White Is for Witching Read online

  •

  Since GrandAnna’s washing machine was there, the ration-book larder became a mini-laundry, washing powder scattered over its tiles, its shelves stocked with small piles of clothes. If you were a guest and had booked in for three days or more, you got your clothes washed, dried and delivered back to you for free. “Just human kindness,” Luc said. The clothes on the shelf were sorted according to whether they had been washed but not dried, or whether they had been both washed and dried and were ready to be returned to their owners. There were no tags or coloured dividers; Miranda had no idea how Sade managed to keep track, but she did it effortlessly.

  From her place by the door, where she sat with her course-work notes spread over her knees, Miranda watched as Sade picked up a pair of Eliot’s jeans and laid them over the ironing board. “Please, you mustn’t iron Eliot’s denim, he hates it.”

  Sade looked up from the ironing board with eyes like liquidized stars.

  “Are you—are you alright?” Miranda stammered.

  Sade seemed to laugh; at least, her shoulders shook.

  “I’m thinking of the shame. To make a man hang himself. That place is a prison. You come without papers because you have been unable to prove that you are useful to anyone, and then when you arrive they put you in prison, and if you are unable to prove that you have suffered, they send you back. That place up there is a prison. He didn’t deserve that.”

  “Yes,” said Miranda. She touched her own cheek, expecting it to be wet. It wasn’t.

  Sade laid her hands down on the ironing board and stared at the plasters on her fingers. “I hate them,” she said, in a voice that seemed to include Miranda.

  Miranda picked up her notes and said she was sorry from behind them. She left the larder quietly, walking backwards. She knew then that Sade had not personally known the dead man. Her grief was almost theoretical. It didn’t mean any less, but it was a different sort of grief from Miranda’s. It was the sort of grief you didn’t have to suppress because letting it out made it smaller instead of bigger. The sort of grief you could say something about because you instinctively understood that it could not continue, rigid inside your breathing apparatus like a metal stem. Miranda made a face at herself in the hallway mirror. Deep thoughts. Why didn’t she just draw a diagram of the different kinds of grief?

  •

  June was bread and nuts and berries. It was also uncharacteristically hot, but Eliot and Miranda didn’t let thoughts of summer come until after exams. Before exams came limbo, spent on the roof, squinting at old notes through sunglasses. Neither of them tanned in the slightest, though the sun’s heat brought into view messages they’d written to themselves in lemon juice on the margins of their pages. Miranda rotated her three halter-neck dresses. Eliot didn’t stoop to shorts, but folded up the bottoms of his jeans and wore flip-flops.

  He got through the exam period on the “brain bread” that Luc baked—the loaves were round and coarse and filled with all sorts of seeds that neither of the twins had heard of. It seemed that every time Miranda looked at Eliot he had some of that bread in his mouth—with Luc’s champagne marmalade, or mackerel, or honey, or butter. Miranda tried not to judge him, but it was hard. In revision sessions at school, Eliot leaned forward and answered the teacher’s questions around a wad of bread. The Sunday before their last set of exams, Miranda and Eliot tested each other on key dates and terms beneath a giant picnic umbrella in the garden. Miranda’s last module was for her history paper; Eliot’s was for politics. They answered so many of their practice questions correctly that it seemed like a jinx.

  Sade sat at the other end of the garden, by the back door, in case she was called. For months she had been knitting something white that grew wider and longer. She didn’t seem to have a final form in mind for it. It lathered her lap like beaten egg white, full of sun, and she paused to brush leaves off it. As she worked she lowered her head and hummed, smiling as if the work was for someone she thought tenderly of.

  “What will you do when it’s really summer?” Miranda asked Eliot.

  When Sade glanced over, she picked up the thick smoothie that Sade had blended for her and pretended to drink. She let the fruit sit on her lips, then, when Sade looked away, she wiped it off. Her heart wasn’t in the subterfuge. The summer before last, Eliot had refused to go on holiday without Lily and spent much of August up on the roof wearing a black balaclava and writing poetry, which he then balled up and threw as far and as hard as he could, in various directions. Lily, contacted in Mumbai, had said that he was clearly exploring the role of the poet as incendiary. When she came home she’d advised that Eliot cut his hair, unless he preferred cheaply acquired androgyny.

