White Is for Witching (12 page)

“Pull your hood up,” she said.

He looked around the room. “Why?

“I just want to see.”

Half smiling, waiting for the joke to catch up with him, he pulled his hood up. Its shape around his head was lumpen. It was obviously the first time he’d ever pulled this hood up over his head. He looked at her and said, “Anything else?”

Would he let her? She kissed him, gently, tentatively at first, her hand cupping his face, her fingers inside the heavy cotton of his hood. When he opened his mouth for her tongue, she drew him up and closer
to her, pushing his hood back and using his hair like a leash until she could bring him no closer. Someone in the group she had left shouted, “Get a room, will you?”

She took Jalil’s hand and held it, pretending, for a minute, to be in love. She looked attentively at him. Open pores grained his skin, and the shade of its brown varied from forehead to neck. He didn’t know what to make of her staring and stirred uncomfortably. She was holding the hand he’d have used to lift his pint. When she said she was going home, he offered to walk her back.

“It’s fine,” she said, and got off her stool.

“But it’s dark,” Jalil protested.

“It’s fine,” Miranda said again. She was already walking away. Jalil wrapped an arm around her waist and tried, awkwardly, to kiss her goodbye, but she stepped away politely. She didn’t want to anymore.

•

I’d written to lots of media training schemes and independent film companies trying to get a placement for the summer, for the majority of my year out, if possible. I didn’t particularly want to travel; there was nowhere I wanted to go. But I couldn’t stay. So I’d applied to things in as many different places as possible and hoped that ultimately wherever I had to go, it would be because of work. As long as English was spoken there, wherever it was, I’d go. One morning a couple of weeks into the new year I got lots of letters back and sat on the staircase, shuffling through them, looking for something encouraging. Most of them were “no”s.

Emma texted me:
Jean de Bergieres—they searched for her in the oven(!) and found her in the attic . . .

I texted back:
And what did they do when they found her?

Her:
Raped her—seven of them.

Me:
O no!

Her:
Breathe. This was in 14thC France. Church had outlawed brothels and locals were desperate.

Me:
Actually just about to commit a couple of v brutal crimes. Wld be helpful to see them put into historical context first.

Her:
I miss you. Also miss my hair. Can we forget drunk pre-Christmas stupidness (mine)?

One of the houseguests wandered out of the dining room and said to me, “Something’s burning . . . ?”

As soon as she said it, I smelt it. In fact I’d been sitting in a cloud of smoke; ridges of it drifted around my head as I moved, like a blurred fingerprint.

“Shit.” A pan had been left on the stove, with the gas burning. It was like . . . “
Fuck.
Fuck
me.
” I hadn’t known oil and bacon could do that. It must have been a different kind of oil. Flame rose from the blackened pan, almost solid, like a ragged soufflé.

For a second I couldn’t do anything but stare and swear powerfully and brace myself for the smoke alarm to go off. The smoke alarm didn’t go off. One of the guests, a different one from the one who’d approached me, shouted “Do something!” and threw a napkin in the direction of the pan. The pan growled and ate most of the napkin, letting a scrap fall to the floor where it blazed on the lino.

I went to the tap, wetted some more napkins and threw them onto the cooker, reserving the first one for the floor. I was encouraged by the sputtering sound of drowning flames and the lessening of smoke, and ended by covering the cooker and floor with wet towels that someone pushed at me. Then I went into the dining room, and the guests trooped in after me. “I don’t think there’ll be any breakfast served here this morning,” I told them. “But there
is
a McDonald’s, right by the square.” There was some grumbling so, struck by inspiration, I said,
“Hand your receipts in when you’re checking out and you’ll be reimbursed.”

I couldn’t find Dad, so I went straight up to the attic. There was an oily, twisted doughnut of cloth hung on a nail in the centre of the attic door, all knots and tails. I didn’t want to touch it or the door, and I settled for kicking at the door with the toe of my trainer. No answer, so I kicked harder, said “Sade” a couple of times, then gave up and went downstairs. The guests had dispersed, though I’d passed a woman on the stairs who looked as if she was ready to go back to bed. Sade was in the kitchen. She was a vision in nuclear red and blue. She was scrubbing at the cooker with her elbow turned in awkwardly, as if it was hurting her.

