White Is for Witching

LUC DUFRESNE

is not tall. He is pale and the sun fails on his skin. He used to write restaurant reviews, plying a thesaurus for other facets to the words “juicy” and “rich.” He met Lily at a magazine Christmas party; a room set up like a chessboard, at its centre a fir tree gravely decorated with white ribbons and jet globes. They were the only people standing by the tree with both hands in their pockets. For hours Lily addressed Luc as “Mike,” to see what he had to say about it. He didn’t correct her; neither did he seem charmed, puzzled, or annoyed, reactions Lily had had before. When she finally asked him about it, he said, “I didn’t think you were doing it on purpose. But then I didn’t think you’d made a mistake. I don’t know what I thought. I suppose I thought you were calling me Mike because Mike was my name, if you see what I mean.”

He wooed his wife with peach tarts he’d learnt from his pastry-maker father. The peaches fused into the dough with their skins intact, bittered and sweetened by burnt sugar. He won his wife with modern jazz clouded with cello and xylophone notes.

His fingers are ruined by too close and careless contact with heat; the parts that touch each other when the hand is held out straight and flat, the skin there is stretched, speckled and shiny. Lily had never seen such hands. To her they seemed the most wonderful in all the world. Those hands on her, their strong and broken course over her, his thumbs on her hip bones.

One night she said to him, “I love you, do you love me?” She said it as lightly as such a thing can be said without it being a joke. Immediately he replied, “Yes I love you, and you are beautiful,” pronouncing his words with a hint of impatience because they had been waiting in him a long time.

He seems always to be waiting, his long face quiet, a dark glimmer in his heavy-lidded eyes. Waiting for the mix in the pot or the oven to be ready. Waiting for blame (when, at twelve, Miranda’s condition became chronic he thought that somehow he was responsible; he’d let her haunt the kitchen too much, licking spoons. He forgot that he had allowed Eliot to do the same.) Waiting, now, for the day Lily died to be over, but for some reason that day will not stop.

Meanwhile he has the bed-and-breakfast to run, he has cooking to oversee, peach tarts to make for the guests who know to ask for them. The peach tarts are work he doesn’t yet know how to do without feeling Lily. He has baked two batches of them since she died. Twice it was just him and the cook, the Kurdish woman, in the kitchen and he has bowed his head over his perfectly layered circles of pastry, covered his face and moaned with such appalled, amazed pain, as if he has been opened in a place that he never even knew existed. “Oh,” he has said, unable to hold it in. “Oh.” Luc is very ugly when he cries; his grief is turned entirely inward and has nothing of the child’s appeal for help. The Kurdish woman clicked her tongue and moved her hands and her head; her distress was at his distress and he didn’t notice her. The first time he cried like that she tried to touch her fat hand to his, but he said, “Don’t — don’t,” in a voice that shook her.

Nobody knew what to say to Luc. His children were closest to knowing, but Miranda was mad and when she saw him those first few weeks after Lily’s death, she wasn’t sure who he was. Eliot noticed Luc more, as an eye does when something is removed from a picture and the image is reduced to its flaw, the line where the whole is disrupted.

I find Luc interesting. He really has no idea what to do now, and because he is not mine I don’t care about him. I do, however, take great delight in the power of a push, a false burst of light at the bottom of a cliff, just one little encouragement to the end. Sometimes it seems too easy to toy with him. Other times… I don’t know. But he is always so close by that it doesn’t matter so much.

•

My father is very brief. All in the most likeable manner possible — he gets this look of discomfort whenever someone tries to discuss something with him at length. He looks as if he would very much like to spare you the effort. He used to go through horrors with Miri on the subject of her day at school, his replies cautious and neutral in case he appeared to be disapproving of something that was a good thing. Miri would chatter and chatter about our teacher having been unfair or the disappearance of her pencils. “Ah,” Dad would say, and, “Right.” And, “Really?”

If I was going on a trip or something it was a simple matter of handing him a letter or an itinerary and saying, “Dad, it’s £300,” or whatever it was. He’d scan the paper and say, “Fine,” or he’d say, “Here’s the thing; can’t afford that this term. Are you now resentful?”

Are you now resentful is always a genuine question from him. We never, ever said yes. It was my dad’s idea to open Lily’s house as a bedand-breakfast. Lily’s grandma, our GrandAnna, had raised Lily herself, and when she died she left Lily the house in Dover. I heard my Dad on the phone to someone about it: “Seven bedrooms, four bathrooms and God’s own 1940s kitchen…”

Lily wanted to put the Dover house up to let and use the money to pay the rent on our flat in London, which, Dad said, made no sense at all. But: “Why on earth would I want to live in Dover again? I spent my childhood in a state of inertia.”

Dad spent about six months working on Lily. The facts, figures and written proposals he’d prepared for the bank left her completely unmoved; she always tried to ignore things she didn’t understand rather than be intimidated by them. But apparently it was the bed linen that changed her mind. Cool blue silk and cotton patchwork. When Dad laid the stitched pillowcase and duvet out for her on the sofa, the colours reminded her of something she’d never seen. She said to us, “Imagine everyone in the house — even people we don’t know — all wrapped up safe in blue, like fishes. What fun…”

Miri and I were ten; Dad spent some time with a big map, planning a scenic route, and then he drove the moving van himself. Miri and I fidgeted at first, then settled when we saw cliffs bruising the skyline and smelt birds and wet salt on the air.

Our new house had two big brown grids of windows with a row of brick in between each grid. No windows for the attic. From the outside the windows didn’t look as if they could be opened, they didn’t look as if they were there to let air or light in, they were funny square eyes, friendly, tired. The roof was a solid triangle with a fat rectangular chimney behind it. Lily bounced out of the van first and I scrambled out of the other side and crooked my arm so as to escort her to the door. The house is raised from the road and laid along the top of a brick staircase, surrounded by thick hedge with pink flowers fighting through it. “Careful on the steps,” Lily said. The steps leading up to the house bulge with fist-sized lumps of grey-white flint, each piece a knife to cut your knee open should you slip. Opposite our house there is a churchyard, a low mound of green divided into two. The graves beneath it are unmarked. Lily took my arm and held Miri’s hand and when we got up to the front door she rubbed the crescent moon — shaped door knocker and laughed a little bit and said, “Hello, hello again.”

The first thing Lily showed us inside was the dusty marble fireplace. It was so big that Miri could crawl into the place where the wood was supposed to sit. She tried to make crackling, fire-like noises (when we were ten I always knew the meaning of the sounds she made, even when they were unsuccessful)

but ended up choking on a puff of dust that bolted down the chimney. Next Lily showed us the little ration-book larder behind the kitchen; the shelves were wonky and the room had a floor so crazily checked that none of us could walk in a straight line in there. I remember how brilliant I thought it all was; there was nothing for it but to jump in the air and yell and kick and make kung-fu noises.

Miri and I conferred and decided that we liked the tallness of the house, the way the walls shoot up and up with the certainty of stone, “Like we’re in a castle,” Miri put it. We liked the steep, winding staircase with the gnarled banister. We especially liked the ramshackle lift and the way you could see its working through a hole worn into the bottom in the back left corner. We liked that the passageways on each floor were wide enough for the two of us to stand beside each other with our arms and legs spread, touching but not touching. I climbed one of the apple trees and surveyed the garden, the patches of wild flowers that crumpled in the shade, the Andersen shelter half-hidden by red camellia shrubs. I was well pleased. “Wicked house,” I said. “Magic,” said Miri, from somewhere below.

We thought it would be hard to make friends because of the way people came out and stared at us in the moving van as it passed through the streets. But Miri is good at making friends, and I am good at tagging along on expeditions and acting as if the whole thing was my idea in the first place. Miri was very pleased with Martin Jones’s curly hair; the boy’s head was like a sheep’s. He became our first friend in the area and he brought most of the rest.

Actually, when we were sixteen Miri gave me the task of telling Martin that he didn’t stand a chance with her. Miri called me into her room, fixed me with a look of dread and whispered, “He asked me out and now I just can’t look at him anymore.” I refused point-blank to be her messenger or to have anything to do with any of it, but she said, “Then I’ll write him a letter.” I cringed and said, “Don’t do that.”

Martin and a couple of others came around to smoke and watch what promised to be “strange and unusual porn.” Women with horses, women with lizards, women with women plus horses and lizards. I pretended to be leaner than I was and at one point mentioned aloud one of the “actor’s” resemblance to Miri’s boyfriend. The others groaned.

“What the fuck—”

“Er, no—”

“Too gay, Silver.”

Martin didn’t say anything himself, but I knew that he was gutted and I didn’t let him pay for his share of the weed; he put a note down and when he wasn’t looking I screwed it up and threw it into his coat pocket with a sense of relief so huge it was disabling. I wrote something in my diary about it a few days later, about our teenage years being a realm of the emotionally baroque. I wasn’t even lean when I wrote that.

So Martin was the first friend, but the other kids he brought liked the house too.