  “Will you go to South Africa straight away?” Miranda asked.

  Eliot drank from her glass and suddenly half her smoothie was gone.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “South Africa’s not until October,” Eliot told her. Perhaps he would spend summer on the roof again, then.

  “What will you do when it’s summer?” he asked.

  Miranda had spent the previous weekend looking through her GrandAnna’s prudent, economical knitting and sewing patterns, and she felt sorry for the old black Singer sewing machine, which seemed never to have had any fun.

  “First I will knit you a scarf, as I’ve read that South Africa won’t really get warm for you until November. Next I think I will make myself an overcoat, with a violently coloured lining.”

  •

  After their last exam, Eliot vanished with a group of friends whose schoolbags clanked with bottles, while Miranda went straight home and returned the notes she’d taken to school to the bundle beneath her bed. She had not answered many of her exam questions completely—she had too much to tell the examiner, and everything she had to say was of the greatest urgency. She’d been reduced to summarising points for the final questions, to give illusions of answers.

  Miranda found Sade and they went down to London together, in search of suitable scarf and coat fabrics at Petticoat Lane Market. Miranda liked the market very much. It was steps away from a main street full of fast-food restaurants, a street that glowed with buses like wheeled danger signs, but the market itself smelt like fried spice and flour and the musk of cloth before it is ever worn.

  Sade bought a brown bag full of peppers more wizened and vicious-looking than chillies, tie-dyed fabric, and a pair of square-toed silver shoes with diamanté buckles that silenced Miranda for a full ten minutes. There was no time or place or event fancy enough for those shoes. She knew that Sade would have to wear them as house slippers.

  Miranda bought plenty of purple thread and some unassuming polyester and viscose mix that fell well and warmly when she held a sample length of it up against herself. She decided that she wanted her overcoat to be a full frock coat, and got some black petticoat gauze too. Then Sade persuaded her to buy a big square of red and purple tie-dyed into shadowy mandalas. “For your violently coloured lining,” Sade said, as they held the cloth out between them and gaped at it and then at each other. There was too much cloth, but that was a good thing, as Miranda had not yet learnt to sew with a machine and was bound to get it horribly wrong at first.

  Sade and Miranda paid for the fabric and the silver shoes together, and the shop owner bantered with Sade while finding her change, peppering his talk with Yoruba words as he wrapped the cloth in tissue paper. He was Indian. He saw Miranda’s surprise and laughed. “Why wouldn’t I know some of this lady’s language? My best customers are Yoruba . . .”

  He also let them take, for only ten pounds, a mannequin that he no longer used because it was too old and he’d had too many complaints about its proportions from his mainly full-figured female customers. The mannequin had no hair, no face, was very white under a film of grime, and had a fifties waist and a nonexistent bust, which pleased Miranda because that way she would be able to see how the coat would look on her even as it was being made.

  At home, she put
the mannequin in the bath and washed it with a flannel, from face to torso to heels, until it was completely clean. The mannequin was taller than her, but as she pulled it out of the bath by its hands, she felt as if she was its mother. In her room she covered the mannequin’s nakedness with one of the long T-shirts she slept in. The mannequin stood beside her wardrobe, arms at its sides, looking cowed somehow.

  Miranda put a knitted hat on its head and started work on her coat. The lack of light in her room made it the coolest part of the house. She had her windows open beneath the closed curtains, and humidity drew the curtains and the window together, giving the impression of a gaunt head looking out of her wall. Its skin was loose, and it gasped vacantly.

  An influx of new guests in search of the perfect beach-to-town balanced holiday meant that Sade couldn’t help Miranda with her knitting for another three days, and it was four days before Miranda saw Eliot for longer than the time it took for him to stumble indoors in the early morning, toss food into his mouth, go to bed, then, in the late afternoon, rise from his bed, toss food into his mouth and leave the house again.

