White Is for Witching (2 page)

“The goodlady?”

“She likes us.”

I skipped a beat, then said: “Stay up, just for a bit more. Tell me a Herodotus story or something.”

She grumbled,
“Tired.”

A small, stiff thing coursed through the dark and sank cold claws into my head. I switched Miri’s lamp on. Miri grumbled again, but the shape under her bedcovers didn’t move. I got the odd feeling that her voice was coming from somewhere else. I said: “Miri . . . Lily’s slipping away. We have to remember her or she’ll be gone.”

She opened her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Quick, we’ve got to remember her. What can you remember?”

Miri’s eyes narrowed and she took a long time to reply. “Lily’s . . . hair,” she said, finally. “The near-blackness of it, and the wave in it, near the bottom, where the brush keeps getting stuck.”

“We need more than that. What else do we know? What else is real about her?”

“Eliot. Please.”

“Miri, you’d better fucking stay awake. I mean it. Stay awake or Lily will die.”

Shrill singing between my ears.

“Why are you saying this? It’s not true,” Miri said. “The goodlady—”

“No. There is no such thing, Miri. Grow up.”

She slid up out of the covers, gasping, her face mottled pink and white as if she had come from a place of burning. She rested her head against her bedstead.

“Don’t say that. There
is
such a thing.”

She was about to cry. There was a change in the shadows and I twisted around, looking into the corners where the lamplight cracked.

Miri is the older twin. Maybe she has seen things that craned their necks to look at her and then withdrew before I was born, thinking that to consider one of us is to consider both.

“Come on, don’t be a baby. Just remember something.”

“Lily smells of the ghosts of roses,” Miri murmured. “Lily is so small she fits under Dad’s chin. Lily . . .”

“Stay awake,” I warned, and lay down with ice in my chest. I fell asleep to the sound of Miri listing things. “Lily loves the shape of cartoon tear-drops. Lily never knew her mother, and she doesn’t care. Lily’s favourite films have a lot of tap dancing and a little bit of story. Lily slides towards the colour red like it’s a magnet . . .”

In the morning Miri was still sitting up, her arms stiff on the bedspread before her, gone so deep into sleep that she seemed part of the wall behind her, a girl-shaped texture rising from the plaster in an un-repeated pattern. Her braid was unravelling. Her lips were pinched, her forehead lined with effort. I think in her dreams she was listing things. She tumbled awake and blurted,
“Lily can’t stand Pachelbel’s Canon!”
I would have laughed if she hadn’t said it with such terror.

Later—when Dad told us what the voice in the phone had told him—prim, slender Miri folded her hands on the lap of her dress. She looked down and, for a moment, appeared to be smiling. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t in control of her face.

29 barton road:

The twins were sixteen and a half when their mother died. She was shot in Port-au-Prince; gunfire sprayed into the queue at a voting station. Her camera remained intact throughout. Also, the lens was unstained. To protect it from dust and flies, Lily had covered it with a square of checked cloth and an elastic band, rustic jam-jar style.

That day two bullets were for her; they found her and leapt into her
lung. She fell amidst milling feet. Someone leant against her and
pushed
her aside, outside, out of life. She pushed back, sweat standing out on her skin in droplets as if she had been rained on. But her opponent had great wings, lined with clouds of feathers that brushed her, cooled her, pricked her. The shadow of them darkened her sight. She tried to lift her head and see into the crowd. The other two she had been standing with, the newspaper journalists, her eyes couldn’t find them. They had long gone. She dribbled blood, could not let it go, closed her eyes only for the length of time it took to drink it up again. The brokenness in her chest was not clean. It was not a straight line or a single throb. She couldn’t see it but it consumed her.

Stupid, stupid; Lily had been warned not to go to Haiti. I warned her.

Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?

It must be that they believe in their night vision. They believe themselves able to draw images up out of the dark.

