White Is for Witching (3 page)

“What the fuck—”

“Er, no—”

“Too gay, Silver.”

Martin didn’t say anything himself, but I knew that he was gutted and I didn’t let him pay for his share of the weed; he put a note down and when he wasn’t looking I screwed it up and threw it into his coat pocket with a sense of relief so huge it was disabling. I wrote something in my diary about it a few days later, about our teenage years being a
realm of the emotionally baroque. I wasn’t even lean when I wrote that.

So Martin was the first friend, but the other kids he brought liked the house too.

For a few months after we moved in it was just Lily, Miri, Dad and me in the house, no guests. Decorating happened, the kitchen got updated; Lily went away to Mexico and came back with a pair of shrivelled corn-husk dolls that she put on a shelf in her studio when Miri and I rejected them. During that time there was no better place in the neighbourhood for hide-and-seek, or for Robin Hood versus Sheriff of Nottingham swordstick fighting in the back garden. There was no better place to play Hitler Resistance Force, a game I made up so I could be Churchill. My first kiss was in the Andersen shelter, more a percussion of heads, faces, mouths than anything else. We were thirteen. Emma’s the sort of girl who likes boys who have unpredictable moods and write poetry and imagine things, so I played up to that. We were in the shelter because she was supposed to be a Nazi double agent giving me secret information. For some reason whilst kissing her my main preoccupation was not hurting her or bruising her. I tried not to hold her too hard. Her hair and skin were so soft.

There is another shelter inside the house. It is beneath the sitting room with the fireplace; it is under a trapdoor set in the floor. The room is dim and long and deep; a room for sleeping in. Sleeping and not much else. I tried to revise for exams in there and ended up curled up on my side on the floor, snoring.

What took getting used to in Dover were the gulls and their croaky sobs, and the sense of climbing upstairs when walking on some roads and downstairs when walking on others. The house, the garden, moving. The whole thing was like a dream; for weeks Miri and I couldn’t
believe it and wandered around the place with pangs in our stomachs, pre-emptive homesickness ready for the time when Dad and Lily would announce it was only a holiday and it was time to leave. Aside from our great-grandmother dying, we knew that it was Dad that had made it all happen, and we revered him as a wizard.

Miri’s room was darker than mine, even before she took to keeping her curtains drawn at all times and Lily started calling her room “the psychomantium.” That first day, Miri found something on the floor of that room she’d picked as hers. I didn’t see what it was, but it was very small, and I thought that it must have cut her or something because just after she dropped it into her pocket she sucked thoughtfully at her finger. It took me about an hour of my best teasing and insults to get the secret out of her; finally she sighed and showed me. It was a ball of chalk.

•

Dad had been a waiter, then a trainee chef, then a food critic, and each job had bored him to the point of existential crisis. This thing with the house was plan B. Or C, or D or X. Without the guests and the maintenance and the folders of forms and bills, Dad would just sit. It’s almost as if Lily knew, years and years in advance, that she was leaving us. As if she was gifting him something to be later, after her. That’s not true, and it’s not possible, but . . . the way she indulged him so completely. She gave him her house; Lily and Miri and I just lived in it. The capital man is the sum of his possessions.

When Lily died, and here I am telling it exactly as it was, Dad got even more control of the house. Lily’s dying meant he didn’t have to ask anyone about anything. There was no longer anyone who needed convincing that it was absolutely necessary to replace the old lift shaft; he just had it replaced, three months after the funeral. He dropped me
off at the clinic and said to me, “I can’t stay long with you and Miri.” At that time Miri would only speak to me, and I knew it bothered him the way Miri sat back in her chair and looked at him without saying anything, with that empty smile on her lips. But the other reason Dad couldn’t stay was that he had to get back and keep an eye on the work on the lift.

