‘So Ama had a proper look at her ceiling, and she found that the leak was coming from a perfectly round, perfectly drilled hole, quite a large hole, like the biggest setting on a Black and Decker.’
I stop laughing. ‘Oh my God,’ I say. ‘Is this a true story?’
‘It was the guy who lived directly above her, the same guy who passed on letters which had been mistakenly delivered to him, the same guy who’d smiled at her and shaken his head in confusion when she mentioned her problems with the leak. He’d drilled a hole in his floor, then sat himself down and drawn up a little timetable. Then, in consultation with that timetable, he would pour a couple of jugfuls of water down the hole. Either Ama had offended him in some obscure way, or this guy was mad, or both.
‘Geoffrey’s mum told us “If you take a hen’s egg from under her and she just looks at you and doesn’t do anything, put that egg back.” Peace and quiet is a sign that something’s wrong. Peace and quiet is like a broken response, a sign of people in pieces.’
I look at the dark, I look at the ceiling and at the bowl, the bowl that is filling, that is nearly full. I think of Miss Lassiter, shrouded face bent intently over a bare patch on her floor. I switch on my bedside lamp and hit Aaron, almost crying.
‘Why did you tell me that? What’s wrong with you? Why did you tell me that?’
Aaron laughs and restrains me with embarrassing ease; he turns off my lamp and holds me until I fall asleep again.
The second time I wake, I hear the television and the leak together. I get out of bed to empty the bowl and find that it’s already been emptied. Aaron is lolling on the sitting-room sofa, remote control in hand, eating cold plantain. He’s watching an old video; in it I am moving in with him and am instantly unnerved by the camera. On-screen I look as if I just left school; my hair is in box-braids that flip over into fuzzy buds at their ends, and I’m wearing dungarees and a red jumper. I’m hauling a suitcase behind me on wheels. When I see him I squeak, ‘Please turn that off,’ and from behind the camera he laughs.
‘You should go to sleep,’ I tell Aaron from where I stand. He doesn’t look round but keeps watching me on-screen as I go into the bathroom, followed at a shaky angle, and triumphantly slam my toothbrush into the cup on the rim of the sink that held only his.
I go and find Chabella’s fruit bucket beneath the kitchen table and pick out a papaya, turning it over in my hand, checking for ripeness, feeling the slight slippage of fruit beneath its skin and knowing that it’s time to eat it. The smell topples me in. Rind, fruit and seed mesh on my tongue, become as dense and sweet as cake. I’m not the one who wants the papaya, but I need all of it. I fall into a chair.
Aaron leans on my shoulder and reaches for the rest of the papaya in my hand, but I say, ‘Don’t.’
Pulp spills down my chin. I’m not angry, but serious, and he feels it. He backs away, exaggeratedly slow, his hands up to show he’s not going to take the fruit. He takes another papaya from the bucket and methodically prepares it with a knife, evacuating whole clusters of seeds with a single flick.
I let seeds slide down the inside of my cheeks to wait, pooled in sticky juice, under my tongue. I know that he does that too. We look at each other and smile, lips wet, faces bulging. ‘Come on, spit,’ he gurgles. ‘You can’t win this.’ He needs to sleep. He needs to sleep. It comes to me the power that I have, that I can do something to Aaron that goes beyond us. I could make myself take a bad fall; I could drink something noxious. I could go to a clinic and have ‘it’ taken away. Even if I never tell him, I would have proved that I can deny him, that I can make my son wait. Panicked, I choke. Panicked, I spit. Aaron spits too, and shouts, ‘Yes! I won!’ We laugh.
In the somewherehouse, amidst the faded cloth of their rooms, the smallest Kayode plays the fierce-eyed one at chess.
‘Here she is again,’ the fierce-eyed Kayode mutters to the small one when he sees Aya.
The chessboard is missing knights, so the Kayodes are attacking each other’s squares with their thumbs. It makes for a game complicated both to play and follow.
Next door the woman Kayode rocks with her sleeping eyes open, darting, scanning. She lets her hand fill pages with lines. Her knuckles crack. On top of the pile of that dreamings’ sketches, Aya sees her Mama’s thickly lashed black eyes. Mama is behind the grille of a confessional. The black lattice is garlanded with blank, long-stemmed lilies. The beginnings of a shadow scrape the pale diamond spaces behind her.
Aya tries to shake the Kayode woman awake. But the other two Kayodes come and hold Aya’s hands away from their kin. They mutter fearfully.
‘A visit,’ they chant at their sleeping woman, ‘a visit, see? What is to be done?’
Aya is marched out of the Kayodes’ rooms and deposited on the stairs to greet the visitor. She watches a woman wearing her Mama’s favourite green bubi step out of the basement.
She is not Mama.
Her dark eyes are like gracefully tinted glass, but her eyelashes aren’t long enough to trail into her hair when she lies down.
This woman gives off an electrical shhhhhh. Without saying she says, You may not touch me.
She is not Mama. Aya has never seen her before.
‘Yeye my own,’ the woman says, smiling a secret smile. Her voice is Mama’s. She does not spread her arms.
‘Go away,’ Aya says. ‘You were not sent for.’
Her eyes travel the gown that is Mama’s and the face that is not.
‘You don’t know your Mama? Strange day.’
The woman believes herself to be repeating the truth; her mouth is relaxed, her words gently brisk. She sets her foot on the step to come up. Angered, Aya shouts and marks her with a finger.
‘Proserpine, I see you!’
But Proserpine does not stop; Proserpine keeps on coming.
The Kayodes are behind Aya, all three, arms linked; if she wants, she could take one step back and be in their midst.
But, ‘Welcome, Ma,’ the Kayodes call to Proserpine, who has come in through the London door with almost no luggage, her fingers threaded through the handle of a shopping bag, a patina of expensive sunshine.
Mama Proserpine settles in a first-floor bedroom, a room that Aya has never chosen to sleep in because it sticks out of the house’s side. The male Kayodes move around her, careful not to spoil Proserpine’s new clothes. They fold and pat lightweight flared skirts and crisp shirts, slipping them into drawers with haste, as if some divided sylph that lives in them will waken, regroup and fly out of the window. From the window seat, Mama Proserpine gazes out into the alleyway of trees and submits to the woman Kayode’s hands, allows her hair to be pinned up into a ruffled stalk.
7 playing at paste (till qualified for pearl)
A while ago Aaron wanted us to swap books that we loved; he wanted to read with me, read me. I said, ‘I don’t read.’
He asked again, and on this asking he was so close to me that our eyelashes brushed each other; his lips struck mine but didn’t stay. I agreed to swap some books.
He gave me Saki short stories with a cracked spine, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, The Great Gatsby. I didn’t read the books; I didn’t need to. I could have told him that these were the books he would give me. Instead of reading them I smelt them, let them fall open at random pages to look for forehead — or fist-shaped pressure. I walked around wearing a pair of his jeans and put Gatsby in the back pocket the way the teenaged Aaron did — Volume I of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in one pocket, Gatsby in the other so that his backside was rectangular and intense and learned. In his jeans, which I had to hold up with braces over a T-shirt, my backside became a saggy jigsaw puzzle. I worried that people who walked behind me were staring at my behind and trying to make the pieces fit together. But I didn’t worry enough to stop my experiment. The books’ pages smelt of Aaron and another low, nutty smell that Aaron said was Accra.