White Is for Witching (24 page)

“It is a monster,” Sade said, simply.

While she had been talking, I’d taken the saltshaker that sat between us, and I’d poured small hills of salt into the pockets of my skirt. Sade made no comment, but when Miranda called me from the sitting room and I got up to go, she grabbed my arm and said, “Wait a second.”

She went to the kitchen drawers and took out some chillies in a plastic bag to give to me. They looked like crooked twigs—brown, but splashed with dark red where autumn had bled on them. She opened the bag and the smell made me cough. You didn’t season food with this kind of pepper, you destroyed nerve endings. I said thank you and attempted a hug. She waved me away.

Miranda showed me the fireplace, the white cave she’d thought she might have lost her life in. She stared at the marble, rubbed its dust onto her fingertips. I tried to get her to look at me without actually saying “look at me.” It didn’t work. Miranda showed me her psychomantium—the place was almost friendly, like being carried on salt water towards yourself. The mirror seemed to cause the darkness. We silently agreed not to raise the matter of the nailheads glinting from her sealed desk drawer, the fact that everything she had seemed to be on view, her underwear folded and stacked beside the heater, even her pens and pencils tied round with a rubber band and placed on her desk amongst papers and tubes of lipstick. I think Miranda was sad that she didn’t have more to show me. A fireplace and a black room were the only places in the whole house that she seemed sure of. In her bed we pulled her covers up to our chins and lay quietly, careful not to bump each other with the sharp parts of ourselves, the elbows and the knees, until our bodies had warmed each other. Then Miranda shifted and
opened my mouth with her own. As we kissed I became aware of something leaving me. It left me in a solid stream, heavy as rope. It left from a hurt in my side, and it went into Miranda, it went into the same place in her. I tried hard to breathe, harder than I have ever tried at anything. I tried so very hard that I felt the strain on the blood vessels in my eyes. But I couldn’t. There was so much air passing between our lips but I couldn’t use any of it. It was like having my mouth blown into while my nostrils were pinched together. When I pulled away from Miranda she looked at me with eyes of puzzled slate.

I showered before dinner. I ran the water too hot as usual; I saw my face in the glass of the shower door and I concentrated on it as if it was a talisman or charm. A tune came unbidden, it was “Frère Jacques,” so I was clearly terrified.
Hello monster, hello monster,
I sang,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
When I opened the shower door, tiny hooks of steam sank into the lino. There were huge white towels, hotel towels, draped over the towel rack and I took one and dried myself, keeping my eyes on my face. The towel the girl in the mirror was drying herself with—

I frowned and looked at my towel. Where it had touched me it was striped with

black liquid, as dense as paint

(don’t scream)

there were shreds of hard skin in it. There was hair suspended in it

“The black’s coming off,” someone outside the bathroom door commented. Then

they whistled “Rule Britannia!” and laughed.

Bri-tons never-never-never, shall be slaves

My skin stung. Where to put this towel? I grew ugly in my need to make sure no one ever saw it, my face collapsing in on itself as I hand-washed the towel in the sink. I dressed slowly and carefully, and by
the time I’d put the towel on the rack to dry and opened the door, the passageway was empty.

Some other guests were booked in, so they ate earlier and Luc, Miranda, Eliot and I ate later. Candles flickered on the table. Miranda’s dad produced a fat thug of a winter stew, full of meat and turnip and other vegetables that crunched. There was red wine in it, too. It looked so rich on the plate that I balked.

“Is everything alright?” Miranda’s dad asked. He was at the head of the table, and Eliot and Miranda were opposite me. Suddenly everyone was looking at me. Eliot and Miranda were so alike. In photographs their twinhood was underwhelming, but in person, when they both had their eyes on you, you couldn’t sort one from the other—or you could, but not quickly enough to stop yourself saying the wrong name by mistake.

