White Is for Witching Read online

  Whenever she tried to think about the long night before the bad morning on which Eliot had found her, nothing came to mind. The sedatives had done their work and she’d gone away and now she was coming home again. Exactly as if she’d been put in an envelope and posted abroad, then returned to sender. Even if alive the package doesn’t, can’t, note events, only the sensation of travel. All Miranda had been left with was a suspicion that she had spent much of her first night at the clinic clapping. She thought there might have been a bout of bringing her hands together over and over after the lights in the room went out, her body held in frightened rigidity because if she dared stop clapping then a bad thing would come.

  She hadn’t told Eliot about it when he came to visit; instead she had taken to asking him whether he thought it would rain. He had said yes every time.

  Eliot was wearing his reading glasses now; he’d climbed into the car with a hardback about the history of doubt. The way he held it on his lap as their father drove, she could tell he was unsure of the ensuing protocol; no one was saying anything, so there was no reason for him not to continue reading. But at the same time, if he started reading it would be a confrontational act somehow. His pockets weren’t big enough to put the book out of sight, either. Eventually he pushed his glasses up to the top of his head and looked out of the window. To make conversation, Miranda said, “Why are you reading that book? Are you in doubt about something?”

  Eliot yawned, as he did when uncomfortable. “I told Cambridge that I’d read it and now I’ve got to make it true.”

  She said, “You’re applying to Cambridge?”

  Uncertainty worked his mouth. She thought she had wobbled in her seat, then realised she hadn’t moved at all; the thought don’t go had flashed through her like a swarm of pins. Eliot was one of those boys that made girls go quiet. He was so beautiful that it seemed certain he was arrogant or insensitive or stupid. He’d taken Luc’s contrast of fair skin and dark hair and he’d taken Lily’s curls and lively wide-set eyes. His bone structure was scary and unnatural and flawless. Besides that he was her knight.

  The first week Miranda and Eliot had moved to Dover, they’d played King Arthur’s Court with Martin, Emma and Emma’s older brother, Mark. Martin was Merlin, Miranda was Morgan La Fay, Emma was Nimue, the Damosel of the Lake, and Mark was King Arthur. Eliot said he didn’t care which knight he was—they were all badasses. He’d pulled the green ribbon down through Miranda’s ponytail, tied it around his sleeve and he’d said to her, “I’m your knight.” Miranda pushed him. He took a single step back and scowled. Miranda said loudly, “I’m Morgan La Fay—I’ve got spells and I can stick up for myself.”

  He’d said, “I know, but just in case.” Eliot at ten was slight and earnest, his face all eyes. He’d been quick to feel and quick to anger, and when he was angry he would smile very deliberately and with incredible sweetness before walking away. He didn’t care that the others heard what he said and sniggered, but Miranda cared. That’s why she’d thought, but hadn’t said, I’m your knight too.

  Now she looked at him, at the awkward length of him, so carefully arranged to fit the space in the front of the car. The sleeves of his jumper and coat were rolled up to his elbows and he was goose-bumping under the cold. He would get into Cambridge, of course he would go.

  She said plaintively, “Is it too late to apply?”

  She felt Luc and Eliot not looking at each other.

  “I didn’t know you even wanted to go there. If you want you can apply next year,” Luc offered.

  Miranda waited, then said, “But what will I do for a whole year?”

  Neither of them answered her. She supposed the answer was, Get better. The thought of a slow and measured crawl back to health filled her with black sand. She said, “I want to try.”

  Eliot twisted around in his seat. “Look Miri, it’s not . . . you can’t just . . . you need to really think hard about it. There are all these different colleges and you’ve got to pick a college, a course, everything.”

  Miranda spun the combination locks of her suitcase. “Well, what course are you applying to? What college are you applying to?” She looked at him and waited, she refused to pick up the thread of any other conversation.

  Luc didn’t make a sound, but he looked into the rearview mirror and she saw the groan on his face. Eliot breathed out through his nostrils. His glance was disbelieving, sent her way to check that she was serious. “What the fuck,” he said. Finally, in tones of outrage, he told her. Miranda noted the name of the college on the back of her hand so she wouldn’t forget. Eliot said something about her having to write a personal statement. Suddenly she wanted to make him angrier; it took everything she had to stay quiet and not ask him to help her write her application.

  Eliot passed her a newspaper, The Dover Post, rolled up. It took her a second to get her eyes focused, then she read of the stabbing of the fourth Kosovan refugee in three weeks. Three had died in hospital. Her gaze could only touch the page very lightly before it skittered away. She said, “Someone is going around stabbing these people?” She didn’t want to say “refugees.” She didn’t want to say “Kosovans.” She didn’t know why. Or maybe it seemed feeble somehow, like making a list of things that were a shame, grouped in order of quantity—shame number seventy-three (73): loss of four (4) Kosovans.

  The main picture was of a boy a little older than her. He was wearing a denim jacket that looked too snug across his shoulders. His eyes were nervous blurs. He was dead. His face was so smooth; he was old enough to shave but young enough to still be excited about shaving and thus meticulous.

