White Is for Witching Read online

  “You know you already have one just like that.”

  “But—”

  Distress showed dimly in his eyes. “Let me see the next one, please.”

  They moved with increasing disheartenment from shop to shop, hands in their coat pockets, looking at the floor more than they looked at the clothes, and finally, knowing that her only condition was that her dresses be black, he swiftly selected dresses off the racks for her to try, with the reasoning that he was more likely to approve an outfit if he’d chosen it.

  She was embarrassed; other shoppers were trying to guess at their relationship. He looked younger than he was. She took every opportunity to say “Father” to him, and hated herself for sounding like such a fool, Father-Father-Father.

  When she tried on the last dress in the pile he’d built up, she was sure he would like it. He had to. It didn’t look like anything she already had, the skirt flared wonderfully, and there was the sweet ribbon bow at the waist. It was a dress to be worn by the sort of girl who’d check that no one was looking, then skip down a quiet street instead of walking, just so the fun of it was hers alone. She looked around the corner of the fitting-room door and saw her father standing with his hands in his pockets, his tie removed and folded into a pocket of his crumpled suit, where part of it unfurled like a yellow-and-blue-striped tongue. A woman who had come shopping alone seemed to be asking his advice on the dress she’d tried on. He nodded and smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners, before giving the woman’s dress a thumbs-up, which made Miranda laugh because her father only gave things a thumbs-up when he thought they were stupid and populist. The woman touched his arm and said thank you.

  Miranda put a hand over her face and looked through her fingers, the world in pieces, her father’s legs gone, the woman’s torso vanished. Now they looked like broken dolls, their jaws clacking, breeze blowing through their hollows. Lily had taken her to a doll hospital in New York once. Neat rooms with bright, hard looking wallpaper tacked precisely into each corner like plastic, chests of drawers with lace cloths on top, the smell of pot-pourri lined with sawdust. Only the repaired dolls were on view

  (Father, let’s go to the doll hospital and get you repaired)

  she didn’t know where the thought had come from, she probably had to be careful because she had been mad.

  Miranda dropped her hand and came out of the fitting room, passing the woman who had been talking to her father as the woman returned to her cubicle. One of them smiled with all her teeth, and the other looked blank.

  When her father saw her, he rubbed his eyes and leaned his elbow on one of the racks. He bit his knuckle and stared at her knees until she was compelled to cross and uncross them, dancing an impromptu Charleston. He didn’t smile.

  “Not this one either?” she asked. “But this is the last one.”

  “It’s not the dresses,” he said.

  “What is it then?”

  He raised his head. “You’re . . . so thin.”

  She turned to a mirror and looked at herself quickly. “I’m not that thin.”

  “Miranda. No one who is well looks the way you look at the moment.”

  “I’m alright,” she said.

  “You are not alright. None of these dresses will do. They will not do at all. Nothing that fits you now will do, do you understand?”

  “I suppose so, but what am I going to do about clothes, then?”

  He looked around. Was his cue written on the walls?

  “You will have to eat. You will wear your other clothes until they fit. It will be good for you.”

  Miranda nodded and her reflection nodded, so that was twice. She crossed her hands over her stomach, as if that would stop her from retching. She blushed because the light in the fitting rooms was stark and hot, like being stared at.

  (I’m not that thin, I’m not that thin)

  She smoothed the pleated skirt of the dress she had on. She liked it. He had chosen the perfect dress for her. Or, at least, for the girl she wanted to be.

  “That’s just gorgeous on you,” the shop assistant said, stopping in front of Miranda. She clasped her hands to her chest and shaped her mouth into a lipsticked “ooh.” When neither Miranda nor Luc replied her, her smile faltered and she said “Alrighty then,” and walked back into the main shop.

  “You haven’t even looked at the price yet. It might be reasonable,” Miranda tried, once the shop assistant was completely out of earshot.

  Luc lightly touched Miranda’s shoulder.

  “Getting healthy won’t be so bad,” he said. “I’ll try to make it delicious, I promise.”

