White Is for Witching (21 page)

•

Away from my sister it became more and more difficult to tell whether I was alright. Before it had been simple: I could look at her, or think of her at the clinic and then there I was, paper-clipped to my flesh, tidy where she wasn’t. But when her term started . . .

I was sharing a flat with another guy and a girl. Both of them were in radio production. Both of them laughed too heartily. The guy’s room was next to mine, and at nights he’d knock on the wall between us and ask me what the fuck I was doing in there: feng shui? And every time I’d be about to say something about his mum or how he should fuck his own furniture I’d look, and, yes, my bed had moved from north to west, or my table had moved from beneath the window to beside the door. And it had been me that had moved it without thinking—I could still feel the work of it in my hands. I’d sit on the floor with my back against the bed and my laptop on my knees, trying to send words to Miri, my frail and feather-like problem, to whom I couldn’t write “I love you” because I meant it angrily and she would know. Not just that though; it wasn’t safe to say something like that without Lily between us. Lily was always very careful to pull us apart, to make Miri and I understand that we were not each other, that my pressing my lips to Miri’s nine-year-old heartbeat was not the same as feeling the blood move in myself. Once Miri jumped me in the Andersen shelter, pinned my arms behind
my back and kissed my dick through my boxer shorts, so quickly I felt the damp and the presence of spiders more than I felt what she’d done. But Lily still knew somehow—she must have. Why else would she have pinched Miri so hard after dinner? So hard the bruise rose, as if the pain of it had put yeast in her skin. I e-mailed Miri about it; subject line: Do you remember . . .

I didn’t send it.

Neither did I send the messages to Miri that said: Can you help me, I do miss her, you are the only one who knows where to find her, I think you talk to each other when I can’t hear.

So what did I do while Miri fed her intellect amongst the greatest minds in the country?

I drank coffee.

I moved the furniture in the place I slept in

(moved it and moved it and moved it),

I walked down alleyways with a camera stuck to my face as if I couldn’t see without it.

I got good at cooking Mormon funeral potatoes. They’re basically just potatoes fried in a batter made extra crunchy with cornflakes. The trick is to get the proportion of cornflake to batter right. Mormon funeral potatoes are the sort of thing that would pain Dad to serve. They’re the sort of thing Miri would beg to be excused from having to eat.

I got back the day before Miri came home. Dad had offered to pick me up, but I told him not to worry about it. There was a Christmas tree in the hallway, a giant, pointy witches’ hat quivering with red-and-silver ribbons and lights, scraping the ceiling like something out of
The Nutcracker Suite
. We’d never had a Christmas tree before. I half expected Dad to spring out from behind the tree dressed as Santa.

Sade was by the telephone table, and I was about to make a comment
about the tree, but she was standing with the receiver in her hand, listening, looking huge and sad. Her eyes were just pinpricks above her cheeks. I said hello, and she didn’t answer me. I was halfway up the stairs before I realised that when I’d walked past her I hadn’t heard anything but the dial tone.

Dad found me in Lily’s studio, trying to see what I could make from the film I’d transferred from the bottom shelf of the fridge in the flat to a mini-cooler for the journey. I was wearing one of Lily’s aprons, and my gloves were doused with solution. I was well aware that the goggles on my face only added to my look of idiocy.

“Welcome home,” Dad said. Red light met daylight.

“Can you come in or stay out, Dad?”

He came in. I told him about Sade and the phone, and he nodded thoughtfully.

“Is that all? Nod nod? She’s . . . mad.”

It was too late to tell him how she’d nearly burnt the house down. I said again: “She’s mad.”

“She’s taking medication,” Dad said, abruptly.

“What?”

“Her problem isn’t anything dangerous, just a perception thing—visions, voices since childhood. Information supplementary to life, assurances of an afterlife, that sort of thing. She didn’t hide it from me when she was applying. Think of her as a modern-day St. Bernadette.”

“St. Bernadette would’ve made a brilliant housekeeper, wouldn’t she,” I said.

Dad said very seriously, “I don’t know about that, but Sade is very good.”

I asked, “Does Miri know?”

