White Is for Witching Read online

  I am not sure if she was lonely. She smiled to herself, and played little games of dress-up with herself, pulling clothes out of her bag and repacking them, switching earrings and examining herself in window glass when night fell. When her little earring tree was gone, she bit at her fingers until I brought her branches from the garden. For years and years, yes. Her hair greyed quickly, but she didn’t notice. When her shift dresses grew too dirty and tattered to play dress up with, I let Jennifer back into the main part, where Lily and Anna lived. Lily was a teenager by then. I had to be very careful, and quick, letting Jennifer in. Jennifer thought that Lily’s room still belonged to her. She ignored the new pictures and posters and tried Lily’s clothes on. She marvelled at them. She loved them. “When on earth did I buy this?” she’d ask herself, stroking the sleeves of a suede jacket, unbuttoning and rebuttoning a pin-striped waistcoat.

  Don’t feel sorry for Jennifer. Why should you? She lived long and relatively well, and she was kept safe from those fears and doubts peculiar to her times. She was safe from the war that sickened what it touched from miles away, the new kind of image that lashed the conscience to the nerves, the pictures of Phnom Penh burning with a kind of pagan festivity, the young bones in the mud at Choeung Ek, the Cambodians and yellow-skinned priests sprawled in graves dug poorly and in great fear, graves they dug for themselves. It is true that Jennifer Silver never did leave home, but she had longed for an unusual life, and she certainly had that.

  Believe it, don’t believe it, as you will. Of course there is the idea that Anna caught Jennifer and tried to stop her from leaving, that the two fought, that Jennifer strangled to death in a circle made of Anna’s fingers. But that is unrealistic for a number of reasons. And besides, without a corpse there is no proof of what may have come

  before

  Lily died Eliot and Miranda had gone to school separately, Eliot coasting away on his bike each morning, leaving Miranda to inch sedately schoolwards in heels so high and thin that they would have got jammed in bicycle pedals. But Eliot walked Miranda to school on her first day back. As usual he had a half-pint bottle of full-fat milk sticking out of his blazer pocket. It bobbed as he walked. For some reason Eliot and all the boys he knew at school drank copious amounts of milk straight from the bottle. When they finished their first bottle, they’d all be at the cornershop at breaktime, buying more. No matter which one of the boys you asked why, he’d only knock his forehead with his knuckles and say, without smiling, “For the bones.”

  Miranda asked if she could try some of the milk. Eliot obliged her without comment and nodded sagely when she wrinkled her nose and said, “It’s just milk.”

  At assembly she realised she’d forgotten her hymnal at home. She looked around helplessly as the head of the sixth form approached. Appealing to him would have no effect. On Monday mornings he handed out detentions to people who weren’t holding small books covered in red leather, and that was all. Help came unexpectedly; a hymnal landed in her lap and she hurriedly opened it and sang loudly until the teacher had passed. When she searched the row of girls for her saviour, Emma Roberts, safe in an area that had already been patrolled, smiled at her and held up a little note that said: Welcome back. Emma’s hair was almost as short as Miranda’s; it made her look much less substantial than she had before; the heavy gold hearts she wore in her ears seemed to weigh her down. Miranda suddenly realised that Eliot wasn’t sitting beside Emma. She decided that he must have bunked assembly. Everyone knew that Eliot and Emma always sat together—they’d so comfortably and easily brought their mutual crush from the playground to lower school and from lower school to sixth form. You couldn’t picture Eliot with his arm around the back of anyone else’s chair, or Emma throwing fries like darts at any other boy. Eliot could be tricky, but Emma made him simpler for everyone. Miranda saw him now, two rows ahead, beside Martin. She didn’t look at Emma again for the rest of assembly, not even when the headmaster read aloud a list of upper sixth formers who’d had Oxford and Cambridge offers and she desperately needed someone vaguely friendly to lock eyes with. All the girls on Miranda’s row eyed her with great curiosity, and, when Tijana’s name was called, the same was done to Tijana in the row in front. Miranda looked at the back of Tijana’s head and felt worried. Tijana had been part of the pack of girls who had chased their car after she was released from the clinic. Tijana, sitting cross-legged in her chair, popped up the collar of her school shirt. The headmaster stood on the varnished stage, with a large portrait of the queen behind him and a marble crucifix to the right of him, and he started clapping. It took everyone a second to follow his lead. Miranda reddened and was glad that she’d chosen a more low-key lipstick that day, a dark pink that matched the inside of her mouth. She was okay intelligence-wise, but she knew that she wasn’t as clever as Eliot. One of the teachers had said that Oxbridge looked for teachability. So it must be that she was more teachable than Eliot. She could picture Tijana at Cambridge, though, grey hood pulled up over her head as she moved through the stone arches with calm eyes.