For a few months after we moved in it was just Lily, Miri, Dad and me in the house, no guests. Decorating happened, the kitchen got updated; Lily went away to Mexico and came back with a pair of shrivelled corn-husk dolls that she put on a shelf in her studio when Miri and I rejected them. During that time there was no better place in the neighbourhood for hide-and-seek, or for Robin Hood versus Sheriff of Nottingham swordstick fighting in the back garden. There was no better place to play Hitler Resistance Force, a game I made up so I could be Churchill. My first kiss was in the Andersen shelter, more a percussion of heads, faces, mouths than anything else. We were thirteen. Emma’s the sort of girl who likes boys who have unpredictable moods and write poetry and imagine things, so I played up to that. We were in the shelter because she was supposed to be a Nazi double agent giving me secret information. For some reason whilst kissing her my main preoccupation was not hurting her or bruising her. I tried not to hold her too hard. Her hair and skin were so soft.

There is another shelter inside the house. It is beneath the sitting room with the fireplace; it is under a trapdoor set in the floor. The room is dim and long and deep; a room for sleeping in. Sleeping and not much else. I tried to revise for exams in there and ended up curled up on my side on the floor, snoring.

What took getting used to in Dover were the gulls and their croaky sobs, and the sense of climbing upstairs when walking on some roads and downstairs when walking on others. The house, the garden, moving. The whole thing was like a dream; for weeks Miri and I couldn’t believe it and wandered around the place with pangs in our stomachs, pre-emptive homesickness ready for the time when Dad and Lily would announce it was only a holiday and it was time to leave. Aside from our great-grandmother dying, we knew that it was Dad that had made it all happen, and we revered him as a wizard.

Miri’s room was darker than mine, even before she took to keeping her curtains drawn at all times and Lily started calling her room “the psychomantium.” That first day, Miri found something on the floor of that room she’d picked as hers. I didn’t see what it was, but it was very small, and I thought that it must have cut her or something because just after she dropped it into her pocket she sucked thoughtfully at her finger. It took me about an hour of my best teasing and insults to get the secret out of her; finally she sighed and showed me. It was a ball of chalk.

•

Dad had been a waiter, then a trainee chef, then a food critic, and each job had bored him to the point of existential crisis. This thing with the house was plan B. Or C, or D or X. Without the guests and the maintenance and the folders of forms and bills, Dad would just sit. It’s almost as if Lily knew, years and years in advance, that she was leaving us. As if she was gifting him something to be later, after her. That’s not true, and it’s not possible, but… the way she indulged him so completely. She gave him her house; Lily and Miri and I just lived in it. The capital man is the sum of his possessions.

When Lily died, and here I am telling it exactly as it was, Dad got even more control of the house. Lily’s dying meant he didn’t have to ask anyone about anything. There was no longer anyone who needed convincing that it was absolutely necessary to replace the old lift shaft; he just had it replaced, three months after the funeral. He dropped me off at the clinic and said to me, “I can’t stay long with you and Miri.” At that time Miri would only speak to me, and I knew it bothered him the way Miri sat back in her chair and looked at him without saying anything, with that empty smile on her lips. But the other reason Dad couldn’t stay was that he had to get back and keep an eye on the work on the lift.

Without saying a word I kept daring him. Fall apart, fall apart. If I could have seen a button to press, I would have. Miri and I don’t need you to be strong, we need you to crack a little now.

PICA

is a medical term for a particular kind of disordered eating. It’s an appetite for non-food items, things that don’t nourish. The word itself is pronounced pie-kah, a word like a song about a bird and food. Miri said it tiredly to herself and to me. “Pie-kah, pie-kah, I’ve got pie-kah.” Lily told all our teachers at primary school and all the dinner ladies knew. When we went to secondary school Lily wrote it down on a form as a special concern. Pie-kah meant that Miri counted bites of food and smiled with breathless relief when she had met her quota. Counting bites was Lily’s idea, and Miri accepted it gladly. “That’s a good idea,” she said, nodding, nodding. Whenever Miri talked about her pica with Lily she seemed so grown up about it, a shaky balance of humility and dignity. Dad was relieved that Miri didn’t mean to be rebellious. I might remember Miri’s special pastries as more elaborate than they really were, but Dad made some astonishing things for her. Flaky cones smothered in honey and coconut and chocolate and whatever else he could think of. He did a lot of soft foods, too, soups, and jellies with (eye) balls of peeled fruit staring out of them. What Miri did was, she crammed chalk into her mouth under her covers. She hid the packaging at the bottom of her bag and threw it away when we got to school. But then there’d be cramps that twisted her body, pushed her off her seat and lay her on the floor, helplessly pedalling her legs. Once, as if she knew that I was thinking of sampling her chalk to see what the big wow was, she smiled sweetly, sadly, patronisingly and said to me, “Don’t start, you’ll get stuck.”

•

It runs in the family. Anna Good had it in 1938; a year before she became Anna Silver. She ruined her work stockings and skirt with crouching in the mud searching for acorn husks that would splinter down her throat. She ate leaves by the handful and chipped her teeth on the pebbles she scooped out of the brown water when she went walking on the promenade. The house is Andrew’s, she told herself; I have no part in it.

One evening she pattered around inside me, sipping something strong that wedged colour into her cheeks, and she dragged all my windows open, putting her glass down to struggle with the stiffer latches. I cried and cried for an hour or so, unable to bear the sound of my voice, so shrill and pleading, but unable to stop the will of the wind wheeling through me, cold in my insides. That was the first and last time I’ve heard my own voice. I suppose I am frightening. But Anna Good couldn’t hear me. When she closed me up again it was only because she was too cold. Most nights she went with the moon, and when it was round she stayed in my biggest bedroom and wouldn’t answer the thing that asked her to let it out

(let you out from where?

let me out from the small, the hot, the take me out of the fire i am ready i am hard like the stones you ate, bitter like those husks)

the moonlight striped her, marked out places where the whispering thing would slip through and she would unfold. When Andrew went to war the sirens shrieked at night and the sky was full of squat balloons that flamed and ate bombs and would not move with the breeze, these balloons and nothing else, not even stars.

Anna Good you are long gone now, except when I resurrect you to play in my puppet show, but you forgive since when I make you appear it is not really you, and besides you know that my reasons are sound. Anna Good it was not your pica that made you into a witch. I will tell you the truth because you are no trouble to me at all. Indeed you are a mother of mine, you gave me a kind of life, mine, the kind of alive that I am.

Anna Good there was another woman, long before you, but related. This woman was thought an animal. Her way was to slash at her flesh with the blind, frenzied concentration that a starved person might use to get at food that is buried. Her way was to drink off her blood, then bite and suck at the bobbled stubs of her meat. Her appetite was only for herself. This woman was deemed mad and then turned out and after that she was not spoken of. I do not know the year, or even how I know this.

But Miranda… you are listening too.

Miranda.

Look at me.

Will you not?

It is useful, instructive, comforting to know that you are not alone in your history.

So I have done you good

and now,

some harm.

WHEN MIRANDA

finally discharged herself from the clinic, Eliot and her father came to collect her. They looked at her strangely. She didn’t know what it could be; she was more normal then she had been in months. She sat in the back of the car and looked very seriously at her suitcase while her brother and father looked at her, looked away, looked at her again. She passed a hand over her hair, which lay meek and wispy against her neck. Her hair had been bobbed out of necessity at first. Miranda had been admitted to the clinic because one morning Eliot had found her wordless and thoughtful. It had been a long night, a perfect full moon tugging the sky around it into clumsy wrinkles. Miranda had been bleeding slightly from the scalp and her wrists were bound together with extreme dexterity and thin braids of her own hair.

It had been six months since then but her hair had been kept short. She didn’t know why, she couldn’t remember having expressed a preference. There was much that she was unable to remember. Especially unclear were the days immediately after she and Eliot had had the news of Lily’s death. She remembered going into school and everyone being very sorry for her loss, but Eliot said that he had gone to school and she had stayed at home. The incident with the hair was completely lost; it seemed that when she’d left herself she’d left completely and it was not worth trying to fetch the images back, pointless trying to identify what exactly it was that had made her snap.

The two doctors who had been “working with” her at the clinic had mistook her resignation for stubbornness and constantly hovered on the edge of pressing her to remember. She objected mildly, with a sense of wasting her father’s money. The clinic was a private clinic. Her room at the clinic had its own phone line and plush curtains and in the common room people checked their e-mail and played snooker. She had agreed to be admitted to an adolescent psychiatric unit because no-one at home knew how to help her feel comfortable.

She had had such a strong feeling that she needed to talk to someone who would tell her some secret that would make everything alright. She had been unable to think who it was. She had sat awake long hours downstairs, looking into the empty white arch of the fireplace, her hands on her rib cage. Who was it that needed to talk to her, that she needed to talk to? She had gone through lists of people it could be. She could only think of people that it couldn’t be. It wasn’t Lily, it wasn’t her father, it wasn’t Eliot, it wasn’t any of the poets whose words stuck spikes in her, not even Rumi. It wasn’t God. She did not think it was someone who was alive. She did not think it was anyone who existed, this messenger. So, the morning after the bad night she went with her father to see a doctor, a different doctor from the one who had, through no fault of his own, been unable to help her with her pica. She had signed a form, her name near her father’s, and admitted herself to the clinic.

Whenever she tried to think about the long night before the bad morning on which Eliot had found her, nothing came to mind. The sedatives had done their work and she’d gone away and now she was coming home again. Exactly as if she’d been put in an envelope and posted abroad, then returned to sender. Even if alive the package doesn’t, can’t, note events, only the sensation of travel. All Miranda had been left with was a suspicion that she had spent much of her first night at the clinic clapping. She thought there might have been a bout of bringing her hands together over and over after the lights in the room went out, her body held in frightened rigidity because if she dared stop clapping then a bad thing would come.

