White Is for Witching (18 page)

After my lecture that afternoon I phoned home. I called to see if I missed home more than for any other reason. My mum answered, and I knew I did. It was like being kicked in the chest. That first term—every term, in fact—I was constantly negotiating reprieve from execution. Everything, every essay, every conversation, even casual ones in the bar, seemed so final. Everything rested on being right, or at least insisting that I was not incorrect. I was taking the whole thing too seriously. Or I was taking steps to blindfold myself so that when I came out of the door of my college room this morning I didn’t see the glass windows glaring at me out of the fourteenth-century walls. Walls and windows forbade me. They pulled at me and said,
You don’t belong here
. Again and again, over textbooks and plates of mush in hall, I gritted my teeth and said, Yes I
do
. Everyone else seemed to blend into the architecture. Even Tijana had already lost her perturbed look. My mum wanted to know whether I’d met my future husband yet, and my dad wanted to know if I’d met any snobs, whether I’d run into anyone who was “being funny” with me. I said no. I wondered what he would have said if I’d told him yes.

I went and knocked on Tijana’s door just before dinner, to see if she was going to come to hall.

“Come in,” she said. She was in bed with a big book and a multitude of pens. She didn’t look as if she’d be going anywhere for days.

“How’s it going,” I said.

“Fine. I can’t come to dinner. I probably won’t be around later, either.” I was about to ask her what she’d do for dinner, but she gestured towards a box of Nutri-Grain bars and a sandwich on the floor by her bed.

“Cool,” I said. “See you . . . later, then.” It wasn’t just the work. I knew she was retreating from me. “Wait,” she said. “I have something for you.”

“Yeah?”

She put her pen behind her ear and pulled distractedly at her pony-tail, looking around, trying to remember where she’d put the thing she’d just mentioned. She pointed. “There. On the table. Beside my pencil case . . . the bottle.” There was a photograph on her desk; Tijana in the midst of a crew of girls, all wearing variations of the same hairstyle, lots of ringlets and clips. The loose, tousled way Tijana wore her hair at college suited her better. The girls in the photo with Tijana were a tangle of arms thrown round each other, mischievous, warm. They looked like the sort of girls who started trouble just so they got the chance to stick up for each other.

I picked the bottle up—it was see-through plastic, and filled with purple water. “Nice,” I said. Tijana threw a pillow at me. It bounced off my head, but I picked it up and advanced on her with it. She was about to learn not to start what she couldn’t finish.

“What’s in the bottle?” I asked, pillow held high.

“A light when all other lights go out,” Tijana whispered dramatically. She had a sexy whisper, even when she was being stupid.

I whacked her with the pillow. “What?”

“Oh God,” she cried. “You’re so violent.”

I bopped her again, gentler than the first time, but she dropped flat beneath her covers as if I’d dropped a slab of rock on her.

“Bitch! It’s exorcism water.”

“Ah,” I said. I put the pillow back on her bed and carefully moved her head so that it rested on the pillow. I patted her neck. She burst out laughing.

“Where did you get it from? Is it
meant
to be purple?” I asked. Tijana tapped the side of her nose and winked. I picked the bottle up and told her I’d use it as bubble bath.

In hall, I gave up on trying to eat my dinner. It had been listed on the menu as shepherd’s pie, but the description seemed inaccurate. Miranda came in carrying a tray. Everyone in hall looked at her, then went back to their conversations, some of them adding “Who is she?” to their cluster of topics. I nodded at Miranda and she sat opposite me. The others said hello to her and introduced themselves, but she didn’t answer them, or even look at them. She looked at me, and she smiled at me, and I looked back, and smiled back. It got awkward. Neither of us was eating anything.

I looked down and felt Miranda smile at me, but when I looked up again she was thoughtfully regarding the ceiling.

“Come on,” I said. “Eat your dinner.”

She dropped a napkin over her plate. “It’s gone.”

That seemed a sound idea to me, so I did the same and we left.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked. I had to be honest; I don’t like tea.

“Would you like to watch me drink some tea?” she asked. “It’s a very ordinary sight, but ordinary in a way that’s good because then you could use it as part of a representative sample in a study on the habits of the English tea-drinker, a dying breed.”

