White Is for Witching Read online

  Nobody knew what to say to Luc. His children were closest to knowing, but Miranda was mad and when she saw him those first few weeks after Lily’s death, she wasn’t sure who he was. Eliot noticed Luc more, as an eye does when something is removed from a picture and the image is reduced to its flaw, the line where the whole is disrupted.

  I find Luc interesting. He really has no idea what to do now, and because he is not mine I don’t care about him. I do, however, take great delight in the power of a push, a false burst of light at the bottom of a cliff, just one little encouragement to the end. Sometimes it seems too easy to toy with him. Other times . . . I don’t know. But he is always so close by that it doesn’t matter so much.

  •

  My father is very brief. All in the most likeable manner possible—he gets this look of discomfort whenever someone tries to discuss something with him at length. He looks as if he would very much like to spare you the effort. He used to go through horrors with Miri on the subject of her day at school, his replies cautious and neutral in case he appeared to be disapproving of something that was a good thing. Miri would chatter and chatter about our teacher having been unfair or the disappearance of her pencils. “Ah,” Dad would say, and, “Right.” And, “Really?”

  If I was going on a trip or something it was a simple matter of handing him a letter or an itinerary and saying, “Dad, it’s £300,” or whatever it was. He’d scan the paper and say, “Fine,” or he’d say, “Here’s the thing; can’t afford that this term. Are you now resentful?”

  Are you now resentful is always a genuine question from him. We never, ever said yes. It was my dad’s idea to open Lily’s house as a bedand-breakfast. Lily’s grandma, our GrandAnna, had raised Lily herself, and when she died she left Lily the house in Dover. I heard my Dad on the phone to someone about it: “Seven bedrooms, four bathrooms and God’s own 1940s kitchen . . .”

  Lily wanted to put the Dover house up to let and use the money to pay the rent on our flat in London, which, Dad said, made no sense at all. But: “Why on earth would I want to live in Dover again? I spent my childhood in a state of inertia.”

  Dad spent about six months working on Lily. The facts, figures and written proposals he’d prepared for the bank left her completely unmoved; she always tried to ignore things she didn’t understand rather than be intimidated by them. But apparently it was the bed linen that changed her mind. Cool blue silk and cotton patchwork. When Dad laid the stitched pillowcase and duvet out for her on the sofa, the colours reminded her of something she’d never seen. She said to us, “Imagine everyone in the house—even people we don’t know—all wrapped up safe in blue, like fishes. What fun . . .”

  Miri and I were ten; Dad spent some time with a big map, planning a scenic route, and then he drove the moving van himself. Miri and I fidgeted at first, then settled when we saw cliffs bruising the skyline and smelt birds and wet salt on the air.

  Our new house had two big brown grids of windows with a row of brick in between each grid. No windows for the attic. From the outside the windows didn’t look as if they could be opened, they didn’t look as if they were there to let air or light in, they were funny square eyes, friendly, tired. The roof was a solid triangle with a fat rectangular chimney behind it. Lily bounced out of the van first and I scrambled out of the other side and crooked my arm so as to escort her to the door. The house is raised from the road and laid along the top of a brick staircase, surrounded by thick hedge with pink flowers fighting through it. “Careful on the steps,” Lily said. The steps leading up to the house bulge with fist-sized lumps of grey-white flint, each piece a knife to cut your knee open should you slip. Opposite our house there is a churchyard, a low mound of green divided into two. The graves beneath it are unmarked. Lily took my arm and held Miri’s hand and when we got up to the front door she rubbed the crescent moon–shaped door knocker and laughed a little bit and said, “Hello, hello again.”

  The first thing Lily showed us inside was the dusty marble fireplace. It was so big that Miri could crawl into the place where the wood was supposed to sit. She tried to make crackling, fire-like noises (when we were ten I always knew the meaning of the sounds she made, even when they were unsuccessful)

  but ended up choking on a puff of dust that bolted down the chimney. Next Lily showed us the little ration-book larder behind the kitchen; the shelves were wonky and the room had a floor so crazily checked that none of us could walk in a straight line in there. I remember how brilliant I thought it all was; there was nothing for it but to jump in the air and yell and kick and make kung-fu noises.