  She was not sure how to pronounce his name, not even in her head would the sound make any sense. She had to look away to stop herself from making up more stories about him. Also because from the page he said, Look away, look away from me, what can you do, nothing so don’t. The article commented on the silence of the local refugee community. No one was naming names, or even suggesting any.

  Eliot told Miranda that it was a sign of the community closing to protect its own. “It’s refugees killing other refugees, man. I know you can’t believe it, I don’t want to believe it either, but, you know what . . . it’s far too simplistic to assume that just because they’re escaping similar troubles and are from the same geographic location, that it’s all love and harmony when they get over here. There are a bunch of differences between these people that precede their status in this country. Some of them really hate each other. I’ve seen kids openly spit at each other because of differences in language and what speaking a certain language means.”

  Miranda slumped in her seat. What Eliot was saying made sense but it didn’t. There was an untruth to it that made her tired. “Like, some Armenians who speak only Armenian consider Armenians who speak Turkish to be Turks and synonymous with the very oppression that exiled them—”

  Luc made a face.

  “You sound like you’re quoting from some sort of textbook. Far too general. Besides, why would you suddenly recover a sense of solidarity and try to protect a killer when the police come around?”

  “Because they’re even more hostile to the police than they are to each other? Because the truth is too good for the police? Because the police are a symbol of the country that’s fucking them over and assigning them marginal status?” Eliot suggested.

  Luc shook his head. “One moment, Eliot. Put the sociological exercise aside. Since we’re talking about family here. Family. And say you knew who had hurt someone in your family and you also knew that the police have the power to stop and punish it. You really wouldn’t say anything?”

  Miranda shook her head, then nodded, unsure which movement was appropriate. She handed the newspaper back to Eliot and went back to spinning combinations in her suitcase lock. Eliot and Luc continued to argue, Luc trying hard to sound amiable, Eliot trying hard to sound impassioned.

  The car stopped at a traffic light, the last one before home. There were some girls sitting on the
bicycle railings outside the corner shop, chewing gum, kicking out at each other, talking and squealing. Miranda couldn’t hear their hoop earrings jangling from where she was, but she felt the vibrations. These girls were Kosovan girls; when they weren’t together they were impassive, tough, their hair gelled into stiff fans with curls slicked down over their foreheads. You saw them in the supermarket holding doubled up carrier bags open, ready to fill with shopping, standing and gazing inscrutably into middle distance while their mothers fumbled through the folds of their big shawls, looking for food vouchers to pay with. One of these girls was in Miranda’s English literature class, and her voice, soft and uncertain, belied her eyes. As the car moved past, one of the girls in the group bounced her gaze off Miranda’s, then looked again, harder. She climbed down off the railings and strode over to the roadside with two other girls behind her. They were mouthing and pointing at her. Miranda didn’t know what to do, so she closed her eyes. Eliot was quiet and Luc whistled and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. A jolt as the traffic light changed. She opened her eyes and saw the girls, a little behind, running. Luc said, “Are those girls running after us?”

  Miranda couldn’t think what they wanted with her, those girls. She blurted, “Drive faster—”

  Eliot laughed. “It’s alright,” he said. “They’ve given up.”

  The girls had stopped and were a street behind, each of them bent over, holding their sides. The girl who had first noticed her was still looking, though. Miranda couldn’t see her expression.

  She had thought that coming home would hurt, but actually she was fine. There were lights shining from the house windows that didn’t have their curtains drawn, harsh yellow scattered between the top and bottom floors, two on top and three on the bottom, like a smile.

  Azwer, the gardener, and Ezma, the housekeeper, came to meet Miranda at the door; their foreheads were wrinkled and their eyes were watering with emotion. Ezma squeezed Miranda’s hands and Azwer said, “Good, it’s good.” What was good; the quality of the repair that had been done at the clinic?

  Ezma turned her attention back to a woman who was writing a cheque against the telephone table. The woman’s hair was full of shiny star-shaped hair clips. She was an American. She bit on the end of her pen and said dreamily, “You should grow blueberries out in the back. I think blueberries bless a place, and are great in pie. If you crush oyster shells and spread them on the soil, it’ll make the earth much richer and better for growing things in.”

  Ezma smiled at the woman. “We don’t serve oysters,” she said.

  Miranda took her suitcase up in the lift, feeling like a guest. She missed being able to see to the bottom of the shaft, the mysterious dustiness of it. She went into her room and there was a stack of cards on her bed, cards filled with hugs and kisses from girls at school. She wondered what Eliot had told them, and whether it was worth returning to school with an assumed limp and only the vaguest explanation of her absence: something about having fallen out of one of the trees at the back and having broken her whole body, “You know . . . just everything.”

  Miranda’s room smelt of musty petals, and she could hear Eliot avoiding her, helping Azwer to shovel snow outside. The dull click of spades on gravelled ice.

  In a psychomantium glass topples darkness. Things appear as they really are, people appear as they really are. Visions are called from a point inside the mirror, from a point inside the mind.

  Miranda looked in.