She hadn’t told Eliot about it when he came to visit; instead she had taken to asking him whether he thought it would rain. He had said yes every time.

Eliot was wearing his reading glasses now; he’d climbed into the car with a hardback about the history of doubt. The way he held it on his lap as their father drove, she could tell he was unsure of the ensuing protocol; no one was saying anything, so there was no reason for him not to continue reading. But at the same time, if he started reading it would be a confrontational act somehow. His pockets weren’t big enough to put the book out of sight, either. Eventually he pushed his glasses up to the top of his head and looked out of the window. To make conversation, Miranda said, “Why are you reading that book? Are you in doubt about something?”

Eliot yawned, as he did when uncomfortable. “I told Cambridge that I’d read it and now I’ve got to make it true.”

She said, “You’re applying to Cambridge?”

Uncertainty worked his mouth. She thought she had wobbled in her seat, then realised she hadn’t moved at all; the thought don’t go had flashed through her like a swarm of pins. Eliot was one of those boys that made girls go quiet. He was so beautiful that it seemed certain he was arrogant or insensitive or stupid. He’d taken Luc’s contrast of fair skin and dark hair and he’d taken Lily’s curls and lively wide-set eyes. His bone structure was scary and unnatural and flawless. Besides that he was her knight.

The first week Miranda and Eliot had moved to Dover, they’d played King Arthur’s Court with Martin, Emma and Emma’s older brother, Mark. Martin was Merlin, Miranda was Morgan La Fay, Emma was Nimue, the Damosel of the Lake, and Mark was King Arthur. Eliot said he didn’t care which knight he was — they were all badasses. He’d pulled the green ribbon down through Miranda’s ponytail, tied it around his sleeve and he’d said to her, “I’m your knight.” Miranda pushed him. He took a single step back and scowled. Miranda said loudly, “I’m Morgan La Fay — I’ve got spells and I can stick up for myself.”

He’d said, “I know, but just in case.” Eliot at ten was slight and earnest, his face all eyes. He’d been quick to feel and quick to anger, and when he was angry he would smile very deliberately and with incredible sweetness before walking away. He didn’t care that the others heard what he said and sniggered, but Miranda cared. That’s why she’d thought, but hadn’t said, I’m your knight too.

Now she looked at him, at the awkward length of him, so carefully arranged to fit the space in the front of the car. The sleeves of his jumper and coat were rolled up to his elbows and he was goose-bumping under the cold. He would get into Cambridge, of course he would go.

She said plaintively, “Is it too late to apply?”

She felt Luc and Eliot not looking at each other.

“I didn’t know you even wanted to go there. If you want you can apply next year,” Luc offered.

Miranda waited, then said, “But what will I do for a whole year?”

Neither of them answered her. She supposed the answer was, Get better. The thought of a slow and measured crawl back to health filled her with black sand. She said, “I want to try.”

Eliot twisted around in his seat. “Look Miri, it’s not… you can’t just… you need to really think hard about it. There are all these different colleges and you’ve got to pick a college, a course, everything.”

Miranda spun the combination locks of her suitcase. “Well, what course are you applying to? What college are you applying to?” She looked at him and waited, she refused to pick up the thread of any other conversation.

Luc didn’t make a sound, but he looked into the rearview mirror and she saw the groan on his face. Eliot breathed out through his nostrils. His glance was disbelieving, sent her way to check that she was serious. “What the fuck,” he said. Finally, in tones of outrage, he told her. Miranda noted the name of the college on the back of her hand so she wouldn’t forget. Eliot said something about her having to write a personal statement. Suddenly she wanted to make him angrier; it took everything she had to stay quiet and not ask him to help her write her application.

Eliot passed her a newspaper, The Dover Post, rolled up. It took her a second to get her eyes focused, then she read of the stabbing of the fourth Kosovan refugee in three weeks. Three had died in hospital. Her gaze could only touch the page very lightly before it skittered away. She said, “Someone is going around stabbing these people?” She didn’t want to say “refugees.” She didn’t want to say “Kosovans.” She didn’t know why. Or maybe it seemed feeble somehow, like making a list of things that were a shame, grouped in order of quantity—shame number seventy-three (73): loss of four (4) Kosovans.

The main picture was of a boy a little older than her. He was wearing a denim jacket that looked too snug across his shoulders. His eyes were nervous blurs. He was dead. His face was so smooth; he was old enough to shave but young enough to still be excited about shaving and thus meticulous.

She was not sure how to pronounce his name, not even in her head would the sound make any sense. She had to look away to stop herself from making up more stories about him. Also because from the page he said, Look away, look away from me, what can you do, nothing so don’t. The article commented on the silence of the local refugee community. No one was naming names, or even suggesting any.

Eliot told Miranda that it was a sign of the community closing to protect its own. “It’s refugees killing other refugees, man. I know you can’t believe it, I don’t want to believe it either, but, you know what… it’s far too simplistic to assume that just because they’re escaping similar troubles and are from the same geographic location, that it’s all love and harmony when they get over here. There are a bunch of differences between these people that precede their status in this country. Some of them really hate each other. I’ve seen kids openly spit at each other because of differences in language and what speaking a certain language means.”

Miranda slumped in her seat. What Eliot was saying made sense but it didn’t. There was an untruth to it that made her tired. “Like, some Armenians who speak only Armenian consider Armenians who speak Turkish to be Turks and synonymous with the very oppression that exiled them—”

Luc made a face.

“You sound like you’re quoting from some sort of textbook. Far too general. Besides, why would you suddenly recover a sense of solidarity and try to protect a killer when the police come around?”

“Because they’re even more hostile to the police than they are to each other? Because the truth is too good for the police? Because the police are a symbol of the country that’s fucking them over and assigning them marginal status?” Eliot suggested.

Luc shook his head. “One moment, Eliot. Put the sociological exercise aside. Since we’re talking about family here. Family. And say you knew who had hurt someone in your family and you also knew that the police have the power to stop and punish it. You really wouldn’t say anything?”

Miranda shook her head, then nodded, unsure which movement was appropriate. She handed the newspaper back to Eliot and went back to spinning combinations in her suitcase lock. Eliot and Luc continued to argue, Luc trying hard to sound amiable, Eliot trying hard to sound impassioned.

The car stopped at a traffic light, the last one before home. There were some girls sitting on the bicycle railings outside the corner shop, chewing gum, kicking out at each other, talking and squealing. Miranda couldn’t hear their hoop earrings jangling from where she was, but she felt the vibrations. These girls were Kosovan girls; when they weren’t together they were impassive, tough, their hair gelled into stiff fans with curls slicked down over their foreheads. You saw them in the supermarket holding doubled up carrier bags open, ready to fill with shopping, standing and gazing inscrutably into middle distance while their mothers fumbled through the folds of their big shawls, looking for food vouchers to pay with. One of these girls was in Miranda’s English literature class, and her voice, soft and uncertain, belied her eyes. As the car moved past, one of the girls in the group bounced her gaze off Miranda’s, then looked again, harder. She climbed down off the railings and strode over to the roadside with two other girls behind her. They were mouthing and pointing at her. Miranda didn’t know what to do, so she closed her eyes. Eliot was quiet and Luc whistled and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. A jolt as the traffic light changed. She opened her eyes and saw the girls, a little behind, running. Luc said, “Are those girls running after us?”

Miranda couldn’t think what they wanted with her, those girls. She blurted, “Drive faster—”

Eliot laughed. “It’s alright,” he said. “They’ve given up.”

The girls had stopped and were a street behind, each of them bent over, holding their sides. The girl who had first noticed her was still looking, though. Miranda couldn’t see her expression.

She had thought that coming home would hurt, but actually she was fine. There were lights shining from the house windows that didn’t have their curtains drawn, harsh yellow scattered between the top and bottom floors, two on top and three on the bottom, like a smile.

Azwer, the gardener, and Ezma, the housekeeper, came to meet Miranda at the door; their foreheads were wrinkled and their eyes were watering with emotion. Ezma squeezed Miranda’s hands and Azwer said, “Good, it’s good.” What was good; the quality of the repair that had been done at the clinic?

Ezma turned her attention back to a woman who was writing a cheque against the telephone table. The woman’s hair was full of shiny star-shaped hair clips. She was an American. She bit on the end of her pen and said dreamily, “You should grow blueberries out in the back. I think blueberries bless a place, and are great in pie. If you crush oyster shells and spread them on the soil, it’ll make the earth much richer and better for growing things in.”

Ezma smiled at the woman. “We don’t serve oysters,” she said.

Miranda took her suitcase up in the lift, feeling like a guest. She missed being able to see to the bottom of the shaft, the mysterious dustiness of it. She went into her room and there was a stack of cards on her bed, cards filled with hugs and kisses from girls at school. She wondered what Eliot had told them, and whether it was worth returning to school with an assumed limp and only the vaguest explanation of her absence: something about having fallen out of one of the trees at the back and having broken her whole body, “You know… just everything.”

Miranda’s room smelt of musty petals, and she could hear Eliot avoiding her, helping Azwer to shovel snow outside. The dull click of spades on gravelled ice.

In a psychomantium glass topples darkness. Things appear as they really are, people appear as they really are. Visions are called from a point inside the mirror, from a point inside the mind.

