White Is for Witching (20 page)

wobbled and almost toppled from the sill, but I grabbed her shoulder and dragged her off the ledge with a sharp jerk, sharper than I meant it to be, but I was scared. I lay spread-eagled over her, pinning her to the floor until her struggling turned into giggles. “What are you doing?” I heard her ask, in her usual voice, her waking voice. I let her crawl out from under me, watched her walk up to the window and close it. She got back into bed, but I stayed where I was. The floor felt secure.

•

Ore spent afternoons reading to Miranda. Miranda liked hearing
The Arabian Nights
best, because then Ore used all her voice, changing accents and tone and speed—when she was a djinn, she threw her voice so that it towered. Miranda was awed by the strange sorceress who could force men to become birds and mules by throwing dust into their faces and commanding: “Wretch, quit thy form!” On the very rare occasion that her necromancy failed and the man stood before her unchanged, the sorceress would laugh coyly and say that she had only been playing.

Miranda lay on her side in her bed, or in Ore’s, and she heard Ore and dreamed with her eyes open. She grew to find a sunlit room bearable; she no longer feared a change of light that she couldn’t control. She stopped taking the pills she’d been prescribed. She washed them down the drain, ripped the labels off the bottles and threw them away. There wouldn’t be any of those doctors’ letters reminding her to make another appointment until after Christmas.

She felt fine, but she began to feel followed. When she passed
through the back gate of her college, it took an age until she heard the gate close behind her. But as she turned the corner into New Court, no one else came through the arch. Clare College had prettier grounds than her college, and she took big detours so that she could pass through them on her way to and from supervisions, fanning herself with a rolled-up essay and catching falling leaves in the skirt of her coat. And there came moments when she knew that there was someone behind her, remaining out of sight by taking one step for every five that she took. Other people moved past her over the bridge between the gardens; they carried books and bags and musical instruments, they were on their way to places. But not the person she felt hovering up in the air behind her, doubling the path she’d walked from Ore’s room to her supervision, or from her supervision to hall. She paid attention to the sense of surveillance because it seemed unconnected to the night. She never felt followed at night, and that made this feeling she had less likely to be paranoia. Probably. She was afraid. Afraid that she was imagining the surveillance, afraid that it was real. When she entered a room she tried to look at everyone in it individually, trying to catch the person who had just been looking at her.

•

For at least ten minutes most evenings I’d taken to waiting outside a phone box on King’s Parade while Miranda tried to call her brother. I watched her stiffen expectantly and then slump, and it made me dislike her brother. There was no way that he was so busy that he couldn’t answer the phone just one of the times that she called. There was no way he couldn’t find five minutes to e-mail her or something. When Miranda came out of the phone box I’d get her a hot chocolate in the yellow-tinged gloom of a vaulted underground café on Market Square. She’d make excuses for him.

I said, “I think he is probably just self-absorbed.”

She kicked me in the shin. It’s no joke being kicked in the shin by a chick wearing stilettos. I was in pain.

Miranda found out about a rock ’n’ roll dance night at Fisher Hall, and she fetched a flared skirt with a poodle embroidered on it from her wardrobe. The skirt was pink, and she tied a pastel-pink scarf around her neck in a jaunty bow. I think that was the only time I saw her wearing a colour other than black. I couldn’t find anything similar, so I settled for wearing a crinoline under a strapless polka-dot dress that already had a big skirt. She tied pink ribbons to the ends of my plaits. I left my room with her kisses tingling on my shoulder blades.

When we got to Fisher Hall, I found out that Miranda could
jive
. She grabbed my hand and shimmied in circles, flicking her heels and flapping her hands as if the music the Elchords were making was mowing her down. She said she had learnt the style from a videotape. I just shuffled and two-stepped and let her use me as a prop. I couldn’t get five minutes’ rest, either—the other dancers stayed away. They cast admiring glances but stuck with their partners.

