Helen Oyeyemi - The Opposite House

‘Did Amy Eleni sound angry with me?’ I ask. I’ve just realised I’m already wearing one of my shoes — the battle is half won.

‘No?’ Aaron tries. He doesn’t want to be involved. He tries to tiptoe past me.

‘Then what? Why would she ask to speak to you before me? Are you seeing her tomorrow?’

‘Calm down. I’m her friend too,’ he says. He bends and hands me my other stiletto. ‘Maybe you should start wearing flatter shoes now. Her school’s running some mentor scheme, and she managed to get some guy from Shell — can you imagine, a Shell Oil man?! A more ethical mentor doesn’t exist, I’m sure. She got this Shell guy to agree to mentor three boys in her form and take them out tomorrow for a first meeting, but the guy pulled out, so. .’

I pretend to be confused: ‘So why did she call you?’

‘Yeah, shut up,’ he says. ‘I’m a good role model. Excellent, in fact. If I survive this year I’ll be well on my way to becoming a psychiatrist, so shog off. Anyways, these boys are Ghanaian, so she thought I’d be perfect.’

I scrutinise him, but I can’t tell what percentage of what he just said is a joke. He must know that if he mentors these boys, he is not showing them what a Ghanaian can do with his life, but what a white guy can do who chooses or refuses Ghana at any given moment. I change the subject. What I want to say is, You are no more Ghanaian than I am Cuban. So what if you can number your memories and group them in years one to eighteen? That country will not claim you when you are broken, when you have forgotten the trick of breathing easily — and you will have to learn how to resuscitate yourself.

But if I say this, he will take offence. Because if I do say it I will mean it to offend.

‘Did you get to talk to Miss Lassiter about the leak?’ I ask instead.

He shakes his head. He leans his forehead against mine.

‘If I were to ask you to marry me,’ he murmurs, ‘what would you say?’

I baulk, but I think I manage to not let him feel it.

‘OK, first of all, I have to go and sing in a minute and you’re trying this? Secondly, I’d say, querido , I can’t marry you yet.’

I can’t be a wife yet, not even Aaron’s. I need to sit down and have a good long talk with my personal hysteric before I become a wife.

‘Why?’ he asks, very seriously.

‘Z.’

He doesn’t want to smile, but he smiles because he has to be grown up about it.

Tonight there is no choice between singing badly and singing well. I cannot sing at all.

Onstage, in the smoky dark, I shut my eyes, place my fingers around the microphone as if in prayer, and I cannot remember anything — not just my Cuba, but even the words to the song and my place in the music. The band realises what is happening. They change temperature; they ease down from standard swing and into a mellow instrumental, and Sophie begins a gentle, improvised solo. I scramble offstage as quickly as I can. I do not cry until I’m outside, and even then I fumble for the tears, as if this crying is just something I’m doing in a blackout while I’m waiting for the light to come back.

Aaron follows me into the bedroom when I get back. He fiddles with my things. He slaps my hand when, in retaliation, I reach for one of his chewing sticks. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I am concerned. I look as haggard as I feel.

‘I am very ugly these days, aren’t I?’ I say.

Aaron looks at me; he makes a good job of his surprised expression. ‘Ah, you don’t know how you look to me.’

I stay out of his reach, smiling tiredly. ‘Is that a direct quote from a Drifters song?’

Aaron groans. I peel off my jumper, turning away a little so he can’t see my stomach. I step out of the skirt I reserve for fat days; it drops to the floor like a flattened pom-pom. Aaron hasn’t gone away.

‘This isn’t a striptease,’ I say.

He is still waiting. ‘What?’

‘This is the first day off I’ve had in ages where I’m not half-dead,’ he says.

I don’t look at him. I do not want to talk. I want to rest first of all, and then I want to try to sing again, try to find a tone that my vocal cords and my aching throat will let me stay with. Or maybe I want Amy Eleni with me under a tent made of blankets, chin in hand, talking to me with her clear eyes narrowed. I don’t want Aaron — he doesn’t know.

‘You don’t want to spend any time together?’

He is flinching a little, as if we are having a fight. We’re not having a fight.

‘I keep thinking you’d rather go back to St Catherine’s or something,’ he says reluctantly, when I don’t reply. ‘You’ve put something down between us. It’s invisible, but it’s very strong.’

He comes to hold me then, and I realise that I can’t reply because I’ve been weeping those easy tears that Chabella passed down to me. He doesn’t hold me any differently — I thought he would have care for my stomach, but he is as sure as ever that his touch is good for me and my son.

‘Tell me why you keep wearing this,’ he says. He runs his thumb lightly, lightly down the ridge of my polo neck, and I hold still and I let him.

But I can’t say. What do I say, ‘My mother. .’? Do I say, ‘The hysteric. .’?

Gelassenheit .

I lift my head from his shoulder and touch my lips to the skin that crinkles over his Adam’s apple. My teeth latch onto him and I clamp down hard, so hard that my teeth find each other again through his skin

(he shouts )

and I am not thinking anything in particular, just that I have to hurt him.

It’s to do with Magalys, who said there was no singing in the garden in Vedado. Such words are surgical; a pole separates a man’s brain and he survives, but no one knows him any more. With my Cuba cut away from under me, without that piece of warm, songful night, I am empty of reasons. Aaron’s hand smacks my forehead, instinctively batting me away from him, and I fall away like he wants me to, painfully sucking at my teeth. Which are laddered with blood. He stares at me with his hand to his neck; my own hand is at my neck. He is breathing hard; I am breathing hard.

‘What is wrong with you?’ he asks me.

I wipe my mouth.

Aaron rubs his neck, puts me into strong focus, and I am so nervous, too nervous, as if I am fourteen and this is the first time I have ever talked to a boy about anything serious. He draws me back to him, and when I bite him this time, he clenches his fists around me, but he doesn’t let go, and he doesn’t cry out.

Mami and her habit of unhappiness. Mami dazzled and shaded in a strip of kitchen tile and flowered tablecloth, candlelight prising her gaze open for the dark. In the kitchen she makes some more of her prayer flowers.

‘What, you think I don’t make them any more? You think I’d forgotten?’ she asks me. ‘I make them on the third day of each month, on the day that should be given to Elegua.’

The blinds are drawn down against a night storm that screams black noise and thorny rain. Chabella shivers and says quietly, ‘This house will blow away.’

I ask her if there are hurricanes in Cuba; her reply is simple silence.

I talk to her softly, talk secrets to her, but she won’t answer me. So I keep talking anyway, to keep myself awake for her, because I see how the muscles in her long neck are strained, how she bites down and swallows even though there is nothing in her mouth. The window frames bounce against the gales. Chabella says, ‘Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth,’ without looking up. She is just as fleet at her prayer-making as she’s always been, just as expert, squinting at the paper heaped between her spread elbows, selecting a piece and swiftly folding, twisting, pinching the crisp layers between her honey-soaked fingertips to form broad petals topped with fractured spires.