White Is for Witching (26 page)

“Oh, lazy,” she said. She put a hand to my forehead, rumpling the net against it, then she put a hand to my chest, then she put a hand to my stomach.

I sat up, still in the net. It was knotted at the top, but I couldn’t see how. I sat in a huge white bag, like a stork’s delivery.

Sade looked at me through the net.

“How—” I began, but she tutted. “Don’t talk about it. It’s bad luck, eh.”

She checked her watch. “Alright, I’m leaving now.”

“Where are you going?”

She rolled her eyes. “Better pull yourself together, Ore. You think I belong to you?”

“But the net—”

“Stand up and it will unravel. Goodbye.”

She bustled away. I didn’t feel like testing what she had said yet; I felt so safe in the net. I put my hands against it and rocked myself. It was late afternoon. Sunset turned the room crystal and orange, like sugared fruit peel. I stood and the net fell around me with such sudden weight that I nearly lost my footing.

•

Miranda followed me to the train station. I didn’t know it until the conductor blew his whistle and I looked out of the window—as a reflex, I always do this, the whistle blows and I check the window—and I saw the tall girl in black, swaying on the platform as if her newly stitched knees were failing her. That’s all I know. Now I have said all that I know.

Miranda almost didn’t go home. She had run so hard and she had come to the end of her strength, and none of it mattered because she was too late. Ore had gone and a new rawness on the insides of her eyelids made her see what that meant. Miranda Silver was not, could not be herself plus all her mothers. She was just some girl on a bench on a train station platform, crying because something stood between her and another girl and said, no. The goodlady said it couldn’t be. Who was the goodlady to say that? How did she dare?

If she could get free, if she could get well—

It would take a long time, she knew. She couldn’t just pull the Silver out of her like a tooth or a hair. If she did she would concertina, bones knocking against each other. No, it would take a long time to get free, longer than Ore could wait. She thought of the inscription Lily and Luc had had engraved around the insides of their wedding bands alongside the date of the ceremony, the letters were as deep in the gold as if they had been written on the very ore:
N
OW IS FOREVER
. That was how lovers saw time. No, Ore would not wait, she would not be able to.

Miranda turned in the opposite direction of home. At the Post Office she bought a postcard with Dover Castle on it, borrowed a Biro from the bored-looking woman behind the counter and addressed the postcard to Ore.

I’m sorry for everything,
she wrote.

I am going down against her.

She bought a single stamp to post the card with. The woman behind the counter clacked gum and looked at her suspiciously. Miranda posted the card on her way back to Barton Road. She stopped at Bridge Street and skimmed pebbles off the water below it. She thought of Eliot. He anchored her mind, a troublesome weight, reassuring.

When she got home, all-season apples were heaped on one of the counters—the sheer number of them constituted a warning. Some kind of warning to her. The temperature in the kitchen felt well below zero, and the apples were turned so that their white sides were hidden and their red sides glowed like false fire.

Her father couldn’t have brought them in. He would not pick such apples, especially if he had seen that they had grown outside the house in December. Her father was in his room, drafting an advertisement for a new housekeeper on his laptop. Miranda could see the words “minimum of six months’ experience in a similar position (plus references) required” on the screen as she came in. Luc’s hair was wet and he had a towel around his neck. The note that Sade had written him was at the top of his paper pile. He kept looking at it as he typed. Miranda sat in his armchair, and when he registered her presence he frowned and motioned towards Sade’s letter. “She says I should stop trying to keep this place open, that it just won’t work. That it’s . . . ill favoured.”

“Perhaps she’s right,” Miranda said, gently.

Her father switched his laptop off without saving the file.

She tried to hold eye contact with him, but he seemed unable to
manage it for long. “Father, I’m stuck,” she said. “I’m trying to think of next year and there’s no place for me in it. Isn’t that strange?”

“Don’t say such things,” he said. His helplessness. He was supposed to know what to do. How was it that he did not?

“Do you think I’ll get to be thirty years old? Do you think I’ll end up living anywhere but here?” She smiled at him. It was a slow-spreading smile, and after a few seconds it contorted her face; she felt it happening.

