the books, and Aaron didn’t go near them. I checked them when I visited him; I had keys to his flat and twice I let myself in just to see if the books had moved. They hadn’t. We didn’t talk about the books; they were just there, faded titles sneering quietly. I didn’t know why I’d done it to him when he was fair with his choices, so the second time I let myself in, when I heard him coming back from the hospital, I collected up the books and went to him to say sorry.

He listened, nodded, shrugged and threw his satchel onto the sofa. The bag coughed up its contents in one abrupt jangle; mints, keys, pens, Post-it pads, English translations of the books I’d given him. He said, ‘Yeah, they’re quite good. Light reading. You know, tube reading. .’

I dropped the books, rushed at him, snapping my teeth to bite. He lifted me off the ground, high so I squealed, and we fell together in a tangle. With a startled laugh he let the wall hold him upright on one side and held me to him with one big, square hand fitted perfectly to the small of my back. I felt how gentle he wanted to be with me, and I realised then, my nose buried in his jumper, that we smelt the same. Not just that he smelt of my perfume, but that he smelt of me. Good perfume on a clean body is a diaphanous membrane that changes and glows and grows on the skin so that each person smells slightly but vitally different wearing it. So the perfume that smelt of spicy patchouli on Amy Eleni floated high, white musk into the air around me, and around him, too. The smell of us scared me.

‘What?’ said Aaron. He knew that something was wrong, or right, or something. I closed my eyes to concentrate on smelling him — does he really . .?

He held still. My lips followed the musk along the length of his wrist, where familiarity — the exact same blank between acid and alkali — danced; where I knew my kingdom. I smiled, blind, pushed his sleeve away with my nose as I travelled up his arm.