The Opposite House (15 page)

The sitting room is lined with lanterns and glass-bubble lamps that radiate purple ultraviolet light. They are gifts
from Aaron’s mother, who is certain that we’ll get depressed because we don’t have access to sunlight. She keeps telling us that we should swap with Miss Lassiter. Aaron doesn’t say anything when she starts on this topic, and his silence is his papal stamp, his way of saying no-not-ever. He doesn’t believe that Miss Lassiter would survive a lack of light.

I join Aaron on the sofa again; the tape stalls again. Aaron, his head lolling against the back of the sofa, tuts drowsily with his eyes hooded, and I lay my head on his chest and let the video whir and click.

I ask him why he won’t just go to sleep – he says he doesn’t know.

I know that I am going to tell him. I rehearse phrases in my head. I must not say ‘my son’, I must say ‘the baby’. When I say it he takes my face in his hands, drapes me in a believer’s smile. He doesn’t look at me the way Amy Eleni looked at me. His questions, his voice – so happy.

A tape recording of the St Peter Oratorio with Aaron’s name listed on the box revealed that he sang tenor at his stiff-collared Schola Cantorum in Accra. After he found himself settled in London, but before he became a junior house officer and had to decide between hymns and extra sleep, he joined the choir of St Meredith’s, a small church with bobbled grey gables.

I couldn’t get my head around Aaron’s ability to sing because I never heard him sing alone – if, burrowed into the beanbag on the floor of his room, I started singing, he’d chime in. But when I slyly dropped out of the melody, he stopped dead and grinned, made false beginnings of notes to make me sing first. So in my final two terms at university,
I made a regular point of going to his Saturday rehearsals. It was a big choir for a small space. Aaron was dwarfed week after week by two broad-shouldered bass singers in knitted jumpers. He looked childishly healthy; dark hair, pale skin, a warm flush over his cheekbones. And he maintained the pursed-lip style of singing of much younger choirboys – eyes wide, troubled by God, the Latin lyric, or both.

One Saturday, in a week when November died amidst wet weather and frosted leaves, I arrived ten minutes into the rehearsal. I was tracking mud into the church, trying to be as quiet as I could considering I had my arms wrapped around a forty-by-forty-inch piece of sandalwood that scraped the floor. Having accepted that, despite Amy Eleni’s best efforts, I was almost certainly going to fail my degree, I’d decided to go out with belligerence and submit both my dissertations on wood, in tiny biro letters – the first dissertation on one side of the block and the second on the other.

My arms had shaken as I bought the wood; they juddered all the way to the church, and I believed that I would be trembling until I handed the thing in. Part of me thought I could still save my degree if I behaved myself and played to the system. One of my teachers at Sacré Coeur, upon being asked whether he thought exam passes could be obtained through diligent prayer, had looked as if he was thinking very hard and then said, ‘Yes.’

I half-sat, half-fell into a pew. The choir and their director, a sister in a blue and cream habit, ignored me. Aaron’s voice soared, naked, clear, but unsure of its strength:

Veni, veni Emmanuel
,

Captivum solve Israel!

The others rose a beat later and clustered his tinsel call, and I felt December coming with footsteps that shook the pavements, and all Decembers before, and the way that, at Midnight Mass, Christmas sometimes seems so sad to me, a giant bedecked with crosses and stars and berries and robins frozen to death.

Qui gemit in exilio
,

Privatus Dei Filio
.

Gaude, gaude! Emmanuel

Nascetur pro te, Israel
.

When the rehearsal had finished, Aaron came over, slightly shamefaced, and I hugged him until he wheezed because he was more beautiful to me for having raised his voice alone.

‘I know why you don’t like to sing in front of me,’ I said in his ear. He put his arms around my shoulders and drove me out into the street before him.

‘Because I’m not very good?’ he hazarded, as if the reason I was trying to guess was not his own.

‘Nope.’

‘You tell me then.’

‘Because you look and sound exactly as if you really mean it, as if you believe in every word.’