Miranda looked in.

She looked with the most particular care and she saw Lily Silver standing there in her room, smiling sadly.

It took half a minute, too long a terror, to realise that she was only looking at herself. Wasn’t she? It was the haircut and the fact that she had grown thinner and her eyes had grown bigger in her head. She had been eating exactly what she liked, and she didn’t like the usual things.

Still, Lily seemed to gaze and gaze at her and say, Oh, Miri. You fell asleep. How could you?

Miranda turned away from the mirror. “I don’t like this blame culture,” she whispered. “I don’t like it at all.”

She checked Lily’s watch. It was midnight in Haiti. The ticking of the watch grew very loud; she wished it would not tick so loudly. She fumbled across the room to put on a CD, but she had taken it out and put it back in, pressed play three times before she realised there was nothing wrong with it, it played every time she pressed the button. There was Ella Fitzgerald, whispering a tisket a tasket. She gritted her teeth. She needed the sound of the watch stopped; she couldn’t hear the music for the sound of the watch. She knelt on the floor and slammed her wrist against it.

Tick, tick

(break it break it)

tick, tick

It was the pain that made her realise what she was doing. She undid the watch clasp, inspected it for damage, then put it on the table and rubbed her swollen wrist. Then she felt for her pills, cursing her hand for trembling so much. She put her steady hand over her trembling hand, to no effect. She lay down and didn’t want to shut her eyes. With the curtains drawn it could almost be night. But she heard someone talking to Luc downstairs, she heard the clatter of cutlery, she heard the whir of

the lift

broke down in the night. No one knew what time. The timing became important when Azwer and Ezma couldn’t find their older daughter in the morning.

Luc had had the attic converted into two large, low rooms. Azwer and Ezma slept in one, while Deme and her little sister, Suryaz, slept in a double bed in the second room. Deme was ten and Suryaz was seven. The two of them went about with their hands joined, smiling and full of secrets so simple that they were given up if asked after. Deme and Suryaz hopped more than they walked; it was always as if they had just left the site of some mirth particular to them. They babbled in prettily accented voices. The combination of their near-identical manes of curly hair and their mother’s tendency to zip them into similarly patterned dresses meant that Suryaz had an air of having been formed without detail. Deme was the oldest, so you looked at her first.

Both girls admitted that they had spent the day before playing around with the lift, pressing buttons for three floors all at once, holding the Door Open button until the lift zinged with confusion. That was reason enough for the lift to later get confused and try to travel unbidden from first floor to second, grinding to a halt between the two. But why was Deme standing in the corner of the lift when Luc, Azwer and the technician pried the doors open? She was standing, not sitting or kneeling. They found her in the back left corner, where there once had been a hole in the floor, and she was standing on tiptoe, so close to the Alarm button, looking at it in fact, her eyes wide as if all night she had been sinking and all night a stubborn thing in her had kept her on her feet.

“I tucked her into bed with Suryaz,” Ezma kept repeating. “I did, didn’t I,” she said to Suryaz, who looked and looked and then shrugged. Ezma hissed at her, but Suryaz would say nothing. At first Deme wouldn’t talk either, then when Ezma shouted at her, Deme spat a large piece of Suryaz’s Lego out into her hand and tried her best to answer the questions that everyone levelled at her, even Eliot, who tugged her ponytail and teased her about her “midnight journey.” The only reply Deme ventured was that she didn’t know.

“Why did you get into the lift so late, when everyone was sleeping?”

“I don’t know.”

“Deme, where is your sense? Why didn’t you just ring the alarm?”

“I don’t know.”

Miranda asked, “Deme are you alright?”

Deme and Suryaz leant on each other and Suryaz said, “Thank you, she is alright.”

Miranda, Luc and Eliot slept on the third floor; above the guests but below the housekeepers. Miranda told Eliot: “I heard someone crying last night. But I thought I was just remembering the clinic.”

Or herself, she had thought she was hearing herself.

•

Later in the morning Miranda opened her wardrobe and found it full of clammy ghosts that hovered around her body when she put them on. The cold trickled down in the gaps between the material and her chest. Scarecrow girl. She felt proud and nauseous, chosen and moulded by hands that froze. She drifted downstairs to find her father, who was stalking around a newly vacated guest room with a checklist. Winter had licked every window in the house and left them smeared with fog. “Nothing fits me anymore,” she said, turning in a slow circle before him, hoping for his horror. “I’ll need some new clothes.”

Her father took her in coolly.

“That is true,” he said.

Together they searched the dressing table and desk drawers in his bedroom until they found a gilt-coloured card with the address of a boutique in Notting Hill printed on it. It was a boutique that Lily had liked for dresses, so Luc told Ezma and Azwer that he would be out for the afternoon and drove Miranda into London.

Dress shopping took longer than she had expected. It took the whole afternoon. Luc refused Miranda every dress she tried on. Each time he shook his head she gauged the extent of his dislike for the dress by checking whether he had raised one eyebrow or both.

“What’s wrong with this one?” she’d ask. Mid-length sleeves, a demure hemline, a keyhole collar.

“You know you already have one just like that.”

“But—”

Distress showed dimly in his eyes. “Let me see the next one, please.”

They moved with increasing disheartenment from shop to shop, hands in their coat pockets, looking at the floor more than they looked at the clothes, and finally, knowing that her only condition was that her dresses be black, he swiftly selected dresses off the racks for her to try, with the reasoning that he was more likely to approve an outfit if he’d chosen it.

She was embarrassed; other shoppers were trying to guess at their relationship. He looked younger than he was. She took every opportunity to say “Father” to him, and hated herself for sounding like such a fool, Father-Father-Father.

When she tried on the last dress in the pile he’d built up, she was sure he would like it. He had to. It didn’t look like anything she already had, the skirt flared wonderfully, and there was the sweet ribbon bow at the waist. It was a dress to be worn by the sort of girl who’d check that no one was looking, then skip down a quiet street instead of walking, just so the fun of it was hers alone. She looked around the corner of the fitting-room door and saw her father standing with his hands in his pockets, his tie removed and folded into a pocket of his crumpled suit, where part of it unfurled like a yellow-and-blue-striped tongue. A woman who had come shopping alone seemed to be asking his advice on the dress she’d tried on. He nodded and smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners, before giving the woman’s dress a thumbs-up, which made Miranda laugh because her father only gave things a thumbs-up when he thought they were stupid and populist. The woman touched his arm and said thank you.

Miranda put a hand over her face and looked through her fingers, the world in pieces, her father’s legs gone, the woman’s torso vanished. Now they looked like broken dolls, their jaws clacking, breeze blowing through their hollows. Lily had taken her to a doll hospital in New York once. Neat rooms with bright, hard looking wallpaper tacked precisely into each corner like plastic, chests of drawers with lace cloths on top, the smell of pot-pourri lined with sawdust. Only the repaired dolls were on view

(Father, let’s go to the doll hospital and get you repaired)

she didn’t know where the thought had come from, she probably had to be careful because she had been mad.

Miranda dropped her hand and came out of the fitting room, passing the woman who had been talking to her father as the woman returned to her cubicle. One of them smiled with all her teeth, and the other looked blank.

When her father saw her, he rubbed his eyes and leaned his elbow on one of the racks. He bit his knuckle and stared at her knees until she was compelled to cross and uncross them, dancing an impromptu Charleston. He didn’t smile.

“Not this one either?” she asked. “But this is the last one.”

“It’s not the dresses,” he said.

“What is it then?”

He raised his head. “You’re… so thin.”

She turned to a mirror and looked at herself quickly. “I’m not that thin.”

“Miranda. No one who is well looks the way you look at the moment.”

“I’m alright,” she said.

“You are not alright. None of these dresses will do. They will not do at all. Nothing that fits you now will do, do you understand?”

“I suppose so, but what am I going to do about clothes, then?”

He looked around. Was his cue written on the walls?

“You will have to eat. You will wear your other clothes until they fit. It will be good for you.”

Miranda nodded and her reflection nodded, so that was twice. She crossed her hands over her stomach, as if that would stop her from retching. She blushed because the light in the fitting rooms was stark and hot, like being stared at.

(I’m not that thin, I’m not that thin)

She smoothed the pleated skirt of the dress she had on. She liked it. He had chosen the perfect dress for her. Or, at least, for the girl she wanted to be.

“That’s just gorgeous on you,” the shop assistant said, stopping in front of Miranda. She clasped her hands to her chest and shaped her mouth into a lipsticked “ooh.” When neither Miranda nor Luc replied her, her smile faltered and she said “Alrighty then,” and walked back into the main shop.

“You haven’t even looked at the price yet. It might be reasonable,” Miranda tried, once the shop assistant was completely out of earshot.

Luc lightly touched Miranda’s shoulder.

“Getting healthy won’t be so bad,” he said. “I’ll try to make it delicious, I promise.”

She nodded again, everything paralysed but her head and neck. You are being silly, she told herself desperately, but the words had no effect. Because she didn’t move to face him, her father kissed the top of her head, the point of the triangle where her parting dissolved into the rest of her hair. She felt the kiss on her actual skull, the skin of her scalp crinkling between his lips as they broke through. She endured it because he didn’t know what this kiss did to her, how could he know?