  She nodded again, everything paralysed but her head and neck. You are being silly, she told herself desperately, but the words had no effect. Because she didn’t move to face him, her father kissed the top of her head, the point of the triangle where her parting dissolved into the rest of her hair. She felt the kiss on her actual skull, the skin of her scalp crinkling between his lips as they broke through. She endured it because he didn’t know what this kiss did to her, how could he know?

  He held her coat for her so she could put her arms into it. He buttoned her coat up for her and walked her out of the shop. He smiled and said goodbye for both of them. When he suggested having dinner in town she said, lightly, without looking at him, “Sorry, Father, I really can’t.”

  They drove into Dover through the dark. Eventually Luc put on a CD and Hildegarde von Bingen’s canticles of ecstasy spilt misty cries out through the car windows. Miranda concentrated on keeping her mouth completely closed.

  A houseguest met them at the front door. He was holding a candle fixed to a saucer with its own wax, red on white. His name was Terry, Miranda was almost sure. “Hello there, Luc. There’s been a power cut,” he said, grinning. “Me and some of the others found some Famous Five books and we’ve been reading those and telling ghost stories for the past couple of hours. What larks . . .”

  Luc shook the hand that wasn’t holding the saucer, said warmly that he was very glad it hadn’t been too much of an inconvenience and strode into the midst of the group of houseguests who had come out to offer theories and suggestions. Before Luc could call her, Ezma arrived suddenly at the centre, as if ejected from the floor. Her hair had tumbled out of its tidy coronets. Her face was grey.

  “You’d better get an electrician, Mr. Dufresne,” she said. “Azwer has looked at the fuse box, but obviously he is no expert at these things.”

  Miranda went to see if Deme and Suryaz were alright.

  “Who is it?” the girls said together, when she knocked on the attic door.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  They wouldn’t answer after

  that

  evening, Emma and I broke up. Her parents were out and her house was full of music, music and every light in every room was on. She even had fairy lights twined around table legs. “Hello, Eliot . . .” She pulled me in through the front door, wrapped my arms around her waist and led me from room to room, dancing ahead of me. She was wearing a short black dress and when she turned to face me I saw she was wearing lipstick. I had never seen her wearing lipstick, but knew better than to say so in case she did that mysterious alchemy some girls do and transformed the comment into my accusing her of having gained weight.

  “You look good,” I said, and kissed her. The music upstairs (’90s R&B from the sound of it) was different from that downstairs (Alanis Morisette), and it was unnerving somehow, like a discordant echo, as if the music upstairs was creeping up on me and if I turned around Mariah Carey would abruptly trill in my face.

  “Is Miranda back?” Emma asked. I twirled her and caught her, partly because it was so inappropriate to do that while Morisette was whining unhappily.

  “How did you know?”

  Emma put her arms around my neck and tried to make me slow dance.

  “Because you look nervous,” she said.

  “Yeah. Well. It’s hard to know what to expect, isn’t it.”


  She said solemnly: “Would you like a beer?”

  I nodded, and she went into the kitchen. The room was so bright that I couldn’t look at anything for long.

  What is all this?

  I called out: “Emma are you alright?”

  She came back with a glass of red wine, a can of beer, and a pair of scissors.

  “Yeah I’m fine. Why?” she asked.

  I sat on the sofa. I looked at the scissors, which she laid on the coffee table with the handles wide open. I drank some beer. She climbed onto my lap, drawing her bare legs against mine, leaning into me so I could feel the curve of her.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t touch me.”

  She breathed against my mouth but she wouldn’t let me kiss her. I said “Emma” without meaning to. The glass of wine she was drinking from now was clearly not her first.

  She yawned and, from nowhere, offered me a cigarette. I couldn’t think about a cigarette; I leant back and just looked at her. She smoked one without me. “Look,” she said. She showed me the cigarette she was smoking. They were red and white. “Red tips,” she said. “An idea from the forties, you know. For the glamorous girl who doesn’t want to leave lipstick marks on her cigarette.”

  “Oh,” I said, stupidly.