Aaron said politely, ‘Is that right?’ and burped, and I screamed ‘disgusting’ and stamped in a puddle to splash his windbreaker. We stood at the bus stop, looking out into brown slush and crawling traffic, and, because he knew that I was still shaking with cold, he opened up his wind-breaker and drew me in against his chest and buttoned us both up into it. There was room for him, me and my
sandalwood under that monster of a coat, and there was his heart. It was kicking in his chest, so strong and steady I felt it pushing me. By the time he said, ‘Stop it,’ I had been lulled into such confusion that I thought he was talking about his heartbeat. That wasn’t it; he wanted me to stop standing on his feet. That was why I had been feeling so tall.

8
peaces

To escape Proserpine, Aya slips through the Lagos door of the somewherehouse and hurtles through faded green rooms, past speckled electrical fans that wheeze dust; she bangs the mosquito-netted screen door of the Lagos house open as she bursts out. It must be a Sunday; she shoulders her way through throngs of church-dressed women hastily swapping ornate hats for headwraps to balance trays packed with fried and baked wares. They head for the motorways, to swarm at the sandy sides. Lithe, chirpy boys with baskets of bread and popcorn flock around cars stopped by other cars, tin beads in a necklace of traffic.

Between the gates of a decrepit compound, a man in white rests his arm on the rim of a well. He looks the sun askance. Aya stops by him and drinks some water. The empty main house collapses into its own baked torpor and ignores her. The man nods at her. He is her watchmaker from Habana. Aya wants to embrace her watchmaker and make him tell about the seeds he gave her so long ago, the ones that wouldn’t grow. She speaks first, in Yoruba: ‘Peace, Baba. Is all well?’ His wheeze is as jagged-soft as shaved coconut: ‘You find me in peace; my ancestors have not forgotten me.’

Aya is suddenly unsure of him.

‘Do you make clocks?’ she whispers.

Aya’s watchmaker takes her palm and hides it between his own for a moment. When he takes his hands from hers, there is a thick glass bottle on her palm, ‘Drink Me’ size from Wonderland when Alice was too big.

‘That is different water,’ he tells her. ‘If you have seeds that told you “No” before, they will agree to this.’

She nods, looks back as she walks away.

He has forgotten her already. He squints at the sun now, and raises hands dripping with well water to his mouth. Aya juggles the watchmakers’ seeds in her palm, juggles them all the way back to the somewherehouse, where she paces, watched by Proserpine.

Aya thinks.

Proserpine is still; her delicate elbows rest on her knees.

Aya hesitates at the somewherehouse’s side door and looks out at the trees, their tangled mass of leaves and fruit. She decides that the grass outside has plenty. She turns and runs tracks around bewildered Proserpine, sowing seeds that skip and bump across the somewherehouse’s floorboards. She chases the seeds with long shots of water that smells of fusty spice.

All the way to Papi and Chabella’s I watch my shadow, try to step on it, feed it into every hungry, unlucky crack in the pavement. Nobody looks at me strangely. In Mami and Papi’s part of Peckham, jerk chicken, Obalende
suya
and shops stocking Supermalt and Maggi sauce are seconds away. Neighbours mind their own business, get their shopping done and fix their eyes on something safe until they’re indoors and can bolt up against the evenings, against the rowdies and the graffitists that sit on low walls and smoke and call out smart comments.

When I still lived at home, Chabella – both alarmed and pleased that those boys never seemed to bother me – made me escort Tomás around the area as often as I could. Once she asked me, ‘Why don’t they pick on you? Which one is your boyfriend?’ She didn’t believe me when I told her that it simply seemed to be a matter of smiling a lot and making sure not to ignore them whenever they asked me something.

At home, Mami sits at Papi’s feet, dictaphone in hand, setting German listening exercises in a high voice while Papi watches a programme about the Pharaohs with the sound turned off. The reel of flame-haloed faces in the altar looks away from them and flickers at the ceiling.

Mami asks if I’m singing tonight; I am, and she is excited for me. But Papi, though he hears what we are talking about, says nothing, which is what he usually does when he is asked a challenging question that he needs time to think about. At dinner a month ago, Aaron asked Papi whether he missed Cuba, and Papi remained silent until Chabella turned it into a discussion of Che Cola versus Coca-Cola. Che Cola lost miserably – Papi summed it up as ‘tasting like shit. And not even shit that’s good for you.’

But days later, Papi phoned and asked to speak to Aaron; he answered the question belatedly, the way people who think too much will. He told him, ‘No, I don’t miss Cuba. I’m not sure that I knew what it was when I lived there. I know now from the outside.’

