Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

The morticians had done well with my father. He didn’t even look that stiff. There was a waxiness to him, but it was more like that of a new doll’s. It was almost eight years since I’d last been in the same room as him, and he looked even younger than I remembered. The sickness had made him small in his suit. I hadn’t expected to be able to see that he had suffered. Now he looked cordial; it felt impossible that he could have done anything terrible, could ever have felt or thought or planned. . If you didn’t know, you could believe that this man had never done anything at all but lie there, patiently waiting for whatever happened next. His cheeks so rosy I almost laid a hand on one, for warmth. I have my father’s nose. I have his ears. I touched my nose and ears. Soon they would be ashes.

Beside me, Jonas began to pray. I don’t know how I knew he was praying, since he didn’t speak and his lips didn’t even move. But he was praying. For a moment I tried to see this situation from Jonas’s perspective. But I couldn’t do it at all. I will never think the way you do, Jonas. You see, my father is a murderer, and yours is not.

Father, in my life I see

(Father in my life I see)

You are God who walks with me

(You are God who walks with me)

I looked back at my father, to see what he thought about Jonas praying. My father was amused, and I followed his lead.

I think I’m going to have to go—

I think I’m going to have to go.

“Go where?” S.J. asked. He was at the other end of the line. I phoned him, at home, at four a.m., and he answered.

“Where do you think you have to go?” S.J. asked again. Where indeed. .

My family was a mistake, I think. The three of us.

I’m the only one left.

I think I’m going to have to go.

“Will you come and get me?” I asked him. “Please.”

“Now?” We were talking about a seven-hour drive through the dawn, and through rush hour. If he started now, he’d be here at about noon. Anything could have happened by noon. They were going to cremate my father at nine a.m. It sounds amazingly stupid, but I was convinced I’d burst into flames with him. I’m bound to my father. How did this happen? I’ve been running from him.

“I’ll come,” S.J. said.

“No.” It scared me that he was so willing. I know I’d asked him to, but his “yes” was impossible to decipher — what was it supposed to mean?

“I want you here. For observation.”

“Haha. I’ll take the train,” I said.

“All right. I’ll take a couple of days off.”

“You can’t. People need you.”

“So do you,” he said. “Call me when you’re on the train.”

I nodded, and I very carefully wrote down the address he gave me.

When I sat down at my computer, checking e-mail before bed, I saw that I had opened twelve identical windows, and Daphne Fox smiled coyly at me out of each one.

I’m no good at train journeys. Half an hour of scenery (which I try to admire), half an hour of the sound of the train on its track, and I have seen and heard enough — my legs begin to jiggle frenetically entirely of their own accord. I began to fall asleep, but the empty seat beside me made me watchful. I didn’t want to fall asleep and wake up and find someone sitting there looking at me. Yelena, Daphne, anybody. The dead are capable of creeping up on you when you aren’t looking, just as capable as the living are.

I kept myself awake with phone calls — to my agent, to explain that I’d be away for a while.

“What? How long for, exactly?”

“I don’t know. My father died.”

“Oh. .” He didn’t say that he was sorry — honest man, my agent: “Take all the time you need, darling. Call me if you need anything.”

He got off the phone quickly. I called Jonas next, and told him where I was going, in case he was interested. Jonas was suspiciously enthusiastic.

“Sounds promising, Miel,” he said.

“Does it?”

He sighed.

“And it’s Mary, by the way,” I said. People shouldn’t think that they can call me Miel just because my father has gone, as if I’m a little girl who was hiding from an ogre. Now they’re all walking around calling out that I can come out now. Well, it’s too late.

It took almost as long to get to Brier Moss by train as it would have by car. Six and a half hours later I climbed out of a taxicab and walked up to a house that stood alone behind a large flat whorl of a garden, almost out of sight of the road. Grasshoppers ticked away in the bushes as I knocked on the front door. S.J. answered, in pyjamas, barefoot, and carrying a towel. Drops of water clung to his lips and ran down his chin, and as I followed him into the house he ducked his head beneath the towel and emerged with his hair standing on end. The hallway smelt strongly of polish and paint; its walls were a very strong and spotless white. No stand for coats and hats, no mat for wiping muddy feet, no carpet, even. The other downstairs rooms were unfurnished and painted the same white as the hallway, until we came to his study, which was walled with shelves that stopped only at the ceiling. There was a ladder attached to the shelves by a wooden claw, the sort of ladder I’d only seen in bookshops — on it you could move around all the books and climb, touch all of them, pluck the exact book you wanted out from amongst the rest yourself. They all looked medical — gynaecology, psychiatry, neurology.

He was watching me. “What do you think?”

I set my bag down by the door and walked around, looking.

“Cosy.”

There was only one chair, and that was behind the desk, which faced the French doors and the late afternoon. I could see how someone would want to live only in this room and abandon the others. But nobody actually does that. You have to at least have something to look at or sit on in the other rooms, even if only for form’s sake. I told myself I would wait a little while and then point that out to him. There was a plate on his desk with three squares of iced cake on it. Each cube had been firmly and largely bitten into just once, and then left. It seemed a strangely dainty thing to do.

“Wait here,” he said, and disappeared.

I looked out through the French doors and said to myself, ‘What. .’ It was such a bare garden. Nothing flowered. There was just green grass levelled low in every direction. It was the sheer effort of maintaining these conditions that amazed me. Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow. So much cutting and uprooting must be done to keep a place like this bare.

My phone rang in my pocket. It was S.J.

“Have you left the house?” My voice pitched higher than I’d have liked it to. But I hadn’t heard him leave. And I didn’t want to be alone in this house. He tutted.

“I’m on the roof,” he said. “Meet me up there.”

“How—”

“Go round to the side of the house — not the side where the cedar tree is, the other side. There’s a ladder. Climb up.”

I hung up and did as I was told, leaving my bronze pumps on the grass and stepping quickly into the sky — not quite running; there was dew on the soles of my feet, and the iron frame beneath me creaked a little too much for my liking. But I went up with ease, the walk was easy, and I didn’t look down once.

He was waiting for me at the top, as he had said. He took my hand and pulled me off the top step and onto the flat tiles. There were two chairs ready, with a single lantern set between them. The chairs faced north, looking out over rooftops and hills, and the roads dipped deep in them. The view made me dizzy; the same scene endlessly multiplied. It could have been a trick done with mirrors, vast ones. Dusk was only just falling, and I heard moths stun themselves against the lantern, the hard flicker of their wings as they sprang away again. S.J. poured whisky from a jug into shot glasses and toasted me. “Here’s to visions,” he said.