Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

The woman insisted on being called mother.

(Which the boy called her, but with a secret hiss that came from a place inside him that he did not understand — inside his head, her name became motherhhhhhhh, smothered myrrh.)

She was an art collector, but she only collected art that was body pieces, one considered piece at a time, painstaking finds because she was looking for a collection that, when put together in a room, would create the suggestion of a woman, a woman who crammed the room from wall to wall. The boy took telephone calls and messages left for his new mother by her contacts all over the world. He travelled Egypt with her and observed cemetery graffiti as she did, so closely that she almost inhaled it — in hundreds of perfumeries they watched glass blowers torture air between their hands, force it to become solid.

Always, as they travelled, she pointed and asked him, “Do you like that? What do you see there?”

He told her the truth, and she always listened to him. She said that he chose well.

But when they got home, the boy did not ever feel anything in the presence of these well-turned ankles and smooth calves, these arms and shoulders captured in shade and the moment of motion. They were a collection, not a woman.

Then the boy and his mother got a face for their collection. The face was a photograph. The photograph was of a girl who had died with her family one night when her neighbours smashed the door down and took an axe to all those living inside that house. The neighbours did this because a radio broadcast told them to. The radio broadcast advised them not to wait for the evil that lived next door to grow and get the better of them. And so it was done. But after killing the family, the neighbours had not touched anything else in the girl’s house, which is how the boy and his new mother, picking over this room at the end of a series of devastated rooms, found the girl’s picture. At first the boy thought that it would be wrong to take the picture. But it was a picture unlike any other. It had been taken in the backyard of the house, at some point between the sun’s disappearance and the illumination of the moon. The girl’s smile did not seem to correspond to the presence of the camera, or even to a joke told off-camera. Her smile was unnerving because it had no reason. They took the picture home, even though the boy’s new mother complained that it wasn’t art. Then the boy’s new mother asked him what he thought of their almost complete collection, waved her arms at all the fineness and said, “You want someone. Is she here?”

He said, “No.”

“We need a heart,” the boy’s new mother said, and when she looked at him, in that moment, she seemed to him so high. It seemed that her feet connected to the ground only tenuously and it was her shadow that bore her up. The boy thought in that moment that this woman must be beautiful — no, of course she was: fine eyes, wide-curved lips, and cheekbones like slanted hooks. But at the same time he thought that his new mother must be a spider.

What nobody knew about the docile girl from Osogbo was that her heart was too heavy, and that almost from birth she had felt its weight, a gravitational pull that invited her to her grave. Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own. People soon learnt that they could play on her sympathy, and, because she was terrified that one day this unasked-for conscience of hers might kill her, she gave away whatever money she earned, gave away bread and went without. The girl tried, several times, to give her love away, but her love would not stay with the person she gave it to and snuck back to her heart without a sound. What people didn’t know about this girl was that the ancestral dead kept her company — they came to find her at bathtime and sat four at a time in the bathwater with her, cooing wistfully and using their wasted, insubstantial hands to wash her hair. The girl urged them to take care of their own children, but they refused. Her head lolled at these times, and she was overcome with gratitude. At bedtime the dead took her with them, and in her dreams, she visited their graves.

At first, in rebellion against her heaviness, the girl thought that she needed to be thinner, and she took to reading imported women’s magazines on credit from a bookstall owner. The magazines talked about calories and saving calories and keeping some back so that you could have a glass of wine. One day at the dinner table, the girl asked her mother for an estimate of how many calories there were in the fried stew that bubbled at the bottom of her bowl beneath a layer of eba. There is no Yoruba word for calories, and so her mother just looked at her and said musingly, smilingly, in English, “Calories,” as if she was trying to understand a punch line hidden between the syllables. Then the girl didn’t ask anymore and just sat looking at the food, which was bottomless and made to sink hunger.

The girl decided that she had to hide her heart somewhere until she was big enough to keep hold of its weight. One night the dead helped her, some stroking her hair and soothing her while others hooked their fingers into her and carefully lifted a strand of steam from her chest. The girl took her heart, and that cool night she was frightened even though she walked amidst a crowd of other people’s ancestors. The shrine was a rectangle of stone arches that spoke of other kinds of love — strange, ugly, smoke-and-choking sort of love, carvings of cruel hands that killed candle flames to break refusal in the dark, women thrusting out hard breasts and genitals. Also in the carvings was the kind of love that wakes you up from nightmares. And also there was a sundial of wise children’s faces. The shrine was the kind of place where a Valentine’s heart would have trembled and wilted. With her fingers the girl scratched a place for herself in the north wall and slipped her heart through into the dry moss behind the stone.

And she walked away, and she walked away, and that was that, and that was that.

Because he had been told to, the boy looked for hearts. He examined unusual playing cards and alabaster chess pieces and went to London with his new mother to examine posters plastered onto the walls of public transport stations. On the boy’s twenty-first birthday, his new mother took him to the west coast of his continent to view a shrine, a shrine where, one of their contacts had told her, you could hear and feel a heart beating when it grew dark. They stood, amidst a small crowd of other curious people, and waited for sunset, which came with a slow earthquake that sent the ground slipping away, until they realised that the sensation was the legendary heartbeat. The boy, now a man, stood a little apart from his new mother, who listened intently, and the heartbeat said things to them both, things that made the boy smile with all of his soul in his face, things that made the new mother suck in her cheeks and look suddenly pinched and old. They stayed long after everyone had gone, and fell asleep at dawn with their heads laid on rocks converted to pillows with thick shawls.

When the next morning came around, the asking in the man’s eyes was so powerful that no one could look at him without offering, offering, offering.

The girl was lighter without her heart. She danced barefoot on the hot roads, and her feet were not cut by the stones or glass that studded her way. She spoke to the dead whenever they visited her. She tried to be kind, but they realised that they no longer had anything in common with her, and she realised it, too. So they went their separate ways. Other people became closed to the girl, and she enjoyed it this way — at the marketplace she handed over her bread and exacted the correct payment for it with a slight pressure of the hand and an uncaring smile. When the girl moved amongst people, she felt as if she were walking in a public place at an hour of the night when it was too dark to come out, or at noon, when it was too hot to be outside, and all the doors around were closed and barred. The girl felt this solitude to be an adventure. She moved away from her parents and went to live by herself on the ground floor of a tenement, even though this was frowned upon. When she was not working or wandering, she listened to the white noise inside her head, or she sat on her bare floor and listened to people arguing, romancing, accusing, the people all around her, she let their words fall into her body like coins into a bottomless well. Sometimes she thought about her heart, and wondered how it was doing without her. But the girl was never curious enough to go and find out.