White Is for Witching Read online

  Uneasily, Miranda came into the light. She did not feel steady on her feet. She thought she had better sit down and tried to sit on the wall nearest her, forgetting that it was horizontal and high instead of vertical and low.

  Sade took her arm and led her to a kitchen stool, then, when Miranda was unable to climb onto it, Sade lifted her onto the stool herself.

  “They’re calling you, aren’t they?” Sade asked her.

  Miranda found it easy to look into Sade’s eyes. The pupils were simple, and the whites were slightly yellow.

  “Who?”

  Sade brought Miranda some water and a small plate of fried, crispy batter. The pieces looked like broken doughnuts, but Miranda could see shreds of chilli puffed up inside them like a red rash.

  “Your old ones,” she said. “I know it’s hard.”

  She shrugged and took a piece herself when Miranda waved the plate away.

  “No, nothing like that. I’m not sure what you mean, actually. Everything is fine,” Miranda said. Her lips missed her glass and she spilled water down her front and into her lap, then put the glass down on the nearest counter. The water was so cold on her skin that it felt dry. “Please tell me more about old ones calling,” she said.

  Sade looked so alarmed that Miranda thought the topic must be the utmost taboo. Then she saw herself on the floor. Water makes a mirror of any surface. She’d sucked her cheeks in so far that the rest of her face emerged in a series of interconnected caves. Her eyes were small, wild globes. The skull was temporary, the skull collected the badness together and taught it discipline, that was all. Miranda wanted to say, That is not my face. No, it wasn’t hers, she had to get away from it, peel it back. Or she had to leave and take this face with her, defuse it somewhere else. Eliot and Luc, she had to protect them.

  Sade turned Miranda’s head away from the terrible face.

  “Thank you,” Miranda said, limply. “Thanks.”

  (I’m very hungry)

  Sade offered her the plate of fritters again, then, after some hesitation, a handful of peanut shells. As Miranda nibbled at peanut shells, Sade pulled up a stool and sat herself on it. She began plaiting strips of Luc’s old shirt and dragging them through a saucer of red fat on the counter beside her. Every now and again she looked about her, checking on her cooking projects. Miranda watched.

  “What are you making?”

  “Juju.”

  “What’s that?”

  She pulled her finger through a knot.

  “Company.”

  The figure Sade was making looked like two hanged men holding fast to each other. She spun black thread around a hook, breaking the thread with a sharp jerk of her arm when the hook was completely covered. She spoke without looking at Miranda, she spoke as if to herself. “Something is wrong.”

  “That is true,” Miranda said, for want of any other comment. She was the something wrong. It was she who had fallen asleep and lost Lily’s life. Now sleep wouldn’t come anymore. Sade’s talisman was a thing worked against her.

  •

  During one English lesson Martin sat next to her. She was surprised; they hadn’t spoken properly since he’d asked her to the cinema months before and she’d said, rashly and unconvincingly, that she didn’t like films because they hurt her eyes. When put on the spot she became terrible.

  At the end of the lesson, he put his arm around the back of her chair.

  “It’s Friday!” he said.

  “Yes,” said Miranda. “It is.”

  She wondered when it was coming, the stupid thing she was going to say to him.

  “Coming to the pub tonight?” he asked. “We haven’t seen you for ages.”

  He kicked the back of Emma’s chair and Emma turned around. “Yeah, come,” she said.

  “We’re underage,” Miranda said. Ah, there it was, the stupid thing. Luckily they laughed.

  “She doesn’t want to come,” Eliot called from across the room.

  “Yes I do,” she said, because she hadn’t been asked before.

  She had no idea what people wore to the pub. She had better wear what she always wore. Later she hopped in and out of the shower, sent a hot iron skating over her black linen dress with the pouch pockets, brushed her wet hair and painted her lips with a bright red dot in the centre that grew outwards and dulled as it did. She threw rose attar over herself in a hasty splash, as if it were a liquid jacket. Then she stood, shivered, and sneezed. She would drink the juice of grapes, she told herself. From a glass. And be comfortable, and be liked, like Eliot.

