White Is for Witching Read online

  “Ah,” I said, not wanting to disappoint her and not wanting to lie to her. “Where is this from?” she said, plucking at my T-shirt. I looked down at the shirt. I didn’t know where it was from. I wasn’t even sure it was mine. Maybe it was my dad’s or something. Or Lily had bought it. Clothing just appeared in my room and I put it on. Now that Sylvie noticed I recognised the miracle of it. I read my T-shirt, which said, PLANET HOLLYWOOD.

  “It’s a secret,” I said finally. “Can’t tell everyone where I get my garms from, or there’d be too many look-alikes.”

  Sylvie smiled. She and The Paul had been to visit us in Dover, and she knew that the place was full of Eliot look-alikes, and that I was one of the look-alikes, a copy of some original anonymous guy. I like that; attention makes me twitchy.

  Lily had perfected a way of talking to me with her gaze elsewhere but her head slightly turned towards me so that I knew her words were for me. Dad has what I think of as only child darkside syndrome; he does everything as if he is being watched.

  On Boxing Day I came down early in the morning. I had heard someone moving around downstairs and thought it might be The Paul. Instead I found my dad, sitting in The Paul’s baking pantry, on a chair that propped the door half open. He had his back to me, and you’d think that would make him warier, more sensitive to the presence of someone standing behind him, but it didn’t. I stood and watched him, thinking, I’ll watch until he notices. It took me a moment to realise what he was doing. He’d made one hand into a fist and was flipping his wedding ring onto it with his other hand, as if picking heads or tails, over and over.

  I watched, and when I got tired of watching I said, “What are you doing?”

  He turned around and seemed unsurprised to find me there. “Nothing. I might bake something. I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” I said, and got myself some water. I went back to bed but couldn’t sleep anymore. I was lying on a hardback biography of T. S. Eliot, but that wasn’t the reason. After about half an hour I sat up again, and Lily was in the rocking chair by the window, Lily smiling with glad eyes as if she had something funny to tell me. Lily in the chair, I mean Miranda was, Miri in a black T-shirt that scraped the tops of her thighs, Miri holding the rockers still with her bare feet. When I jumped, she laughed. I half expected her to say, “Again, do it again!”

  I sat down on the end of my bed, facing her, and said, “Good morning.”

  Miri didn’t use lipstick, she used something in a little pot that was applied with a fingertip. Miri said, “I miss her. So much that sometimes I’m scared I’ll bring her back.”

  The red on her mouth was so strong; maybe it was just the early morning but I’d never seen a red as startling, as odd. Maybe she’d bitten her lip.

  “She liked you best,” Miri said, softly.

  I shook my head but couldn’t speak. We both considered the lawn outside the window, Sylvie and The Paul’s tidy lawn. I did not have a thought, not even a painful one. A large and colourless umbrella had opened up inside my brain. All I did know was that after that initial shock of thinking that Lily had come back I had felt a cool, small relief, a moment of adjusting to Lily’s ghost so that I could be . . . not unsatisfied with the quality of her being there. I can only explain it in comparison to something mundane—my adjustment to Lily’s ghost was sort of like when you’re insanely thirsty, but for some reason you can’t get the cap on your water bottle to open properly so you tussle at it with your teeth and hands until you can get a trickle of water to come through. A little water at a time, and you’re trying to be less thirsty and more patient so that the water can be enough. The thing with having seen Lily was just like that, a practical inner adjustment to meet a need. At least she is there, I’d thought, even if she is just a ghost and doesn’t speak, at least she is

  there

  was a bird on the windowsill later in the afternoon. I looked up from Thus Spake Zarathustra and saw it standing motionless. Its feathers were brown and grey; in some places bands of one colour crossed the other. The bird was small enough to stand on the palm of my hand, which it did without alarm after about twenty minutes of me rushing at it and growling, opening and closing the window with a bang in my attempts to scare it into flying away. The bird and I looked each other over. Why wouldn’t it fly? That’s what birds are meant to do. Slowly, carefully, expecting it to flee at any moment, I took the bird into my hand and downstairs with me, where the others marvelled at it and fed it toasted brioche crumbs.