Without saying a word I kept daring him.
Fall apart, fall apart.
If I could have seen a button to press, I would have.
Miri and I don’t need you to be strong, we need you to crack a little now.

is a medical term for a particular kind of disordered eating. It’s an appetite for non-food items, things that don’t nourish. The word itself is pronounced
pie
-kah, a word like a song about a bird and food. Miri said it tiredly to herself and to me. “Pie-kah, pie-kah, I’ve got pie-kah.” Lily told all our teachers at primary school and all the dinner ladies knew. When we went to secondary school Lily wrote it down on a form as a special concern. Pie-kah meant that Miri counted bites of food and smiled with breathless relief when she had met her quota. Counting bites was Lily’s idea, and Miri accepted it gladly. “That’s a good idea,” she said, nodding, nodding. Whenever Miri talked about her pica with Lily she seemed so grown up about it, a shaky balance of humility and dignity. Dad was relieved that Miri didn’t mean to be rebellious. I might remember Miri’s special pastries as more elaborate than they really were, but Dad made some astonishing things for her. Flaky cones smothered in honey and coconut and chocolate and whatever else he could think of. He did a lot of soft foods, too, soups, and jellies with (eye) balls of peeled fruit staring out of them. What Miri
did was, she crammed chalk into her mouth under her covers. She hid the packaging at the bottom of her bag and threw it away when we got to school. But then there’d be cramps that twisted her body, pushed her off her seat and lay her on the floor, helplessly pedalling her legs. Once, as if she knew that I was thinking of sampling her chalk to see what the big wow was, she smiled sweetly, sadly, patronisingly and said to me, “Don’t start, you’ll get stuck.”

•

It runs in the family. Anna Good had it in 1938; a year before she became Anna Silver. She ruined her work stockings and skirt with crouching in the mud searching for acorn husks that would splinter down her throat. She ate leaves by the handful and chipped her teeth on the pebbles she scooped out of the brown water when she went walking on the promenade.
The house is Andrew’s
, she told herself;
I have no part in it
.

One evening she pattered around inside me, sipping something strong that wedged colour into her cheeks, and she dragged all my windows open, putting her glass down to struggle with the stiffer latches. I cried and cried for an hour or so, unable to bear the sound of my voice, so shrill and pleading, but unable to stop the will of the wind wheeling through me, cold in my insides. That was the first and last time I’ve heard my own voice. I suppose I am frightening. But Anna Good couldn’t hear me. When she closed me up again it was only because she was too cold. Most nights she went with the moon, and when it was round she stayed in my biggest bedroom and wouldn’t answer the thing that asked her to let it out

(let you out from where?

let me out from the small, the hot, the take me out of the fire i am ready i am hard like the stones you ate, bitter like those husks)

the moonlight striped her, marked out places where the whispering thing would slip through and she would unfold. When Andrew went to war the sirens shrieked at night and the sky was full of squat balloons that flamed and ate bombs and would not move with the breeze, these balloons and nothing else, not even stars.

Anna Good you are long gone now, except when I resurrect you to play in my puppet show, but you forgive since when I make you appear it is not really you, and besides you know that my reasons are sound. Anna Good it was not your pica that made you into a witch. I will tell you the truth because you are no trouble to me at all. Indeed you are a mother of mine, you gave me a kind of life, mine, the kind of alive that I am.

Anna Good there was another woman, long before you, but related. This woman was thought an animal. Her way was to slash at her flesh with the blind, frenzied concentration that a starved person might use to get at food that is buried. Her way was to drink off her blood, then bite and suck at the bobbled stubs of her meat. Her appetite was only for herself. This woman was deemed mad and then turned out and after that she was not spoken of. I do not know the year, or even how I know this.

But Miranda . . . you are listening too.

Miranda.

Look at me.

Will you not?

It is useful, instructive, comforting to know that you are not alone in your history.