He held her coat for her so she could put her arms into it. He buttoned her coat up for her and walked her out of the shop. He smiled and said goodbye for both of them. When he suggested having dinner in town she said, lightly, without looking at him, “Sorry, Father, I really can’t.”

They drove into Dover through the dark. Eventually Luc put on a CD and Hildegarde von Bingen’s canticles of ecstasy spilt misty cries out through the car windows. Miranda concentrated on keeping her mouth completely closed.

A houseguest met them at the front door. He was holding a candle fixed to a saucer with its own wax, red on white. His name was Terry, Miranda was almost sure. “Hello there, Luc. There’s been a power cut,” he said, grinning. “Me and some of the others found some Famous Five books and we’ve been reading those and telling ghost stories for the past couple of hours. What larks…”

Luc shook the hand that wasn’t holding the saucer, said warmly that he was very glad it hadn’t been too much of an inconvenience and strode into the midst of the group of houseguests who had come out to offer theories and suggestions. Before Luc could call her, Ezma arrived suddenly at the centre, as if ejected from the floor. Her hair had tumbled out of its tidy coronets. Her face was grey.

“You’d better get an electrician, Mr. Dufresne,” she said. “Azwer has looked at the fuse box, but obviously he is no expert at these things.”

Miranda went to see if Deme and Suryaz were alright.

“Who is it?” the girls said together, when she knocked on the attic door.

“It’s me,” she said.

They wouldn’t answer after

that

evening, Emma and I broke up. Her parents were out and her house was full of music, music and every light in every room was on. She even had fairy lights twined around table legs. “Hello, Eliot…” She pulled me in through the front door, wrapped my arms around her waist and led me from room to room, dancing ahead of me. She was wearing a short black dress and when she turned to face me I saw she was wearing lipstick. I had never seen her wearing lipstick, but knew better than to say so in case she did that mysterious alchemy some girls do and transformed the comment into my accusing her of having gained weight.

“You look good,” I said, and kissed her. The music upstairs (’90s R&B from the sound of it) was different from that downstairs (Alanis Morisette), and it was unnerving somehow, like a discordant echo, as if the music upstairs was creeping up on me and if I turned around Mariah Carey would abruptly trill in my face.

“Is Miranda back?” Emma asked. I twirled her and caught her, partly because it was so inappropriate to do that while Morisette was whining unhappily.

“How did you know?”

Emma put her arms around my neck and tried to make me slow dance.

“Because you look nervous,” she said.

“Yeah. Well. It’s hard to know what to expect, isn’t it.”

She said solemnly: “Would you like a beer?”

I nodded, and she went into the kitchen. The room was so bright that I couldn’t look at anything for long.

What is all this?

I called out: “Emma are you alright?”

She came back with a glass of red wine, a can of beer, and a pair of scissors.

“Yeah I’m fine. Why?” she asked.

I sat on the sofa. I looked at the scissors, which she laid on the coffee table with the handles wide open. I drank some beer. She climbed onto my lap, drawing her bare legs against mine, leaning into me so I could feel the curve of her.

“No,” she said. “Don’t touch me.”

She breathed against my mouth but she wouldn’t let me kiss her. I said “Emma” without meaning to. The glass of wine she was drinking from now was clearly not her first.

She yawned and, from nowhere, offered me a cigarette. I couldn’t think about a cigarette; I leant back and just looked at her. She smoked one without me. “Look,” she said. She showed me the cigarette she was smoking. They were red and white. “Red tips,” she said. “An idea from the forties, you know. For the glamorous girl who doesn’t want to leave lipstick marks on her cigarette.”

“Oh,” I said, stupidly.

She slid slowly down my lap and onto the floor. I didn’t make a sound. It was a matter of principle. She walked around the sofa, smoking her red-tipped cigarette, then she picked up the scissors and handed them to me.

“What am I meant to do with these?”

She said, “Wait a sec, I need this for courage,” and took a long drag on her cigarette before putting it out. Then knelt on the sofa beside me and gathered the dark mass of her hair up into a ponytail, the hair band tied round at the neck. She hesitated, then, without taking her eyes off me, pulled the hair band up a little higher, a little tighter. She turned her back on me.

“There, where the hair band is.”

“Why?”

“I said cut it right here, Eliot.” She touched the hair band.

“No.”

I put the scissors down, but she picked them up and tried to force them back into my hand.

“Do it yourself,” I said. “I’m off.”

By the time I stood up, her ponytail had fallen onto the sofa in a silent fan. She turned around and mussed her hair, ran her fingers through the ragged ends, the ragged ends, her eyes were huge.

“You’re sick,” I said.

“Am I?” She reached for her lighter and cigarette box and lit up again.

She blew smoke in my face and I drifted towards the door with my best absent-minded smile, as if I had been on my way out anyway, as if I’d been ready to leave her from the moment I came. Emma is an only child, and she was drunk besides.

I didn’t go straight home. I walked around the park opposite our house, kicking at the railings, trying to think what to do. I couldn’t blank Emma altogether, because that would look weird, also I couldn’t risk her saying anything to any of our other friends.

Everyone would believe her because at the back of their minds, everyone thinks that twin brothers and sisters grow up magnetized towards each other, the prince at the foot of Rapunzel’s tower before the tower is even built, the lover you can get at all the fucking time, the one who is you but a girl, or you but a boy, whose bed you know as well as your own. How could you endure that without falling in love? The question is, were they born in love with each other, these twins, or did it blossom? At any rate it’s already happened, the onlookers agree. It must have. Ask them when they fell. The brother and sister say no, no, it’s nothing like that, but what they mean is they can’t remember when.

•

Lily’s photo studio was a small extension to the house, a lump that had grown on its side when it was young. It had its own tiled triangular window frame; from the outside it looked like a cuckoo clock. A thick piece of twine crossed the length of the room, hung low so that Lily could reach up and pluck down a photograph. Steel pegs dangled and didn’t shine; like the capped steel tanks at either end of the room they drew dark into their outlines and almost disappeared. The cupboards had jugs in them, and a few pint bottles full of pale fluids. The jugs weren’t dusty yet; Miranda dreaded the day when they would become so. She tried to put a shield up in her mind against it, a collection of bright things to do with Lily that would blaze through the dust when it came down.

When Eliot came home that evening, he took the key to Lily’s studio off its hook in the kitchen.

Miranda asked him, “What are you going to do in there?”

He said, “Homework.”

She tried to follow him in, but he suddenly and silently pushed the door against her until she squealed with pain; the pressure of the door between them threatened to throw her arm out of its socket.

“Eliot!” she said through the gap.

“Get back from the door,” he said calmly.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Later.”

She thumped her fist against the door, then opened her hand so that it was just her palm, soft on the wood.

He laughed. “Get your scrawny arm out of the door, Miri.”

“You said stay awake or she’ll die. Why did you say that? How could you say that?”

He opened the door fully. Behind him the light strips glowed red. He was looking at her through the skin of his eyelids. She didn’t like his eyes, she wanted to cover them with her hands, turn the lights out so she couldn’t see them. This was more than weed; he must have taken something else besides. He was looking at her but his eyes were closed: “You didn’t have to believe me.”

She stepped inside and slapped him. Then she laughed until she hiccupped, because she hadn’t known she meant to do it. The studio door clicked closed behind her. She could see her slap had been hard because there was her handprint on his face, a flushed shadow. He didn’t blink, but he slapped her back, and she fell onto a counter, scraping all her weight along her wrist as the glass in the cupboard rattled. When the throb died she walked up to him and dug her nails deep into his cheek, her other hand dragging his head back by the hair.

She wasn’t angry, she was just being deontological. He had to be paid out for the pain in her wrist. It was strange that she could hold him like this for even a second. She felt weak, but her will was cold. And there was a sort of wonder in seeing tears so close, in actually watching them form in his eyes. They scrabbled around on the floorboards, trying, for some reason, to hold each other flat in the shadows. She banged her head, or he banged her head, against a corner of the counter, and she let go of him and they rolled slowly away from each other. She was drowning in a flood of colour she had never seen before, she was scared it was blood from her brain. She heard Eliot breathing. She knew where he was, around the other side of the counter, out of her sight. “Miri,” he said. “Miranda. Are you alright?”

She didn’t answer. Let him worry.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He said it as if he was choking.

She could see under the counter, a strip about two inches thick. It looked sticky, as if developing fluids had dripped through to the floor and collected there. And there was a slip of paper,

or

a photograph gone astray.

She wasn’t sure if she could reach it, but Miranda reached an arm under the counter. If her fingers touched the photograph it was hers. If it was out of her reach then it belonged to the room.

She could hear Eliot moving. “Stay there,” she said. Her fingertips clutched the paper and she drew her arm out. With the slip in her hand, she rose to her knees at the same time Eliot did. They regarded each other across the counter from the nose up, wary grey gaze meeting its wet counterpart.

Lily and Luc had agreed that she and Eliot would take Lily’s surname if they were born grey-eyed, and Luc’s surname if they were born brown-eyed. Miranda and Eliot’s names were really just a matter of grey or brown, a choice between colours.

What would Miranda Dufresne have said now, how would she have made things better? She knew what Miranda Dufresne would have looked like. She would have had very straight black hair in a bob, she would have been a thin, already tall girl towering on heels, buttoned into a dark suit. She would have been born grown-up.