  Their group sat at a corner table, the girls all strawberry lip gloss, halter-neck tops and bare legs, the boys wearing so much gel that their hair didn’t move when blown on at close quarters (Miranda experimented surreptitiously when they had their heads turned). Everyone was touching each other, heads on shoulders, arms around waists, and all she could smell was skin and smoke. She could hardly see—the world was fogged over.

  Emma was kind, asking her neutral questions about music and TV from her precarious position on the lap of a boy called Josh. But it soon became clear that Miranda didn’t watch TV, and had no opinion on any record released after 1969. Eliot sighed, got up and added a song to the jukebox selection, then went to play snooker. A few of the others got up and followed him about like ducklings. Martin stayed and spoke to her and she thought, Help, I will die, and struggled out of the corner, asking if anyone wanted anything from the bar. It was as if she hadn’t spoken. Finally: “You’re alright,” Emma said. Josh kissed her shoulder, and she squirmed and giggled.

  Miranda went and sat down at the bar. She asked for peanuts and made a circle with them in an ashtray. A vaguely familiar boy turned to her and said: “Miranda. How are you doing?”

  It took her a moment to place him. Jalil. They had had once done a presentation to their class on Lamia. She had liked the air of fey tragedy about him, his wide eyes and artfully mussed hair. Once she knew who he was, she smiled at him.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You’re feeling better now, yeah?”

  “Weren’t you in my English class?”

  “I dropped English. For economics.” He groaned and stared into his pint. “So neekish to be talking about this. Change the subject.”

  “What is your opinion on curses?”

  “What?”

  “For example, do they really persist unto the third generation?”

  As if watching a slide show, she saw a series of gashes on arms and faces. They emerged so naturally and normally that she wasn’t sure whether she was seeing them in conjunction with her view of the smoky room, or whether the gashes were all she could see. They were of different shapes and sizes. They were healing over, the new skin shuddering over the blood like intricate lace. She was fascinated. She was falling asleep. To wake herself up, she reached for the circle of flesh beneath Lily’s wristwatch and pinched it.

  Unexpectedly, he smiled. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  She shook her head. He offered to show her a strange thing he could do instead. With an expression of the utmost gravity, he planted his hand on the table and swivelled his wrist 360 degrees without changing the position of his hand. All this without audible sign, as if his bones were oiled. Miranda squeaked obligingly. He relaxed, looked pleased and sat back on his stool. She noticed his jacket was hooded.

  “Pull your hood up,” she said.

  He looked around the room. “Why?

  “I just want to see.”

  Half smiling, waiting for the joke to catch up with him, he pulled his hood up. Its shape around his head was lumpen. It was obviously the first time he’d ever pulled this hood up over his head. He looked at her and said, “Anything else?”

  Would he let her? She kissed him, gently, tentatively at first, her hand cupping his face, her fingers inside the heavy cotton of his hood. When he opened his mouth for her tongue, she drew him up and closer to her, pushing his hood back and using his hair like a leash until she could
bring him no closer. Someone in the group she had left shouted, “Get a room, will you?”

  She took Jalil’s hand and held it, pretending, for a minute, to be in love. She looked attentively at him. Open pores grained his skin, and the shade of its brown varied from forehead to neck. He didn’t know what to make of her staring and stirred uncomfortably. She was holding the hand he’d have used to lift his pint. When she said she was going home, he offered to walk her back.

  “It’s fine,” she said, and got off her stool.

  “But it’s dark,” Jalil protested.

  “It’s fine,” Miranda said again. She was already walking away. Jalil wrapped an arm around her waist and tried, awkwardly, to kiss her goodbye, but she stepped away politely. She didn’t want to anymore.