He was on his feet before her smile reached its most strained point—he walked away, rubbing his head with his towel. Miranda left after him

(briefly she thought of shadowing him down the stairs, sharing this smile with him every time he turned, but after all, what had he done to deserve it? The smile stopped.)

she turned towards her own room, but Eliot called her.

“Where’s Lind?” he asked. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed. He dropped his headphones down around his neck and placed his book facedown, preparing for some kind of talk. Miranda eyed him without emotion.

“She went home.”

“You’re okay,” he said. The hint of a question in his voice was an offering, and she refused it.

“I’m sorry,” he said, crestfallen.

“What for?”

“That stupid thing I said before Lily died. I don’t think you’ll ever forgive me. Will you.”

(“Don’t fall asleep Miri, I fucking mean it.”)

She smiled politely and went into the psychomantium. She locked the door and put a chair against it.

Are you happy?
She asked the walls, the ceiling, the floor.
Are you
happy that we have no one but each other? Are you happy are you happy.
She locked her tongue between her teeth and drummed her hands and head against the wall by her bed until she lay motionless and everything she saw peeled back into whiteness, like a shelled egg from the centre out.

Lily Silver looked her eyeball to eyeball and said, “Hm . . . now you’ve hurt yourself.”

“Don’t expect us to help you,” Jennifer said, reprovingly. She smelt of tree sap.

“You did this to yourself,” her GrandAnna finished. “Why did you let the black girl leave?”

They looked the same now, all four of them. It was tiresome to see herself repeated so exactly, without even the thin mediator that was a mirror.

I am going down
against
her

I am going
down
against her

She had meant something by that. They were waiting for her where they always waited, even when she hadn’t known they were there.

It was night-time when she was able to stand up without her head spinning. She ripped her curtains open. There was a cloud on the moon, and two slick punctures in her lips. A pain as if her mouth had been stapled. She looked in the mirror and blood was drying on her chin. When she opened her mouth her teeth lifted, then sliced her bottom lip again. She couldn’t see the teeth, only the cuts they made. But she felt the teeth. Her features couldn’t accommodate the length of them, they were her skeleton extended.

What am I?

She strapped Lily’s watch to her wrist. She swallowed her friend’s gift of ten years, or two small watch batteries, as if they were pills. She had heard that people died from accidentally swallowing these. She wished she could be sure of it. Miranda went down barefoot, like
Eurydice. She walked with her fingers spread over her face, because no one must see. Luc was asleep behind his door.

The ground floor of the house was the only part that was lit. She turned to trapdoor-room, but Eliot intercepted her at the kitchen door. He pulled off his oven gloves.

“I made you something.”

She smelt baked apple. She gagged. The pie looked impressive, like a crisp brown basket. Even Luc couldn’t have been critical of the lattices that Eliot had worked across the top. It was a sign that Eliot observed more than he admitted.

“I even made the pastry myself,” he said.

The kitchen light was so bright she couldn’t see him properly. But she saw the winter apples—their pile had shrunk. He offered her a slice of pie, saying something about it being an attempt to replace Lind, that he knew she was feeling down about that.

She took the slice he offered her and tossed it into the bin, saucer and all. She peered at him. Why couldn’t she see him properly? It was hard to talk to him without opening her mouth fully. If she stood at a distance and in the dark, he would not notice. She stepped out into the passage and switched off the light. The air was crowded with droplets of rose attar and loomed behind her.

“I can’t see you properly,” she said to him. “Come out here.”

He meant something by the pie. He meant to poison her in some way, to disable her. Or, misguidedly, he meant to cure her.

“Why did you use the winter apples?” she asked. He wouldn’t come into the dark.

“What are you talking about?”

She beckoned him frantically, but he stayed where he was.

“Why did you use the winter apples?”

“Miri,” he said. His eyes were wet. Or maybe not, it wasn’t clear.
The goodlady called to her. She should not have to go to trapdoor-room alone.

“Bad. You are bad.” They were the only words she could fit her astonishment inside.

