White Is for Witching Read online

  White Is

  for

  Witching

  Also by HELEN OYEYEMI

  The Opposite House

  The Icarus Girl

  White Is

  for

  Witching

  •

  HELEN

  OYEYEMI

  HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published in Canada by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2009.

  Simultaneously published in the United States by Nan A. Talese,

  an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and in Great Britain by Picador, London, under the title Pie-kah.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Helen Oyeyemi, 2009

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Oyeyemi, Helen

  White is for witching / Helen Oyeyemi.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06857-9

  I. Title.

  PR6115.Y49W47 2009 823’.92 C2009-902103-X

  * * *

  American Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication data available

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  I hold my honey and I store my bread

  In little jars and cabinets of my will.

  I label clearly, and each latch and lid

  I bid, Be firm till I return from Hell.

  —GWENDOLYN BROOKS, Selected Poems

  White Is

  for

  Witching

  WHERE IS MIRANDA?

  ore:

  Miranda Silver is in Dover, in the ground beneath her mother’s house.

  Her throat is blocked with a slice of apple

  (to stop her speaking words that may betray her)

  her ears are filled with earth

  (to keep her from hearing sounds that will confuse her)

  her eyes are closed, but

  her heart thrums hard like hummingbird wings.

  Does she remember me at all I miss her I miss the way her eyes are the same shade of grey no matter the strength or weakness of the light I miss the taste of her I see her in my sleep, a star planted seed-deep, her arms outstretched, her fists clenched, her black dress clinging to her like mud.

  She chose this as the only way to fight the soucouyant.

  eliot:

  Miri is gone.

  Just gone. We’d had an argument. It was dark outside. Gusts of wind tangled in the apple trees around our house and dropped fruit onto the roof, made it sound like someone was tapping on the walls in the attic, Morse code for let me out, or something weirder. The argument was a stupid one that opened up a murky little mouth to take in other things. Principally it was about this pie I’d baked for her. She wouldn’t eat any of it, and she wouldn’t let me.

  “Why did you use the winter apples?” She asked it over and over. Nothing I replied could break her monotone.

  She said: “You’ve done too much now. I can’t trust you anymore.”

  She shook her head and dropped to the disappointed hiss of a primary-school teacher, or a kid trying to borrow the authority of one: “Bad! You are bad.”

  (My sister turned seventeen in a mental health clinic; I brought our birthday cake to her there.)

  Miri’s accusations, her whole manner that night scared the shit out of me. She looked in my direction but she couldn’t seem to focus on me. She was the thinnest I’d ever seen her. Her hands and head were the heaviest parts of her. Her neck drooped. She hugged herself, her fingers pinning her dress to her ribs. There was an odd smell to her, heavy and thick. It was clear to me that she was slipping again, down a new slide. When she said she didn’t trust me, I turned away rather than let myself get angrier.

  I went up to my room. Miri didn’t call after me. I don’t think she came upstairs again. Or she may have, without my hearing. I’m not sure. I heard the front door slam, but I thought it was just one of the guests coming home late. I stayed where I was, knelt on my window seat, smoking, seeing shapes in the rain, listening to all the apples in the world bouncing off our roof.

  That last time I saw Miri, she wasn’t wearing any shoes. Five months ago I took that as security that she would come back. And now I keep coming back to that in my mind, the fact that she was barefoot. That her running away was a heat-of-the-moment thing, unplanned.

  A part of me knows that we can’t find her because something has happened to her.

  29 barton road:

  Miranda is at home

  (homesick, home sick)

  Miranda can’t come in today Miranda has a condition called pica she has

  eaten a great deal of chalk—she really can’t help herself—she has been

  very ill—Miranda has pica she can’t come in today, she is stretched out

  inside a wall she is feasting on plaster she has pica

  try again:

  IS MIRANDA ALIVE?

  ore:

  Probably not—

  eliot:

  I’ve been dialling her phone, the phone she lost months ago, as if she might have caught up with it somewhere. I wrote her a note and folded it in four and slipped it under her door.

  I know she’s not there.

  But I wrote, Miri I’m lonely.

  I dropped the words onto the paper so hard that they’re doubled by the thin perforations around them.

  I wouldn’t have bothered trying to tell her, I wouldn’t have written to her if

  What I mean is, each act of speech stands on the belief that someone will hear. My note to Miri says more than just I’m lonely. Invisibly it says that I know she will see this, and that when she sees this it will turn her, turn her back, return her.

  Miri I conjure you.

