‘Yeye, listen —’
The rooster escapes Proserpine’s arms as Aya comes at her. Aya is like thunder. Blood wells from Proserpine’s lip; she is dazed, delayed.
Aya cries to her, ‘You told me you took them home. But you killed them.’
‘Yeye —’
Aya says, grimly, ‘Shut your mouth. Don’t ever address me that way. Proserpine, I saw you from the first.’
Aya has the chair leg to Proserpine’s throat. Proserpine has not cowered, though one of her eyes has swollen shut. The gaze of the other eye, the bulge of surprise in it — that drives Aya outside of herself. Aya’s hand is a hot-red clutching; the wood splinters it, and she doesn’t care. Her next blow snaps the chair leg clean in two.
‘Yeye,’ Proserpine wails. ‘Don’t you know how long it took you to find this place? When you got here, the Kayodes had only just arrived.’
‘Which Kayodes? The ones you killed?’
Proserpine spits a messy tooth into her cupped hand.
Aya asks, very quietly, ‘When?’
Proserpine smears down the wall until she is crouching, the heels of her shoes broken. Aya bends to hear her, her face knitting itself ready to spit. And Proserpine tells her about the Kayodes now, Proserpine tells and tells. With each repetition the story is truer.
By the time Aya asked her where the Kayodes were, the Kayodes were already dead. Because while Aya was gone through the London door, the Kayodes began starvation. But they didn’t know what the feeling was — they didn’t know that the ache meant ‘eat’.
Proserpine cooked for them, so many desperate meals: she cooked amala and ewedu, eko, moin-moin, bistecca, ajiaco, fish and chips.
The Kayodes tried to feed on the smell; they breathed in until their lungs let the scent escape. But then one of them always said to the other, ‘Proserpine must not waste this food. Proserpine must give this food to someone who needs to eat.’
Soon the Kayodes grew too weak even to talk to each other.
In the basement they sat and stared and waited for Aya’s Papa.
They were certain that Aya’s Papa would not forget them.
Then they were less certain.
Then they grew bitter.
And then they died, one immediately after the other, click, click, click, like three switches breaking a circuit. How afraid the third one was when he saw the dying moment begin in the first.
16 ventured all (upon a throw)
Aya and Proserpine strain and sweat and dig a shallow grave around the back of the somewherehouse, in a spot where the grass and trees dip at the same point. Proserpine weeps. Her hands claw at Aya as if she is a closing door with home on the other side. Aya is suffocated by icy leaves. She leaves that place, leaves that woman.
Aya watches Amy untie the knots that secure her handkerchiefs to her belt and spread the silken squares out, full-length, over her bed. Picking one up at the corner feels like pinching a beautiful nothing between the fingertips.
‘Do you want them?’ Amy asks.
Aya lets the handkerchief settle back onto the covers.
Amy turns her bruise-hooped back to Aya and brushes the handkerchiefs onto the floor before she climbs into bed.
‘Look what Tayo gave me,’ Amy says, after a moment. She opens her hand and a saint is in it; a medallion with dainty piecrust metalwork running round it. The saint is a woman with a long nose, hair demurely covered by a shawl, hands crossed on her breast.
‘It’s Our Lady of Mercy,’ Amy says. She closes her hand with a grim smile and draws her saint back under the covers. She gets lost in a dark memory that she doesn’t say aloud.
The handkerchiefs are waiting on the floor. On her way out, Aya wonders, for less than a moment, what it would be like to own these handkerchiefs, to leave an aftermath of honey perfume. In Tayo’s room, the white pointed tips of wet flowers spill over the tops of every drawer in his cupboard, as if the cupboard is crammed with people who are reaching their hands up and willing their fingers to escape the trap.
But early in the next day the fresh air in the room is spent, and the carpet around the chest of drawers is ringed in charcoal dust.
Amy is gone.
In her absence, Amy’s room, baring itself between hills of glass-bead necklaces, socks, books and shrugged-off cardigans, is filled with grey light. Tayo, one hand clad in Amy’s green silk handkerchief, stands at her dresser as if he is awaiting some news or appearance. He is so angry that he does not know what to do with himself, how to stay inside his skin. He shakes his head, bares his teeth to maul the air, but he doesn’t leave the room.
He says, simply, ‘Where is she?’
‘You love her?’ Aya is serene.
‘Amy,’ he says, ‘is missing. And you’re asking stupid questions.’
His smile is unguarded, also it is antique somehow
(yes, yes, who are you to me? Almost I know) his arms come down around her, draw her to him; she arcs under the pressure of his hand. His ache comes to her loudly. It comes through his chest.
‘We have to get Amy to come back.’ Tayo’s wish is spoken into her hair.
Aya closes her eyes against him. She will not go.
‘Please,’ he says.
In the attic of the somewherehouse, Proserpine is hanged. She is like a pale, black-sheathed pendulum caught on a ceiling beam, in a quiet space behind the door that will not trouble anyone. As long as they stay outside, as long as they avoid looking to the left and catching sight of a bare, dapper foot, toes achieving the perfect pirouette. The mirrors report the hanging first; they are stern and reproving, then they make eulogy in softened light. Dozens of refracted Proserpines, faces forced up by frantic throats.
Proserpine not Mama, Proserpine not Mama.
Why, then, has Mama’s face returned to this woman?
Her eyelashes, settled on her cheeks, spike the black clouds of her hair.
Tayo is downstairs — Aya hears muffled thumps, as if he is moving things around. The somewherehouse’s cedar beams whisper to her of their alarm, but she ignores them and turns away.
‘Tayo, don’t come up here,’ Aya calls, and shuts the door.
Her Papa, high, high in the roots and the snow, must know of this by now. Downstairs, the somewherehouse has thrown off its disguise. The house recognises her with a sniff — about time. Aya falls to her knees, winded. All of the running that she has ever done, all of that fleeing for freedom from the Regla house, just to find the Regla house unfolding before her again. This hallway lit with a galaxy of gas lamps.
Tayo stands in the centre of the hallway and looks up at the domed ceiling, the rich stains that form the Creation fresco. Young river, wild-eyed rooster, bulging palm kernel — poised intent on a beginning against the sky. They reach the big window at the end of the hallway and Aya leans out, touches the trees; their leaves rustle under her hands with well-fed laughter, sated by the sun and the warm earth. But Tayo is afraid. Aya tries to take his hand. She tries to bring him with her into the next room, but Tayo will not come. His smile is as hard and dark as mud clay. Aya frowns and calls Tayo’s name, gently calls on him to explain, but Tayo says, ‘No, not him.’
He backs away from her, holding his arms out to her; she follows him step for step, down, down into the dust, the basement. Step for step, she tries names, old names, newer names, until she remembers her Mama’s tale of the trickster who left the family for change.
She asks, ‘Elegua?’
‘No!’
‘Echun. .’
He is crying hard now, the shape of his face buckles as if under blows.