  After breakfast, Sylvie and Dad stayed in and baked, and Miri and I went out for a walk along the Seine with The Paul. I took the bird with us, holding my jacket slightly open for the bird, which I felt shuddering slightly in the inside pocket, a brittle shape with life in it, like a flute playing itself. The Paul was in between Miri and me, and Miri supported him by coquettishly slipping her arm through his. Her high heels slipped on the ice. This happened a lot, but she refused to go out without her heels so she’d adapted to it, fully bending her knees each time she slipped so that she staggered with elegance. The trees were laced with ice and only a few other people were out. When they passed us, they gave friendly nods. I made observations aloud, for the bird’s benefit. “Lovely weather,” I said, and “Fit girl,” I told the bird, when one walked past. I also said, “I hope you don’t shit in my pocket.” The bird raised its beak and its eyes like wet black marbles, and it seemed to listen to me. Either that or it was trying to get a feeling for the sky and when it might fly again. The Paul said sympathetically, “Poor boy. Your old grandparents have bored you eccentric. I understand. A fellow’s got to amuse himself.”

  Just before we left for home I tried once more to make the bird fly. I opened the window of my room at Sylvie and The Paul’s house and I set the bird’s dumpy body on the sill, pushed it with a finger, but it only shook itself a little and stayed with its back to me, tail feathers ruffled, a defiant loner against the sunset and against the world. I reinstated it in the inside pocket of my jacket.

  Miri spent most of the train journey to Calais trying to flirt with the bird, but it ignored her, snuggled deeper into my pocket and seemed to melt into hibernation—even its claws softened. The other people sitting around us seemed worried by the bird; they kept looking at the top of its head, which was all that was visible, as if they expected it to suddenly rise and start zooming around the train carriage, buzzing like a huge fly with a beak. But the bird relaxed until we’d docked at Dover, where it suddenly chirruped, struggled from my pocket to my shoulder, and threw itself at the air, singing madly. Then it was gone.

  Miri squeezed my arm. “What a lazy thing that bird was,” she said. “Outrageous. Don’t you see? It was using you to get across the Channel.”

  Dad was ahead of us, weighed down with Miri’s bag and his own. He looked back and said, “Good job you hadn’t given it a name.”

  There was a stack of bills for Dad on the doormat when we got in. Also there was a letter postmarked Cambridge. It was for Miri. She held it and looked at me, scared. “I won’t open it until yours comes,” she said.

  I spoke even though my lips felt frozen. Not really frozen, actually. Intensely lethargic. My lips couldn’t be bothered to form words. “Come on,” I said. “We applied to the same college for the same subject.”

  I took the letter out of her hands and opened it for her. She had been offered a place. I kissed her cheek and said congratulations. She opened her mouth and put one hand on her chest, the other to her cheek. She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she cared about the offer. She was just trying to feel this for me.

  Dad read the letter, then put an arm around Miri’s waist and drew her to him. He kissed her forehead. “My clever, darling girl,” he said. Miri smiled at last. When Dad looked at me, I looked at the wall. I wanted to leave, but told myself, stand still, stand still. The floor below, the ceiling above. I stood there until they felt uncomfortable.

  THE GOODLADY

  “is very beautiful, Miranda,
but very strict. Everything she does is necessary, and she makes no exception to any rule. She’s what I had instead of a mother, much stricter than any mother. She’s like tradition, it’s very serious when she’s disobeyed. She’s in our blood. And she’s told me that if I can’t get you to eat, she will. You must eat real food, and you must eat as much as you can manage, or you might end up with the goodlady for your mother. Wouldn’t you rather have me?”

  “Of course. Always you, always. How can you even ask me that?”

  Lily wasn’t even an hour into her final trip abroad when Miranda fell into conversation with the goodlady herself. There was an essay due for key skills. The topic was suicide, and the essay was to be a discussion of the ethics of ending one’s own life. Was suicide wrong, right, or a value-free choice? Was it even a choice in some cases? And so on.