  When the bell rang for lunch, Miranda unchained Eliot’s bike and rode downhill and then uphill again, feeling the wheels cling to the earth’s descent as shops shot by, and the dour water that split Bridge Street. A couple of white gulls raced her, their wings flapping about her head. The only way she could ride a bike in shoes like hers was fast, legs pumping in a way that outwitted the conspiracy of pegs and holes. She stopped when the ground jutted and sent her body leaning back, protesting the steepness. She got off the bike and drew it along behind her. She heard and smelt the water at the bottom of the cliffs, but it felt like a long time before she’d walked long enough to glimpse the sea crashing and breaking against the shore, foam eating into stone. England and France had been part of the same landmass, her father had told her, until prised apart by floods and erosion.

  She was not sure what time it was; when she looked at the sun she could understand that it had changed position but she did not dare to say how much. There were cruise ships coming in, vast white curved blocks like severed feet shuffling across the water. She waved halfhearted welcome. She felt the wind lift her hair above her head. In daylight the water was so blue that the colour seemed like a lie and she leant over, hoping for a moment of shift that would allow her to understand what was beneath the sea. Was this where the goodlady lived? That was how you caught a magical creature, you found out where it lived and you laid traps for it.

  Her hands were pinned behind her and she was knocked down by a deft kick to the back of her knee. All this was done in complete silence. She lay and frowned into the grass, began to get up and was stopped by the fact of a knife held near her face. It was so sharp. Where it cut, her flesh would hang neatly but separated, like soft dominoes.

  “Oh God,” said Miranda. “Come on. Really?”

  A girl she recognised but had never spoken to was crouched by her, holding the knife. She was one of the Kosovan girls. The girl hissed at her. “Why don’t you stay away from our boys?”

  Miranda said, “May I get up, please?” She was lying on her front and it was hurting her neck to have to look up so steadily.

  “No, you certainly may not,” the girl said, mimicking Miranda’s accent. Then she grew serious again. “Did you hear me? I said, why don’t you stay away from our boys?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Another girl came into view, looking so much like the first girl that Miranda thought she might be hallucinating.

  “We saw you,” the second girl said. “You and Amir, you and Farouk, you and Agim, you and whoever. Then they end up getting stabbed.”

  Miranda thought about screaming. But she’d never been one for raising her voice, and an unpractised scream would just dissolve into seawater.

  Instead she said, “Listen, I really don’t know what or whom you are talking about. You have mistaken me for someone else.”

  Tijana appeared behind the first two girls.

&n
bsp; Miranda said, “Tijana—”

  “Agim is my cousin.” She said it flatly, and she said it in such a way that Miranda understood that these girls really and truly meant to hurt her. She struggled to her feet, and the girls were around in a tight circle, their arms linked. Their hair, which looked so rigid, was soft and greasy and synthetically perfumed. Miranda gagged, and they rocked her, the three of them, rocked her close enough to the cliff edge to make her stutter, “Don’t, please don’t.”

  “Agim is my cousin,” Tijana repeated.

  “Who is Agim?” Miranda asked, desperately.

  Silence and adamant eyes.

  “I’ve been away for months,” Miranda babbled. “Doing my lessons in bed. I’ve been . . . away. If you’re talking about the stabbings I’ve no idea . . .”

  Tijana looked into Miranda’s eyes and seemed, for the first time, unsure.

  “She’s lying, man. It’s her,” one of the other girls said, then, to Miranda, “Now you tell us how the fuck you’re involved with this or I cut you.”

  “Hold on,” Tijana said. “Maybe she means it. It may be. She wasn’t at school for months.”

