Helen Oyeyemi - The Opposite House

(with Mama’s full voice comes fear, oh, fear to split you open and make you pour out good gold like yolk)

Papa caused Mama to fall to the ground. Mama fell hard and, as Papa had wanted, as he had needed, she fell quiet. She lay. She lay under minutes like fingers, and after a handful Aya did not move in her mother’s stomach.

The stillness brought the thought: I’ve lost this baby .

Then transparency.

Mama became as a season is; she felt weather in her, she felt empty heat. Slowly she came to understand that she wasn’t alone, that she had some secret help inside her. They got up, Aya’s Mama and her help, and they took a bone-handled cutlass, and they went to the next room to kill Aya’s Papa.

When they came, Aya’s Papa saw two women and one face — the face was small and faraway, and it looked on him with laughter.

Aya’s Papa said, ‘Who is that? Who’s there?’

Mama and her helper didn’t answer — they cut Mama’s fingertip to make sure the knife was sharp enough. The blood rushed well, and quickly. They accused him. They said to him, ‘You’ve made her lose her son.’

Aya’s Papa said, ‘Not a son, daughter. And you haven’t lost her, you couldn’t have.’

But still these two accused him and turned their tiny eyes on him as if his death was already a lens that they looked through.

‘Who is that? What’s there?’ Papa called. ‘Name it — name her.’

Mama said later, It was too much temptation for my help; he was giving her a chance to be. So she broke away from me to name herself — Proserpine — and a name was all he needed to take her from me.

Like every girl, I only need to look up and a little to the right of me to see the hysteria that belongs to me, the one that hangs on a hook like an empty jacket and flutters with disappointment that I cannot wear her all the time. I call her my hysteric, and this personal hysteric of mine is designer made (though I’m not sure who made her), flattering and comfortable, attractive even, if you’re around people who like that sort of thing. She is not anyone, my hysteric; she is blank, electricity dancing around a filament, singing to kill. It’s not that there are two Majas; there is only one, but she can disappear into her own tension and may one day never come back.

My second ever boyfriend was five years older than me, frizzy, blond-haired and rugby-player-built, a postgraduate student when I was a first-year undergraduate. He seemed to prefer my personal hysteric to me. He told me over and over that I was beautiful, sweet, so clever.

In his mouth, on his tongue, those words were not safe.

And he said these terrible things earnestly enough to make me sit on my hands when I was across from him at dinner. In his mouth, on his tongue, those words cast a spell which conjured me into the things he kept insisting I was.

Luke was always pleading with me to calm down before I even realised that I was unsettled. I stopped daring to raise my voice at him, or smile too much, even. Luke made bedtime drinks for me, mugs brimful with creamy white, warm Kahlua and milk. When I sipped them sleepily from the enfoldment of his arms, I became convinced that I was ill, and that it was terminal. There was no other reason for such care, for the way he laid hands on me so lightly that it seemed I was already disappearing. One night, drunk, drunk, drunk, I dropped my empty shot glass and a full one for Luke, sat down beside the pieces and arranged them in my skin, twisting clear flowers planted to grow from my soles, my arms. It hurt. But wearing my hysteric, it became a matter of art and pain and so on. It was extreme, it was because of tension. Luke took me to Accident and Emergency and spoke to me richly, quietly, held me for as long as he could while I cried and put my sight away from my torn skin.

We went to a girls’ school, Amy Eleni and I. We know about subtle, slow murder, the way that glances and silences and unnecessarily kind words can have a girl running into traffic trying to get hit so that she doesn’t have to turn up the next day. When Amy Eleni arrived at the hospital she was in no mood for pleasantries. She took Luke aside and told him to ‘Fuck right off. Immediately.’

Luke became typical; he called her a man-hating dyke, and she made some movement towards him, some movement that scared him. It was as if she was going to pincer his testicles and he thought she’d do it, so he shrank. When she told me about it her voice rose and fell, bitter and sad. Amy Eleni told me gossip about Luke as I waited to be allowed to go home. One girl had said to her, ‘Luke only goes out with nutters. But he’s never been out with a black girl before, so she must be extra psychotic.’

My hysteric smells foreign, like perfumed sand, but maybe that’s how she’s supposed to smell. She is not part of me, but part of my store. In times of need she converts into my emergency image of Chabella, a poorly done portrait that I can show people when I need to ask, ‘Have you seen this woman?’

I have no natural sensitivity; I am forced to it.

For a boyfriend from the Ivory Coast, handsome and strong like a mined mineral, I cut off all my hair. Because he said he preferred me like that, all long neck, bare ears and hopeful eyes. I hated my hair like that, hated it almost too much to live. When I wasn’t with him I spent a lot of time crying. Chabella, who sometimes is my mind outside of me, said, musingly, ‘You look like a boy with that haircut. Your nose. . it takes over the middle of your face when there’s no hair to look at. It’s strange, because in actuality your nose isn’t that big.’

Amy Eleni only said, ‘It’ll grow. Your hair always grows really fast.’

But I had to keep cutting away new growth with scissors. When he broke up with me, he said he was unhappy that I didn’t seem to love my hair in its natural state. I asked him, Is its natural state short? He just said he had to go. I ran a bath; the hysteric came and I was persuaded to try and drown myself. But Amy Eleni phoned and I realised I wanted to answer the phone just a little bit more than I wanted to die.

Amy Eleni gets it. When I first tried to describe the hysteric to her, she snorted and said, ‘You can’t speak for all of us. My personal hysteric walks three paces behind me at all times, and when it’s all a bit much, I kind of hang back and she kind of hurries forward, and she jumps on my back and takes me down. Then she stands up in my place.’

I said I didn’t like that idea. I said it sounded like a denial of responsibility, a denial that Amy Eleni was underneath her hysteric.

‘I am underneath her,’ Amy Eleni said. ‘She has her fucking stilettos digging into my spine.’

When Amy Eleni isn’t doing well her thoughts ignore her and come out exactly the way they want to. One summer her mother went to Cyprus without her. Even though Amy Eleni wanted to go, so much. But Despina was punishing her because of a bad school report. We were in her bedroom at her parents’ house, and she was sitting on the broad window ledge with her curls squashed against the glass, her hands clawing the window as if she was trying to hold her house upright. She said insistently, through gritted teeth, ‘Do you aid me with my pulse which is gone away.’ She said it a few times before I heard the words. I can’t remember her expression; instead I think of redness. But if she had punched the window she would only have hurt herself.

When we were fourteen Amy Eleni decided that she and I should be friends. Before that, she wouldn’t talk to anyone she didn’t want to talk to. She was a bit dangerous. She ate lunch by herself — as if lunchtime for the packed-lunch students wasn’t all about setting up a circle of chairs in the school hall for your group, as if lunchtime wasn’t all about showing that you had a group. She placed her chair near the centre of the hall so that she faced outwards, looking toward the door, and she sat cross-legged on it, eating interesting-looking food that didn’t match her precise, English features; flat pita sandwiches filled with grilled chicken, cold stuffed vine leaves, squares of honeyed pastry, pomegranates. She ate daintily and with a calm that said she couldn’t be bothered with the likes of us.