  Eliot was writing his own answer to the question next door in his room. Both Miranda and Eliot understood that they were expected to argue that suicide was wrong. Their school was that sort of school. Eliot would probably argue in favour of suicide. He’d write that suicide was a terrible, wonderful thing, a gift from the intellect to the body. Miranda wanted to give the correct answer. She would say that suicide was wrong, wrong, not a good idea at all, terrible in fact. She just had to hope that such an answer would emerge as the result of proper consideration and would thus be conscionably correct.

  She sat at her desk in the psychomantium, pushing her feet in and out of her shoes and sighing as though stricken. She had no idea where to begin. She thought about her mother, gone away again, and she thought about her renewed promise to eat full meals, and she thought about her mother’s forgotten watch. A sharp pain arrived in her stomach and stayed small, like a sting. If she stayed healthy she would live for decades, and there were so many meals left to eat. But she had to keep going, otherwise Eliot would never forgive her. He hated her pica, she knew. She would eat for Eliot, not for Lily, who couldn’t really care all that much if she was always on her way to somewhere else.

  Miranda’s hair poured over her face and onto her paper and pen, and she pushed it back so that it all fell to the base of her chair. She turned to a new page in her notebook and began writing questions. Beneath the questions she wrote answers, in a hand as different from the one the questions were written in as possible.

  Goodlady, are you really good?

  yes

  Even when no one is looking?

  of course

  But do you understand your nature?

  my nature?

  Did you choose to be good, or were you so created?

  i chose to be created

  Is that really an answer?

  yes

  Miranda’s elbow slipped against the pages of her book, and the paper cut her. The room rolled like a dice. No matter how much she pretended bravery Miranda couldn’t stand the sight of blood. She reared back, a hand to her elbow, too late—a bead of blood fell and grew into a large full stop in the middle of her open page, an ending to a sentence she hadn’t written yet. She went in search of cotton wool and a plaster, and when she came back the stain was even bigger—she feared it might smother the page, the entire book.

  You are not good, she accused.

  The answer she wrote unnerved her because the handwriting was truly different from her own. It was handwriting she’d seen before in Christmas and birthday cards, shaky but elegant, the g’s and the y’s straight legged rather than curled.

  neither are you

  Miranda tapped her pen against her teeth, read over what she’d written. She ripped the red spotted page out of her book and threw it away. But the page was the reason for the certainty in Miranda’s voice the next night, when she told her brother that the goodlady would take care of Lily. How could she doubt the goodlady? The goodlady was Lily’s creation. Besides, she thought, the blood is the life.

  •

  Our great-grandmother, GrandAnna, the one who left the house to Lily, was named Anna Good. There’s a cupboard in the attic full of her things, or at least the things that Lily didn’t give to charity shops. The cupboard was a treasure trove for Miri—Miri found things in there I couldn’t even see until she brought them out—white kid gloves, silver hair ornaments, fans. One day I found a sheaf of newspaper cuttings from the ’40s in there—pages of The Dover Post collected without a theme until I noticed, halfway through the pile and checking back, that each page had the same number in its corner—25. Page 25 always had a patriotic cartoon on it, all on the theme of plucky Brits defeating the enemy by maintaining the home front—a stout housewife planting her own potatoes and taking a moment to smack a potato that looked just like Hitler on the head with her trowel, that sort of thing. They were drawn by an artist who worked in curved lines and harsh scribbles to indicate shade. The biggest cartoon took up a quarter of the page: Be careful what you say—you never know who’s listening. Two sweet-faced teenage girls talked avidly on a bus, while behind them, two men grinned with their teeth and leaned closer to the girls, closer, closer, more as if they were about to devour the girls than eavesdrop on their conversation. One man was a fat soldier covered in swastikas, the other was slit-eyed, uniformed, with a moustache that fell to his knees. You don’t have to be that close to someone to listen in on their conversation. You don’t have to be licking the person’s neck. The horrible hyperbole of it—it was a brilliant cartoon. None of the page 25s collected in GrandAnna’s folder were dated later than 1943. They had begun in 1940. Three years worth of cartoons. And it was on the biggest and best cartoon that I made out the signature: Andrew Silver. My great-grandfather, whose RAF plane had gone down somewhere over Africa before the war was even halfway through.

