Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

I made it into the library by the skin of my teeth and locked the door behind me. I wrote, am writing, this letter to you, my Montserrat. The servants have given up their rough music and have gone to bed. You will be born soon, maybe later today, maybe tomorrow. I feel you close. I know where I will have to leave you. As for this letter, I will give it to the roses, and then I must get out of here for a while. How long? Until I am sure of what happened, or at least the true order of it all. Did I somehow give him more time than he would have had on his own? The entire time I have been writing this letter I have felt Isidoro’s eyes on me. He seems to be telling me that we could still have been married, that if I’d only brought the priest and not Fausta we could still have been married. Of course he cannot really be telling me anything: I have seen him as a dead man. Why am I not afraid?

Montse found that she’d walked the length of the library as she read her mother’s letter. Now she stood at the door to Isidoro’s garden, which opened with the same key. Outside, someone in the shadows took a couple of startled steps backward. Señora Lucy.

“I saw all this light coming out from under that door,” Lucy said. “That was new.” She peered over Montse’s shoulder. “Swap you a rose for a book,” she said.

/

To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely

To you who sleep a lot because you are bored

To you who cry a lot because you are sad

I write this down.

Chew on your feelings that are cornered

Like you would chew on rice.

Anyway life is something that you need to digest.

— CHUN YANG HEE

Be good to Boudicca and Boudicca will be good to you,” Chedorlaomer said. Boudicca and I eyed each other through the blue-tinted glass of Ched’s fish tank, and I said: “Tell me what she is again?”

To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill. But Ched’s got this certificate that states Boudicca’s species is Betta splendens , colloquially known as Siamese fighting fish because fish of this kind have a way of instigating all-out brawls with their tank mates. It’s almost admirable. Boudicca doesn’t care how big or pretty her fellow fish are; if they come to her manor she will obliterate them, whether that means waiting until the other fish is asleep before she launches her attack or, in the case of a fish that simply refused to engage with her, eating the eggs that the other fish had spawned and then dancing around in the water while the bereaved mother was slain by grief.

So now Boudicca lives alone, which is exactly what she wanted all along.

I get this vibe that Ched the eternal bachelor sees Boudicca as a fish version of himself, but he’s never said that out loud, at least not to me. We don’t have those kinds of talks. Even if Ched and Boudicca are on some level the same person, the fact remains that the man is able to feed himself and the fish needs someone to see to her nutrition a couple of times a week.

Ched called me over to tell me he was going away for two years and he expected me to take care of Boudicca. Twice a week for two years! Plus Ched’s house is spooky. The House of Locks, it’s called. That’s the actual address: House of Locks, Ipswich, Suffolk. He travels a lot and I have his spare set of keys for use while on best friend duty, watering his house plants when he used to have house plants, collecting post, etc., but when I’m in there I don’t linger. Nothing has actually happened to me in there. Not yet, anyway. But every time I go into that bloody house there’s the risk of coming out crazy. Because of the doors. They don’t stay closed unless they’re locked. Once you’ve done that you hear sounds behind them; sounds that convince you you’ve locked someone in. But when you leave these doors unlocked they swing halfway out of the doorframe so that you can’t see all the way into the next room and it’s just as if somebody’s standing behind the door and holding it like that on purpose. The windows behave similarly — they won’t fully open unless you push them up slowly, with more firm intent than actual pressure. Only Ched really has the knack of it. Apparently the house’s first owner took a particular pleasure in fastening and releasing locks — the feel and the sound of the key turning until it finds the point at which the lock must yield. So for her the house was a lifetime’s worth of erotic titillation.