‘I got worried that some of those Americanos would come with cameras and take a picture. I was thinking, Get up, you. Just get up, get up. Blood was pouring from his mouth; every time he opened it his lips made this wet slapping noise and flies came near. I bent down to him, but I couldn’t do anything. I saw his tongue. Well, half his tongue. He had bitten his tongue in half; the end of it was in the dust, sort of coiled up like a wet tail. The heat made it smell. And he was just trying to speak, trying to speak to the sky I think, not to me, but his mouth was full of blood.’
Tomás doesn’t believe Papi about the babalawo. ‘You didn’t see his tongue, man. Not his tongue. Maybe you heard about that. He probably just drank chicken blood as part of a ritual or something.’
Papi is adamant: ‘It was his tongue. His daughter died and he bit it off. I ran away from him. You shouldn’t run away from grief, but my God, you must run from madness. That country. It seems that no one there is able.’
What if Papi has no strength either? What if he is wrong not to live in the place allocated to him and he is gusano? Then Tomás is the son of a gusano, and, after all, worms eat soil and dead bodies. If the boy can’t keep food down, maybe food is not meant for him. What can it mean, not to be in love with your country? That you belong above the earth, or under it.
One evening dinner was haphazard; moros y cristianos with yuccas rellenas and ladlefuls of stew poured over. Amy Eleni ate with us, and every bite brought her a surprise — one minute she tasted mashed rice and beans, the next mashed potato and beef, the next spicy tomato.
I teased Chabella about the Moors and Christians — ‘The beans are black, right, so that’s the Moors, and the rice is white, so those are the Christians. . ay, Mami, we can’t be Christians, we’re black!’ Amy Eleni backed me up; she said she reckoned that she was a Moor, and she wanted to know what Chabella was going to do about that. Mami whooped, ‘I didn’t name the dish!’
Papi didn’t say much. He ate and darted his attention from his own plate to Tomás’s face. And, maybe because of the pressure of Amy Eleni’s presence, Tomás gave a small cough, the beginnings of a full-blown heave. Mami still smiled, but she quieted down, became watchful. Amy Eleni knew something was wrong and she looked at Tomás, too, even though I fussed at her to distract her, poured her more water, poured her more juice. Tomás bowed his head and pressed his hands on his knees, arguing with his food, his cheeks distended. Papi twitched but kept on eating, even when Mami gave him a quick, deep, mournful glance.
When Tomás looked at him, Papi barked, ‘Téngalo en. Tragalo hacia abajo.’ He told Tomás in Spanish to hold it in, to swallow it down, because he didn’t want Amy Eleni to know what he was saying. But Tomás wouldn’t hear him. He just held on to the chair and lowered his head, waiting for Papi to let him go to the bathroom.
I said, ‘Papi! El es apenas un chico pequeño!’
Papi made a sign that I should quieten down and said painfully, ‘El debe aprender.’ He must learn. In English he said to Tomás, almost pleading, ‘Come on, T-boy, it’s unheard of.’ Tomás didn’t move or look up, but his breathing grew more laboured — he was about to cry. Amy Eleni gave me a wide-eyed sideways glance. Papi said, ‘Tomás! Dije, tragalo hacia abajo!’
Amy Eleni studied Papi and studied Tomás and said to the top of Tomás’s head, ‘Tomás, go on, throw up. I dares ya. If you throw up, I’ll do it too.’
Tomás’s eyes found Amy Eleni’s and he shook his head desperately from side to side — no, no, don’t you throw up.
‘What? You don’t want me to throw up all over the table? But I will. You think you’re so tough! You think you’re so clever to throw up like that? I can do it too!’
Chabella said, uncertainly, ‘Amy Eleni —’ but Amy Eleni made a fake gagging sound that was so slimily authentic that Tomás swallowed, burped, and squealed, ‘No!’ in a single moment of delighted horror.
‘We’re trying to eat!’ Mami said, bowing her head to Amy Eleni, her eyes full of thanks.
‘What’s wrong with you! Trying to throw up on the table!’ Tomás demanded of Amy Eleni, his face lit bright. It was the way Amy Eleni made my brother move when nothing else would move him that brought Papi to realise something. Before he put him to bed that night, Papi picked Tomás up under his arm, chuckling as he wriggled, and walked around the house with him, whispering things. I couldn’t hear what Papi told Tomás. But it must have been simple, because every now and again, Tomás replied calmly, ‘I know.’
Aya steps through her London door and crosses concrete slopes that balance drowsy houses on their shoulders. Night’s edge blunts itself at traffic-light level. Aya wishes that she could reach that night and bring it down. Her Aunty Iya could. Aya has seen her Aunty Iya stop walking, stretch languorously, then leap with her arms splayed against impact and sprint up into the atmosphere on a diagonal, hot sparks snapping from her heels as she wrests clouds open. Aya walks and wishes.
A girl sitting on the pavement with her legs crossed under her, this girl holds her hands out to Aya with soft words, words sighed more than said. Her smile is numb, fragile, milk and water. A round plaster at her temple drives back long black waves of her hair. The girl smells of wild honey, jellied amber so raw that fingers delving into its centre bring up the crisped black remnants of bees. The girl is saying, ‘Ye-ma-ya-Sa-ra-ma-gu-a-Ye-ma-ya-Sa-ra-ma-gu-a,’ and she rocks, wrapped in the rhythm of her own words, rapt like a child at play.
‘How do you know my name?’ Aya asks the girl.
The girl looks into Yemaya Saramagua’s eyes and slowly, painfully puts her smile away somewhere safe. The girl says to Aya, ‘I don’t know your name. What’s your name?’
A rainbow of blowsy silk handkerchiefs hangs from the girl’s belt. And when the girl says her name is Amy, to Aya this does not feel true. Amy puts out her hand for help, and to make a beginning of it, Aya helps her to stand up.
Amy lives on the top floor of a tall house with stairs that go apologetically naked after their third rotation. Inside, Amy’s warm honey smell drugs every hollow; the immediate inside rectangle of doorways, the cracks in the corners of window cases. This place is more of a home for books than it is for people; scruffy paperbacks lounge in heaps on the sofa, rickety shelves host a gap-strewn gallery of faded titles. The light, when it comes, will be full and frank; the night sky heaves against square windows wider than Aya’s outstretched arms. When Amy pleads with her to stay, Aya curls up in the contours of the armchair to wait. If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.
In the morning comes the man that Amy lives with, and Aya feigns sleep to watch him. He is beautiful. He might be from Abeokuta, where the essence of the Ewe poet stirs and causes cool-faced people to be born, cool-faced people whose hearts are self-stoked furnaces, great anger and great love. He stows his trunk into a space at the foot of the television. His gaze lingers on Amy who, still asleep, has curled up on the sofa so tightly that she is no more than a patch of denim topped with a tangle of brown hair, and then he bends over the trunk and snaps its locks open. The trunk is filled with ash, or grey sand, and he hunkers down beside it and makes a small, distressed sound, running his fingers through it, watching the grains whirl together into twisted fronds as they touch his hand.