“I am so very sorry,” she said, with such force I felt I had to turn aside to deflect it.

“Where were you?”

“Here, I was here.”

“No you weren’t,” I said, flatly.

When I moved past her I saw that she’d hurt her hands; she had a plaster wrapped around each fingertip. She looked at me looking at her hands. I got a stool, climbed up onto it and poked at the smoke alarm. There was nothing wrong with it, except that it had been switched off.

“Oh that was me,” Sade said. “I was cooking last night and I didn’t want to wake everyone up so I switched the thingie off just to make sure.”

She gestured towards an array of lidded tubs she’d stacked up on the counter nearest the fridge.

I nodded to show that I understood, stuffed my letters into my back pocket and left the kitchen. I had an interview in London to get to. Sade called me back.

“What will you tell your father?”

“About what?”

She looked me over, and for a horrifying moment I thought she might touch me, fuss over me, lick her finger and wipe away something on my chin, or smooth my hair out of my eyes. She let me go, but called: “Eliot, do you have a girlfriend?” across the passageway.

I sighed and put my jacket on.

“Ah. You should get a girlfriend. It would cheer you up. You are gloomy. Miranda too.”

“Our mother died,” I explained, and wandered around to the back for my bike. Miri was looking out of her window, a white white face with the darkness of her curtains behind her, and I don’t know why, but I ducked out of her sight.

The interview was conducted in a cream-coloured room with a flip chart. It was an interview for an internship at a television production company based in Cape Town. Since Miri had left the video with the advertisements on a chair in the sitting room, I’d watched most of the adverts as soon as I’d woken up. I filled my parts of the interview conversation with references to the apprenticeship “work” I sometimes did for an ad agency. By the time I got back to Dover, it was already dark. I wrestled my bike off the train and rode home, keeping an eye out for the girls who had been out to get Miri. There was no sign of them, but the cliffs were wearing broad chains of snow, so I took out my camera and slowed down, elbows on the handlebars, pointing the lens upwards. I took photos. Too many, and I worked the shutter too fast, because I kept thinking someone would come and get in the way, people with shopping bags or something.

Dad had had Lily’s Haiti photos developed, and

(Taking the film out of
that
camera, closing the back up again, how much had that felt like blinding someone?)

among them was a sunset miniatured in purple, birds with long wings swimming through it in curious Vs. There was a bucketful of live sand, no, crabs, at a market stall. A potted tree, or a green skeleton, stood in a darkened doorway. Tiny robots churning in a grey fishing net. Looking at those last photos was like flipping through a book of silence, all the information conveyed with the certainty of a glimpse. There were people in the photos—the bored, teenaged market trader was there, the fisherwomen too, kings of their boats—but they were there minus everything that was absurd and ungainly about them. They were in the picture but their bodies weren’t.

You can only take pictures like that if you’re able to see ghosts. Lily could. Miri too. Why can’t I?

•

On Sunday afternoon Sade washed the sitting-room windows from the inside, an expression of pure patience on her face as Miranda tried to teach her to whistle. She couldn’t get the hang of it. Every time she got the right length of breath going, she looked nervous, opened her mouth fully and said
whoooooosh
.

“I grew up believing it’s bad luck to whistle in the house,” she explained, eventually. “It’s just no good. It’s too late.”

“Why is it bad luck?”

“Well. I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don’t have names.”

Miranda was pleased with the idea of a whistler as a witch, and she let out a long, unmusical whistle, relenting when Sade winced.

“I was only calling Eliot home,” she said.

The front door banged.

“Eliot?” Sade called.

He announced, “It is but the shade of Eliot,” as he went upstairs.

Sade and Miranda looked at each other significantly.

“Whistler,” said Sade.

“Witch,” said Miranda.

Then: “Is it bad luck if a builder whistles at you? And if it is, is it bad luck for you or for him? Because technically he’s sort of indoors.”

Sade wiped a wet cloth over the soap, inspected the window and wiped her hands on her apron. “I’ll tell you later. What’s the time . . . actually, never mind, you.”