Miranda looked down at herself, touched her hair, started, then smiled nervously. Maybe the thing she needed to do was imagine what Miranda Silver would have looked like. What if she dyed her hair blond, she wondered, knowing that her skin was too pale to support it. Her thoughts were like ice floes, and she became too large for them — she couldn’t move from thought to thought without breaking them. One day she might get better and be pretty, rather than a sicklier version of Eliot.

Out of his line of sight she was holding a piece of A4 paper, a secret easily unfolded. It was a drawing on brown, crackly paper, a drawing of a perfect person. Miranda sat down.

(How excellent a body, that

Stands without a bone)

A perfect person has no joints. The arms, emerging from short sleeves, are unmarked by the ripple of skin that shows where the limbs bend. A perfect person’s portrait is lifelike despite their strange clothes, a black dress that fastens without buttons or a zip, just a straight line across the material to show that it was not pulled on over the head. It was still possible to believe that the person drawn was a real person despite the great almond-shaped eyes set deep into the head, deep and open, unable to blink. Eyes without eyelids or eyelashes. The pose of the perfect person was so natural, the colouring so lifelike that the omission of joints and eyelids seemed deliberate, so that the thing was art, or honesty.

The perfect person was a girl. Bobbed dark hair, black dress, pearls she was too young for, mouth, nose and chin familiar… Miranda’s, almost. Look, look, remember. This sight might not come again. The perfect person had beautifully shaped hands, but no fingernails. A swanlike neck that met the jaw at a devastating but impossible angle. Me, but perfect. She quickly corrected herself. Before Lily died, Miranda’s hair had been long enough to sit on. Me after the clinic, but perfect. Lily did you know? How did you know? Miranda turned the picture over and ran her hand over the back of it; in one, yes, two, three, four places the paper was rougher, once adhesive, now matted with fine hairs and specks of dust. Lily Silver, the lonely girl on the third floor, had kept herself company with pictures of people, no one she’d ever seen, she’d said. Miranda turned the page over again, and it was blank. So this was what happened when she hit her head.

Eliot collapsed onto the floor beside her. She put her head on his shoulder and he moved his head so that he was combing her hair with his chin. “That was really stupid,” she said, at the same as he said, “That was ridiculous.”

Without raising her head, she ran her fingers over the marks she’d made on his face, kissed each of her fingers and her thumb and touched them to each scratch. Just to be sure she touched his eyelids.

“Did you take something?”

“What?”

“Your eyes… I don’t know, maybe you smoked something.”

“No more than usual.” He crossed his heart.

“What do you really do in here?”

“What d’you think?”

“Develop photos, I suppose. Since when, though?”

He shrugged. She took some chalk out of the pocket of her dress. When she offered him a stick of it he looked surprised, but took it and stuck it in his mouth, pretended to smoke it like a cigar while she ate.

•

Azwer gave his notice the day of Eliot’s and Miranda’s Cambridge interviews. He stopped Luc as he was on his way out to meet the twins by the car. Azwer said, “My wife and daughters are afraid. If we stay they will only become more afraid, and then something bad will happen.” His heavy eyebrows lowered and he made some small, involuntary gesture with his hand that was recognisably superstitious, as if the words “God forbid” had flowed into his body.

Luc said, “Two weeks is too short notice for me to find replacements for you and Ezma. And we’ve had the lift looked at.”

Azwer said quickly, heatedly, “Mr. Dufresne, it’s not just the lift—”

Luc put his car keys down on the hall table, and tension pulled him taller. “Then what?”

Azwer kept his eyes fixed on Luc.

Luc looked at Miranda, then lowered his voice and said to Azwer, “Do you need more pay?”

Azwer spread his hands. “We cannot stay.”

Azwer and Ezma didn’t have papers; as far as the government was concerned, Luc was running the Silver House alone. Luc said, “Azwer, listen. Think about it. Where will you work? Where will you go?”

Azwer shrugged. “To London.”

Luc said, “I see,” in tones that patently signalled that he didn’t.

He took Miranda by the shoulders and turned her in the direction of the door.

She didn’t look like a promising interview candidate at all, she knew. All the colour in her face was in her lips, and her dress was still far too big. The back of it gaped around her shoulder blades as if the dress had been designed for someone who had wings. She would have to talk fast and come to surprising conclusions and smile a lot so no one would notice.

•

Miranda’s first interview was an hour and a half after Eliot’s, so she wandered in and out of the entrances to the college’s stone stairwells. She wondered how Eliot’s interview had gone and where he was, but she couldn’t find her phone; she must have left it somewhere. Cambridge was subdued; it wasn’t just the frost and the puffy felt sky, it was the abundance of massive, old stone. And then the bells, which pealed their deep songs at mysterious intervals. Miranda felt as if she was being pressed to the ground beneath a great grey finger. She had a pocketful of onyx chips

(properties of onyx: it helps you hold your emotions steady; side effects of onyx: it is the sooty hand that strangles all your feeling out of you) and she used her teeth to carve tiny, acrid flakes of onyx onto her tongue. She knew how to do it so that it looked as if she was simply biting her nails.

She collided with another girl on her way back into the waiting area outside the interview room. They both held their heads and moaned.

“Oh Lord! You must have the hardest head in all creation,” the girl said.

Miranda waited until she could look at the girl without it hurting, then lifted her gaze. The girl was black, all long legs and platform trainers, clad in grey school uniform. Her head was covered with tiny plaits that had coloured elastic bands tied around the ends, and her eyes were dark and large like drops of rich ink.

There was an awkward silence. Then Miranda held the door open and said, “Let’s try again, you first,” before she remembered that she had been the one going in. The other girl had been leaving.

“Look… what’s the time?” the girl said.

Miranda said, “I don’t know,” and looked around for a clock.

The girl looked at the watch on Miranda’s wrist.

“It doesn’t work,” Miranda said, rather than explain about Haitian time. “How have your interviews gone?”

“They haven’t. I mean I haven’t been called yet. I’m not doing it after all. Fuck it. I only wanted to know the time because there’s a train I might be able to catch if I leave right now,” the girl blurted.

“You’re… not going to your interviews?”

“No! I can’t be bothered.”

The girl’s hands were shaking. Miranda tried not to stare.

“Er… listen, it will be very demoralizing for me if you leave.”

The girl looked Miranda up and down and quietly advised her that she probably had nothing to worry about.

Miranda frowned. “What are you saying? Do I just walk in and say a secret password?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Do you?”

Miranda pushed the question aside with her hand. “It would be a shame not to bother. After you applied and everything. And… where do you live?”

“Faversham.”

“Right. So you came all the way up from Faversham—”

“Indeed!” the girl said. “Look… what’s your name?”

“Miranda.”

“I’m Ore. Look, Miranda. I’ve already been through all that ‘you’ve already applied and here you are’ stuff in my head. But hear ye, hear ye: only one person from my school’s got in here in the last five years, that’s a very discouraging pie chart to draw, plus I’ve been thinking about my personal statement and there are at least seventeen lies in there and I can’t keep track of them all. Plus I just realised I’m stupid, an actual dunce. I got a C for GCSE maths. It’s very likely that I’ve only been called to interview so they can laugh at me. Anyway thanks for listening, I’m off.”

“Well, I think it’s a terrible waste,” Miranda said, following Ore down the staircase. “And how will you ever know unless you try?”

Ore took Miranda’s hands between both of hers and shook it. “Good luck,” she said. “All the best. Really. I think it’s really nice of you to bother.”

Miranda could see how hard Ore was trying to take full breaths, to be calm. The only thing was to use a strategy of Lily’s.

“I,” said Miranda, “will give you a prize if you stay and do your interviews.”

Ore perched herself on the stair rail and closed her eyes.

“Well,” she said, after a moment, “I’ve never won a prize.”

They walked back upstairs together, arm in shaky arm. Ore wouldn’t let Miranda talk because, she said, she needed silence to get her lies in order.

Miranda thought about Ore throughout her interview, even when it descended into a semi-aggressive debate over her assertion that Thackeray’s Becky Sharp would easily beat Brontë’s Cathy in a fistfight. The only criticism she would have accepted was that she was giving patriarchy precedence over the female consciousness explored in the Gothic. But since that criticism wasn’t offered, she stood her ground. She didn’t remember her interviewers after the fact of her interviews — the professors didn’t have features, they were learnedness dressed up as people and housed in armchairs.

“Well? Where’s my prize?” Ore said, when Miranda came out. There were two others waiting outside now, a boy and a girl, both wearing blazers and silently reading thick books. They looked up when Ore spoke.

“How did it go?” Miranda asked.

“Wonderful. Really unbelievably good.” Cheerfully, Ore mimed stabbing herself. “If I don’t get that prize, the day might as well not have happened at all.”

She held her hand out expectantly.

“Alright, here it is,” said Miranda, and laid Ore’s purse on her palm. “You wouldn’t have got very far without it anyway,” she said. “Would you?”

Ore skipped a beat, then said: “I hope you get in. It’ll keep you off the streets, at least.”

She demanded the time of the boy nearest her and rushed down the college steps. The nervousness in her brought an otherwise gawky frame together in concentration — she delayed reaching out to push doors to the very last second, moving towards them as if, Miranda thought, they would slip aside for her or she would pass through them.

•

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.”

