Helen Oyeyemi - The Opposite House

I was seven years old when we came here. I’ve come to think that there’s an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away. I arrived here just before that age.

One time I needed to know an A-level essay’s worth of Kantian ethics, but the very layout of the book I was reading took the words away from me. Papi leaned over my chair. My Papi put warmth between me and the ceiling with his stubbly chin and his kind eyes and a hand on my shoulder. He explained to me some things about Kant and duty. He couldn’t make me understand what he was talking about. Mami sat with me then and told me again, with long pauses as she moved the ideas she remembered from German to English. When she prays to the saints for intercession, her Spanish is damaged and slow because she is moving her thoughts from Africa to Cuba and back again.

St Teresa of Avila was the one who brought me to St Catherine’s for the first time. In her autobiography, St Teresa of Avila tells of a meeting with the devil, and it seemed to her that the devil was a short Negro. Of course it’s funny about the devil being black; I thought it was funny, but at the same time. .

I needed to do something after I put down the Avila book; I needed to do the worst thing I could do in the world, something to call down hellfire and justice. I took my fifteen-year-old self to Chabella’s room. I took a pair of scissors to the most beautiful dress in the world, Chabella’s hoop-skirted wedding dress, so full-skirted a dress that it can stand up all by itself. I took the scissors to it, but I stopped before I could cut. I went to my best friend Amy Eleni’s house instead. When I briefly described what was going on, she took me to her parents’ loft, opened up a wooden chest and tossed her mother’s wedding dress at me.

‘Go on then,’ she said. She was laughing. But I couldn’t do anything to the dress. Despina’s dress was the second most beautiful in the world — this dress was satin, with a mist of silver mesh, the kind of dress that makes its wearer look newly wept. In the chest the dress had looked very narrow, narrower even than I thought Despina could be, but Amy Eleni wasn’t scared of getting stuck in it. Amy Eleni didn’t even care about the dress; she just put it on to show me. She flicked up the zip of Despina’s tear-dress as if it were all just jeans.

She turned to the dusty mirror sideways on, struck a pose, hands on her hips, her elbows crooked governess-style. She kicked back at the air to loosen her pose, and the dress’s seams creaked at her thigh. I couldn’t breathe, but Amy Eleni breathed. I looked at Amy Eleni in the mirror, but she didn’t see me looking. She struck another pose on tiptoe, arms held high, neck swaying as if something heavy was on her head. The skylights caught an accusing flash of sun that bypassed stacked sea-grass boxes to illuminate the dress.

The poor dress, it was too much. I stopped Amy Eleni with my hands, kept her waist straight under my palms to let her know that she shouldn’t bend any more, and I turned her in a swish of cold white as I examined the dress for damage. She drooped and jiggled her wrists, pretending to be a puppet. But before my eyes the dress’s shoulder was turning to sad, shredded cloth. Before I could even open my mouth, Amy Eleni said, ‘It’ll survive, wedding dresses survive anything. People have sex in wedding dresses. I mean, Jesus. Once I put this dress on and I climbed a tree in it! I fell, though. .’

I screamed small and checked the satin for grass stains, but Amy Eleni sniggered, batted my hand away, named a book and said I really needed to read it.

Books: I am attracted and repelled; books are conversations that are not addressed to me and I want to sneak up and listen but I also want to be invited in. If I was invited in the conversation would not be what it was.

After reading that Avila book, I scared Chabella badly. She decided that I was having ‘a moral, religious and mental breakdown’. I was only saying what was on my mind. The conversation that made Chabella decide that we were going to take a weekend retreat went exactly like this:

ME: Chabella, is it true that the Church refuses to confirm the presence of a single soul in Hell?

CHABELLA (with an enormous, proud smile): Ai, querida .

ME: Not even Hitler or Stalin or It the Clown?

CHABELLA: Not even them. Forgiveness –

ME (interrupting): What about Teresa of Avila?

CHABELLA: — is always an option. Mm, St Teresa, what?

ME: Well Teresa of Avila is a bitch, after all, so I expect she’s in Hell.

CHABELLA: (screams for three or four long seconds, while I just sit and look at her. Gasps. Holds her head with tears pouring down her face, shrinks and shakes as if I am punching her.)

Chabella said it wasn’t so much the words, but the way my face went when I said them — she said my face ‘twisted’ and she couldn’t recognise me. Chabella knows the Rites of Exorcism by heart. She is prone to exaggeration.

When Papi heard that Chabella and I were going on a retreat, he gave six-year-old Tomás a high five and said, ‘Just you and me, London baby. Show me some of those London ways.’ Papi had to give Tomás the high five very gently, it was in fact a matter of pressing his palm against Tomás’s fingers, or Tomás would have fallen down. Tomás was happy with the idea of us going away, too. He cackled, ‘Bye.’

When we actually left the following week, he said ‘Wait for me’ and ran upstairs to throw some toys into his rucksack. Mami closed the front door and he cried out: ‘No! No!’

The way Tomás said ‘No’, the way he said it.

He didn’t know what two days would feel like; he didn’t understand that he would only have to go to sleep and get up twice, and then we’d be back.

That first weekend at St Catherine’s, Chabella and I slept in the same room on low, neat white beds with scratchy blankets. We didn’t talk about Catholicism or Teresa; we were already in the Church, high up with a sweet vanilla smell and the softest hush all around. We laughed together in the night for no reason at all. We tried to be quiet because you were supposed to be quiet, and anyway, everyone was sleeping. But Mami would just look at me with her nostrils quivering and that was enough to set me off. At Mass, when I looked at my Mami, she glittered. When she sang, the song came from the wound on her tongue. While Mami slept at night, and I lay with my eyes closed,

a shadow fell, fast and from a great height it fell

it put me inside

it put me inside

the weight of it. Dark came to rest on my eyelids; strange and painful pennies. What if, what if I had opened my eyes and tried to look at what was there in that room. .

. . with sleepy awe I felt it: I am loved . And outside there were tall trees that had other people’s sleep caught in their branches, dreams like white lights, that first time Mami took me away to save my soul.

Now it’s 4 a.m. and I’m still awake with my fingers splayed over my neck and its old loop

of pain

(and I am at St Catherine’s again,

at the window again

amazed again

at the way a steep hill holds growing green on its swerve when it will support nothing else).

On the wall is St Catherine of Siena, sheets of chestnut hair floating in heaven-driven winds, Catherine who I always fail to love when I remember that she is not the Catherine of spiked-wheel martyrdom. Catherine of Siena looks at me with all of her soul in her soft smile; she looks at me, glad that I will not be staying. I think about the mothers I know or have seen or have heard of. My mother, Amy Eleni’s mother, mothers in books, mothers in Chabella’s apataki , her stories about the gods. Twenty-four not being old enough, I want to tell my son, Not now, please .