White Is for Witching Read online

  Her father was in the deck chair beside the hammock, his notebook on his lap. He’d fallen asleep with his glasses on. He looked happy in his sleep. Miranda ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth—what can I taste, what can I taste, what can I Luc’s head drooped and, in raising it with a guilty jerk, he woke himself up. He smiled at her.

  Miranda was on the point of saying that she might need to go away again. Only she wasn’t sure what good it would do. Hadn’t it begun while she was away?

  “You should have made me get out of the hammock,” Miranda said.

  Luc shook his head. “You looked far too peaceful for me to interrupt.”

  Miranda laughed emptily. She asked, “What are you writing?”

  Luc took his glasses off and closed them back into their case. “A recipe book, I hope. Based around seasonality. Every other word seems to be ‘Lily’, or ‘my wife,’ or ‘the twins’ maman.’ ”

  “Father,” Miranda said. She could only lie there and look at him.

  “What if we sold the house?” Luc said. “What if I went back to food writing and we went back to London?”

  Miranda held her hand out to him, even though she had no chance of touching him from where she was.

  “I don’t mind. I’m sure Eliot is the same. We’ll do whatever you like,” she told him, not really believing that they would be allowed to leave. They had never lived in London, they had always lived in her GrandAnna’s house.

  “Miranda,” Luc said. “You look . . . so different, since . . . I don’t think you understand how different you look.”

  “I cut my hair and lost some weight—which I’ll put back on, really I will—that’s all.”

  Luc put his glasses on again and looked her over. He shook his head.

  “Something misgives me.”

  Miranda said nothing. What was there to say?

  “What’s your date of birth, daughter of mine?”

  “Father.”

  “Well?”

  “November 12th,” she said, and laughed. Her father did too.

  “And the year?” he asked.

  And the year, and the year, and the year. There was no answer anywhere. She tried not to panic. Four numbers came to her, but they were upside down and she couldn’t read them. She tried to count back from the year 2000. To do that successfully she would need to know how old she was, and she didn’t know. Rather than make a wrong guess, she said, “Father,” as scornfully as she could manage. He smiled.

  “But seriously, Miranda. What if we left? I would not even sell the place, just rent it or something.”

  Miranda waited for more, but there wasn’t any more.

  “We’ve been happy here,” she said, gently. “Moving here was a good thing. You’re not to be a Calvinist about it—I promise you’ll go to heaven. I’ll even put it down in writing if you’d like.”

  “I like you,” her father said, and got up to start seeing about breakfast orders.

  Miranda went to her psychomantium and turned it upside down looking for her passport. She couldn’t find it. She sat on the floor with her eyes closed and tried to recall the years before now. She tried to recall games, arguments, secrets, toys, trips, TV shows. Just like the night before she’d checked into the clinic, they had not happened. It was 11:00 AM in the place where Lily had died.

  Miranda knocked on Eliot’s door, and when he didn’t reply, she went into his room and took his passport out of the top drawer of his desk. He slept so heavily that she felt no particular need to move quietly. Nineteen eighty-two. November 12, 1982. In her room, Miranda wrote 1982 large on a sheet of paper and blu-tacked it to the wall above her mirror. She didn’t look into the mirror itself. She was becoming someone, it seemed. She had read somewhere that you only became a woman once your mother had died. But that wasn’t what worried her. She worried about becoming as perfect as the person shown to her on paper in Lily’s studio.

  •

  Dad packed all Lily’s things up one day in the middle of August. Miri knew what he was doing, and she let herself out of the house quietly and just disappeared. If I hadn’t caught Dad in the actual act of dragging bags full of her clothes over to the lift, no one would have said anything to him. I took a bag in each hand and asked him where he was taking it all. Suddenly there was the smell of rose attar all around us. I couldn’t keep my grip on the bags—the way they bulged—in my mind I saw Lily in them, in clean pieces. Put me back together and I’ll stand up. I nudged one of the bags with my foot. Soft. Just clothes.

