White Is for Witching Read online

  Sade turned up the volume on the kitchen radio. Up at the port, fifty-eight people had been found dead in the back of a truck. Chinese. They had suffocated. Miranda was a heartbeat away from putting her hands over her ears. What is wrong with Dover, she thought.

  Eyes closed, Sade stroked the scars on her cheek.

  “Didn’t they call Dover the key to England?” she asked, slowly. “Key to a locked gate, throughout both world wars, and even before. It’s still fighting.”

  She drew her scarf around her neck and wriggled into her coat, swinging the heavy carrier bag as if it was nothing. As she left, a gust of wind came through the hallway and the back door slammed. It was the couple who had been picnicking outside. Now they came into the warmth and looked around, and shivered. They were sweating. They passed Miranda and she was troubled. The woman smiled vaguely and gave Miranda the lily from her hair. The man followed the woman up the stairs without even glancing at Miranda.

  “Is everything okay?” Miranda asked.

  No reply. She tried to add up how many days the couple had booked in for; she should look in her father’s book. The flower in her hand was so large and sweet smelling that she might have been carrying the frozen scent of a lily. She paused halfway up the staircase, looked up and listened to them.

  “A tisket, a tasket,” the man sang, off-key, outside the door of the couple’s guest room. “A tisket, a tasket.”

  “Stop it,” Miranda heard the woman say, just as she herself mouthed, “Stop it.”

  “Something’s killing me.” There was a static quality to their voices, as if they were people on the radio. Miranda’s vision blurred until the staircase was the only thing she could see clearly. A helter-skelter of wood and carpet, a backbone.

  “What is it?” the man asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was the apple. Where did it come from?”

  The woman began to choke. Miranda, who did not know CPR, ran up to the second floor, but the man had led the woman inside the bedroom, saying, “Sh, sh,” and the horrible coughing was quieted somehow.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Er . . .”

  Jalil had brought her a bunch of sunflowers. Miranda found sunflowers very ugly, and yellow made her so nervous that she suspected it was the cause of war. She was irritated with Jalil for bringing the sunflowers, and irritated with herself for being ungrateful. She stood at the door, a barrier between him and the house, sniffed at the brown florets that spiralled at the centre of the petals. She couldn’t smell anything, but she said, “Thank you. These are beautiful.” Then she closed the door, praying that no one else would come up and ring the doorbell until he had gone. Jalil stood on the doorstep for three seconds, smiling uncertainly, waiting for her to open the door, but she said, “Goodbye! See you at school!” through the letter box, and then he went off, disconsolately dragging his feet against the gravel.

  As soon as he was out of sight, she thought charitably of him. It had been brave to bring the flowers. Once Eliot had come in with a bunch of flowers he’d bought for someone, then had thrown them into the almost-full bin on his way out, slamming the lid again and again to crush the petals farther down into the mass of eggshells and old bread. When Eliot saw Jalil’s sunflowers on the sitting-room mantelpiece, he asked where they had come from. She told him. A look of such extreme sarcasm crossed his face that Miranda rushed to him and covered his mouth with both hands before he could speak.

  •

  Monday was the day I got the letter from the South African production company, offering me their internship. The acceptance sank my heart. My Dad knows magazine people who wrote me glowing, if vague, references. I tried to remember if Lily had been in Cape Town—if she had then I would have something to connect the words to. Then I remembered that Lily had been there, and she’d hated it. “It’s that mountain . . . Table Mountain. It stands there and glowers like some kind of club bouncer, and you just can’t get away from it—no matter what part of town you look around and somehow the mountain is there. If it doesn’t block your light then you feel it.”

  Monday was also a day Miri said she’d stay at home. I went out to the garden to get my bike and she emerged from the shelter, looking vague. She said that she wanted to help Sade take some snacks up to the Immigration Removal Centre.

  “Are you avoiding that brer?” I asked her.

  “That . . . brer,” she said after me, looking inquisitive.

  “The fellow you pulled in the pub.” I tried to stop, but couldn’t stop myself from adding: “The one who came yesterday, with the sunflowers.”

  “Jalil.”

  “Okay. Yes, him.”

  “His name is Jalil.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not avoiding Jalil. Get the homework for me.”

  “Are you not planning to go in tomorrow either, then?”

  “I don’t think school suits me at the moment,” Miri said. She was holding on to the side of the shelter so hard that her knuckles were white. She kept looking somewhere to the left of me. Her concentration was unflickering. The thing she was watching, whatever it was, moved from a point just behind my head to somewhere near my kneecaps, and by the time the thing (and her gaze) had reached the ground, I realised she wasn’t watching anything, she’d lost consciousness. Almost as soon as she’d fallen, she opened her eyes again. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she said. I picked her up and carried her inside the house, worried by how little effort it took to lift her. She laughed. “Oh, are you actually carrying me? Am I heavy? Eliot you are such a gentleman—”

  She threw her head back as if on a ride.

  “I’ll drop you and see how you feel about that,” I warned her.

  She whispered in my ear, suddenly serious. “I’m scared of those girls. They’re going to come after me.”