  •

  I’d written to lots of media training schemes and independent film companies trying to get a placement for the summer, for the majority of my year out, if possible. I didn’t particularly want to travel; there was nowhere I wanted to go. But I couldn’t stay. So I’d applied to things in as many different places as possible and hoped that ultimately wherever I had to go, it would be because of work. As long as English was spoken there, wherever it was, I’d go. One morning a couple of weeks into the new year I got lots of letters back and sat on the staircase, shuffling through them, looking for something encouraging. Most of them were “no”s.

  Emma texted me: Jean de Bergieres—they searched for her in the oven(!) and found her in the attic . . .

  I texted back: And what did they do when they found her?

  Her: Raped her—seven of them.

  Me: O no!

  Her: Breathe. This was in 14thC France. Church had outlawed brothels and locals were desperate.

  Me: Actually just about to commit a couple of v brutal crimes. Wld be helpful to see them put into historical context first.

  Her: I miss you. Also miss my hair. Can we forget drunk pre-Christmas stupidness (mine)?

  One of the houseguests wandered out of the dining room and said to me, “Something’s burning . . . ?”

  As soon as she said it, I smelt it. In fact I’d been sitting in a cloud of smoke; ridges of it drifted around my head as I moved, like a blurred fingerprint.

  “Shit.” A pan had been left on the stove, with the gas burning. It was like . . . “Fuck. Fuck me.” I hadn’t known oil and bacon could do that. It must have been a different kind of oil. Flame rose from the blackened pan, almost solid, like a ragged soufflé.

  For a second I couldn’t do anything but stare and swear powerfully and brace myself for the smoke alarm to go off. The smoke alarm didn’t go off. One of the guests, a different one from the one who’d approached me, shouted “Do something!” and threw a napkin in the direction of the pan. The pan growled and ate most of the napkin, letting a scrap fall to the floor where it blazed on the lino.

  I went to the tap, wetted some more napkins and threw them onto the cooker, reserving the first one for the floor. I was encouraged by the sputtering sound of drowning flames and the lessening of smoke, and ended by covering the cooker and floor with wet towels that someone pushed at me. Then I went into the dining room, and the guests trooped in after me. “I don’t think there’ll be any breakfast served here this morning,” I told them. “But there is a McDonald’s, right by the square.” There was some grumbling so, struck by inspiration, I said, “Hand your receipts in when you’re checking out and you’ll be reimbursed.”

  I couldn’t find Dad, so I went straight up to the attic. There was an oily, twisted doughnut of cloth hung on a nail in the centre of the attic door, all knots and tails. I didn’t want to touch it or the door, and I settled for kicking at the door with the toe of my trainer. No answer, so I kicked harder, said “Sade” a couple of times, then gave up and went downstairs. The guests had dispersed, though I’d passed a woman on the stairs who looked as if she was ready to go back to bed. Sade was in the kitchen. She was a vision in nuclear red and blue. She was scrubbing at the cooker with her elbow turned in awkwardly, as if it was hurting her.

  “I am so very sorry,” she said, with such force I felt I had to turn aside to deflect it.

  “Where were you?”

  “Here, I was here.”

  “No you weren’t,” I said, flatly.

  When I moved past her I saw that she’d hurt her hands; she had a plaster wrapped around each fingertip. She looked at me looking at her hands. I got a stool, climbed up onto it and poked at the smoke alarm. There was nothing wrong with it, except that it had been switched off.

  “Oh that was me,” Sade said. “I was cooking last night and I didn’t want to wake everyone up so I switched the thingie off just to make sure.”

  She gestured towards an array of lidded tubs she’d stacked up on the counter nearest the fridge.

  I nodded to show that I understood, stuffed my letters into my back pocket and left the kitchen. I had an interview in London to get to. Sade called me back.

  “What will you tell your father?”

  “About what?”

  She looked me over, and for a horrifying moment I thought she might touch me, fuss over me, lick her finger and wipe away something on my chin, or smooth my hair out of my eyes. She let me go, but called: “Eliot, do you have a girlfriend?” across the passageway.

  I sighed and put my jacket on.

  “Ah. You should get a girlfriend. It would cheer you up. You are gloomy. Miranda too.”