  Miranda took a close look at the back of her mind while the other two girls considered. She thought she might faint. Whoever Agim was, she didn’t want him to come. Because if these girls thought she was someone else, then Agim would too. She had to get away. The girls lessened their grip on her while they argued, and Miranda stepped out of her shoes. Miranda bent over and retched and when they jumped clear, she ran.

  She pushed and kicked Eliot’s bike so that it rattled far ahead of her until the way was smooth enough for her to scramble onto it, nearly tipping it over, and she pedalled harder even than her heart was thumping. She didn’t know where she was going; she had forgotten the way home. She weaved through Market Square, narrowly avoiding riding straight into the fountain, then she passed through side streets that branched off the high street, slowing and remembering herself once she was sure she’d lost Tijana and the other girls. She made her way home and sat on the flint steps, freezing and mourning her beautiful, black pointy-toed court shoes, whose leather would be destroyed by the inquisitive tongues of the sheep that wandered on the cliffs.

  When she finally went into the house, there were three cardboard boxes on the staircase that led up from the ground floor. Sade, the new housekeeper, and her father were arguing and laughing in the dining room.

  “Sade. First of all let me tell you that you can’t put pepper in the baked beans, you really can’t.”

  “Why not? They don’t taste of anything.”

  Miranda looked inside one of the boxes, not knowing what she expected to see—garish prints, a Bible, a huge cross—but the box was packed solid with books. Dickens and the Brontës, even. She picked a couple of them up—each had a huge white S slashed across the title page.

  Two houseguests picked their way around the first of the boxes on their way downstairs. They were a black couple from London who had enthused about their love of British history while Miranda had swayed, glassy-eyed and dead on her feet, and drawn red circles around the Cinque Ports on a map of Kent for them.

  In order to avoid a repeat occurrence, she sidestepped into the sitting room and looked through the old newspapers for the issue of The Dover Post that Eliot had handed her when Luc had brought her back from the clinic. There was Tijana’s cousin’s name, Agim Hajdari. He’d sustained serious wounds but had recovered. He’d been found curled up in a ball between a wall and a tree on Priory Lodge road, arms crossed over himself. As if to hold his insides in, Miranda thought.

  After some time she noticed Eliot had come home. He was standing in the sitting-room doorway with his arms crossed.

  “I’m sorry I took your bike! But I think it was fated. Some girls tried to kill me,” she said, as soon as she saw him. “And the bike revealed itself as my trusty getaway steed.”

  By the time she’d explained properly, he was pacing the room worriedly. “We have to sort this out,” he said. “These girls sound deluded enough to keep coming after you, especially if . . . anything else happens.”

  “What shall I do?” Miranda asked.

  “Two choices. Number one—Martin and I go after these girls and beat them with sticks—okay, you’re not keen, fair enough—number two, we talk to Tijana tomorrow and meet this cousin of hers and get him to tell them that you’ve got nothing to do with all of this.”

  He stopped and looked at her carefully.

  “Because you haven’t got anything to do with this,” he reminded her. “I mean, what? The very idea of it is . . .”

  Miranda crumpled the sheets of newspaper on her lap.

  “I am very concerned,” she said, in a small voice, “that this will not end well. They seemed convinced that they’d seen me before.”

  Eliot pulled her to her feet. “There is no way, Miri,” he said. “No way in the world.” Grey eyes convince so well, burying the person they look at in truth like flung pebbles. But Miranda could never do that with her eyes; convince. Anyway she was never sure about anything.

  “Come and have some dinner,” he said.

  “In a minute,” she said. “Go. I’ll see you in there.”

  “The new housekeeper is interesting,” he said, on his way out of the room. “She asked Dad if he had any shirts he didn’t want, and now she’s slashing his old shirts by hand in the kitchen. I think she’s, er, making something. Arts and crafts.”

  “I don’t like her,” Miranda said. Then, confused, she said, “Oh, I do.”

  Eliot rolled his eyes. “You don’t have to make an immediate decision about it.”

  That night it rained and a disconsolate wowowowow came down the chimney and flew around the rooms. Miri, Eliot and Luc watched TV and read in Luc’s room. Eliot lay under Miranda’s elbows, reading Moby-Dick while she used his back to prop up her collected works of Poe.