But black wells only yield black water.

is not tall. He is pale and the sun fails on his skin. He used to write restaurant reviews, plying a thesaurus for other facets to the words “juicy” and “rich.” He met Lily at a magazine Christmas party; a room set up like a chessboard, at its centre a fir tree gravely decorated with white ribbons and jet globes. They were the only people standing by the tree with both hands in their pockets. For hours Lily addressed Luc as “Mike,” to see what he had to say about it. He didn’t correct her; neither did he seem charmed, puzzled, or annoyed, reactions Lily had had before. When she finally asked him about it, he said, “I didn’t think you were doing it on purpose. But then I didn’t think you’d made a mistake. I don’t know what I thought. I suppose I thought you were calling me Mike because Mike was my name, if you see what I mean.”

He wooed his wife with peach tarts he’d learnt from his pastry-maker father. The peaches fused into the dough with their skins intact, bittered and sweetened by burnt sugar. He won his wife with modern jazz clouded with cello and xylophone notes.

His fingers are ruined by too close and careless contact with heat;
the parts that touch each other when the hand is held out straight and flat, the skin there is stretched, speckled and shiny. Lily had never seen such hands. To her they seemed the most wonderful in all the world. Those hands on her, their strong and broken course over her, his thumbs on her hip bones.

One night she said to him, “I love you, do you love me?” She said it as lightly as such a thing can be said without it being a joke. Immediately he replied, “Yes I love you, and you are beautiful,” pronouncing his words with a hint of impatience because they had been waiting in him a long time.

He seems always to be waiting, his long face quiet, a dark glimmer in his heavy-lidded eyes. Waiting for the mix in the pot or the oven to be ready. Waiting for blame (when, at twelve, Miranda’s condition became chronic he thought that somehow he was responsible; he’d let her haunt the kitchen too much, licking spoons. He forgot that he had allowed Eliot to do the same.) Waiting, now, for the day Lily died to be over, but for some reason that day will not stop.

Meanwhile he has the bed-and-breakfast to run, he has cooking to oversee, peach tarts to make for the guests who know to ask for them. The peach tarts are work he doesn’t yet know how to do without feeling Lily. He has baked two batches of them since she died. Twice it was just him and the cook, the Kurdish woman, in the kitchen and he has bowed his head over his perfectly layered circles of pastry, covered his face and moaned with such appalled, amazed pain, as if he has been opened in a place that he never even knew existed. “Oh,” he has said, unable to hold it in. “Oh.” Luc is very ugly when he cries; his grief is turned entirely inward and has nothing of the child’s appeal for help. The Kurdish woman clicked her tongue and moved her hands and her head; her distress was at his distress and he didn’t notice her. The first
time he cried like that she tried to touch her fat hand to his, but he said, “Don’t—don’t,” in a voice that shook her.

Nobody knew what to say to Luc. His children were closest to knowing, but Miranda was mad and when she saw him those first few weeks after Lily’s death, she wasn’t sure who he was. Eliot noticed Luc more, as an eye does when something is removed from a picture and the image is reduced to its flaw, the line where the whole is disrupted.

I find Luc interesting. He really has no idea what to do now, and because he is not mine I don’t care about him. I do, however, take great delight in the power of a push, a false burst of light at the bottom of a cliff, just one little encouragement to the end. Sometimes it seems too easy to toy with him. Other times . . . I don’t know. But he is always so close by that it doesn’t matter so much.

•

My father is very brief. All in the most likeable manner possible—he gets this look of discomfort whenever someone tries to discuss something with him at length. He looks as if he would very much like to spare you the effort. He used to go through horrors with Miri on the subject of her day at school, his replies cautious and neutral in case he appeared to be disapproving of something that was a good thing. Miri would chatter and chatter about our teacher having been unfair or the disappearance of her pencils. “Ah,” Dad would say, and, “Right.” And, “Really?”

If I was going on a trip or something it was a simple matter of handing him a letter or an itinerary and saying, “Dad, it’s £300,” or whatever it was. He’d scan the paper and say, “Fine,” or he’d say, “Here’s the thing; can’t afford that this term. Are you now resentful?”

Are you now resentful
is always a genuine question from him. We
never, ever said yes. It was my dad’s idea to open Lily’s house as a bedand-breakfast. Lily’s grandma, our GrandAnna, had raised Lily herself, and when she died she left Lily the house in Dover. I heard my Dad on the phone to someone about it: “Seven bedrooms, four bathrooms and God’s own 1940s kitchen . . .”