So I have done you good

and now,

some harm.

finally discharged herself from the clinic, Eliot and her father came to collect her. They looked at her strangely. She didn’t know what it could be; she was more normal then she had been in months. She sat in the back of the car and looked very seriously at her suitcase while her brother and father looked at her, looked away, looked at her again. She passed a hand over her hair, which lay meek and wispy against her neck. Her hair had been bobbed out of necessity at first. Miranda had been admitted to the clinic because one morning Eliot had found her wordless and thoughtful. It had been a long night, a perfect full moon tugging the sky around it into clumsy wrinkles. Miranda had been bleeding slightly from the scalp and her wrists were bound together with extreme dexterity and thin braids of her own hair.

It had been six months since then but her hair had been kept short. She didn’t know why, she couldn’t remember having expressed a preference. There was much that she was unable to remember. Especially unclear were the days immediately after she and Eliot had had the news of Lily’s death. She remembered going into school and everyone being
very sorry for her loss, but Eliot said that he had gone to school and she had stayed at home. The incident with the hair was completely lost; it seemed that when she’d left herself she’d left completely and it was not worth trying to fetch the images back, pointless trying to identify what exactly it was that had made her snap.

The two doctors who had been “working with” her at the clinic had mistook her resignation for stubbornness and constantly hovered on the edge of pressing her to remember. She objected mildly, with a sense of wasting her father’s money. The clinic was a private clinic. Her room at the clinic had its own phone line and plush curtains and in the common room people checked their e-mail and played snooker. She had agreed to be admitted to an adolescent psychiatric unit because no-one at home knew how to help her feel comfortable.

She had had such a strong feeling that she needed to talk to someone who would tell her some secret that would make everything alright. She had been unable to think who it was. She had sat awake long hours downstairs, looking into the empty white arch of the fireplace, her hands on her rib cage. Who was it that needed to talk to her, that she needed to talk to? She had gone through lists of people it could be. She could only think of people that it couldn’t be. It wasn’t Lily, it wasn’t her father, it wasn’t Eliot, it wasn’t any of the poets whose words stuck spikes in her, not even Rumi. It wasn’t God. She did not think it was someone who was alive. She did not think it was anyone who existed, this messenger. So, the morning after the bad night she went with her father to see a doctor, a different doctor from the one who had, through no fault of his own, been unable to help her with her pica. She had signed a form, her name near her father’s, and admitted herself to the clinic.

Whenever she tried to think about the long night before the bad morning on which Eliot had found her, nothing came to mind. The
sedatives had done their work and she’d gone away and now she was coming home again. Exactly as if she’d been put in an envelope and posted abroad, then returned to sender. Even if alive the package doesn’t, can’t, note events, only the sensation of travel. All Miranda had been left with was a suspicion that she had spent much of her first night at the clinic clapping. She thought there might have been a bout of bringing her hands together over and over after the lights in the room went out, her body held in frightened rigidity because if she dared stop clapping then a bad thing would come.

She hadn’t told Eliot about it when he came to visit; instead she had taken to asking him whether he thought it would rain. He had said yes every time.

Eliot was wearing his reading glasses now; he’d climbed into the car with a hardback about the history of doubt. The way he held it on his lap as their father drove, she could tell he was unsure of the ensuing protocol; no one was saying anything, so there was no reason for him not to continue reading. But at the same time, if he started reading it would be a confrontational act somehow. His pockets weren’t big enough to put the book out of sight, either. Eventually he pushed his glasses up to the top of his head and looked out of the window. To make conversation, Miranda said, “Why are you reading that book? Are you in doubt about something?”

Eliot yawned, as he did when uncomfortable. “I told Cambridge that I’d read it and now I’ve got to make it true.”

She said, “You’re applying to Cambridge?”

Uncertainty worked his mouth. She thought she had wobbled in her seat, then realised she hadn’t moved at all; the thought
don’t go
had flashed through her like a swarm of pins. Eliot was one of those boys that made girls go quiet. He was so beautiful that it seemed certain he was arrogant or insensitive or stupid. He’d taken Luc’s contrast of fair
skin and dark hair and he’d taken Lily’s curls and lively wide-set eyes. His bone structure was scary and unnatural and flawless. Besides that he was her knight.