The murmur around us peaks and dips, and I look up to see an old black man, grey haired with a long face sectioned up by an anxious smile, arms bearing a blizzard of white roses. He is inching up to us, and he is Papi, and his eyes are on Chabella.
‘OK, good night London baby, my little dwarf. Sleep well,’ Chabella tells Tomás weakly, and pushes a number of wrong buttons before ending the call, smiling at Papi, drawing him on.
I look around at everyone else, and everyone is looking at us. I am happy and embarrassed and stressed and I want to get up and help Papi, take his arm, but I know that he would hate that. So I wait in agony until he is directly before Mami and bends to kiss her cheek and say he’s sorry, and then Amy Eleni stomps the ground and whoops and starts the clapping. Out of the corner of her mouth, she says to me, ‘What’s going on?’
I tell her it’s an anniversary, or a long story — I tell her that she should take her pick.
* * *
When we leave the café, Amy Eleni comes to wait for my bus with me. She looks at me for a long time, her eyes a deep green, dryadic despite the cold.
‘I’m not mad, I’m not mad,’ she tries, a smile touching her lips. ‘I don’t want to die.’
I should do what? I should smile, or I should respond.
There’s someone inside of me, and she says I must die.
But something is happening here, something that doesn’t fall into good, OK, or bad. The hysteric isn’t appealing to me; there is no need to beat her. I keep thinking, maybe if I could just know what my son looks like, who my son is, then I will be all right. I have strangeness in my family, a woman who was a priest when she wasn’t supposed to be. I have delicacy in my family. I think. I don’t know, am I delicate? I know by now that I am not going to be one of those pregnant women who touches her stomach in public; even when I am heavily pregnant I will keep my hands by my sides and keep a circumspect eye on the situation.
I tell Amy Eleni I am pregnant. I just say it. She winces, and I need to know why she did that, but immediately afterwards she says, ‘Maja, that’s wonderful. Aaron must be. . Maja, that’s. .’
We hug; her hands dig into my shoulder blades as our heads bump. ‘He doesn’t know,’ I say into her ear.
Amy Eleni’s frown is full of needles; to donate eggs you are screened for
HIV
cystic fibrosis
hepatitis B
hepatitis C
cytomegalovirus
and they do a chromosomal analysis too.
All this I saw underlined in her leaflets; Dr Maxwell screened me for them when I saw her. Amy Eleni’s frown is full of test results printed on thin crackly paper with hole-punched edges. It’s bloated with daily hormone injections, her frown. It goes on forever.
‘What, is it not his kid or something?’
That’s not really a question, so I just stare at her.
‘Then tell him. Duh,’ she says.
As I let myself back into the flat Aaron shouts, ‘My mum called; she wants to have lunch with you on Saturday. .’
I scowl at the ceiling. Aaron’s mother, Rebecca, keeps saying things like, ‘Where are the go-getters? Where are the people who are going to make a difference?’
She doesn’t sound accusing, just encouraging; she wants me to look around, then look into myself and see that the go-getter is me. Under a thatch of grey-black hair, Rebecca has Aaron’s misty eyes, and she uses them to far more oppressive effect than he does. Over lunch we will not have a conversation; she will be attempting to enlist me for some cause.
In the bedroom, Aaron is kneeling by the dresser with his camcorder trained on his head. He is parting his hair with his fingers. I pull my dress up over my head, change into one of his T-shirts, hang the dress up. I refuse to ask him what he’s doing. He’s bare-chested and his jeans are slung low to reveal the top of his boxer shorts. He says sadly, ‘I’m getting old.’
I go to him then, wrap my arms around him, tuck my chin over his shoulder so that I’m peeping up into the camera as well, but he wants me to inspect his hair. Mixed in with the black are minute strands of grey. I am not certain that I know what form the fear of turning into an old man takes. In my memory Papi seems always to have been grey, but always strong, never winding down his inner speed. I don’t think anything of Aaron’s hair, but because I have to say something I tell him I think it looks distinguished, and he groans. ‘It’s the hospital.’
Aaron switches off the camcorder. He stands to show me a bowl he’s placed on a damp patch of carpet beside the mirror. Fat, sluggish drops of water fall from a discoloured part of the ceiling.
‘There’s a leak as well, and I can’t sleep, but I’ve got to get up fucking early tomorrow, and I’m getting old.’
‘And thin. Eat!’ I say, crashing onto the bed and bringing him, laughing, down with me. His ribcage is gaining definition beneath his skin, but a small pad of fat, a downscale of a kwashiorkor belly, is sticking out over the top of his waistband. His arms tighten around me, and I close my eyes and pretend to draw his face anew; I draw what is already there, and it is exactly as I would have it.
‘You smell good,’ he says in my ear. His fingers lightly trace letters on my inner arm with his thumb. I can’t tell what they spell; I’m not following their curves and lines, but the way his voice starts a sweet hum at the base of me.
I keep waking up and thinking that it is raining. I keep waking up with my fingers spread to protect my hair, but every time it is only the leak in the ceiling, dripping in a pattern intrinsic to itself, a self-orchestrated, maddening musical score for after dark. Aaron isn’t sleeping; it’s like he’s waiting to be able to drag me into his vortex. The first time I wake Aaron says, ‘When we were still living in Accra, Geoffrey’s mum told us what happened to a cousin who was living in London. I was. . I couldn’t even connect what she was telling me with what was around me right then, the way people were relaxed and warm and sat out in the street and minded each other’s business. Geoffrey’s mum kept telling us, “Londoners! They are mad, o!”
‘Her cousin Ama moved into this flat in Croydon, and everything was fine for a week or so; she got on well enough with the neighbours, settled in, made a few personal touches with the decoration — it was all fine. Then this leak started, ruining her carpets, making a cold winter wet and worse, and it went on and on and on for weeks. She talked to the council about it but the council wouldn’t come and take a look because the council are shit. She asked all her neighbours about the leak, but nobody knew what was happening —’
He stops. Why has he stopped? Checking me. He is such a neurotic storyteller; he never trusts that I am still listening. I think he works on a model of the first stories he learnt to love; Ghanaian call and response stories, tales as an eager echo thrown back and forth amongst the same people. ‘Yeah?’ I prompt him, muffled by my pillow. I am so tired I am drooling.
‘Well, then Ama noticed something. She noticed that the leaks had an extremely regular starting and stopping time. On Monday mornings, for example, the leak would dry up completely, but on Tuesday afternoons, the leak would get going at 3 p.m. or thereabouts.’
I giggle. ‘Say it again,’ I say. I love it when he says ‘thereabouts’ — he can’t avoid saying it with the grandiloquence a semi-Ghanaian accent bestows on mashed-together English vowels. Aaron refuses to indulge me.