Aaron was holding the phone between us, and he and I shook our heads at each other because that didn’t sound honest to either of us. Aaron said to Papi, ‘I don’t get it.’

Papi said, ‘Of course you get it. A white man in Ghana? The entire time you lived there, you had one foot outside its borders.’

Aaron said firmly, ‘I really think you are wrong to say that, Juan. I am Ghanaian. I was born there.’

I wish that Papi could give me his response to my singing, something that I can say ‘No, you are wrong to say that’ to. I wish he would give me something other than a gently bemused teasing: ‘Why do you like to sing so much? It is too much. Even your Aunt Lucia, she was just crazy for singing, but she calmed down and became an engineer.’

I go upstairs and tiptoe into Papi and Chabella’s bedroom. Chabella’s vanities are all to do with her heart. On top of her dresser, photos of me and Tomás and Papi and Aaron and her cousins and her favourite pupils and all the living that she prays for; all these photos jostle with small, mysterious tasks that she has begun and neglected to finish – a plastic half-bottle of holy water from Lourdes stands beside a full crystal bottle of rose water; both stand on top of a rectangle of ruched silk with a threaded needle dangling from one corner. Handfuls of seeds are strewn amongst wooden beads. Scraps of rice paper, maybe the beginnings of paper chains, are stuck to the side of the desk.

In Mami’s top drawer are her photo albums, and I open one at random, my fingers blunt on the stiff pages, finding her again and again. In all of the pictures, Papi looks at Mami with tender concern, as if he has forgotten that it’s his wedding too.

I find Chabella not just in her tense, happy bride’s face

(she told me that for the entire day she was so happy that she thought she must faint, or die – nothing happened except that her heart grew fuller)

but in the people she left behind her; the way they smile from beneath the impression of her thumb pressed painfully over their faces.

On the phone, Amy Eleni says, ‘You know what I read about rats? I read that if they lived uninterrupted lives, they never stop growing. Imagine! You could get a rat as big as a dustbin. As big as a house.’

(
So what
, I think. I am painting my nails and thinking of boys’ names.)

‘I mean, what if foetuses were like rats? Say a foetus stays in the womb longer than nine months, what if it went on a growth bender? What if a baby got as big as its mother?’

‘Amy Eleni,’ I say, ‘shut up.’

Why is she saying this? She knows about the hysteric, how she beats me by making things seem funny when they’re not, by finding pain in speculation. But she can’t know how it gets when I think about my son, so when she says, ‘What?’ I just ask her if she still has my purple nail varnish.

Amy Eleni says Despina is not anorexic. She doesn’t say it defiantly; she just says it, because she is sure. According to
Amy Eleni, her mother ‘doesn’t give a shit about her weight’. Emily Brontë probably didn’t care that much about her weight either, but she died hungry, with food in the house. I can’t forget Despina’s mint-tea cupboard from the times I went over to Amy Eleni’s house to drink mint tea with all the lovely sugar that Chabella wouldn’t let me have.

The first time, Amy Eleni opened a kitchen cupboard and said, ‘This is the mint-tea cupboard.’ She said it formally, as if the cupboard was a person she was introducing me to. Inside sat one tiny, thick-spouted silver teapot. Behind the teapot was an organic wall of sugar, forty to fifty kilo bags of it, all packed so tightly together that it looked as if a giant fist had punched them into the back wall; the packets had lost their edges and ran into each other.

(I thought, maybe Despina likes her mint tea sweet, maybe she’s a hoarder, maybe she’s an anorexic.)

Amy Eleni looked at me and said, ‘I think it’s more of an aesthetic thing than anything else.’ We were sixteen. Aesthetic was Amy Eleni’s favourite word that week.

I recognised the sugar wall, its jigsawed threat. I know that in this world something really is trying to stop me from having a large milkshake with my large fries. This suspicion emerges like a spasm in my jaw whenever what’s crammed in there tastes too well. I used to think that the only reason Chabella could weep copiously and at the same time eat slabs of steak in stewed tomato sauce was that she was not complex. Cubans are cheerful, Cubans are resilient, Cubans are collectivist. In my mother’s country, I thought,
la lucha
is such that people are not equipped to understand when they are unhappy. It’s a situation-specific kindness from God – Cubans are born lacking; they have no internal ‘off’ switch, and so it is that they go on and on and on.