  “They’re all going to charity,” Dad said. “Miranda won’t wear these things, use these things. It wouldn’t be good for her if she did. These things are being wasted here.” Something about the slow way he spoke made me think he hadn’t known what he was going to do with Lily’s things until he’d said it aloud. He walked past me and into the bedroom, brought out more bags, more boxes. I met him at the door and threw bags back into the room. One of them hit him, then sagged across the floor. Multicoloured scarves flowed out. Dad said: “Eliot. Eliot, I know. But it’s got to be.”

  I thought briefly of pulling the door shut and locking him in somehow (how?). I thought, Don’t take her away. “Just . . . don’t give her stuff away, Dad. Not now. Alright?”

  Dad opened his arms. The bare room seemed to settle around his shoulders like a cloak. It took me a moment to interpret the gesture as a request that I come across the room to him. I started to go, I really did, but in the time it took me to make a step he’d dropped his arms. He sat down on one of the boxes.

  “Listen,” he said. “I cannot endure that dream again.”

  “What dream,” I said.

  “The one where it’s dark, and the house gets warm, warmer. Then it’s hot and I’m all . . . dried out. I drink from the kitchen tap and go out into the garden to breathe. After a few moments I feel much better and I try to get back into the house, but my key won’t work. I walk around to the back door and the key for that doesn’t work either. The key breaks when I try to turn it in the lock, the handle breaks under my hand. It’s pathetic, really, but I walk around to the front of the house and start pleading. Let me in! I don’t know who I’m talking to. The house just stands there, dark, absolutely silent. I put a rock in my pocket and climb a tree in the garden, thinking I can open a window, and climb in. But I can’t even touch the windowsill—it gives off a strange, feathered static that bites me. Back on the ground I shout out, Lily. I shout out, Lily can you let me back in? A light goes on in the house. It goes on on this floor. And each time I dream this, I try to work out what room the light goes on in, as if that matters. But I just can’t work it out. It’s not mine, not yours, it’s not the light in the psychomantium. It’s not the bathroom light. It’s like there’s an extra window, or an extra room I haven’t seen before. Three figures come to the window. One is in the middle and has her arms around the other two. I can’t see them, just their silhouettes through the blind. They’re standing there watching, waiting for me to go away. They want me to go away. I know who they are; it’s Lily and Miranda. I don’t know who the other one is. But suddenly I’m glad that the blind is over the window, because I have this feeling that they look different, not the way I thought they did. I’m cold then, as cold as I was hot. Then I wake up.”

  I had nothing to say. I picked up a box and walked out to the lift with it. That’s what I did instead of telling him that I had had that dream too, that exact same dream, only I had been calling Miri. Sometimes our subconscious is so transparent it’s boring. I would have written that in my diary, but I’d stopped keeping one.

  •

  By the end of August, Eliot’s scarf was ready, and the fat dove-grey band of wool took pride of place on the mannequin’s neck. By then Miranda had moved the mannequin closer to her bed so that it didn’t seem so lonely anymore. Sade’s trips to the Immigration Removal Centre no longer included Miranda, who forgot even to be apologetic, enthralled as she was by her sewing machine, her courtier-like
hovering around a still white figure, her hands smoothing cloth, and her mouth full of pins. At one point Miranda became convinced that she had hurt the mannequin. She carefully checked the material she’d draped over the mannequin, and she found a pin embedded in the right shoulder where she’d pressed too hard. She didn’t say sorry aloud, but she was sorry.

  Later, Eliot dragged her down to the beach to swim, but she wasn’t strong enough, so he stayed on the sand with her and bought her ice cream. He mocked The Dover Post: “Remember how a guy hung himself at the Immigration Removal Centre months ago?”

  “Yes,” Miranda said.

  “No one wrote in or said anything about it—not one letter,” Eliot said. “I checked.”

  Miranda’s ice cream was melting onto her hand.

  “It’s an über-local paper,” she said, when Eliot wouldn’t let her get away with not responding. “The upstanding citizens probably saved their letters for The Times or something.”

  “Hm,” said Eliot. “There were letters from people complaining about misanthropic parking attendants.”

  A boy who was building a sandcastle nearby looked over at them. Miranda pointed at his handiwork and held her head as if the sandcastle had given her a headache of admiration.

  Gruffly, the boy called out: “You can kick it over if you like.”