  I set her on her feet in the lift. “Get some sleep. I’ll find out about the homework for you. And I’ll sort the thing with Tijana out.”

  “Promise?”

  “Er . . . I’m not in a boy band.”

  The lift door closed on her smile.

  On my way back from lunch I saw Tijana standing at the school gate. She had her blazer thrown over her shoulders like a cape, and her hair was loose and sort of stumbling down her back in different stages of curl. She was talking to a boy, and their body language was interesting. They were talking loudly (and not in English) but the volume wasn’t hostile and it seemed to increase and increase despite the fact that they were standing almost close enough to simply whisper. I should have realised just by that token that Tijana and the boy she was talking to were related. The boy sat on his bike, one foot on a pedal, as if ready to ride off at any second. He stared at me when I walked up to Tijana, and I stared back, then ended up having to look away because he looked so sick. He had big yellow rings around his eyes.

  “I need to talk to you for a minute,” I said to Tijana. Tijana raised her eyebrows. She looks like a fortune-teller. I’m not sure what I mean by that, but it’s true.

  “What is it?” she said.

  The boy on the bike looked at me patiently, waiting for me to go away. He looked as if he hoped he wouldn’t have to exert himself.

  “I need to talk to you about the thing with Miranda,” I said, and I moved away as an indication that she should step aside too. Tijana didn’t move. She did something with her hair that made me realise what writers mean when they say “she tossed her head.”

  “Talk then. This is my cousin, the one who was attacked. Agim.” He winced at her introduction; I was glad not to be the only one, except my wince stayed inside my face.

  I turned to Tijana and got on with it. “Did you think it was clever to come after my sister with knives? Say you cut her, do you think you would have got away with that?”

  Tijana didn’t even open her mouth. She just rolled her eyes at me.

  “No, they would not have got away with it,” her cousin said. “It’s only the other way around that nothing is done
.”

  “You’re pretty stupid. And you’re lucky I didn’t call the police when she told me,” I said, simply.

  “Why didn’t you?” Tijana asked.

  “Because there’s obviously been a misunderstanding, and I’d rather sort it out between us.”

  “I wish you had called the police,” Tijana said.

  I sighed.

  “She ran away before I could go and get Agim—”

  “Because you were waving knives in her face,” I finished.

  “She ran away before I could go and get Agim to confirm that it was her,” Tijana insisted.

  To Tijana’s cousin I said, “You really think you’ve met my sister?”

  I had pulled a photo off the wall above my dad’s desk. It was at least a year old, from a holiday in Cornwall with Dad and Lily. In the photo Miri and I are sitting on a fence at dusk with an eerily empty square of grass behind us. I took the photo out of my rucksack and showed it to him. “Are you sure?”

  He looked at the photo, and I saw his relief.

  “That’s Miranda?”

  I didn’t answer, and he said, hastily, “Okay, well that’s different. I don’t know that girl. The girl I meant has short hair and smokes these weird red and white cigarettes, and she said her name was Anna. It’s the same word backwards and forwards, the same word in a mirror, she said.”

  “Miranda has short hair now,” Tijana said.

  “She doesn’t smoke though,” I said. I didn’t put the photo away. The sight of it seemed to calm him down.

  Over Agim’s shoulder I could see, through the gritty windowpanes of the Old Building, Martin furtively fetching a hammer out of his locker. Martin had been smoking a lot. It gave him these unrealisable ideas for arts and crafts. He was with Emma, and she was chatting blithely as he stowed the hammer in her bag. I think all my friends at school smoked too much. There really isn’t much else you can do regularly if you’re young and there’s no one thing you’re really into. Miri was the only friend I had who didn’t smoke at all.

  “Agim,” Tijana said. “Just tell the truth if you recognise her. Don’t be scared.”

  Agim turned to her. “I swear to you . . . this isn’t the girl.”

  “But . . .” Tijana took the photo herself and looked at it closely. “I don’t understand this.”

  I took the picture out of her hands. “Not interested. If either of you bother my sister again, I’m going to the police. Nothing long.”

  “He nearly died,” Tijana said. Then she spat in my face.

  I wiped my face and went in for the next lesson. The duty to speak when Miri couldn’t, to make sense when she didn’t. I checked that no one was around, then put my forehead to my locker and stood against it just like a plank, with all my weight in my head. I stood like that until I stopped feeling like breaking something. Otherwise I could snap the Biros in my pocket, go into the nearest empty classroom and spin the chairs into the bookshelves, then what? Go home and smash Lily’s camera? Thank you, Lily, for leaving me in charge of someone I just can’t be responsible for. She won’t forget or recover, she is inconsolable.

  •

  There were protestors outside the Immigration Removal Centre. Miranda and Sade walked into a bristle of placards that tilted as people moved to let them through. “What’s the matter, what’s happening?” Miranda asked. She didn’t notice how tightly she was clutching Sade’s arm until Sade gently removed her hand. They were surrounded by grim faces and black print.

  “Another inmate hung themselves.” It was a wiry woman that had spoken; her sleeves were pushed elbow high. “No social visits today.”