  Miri and I conferred and decided that we liked the tallness of the house, the way the walls shoot up and up with the certainty of stone, “Like we’re in a castle,” Miri put it. We liked the steep, winding staircase with the gnarled banister. We especially liked the ramshackle lift and the way you could see its working through a hole worn into the bottom in the back left corner. We liked that the passageways on each floor were wide enough for the two of us to stand beside each other with our arms and legs spread, touching but not touching. I climbed one of the apple trees and surveyed the garden, the patches of wild flowers that crumpled in the shade, the Andersen shelter half-hidden by red camellia shrubs. I was well pleased. “Wicked house,” I said. “Magic,” said Miri, from somewhere below.

  We thought it would be hard to make friends because of the way people came out and stared at us in the moving van as it passed through the streets. But Miri is good at making friends, and I am good at tagging along on expeditions and acting as if the whole thing was my idea in the first place. Miri was very pleased with Martin Jones’s curly hair; the boy’s head was like a sheep’s. He became our first friend in the area and he brought most of the rest.

  Actually, when we were sixteen Miri gave me the task of telling Martin that he didn’t stand a chance with her. Miri called me into her room, fixed me with a look of dread and whispered, “He asked me out and now I just can’t look at him anymore.” I refused point-blank to be her messenger or to have anything to do with any of it, but she said, “Then I’ll write him a letter.” I cringed and said, “Don’t do that.”

  Martin and a couple of others came around to smoke and watch what promised to be “strange and unusual porn.” Women with horses, women with lizards, women with women plus horses and lizards. I pretended to be leaner than I was and at one point mentioned aloud one of the “actor’s” resemblance to Miri’s boyfriend. The others groaned.

  “What the fuck—”

  “Er, no—”

  “Too gay, Silver.”

  Martin didn’t say anything himself, but I knew that he was gutted and I didn’t let him pay for his share of the weed; he put a note down and when he wasn’t looking I screwed it up and threw it into his coat pocket with a sense of relief so huge it was disabling. I wrote something in my diary about it a few days later, about our teenage years being a realm of the emotionally baroque. I wasn’t even lean when I wrote that.

  So Martin was the first friend, but the other kids he brought liked the house too.

  For a few months after we moved in it was just Lily, Miri, Dad and me in the house, no guests. Decorating happened, the kitchen got updated; Lily went away to Mexico and came back with a pair of shrivelled corn-husk dolls that she put on a shelf in her studio when Miri and I rejected them. During that time there was no better place in the neighbourhood for hide-and-seek, or for Robin Hood versus Sheriff of Nottingham swordstick fighting in the back garden. There was no better place to play Hitler Resistance Force, a game I made up so I could be Churchill. My first kiss was in the Andersen shelter, more a percussion of heads, faces, mouths than anything else. We were thirteen. Emma’s the sort of girl who likes boys who have unpredictable moods and write poetry and imagine things, so I played up to that. We were in the shelter because she was supposed to be a Nazi double agent giving me secret information. For some reason whilst kissing her my main preoccupation was not hurting her or bruis
ing her. I tried not to hold her too hard. Her hair and skin were so soft.

  There is another shelter inside the house. It is beneath the sitting room with the fireplace; it is under a trapdoor set in the floor. The room is dim and long and deep; a room for sleeping in. Sleeping and not much else. I tried to revise for exams in there and ended up curled up on my side on the floor, snoring.

  What took getting used to in Dover were the gulls and their croaky sobs, and the sense of climbing upstairs when walking on some roads and downstairs when walking on others. The house, the garden, moving. The whole thing was like a dream; for weeks Miri and I couldn’t believe it and wandered around the place with pangs in our stomachs, pre-emptive homesickness ready for the time when Dad and Lily would announce it was only a holiday and it was time to leave. Aside from our great-grandmother dying, we knew that it was Dad that had made it all happen, and we revered him as a wizard.