  “You are very kind,” Miranda said, and stayed where she was.

  “Can I kick it over?” Eliot asked. The boy shook his head. His eyes were almost the same grey as theirs.

  •

  They opened each other’s envelopes on results day, and Miranda felt that the rows of numbers and percentages that added up to three perfect A’s beneath Eliot’s name belonged to her. She smiled and nodded at them, as if the panic of the momentarily misplaced lucky Biro was hers, as if the five-minute amnesia regarding Gladstone and Disraeli was hers. Eliot ripped Miranda’s envelope open so hurriedly that a corner of the paper inside fell off. He cast a glance over the page, seemed to make some quick calculations, then whooped and lifted her off her feet. Both their grades got tattered in the crush between them—Eliot spun her round with her results envelope fanned out against her back.

  “Fuck you Cambridge fuck you Cambridge fuck you,” he chanted.

  Eliot and Miranda walked out of school with their arms around each other. They passed Jalil, standing by the results board and running a pensive finger down the list of names. Seeing him she felt her relief in her chest, as strong as if she had just won an impossible race, or a bet.

  Tijana was nearby, with her mother. Tijana’s mother was radiant with smiles, but Tijana’s eyes were red and her wrists stuck out of her black sleeves with alarming scrawniness.

  •

  September ended. The night before Eliot was due to leave, Miranda was so cold in her bed that she knew she couldn’t survive it and knocked on the wall between her and Eliot’s rooms. With minimal grumbling, he came and climbed into bed with her and let her lie with her head on his breastbone, his arms around her a blanket beneath the blanket. She tried to tell him she would miss him, but he said: “I’m asleep, actually.”

  The next morning, his preparations were simple. He had one suitcase. He slung his satchel across his body, stuck his hands in his pockets, and he was ready to leave. Sade seemed anxious. She didn’t say it, but she was. Luc patted her arm. “Only two guests booked in, and we’re away for four hours, four and a half max. You and those silver shoes can handle anything.”

  Sade smiled, but said nothing. She appeared to be conserving energy.

  All the way to the airport, Miranda and Eliot could not stop looking at each other. Luc let them sit in the back together and managed not to mention that he felt like a taxi driver. Miranda and Eliot slid low into their seats and considered each other completely. In November, Miranda and Eliot would be eighteen, and they would be apart. At Departures, Miranda put Eliot’s scarf around his neck.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  She took Luc’s hand and walked away quickly.

  The next day Miranda’s overcoat was ready. She could barely believe that such a simple-looking coat could take so much work, so much staring at rumpled sewing-machine tracks on cloth, wondering what had gone wrong, wondering why the needle had stabbed that place instead of this. It looked so fine on

  the mannequin

  proved very useful for me when Miranda, Luc and Eliot left for the airport. Especially as I did not have much time. I could not, for example, use the looking people. Things progress quite slowly with them. And Luc’s precision meant that when he said four hours he would most likely be away for a little less than that, even. It was very unlikely that he would be gone for more. Besides, the key thing was to have everything as it was, or almost as it was, by the time Miranda returned. I allowed three hours and forty-three minutes to pass without incident. I was confident. The forty-fourth minute before the fourth hour, began in Eliot’s room.

  Eliot had left his room painfully tidy, chair fitted into desk like a puzzle, his bed made (his bed made!), excess clothes folded into each drawer. But he had left his door open, trusting his sister to lock up after him. He had left his window open. His window is so close to some of the trees that, if the branches were safe, which they are not, he could climb out of his window and crawl straight along a branch. An apple fell in through Eliot’s window. It was an all-season apple. I can make them grow. Do you know the all-season apples? They have a strange, dual colouring. If you pitied Snow White, then you know. One side of such an apple is always coma-white, and the other side is the waxiest red. The apple bounced and rolled across Eliot’s floor, only a little bruised. It made a smooth track to the door of Miranda’s room, where it stopped, because Miranda’s door was closed.