  Sade made a short, low keening sound that seemed not to come from her mouth.

  It was strange on the Western Heights, you could see both town and sea, one seeming to hold the other back with its split brick and glass. On the Heights you were high and not at all secure, you felt as if you could fall at any moment, and that gave the stones and water a vitality of colour—if these things were to be the last you saw while falling, then they belonged to you.

  Miranda had known the address of the detention centre before she had come, she knew that the place was called The Citadel, but she had forgotten that it actually looked like a citadel. She had reimagined the building as white and similar to a hospital. But now she understood that that would have been silly. A building of this size would not blend on the Western Heights if it was

  white

  was a colour that Anna Good was afraid to wear. Her fear reflected her feeling that she was not clean. She had, of course, been baptised in white. As a child she had been buttoned into frilly white pinafores and had subsequently been too frightened to move. At school, her gymnastics class had been filmed for a programme on British sports and pastimes, and she’d been picked to wear a bronze-coloured helmet and a white gown and a blue sash and sit at the top of a chariot built of the other girls’ bodies. She was Britannia, and her shield was a round tea tray covered with coloured crepe and ribbon. There was no lion, but some of the girls dug their fingernails into her thighs, and it was just like being bitten. She had still smiled, though, and waved her arms at the camera. Britannia had to have pluck. Anna never thought she would have a granddaughter who didn’t know what Britannia meant; Lily said that patriotism was embarrassing and dangerous. Who gave you your mind? Anna would wonder, when Lily said such things. She couldn’t believe her ears. How had Britannia become embarrassing and dangerous? It was the incomers. They had twisted it so that anything they were not part of was bad.

  When Anna met Andrew she was wearing a cream-coloured dress, the material having been the cheapest she’d seen on sale and easily slid beneath the needle of her sewing machine. Anna smoothed the cloth of her dress over her lap as he, Andrew, walked past the desk she shared with Alice Williams at the newspaper office. Andrew was on his way to see the editor; you could tell he was someone important because of the way he wasn’t afraid to be caught looking at whatever interested him. He stopped and nodded at Liz Welles, who had a little band of scarlet ribbon fixed around a spare scroll on her typewriter. Was it a charm to help her type faster, he wanted to know. His smile was charming, but very dark somehow. Liz laughed shyly and said she didn’t know, her daughter had made it.

  “He’s stinking rich, that Andrew Silver,” Alice Williams whispered to Anna. “From an American merchant family, but they had him schooled over here and he’s almost English. Isn’t he handsome? It’s just him in that big house on Barton Road.”

  “Stow it, will you, he’s coming,” Anna muttered desperately, smiling hard at her typewriter as he passed.

  His manners were strange. He didn’t speak to her, but he looked at her for longer than was polite, and she knew that they had met now, that everything real that had ever been going to happen to her would happen now. She inspected the entire front of her dress once he was gone, convinced that some vast stain had left her and entered the cloth. It was summer. She was sweating slightly, but that was all.

  White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them. At a pinch, cream will do.

  Four years later Anna Good put the cream dress on again, and an expensive white coat that Andrew had bought her, and she did some witching.

  Andrew Silver was a Dover Queensman, one of the “buffs,” as they were called, a brave man in brown who flew a plane to Africa to fight the Germans there. One morning someone knocked on my door and gave Anna a telegram, which said that her husband was dead. She looked at it and then she wandered up and down my staircases, in and out of my rooms, flinching, hearing bombs far away. I curved myself into a deep cup, a safe container for her. I did not let her take any harm to herself, I did not let her open the attic window to jump. I was like a child with its mouth obstinately closed, refusing speech, refusing air. She had bought some rat poison the week before, and though she did not turn to that, I shook the pellets so that they fell deep into my recesses. Just in case. She
was pregnant, you see. It was two Silvers at stake. My poor Anna Good, my good lady.

  “They killed him,” she wept. I could not respond. Her fear of her pica and the whispers and her fear of shrapnel and fire and, yes, her fear of me, of being left all alone in a big silent house. Her fear had crept out from the whites of her eyes and woven itself into my brick until I came to strength, until I became aware. I could keep Anna Good from killing herself and her child, but I had no other gift.

  “I hate them,” she said. She sat down on the kitchen floor, the telegram rumpled on her lap. A rat scampered past her, putting its feet on her white coat. Her hair fell from its pins. She was supposed to go to the newspaper office and type, but she would not that day. Instead she gave me my task.

  “I hate them,” she said. “Blackies, Germans, killers, dirty . . . dirty killers. He should have stayed here with me. Shouldn’t have let him leave. Bring him back, bring him back, bring him back to me.” She spoke from that part of her that was older than her. The part of her that will always tie me to her, to her daughter Jennifer, to Jennifer’s stubborn daughter Lily, to Lily’s even more stubborn daughter Miranda. I can only be as good as they are. We are on the inside, and we have to stay together, and we absolutely cannot have anyone else. It’s Luc that keeps letting people in. To keep himself company, probably, because he knows he is not welcome (if he doesn’t know this he is very stupid). They shouldn’t be allowed in though, those others, so eventually I make them leave.