  She slid slowly down my lap and onto the floor. I didn’t make a sound. It was a matter of principle. She walked around the sofa, smoking her red-tipped cigarette, then she picked up the scissors and handed them to me.

  “What am I meant to do with these?”

  She said, “Wait a sec, I need this for courage,” and took a long drag on her cigarette before putting it out. Then knelt on the sofa beside me and gathered the dark mass of her hair up into a ponytail, the hair band tied round at the neck. She hesitated, then, without taking her eyes off me, pulled the hair band up a little higher, a little tighter. She turned her back on me.

  “There, where the hair band is.”

  “Why?”

  “I said cut it right here, Eliot.” She touched the hair band.

  “No.”

  I put the scissors down, but she picked them up and tried to force them back into my hand.

  “Do it yourself,” I said. “I’m off.”

  By the time I stood up, her ponytail had fallen onto the sofa in a silent fan. She turned around and mussed her hair, ran her fingers through the ragged ends, the ragged ends, her eyes were huge.

  “You’re sick,” I said.

  “Am I?” She reached for her lighter and cigarette box and lit up again.

  She blew smoke in my face and I drifted towards the door with my best absent-minded smile, as if I had been on my way out anyway, as if I’d been ready to leave her from the moment I came. Emma is an only child, and she was drunk besides.

  I didn’t go straight home. I walked around the park opposite our house, kicking at the railings, trying to think what to do. I couldn’t blank Emma altogether, because that would look weird, also I couldn’t risk her saying anything to any of our other friends.

  Everyone would believe her because at the back of their minds, everyone thinks that twin brothers and sisters grow up magnetized towards each other, the prince at the foot of Rapunzel’s tower before the tower is even built, the lover you can get at all the fucking time, the one who is you but a girl, or you but a boy, whose bed you know as well as your own. How could you endure that without falling in love? The question is, were they born in love with each other, these twins, or did it blossom? At any rate it’s already happened, the onlookers agree. It must have. Ask them when they fell. The brother and sister say no, no, it’s nothing like that, but what they mean is they can’t remember when.

  •

  Lily’s photo studio was a small extension to the house, a lump that had grown on its side when it was young. It had its own tiled triangular window frame; from the outside it looked like a cuckoo clock. A thick piece of twine crossed the length of the room, hung low so that Lily could reach up and pluck down a photograph. Steel pegs dangled and didn’t shine; like the capped steel tanks at either end of the room they drew dark into their outlines and almost disappeared. The cupboards had jugs in them, and a few pint bottles full of pale fluids. The jugs weren’t dusty yet; Miranda dreaded the day when they would become so. She tried to put a shield up in her mind against it, a collection of bright things to do with Lily that would blaze through the dust when it came down.

  When Eliot came home that evening, he took the key to Lily’s studio off its hook in the kitchen.

  Miranda asked him, “What are you going to do in there?”

  He said, “Homework.”

  She tried to follow him in, but he suddenly and silently pushed the door against her until she squealed with pain; the pressure of the door between them threatened to throw her arm out of its socket.

  “Eliot!” she said through the gap.

  “Get back from the door,” he said calmly.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Later.”

  She thumped her fist against the door, then opened her hand so that it was just her palm, soft on the wood.

  He laughed. “Get your scrawny arm out of the door, Miri.”

  “You said stay awake or she’ll die. Why did you say that? How could you say that?”

  He opened the door fully. Behind him the light strips glowed red. He was looking at her through the skin of his eyelids. She didn’t like his eyes, she wanted to cover them with her hands, turn the lights out so she couldn’t see them. This was more than weed; he must have taken something else besides. He was looking at her but his eyes were closed: “You didn’t have to believe me.”

  She stepped inside and slapped him. Then she laughed until she hiccupped, because she hadn’t known she meant to do it. The studio door clicked closed behind her. She could see her slap had been hard because there was her handprint on his face, a flushed shadow. He didn’t blink, but he slapped her back, and she fell onto a counter, scraping all her weight along her wrist as the glass in the cupboard rattled. When the throb died she walked up to him and dug her nails deep into his cheek, her other hand dragging his head back by the hair.