  She looked with the most particular care and she saw Lily Silver standing there in her room, smiling sadly.

  It took half a minute, too long a terror, to realise that she was only looking at herself. Wasn’t she? It was the haircut and the fact that she had grown thinner and her eyes had grown bigger in her head. She had been eating exactly what she liked, and she didn’t like the usual things.

  Still, Lily seemed to gaze and gaze at her and say, Oh, Miri. You fell asleep. How could you?

  Miranda turned away from the mirror. “I don’t like this blame culture,” she whispered. “I don’t like it at all.”

  She checked Lily’s watch. It was midnight in Haiti. The ticking of the watch grew very loud; she wished it would not tick so loudly. She fumbled across the room to put on a CD, but she had taken it out and put it back in, pressed play three times before she realised there was nothing wrong with it, it played every time she pressed the button. There was Ella Fitzgerald, whispering a tisket a tasket. She gritted her teeth. She needed the sound of the watch stopped; she couldn’t hear the music for the sound of the watch. She knelt on the floor and slammed her wrist against it.

  Tick, tick

  (break it break it)

  tick, tick

  It was the pain that made her realise what she was doing. She undid the watch clasp, inspected it for damage, then put it on the table and rubbed her swollen wrist. Then she felt for her pills, cursing her hand for trembling so much. She put her steady hand over her trembling hand, to no effect. She lay down and didn’t want to shut her eyes. With the curtains drawn it could almost be night. But she heard someone talking to Luc downstairs, she heard the clatter of cutlery, she heard the whir of

  the lift

  broke down in the night. No one knew what time. The timing became important when Azwer and Ezma couldn’t find their older daughter in the morning.

  Luc had had the attic converted into two large, low rooms. Azwer and Ezma slept in one, while Deme and her little sister, Suryaz, slept in a double bed in the second room. Deme was ten and Suryaz was seven. The two of them went about with their hands joined, smiling and full of secrets so simple that they were given up if asked after. Deme and Suryaz hopped more than they walked; it was always as if they had just left the site of some mirth particular to them. They babbled in prettily accented voices. The combination of their near-identical manes of curly hair and their mother’s tendency to zip them into similarly patterned dresses meant that Suryaz had an air of having been formed without detail. Deme was the oldest, so you looked at her first.

  Both girls admitted that they had spent the day before playing around with the lift, pressing buttons for three floors all at once, holding the Door Open button until the lift zinged with confusion. That was reason enough for the lift to later get confused and try to travel unbidden from first floor to second, grinding to a halt between the two. But why was Deme standing in the corner of the lift when Luc, Azwer and the technician pried the doors open? She was standing, not sitting or kneeling. They found her in the back left corner, where there once had been a hole in the floor, and she was standing on tiptoe, so close to the Alarm button, looking at it in fact, her eyes wide as if all night she had been sinking and all night a stubborn thing in her had kept her on her feet.

  “I tucked her into bed with Suryaz,” Ezma kept repeating. “I did, didn’t I,” she said to Suryaz, who looked and looked and then shrugged. Ezma hissed at her, but Suryaz would say nothing. At first Deme wouldn’t talk either, then when Ezma shouted at her, Deme spat a large piece of Suryaz’s Lego out into her hand and tried her best to answer the questions that everyone levelled at her, even Eliot, who tugged her ponytail and teased her about her “midnight journey.” The only reply Deme ventured was that she didn’t know.

  “Why did you get into the lift so late, when everyone was sleeping?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Deme, where is your sense? Why didn’t you just ring the alarm?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Miranda asked, “Deme are you alright?”

  Deme and Suryaz leant on each other and Suryaz said, “Thank you, she is alright.”

  Miranda, Luc and Eliot slept on the third floor; above the guests but below the housekeepers. Miranda told Eliot: “I heard someone crying last night. But I thought I was just remembering the clinic.”

  Or herself, she had thought she was hearing herself.

  •

  Later in the morning Miranda opened her wardrobe and found it full
of clammy ghosts that hovered around her body when she put them on. The cold trickled down in the gaps between the material and her chest. Scarecrow girl. She felt proud and nauseous, chosen and moulded by hands that froze. She drifted downstairs to find her father, who was stalking around a newly vacated guest room with a checklist. Winter had licked every window in the house and left them smeared with fog. “Nothing fits me anymore,” she said, turning in a slow circle before him, hoping for his horror. “I’ll need some new clothes.”

  Her father took her in coolly.

  “That is true,” he said.

  Together they searched the dressing table and desk drawers in his bedroom until they found a gilt-coloured card with the address of a boutique in Notting Hill printed on it. It was a boutique that Lily had liked for dresses, so Luc told Ezma and Azwer that he would be out for the afternoon and drove Miranda into London.

  Dress shopping took longer than she had expected. It took the whole afternoon. Luc refused Miranda every dress she tried on. Each time he shook his head she gauged the extent of his dislike for the dress by checking whether he had raised one eyebrow or both.

  “What’s wrong with this one?” she’d ask. Mid-length sleeves, a demure hemline, a keyhole collar.