White Is for Witching (7 page)

•

Since Azwer and Ezma were leaving, Miranda felt she should give their daughters something. Suryaz and Deme would each need a talisman,
an object that smelt lovely, or that felt kind to the hand; such things are little suitcases to put sad feelings in so that they can go away by themselves.

Miranda didn’t have to go back to school until after the Christmas holidays, so for Suryaz she spent five nights under her bedroom lamp, making a cloth doll with a seed pearl smile and rose petals for eyes. She slept sparingly and unwillingly. Rest seized her and kept her until she twitched awake two or three hours later.

When Suryaz and Deme came home in the afternoons and sat down in the kitchen for their after-school snacks, Miranda mustered the energy to shuffle downstairs. She poked her head around the kitchen door for a brief but fond sighting of Suryaz, who was invariably a creature of jam, all sticky mouth and gooey ringlets. She thought, Soon I will have something to give you, and you don’t know it yet.

Each night Miranda worked on the doll and then she spent the day in bed, half dreaming of her needle in a circle of white. On the night that Suryaz’s doll was finished, she took her big bottle of attar of roses, unplugged its glass stopper and filled a bowl, then swam Suryaz’s doll in it. When the doll was slack and fat with liquid, she removed it and dropped it on the floor, where it lay beside her with arms and legs spread until the morning, by which time it had dried out.

Deme was harder to think of a gift for—Deme who’d stood on tiptoe in a box in the night, looking at the Alarm button. Deme wouldn’t want a thing that flopped charmingly and had nothing to tell her. When Azwer and Ezma began loading things into Luc’s car, Miranda went to find Deme. “Please come and choose a going-away present for yourself. Anything I have that you like,” she said, feeling shy now under the younger girl’s glossy stare. The girls had become steely since the lift broke down; they seemed full of resolutions not to smile anymore. Deme wouldn’t come without Suryaz, so the three of them stood in
Miranda’s room, peering around in the gloom. Miranda covered the face of Lily’s watch with her hand and thought to herself, be giving. She watched Deme’s eyes move from her books to the sticks of chalk that she kept in a Marlboro cigarette box.

“Never smoke,” she told Deme, firmly. Deme put her hand out and pointed at a hairbrush that Lily had given Miranda. It was bone backed, with tiny skulls carved into it. Some of the skulls faced each other and were blended together at the jaw. Miranda had only recently realised that these were the skulls that were kissing. Deme chose that hairbrush, and Miranda wrapped it up in a silk scarf and gave it to her gladly. Suryaz stood by, rocking her new doll in the big pocket of her dress.

Suryaz bowed her head and her curls swung before her closed eyes, her face scrunched as if she was about to describe something and was trying to remember it with exactness and close attention. But she only seemed able to say, “Oh Miranda. Be careful.”

And Deme urged, “It is true. You’re nice, and you haven’t been well. Do be careful.”

Ezma called her daughters from the floor below. Suryaz said something to Deme in Azeri. Deme replied to her in Azeri, then turned a sweet smile on Miranda and dropped a square of lined writing paper onto Miranda’s pillow.

Miranda shook hands with Suryaz. Deme shook hands with Miranda. Each said goodbye.

Miranda stretched, then sat for a while after the noise of their departure had died in her ears. She was feeling fragile and had missed her morning dose, so she took more pills than was customary for her and washed them down with vinegar. She poured rose attar onto her tongue to mask the sourness her drink brought. She knelt down with her neck bowed as though for an axe and ran her perfume-wettened fingers through her hair.

Then she opened Suryaz and Deme’s letter. It was written in a round and extra neat hand that was unmarred by the splotches the fountainpen nib had made in several places.

The letter read:

Dear Miranda Silver,

This house is bigger than you know!
There are extra floors, with lots of people on them. They are looking people. They look at you, and they never move. We do not like them. We do not like this house, and we are glad to be going away.

This is the end of our letter.

Yours sincerely,

Deme and Suryaz Kosarzadeh

Miranda folded the letter several times and put it in her pocket. She tried to smile, and managed, but not for long. She took the letter out and read it again. She was thinking things, but she couldn’t understand her thoughts. It wasn’t necessarily about Suryaz and Deme. It was more about the exhaustion of having finished Suryaz’s doll, of having worked her eyes and her nerves for someone different and distant, someone who had lived in a different house from her when she’d thought they were all living in the same house, safe as little fishes in folds of the deep blue sea.