  Eliot came and found her in the garden, where she sat beside Sade and her enormous crochet project, a book on her lap, her face turned up to meet a butterfly that flitted in place just above her nose.

  “What the fuck is that in your room?”

  The butterfly veered away.

  “It’s a mannequin,” Miranda murmured. “Have you been having fun?”

  “Yeah. But I start work tomorrow. What’s the mannequin for?”

  “Work?” Both Sade and Miranda looked at Eliot.

  “Indeed. Junior reporter at The Dover Post. Probably just retyping memos from the council on their new initiatives or something. What’s the mannequin for?”

  “My coat,” said Miranda.

  “Oh.” Eliot looked at the scarf she’d begun for him, nodded politely and grabbed his bike.

  Agim died—it was in The Dover Post. Unexpected medical complications were cited—even Eliot was unable to explain what that was supposed to mean. Miranda hid the newspapers for that day under an armchair in the sitting room and resumed work on her coat. Her hands shook, and her stitches kept failing.

  In the evening Sade took advantage of the empty sitting room and watched a Nigerian film. She put her feet up and divided her attention between a bowl of salted peanuts, some warm Guinness drunk from a glass she’d left to chill in the fridge all afternoon, and the film, which brought tears of silent laughter into her eyes. The film seemed not to be a film at all; rather it was a competition between a cast of actors to see who could shout and moan the loudest and show the greatest amount of agony at the death of a close relative.

  Miranda got up and wandered out to the garden just as Sade called out to Luc— “Mr. Dufresne, Mr. Dufresne! This part you will love—Wole now knows that Yemisi is the one who poisoned Mama Atinuke’s chin-chin.”

  Luc smiled at Miranda as he passed her. Sade had been teaching him how to make chin-chin, which was basically pastry, thickly folded and heavily buttered. Luc couldn’t bear to bake anything as dense as the chin-chin Sade produced, and his version of the snack was closer to mini-palmiers than anything else. Sade disapproved, but she took some on her weekly trips to the detention centre and said that they had been declared passable.

  Miranda moved Luc’s spectacles and notebook onto a nearby deck chair and climbed into the hammock that Luc had set up between two of the trees. She rocked, but the moon wouldn’t let her sleep. Its light was faint, yet, like the breeze that soothed her bare arms and legs, it kept moving. She had to watch the moon through the apple-tree branches. It was easier to watch through her fingers.

  When she grew tired of watching and realised she couldn’t drop her hand, she began to think it possible that in those months of her madness she had been supplanted by someone that she could only be vaguely aware of. Her nails locked into her forehead, but there was no pain.

  Interesting, all is very interesting.

  She closed her eyes.

  Heavy footsteps crossed the grass and stopped just behind her.

  “Miranda,” her GrandAnna whispered in her ear. Her words met the air with difficulty, as if there was something in her mouth she had to talk around. “You must eat.”

  Miranda said nothing. She had decided the key was to pretend as if she hadn’t heard. Her hand came loose, the moon let her alone, and she tried to sleep on an empty stomach, which everyone says not to do.

  After a while she pushed herself out of the hammock, rolled confusedly on the grass, then picked herself up, arms above her head in case the trees fell on her. The air was full of the smell of burning. There was screaming. It wasn’t human, it was mechanical and without pause. There wasn’t a house light on for miles and miles. She had to get into the shelter, they were calling her, they were waiting. She moved through the pitch-black house and she was the only thing that stirred. She came through the trapdoor, and Lily stood beside a table laid for four. Miranda put her arms around her mother, and they held each other for longer than a greeting took; the house shook as the ground outside was beaten—just one hit, but the vibrations went on for so long that Miranda realised it was only her ears refusing to forget the sound.