“It looks lovely,” I said. I added “sir,” in case I was supposed to call him “sir” and also because he reminded me of a teacher I’d had. I was careful not to let any food or water touch my lips—I tilted my glass and swallowed air, I lifted the fork to my mouth, spoke and rearranged the forkful of food on my plate whilst speaking. I wiped my mouth with a napkin, left red smudges on it, stared and tried to reason the colour away. Was my lip torn? Surreptitiously I lay a finger across my bottom lip; the skin was whole, but there was more red on my fingertip. After about five minutes I remembered what this was: lipstick. Miranda’s lipstick, the imprint of her kisses on my lips. And there we all were, Miranda, her father, her brother and I, sharing oxygen around a dinner table. I scrubbed at my lips as hard as I could without it looking pathological. I don’t know what kind of lipstick Miranda wore but it just wouldn’t come off. At best the smudges on the napkin lightened in shade until they were a decayed pink.

I wanted to hide, or to sleep. I thought if I just slept the discomfort off, the place would make sense to me in the morning. Miranda wanted me to read to her, and I did, the book on the pillow before her so that I had to curl my arm around her to turn the pages. It was a Hans Christian Andersen story about the disadvantages of a mechanical nightingale when compared to the real thing, and towards the end I got quieter and quieter until I was whispering the story into her ear. She was asleep almost before I’d even finished. I turned off the lamp and lay so that there was a small gap between us.

•

“Ore,” Miranda whispered. “Ore. Are you awake?”

I felt the heat rising from her skin. I ran my hands over her arms, her breasts, her stomach; they were covered with sweat. She said she was thirsty. She kissed me and said again that she was thirsty. I said I’d go and get her some water, grabbed a glass from her desk and ran into the bathroom, shaking all over. I jumped when the cold water from the tap hit me; I was trying to fill the glass as quickly as possible. If I brought her water she would be well.

I tried to take the water to her, but I couldn’t find her.

I walked out of the bathroom door and, I don’t know how, found myself still in the bathroom. The room hadn’t grown any longer; the door was still in front of me; I didn’t feel any change in the ground beneath my feet. But when I tried to pass through the door again I was in the bathroom again, and my neck cricked, as if I’d turned my head too fast. I tried one more time, and came through into the passageway, which was meant to be arranged into an L, with the staircase completing the rectangle. I was on the longest part of the L—the bathroom was meant to be in between Eliot’s room and their dad’s room. But the doors had changed positions. All four doors on that floor were now ranged along one wall, and
the rest of the “L” was blank. None of the doors would open. The stairs were still there, and I inched down them carefully, one by one, afraid that they would change too, unsure where they would take me. The staircase ended in the kitchen, every surface heavy in the moonlight.

There was a long shadow behind me. It wasn’t my shadow. From the corner of my eye I saw it grow like a syrup stain, called from nowhere. I went to the counter, spilled salt all over it and ran the flat of a knife through the salt, on both sides. I turned before I could lose my nerve; or more, the knife turned and took me with it.

Kill the soucouyant.

“Ore,” Miranda said. I had her by the throat. It was the principle of knife and fork. You had to hold something down before you could stab it.

She was holding a pair of dressmaker’s scissors to my chest, opened into a stark V. I didn’t feel them there until I looked down. There was a rip in my pajama top. She let the scissors drop onto the counter, and I dropped the knife.

“I thought you were the soucouyant,” I said.

She said, “I thought you were.”

We touched each other’s faces in the dark, trying to be sure.

“Did I look different?”

“I just couldn’t . . . see you.”

“You’re shaking.”

“The soucouyant—”

“The goodlady—”

We were talking at the same time; until she said “goodlady” I couldn’t tell which of us was saying what.

“The goodlady?” I said.

Miranda fetched a cloth and a newspaper and wiped all the salt off the counter. She didn’t answer.

“I’m off home,” I said.

“You can’t, it’s 2:00 am.”

She drank noisily from the tap, then wiped her forehead. “God. That’s better.”

Miranda led the way through the house’s unlit core. I wished I could see her face.

“Miranda,” I said, but not loudly enough, because she didn’t answer me. “She’s not good,” I said, once we were in her bed, her legs wrapped around mine.

Miranda put a hand on my backbone. Lately it had been starting to show.

“No. I don’t think she is after all. Are you scared?” she asked.

“Aren’t you?”

Very softly she said into my shoulder, “Please understand. We are the goodlady.”

“You and I?” I asked.

“No. The house and I.”

I lay very still. I didn’t know what would happen to me if I moved, if I tried to run. For some time I was aware of her talking to me, but I was concentrating so hard on being quiet and still that I couldn’t understand her. When I finally tuned in, she was sleepy. She had been saying the same thing for minutes, it seemed.