Miranda went down through the trapdoor and curled up in a corner of the indoor bomb shelter. She cried with her face turned into the wall. Lily had told her and Eliot that this house, with their great-grandmother inside it, had escaped the effects of a bomb in 1942, that the houses a short distance away had been torn apart, their roofs whirling away to reveal cakes of brick with savage bites taken out of them. The house was lucky. Or storing its collapse.

To live here without Lily . . . Miranda found that the sadness was far far bigger than her, and it was forcing her back. The wall she leant against had a damp, high temperature to it, like tears on skin.

•

Christmas was dismal. We went to Paris as usual, to stay with our grandparents (Dad’s parents, I mean) on the Île Saint-Louis. There was too much food. There’s always too much food at Christmas, but this time it kept getting stuck in my throat and each bite turned into this choice between eating and breathing, as if you should ever have to choose.

We sat around the table and Miri and I didn’t even try to join in with the conversation that Sylvie, Dad and The Paul were having. I stared at the huge holly and mistletoe wreaths on the wall, and Miri accidentally counted her bites of turkey aloud. “Nine,” she breathed out, and dropped her knife and fork onto her plate with a clatter, and after that no one could think of anything to say for a while.

Miri and I call our grandfather The Paul. He is very wrinkled, quite stooped, smiles amiably and is generally a most excellent and easygoing being. I aim to reach that state of grace by the time I’m his age, calmly putting my tackle box in order or reading the newspaper with seemingly unmitigated attention while my wife gets at me about something. Our grandmother, Sylvie, is not known as The Sylvie. She is the girl who fell in love with a boy who worked in a bakery and had married him by the time his patisserie P. M. Dufresne had become so notable that fashionable magazines recommended it.

Miri told me that Sylvie had once showed her a pristine 1969 copy of French
Vogue
, with a small piece about P. M. Dufresne. Alongside the piece was a photograph of some intimidatingly fashionable creatures tripping gaily in through the shop door. Sylvie only let Miri see
the piece for a couple of seconds, then whisked it away, saying, “Sticky fingers. Besides, you are not able to understand it.”

Sylvie is still vexed because we all tried to learn French but had to stop because Lily couldn’t get the hang of it and would substitute any word she couldn’t recall with “
l’oignon
” and then she’d wave her hands and laugh. When Dad got annoyed with her (which he did quietly, but curtly) her face fell a million feet and she’d call herself an ignoramus until we couldn’t take it anymore and demanded that the lessons stop. But I doubt it was just the thing with the French lessons that came between Lily and Sylvie; there’s also the fact of Sylvie being impeccable. Lily was a bunch of crumpled pockets and Sylvie is a black dress, perfumed scarves, iron posture and whatever else turns a person into an atmosphere. Sylvie doesn’t look capable of getting involved with a messy pastry.

Miri was like a mini-Sylvie, but she hadn’t always been. I can’t remember when she stopped wearing jeans and jumpers and skirts and started with the black and the severe outlines (why did she start?) but I do remember Lily finding the change hilarious for months, and I also remember being embarrassed to have to be seen outdoors with Miri until I realised that no one seemed to think that her dress sense was odd. Aside from infrequent comments

(“Cheer up, love,” or “It’s not Hallo’ween”),

no one wondered why a teenager was dressed up as a chic governess. Sylvie approved of Miri, even at the same time as she was confused by her. “It’s a style at least,” she said, and took off her rope of pearls and looped them around Miri’s neck. “Perhaps when you are my age you will have to turn to short skirts and mini-dresses, just for something different.” Then Sylvie turned to me. “You dress exactly as if you don’t care, but there is some artfulness to it; your colours balance each other.”

“Ah,” I said, not wanting to disappoint her and not wanting to lie to her. “Where is this from?” she said, plucking at my T-shirt. I looked down at the shirt. I didn’t know where it was from. I wasn’t even sure it was mine. Maybe it was my dad’s or something. Or Lily had bought it. Clothing just appeared in my room and I put it on. Now that Sylvie noticed I recognised the miracle of it. I read my T-shirt, which said,
PLANET HOLLYWOOD
.

“It’s a secret,” I said finally. “Can’t tell everyone where I get my garms from, or there’d be too many look-alikes.”

Sylvie smiled. She and The Paul had been to visit us in Dover, and she knew that the place was full of Eliot look-alikes, and that I was one of the look-alikes, a copy of some original anonymous guy. I like that; attention makes me twitchy.