  Over Lily’s shoulder, Miranda counted—four places, four people—Lily made one, Miranda made two, for number three there was Jennifer, Lily’s mother, and the fourth was her GrandAnna, her white hair gleaming. Jennifer and GrandAnna sat side by side with their elbows on the table. They leaned forward, anticipating a meal. They were naked except for corsets laced so tightly that their dessicated bodies dipped in and out like parchment scrolls bound around the middle. They stared at Miranda in numb agony. Padlocks were placed over their parted mouths, boring through the top lip and closing at the bottom. Miranda could see their tongues writhing.

  “Who did this to them?” Miranda asked Lily, curling her arms around her mother’s neck.

  Lily turned her head away. “I did,” she said. She sounded proud.

  The long table was made of pearl, or very clean bone, and it was crowded with plates and dishes; there was fruit, and jugs of the spiced wine her father would make in a cauldron at the beginning of November. There were jugs of the pithy lemonade that her father made in the very same cauldron when May came. Miranda knew exactly what was on the table because she and Lily joined hands and walked up and down its length, looking for something, anything, that Miranda might like to eat. Food steamed and sizzled and swam in juices and sauces hot and cold and rich and sweet, there were even sticks of chalk and strips of plastic, but all they did was make Miranda hungrier for what was not there, so hungry that she released her mother’s hand and held her own throat and gagged. Her hunger hardened her stomach, grew new teeth inside her.

  “Miranda you must eat something,” Lily said, sorrowfully. “What will you eat? Tell me and I’ll bring it to you.”

  Miranda shook her head. She didn’t know. No, that was wrong. She knew, but she couldn’t say it.

  Lily sat down at the table, opposite Jennifer and GrandAnna. Lily played with a padlock. She looked angelic, too pure to be plainly seen. Her combat trousers and vest top were badly crumpled, the way they usually got when she took night flights and spent the hours squirming in her plane seat. Her hair was a little longer.

  Miranda began to speak, but Lily raised a finger to her lips—there was a fifth in the room, someone listening. Miranda looked very carefully at each thing in the room, waiting for the fifth person to appear. She looked under the table—maybe the fifth person was there. They were not. As she straightened up, she met her GrandAnna’s gaze. Her GrandAnna’s eyes spoke to her; they said, Eat for me.

  “Eat for us,” Jennifer slurred through her padlock.

  Another bomb struck, with such force that Miranda fell. She lifted herself up on her hands and crawled into the corner, feeling as if she’d broken her shoulder on the floor. None of the others had even moved. They were used to this.

&
nbsp; “Will there be another one after this?” Miranda asked. No one answered her. “Oh my God,” she said. She was shaking already, in anticipation of the next drop. “Please don’t let there be any more.”

  “There’s a war on,” GrandAnna said, slowly, clearly, and with great severity.

  “It’s safe in here,” Lily added. “Us Silver girls together.” She sounded sarcastic, but looked sincere.

  Miranda’s fall had been cushioned by clothes. The clothes were familiar: jeans, a short-sleeved T-shirt, a hooded jacket, and a pair of trainers. The fifth person. Oh, she knew where he was; he was there, right beside her head. There were holes bored into the wall. She knew that they numbered ten when a finger inched out of each hole with a sluggishness that fascinated her. The way the fingers twitched, she got a sense that they weren’t attached to a body, only to each other, and that she was watching ruptured nerve endings in denial. The hands were brown. Jalil’s party trick hands, the hands he could turn in a full circle without putting stress on his wrist bone

  (he should have kept away from her)

  oh no oh no oh oh no oh

  Miranda knew that she had done this, in a period of inattention. It was not unlike watching someone else take her hand and guide it and the pen it held into putting down a perfect copy of her signature.

  More, Jennifer and GrandAnna said, but Lily came and ran a pitying hand over Miranda’s hair and her face as she cowered in the corner, blood sticking her clothes to her body. Lily understood, she understood everything. Lily gave Miranda a padlock. Miranda gratefully kissed its cold loop. Jennifer and GrandAnna moaned and beat the table, pushing dishes and jugs off its edges as Miranda climbed back up into the main house. Miranda passed the hallway mirror and she was clean again. She looked at her reflection and saw a cube instead, four stiff faces in one. She went outside and climbed back into the hammock. The sun rose and that made it morning.