She went into the kitchen and checked the clock. Visiting hours at the Immigration Removal Centre had begun. “Help me get the food together.” Together they packed a bag full of food wrapped in tin foil and cling-film until it was a solid block, like a building caught in plastic. The sun shone on the garden and made it seem warmer out than it was, and Miranda hummed to herself and looked out of the kitchen window.

The couple who had made her circle the Cinque Ports on a map for them, the couple she’d heard together in their room, were sitting under one of the trees, on a blanket. The woman wasn’t wearing a coat, just a short-sleeved white dress. Her legs were bare and a big white flower shone from the midst of her plaits. The man was wearing his sweater slung across his shoulders, the arms tied around the front of him. They were talking earnestly and eating apples. It was far too cold for them to be sitting out there having a picnic. Miranda wanted to open the window and shout “It’s January!” but she didn’t, because there was something so lovely about their being out there, their faces turned towards each other, their gazes chained together. They had stayed for quite a while now, longer than most other guests stayed. She wondered what were they doing in Dover. She thought she should try to remember their names.

Sade turned up the volume on the kitchen radio. Up at the port, fifty-eight
people had been found dead in the back of a truck. Chinese. They had suffocated. Miranda was a heartbeat away from putting her hands over her ears. What is wrong with Dover, she thought.

Eyes closed, Sade stroked the scars on her cheek.

“Didn’t they call Dover the key to England?” she asked, slowly. “Key to a locked gate, throughout both world wars, and even before. It’s still fighting.”

She drew her scarf around her neck and wriggled into her coat, swinging the heavy carrier bag as if it was nothing. As she left, a gust of wind came through the hallway and the back door slammed. It was the couple who had been picnicking outside. Now they came into the warmth and looked around, and shivered. They were sweating. They passed Miranda and she was troubled. The woman smiled vaguely and gave Miranda the lily from her hair. The man followed the woman up the stairs without even glancing at Miranda.

“Is everything okay?” Miranda asked.

No reply. She tried to add up how many days the couple had booked in for; she should look in her father’s book. The flower in her hand was so large and sweet smelling that she might have been carrying the frozen scent of a lily. She paused halfway up the staircase, looked up and listened to them.

“A tisket, a tasket,” the man sang, off-key, outside the door of the couple’s guest room. “A tisket, a tasket.”

“Stop it,” Miranda heard the woman say, just as she herself mouthed, “Stop it.”

“Something’s killing me.” There was a static quality to their voices, as if they were people on the radio. Miranda’s vision blurred until the staircase was the only thing she could see clearly. A helter-skelter of wood and carpet, a backbone.

“What is it?” the man asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was the apple. Where did it come from?”

The woman began to choke. Miranda, who did not know CPR, ran up to the second floor, but the man had led the woman inside the bedroom, saying, “Sh, sh,” and the horrible coughing was quieted somehow.

The doorbell rang.

“Er . . .”

Jalil had brought her a bunch of sunflowers. Miranda found sunflowers very ugly, and yellow made her so nervous that she suspected it was the cause of war. She was irritated with Jalil for bringing the sunflowers, and irritated with herself for being ungrateful. She stood at the door, a barrier between him and the house, sniffed at the brown florets that spiralled at the centre of the petals. She couldn’t smell anything, but she said, “Thank you. These are beautiful.” Then she closed the door, praying that no one else would come up and ring the doorbell until he had gone. Jalil stood on the doorstep for three seconds, smiling uncertainly, waiting for her to open the door, but she said, “Goodbye! See you at school!” through the letter box, and then he went off, disconsolately dragging his feet against the gravel.

As soon as he was out of sight, she thought charitably of him. It had been brave to bring the flowers. Once Eliot had come in with a bunch of flowers he’d bought for someone, then had thrown them into the almost-full bin on his way out, slamming the lid again and again to crush the petals farther down into the mass of eggshells and old bread. When Eliot saw Jalil’s sunflowers on the sitting-room mantelpiece, he asked where they had come from. She told him. A look of such extreme sarcasm crossed his face that Miranda rushed to him and covered his mouth with both hands before he could speak.