  29 barton road:
/>
  She has wronged

  me I will not allow her to live

  try a different way:

  WHAT HAPPENED TO LILY SILVER?

  ore:

  Miranda lay beside me on the grass that circled the mill pond, her lecture notebook opened up on her stomach. Bicycles kept passing by, their wheels groaning against the wooden bridge. The sun shone through clouds swollen with the smell of wet bark, and there were bees around us.

  Miranda spoke so quietly I had to move closer to her, my ear to her lips. “It’s Eliot’s fault,” she said.

  When I looked at her, she smiled brightly. Incongruous smiles were a sort of nervous thing with Miranda, a way of protecting herself from consequences, I think. Just like putting sunglasses on, or opening up an umbrella.

  eliot:

  I spent Lily’s second night in Haiti on Miri’s bedroom floor. Miri switched off the light and folded herself into her bed in her usual way, so that every part of her was covered and the bedsheets set around her curled body as if she was fixed in wax. I never knew how she managed to breathe. She said she slept like that so her dreams wouldn’t escape.

  I leaned my back against her desk, wrapped blankets around my shoulders and tried to read with a flashlight.

  The weird thing started when I said to Miri, “Don’t fall asleep yet.” The “please” hugged the roof of my mouth and refused to go out to meet her.

  Miri said, “You’re scared about Lily.”

  I didn’t answer. I tried to picture our mother in Haiti and I saw her in a tower built of guns, heaving with voodoo, creepy gods and white feathers tipped with blood.

  Lily’s eye transformed places. She looked at structures and they turned inside out and offered her their desolate jigsaw patterns. Once Lily pointed out a photo of hers in a magazine, a picture of a tundra with a ball of ice at noon in the sky. What was this place? My mother gave me three guesses. My best and most desperate guess was that truckloads of sand had been poured onto a simulation of the surface of the moon. “Nope,” she said. “Gobi desert.”

  Lily was the changer who came home the same. But that last time the signs were bad. When she left, she had forgotten her watch on the telephone stand in the hallway, a brass body with thin leather arms, ticking away Haitian time, six hours behind ours. How could she have forgotten her watch? She never had before. Miri and I had debated leaving it where it was (that seemed luckier), then Miri had confiscated it for safekeeping in case one of the houseguests stole it or broke it or something.

  Miri said sleepily, “The goodlady will take care of Lily. She promised.”

  “The goodlady?”

  “She likes us.”

  I skipped a beat, then said: “Stay up, just for a bit more. Tell me a Herodotus story or something.”

  She grumbled, “Tired.”

  A small, stiff thing coursed through the dark and sank cold claws into my head. I switched Miri’s lamp on. Miri grumbled again, but the shape under her bedcovers didn’t move. I got the odd feeling that her voice was coming from somewhere else. I said: “Miri . . . Lily’s slipping away. We have to remember her or she’ll be gone.”

  She opened her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Quick, we’ve got to remember her. What can you remember?”

  Miri’s eyes narrowed and she took a long time to reply. “Lily’s . . . hair,” she said, finally. “The near-blackness of it, and the wave in it, near the bottom, where the brush keeps getting stuck.”

  “We need more than that. What else do we know? What else is real about her?”

  “Eliot. Please.”

  “Miri, you’d better fucking stay awake. I mean it. Stay awake or Lily will die.”

  Shrill singing between my ears.

  “Why are you saying this? It’s not true,” Miri said. “The goodlady—”

  “No. There is no such thing, Miri. Grow up.”

  She slid up out of the covers, gasping, her face mottled pink and white as if she had come from a place of burning. She rested her head against her bedstead.

  “Don’t say that. There is such a thing.”

  She was about to cry. There was a change in the shadows and I twisted around, looking into the corners where the lamplight cracked.

  Miri is the older twin. Maybe she has seen things that craned their necks to look at her and then withdrew before I was born, thinking that to consider one of us is to consider both.

  “Come on, don’t be a baby. Just remember something.”

  “Lily smells of the ghosts of roses,” Miri murmured. “Lily is so small she fits under Dad’s chin. Lily . . .”

  “Stay awake,” I warned, and lay down with ice in my chest. I fell asleep to the sound of Miri listing things. “Lily loves the shape of cartoon tear-drops. Lily never knew her mother, and she doesn’t care. Lily’s favourite films have a lot of tap dancing and a little bit of story. Lily slides towards the colour red like it’s a magnet . . .”