  “What do you think of Poe?”

  “He’s awful. He was obviously . . . what’s the term . . . ‘disappointed in love’ at some point. He probably never smiled again. The pages are just bursting with his longing for women to suffer. If he ever met me he’d probably punch me on the nose.”

  “I think Poe’s quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say ‘Oh you know, I’m just afraid of Death’ and then they keep on with the screaming.”

  “Hm,” said Miranda. “I’d rather they talked to someone about this fear.”

  “A psychiatrist couldn’t put up with all the screaming.” Eliot had marked his place in his book with his finger, and now he stirred restlessly, impatient to get back to it.

  “Oh, not a psychiatrist, a priest. Priests can put up with screaming.”

  “A priest,” said Eliot, “would not say anything constructive to someone who was scared of death. A priest would say ‘Death is great! You get to go to heaven!’ ”

  “True. But they’d put up with the screaming,” Miranda insisted. “A psychiatrist would sedate you and act as if it wasn’t normal to be so scared. In a situation of Poe’s kind I would always, always go to a priest before I went to a psychiatrist. I’d be out of that House of Usher like a shot and off looking for Father Joe. And I’d have gotten rid of Ligeia with holy water.”

  “Would you now,” Eliot muttered, and Luc, lolling in his armchair with the newspaper spread across his lap, looked up and said, “Easy to see the solution when you’re not in the story, isn’t it.”

  Miranda had found a pen somewhere. She fixed it into Eliot’s hair. She wrapped four strands around it and it stayed.

  “Thanks,” Eliot said, sounding as if he meant it.

  “How’s Moby-Dick?” Miranda asked.

  After a few seconds, Eliot admitted, “I don’t . . . get it. Dad, did you get it?”

  Luc put his paper down, cleared his throat, changed the TV channel.

&nb
sp; “Yes, I understood it. It is about many things.”

  Miranda and Eliot waited, but Luc didn’t elaborate. Eliot sniggered, and the pen fell out of his hair. It was getting to 1:00 AM and Miranda knew that soon Luc would kick her and Eliot out, and Eliot would go to bed and then it would be her and Poe until morning.

  “Father,” she said, “my sleep’s bad again. Please give me something to do, or give me something to make me sleep, or give me death.”

  Luc raised an admonishing finger. “I lie in bed until I fall asleep, no matter what; I lie there until I have no choice but to sleep,” he began.

  “Tried that,” Miranda said.

  There was an especial horror in lying with her eyes closed and her thoughts coming too quickly and strongly to be deciphered. At such times she saw herself twice, the girl lying down and the woman in the trapdoor room sitting directly beneath the fireplace, delicately wiping her beautiful mouth again and again.

  “Hot milk and honey, Nytol, a nice long warm bath . . . ?” Luc ticked the options off on his fingers.

  “Tried that, tried that, tried that.”

  “I have heard,” Eliot murmured, “that marijuana is a good sleep aid.”

  Luc snapped his fingers. “I can give you some work. I was going to give it to Eliot, but . . .”

  He went to his desk and sorted through the envelopes on it. He handed her one. A friend of his had started working for an advertising agency, his job was to get feedback on television advertisements they’d filmed before they were sent for approval to the companies who had commissioned the product advertisements. Things like crisps, contact lenses, house and car insurance. There were sheets to fill in for each advert she watched. She had never realised that anyone cared so much; besides there were some terrible adverts on TV. “I’ll do it,” she said, picking up the pen that had dropped out of Eliot’s hair.

  After Luc and Eliot had gone to bed, she watched as many adverts as she could and scribbled notes, poking at her eyelids with her pen so that she could pay better attention to the dancing life-sized tadpoles that, to her surprise, made her feel like buying the soft drink they were promoting. A pungent smell of stewing meat crept out of the kitchen, getting bolder and bolder until it was wadded up behind the bones of Miranda’s face. Sade was cooking vigorously, her curly perm trapped in a hairnet. She jiggled from countertop to countertop, chopping chillies, crushing garlic, tossing handfuls of spice into pots. The smell made Miranda realise how hungry she was; not for the sharp-toothed fireworks that Sade was lighting in Luc’s pot. Not for chalk, not for plastic . . .