  Miri’s room was darker than mine, even before she took to keeping her curtains drawn at all times and Lily started calling her room “the psychomantium.” That first day, Miri found something on the floor of that room she’d picked as hers. I didn’t see what it was, but it was very small, and I thought that it must have cut her or something because just after she dropped it into her pocket she sucked thoughtfully at her finger. It took me about an hour of my best teasing and insults to get the secret out of her; finally she sighed and showed me. It was a ball of chalk.

  •

  Dad had been a waiter, then a trainee chef, then a food critic, and each job had bored him to the point of existential crisis. This thing with the house was plan B. Or C, or D or X. Without the guests and the maintenance and the folders of forms and bills, Dad would just sit. It’s almost as if Lily knew, years and years in advance, that she was leaving us. As if she was gifting him something to be later, after her. That’s not true, and it’s not possible, but . . . the way she indulged him so completely. She gave him her house; Lily and Miri and I just lived in it. The capital man is the sum of his possessions.

  When Lily died, and here I am telling it exactly as it was, Dad got even more control of the house. Lily’s dying meant he didn’t have to ask anyone about anything. There was no longer anyone who needed convincing that it was absolutely necessary to replace the old lift shaft; he just had it replaced, three months after the funeral. He dropped me off at the clinic and said to me, “I can’t stay long with you and Miri.” At that time Miri would only speak to me, and I knew it bothered him the way Miri sat back in her chair and looked at him without saying anything, with that empty smile on her lips. But the other reason Dad couldn’t stay was that he had to get back and keep an eye on the work on the lift.

  Without saying a word I kept daring him. Fall apart, fall apart. If I could have seen a button to press, I would have. Miri and I don’t need you to be strong, we need you to crack a little now.

  PICA

  is a medical term for a particular kind of disordered eating. It’s an appetite for non-food items, things that don’t nourish. The word itself is pronounced pie-kah, a word like a song about a bird and food. Miri said it tiredly to herself and to me. “Pie-kah, pie-kah, I’ve got pie-kah.” Lily told all our teachers at primary school and all the dinner ladies knew. When we went to secondary school Lily wrote it down on a form as a special concern. Pie-kah meant that Miri counted bites of food and smiled with breathless relief when she had met her quota. Counting bites was Lily’s idea, and Miri accepted it gladly. “That’s a good idea,” she said, nodding, nodding. Whenever Miri talked about her pica with Lily she seemed so grown up about it, a shaky balance of humility and dignity. Dad was relieved that Miri didn’t mean to be rebellious. I might remember Miri’s special pastries as more elaborate than they really were, but Dad made some astonishing things for her. Flaky cones smothered in honey and coconut and chocolate and whatever else he could think of. He did a lot of soft foods, too, soups, and jellies with (eye) balls of peeled fruit staring out of them. What Miri did was, she crammed chalk into her mouth under her covers. She hid the packaging at the bottom of her bag and threw it away when we got to school. But then there’d be cramps that twisted her body, pushed her off her seat and lay her on the floor, helplessly pedalling her legs. Once, as if she knew that I was thinking of sampling her chalk to see what the big wow was, she smiled sweetly, sadly, patronisingly and said to me, “Don’t start, you’ll get stuck.”

  •

  It runs in the family. Anna Good had it in 1938; a year before she became Anna Silver. She ruined her work stockings and skirt with crouching in the mud searching for acorn husks that would splinter down her throat. She ate leaves by the handful and chipped her teeth on the pebbles she scooped out of the brown water when she went walking on the promenade. The house is Andrew’s, she told herself; I have no part in it.

