The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi

Author:Helen Oyeyemi
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
Published: 2007-06-09T21:00:00+00:00

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.

Aaron asked me what I thought of Gatsby. I said, ‘Yeah, it’s really good.’ He waited for more, so I said, ‘It’s short, though.’ Aaron kissed me and wanted to know what I’d been doing with his books since I hadn’t been reading them.

When it came to my part of the swap, I hovered over my shelves at home. I panicked at the last minute and gave him Spanish books; Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba; Alejo Carpentier’s sensational voodoo stories that make Chabella and me laugh; Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s book Sab, about the strong slave who falls in love with a white woman and learns that love makes him better than everyone. When Aaron saw that the books were in Spanish, his brow creased and he opened and closed his mouth, then simply said, with his eyebrows raised, ‘Thank you.’

For a week they sat on his bedside table, the books, and Aaron didn’t go near them. I checked them when I visited him; I had keys to his flat and twice I let myself in just to see if the books had moved. They hadn’t. We didn’t talk about the books; they were just there, faded titles sneering quietly. I didn’t know why I’d done it to him when he was fair with his choices, so the second time I let myself in, when I heard him coming back from the hospital, I collected up the books and went to him to say sorry.

He listened, nodded, shrugged and threw his satchel onto the sofa. The bag coughed up its contents in one abrupt jangle; mints, keys, pens, Post-it pads, English translations of the books I’d given him.

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