  “Our mother died,” I explained, and wandered around to the back for my bike. Miri was looking out of her window, a white white face with the darkness of her curtains behind her, and I don’t know why, but I ducked out of her sight.

  The interview was conducted in a cream-coloured room with a flip chart. It was an interview for an internship at a television production company based in Cape Town. Since Miri had left the video with the advertisements on a chair in the sitting room, I’d watched most of the adverts as soon as I’d woken up. I filled my parts of the interview conversation with references to the apprenticeship “work” I sometimes did for an ad agency. By the time I got back to Dover, it was already dark. I wrestled my bike off the train and rode home, keeping an eye out for the girls who had been out to get Miri. There was no sign of them, but the cliffs were wearing broad chains of snow, so I took out my camera and slowed down, elbows on the handlebars, pointing the lens upwards. I took photos. Too many, and I worked the shutter too fast, because I kept thinking someone would come and get in the way, people with shopping bags or something.

  Dad had had Lily’s Haiti photos developed, and

  (Taking the film out of that camera, closing the back up again, how much had that felt like blinding someone?)

  among them was a sunset miniatured in purple, birds with long wings swimming through it in curious Vs. There was a bucketful of live sand, no, crabs, at a market stall. A potted tree, or a green skeleton, stood in a darkened doorway. Tiny robots churning in a grey fishing net. Looking at those last photos was like flipping through a book of silence, all the information conveyed with the certainty of a glimpse. There were people in the photos—the bored, teenaged market trader was there, the fisherwomen too, kings of their boats—but they were there minus everything that was absurd and ungainly about them. They were in the picture but their bodies weren’t.

  You can only take pictures like that if you’re able to see ghosts. Lily could. Miri too. Why can’t I?

  •

  On Sunday afternoon Sade washed the sitting-room windows from the inside, an expression of pure patience on her face as Miranda tried to teach her to whistle. She couldn’t get the hang of it. Every time she got the right length of breath going, she looked nervous, opened her mouth fully and said whoooooosh.

  “I grew up believing it’s bad luck to whistle in the house,” she explained, eventually. “It’s just no good. It’s too late.”

  “Why is it bad luck?”

  “Well. I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, cal
ling things that don’t have names.”

  Miranda was pleased with the idea of a whistler as a witch, and she let out a long, unmusical whistle, relenting when Sade winced.

  “I was only calling Eliot home,” she said.

  The front door banged.

  “Eliot?” Sade called.

  He announced, “It is but the shade of Eliot,” as he went upstairs.

  Sade and Miranda looked at each other significantly.

  “Whistler,” said Sade.

  “Witch,” said Miranda.

  Then: “Is it bad luck if a builder whistles at you? And if it is, is it bad luck for you or for him? Because technically he’s sort of indoors.”

  Sade wiped a wet cloth over the soap, inspected the window and wiped her hands on her apron. “I’ll tell you later. What’s the time . . . actually, never mind, you.”

  She went into the kitchen and checked the clock. Visiting hours at the Immigration Removal Centre had begun. “Help me get the food together.” Together they packed a bag full of food wrapped in tin foil and cling-film until it was a solid block, like a building caught in plastic. The sun shone on the garden and made it seem warmer out than it was, and Miranda hummed to herself and looked out of the kitchen window.

  The couple who had made her circle the Cinque Ports on a map for them, the couple she’d heard together in their room, were sitting under one of the trees, on a blanket. The woman wasn’t wearing a coat, just a short-sleeved white dress. Her legs were bare and a big white flower shone from the midst of her plaits. The man was wearing his sweater slung across his shoulders, the arms tied around the front of him. They were talking earnestly and eating apples. It was far too cold for them to be sitting out there having a picnic. Miranda wanted to open the window and shout “It’s January!” but she didn’t, because there was something so lovely about their being out there, their faces turned towards each other, their gazes chained together. They had stayed for quite a while now, longer than most other guests stayed. She wondered what were they doing in Dover. She thought she should try to remember their names.