Aaron snaps the lid back onto his noodle tub. ‘There was a message on the answer machine when I got back,’ he says. ‘From a Sister Perpetua.’
Sister Perpetua, who is so sure that darkness is part of heaven. St Catherine’s, where darkness comes for me and it is not hell. He looks at me, waits, as if I have to say something to reassure him that I’m staying with him, but I just say, ‘Oh.’
‘She said —’
I force myself to say it softly: ‘I’ll listen to it myself.’
He smiles unhappily; his eyes search me.
Sister Perpetua’s message is simple: she felt moved to speak to me, and she wants me to know that I am always welcome to visit, that I must come if I need space to think.
I don’t want to think. I thought I wouldn’t be one of those pregnant women who touched their stomachs, but I am touching, wondering do I still feel pregnant, trying not to let myself know that I’m wondering.
Aaron stays outside and stays outside and stays outside. It is cold out there and fast becoming night. I want Aaron to come in to me. But I just stand at the window, looking up and out into the street, and all I can see are his legs, dressed in dark jeans, stretched a long way over the grey steps.
On the window, dusk is formed into a mushy hand shape, a single print. I stare at it, then switch on a lamp and lift my hand to the print. I cannot understand why someone has pressed their hand so hard against the window. I cannot understand why there is only one handprint. The interior is solid, like a mist breathed against the glass, and there are no skin patterns, no fingerprint patterns. This print has been left by a cold glove, a morgue glove. I tell myself that it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true. I say, ‘Aaron,’ as if he could hear me through the glass, and of course he doesn’t notice that I am calling him, and so to bed.
15 the king who does not speak
No Kayodes in the somewherehouse, and so Aya hears nothing but the cedar beams whispering until Mama Proserpine strides out into the hallway to find her. Because it is a mask day for Aya’s Mama, and because Proserpine is not wearing a mask this mask day, Aya averts her own gaze. Proserpine’s wooden mask is secured atop her head in bows of downy lining; her cloak fastens in tarnished bronze links at her throat. Proserpine multiplies and a carnival of cloaked women bend their fractured gazes on Aya.
But no, it is only the mirrors, mirrors everywhere Aya looks.
‘Proserpine, why did you bring the mirrors down?’
Proserpine’s sigh is refined, tolerant: ‘Proserpine is not my name.’
Aya climbs the stairs to the Kayodes’ rooms. She is slowed by flashing mirror surfaces that stir the air in an ascending chime. The house gives way to a spiky maw that snaps at Aya as she opens doors and doors and doors to take down mirrors. Her own aghast reflection runs at her, looms at her, flies from openings to toss her into foreboding until she cries, ‘Who’s that, who’s there?’
The mirrors are studded with the blunt stems of her watchmaker’s seeds, which have staggered into mahogany life; their petals all point one way. The attic, nude and luxuriating in its new dark, welcomes Aya by spattering her with moths. Aya sits with her back against the door and places her hand over her juddering heart.
But the hard flowers are here too — she didn’t forget the attic when she was planting them. The flowers point: Aya is meant to go still higher.
She puts her head out of the attic window. The branches scrabble to attention, she winces as snow scuttles across her face and eyes.
‘Yeye?’ Mama Proserpine’s call climbs from the kitchen to the rafters.
Aya looks up, sees that she has never understood the somewherehouse’s trees. Their branches brush the ground, yes, their branches fountain in twiggy brackets from earth upwards, but (their roots are buried in the sky) clouds crawl lazily away from the black suction that the roots, wide and thick as doors, drive into the blue. Snow crumbles onto Aya, snow salts her.
All of the watchmaker’s signpost flowers are straining upwards, pointing out what it is that she seeks, up, up. In shattered minutes from window ledge to rough treetrunk, she has fought her way up to the snow’s uneven red centre, a ‘v’ that looks less and less like light and more like blood. Snow unfolds itself in bolts on and around her. Inside her is a happiness that threatens to unzip her and step out singing.
Then her skin finds a limit: other skin, a cheek against her cheek. She tries to climb back down to safety, but, as if she does not own or control her hands, Aya releases the branch. She does not fall, but her tears start immediately. Compunction, for he is terrible.
Him. He leans forward to her; he is the one who has caused the trees to grow contrary, to grow from his heart. He is a great cuspate blade primed to flay her, he is a hammer bringing sun down to gloom.
He says, ‘Daughter.’
‘I cannot.’
‘Cannot —?’
‘I.’
Aya weeps and she looks for herself, but there is no one there.
Papa says, ‘What do you want of me?’
‘I.’
‘You poor child,’ her Papa says.
Her nerve a million times denies her. Papa waits and they breathe together, but Aya cannot speak. Such oppression — it pulls at her eyeballs. He releases her. Aya falls through the tree’s tentacles with her arms spread wide; she is shadowed by falls of snow. . until a new heat lances her and with trembling hands she learns that she is dangling just above her window, her stomach impaled on an ice-whitened branch. Oh, blood.
Mama Proserpine, swimming in place in an ocean of black silk, leans out of the attic window
(too far — she could fall)
to try to help her, and Aya, unable to gesture ‘no’, cannot yet say that this pain brings her ache to the front of her mind. Sleet races leaves down from the tree roots; sleet covers Aya’s shoulders, chills the hot blood she’s losing. The way her limbs are splayed now she is more honest in her agony than she has ever been before. This is what she really looks like, humble before him, her father. This is how he has always seen her.
Kneeling down before three mirrors that Mama Proserpine has fetched and propped up against the attic wall, Aya touches her lips, her forehead, her cheeks; they are daubed with blood from her fingers.
Once, she heard the word ‘welkin’ used, and ‘welkin’ became a word she loved, but did not hear again. Welkin describes old, high fascination. It describes supple colour that catches and jails the eye — blue sky in summer when it spreads itself out like a magic carpet and it seems a person could step up onto it. The welkin tint is caught in Aya’s eyes, is swept over her lips, lights her whole face. Her fingertips wind a dance of shudders down her throat, stroke whorls around her nipples. Drugged with content, her hand slides down to her lap.
‘Where are the Kayodes?’ Aya asks.
Proserpine squeezes another bloodstained rag into her bowl of water, and a green herb smell stretches its fronds over them.
‘They went.’
‘You took them home?’
Proserpine nods and flattens another rag over Aya’s stomach. Aya doesn’t feel it.
‘Are you Mama?’
‘Yeye, don’t do this.’
Aya peels off the hot rag and drops it into the bowl. ‘What happened to your face, your skin? What happened to the way you walk? Why don’t you wear your mask on a mask day?’
Mama settles herself opposite Aya. She sees Aya is uncomfortable and she pulls down her mask, adjusts it. The mask is a white hand that cups Mama’s face.
‘I was weary. So I went to your Papa, and he took my ache.’
This new Mama’s eyes flicker behind her mask.