“Miranda can’t get away,” she murmured. “She can let you go, but it will be bad for her because then they will be angry.”

She slept, but I didn’t. I tried to understand her. With my eyes closed, I touched her hair with both hands, found the place just below the curve of her shoulders where her hair continued as a soft phantom, impossible when my eyes were open. I wrapped this hair around my fingers and sought faith in her goodness. When I couldn’t find it I slipped out from under the covers, away from her, and I looked at her
as she lay, weak but made of wire. I fought the impulse to part her lips with my fingers, to check her teeth.

You have seen her teeth before

I told myself that no matter what Miranda said, the soucouyant was the old lady. That was the rule. It was the young girl that defeated the soucouyant. The two did not enter the story in each other’s bodies; the two did not share one body, such a thing was a great violation. Of what? I didn’t know.

The moon-coloured mannequin halfway across the room had its arms out, as if it would smoothly and calmly murder me if I moved for the door. Finally, I reached out and switched on the bedside lamp, which didn’t seem to disturb Miranda’s sleep. The light was sickly, but at least everything in the room appeared as it was.

•

It’s hard to believe that there are girls as straightforwardly sexy as Ore Lind who also get into Cambridge. It’s even harder for me to believe that girls that looked like her got into Cambridge and befriended my sister. Ore is almost as tall as me. Plaits and ribbons and a scent of coconut. Big, bright eyes. She had this constantly benevolent expression, somewhere between a smile and a look of preoccupation. She’d brought Miri a lollipop and spent the afternoon in an armchair in front of the TV, languidly licking both her lollipop and Miri’s rejected one, the shoulder of her jumper dress slipping down, her knees drawn up so that her feet didn’t touch the ground. Her legs were long and slim and she’d dressed them in stockings that travelled up and up, marked by a strip of lace where they stopped—I only caught glimpses of those stocking tops, and couldn’t look too long without being blatant.

I kept wanting to ask her if she was cold. I kept wanting to run a finger along the seam of those stockings. I caught Miri catching me
looking at Ore, and decided to dub our visitor Lind in the hope that I could inspire gentlemanly feeling in myself. Still, she must have had a reason for wearing stockings and a short dress in winter. Girls who dress for themselves dress like Miri.

I went to Martin’s after dinner—he’d seen Miri and Ore walking over from the station and said, jokingly, that I should “get in there.” Most of our sixth-form posse was there too, sitting and lying on beanbags, drinking beer and chatting breeze, soaking up the last week or so of holiday before trekking back to their essays at Durham, UCL, Kings, Bristol, Oxford, Edinburgh. People kept asking me about South Africa and then pitching in with their accounts of Freshers Week before I could complete a sentence. Dan was proud to have been appointed “the naked fresher” for 2001. I told him I thought that was mighty gay, and he said, “You wish it was, Silver, but I don’t like you like that.” So that was the quality of the evening’s conversation. Emma was there, laboriously making Cosmopolitans for the girls with a cocktail shaker she’d got for Christmas. She’d grown her hair out and dyed it blond. She looked good. She tried to get a game of chess going but no one was interested. All in all that night was intolerable.

The house was dead when I got home, except for a couple watching Sky News in the sitting room. Not Americans then, otherwise they’d have been watching BBC news and loving the Britishness of it. I heard Ore and Miri talking in Miri’s room, and thumped suddenly on my bedroom wall, to scare them. They fell silent. Haha.

I found a box of the Gauloises Dad had given me. As I lit one it came to me that my GrandAnna’s husband, the RAF man, had called them golliwogs. A serviceman was smoking a golliwog in one of his cartoons and when I’d asked Lily what it meant to smoke a golliwog she’d just stared and crooked her finger at me and didn’t relax until I brought her the cartoon.

I stuck my head out of the window and breathed smoke at the half moon. It snagged in the tree branches. I heard Miri’s window opening, and a couple of metres away from me, Ore stuck her head out of the window too. She had a haughty profile, her hair like a ruffled crown. She wasn’t wearing much—I saw a bit of silk and lots of skin. I hoped that, beneath the sill, she was wearing the stockings too. She turned and waved at me, I nodded back.