  GrandAnna’s hair was very white and came down over her shoulders in a great mass. Lily used to have a photo of GrandAnna, Miri and me in her purse, from when we went to visit GrandAnna on our seventh birthday. In the photo Miri is on Anna’s lap and has her arms around Anna’s neck with the sober confidence of someone adored. GrandAnna and Miri are looking at the camera, at Lily the photographer, and they are very poised. I am beside GrandAnna, leaning an elbow on the back of her chair and looking at her with an apprehensive expression.

  The room under the trapdoor downstairs was her bedroom. “After the war she was scared of bombs for the rest of her life. It was the noise, she said. She couldn’t sleep anywhere else,” Lily told us. It was the Christmas before Lily died and she was sitting on my bedroom floor with handmade notepaper spread across her knees. She had a tinsel flower tucked behind her ear and she was writing thank-you notes for our Christmas presents. She liked to do it and we liked her doing it.

  “Where did you sleep, then? Not down there?” I asked.

  The psychomantium used to be Lily’s room. There was a dressing table in there, and a velvet, high-backed chair, faint smudges on the walls where posters had been, and a mirror that crawled across the wall in a wooden frame. When I go into Miri’s room all I can see, all I can think of is that enormous mirror, like a lake on the wall. Sometimes I talk to her reflection instead of her, and she doesn’t seem to find anything strange in that. As a child, Lily had had the whole floor to herself.

  “Weren’t you scared?” Miri had asked.

  Lily shook her head. “I liked it. I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.”

  Miri and I looked at each other. “Alive,” we said. “Alive like how?” I added.

  Lily laughed. “Alive like they were alive. They talked and moved and told me who I was. I’ll never forget.”

  “What did they say to you?” I can’t remember which of us asked that.

  “Lily Silver, you are more precious than gold,” Lily chanted, and she looked a little bit different, the lines of her face were finer, she looked like a drawing herself. Miri yawned.

  “Is that all they said?”

  “Yes.”
r />   “Booooooooooring.”

  Lily gave me a handful of notes to sign; I scrawled my name and passed them to Miri.

  “It was all I needed. I’m not even sure if they spoke out loud. I was very lonely. Nobody’s fault, though. I hate blame culture.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I knew what I thought; it was her mother’s fault for abandoning her. Babies get me down, but I’d seen photos of Lily as a baby and she looked robust and fun. There was a consciousness in her eyes that made her pudgy helplessness seem sarcastic. She looked as if she could easily have been adapted into an accomplice for many practical jokes. And she’d only been a year old. Our grandma Jennifer was pretty, an indifferent student (we’d seen her photographs and report cards bound with pink ribbon) and she’d run off with someone dashing and foreign, a different dashing and foreign someone to whoever Lily’s dad had been.

  Miri and I wanted to know what they looked like, the people that Lily drew. Lily laid five stamps on her palm, licked them all in one go, and flicked them onto envelopes. “People,” she said. “Just . . . people. No one I’d ever seen. People I made up. They looked the way I felt they should look. I stuck them on my walls. In fact I left them there when I went to college; when I brought you two back to visit your GrandAnna here, I sort of expected the pictures to be still there.”

  “We used to visit? Here?”

  “We did, and your dad too. Then when you were three, your GrandAnna had a crack-up. A . . . well, a really big crack-up, and she had to go into a home. You wouldn’t remember,” Lily said.

  “I remember,” my sister said. This was news. I stared at her but she didn’t look up from the cards on the floor in front of her. She dotted the i’s in her name with sharp hearts.

  Lily stretched her legs out in front of her and cricked her neck. “Oh yes? What do you remember, my Miranda?”

  “GrandAnna’s crack-up. It was like the heraldic pelican,” Miri said. She put her pen in her mouth, the inky end on her tongue, then hastily removed it when Lily narrowed her eyes.