He said he’d had no reason to tell her.

About an hour before Dad went to pick Miri up, I heard hammering in Miri’s room and put down the photography book I was reading next door. Dad was in the psychomantium with the light on, nailing Miri’s drawers shut, fixing the closed compartments in her wardrobe so that they wouldn’t open again. I waited for a break in the hammering, then asked Dad if he needed a hand nailing any other cupboard doors in the house shut. It would stop the guests from stealing clothes hangers, I suggested.

He gestured towards Miri’s bed. An array of chalk packets were heaped on the bedspread, alongside a mass of plastic, which I poked and watched fall into separate components—it seemed they were the remains of spoons, curved with tooth marks. I felt vaguely nauseous. It was like looking at leftover bones in a KFC bargain bucket.

“She’s been hiding them all over her room,” Dad said. “The whole time she’s been saying, yes, yes, I’ll eat properly, yes, I’ll get better, and she’s been doing this.”

He stood, still holding the hammer, and stared at me. His pupils looked black.

“Did you know about this?”

I looked back at him steadily. I shook my head.

“She won’t do this anymore,” he vowed.

“I don’t see how this is going to work. She’ll just find new hiding places. And, Dad . . . she’s going to be pissed off that you went through her stuff.”

He turned to her desk drawer and swung the hammer with much more force than he needed to. He didn’t even hit any of the nails he’d already embedded in the wood.

“It’s got to work,” he said. His voice as he said it made me respond immediately: “I know.”

“While you’ve been gone I’ve been working on—” he laid the hammer on the table, inhaled deeply “—new recipes for her. Appetizing things. I know what to do. It’ll work, Eliot.”

“Okay,” I said.

“It’ll work,” he said. “It’s not going to be easy, but I know she wants to stop all this. I know she wants to get better.”

“No one likes being sick,” I agreed, and walked backwards, softly, into my room. After a moment the hammering began again.

•

Miranda and her father sat in the Dean’s office with the Dean himself, nodding and smiling soberly at each other, taking turns to talk and to listen. All three of them had expressed their sorrow at the fact that Miranda’s change of environment had worsened her condition. Miranda watched the Dean’s goatee beard move as he explained that, if she continued as she was for the next two terms, she would fail her first year and be sent down.

Everything in the room was quietly powerful; leather-bound books, an antique globe, near-black wooden chairs and surfaces, stiff, richly coloured drapes. The window cases swooped into domes, like those of a chapel. There might as well have been stained glass, but it seemed someone had thought that would be too much. Outside the Dean’s windows, people yelled goodbye to each other across New Court, luggage wheels chattered on cobblestones.

Miranda took out her notebook despite the fact that the discussion was still ongoing. She began writing. Luc’s and the Dean’s eyes followed her pen with astonishment, but neither of them asked her what she was scribbling. To calm herself she scrawled:

I am lucky
, in her GrandAnna’s mountainous hand. She was lucky. Had it been the fifties, her father wouldn’t be taking her home from here,
he’d be dropping her off at a clinic that specialised in electroshock therapy. She’d be on her way to the gag and ball.

Behave yourself
, she wrote.
Eat.

How had Lily managed it? It was like dancing with a mask that was attached to a stick—she dared not lower it, no matter how tiring it was to hold the mask up. She was the ugly girl at the ball, hungry but plastic was nothing anymore.

Last night had been the fifth, perhaps the sixth night that Miranda had lain by Ore, smelling her, running her nose over the other girl’s body, turning the beginning of a bite into a kiss whenever Ore stirred, laying a trail of glossy red lip prints. Ore’s smell was raw and fungal as it tangled in the hair between her legs. It turned into a blandly sweet smell, like milk, at her navel, melted into spice in the creases of her elbows, then cocoa at her neck. Miranda had needed Ore open. Her head had spun with the desire to taste. She lay her head against Ore’s chest and heard Ore’s heart. The beat was ponderous. Like an oyster, living quietly in its serving-dish shell, this heart barely moved. Miranda could have taken it, she knew she could. Ore would hardly have felt it.

