Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

She listened for some sign, tried to find out where he was, but there was so much calling amongst the tombstones, croaking and chattering and echoes. I must move. I must move. After the first step the rest were easy, the way was sure, left, right, left right, and she fell down and cut her hands on stones because she heard him calling her. “Madame la Folle! Madame la Folle? A word in your ear, if you please. Just a moment of your time. .” She had lost her torch. A loud cracking sound nearby — him? Where was he? Everywhere. His voice was behind her, ahead of her, above, below. She rolled into a ball against the exposed roots of a tree for a moment. Then she raised herself up onto her knees and crawled, slowly, slowly, so slowly, cover me, leaves, cover me, earth, don’t let him find me.

Hands plunged through the leaves, seized her wrists and dragged her up. She screamed then. She screamed and screamed, first at the sky, which was whirling like water; then she was screaming into a hand clapped over her mouth. She looked into eyes too wide to be sane. He released her once she was quiet. A man with a shock of white hair and a face painted like a harlequin’s, dead white with black diamonds around his eyes. His features were very hard. Skeletal.

“Why won’t you just write the stories?” he said. “You’ve been asked nicely.”

Fear pressed her tongue against her gums.

“Fear not, Madame,” the man told her. “I am Reynardine. And I can get you whatever your heart desires.” He sat down upon a tombstone and patted the space beside him. What could she do? She joined him.

“The stories are for you?”

He shook his head. “One moment.” He cleared his throat and his gaze grew shadowy, as if something dark had spilt into him. When he next spoke, it was with an accent that was familiar to her but in a voice that was not. It was deep — more a vibration that came through the ground than a voice.

“Who is it?” she whispered.

“Can you see us?” And for a moment she saw and felt them all, crowding her. Faces she recognised from family photo albums, some she had never seen before, old ones leaning on walking sticks. They were all familiar. They all knew her, and she knew them. Then they relented and faded away.

“We’re here,” they said, through Reynardine’s lips.

“What do you want?”

“You are Yoruba.”

“Am I?”

“So you think your accent fools us. . ”

“But I can’t even speak Yoruba!”

“That doesn’t fool us, either.”

“All right,” she said. “I know. But look — I’m in Paris at the moment.”

“Don’t interrupt,” they said. “You might want to get away from us. You might feel that we crowd too close, that we want too much. But we like you. We think you’re spirited. And we’re trying to listen.”

“To what?”

“To what you won’t tell us. We want your stories.”

“I don’t have any. I don’t know what to write.”

“Tell the stories. Tell them to us. We want to know all the ways you’re still like us, and all the ways you’ve changed. Talk to us. We’re from a different place and time. . ”

“I’m not lying to you,” she said, shaking her head. “I really can’t do it.”

“You can and you must,” they snapped. “Those stories belong to us. It doesn’t matter what language they’re in, or what they’re about; they belong to us. And we gave them to you without looking at them first. So now it’s time to see what we’ve done.”

After a long moment, the harlequin returned to himself and began speaking reasonably. They weren’t asking for very much, were they? he asked. Just a few words on paper, anything she liked, anything that came to mind, nothing that anyone else need ever read. It didn’t even have to be good.

He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn’t mind.

“What’s your part in this?” Brown demanded.

“Favours are a useful currency,” said Reynardine.

“You’re working for them because favours are a useful currency?”

Reynardine yawned clownishly and rubbed his eyes. Black paint came away on his knuckles. “I work for myself,” he muttered. “I’m freelance.”

Brown looked down at her hands. She had never been good at anything. There had never been any work that she’d been able to make her own. She raised a hand to the moonlight, and the brass ring winked at her.

“I want what I lost,” she said.

“You should do this just because they asked you to. You came from these people. You owe them everything,” Reynardine pointed out.

Politely, she disagreed. She was vastly outnumbered, she knew that, but that didn’t mean she would budge. There’s a reason the Yoruba were famed as warriors.

Reynardine was amused.

“Do this and I’ll restore what you lost,” he said. Brown was suspicious. “How? Why?”

Reynardine stood and looked down at her. His gaze was very wild indeed; it seemed to have no focus. She came very close to flinching.

“How?” she asked again. “Why?”

Reynardine made some answer, but it was muffled because he was walking into the ground; the earth covered his head.

Brown worked for days. She didn’t know how many days — afterwards she would only ever be able to recall that time as a pause between two breaths she took. In between she ran through the twelve fountain pens. More appeared. She ran through blocks of paper, and more was provided. Occasionally she would feel a hand, a hand that was not her own, passing over her hair, as if blessing her. The words didn’t come easily. She put large spaces between some of them for fear they would attack one another.

She’d thought she didn’t have any stories, but in fact she had too many.

She put down things she didn’t know she knew. She wrote about a girl who babysat herself while both her parents worked and worked for not enough pay. The girl didn’t answer the door or the telephone because no one was meant to know she babysat herself, and besides, it might be the Home Office, and then they’d all be deported. So that she would not be scared, she pretended she was a spy and wrote secret spy notes on pink paper. She posted the spy notes out of the living-room window; she sent them spinning down onto the heads of passersby, who picked them up and didn’t understand them. They’d look up, but the girl had disappeared from the window — no one was supposed to know she was there.

Brown wrote about another girl who lived in a city that men were forbidden to enter. This girl knew nothing but the city and the stern stretch of coast that surrounded it, and she thought that men were just a funny story, and she didn’t expect that she was missing much.

She wrote about an Okitipupa village boy who was nobody’s boy, and earned money for himself by taking care of other children. She wrote about the afternoon nobody’s boy returned to the village in despair, having mislaid four of his ten charges and roped the remaining six boys to his waist with a long piece of scarlet rope and a great many strong knots. He had spent two hours looking for those four boys, and was just on his way to the first of the boys’ parents to confess what had happened when, in a moment like a nightmare, the missing boys jumped up from the shallow pits they’d been lying in, boy after boy shaking the earth with unearthly cries.

There was more, much more, and she put it all down, though she didn’t see what good it could do. She put it all down for the ones who had said, Tell us.

Here are your stories, then. Have them back.

Reynardine came then, and he smiled at her, and he took all her stories away.

What did Reynardine leave behind?

A man she knew.