  A moment of utter silence throughout me, then the mannequin opened the door. It bent and picked the apple up. I very much enjoy the way that mannequin moves—it rejoices in its limbs, rearranging itself quickly and expertly, ending each sequence of movement with a flourish. It stood holding the apple high, offering it to no one, the empty hand slanted towards the full one, hips jutting jauntily. Then the mannequin skipped downstairs. It is not easy to explain how the mannequin skipped. Just that it was too fast for plastic, too slow for fabric. It sort of rippled. It met the African housekeeper in the garden, where she was quietly knitting. The woman saw the mannequin out of the corner of her eye. She said, “Miranda . . .?”

  When she saw what it was, she was so afraid that she became stupid and babbled senselessly. The mannequin stood over her, displaying its apple like a child proud of its prize. It had no lips, so it said nothing to her. The African woman looked at the apple and

  (this had not at all been accounted for)

  her heart stopped beating. It was some sort of trick, for I was certain that the woman was still alive. For one, she continued to blink. There was a dark, lean intelligence in her eyes, something that stirred yet did not know itself. Stillness, stillness. The mannequin bent over her and rearranged the white wool on her lap, like a solicitous waiter preparing her for her meal. It seesawed forward so that its body was halved, seized her chin, opened her mouth with its fingers and pressed the white side of the apple, the bad side, against her mouth.

  She bit at the white side—she bit! In my distraction I lost hold of the other black guests, the couple on the second floor who I had kept in their bed the past three days, curved around the bed like fitted sheets with their faces crusting over. The African with the silent chest chewed, swallowed and opened her mouth for more, while the couple picked up their cases and fled, leaving money on the hallway desk as payment for their stay. Then, precise as ever, Luc Dufresne’s car pulled up outside, the car with my Miranda inside it, and there was nothing more to be done at that time.

  The next day, the frock coat was the last thing Miranda took on her way out of her room; she pulled it off the mannequin, put it on and left for Cambridge.

  PART TWO

  *

  and curiouser

/>   On the first day of Freshers Week the sunlight turned the stone buildings silver. Dad got so baffled by the one-way system that we ended up parking, walking up to my college and borrowing a luggage trolley from a porter to wheel my suitcases up to my room. Mum kept dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, but when I asked her what she was sniffling about she said, “Ore, I’m fine.” Each college we passed stood as taut and strong as a flexed arm and had its flag flying from a pennant. Both road and pavement were full of people on foot, laughing and calling out to each other. I thought it could be Camelot, or Lyonesse. I thought, I can’t live here. I was relieved when it finally got dark and the town became more anonymous. By then people had started sharing their A-level results, and when they had exhausted that topic, they started on their GCSEs. You could tell who’d gotten 5 A’s at A level because they’d ask the question, yet hold out on contributing their own answer until the last possible moment.

  Everyone seemed upbeat, except for Tijana. I discovered her at matriculation dinner. She was sullen until tricked into smiling. Her accent was gentle, she had long, dark hair and the high forehead of a romantic heroine. She smelt of some sweet fruit, or a jam. She had put her arms through only one of the two pairs of slits in her college gown, but I decided not to offer her any advice about that—she probably knew already, also she looked very dignified sitting there with these enormous black sleeves that were too important for food. She drank her wine and she listened patiently to the rules of a game that a mockney guy from the year above us explained to her.

  The game was to flip penny coins into each other’s wineglasses. If you found a penny in your wine, then you had to drain the glass in one go. I listened in on what the guy was saying to Tijana, and I looked up and down the table (boys outnumbered girls by about three to one) and thought it was a cheap trick for getting girls drunk. But there was more. The guy explained that the rules were the same if a penny piece was dropped onto your dinner plate—if you were “up for it” then you ate the food on it as quickly as you could, and with your hands behind your back. Tijana’s face was expressionless as she listened. Once he had finished explaining about the game, the guy dropped a penny into Tijana’s glass. She didn’t even wait half a second. She picked up her dessertspoon, fished out the penny and went to drench the guy in wine. I disliked his chat so much that I almost let her do it, but then a sense of responsibility kicked in. I took her glass from her and put it down on the table. “You don’t have to play,” I said, at the same time as the guy, who drew back from her (he was already quite drunk, so he nearly fell off his seat) and said, “Calm down, it’s just a bit of fun.”