He said something, but she could no longer bear his voice. When he left her and went upstairs, she followed him, silent and intent, delaying her steps until he was safely in his room. Bob Dylan crooned scratchily. Her breath on the wood of his closed door. She could see him, her thoughts bent against him, if she wanted to she could strip him down to true red, the thing hinted at in rouge and roses

(no he’s eliot eliot is me we were once one cell)

he would be sour.

She ran downstairs, away from him. There was someone strange at the front door. They stood where the Christmas tree had stood until the day after Boxing Day, when Sade had dismantled it for fear of bad luck. The stranger wore a big black hat and she didn’t dare to pass them. Their back was to her, and they stood very straight, with a shapeless coat draped over them in such a way as to put the existence of limbs in doubt. And yet they stood. It was in trapdoor-room that she fell, and the house caught her. She had thought she would find the goodlady below, or Lily, or Jennifer, or her GrandAnna, but there was no one there but her. In trapdoor-room her lungs knocked against her stomach and she lay down on the white net that had saved Ore but would not save her. Two tiny moons flew up her throat. She squeezed them, one in each hand, until they were two silver kidneys. Acid seeped through her.

•

It’s July. I’ve been listening to one song by the Shirelles over and over.
Will you still love me tomorrow?
It’s July and the low-growing plants in
the garden are choked with humidity, but I’ve caught a cold in my head. It might be the song. I think this is the song that Miri liked to play, but I’m not sure, I just can’t be sure. Her favourite songs sounded just like each other—she stuck to one musical era, twelve years in a row, holding hands like shy sisters going out into the world.

Dad has closed the bed-and-breakfast. That was three weeks ago. He couldn’t run the place without help, and I haven’t been any help. I’d push the Hoover down hallways with my foot, wishing the sound it made was quieter. What if the phone rang? What if it had news to tell? Miri may have been found drowned, washed up at the foot of the cliff with tiny seashells in her ears. Dad was aware of the phone too, of its power. When he answered a call he’d twist the wire between his fingers, moving down as far as he could, as if checking and double-checking that all was as it should be, that the line was in order and the phone was actually connected.

We couldn’t find a recent photo of Miri to give to the police, so her missing person’s poster features a girl with long hair and dreamy eyes that don’t see the fracture coming. I tried to explain to the police officer who visited, but she nodded and said, “We’ll mention that she wears a shorter hairstyle now.” She was right to say that, there was nothing else she could say.
Shadadapsha, shadadapsha.

I didn’t even know Dad was going to close the bed-and-breakfast until I saw him unscrewing the sign that said The Silver House from the gate. He made me set an answer-machine message saying that reservations are no longer being accepted. At first I said I wouldn’t do it. Why should I? He was the one closing the place down. He picked up the receiver and slammed it into my chest. He didn’t do it angrily; he did it as if he’d seen a groove in my chest that fitted the shape of the receiver. He wrote the message on some notepaper and I said the
words, stumbling, for no real reason, over the last part: “We regret any inconvenience caused.”

Sylvie and The Paul came to stay for the fifth time since Miri left, even though Dad told them not to come this time. I was glad to see The Paul. Every day we got
The Times
and
The Daily Telegraph
, because there was more in them to read than in tabloids. I think Sylvie expected that by now she would have to cook for us and take care of us, but Dad made three meals a day in the kitchen, chopping and whisking with a grim energy that pushed her out, pushed all of us out. Sylvie kept looking at us with doe-eyed shock, as if she couldn’t believe that Dad and I hadn’t died of grief. Sylvie phoned Lind. To ask if Miri had been upset by a boy. “Why else would a young girl run away? It must be love.”

“She’ll come back,” The Paul said to me, over the top of
The Guardian
. “All the best people run away from home when they’re young. I ran away when I was just twelve years old, and I came back when I was bored of it.” Sylvie and The Paul only ended up staying for a week. Dad spent most of his time blatantly avoiding them (I mean ducking into rooms and stepping hastily around corners when he saw them, as if he was regressing into boyhood) and it was getting tense.