Helen Oyeyemi - The Opposite House

I sleep. I wake and put Chabella’s collar back on to make my sleep uncomfortable, to give me a better chance of waking. Sometimes Aaron is there. More often he is not there. When he speaks on the phone to Geoffrey, he speaks in Ewe because he doesn’t want me to know what he is saying. The smell of damp collects in my bones.

I warm myself up some tomato soup and before I can sit down to drink it I’ve become carbon, the black before a diamond shows itself. My senses turn crystalline and abrade each other until I lay down my spoon. If this spoon should scrape against the bottom of the bowl just once, and I should hear it scrape, I am not sure of the result. I am not sure where the hysteric and I are going to go when that bad sound comes. I hold the spoon away and I breathe and do not eat.

Aaron looks at me over the top of his own bowl of soup, and the circles around his eyes are so dark that I begin to think I am reflecting him.

‘You have got to eat,’ he says. His voice is very hard. It hurts. He stands over me and drags my wrist so that I have to put soup into my mouth. I let him; with his hand over mine there is less risk of the bad sound coming. A spoonful at a time, we do it. The cold in this kitchen never ends, the steam off the soup is nothing. Whenever I think I am going to spit soup in Aaron’s face, he knows, and he warns me with his eyes.

I say I’ve had enough, and Aaron looks into the bowl. It is still more than three-quarters full. Aaron says, ‘Don’t be selfish.’ He jams the sloppy spoon into my mouth. It isn’t deliberate when the metal strikes my teeth — but the metal does strike. I take the spoon myself and continue the work. Aaron watches me swallow; he is sad that he has to do this, but he is strong. In his eyes I am a throat working down red juice, I am a shaking hand and a spoon and beyond that his baby.

(Herr Doktor please die as I cannot have you think of me this way.)

I am so ashamed of my tears that I am going away, not up and out, not inside, I don’t know where, just away. My shame brings me escape velocity, brings me Gelassenheit . I love my son, so when Aaron is gone, I do not throw up to spite him. I let the soup stay. I let us have the soup.

Aaron has to go when there is a cardiac arrest and he is on night cover; he has to go for fourteen hours at a time on a lot of days. He has to be gone full stop.

Amy Eleni has tousled her hair up with gel. I peek into the sitting room and watch Aaron wrap his arms around her; she nips his cheek, talks to him for a moment

(the first thing she says is, ‘this place smells worse and worse all the time.’ I think he offers her words about the plumber, or time, or something, because the second thing Amy Eleni says is, ‘she will lose her mind in this smell, you know.’ I don’t hear the third thing)

then she comes through to me.

She has brought me an armful of coffee-table books about Cuba, two torches and a grab bag of salt and vinegar crisps. I refuse to let the books remain in the bedroom.

‘But these are good, I promise,’ she says. ‘I meant to give them to you for your birthday, but this is an emergency. Anyway, shut up.’

Amy Eleni has inscribed the inside of the first book: ‘Friends make the world strong and beautiful — Jose Marti’

We crawl under the covers with torches, Amy Eleni lies flat on her stomach, I lie on my side. Our breath tickles the pages, and we stare at Cubans and the words that they have said to the photographers, the words printed alongside the monochrome and sepia images of bearded men waving out of the windows of long brown cars, houses with tiled floors and open wooden shutters and pictures of Che Guevara beside pictures of Jesus, leathered women in aprons churning butter, a queue of uniformed girls following a nun down the street with their buckle-shoed feet caught in variations of the cha-cha-cha, each grabbing the other by the ponytail.

My fingers turn the pages to salt and vinegar, but they stay on a page where a black Santero woman strewn with the beads of her gods lets her laughter throw her head right back. She is a big woman, and a diamond-patterned headscarf covers even bigger hair in a turban wrap. Behind her on the wall, in blurry focus, is a wooden crucifix, and the words next to her picture don’t matter.

I decide to be proactive about the leak. I take pen, paper and the Yellow Pages and sit down on the floor by the phone to find and write down the telephone numbers of four plumbers in the area. Understanding what I am reading takes longer than it should because something seems hilarious to me, but I don’t know what it is. The laughter is there and there’s no bottom to it. I try strategies. I try to dissect what could be making me laugh; I try to remember if I’ve just seen anything or heard anything or there’s anything in the room that I’m not fully registering. I put the phone book down and I search the sitting room for hilarity. The sitting room is nothing but books and lamps and videotapes. At the window I see that the day is recovering from rain and I see that Aaron has left a plantain skin on the windowsill.

I try to stop smiling because smiling is another way for this laughter to seethe out from between my teeth. I try to outrun the grin and I go to the front door and back again, but when I stop, the world whirls and the sloshing in my ears tells me my water levels have gone awry. There is already too much water inside — my son swims as he sleeps; when he is awake he surges towards a sound. I want my son to try at leaving me a little, so, for him, I found my voice this morning and sang. I think my son likes my voice. It disordered me to track his movement with my thumb. My voice came differently this morning — there was a raspy range to it before that has gone away. Now I’m sounding impossibly light and singing nonsense lullabies that very quickly seem as if they had never been, like bubbles blown and broken at second breath. But my son heard, and he swelled his walls in one smooth rush. He strained so eagerly that I understand that he doesn’t know that his walls are me. I wanted Aaron to know. I called out, ‘Oh my God! Aaron!’ and then I remembered that he had already left for the day.

Still believing that I am about to start laughing, I look at phone numbers, but each number stands independently of the others, smug mathematical symbols. Today my handwriting comes out so small that when I try and call one of the numbers I misread my ‘5’s for ‘6’s and my ‘6’s for ‘5’s and call the wrong number. The second time, I call the right number. But there is some problem with the way that I’m describing the leak, and the man I’m talking to gets exasperated and hangs up.

After that I sit and hold myself very tightly in case I start to laugh. The leak is making me laugh; the sound, the way the water droplets smack each other, like clown shoes. Someone will fall over soon, and even if it’s me, it will still be funny. I snort and stuff my fingers into my mouth so that the joke doesn’t come loose. I should go to sleep. At least that way I will not be laughing. I don’t want Aaron to have to come back and find me laughing and make me stop. It’s as Amy Eleni says, there’s nothing between me and myself and I may have to end up letting Aaron intervene.

No, I should go to bed. I leave the numbers on the notepad by the phone and I write to Aaron, very carefully, that he should please call TODAY .

In bed, by accident, I say, ‘Ha ha.’

And then it’s all over and it’s rhythmic, it’s

ha ha ha

ha ha HA HA HA HA

HA ha

HA ha

and again.

I cannot hear the leak while this ‘ha’ is being forced out of me.

I laugh until I’m bent almost in half and the bones in my knees bounce against my stomach. My mouth is dripping because I haven’t had enough time to swallow. I’m upside down, I can’t understand what I’m seeing and I think I need to climb over my knees somehow if I want to be in an upright position. But there is a living end to the laughter after all — this is good news. Maybe the laughter is my son’s. He is a serious event, but not all that serious. He is not the first baby that was ever born. I take Chabella’s collar in my hand and it corrugates my fingertips, hard wood in a trickster’s colours. Elegua’s humour is inscrutable.