At the end of the dance Miranda was so exhausted that she lay flat on the floor by the emptied drinks table, unable to move even to minimise the effort of the people who laughed nervously and stepped over her. I made her drink lemonade through a straw, and got her back to her room on a sugar rush, singing
too lay too lay peppermint stick
. I wanted to say something to her, something like “Hey I like you,” or “You’re so so pretty. You’re actually gorgeous.” She had a black sash tied around her head; it drove stray strands of hair behind her ears and suddenly even her ears were beautiful.

“Why don’t you take a picture,” she said, flapping her hand at me. “It’ll last longer.”

I climbed onto her bed and tucked myself around her, my knees
against the backs of her knees, my stomach against her back. We were both trembling.

“Nice ears,” I said.

Our bodies struck like matches; she changed form under my hands, I went slowly, slowly,

(only do as much as we both want)

her nipples hard under my lips, her stomach downy with the fuzz that kept it warm, the soft hollows of her inner thighs. She said, “Please stop.”

I flopped down beside her, turning her face towards me, stroking her hair. Her hair felt endless in the dark. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” Then, surprisingly, she asked me if I was okay.

“Not really, not if I’ve upset you. Did it feel weird?”

“No. Well, a little, perhaps. It was . . . I don’t know. Too much, probably. I’ve never . . . not even with a boy.”

I know I said something, but whatever I said made no sense. She was so worried that there was no way for me to assure her that I was no marauder out to feast on the shattered remains of her hymen or something. My fingers snagged in her hair and her head jerked on the pillow. She got up and got dressed and I did too, trying to think of a way to stop this becoming a crisis.

I caught up with her at the college gate. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

We both smiled, embarrassed, not at each other, in different directions. “What are you sorry for?” we said.

I felt every vein in me move closer to the surface of my skin, all veins plucked in one direction as if I was a stringed instrument.

She opened the college gate with her key and stepped out onto the street. I followed her; she hadn’t said that I couldn’t. It was full moon. No one was out, and it was so cold that our breath stained the air
around our heads. Birds chirped. I don’t know what kind of bird chirps at night. We walked towards the mill pond.

“My mental health is questionable anyway,” she said, not looking at me. She told me she’d been in a clinic for just over five months because she’d had a breakdown and forgotten who she was. I sat down on a low wall; the river was at my back. She sat down too.

“What, the breakdown came just all of a sudden?”

“No. There was this one night when something went wrong. Some kind of splinter swerved in my brain or something.”

“What happened on splinter night?” I asked.

“Splinter night?”

“The night everything went wrong.”

She paused. “I can’t remember.”

“Can’t you?”

She took a deep breath and rested her chin on her hand. “I have a theory,” she said. I nodded at her to continue and she said, “There’s this fireplace downstairs. I think I went down there for some reason. To hide, maybe. I thought it was all my fault my mother died. And I hit my head on the marble. My brain bled. I died.”

She watched me.

“Right,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Why don’t you think it’s possible?” she asked. “Because everyone can see me?”

“It’s not that. It’s just that it seems to me that the dead only return for love or for revenge. Who did you come back for?”

Neither of us smiled. I felt light-headed. I couldn’t believe that we were discussing this.

“Love or revenge,” she sighed. “Neither.”

“Miranda,” I said. “You’re not dead. Okay?”

“Ore,” she said. “I’m not alive.”

I had found the bottle of purple water that Tijana had given me; I ran my thumb over its lid in my pocket.

“Let’s suppose that what I say is true,” she said. “Just as a thought experiment. Let’s say I’m not alive anymore. What would be helping me to maintain the appearance of life? That’s the baffling thing.”

“That rouge of yours,” I said, giving in. I touched the dip between her collarbones, it was like touching thin paper as breath shifted through it.

“You should run,” she said, mournfully.

“No, you should,” I said. I pulled the bottle out of my pocket and shook it.

“What is that,” she said. Her pupils were huge satin cavities. There was no curiosity in them.

“Run,” I said, and threw some water at her. It didn’t touch her, but she blenched, turned and ran away between the trees.