Her room was much bigger than mine. Its darkness was softened by scent—it reminded me of a nature documentary, a simulation of the inside of a flower that had closed its petals for the night. She had
a piece of cloth hung over the mirror on her wardrobe. She took her coat off, pointed out a chair I could sit on and sat opposite me, stuffing tea filters with dried leaves from a bowl beside her chair. Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then she started talking about the blend she was making, a mix of jasmine tea, black tea and rose petals. She said her father always drank it in the colder months. I nodded and looked around. Her bookshelf was quite good—
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
. Perrault, Andersen, Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins, E. T. A. Hoffmann. No Poe, which surprised me, considering the presence of the others. There was a small cluster of images on the wall above her desk. A white-haired woman in a dark-red dress, a school photo of a girl with a sleek ponytail and eyes like smoke fixed in ovals, a short-haired woman who looked as if she was trying very hard not to burst out laughing. Beside that was a photo of a girl and a boy sitting on a fence, cousins of hers, I assumed. I nodded towards them. “Who are the pictures of?”

The kettle boiled. She attended to her teapot, then said, “Me, mostly.”

I took the tea she offered me. It wasn’t bad. I tasted the smell of the rose petals more than anything else.

“Do you like them?” She pressed some rose petals into my hand. “Smell them on their own.”

I did, then reached over and sprinkled petals over her head. The withered pink clung to her hair, and she wrinkled her nose, but didn’t brush it away. She crossed her ankles and sipped at her tea.

I fought the impulse to tilt the chair I was sitting on onto its rear legs. I’d only fall over and look like an idiot.

“Tell me about that woman,” Miranda said. “The woman with the covered face?” She put a hand over her face and spread her fingers so that only her eyes shone through. “Is she
your
mother?” she asked.

Something told me that Miranda was talking about the soucouyant,
that this girl looked at me and saw the soucouyant at my shoulder. I became very aware of the purple water in the pocket of my coat. I don’t know whether I was thinking about dousing myself in it or dousing Miranda. I thought, I’ve got to get out, but she stood up too and tapped my sleeve.

“Please don’t be cross,” she said.

“I was just being silly.” “I’m not cross,” I said. I sat down again and let her tell me about the project on her wall. The white-haired woman was Miranda’s great-grandmother, who had raised the short-haired laughing woman, who was Miranda’s mother. The girl in the old school photo was Miranda’s absentee grandmother. They were all dead.

“My mother had a condition called pica. She ate ladybirds and things,” Miranda said, reflectively. She glanced at me, then back at the picture of her mother. “I only just remembered that recently. And I’m forgetting all sorts of other things of my own.”

I tapped the photo of the boy and the girl. “And these two?” The boy looked out of place in his T-shirt and jeans—he had costume-drama looks, the whole dark windswept hair and scornfully curled lip thing. As if he belonged in a topcoat and tails, menacingly tapping a silver-topped cane. The girl was one of those Gothic victims, the child-woman who is too pretty and good for this world and ends up dying of tuberculosis or grief—a sweet heart-shaped face and a river of blue-black hair.

“That’s my twin brother,” Miranda said, touching the guy’s face. “He’s in South Africa.”

“And who’s she?”

Miranda sighed. “Very funny,” she said. She picked up her teacup. “That’s me. I suppose it’s quite an old picture. It was taken nearly two years ago.”

I stared at her, and when she didn’t smile to show she was joking, I looked at the picture again. I suppose I could have drawn an association
from the black dress that the girl was wearing. But otherwise the girl in the picture was not the girl who stood in the room with me; I can unequivocally say that it wasn’t her. The eye colour matched, the hair colour matched, but that was all.

I found myself nodding uncontrollably

(get away from this girl and do not go near her again)

“You’ve . . . changed a lot,” I said.

She said, “Let’s go for that walk.”

I nodded again. Maybe it was just that I needed air. We stopped at the kitchen on my staircase while I filled a bag with food—bread, brazil nuts, brie, half of a dented pork pie, a six-pack of Cadbury Creme Eggs that I’d been saving since Easter for a special occasion and should probably have poisoned us. I wanted it to be a long picnic; if necessary, as long as we might have slept. Miranda sat on the kitchen counter and suggested fruit, so I added two of someone else’s apples and two of someone else’s oranges.