  One evening she pattered around inside me, sipping something strong that wedged colour into her cheeks, and she dragged all my windows open, putting her glass down to struggle with the stiffer latches. I cried and cried for an hour or so, unable to bear the sound of my voice, so shrill and pleading, but unable to stop the will of the wind wheeling through me, cold in my insides. That was the first and last time I’ve heard my own voice. I suppose I am frightening. But Anna Good couldn’t hear me. When she closed me up again it was only because she was too cold. Most nights she went with the moon, and when it was round she stayed in my biggest bedroom and wouldn’t answer the thing that asked her to let it out

  (let you out from where?

  let me out from the small, the hot, the take me out of the fire i am ready i am hard like the stones you ate, bitter like those husks)

  the moonlight striped her, marked out places where the whispering thing would slip through and she would unfold. When Andrew went to war the sirens shrieked at night and the sky was full of squat balloons that flamed and ate bombs and would not move with the breeze, these balloons and nothing else, not even stars.

  Anna Good you are long gone now, except when I resurrect you to play in my puppet show, but you forgive since when I make you appear it is not really you, and besides you know that my reasons are sound. Anna Good it was not your pica that made you into a witch. I will tell you the truth because you are no trouble to me at all. Indeed you are a mother of mine, you gave me a kind of life, mine, the kind of alive that I am.

  Anna Good there was another woman, long before you, but related. This woman was thought an animal. Her way was to slash at her flesh with the blind, frenzied concentration that a starved person might use to get at food that is buried. Her way was to drink off her blood, then bite and suck at the bobbled stubs of her meat. Her appetite was only for herself. This woman was deemed mad and then turned out and after that she was not spoken of. I do not know the year, or even how I know this.

  But Miranda . . . you are listening too.

  Miranda.

  Look at me.

  Will you not?

  It is useful, instructive, comforting to know that you are not alone in your history.

  So I have done you good

  and now,

  some harm.

  WHEN MIRANDA

  finally discharged herself from the clinic, Eliot and her father came to collect her. They looked at her strangely. She didn’t know what it could be; she was more normal then she had been in months. She sat in the back of the car and looked very seriously at her suitcase while her brother and father looked at her, looked away, looked at her again. She passed a hand over her hair, which lay meek and wispy against her neck. Her hair had been bobbed out of necessity at first. Miranda had been admitted to the clinic because one morning Eliot had found her wordless and thoughtful. It had been a long night, a perfect full moon tugging the sky around it into clumsy wrinkles. Miranda had been bleeding slightly from the scalp and her wrists were bound together with extreme dexterity and thin braids of her own hair.

  It had been six months since then but her hair had been kept short. She didn’t know why, she
couldn’t remember having expressed a preference. There was much that she was unable to remember. Especially unclear were the days immediately after she and Eliot had had the news of Lily’s death. She remembered going into school and everyone being very sorry for her loss, but Eliot said that he had gone to school and she had stayed at home. The incident with the hair was completely lost; it seemed that when she’d left herself she’d left completely and it was not worth trying to fetch the images back, pointless trying to identify what exactly it was that had made her snap.

  The two doctors who had been “working with” her at the clinic had mistook her resignation for stubbornness and constantly hovered on the edge of pressing her to remember. She objected mildly, with a sense of wasting her father’s money. The clinic was a private clinic. Her room at the clinic had its own phone line and plush curtains and in the common room people checked their e-mail and played snooker. She had agreed to be admitted to an adolescent psychiatric unit because no-one at home knew how to help her feel comfortable.

  She had had such a strong feeling that she needed to talk to someone who would tell her some secret that would make everything alright. She had been unable to think who it was. She had sat awake long hours downstairs, looking into the empty white arch of the fireplace, her hands on her rib cage. Who was it that needed to talk to her, that she needed to talk to? She had gone through lists of people it could be. She could only think of people that it couldn’t be. It wasn’t Lily, it wasn’t her father, it wasn’t Eliot, it wasn’t any of the poets whose words stuck spikes in her, not even Rumi. It wasn’t God. She did not think it was someone who was alive. She did not think it was anyone who existed, this messenger. So, the morning after the bad night she went with her father to see a doctor, a different doctor from the one who had, through no fault of his own, been unable to help her with her pica. She had signed a form, her name near her father’s, and admitted herself to the clinic.