I followed her. For someone with so little energy, she ran fast. She was really and truly running from me. She crossed the mill pond bridge, sprang right and headed back towards college. I tossed the exorcism water into a bin a second before I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. She slowed down immediately. She was crying angry tears.

“If you don’t believe me just say you don’t believe me. Don’t go along with me and then make fun,” she said. She shrugged my hand off her arm and collapsed onto the zebra crossing. There were no cars coming. I sat down beside her.

“I wasn’t taking the piss out of you,” I said, unsure whether I was lying. “I just wanted to give you some way of knowing for certain. It was an experiment. That was exorcism water.”

She sniffed. When I dared to look at her, she was smiling.

“Why was it purple?” She wore her tears like tiny crystals that tipped her lashes.

“Because . . . I don’t know.” I didn’t have the heart to make anything up.

“It’s so quiet,” she said. Three
AM
and as usual, the town was dead. She lay down with zebra stripes stacked behind her, and she pulled me down beside her. “Don’t you care where you come from? Don’t you wonder why you do the things you do and like the things you like?”

“Er . . . not really,” I said.

“Do you think it is her fault,” she said, without inflection.

“Whose?”

She didn’t repeat herself.

We looked at the moon and the moon looked at us. I had thought we would be able to hear when a car was coming, or feel the rumble of its wheels through the tarmac, but headlights were the only warning, and even then I noticed them so late that when we scrambled up from the road the car’s driver took fright and blared his horn at us as he went past.

We went back to college. I went to my room and Miranda went to hers.

I wanted to ask her something. I wanted to say, “If you’re dead, then why did you get up when the car came? Why bother?” But I didn’t want her to run from me again. And, I suppose, having died once there is no reason to die again.

I went home on the last weekend of term. I left most of my things in my college room, so all I had to take to the train station with me was a Reebok bag filled with dirty clothes. The last thing I did before leaving college was check my pigeonhole in the post room. Tijana was in there, checking for post herself. The mockney guy from the year above us, the one who’d wondered aloud whether Tijana had a boyfriend, was holding her hand and whispering in her ear while she giggled and read a letter. I was amazed. I shook my head. The mockney guy saw someone
he wanted to speak to out of the post room window and bounded out of the door like a badly made puppy. As soon as he’d left, Tijana turned to me and said, “What are you all shaking your head for?”

“Well,” I said. “Are you with him?”

“What if I am?”

“Nothing. I just wouldn’t have thought you’d go for that type.”

“That type?”

I pointed at him. He was standing in New Court with another guy who looked just like him, laughing from only one side of his mouth. Couldn’t she see what he was?

“Tijana. He’s a public-school wanker.”

“How can you say that? You don’t even know him.”

“Have a good Christmas, Tijana.”

“Not knowing people doesn’t bother you, does it? That’s why you have this thing with the girl who hardly even exists. I mean, do you want to be with her, or is it that you want to be her?”

I wanted to wither her with a look followed by a superbly dismissive comment, but instead I said, “What?”

Tijana said, “Look at yourself. You’re disappearing.”

It wasn’t as dramatic as Tijana had put it. But that day I was wearing the jeans that I usually reserved for thinner days, and even though I’d belted them up as tightly as I could, they still slipped down over the spiky new angles of my hips. I couldn’t acknowledge it, though. The trick was not to think about the shrinkage, or how tired I was. I could not say aloud how draining it was to share a bed every night, how it became so difficult to breathe together, because if I said it aloud it would sound like a complaint and then it would become a complaint. I could not say anything against Miranda. There wasn’t anything bad to say, she did nothing wrong. I deferred thinking about the fact that for most of the term I had been eating and eating in my room with the
door closed, crisps and chocolate and sausage rolls in the hours when Miranda’s lectures overlapped with my free time. I had never eaten so much, I had never wanted to eat so much. But my clothes kept getting looser. I would think about all this once I’d spent enough time unconscious in my own bed at home, beneath my poster of Malcolm X. “By any means possible” . . . first I would sleep alone, later I would look for wounds.