I need to think — I try to smile and think at the same time. I close my eyes and try to fetch back that lantern-lit night, the singing, and the other girl, rosy Magalys, flailing the air. But now there are gaps ripped through the image and the singing has turned to a mashed, static whine. I want to ask Magalys what she has done to my one whole memory. Instead I say, still smiling, ‘That’s not how it happened, Magalys.’
(Magalys please see my smile see it is not a happy one and agree with me just shut up and agree with me)
Magalys stares at me. ‘I remember your mother just picked you up and took you away, and almost as soon as she’d gone, some people started whispering about her and you and saying that she’d asked a babalawo to give you visions, to see how it would go with you abroad. The fit seemed like a bad sign.’
I am not the one who had the fit — how could it have been me? Or, if I had the fit, then I had already left that place and it was you who were caught fast in illness like glue, while elsewhere the woman sang.
I need my Cuba memory back, or something just as small, just as rich, to replace it; more food for my son, for me. I think I will pretend that I am not from Cuba and neither is my son. The boy and I started a race from that other country, and I got here first.
I walk up the street from Aaron’s flat to the travel agent’s, and I take time during the journey to stand still and gape at nothing; I don’t care who sees — I do it because I need to. If I don’t protest my skin will destroy me. When I rubbed cream into my skin today, the cream layered, then scratched away to show me that I am a gourd, bound in crisp servility to my insides.
With plane tickets in my bag I call Chabella, maybe to tell her about a thing that I will soon be unable to hide. When she picks up the phone, I say that I have called by accident.
On a dais in a London church, the Virgin Mary sits surprised by a rough crest of candlelight. The discomfiture isn’t in her expression, but in the fluid form her carving takes, the way peaceful eyes rest in sockets that threaten to release them. Either the wood is eccentrically soft, or this sculpture remains a tree, alert
(despite careful varnishing and a wide, warning ring of sacred space around it)
to a propensity to burn. The rest of the church is dim and all of a piece; russet floors nascent with insubstantial pews, Stations of the Cross boarded to the tops of the very last row. Incense knots in Aya’s nostrils. Her hands shake as she leans over and puts a candle to the Virgin’s rigid blue shawl, willing her to catch fire. Varnish turns to smoke.
But Tayo speaks a greeting into Aya’s ear, slips his arm around her waist and reaches up, gesture joined to hers, to capture the candle’s metal base from her hand. He blows the flame out. She side-steps him and he follows, plucking her away from the bank of candles when she backs too close to them. His hair is done all over bumps, plaits dragged in on themselves.
‘What are you doing here?’ they ask each other. Outside it is calm. The sun’s gift to the day is the most benevolent yellow Aya has ever seen. Today is bright yellow like waking well after a long illness; the heart’s tinny hymn post-crisis. Gold.
They walk; the wind is polite and dusts the playthings of other days from their path. Tayo lights a cigar and blows smoke at the ground. High on his cheeks, his eyelashes form fringed crescents. Aya asks of Amy, and Tayo lets his cigar fall and by so doing murders it; its battered head smoulders and collapses. Amy is in hospital, he says, because she tried to die.
* * *
The beds on the ward are narrow and high. Iron bedsteads. Everybody lies down obediently and in exactly the same way; people who slept on their sides or their stomachs at home lie on their backs here, stiff. No bed is near a window, no one has a view. A giant Pinocchio lopes in red, yellow, pink and brown along the back wall, interrupted by a heavy door that stands, unperturbed, in his stomach.
Amy, her hair dropping in a multitude of coils from a single, burnished bun, beams from amongst her pillows when she sees Aya and Tayo, though she could be smiling at the gifts — a carton stuffed to overflowing with red grapes, and sunflowers whose tawny heads double the size of her palms.
Amy hugs Tayo, Aya, the fruit and the flowers simultaneously. The pain on her cheeks, her forehead, her hands, stands out blackly, as if her veins are delicately weeping poison and her skin is a cloth placed over it to soak up the damage. The girl in the bed next to Amy’s is asleep. She has a sharp little face, like a baby bird’s, and she cannot walk because her spirit does not want her body and bids it disappear. Beneath the girl’s covers, atrophied muscle makes her legs lithe and kneeless. The girl’s mother sits beside her, reading the newspaper to herself.
Tayo slowly kneads Amy’s hands between his own; it reminds Aya of her Mama. But Amy turns away from him, turns into her pillow. Her body curls up, foetal. She hides in her hair and quietly, quietly coughs out gummy streams of pale green. The nurses gently move her to a new bed. Amy’s silk handkerchiefs still cluster over and under the brown leather belt she’s tightened around the waist of her nightie, but Aya gives her a tissue; she dabs feebly at the sores that now show starker beside her mouth.
Aya asks her, ‘Amy, why?’
(How can you know my name and want to die?)
Amy says, ‘I don’t know. It was just an idea, really.’
Aya cannot stop looking at the beautiful bird-girl in the bed next to Amy’s; the girl sleeps even though the blankets are too heavy for her, even though her mother’s sad hand on her pillow is too heavy for her.
Aya cannot stay. This place is not a place that she understands, and Amy knows that. She kisses Aya and says to her, ‘It has been good to see you again, Yemaya Saramagua.’
11 1 % thanatos instinct, 99 % air
Amy Eleni’s flat is a deconstructed chest of drawers — all on one level, all as is to be expected. The medium-sized sitting-room box sits in between the medium-sized kitchen box and the bedroom, with its high double bed and the black television and VCR on the table beside it. In the sitting room is a non-scent, a pale, clean sofa, light curtains. There is waiting-room magic here, a polite insistence that these rooms are in fact a space you pass through on your way to somewhere else. You’re not to trouble yourself to look at the walls, since there are no pictures there. You’re to wipe your feet, but keep your shoes on.
You would never guess that Amy Eleni is a teacher. Actually, you wouldn’t guess anything about her; you’d think she was suicidal and had given most of her stuff away.
Amy Eleni doesn’t buy books; she buys shoes instead. She takes books out from the library — ten at a time — and lives on them, around them, all over them. She spilt coffee all over a library book and said to me, ‘See? Me and books — I’d better not even try to live with them. Life is over there, behind the shelf.’
Amy Eleni doesn’t have a shelf in her flat. So, because I had no idea what she was talking about, I was immediately suspicious that her hysteric had her. But before I could say anything, Amy Eleni jumped on me, smothered me with her hands and shouted, ‘Why are we friends? You really need to read —’
I surfaced and covered her face with my hand.
‘Shut up! I’m not taking any more recommendations!’
Melded together on her sofa, drunk on Fragolino and watching TV, Amy Eleni caught me peering around, in a mood to dismiss, thinking, How bare this place is.
She said, ‘Look, I just don’t have a lot of things.’