Lily had perfected a way of talking to me with her gaze elsewhere but her head slightly turned towards me so that I knew her words were for me. Dad has what I think of as only child darkside syndrome; he does everything as if he is being watched.

On Boxing Day I came down early in the morning. I had heard someone moving around downstairs and thought it might be The Paul. Instead I found my dad, sitting in The Paul’s baking pantry, on a chair that propped the door half open. He had his back to me, and you’d think that would make him warier, more sensitive to the presence of someone standing behind him, but it didn’t. I stood and watched him, thinking,
I’ll watch until he notices
. It took me a moment to realise what he was doing. He’d made one hand into a fist and was flipping his wedding ring onto it with his other hand, as if picking heads or tails, over and over.

I watched, and when I got tired of watching I said, “What are you doing?”

He turned around and seemed unsurprised to find me there. “Nothing. I might bake something. I don’t know.”

“Okay,” I said, and got myself some water. I went back to bed but couldn’t sleep anymore. I was lying on a hardback biography of T. S. Eliot, but that wasn’t the reason. After about half an hour I sat up again, and Lily was in the rocking chair by the window, Lily smiling with glad eyes as if she had something funny to tell me. Lily in the chair, I mean Miranda was, Miri in a black T-shirt that scraped the tops of her thighs, Miri holding the rockers still with her bare feet. When I jumped, she laughed. I half expected her to say, “Again, do it again!”

I sat down on the end of my bed, facing her, and said, “Good morning.”

Miri didn’t use lipstick, she used something in a little pot that was applied with a fingertip. Miri said, “I miss her. So much that sometimes I’m scared I’ll bring her back.”

The red on her mouth was so strong; maybe it was just the early morning but I’d never seen a red as startling, as odd. Maybe she’d bitten her lip.

“She liked you best,” Miri said, softly.

I shook my head but couldn’t speak. We both considered the lawn outside the window, Sylvie and The Paul’s tidy lawn. I did not have a thought, not even a painful one. A large and colourless umbrella had opened up inside my brain. All I did know was that after that initial shock of thinking that Lily had come back I had felt a cool, small relief, a moment of adjusting to Lily’s ghost so that I could be . . . not unsatisfied with the quality of her being there. I can only explain it in comparison to something mundane—my adjustment to Lily’s ghost was sort of like when you’re insanely thirsty, but for some reason you can’t get the cap on your water bottle to open properly so you tussle at
it with your teeth and hands until you can get a trickle of water to come through. A little water at a time, and you’re trying to be less thirsty and more patient so that the water can be enough. The thing with having seen Lily was just like that, a practical inner adjustment to meet a need.
At least she is there,
I’d thought,
even if she is just a ghost and doesn’t speak, at least she is

there

was a bird on the windowsill later in the afternoon. I looked up from
Thus Spake Zarathustra
and saw it standing motionless. Its feathers were brown and grey; in some places bands of one colour crossed the other. The bird was small enough to stand on the palm of my hand, which it did without alarm after about twenty minutes of me rushing at it and growling, opening and closing the window with a bang in my attempts to scare it into flying away. The bird and I looked each other over. Why wouldn’t it fly? That’s what birds are meant to do. Slowly, carefully, expecting it to flee at any moment, I took the bird into my hand and downstairs with me, where the others marvelled at it and fed it toasted brioche crumbs.

After breakfast, Sylvie and Dad stayed in and baked, and Miri and I went out for a walk along the Seine with The Paul. I took the bird with us, holding my jacket slightly open for the bird, which I felt shuddering slightly in the inside pocket, a brittle shape with life in it, like a flute playing itself. The Paul was in between Miri and me, and Miri supported him by coquettishly slipping her arm through his. Her high heels slipped on the ice. This happened a lot, but she refused to go out without her heels so she’d adapted to it, fully bending her knees each time she slipped so that she staggered with elegance. The trees were laced with ice and only a few other people were out. When they passed
us, they gave friendly nods. I made observations aloud, for the bird’s benefit. “Lovely weather,” I said, and “Fit girl,” I told the bird, when one walked past. I also said, “I hope you don’t shit in my pocket.” The bird raised its beak and its eyes like wet black marbles, and it seemed to listen to me. Either that or it was trying to get a feeling for the sky and when it might fly again. The Paul said sympathetically, “Poor boy. Your old grandparents have bored you eccentric. I understand. A fellow’s got to amuse himself.”