Just before we left for home I tried once more to make the bird fly. I opened the window of my room at Sylvie and The Paul’s house and I set the bird’s dumpy body on the sill, pushed it with a finger, but it only shook itself a little and stayed with its back to me, tail feathers ruffled, a defiant loner against the sunset and against the world. I reinstated it in the inside pocket of my jacket.

Miri spent most of the train journey to Calais trying to flirt with the bird, but it ignored her, snuggled deeper into my pocket and seemed to melt into hibernation — even its claws softened. The other people sitting around us seemed worried by the bird; they kept looking at the top of its head, which was all that was visible, as if they expected it to suddenly rise and start zooming around the train carriage, buzzing like a huge fly with a beak. But the bird relaxed until we’d docked at Dover, where it suddenly chirruped, struggled from my pocket to my shoulder, and threw itself at the air, singing madly. Then it was gone.

Miri squeezed my arm. “What a lazy thing that bird was,” she said. “Outrageous. Don’t you see? It was using you to get across the Channel.”

Dad was ahead of us, weighed down with Miri’s bag and his own. He looked back and said, “Good job you hadn’t given it a name.”

There was a stack of bills for Dad on the doormat when we got in. Also there was a letter postmarked Cambridge. It was for Miri. She held it and looked at me, scared. “I won’t open it until yours comes,” she said.

I spoke even though my lips felt frozen. Not really frozen, actually. Intensely lethargic. My lips couldn’t be bothered to form words. “Come on,” I said. “We applied to the same college for the same subject.”

I took the letter out of her hands and opened it for her. She had been offered a place. I kissed her cheek and said congratulations. She opened her mouth and put one hand on her chest, the other to her cheek. She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she cared about the offer. She was just trying to feel this for me.

Dad read the letter, then put an arm around Miri’s waist and drew her to him. He kissed her forehead. “My clever, darling girl,” he said. Miri smiled at last. When Dad looked at me, I looked at the wall. I wanted to leave, but told myself, stand still, stand still. The floor below, the ceiling above. I stood there until they felt uncomfortable.

THE GOODLADY

“is very beautiful, Miranda, but very strict. Everything she does is necessary, and she makes no exception to any rule. She’s what I had instead of a mother, much stricter than any mother. She’s like tradition, it’s very serious when she’s disobeyed. She’s in our blood. And she’s told me that if I can’t get you to eat, she will. You must eat real food, and you must eat as much as you can manage, or you might end up with the goodlady for your mother. Wouldn’t you rather have me?”

“Of course. Always you, always. How can you even ask me that?”

Lily wasn’t even an hour into her final trip abroad when Miranda fell into conversation with the goodlady herself. There was an essay due for key skills. The topic was suicide, and the essay was to be a discussion of the ethics of ending one’s own life. Was suicide wrong, right, or a value-free choice? Was it even a choice in some cases? And so on.

Eliot was writing his own answer to the question next door in his room. Both Miranda and Eliot understood that they were expected to argue that suicide was wrong. Their school was that sort of school. Eliot would probably argue in favour of suicide. He’d write that suicide was a terrible, wonderful thing, a gift from the intellect to the body. Miranda wanted to give the correct answer. She would say that suicide was wrong, wrong, not a good idea at all, terrible in fact. She just had to hope that such an answer would emerge as the result of proper consideration and would thus be conscionably correct.

She sat at her desk in the psychomantium, pushing her feet in and out of her shoes and sighing as though stricken. She had no idea where to begin. She thought about her mother, gone away again, and she thought about her renewed promise to eat full meals, and she thought about her mother’s forgotten watch. A sharp pain arrived in her stomach and stayed small, like a sting. If she stayed healthy she would live for decades, and there were so many meals left to eat. But she had to keep going, otherwise Eliot would never forgive her. He hated her pica, she knew. She would eat for Eliot, not for Lily, who couldn’t really care all that much if she was always on her way to somewhere else.

Miranda’s hair poured over her face and onto her paper and pen, and she pushed it back so that it all fell to the base of her chair. She turned to a new page in her notebook and began writing questions. Beneath the questions she wrote answers, in a hand as different from the one the questions were written in as possible.

Goodlady, are you really good?

yes

Even when no one is looking?

of course

But do you understand your nature?

my nature?

Did you choose to be good, or were you so created?

i chose to be created

Is that really an answer?

yes

Miranda’s elbow slipped against the pages of her book, and the paper cut her. The room rolled like a dice. No matter how much she pretended bravery Miranda couldn’t stand the sight of blood. She reared back, a hand to her elbow, too late — a bead of blood fell and grew into a large full stop in the middle of her open page, an ending to a sentence she hadn’t written yet. She went in search of cotton wool and a plaster, and when she came back the stain was even bigger — she feared it might smother the page, the entire book.

You are not good, she accused.

The answer she wrote unnerved her because the handwriting was truly different from her own. It was handwriting she’d seen before in Christmas and birthday cards, shaky but elegant, the g’s and the y’s straight legged rather than curled.

neither are you

Miranda tapped her pen against her teeth, read over what she’d written. She ripped the red spotted page out of her book and threw it away. But the page was the reason for the certainty in Miranda’s voice the next night, when she told her brother that the goodlady would take care of Lily. How could she doubt the goodlady? The goodlady was Lily’s creation. Besides, she thought, the blood is the life.

•

Our great-grandmother, GrandAnna, the one who left the house to Lily, was named Anna Good. There’s a cupboard in the attic full of her things, or at least the things that Lily didn’t give to charity shops. The cupboard was a treasure trove for Miri — Miri found things in there I couldn’t even see until she brought them out — white kid gloves, silver hair ornaments, fans. One day I found a sheaf of newspaper cuttings from the ’40s in there — pages of The Dover Post collected without a theme until I noticed, halfway through the pile and checking back, that each page had the same number in its corner—25. Page 25 always had a patriotic cartoon on it, all on the theme of plucky Brits defeating the enemy by maintaining the home front — a stout housewife planting her own potatoes and taking a moment to smack a potato that looked just like Hitler on the head with her trowel, that sort of thing. They were drawn by an artist who worked in curved lines and harsh scribbles to indicate shade. The biggest cartoon took up a quarter of the page: Be careful what you say — you never know who’s listening. Two sweet-faced teenage girls talked avidly on a bus, while behind them, two men grinned with their teeth and leaned closer to the girls, closer, closer, more as if they were about to devour the girls than eavesdrop on their conversation. One man was a fat soldier covered in swastikas, the other was slit-eyed, uniformed, with a moustache that fell to his knees. You don’t have to be that close to someone to listen in on their conversation. You don’t have to be licking the person’s neck. The horrible hyperbole of it — it was a brilliant cartoon. None of the page 25s collected in GrandAnna’s folder were dated later than 1943. They had begun in 1940. Three years worth of cartoons. And it was on the biggest and best cartoon that I made out the signature: Andrew Silver. My great-grandfather, whose RAF plane had gone down somewhere over Africa before the war was even halfway through.

GrandAnna’s hair was very white and came down over her shoulders in a great mass. Lily used to have a photo of GrandAnna, Miri and me in her purse, from when we went to visit GrandAnna on our seventh birthday. In the photo Miri is on Anna’s lap and has her arms around Anna’s neck with the sober confidence of someone adored. GrandAnna and Miri are looking at the camera, at Lily the photographer, and they are very poised. I am beside GrandAnna, leaning an elbow on the back of her chair and looking at her with an apprehensive expression.

The room under the trapdoor downstairs was her bedroom. “After the war she was scared of bombs for the rest of her life. It was the noise, she said. She couldn’t sleep anywhere else,” Lily told us. It was the Christmas before Lily died and she was sitting on my bedroom floor with handmade notepaper spread across her knees. She had a tinsel flower tucked behind her ear and she was writing thank-you notes for our Christmas presents. She liked to do it and we liked her doing it.

“Where did you sleep, then? Not down there?” I asked.

The psychomantium used to be Lily’s room. There was a dressing table in there, and a velvet, high-backed chair, faint smudges on the walls where posters had been, and a mirror that crawled across the wall in a wooden frame. When I go into Miri’s room all I can see, all I can think of is that enormous mirror, like a lake on the wall. Sometimes I talk to her reflection instead of her, and she doesn’t seem to find anything strange in that. As a child, Lily had had the whole floor to herself.

“Weren’t you scared?” Miri had asked.

Lily shook her head. “I liked it. I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.”

Miri and I looked at each other. “Alive,” we said. “Alive like how?” I added.

Lily laughed. “Alive like they were alive. They talked and moved and told me who I was. I’ll never forget.”

“What did they say to you?” I can’t remember which of us asked that.

“Lily Silver, you are more precious than gold,” Lily chanted, and she looked a little bit different, the lines of her face were finer, she looked like a drawing herself. Miri yawned.

“Is that all they said?”

“Yes.”

“Booooooooooring.”

Lily gave me a handful of notes to sign; I scrawled my name and passed them to Miri.

“It was all I needed. I’m not even sure if they spoke out loud. I was very lonely. Nobody’s fault, though. I hate blame culture.”

I didn’t say anything, but I knew what I thought; it was her mother’s fault for abandoning her. Babies get me down, but I’d seen photos of Lily as a baby and she looked robust and fun. There was a consciousness in her eyes that made her pudgy helplessness seem sarcastic. She looked as if she could easily have been adapted into an accomplice for many practical jokes. And she’d only been a year old. Our grandma Jennifer was pretty, an indifferent student (we’d seen her photographs and report cards bound with pink ribbon) and she’d run off with someone dashing and foreign, a different dashing and foreign someone to whoever Lily’s dad had been.