I didn’t have any particular direction in mind, and we ended up wandering towards Newnham Village, passing through the hedge corridor that led to Midsummer Common. It was around midnight and the passage was pitch-black; it ticked over with the sound of our footsteps on the leaves, and insects hissed above. Miranda was carrying the food, her steps were sure and she didn’t put her arms out to feel ahead. Not once. We didn’t really speak. Walking in the dark behind her there was a thing I noticed that can’t be true. It’s this:

Occasionally, to tease her for walking slowly, I’d put a hand to the small of her back and gently push her forward. Whenever I did, her hair swished over my fingers like torn silk. I felt this more than once, but I can’t explain it. Her hair only came down to her shoulders, but when I couldn’t see her clearly, her hair was very long.

When we came out of the hedge, we faced each other. In her stilettos
she was taller than me. She asked, “So how is this going to work, are you going to kiss me?”

“No,” I said. I had been thinking about kissing her.

She seemed amused. “Why not?”

All I could give her was an “Um.”

She didn’t take her eyes from mine. “I’m not saying I’m amazing or anything, but I’m decent-looking. Why shouldn’t a decent-looking girl expect to be kissed?”

She sounded bold, but there was so much terror in her eyes. She thought I didn’t want her.

Walking over Midsummer Common at night on minimal sleep is like trying to cross a place-between without a map. You suspect that you might be walking back in the very direction that you came from. It doesn’t feel like Cambridge. It doesn’t feel like anywhere. The ground is suspended and the sky pins it down on one corner, like an elbow. You can hear the river, and feel how close the running water is. We knelt down on our coats, nibbling at olives—now I remember there were olives—then sat cross-legged for the sandwiches and pie, then lay down with the chocolate and the apples. I’d never been so hungry—it tied in to my tiredness somehow, the tautness I felt in my arms and back. We were both very rude. We lay facing each other, eating like mad, each stuffing cheese fast and hard, as if to prevent the other from getting more than their share.

“Hall food really is rubbish,” Miranda said. She had finished everything and was eating the peel of her orange.

I picked up a piece of my own orange peel and considered it lazily. “Are you sure that’s alright to eat?”

“It’s just a bit harder to digest, that’s all.”

“If you say so, Miranda.”

“Tell a story,” she said. She scratched the ground and began eating earth. I began to think I was dreaming.

“What are you doing? You’ll get sick.”

She looked quizzical, but let me take her hands and wipe them on the grass. The mud around her mouth. She ate without smudging her lipstick.

“I’m already sick,” she said. She held up her arm and closed her thumb and second finger around her elbow. Which she shouldn’t have been able to do. I didn’t wince, but it was close. “You can see exactly how sick I am. That’s why you don’t want to touch me.”

I said, “Miranda.”

“For a year I’ve been trying and trying to fill out the dresses I wore before I got ill. And I just can’t,” she said. “Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.”

I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?”

“From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her.”

“You don’t want her to be happy and good?”

“I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.”

I was silent. I couldn’t think of a single story she would want to hear.

Finally she sighed and said, “Alright. What’s your favourite story?”

Our hands were joined across our coats. I hadn’t seen it happen, but since it had I drew her closer and told her, very quietly, about the soucouyant. The night didn’t listen to us—it had a noise of its own, wind
murmuring in the branches. I told Miranda about the girl who killed the soucouyant.

That girl had grown up friends with her shadow, grown up hugging herself and singing to herself, so happy alone that everyone in her village thought that she was retarded. While they slept the girl took herself out dancing, put her arms around the moon and travelled to see things no one else in the village would ever see, not even if they lived to be a thousand. She saw the wicked soucouyant feast on the girls and boys in her village and the next. She saw where the soucouyant slept, and was bold enough to follow her there. She saw where the soucouyant put her skin when she walked in her true form. Her lover the moon told her: “If you cared to, you could kill the soucouyant. Treat her skin with pepper and salt. How it burns her, how it scratches her. Only the night gives her her power, and if she is unable to reenter her body by sunrise, she cannot live.” The girl cared to protect the lives of the young in her village, and she knew you cannot bargain with a thing inhuman. So the girl reached right inside the old-woman skin and rubbed salt and pepper all along it; she stretched past bone and sinew because she was herself entire, and knew she could not be consumed. She hid and watched as the ball of flame returned to its tree hollow at dawn, searching for its skin. She watched as it filled the old woman skin, watched as the body rose and bulged with life, then screamed and fell deflated. She watched as the soucouyant, having no other option, rushed to join her flame with that of the rising sun.