  She wasn’t angry, she was just being deontological. He had to be paid out for the pain in her wrist. It was strange that she could hold him like this for even a second. She felt weak, but her will was cold. And there was a sort of wonder in seeing tears so close, in actually watching them form in his eyes. They scrabbled around on the floorboards, trying, for some reason, to hold each other flat in the shadows. She banged her head, or he banged her head, against a corner of the counter, and she let go of him and they rolled slowly away from each other. She was drowning in a flood of colour she had never seen before, she was scared it was blood from her brain. She heard Eliot breathing. She knew where he was, around the other side of the counter, out of her sight. “Miri,” he said. “Miranda. Are you alright?”

  She didn’t answer. Let him worry.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He said it as if he was choking.

  She could see under the counter, a strip about two inches thick. It looked sticky, as if developing fluids had dripped through to the floor and collected there. And there was a slip of paper,

  or

  a photograph gone astray.

  She wasn’t sure if she could reach it, but Miranda reached an arm under the counter. If her fingers touched the photograph it was hers. If it was out of her reach then it belonged to the room.

  She could hear Eliot moving. “Stay there,” she said. Her fingertips clutched the paper and she drew her arm out. With the slip in her hand, she rose to her knees at the same time Eliot did. They regarded each other across the counter from the nose up, wary grey gaze meeting its wet counterpart.

  Lily and Luc had agreed that she and Eliot would take Lily’s surname if they were born grey-eyed, and Luc’s surname if they were born brown-eyed. Miranda and Eliot’s names were really just a matter of grey or brown, a choice between colours.

  What would
Miranda Dufresne have said now, how would she have made things better? She knew what Miranda Dufresne would have looked like. She would have had very straight black hair in a bob, she would have been a thin, already tall girl towering on heels, buttoned into a dark suit. She would have been born grown-up.

  Miranda looked down at herself, touched her hair, started, then smiled nervously. Maybe the thing she needed to do was imagine what Miranda Silver would have looked like. What if she dyed her hair blond, she wondered, knowing that her skin was too pale to support it. Her thoughts were like ice floes, and she became too large for them—she couldn’t move from thought to thought without breaking them. One day she might get better and be pretty, rather than a sicklier version of Eliot.

  Out of his line of sight she was holding a piece of A4 paper, a secret easily unfolded. It was a drawing on brown, crackly paper, a drawing of a perfect person. Miranda sat down.

  (How excellent a body, that

  Stands without a bone)

  A perfect person has no joints. The arms, emerging from short sleeves, are unmarked by the ripple of skin that shows where the limbs bend. A perfect person’s portrait is lifelike despite their strange clothes, a black dress that fastens without buttons or a zip, just a straight line across the material to show that it was not pulled on over the head. It was still possible to believe that the person drawn was a real person despite the great almond-shaped eyes set deep into the head, deep and open, unable to blink. Eyes without eyelids or eyelashes. The pose of the perfect person was so natural, the colouring so lifelike that the omission of joints and eyelids seemed deliberate, so that the thing was art, or honesty.

  The perfect person was a girl. Bobbed dark hair, black dress, pearls she was too young for, mouth, nose and chin familiar . . . Miranda’s, almost. Look, look, remember. This sight might not come again. The perfect person had beautifully shaped hands, but no fingernails. A swanlike neck that met the jaw at a devastating but impossible angle. Me, but perfect. She quickly corrected herself. Before Lily died, Miranda’s hair had been long enough to sit on. Me after the clinic, but perfect. Lily did you know? How did you know? Miranda turned the picture over and ran her hand over the back of it; in one, yes, two, three, four places the paper was rougher, once adhesive, now matted with fine hairs and specks of dust. Lily Silver, the lonely girl on the third floor, had kept herself company with pictures of people, no one she’d ever seen, she’d said. Miranda turned the page over again, and it was blank. So this was what happened when she hit her head.