Lily wanted to put the Dover house up to let and use the money to pay the rent on our flat in London, which, Dad said, made no sense at all. But: “Why on earth would I want to live in Dover again? I spent my childhood in a state of inertia.”

Dad spent about six months working on Lily. The facts, figures and written proposals he’d prepared for the bank left her completely unmoved; she always tried to ignore things she didn’t understand rather than be intimidated by them. But apparently it was the bed linen that changed her mind. Cool blue silk and cotton patchwork. When Dad laid the stitched pillowcase and duvet out for her on the sofa, the colours reminded her of something she’d never seen. She said to us, “Imagine everyone in the house—even people we don’t know—all wrapped up safe in blue, like fishes. What fun . . .”

Miri and I were ten; Dad spent some time with a big map, planning a scenic route, and then he drove the moving van himself. Miri and I fidgeted at first, then settled when we saw cliffs bruising the skyline and smelt birds and wet salt on the air.

Our new house had two big brown grids of windows with a row of brick in between each grid. No windows for the attic. From the outside the windows didn’t look as if they could be opened, they didn’t look as if they were there to let air or light in, they were funny square eyes, friendly, tired. The roof was a solid triangle with a fat rectangular chimney behind it. Lily bounced out of the van first and I scrambled out of the other side and crooked my arm so as to escort her to the door. The
house is raised from the road and laid along the top of a brick staircase, surrounded by thick hedge with pink flowers fighting through it. “Careful on the steps,” Lily said. The steps leading up to the house bulge with fist-sized lumps of grey-white flint, each piece a knife to cut your knee open should you slip. Opposite our house there is a churchyard, a low mound of green divided into two. The graves beneath it are unmarked. Lily took my arm and held Miri’s hand and when we got up to the front door she rubbed the crescent moon–shaped door knocker and laughed a little bit and said, “Hello, hello again.”

The first thing Lily showed us inside was the dusty marble fireplace. It was so big that Miri could crawl into the place where the wood was supposed to sit. She tried to make crackling, fire-like noises (when we were ten I always knew the meaning of the sounds she made, even when they were unsuccessful)

but ended up choking on a puff of dust that bolted down the chimney. Next Lily showed us the little ration-book larder behind the kitchen; the shelves were wonky and the room had a floor so crazily checked that none of us could walk in a straight line in there. I remember how brilliant I thought it all was; there was nothing for it but to jump in the air and yell and kick and make kung-fu noises.

Miri and I conferred and decided that we liked the tallness of the house, the way the walls shoot up and up with the certainty of stone, “Like we’re in a castle,” Miri put it. We liked the steep, winding staircase with the gnarled banister. We especially liked the ramshackle lift and the way you could see its working through a hole worn into the bottom in the back left corner. We liked that the passageways on each floor were wide enough for the two of us to stand beside each other with our arms and legs spread, touching but not touching. I climbed one of the apple trees and surveyed the garden, the patches of wild
flowers that crumpled in the shade, the Andersen shelter half-hidden by red camellia shrubs. I was well pleased. “Wicked house,” I said. “
Magic
,” said Miri, from somewhere below.

We thought it would be hard to make friends because of the way people came out and stared at us in the moving van as it passed through the streets. But Miri is good at making friends, and I am good at tagging along on expeditions and acting as if the whole thing was my idea in the first place. Miri was very pleased with Martin Jones’s curly hair; the boy’s head was like a sheep’s. He became our first friend in the area and he brought most of the rest.

Actually, when we were sixteen Miri gave me the task of telling Martin that he didn’t stand a chance with her. Miri called me into her room, fixed me with a look of dread and whispered, “He asked me out and now I just can’t
look at him
anymore.” I refused point-blank to be her messenger or to have anything to do with any of it, but she said, “Then I’ll write him a letter.” I cringed and said, “Don’t do that.”

Martin and a couple of others came around to smoke and watch what promised to be “strange and unusual porn.” Women with horses, women with lizards, women with women
plus
horses and lizards. I pretended to be leaner than I was and at one point mentioned aloud one of the “actor’s” resemblance to Miri’s boyfriend. The others groaned.