The watch had ticked loudly, with the sound of a tongue slapped disapprovingly against the roof of a mouth. Then came the recoil—would I really? and she’d bitten her own wrist, to test the idea of Ore not feeling a thing. Beneath her teeth the skin of her wrist bulged, trying to move the veins away from the pressure, trying to protect them.

In her seat in the Dean’s office, Miranda crossed her ankles.
Manage your consumption
, she noted, beneath
I am lucky, Behave yourself
, and
Eat
. Then she took a new line whilst nodding agreement to some words the Dean addressed to her (she had no idea what) and wrote in her own handwriting:

Ore is not food. I think I am a monster.

She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed.

Miranda wouldn’t be returning to college next term. She wasn’t well enough, the Dean said, her father said, she said. She would rest at home and undergo some cognitive therapy and return when she was ready, they agreed. She would retake first year if that proved necessary. None of this was her fault and it would be a pity for her potential to be wasted just because of her health. There were papers to sign. Miranda and her father signed them.

“Let me tell Eliot about this myself,” she told Luc, and he nodded. If he was relieved, he hid it well. He listened to her with his head cocked slightly, and his expression was serious and attentive, as if she was speaking to him from a great distance and he was making sure to catch every word. When Miranda and Luc walked out of the Dean’s office together, she stumbled, and he steadied her without changing his expression.

I know they said it could never be love, but I wonder . . .

My Miranda came home from college and her change had almost come full circle. She looked so beautiful. Tiny. Immaculately carved; an ivory wand. Her eyes were oracle’s eyes, set deep, deep in the smooth planes of her face. She had six and a half ulcers on the insides of her mouth (one was not yet complete), jewels formed by the acid her stomach had hopefully, uselessly produced. She was no longer able to eat comfortably, even if she wanted to. When she kissed her brother hello she had to close her throat for a second, to stop herself from wincing aloud. The layers between her inner and outer cheek were not thick enough.

She had been finding it difficult to see, and as she came in on her father’s arm and hesitantly turned her head from side to side, I saw how
heavily she was relying on her hearing—I felt her struggle to perceive shapes. The exact dimensions of doorways seemed dim to her, and they slid around uneasily in the shapes she fixed them in, like magnets repelled by their poles. I depressed my floors for her, made angles of descent that led her across the hallway and through my rooms and up my stairs with the decisiveness of someone who could see properly.

Once Eliot and Luc had left her alone, she set to feeling around her room for me, looking for me. Her fingers trailed across her chair, her desk, her shelves, the back wall of her wardrobe. What’s mine is hers. She noticed the nails, frowned momentarily as she checked for her stash of chalk and found no way to access it, but it didn’t matter. She moved on, even touching her mirror. Searching.

“I’m sorry it took so long,” she told me. “I’m back.”

Only I knew how unwell she was. Really she should have been hospitalised. But what would have become of her beauty then?

I was—there is no correct word to place here—shy. I wanted to show myself to her, in a way she would understand. I wasn’t worried about frightening her. It was not possible for her to be frightened. When she was little I did not allow anyone or anything to do it, and now that she was older, fright was not a thing she understood.

She tucked herself into bed, drawing the blankets up over her head, smoothing them around her so that she was completely covered, as she liked to be.

“I’m in love,” Miranda whispered, once she was hidden.

We saw who she meant. The squashed nose, the pillow lips, fist-sized breasts, the reek of fluids from the seam between her legs. The skin. The skin.

(is it alright to say how much I like this

the way our skin looks together)

Anna was shocked. Jennifer was shocked. Lily was impassive.

Disgusting. These are the things that happen while you’re not looking, when you’re not keeping careful watch. When clear water moves unseen a taint creeps into it—moss, or algae, salt, even. It becomes foul, undrinkable. It joins the sea.

I would save Miranda even if I had to break her.

Miranda slept. How easy to peel the covers back and pinch her mouth shut with one unyielding hand, to close the nostrils with the other. How easy to suffocate. Her heart and lungs were already weak. It would not have taken much to kill Miranda. That moment passed. In the next moment my thought was to let her die. If she continued as she was, that would be soon. Then in the moment after that I resolved to take her away.