  In the morning Miri was still sitting up, her arms stiff on the bedspread before her, gone so deep into sleep that she seemed part of the wall behind her, a girl-shaped texture rising from the plaster in an un-repeated pattern. Her braid was unravelling. Her lips were pinched, her forehead lined with effort. I think in her dreams she was listing things. She tumbled awake and blurted, “Lily can’t stand Pachelbel’s Canon!” I would have laughed if she hadn’t said it with such terror.

  Later—when Dad told us what the voice in the phone had told him—prim, slender Miri folded her hands on the lap of her dress. She looked down and, for a moment, appeared to be smiling. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t in control of her face.

  29 barton road:

  The twins were sixteen and a half when their mother died. She was shot in Port-au-Prince; gunfire sprayed into the queue at a voting station. Her camera remained intact throughout. Also, the lens was unstained. To protect it from dust and flies, Lily had covered it with a square of checked cloth and an elastic band, rustic jam-jar style.

  That day two bullets were for her; they found her and leapt into her lung. She fell amidst milling feet. Someone leant against her and pushed her aside, outside, out of life. She pushed back, sweat standing out on her skin in droplets as if she had been rained on. But her opponent had great wings, lined with clouds of feathers that brushed her, cooled her, pricked her. The shadow of them darkened her sight. She tried to lift her head and see into the crowd. The other two she had been standing with, the newspaper journalists, her eyes couldn’t find them. They had long gone. She dribbled blood, could not let it go, closed her eyes only for the length of time it took to drink it up again. The brokenness in her chest was not clean. It was not a straight line or a single throb. She couldn’t see it but it consumed her.

  Stupid, stupid; Lily had been warned not to go to Haiti. I warned her.

  Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?

  It must be that they believe in their night vision. They believe themselves able to draw images up out of the dark.

  But black wells only yield black water.

  PART ONE

  •

  Curiouser

  LUC DUFRESNE

  is not tall. He is pale and the sun fails on his skin. He used to write restaurant reviews, plying a thesaurus for other facets to the words “juicy” and “rich.” He met Lily at a magazine Christmas party; a room set up like a chessboard, at its centre a fir tree gravely decorated with white ribbons and jet globes. They were the only people standing by the tree with both hands in their pockets. For hours Lily addressed Luc as “Mike,” to see what he had to say about it. He didn’t correct her; neither did he seem charmed, puzzled, or annoyed, reactions Lily had had before. When she finally asked him about it, he said, “I didn’t think you were doing it on purpose. But then I didn’t think you’d made a mistake. I don’t know what I thought. I suppose I thought you were calling me Mike because Mike was my name, if you see what I mean.”

  He wooed his wife with peach
tarts he’d learnt from his pastry-maker father. The peaches fused into the dough with their skins intact, bittered and sweetened by burnt sugar. He won his wife with modern jazz clouded with cello and xylophone notes.

  His fingers are ruined by too close and careless contact with heat; the parts that touch each other when the hand is held out straight and flat, the skin there is stretched, speckled and shiny. Lily had never seen such hands. To her they seemed the most wonderful in all the world. Those hands on her, their strong and broken course over her, his thumbs on her hip bones.

  One night she said to him, “I love you, do you love me?” She said it as lightly as such a thing can be said without it being a joke. Immediately he replied, “Yes I love you, and you are beautiful,” pronouncing his words with a hint of impatience because they had been waiting in him a long time.

  He seems always to be waiting, his long face quiet, a dark glimmer in his heavy-lidded eyes. Waiting for the mix in the pot or the oven to be ready. Waiting for blame (when, at twelve, Miranda’s condition became chronic he thought that somehow he was responsible; he’d let her haunt the kitchen too much, licking spoons. He forgot that he had allowed Eliot to do the same.) Waiting, now, for the day Lily died to be over, but for some reason that day will not stop.

  Meanwhile he has the bed-and-breakfast to run, he has cooking to oversee, peach tarts to make for the guests who know to ask for them. The peach tarts are work he doesn’t yet know how to do without feeling Lily. He has baked two batches of them since she died. Twice it was just him and the cook, the Kurdish woman, in the kitchen and he has bowed his head over his perfectly layered circles of pastry, covered his face and moaned with such appalled, amazed pain, as if he has been opened in a place that he never even knew existed. “Oh,” he has said, unable to hold it in. “Oh.” Luc is very ugly when he cries; his grief is turned entirely inward and has nothing of the child’s appeal for help. The Kurdish woman clicked her tongue and moved her hands and her head; her distress was at his distress and he didn’t notice her. The first time he cried like that she tried to touch her fat hand to his, but he said, “Don’t—don’t,” in a voice that shook her.