Miri and I wanted to know what they looked like, the people that Lily drew. Lily laid five stamps on her palm, licked them all in one go, and flicked them onto envelopes. “People,” she said. “Just… people. No one I’d ever seen. People I made up. They looked the way I felt they should look. I stuck them on my walls. In fact I left them there when I went to college; when I brought you two back to visit your GrandAnna here, I sort of expected the pictures to be still there.”

“We used to visit? Here?”

“We did, and your dad too. Then when you were three, your GrandAnna had a crack-up. A… well, a really big crack-up, and she had to go into a home. You wouldn’t remember,” Lily said.

“I remember,” my sister said. This was news. I stared at her but she didn’t look up from the cards on the floor in front of her. She dotted the i’s in her name with sharp hearts.

Lily stretched her legs out in front of her and cricked her neck. “Oh yes? What do you remember, my Miranda?”

“GrandAnna’s crack-up. It was like the heraldic pelican,” Miri said. She put her pen in her mouth, the inky end on her tongue, then hastily removed it when Lily narrowed her eyes.

“Oh was it… was it like the heraldic pelican?” I said.

Lily tugged my earlobe. “Let your sister speak.”

“It was,” said Miri. “The bird that pecks itself to death to feed its children. She tried to give us her blood but we didn’t want it.”

I looked at Lily. “I did say you wouldn’t remember,” Lily said, calmly. “I can’t think where you got that from.”

Miri turned to me. “She rubbed it on our lips, Eliot, but you wiped it off.”

“Er… I think I’d definitely remember that,” I said.

“Miranda,” Lily said, and we knew she was getting annoyed because the music in her voice was stronger. “I did say you wouldn’t remember. You were three. You can’t remember everything.”

“Her whole hand was covered with blood, and she had her hand over her face and we could see her looking through her fingers, and she got down between our beds and—”

“There is nothing… mysterious and gothic about a crack-up. If anything it’s just… sad.” Lily was so angry she was almost singing, her temper changing the stress she put on her words. “There is no need to make up stories about it.”

“Lily couldn’t stop her,” Miri said.

“Leave your GrandAnna alone.” Lily sounded as if she was unable to believe that she had to say it. Miri’s first proper meeting with our GrandAnna was at the home; I was there and I don’t remember her any other way. When I think of her I see a white-haired woman kneeling on the carpet with us, motioning to the sunlight outside the window of her room and saying with desperate smiles, “Come and play, please come and play children.”

I remember once I raised my voice at Miri and our GrandAnna jumped and burst into tears that seemed to come straight from her heart, as if it was her I’d shouted at and not Miri. I found that so strange that I shut up for the rest of the visit. GrandAnna had a heart attack a few days afterwards, and she died.

Miri looked at me narrowly and I went and sat in a corner because we thought it was my fault; I’d done it with my shouting.

And I don’t remember Miri saying anything about the goodlady before that.

•

I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home, I’m the Braille on your wallpaper that only your fingers can read — I tell you where you are. Don’t turn to look at me. I am only tangible when you don’t look.

Luc knows this feeling, from an early visit he made here with Lily and the twins. He knew that I was nothing like that flat of theirs in London. One day he came in from the back garden and stood in the sitting-room doorway, smiling while his wife sat on the floor knitting a tiny jacket for one of Miranda’s dolls and using a socked foot to wheel Eliot’s spare trains across the carpet so he could have train races. It was summer, Lily had tied streamers to the ceiling fan and her freckled shoulders were covered with sun cream. And the twins had four years of life between them, Eliot in a pink T-shirt that hugged his pot belly and Miranda in a dark-blue dress and a little sailor’s hat. There was a thing that Lily, Eliot and Miranda tended to do when they were together and he joined him. They pretended he wasn’t there at first. He knew that on some level it was intended for his benefit, so he could look at his rosy little English family as if they were in a portrait. When he said hello they’d come alive to him, but first he had to say it.

Before Luc could speak this time, Eliot wobbled over to Lily, wearing a look of grim determination peculiar to children who have only just learned to walk, reached out and yanked her hair hard. Lily didn’t stop knitting, but she eyed Eliot sternly and said: “Eliot, you are hurting me.”

Eliot didn’t answer, and he didn’t let go of her hair. He sat down hard, trying to drag Lily’s forehead to the floor.

Luc didn’t know why he couldn’t move. I knew why; it was because I’d leant all my weight, every wall and corridor, on his shoulders. He was lucky I allowed him to stand.

Miranda, on one of the armchairs with her lap full of Barbie dolls and her thumb in her mouth, emptied the dolls onto the floor and crossed the room faster than a thought to grab a handful of Lily’s hair too, wrenching at her head from the other side. Lily’s fingers tightened around the knitting needles, and she let out a long breath. “Eliot,” she said, then: “Miranda!”

She raised her hand to the back of Eliot’s neck and pinched him hard. She did the same to Miranda, dug her fingers into the skin. It looked practised.

The twins let go of their mother immediately.

All three of them laughed, and their eyes were full of tears.

Luc walked away and went out again, let himself in through the front door this time, noisily this time.

“Hello!” he called, before he even reached the sitting room this time.

“Hello!” they all called back.

Good mother, good father, good children, all watched over by me.

•

Miranda avoided dinner on New Year’s Eve by pretending to be asleep when Luc called her. She was ready for him when he came looking for her. She lay on her back and offered her face to him, knowing how she looked, knowing that he saw the dark smudges that wheeled around her eyes. He didn’t try to wake her anymore.

When Luc had gone she locked the door and searched a drawer at the top of her wardrobe for the last remaining strip of a blue plastic spatula she had been working on for two months. Come slowly, Eden…

She put the Crests’ greatest hits album into her CD player and skipped through to “Flower of Love.”

Plastic was usually very satisfying. A fifty-millimetre wad of it was tough to chew away from the main body of the strip, but with steady labour, sucking and biting, it curved between the teeth like an extension of the gum, and the thick, bittersweet oils in it streamed down her throat for hours, so long she sometimes forgot and thought her body was producing it, like saliva.

She changes all the time

It was 6:00 AM in Haiti when she decided on a midnight feast. She touched the knob at the top of her spine, knowing that if the dress she wore fitted her at all she would not have been able to reach it. She knew that the meal she’d missed would wait in the oven long after Luc had called her to the kitchen and scraped the food off the plates and into the bin. Luc was asleep now, in the round bed, surrounded by the blankets, rugs, wall hangings, prints and figurines that Lily brought back from her photography jobs by the armful. It must have been like being locked into a small, cheerful museum for the night. In the morning she’d surprise him with an empty plate. But first a walk, to get up an appetite.

She left her room and knocked on Eliot’s door, to see if he was back from wherever he’d gone for the night. He didn’t answer. She peeked inside his room. He wasn’t in there, but his lights were on and his window was wide open, the wind whisked leaves around his room in bristles, like a broom. She went back to her psychomantium and played some more CDs at low volume. She had not slept for a while, a matter of days, though she could not think how many. She didn’t want to do anything but dance. If Eliot had been there she would have got him to dance with her. Somehow he had the knack of the tuneful wail, oo-wee-ooo, the elbow sway, the fist over the heart, though he had done it mainly for Lily’s entertainment. Miranda checked the time again, watchfully going through the hours between here and Haiti. So. It was 5:00 AM. Eliot where are you walking?

The lift from the ground floor to the first floor, then from first to second, second to third, then from the third floor to the empty attic. She peered up and down the broad passageways and tiptoed past the bedroom doors, feeling like dust, as if she was everywhere at once. She could pull herself tight and then explode and choke everyone in the house. She had never breathed so well or seen so clearly. She could hear one person snoring with the tidy rumble of an engine. In another room, someone murmured to herself or into the phone. Next door to that person a couple quietly crushed each other with sighs and words and their bodies. The fifth and biggest guest room was unoccupied, so nothing from there. A scream came to her, the word “Fire!” but she did not let it leave her, and she didn’t ring an alarm. How dare people sleep, how dare they lie so blankly in the dark?

In the dining room she looked glumly at the plate on the table before her. Beef stew and potatoes, the meat drowned in wine and limp onions, she saw brown fat running over white. She took a knife and divided the plate, pushing food aside so that there was a clear line in the middle of the plate, a greasy path of sanity. The light overhead was the deep orange of church candles. She would eat all the meat first, then vegetables. She started with a knife and fork, but soon resorted to bending over her plate with her hands planted on the table, desperately hauling food up into her mouth as if in the final seconds of an all-you-can-eat contest. She thought, There is no way that taking this stuff into my body is doing me any good. Sauce ran across her nose and cheeks and there were tears in her plate. Tears improved the flavour of the vegetables. Perhaps that was in a cookbook somewhere — a Gaelic one, probably, for a people who saw the kind of spirit that did nothing but weep and bode ill.

When she paused to chew, she bumped noses with someone who lifted their head from her plate at the same time. She smelt the beef and potatoes, reheated by the breath from their lips. She started and jumped up from her chair. There was no one else at the table.

“Who’s there?” she said, ridiculously, because the kitchen was empty. She grabbed some kitchen towel, wiped her face, then walked around the dining table and put her hand on the back of the chair that had been opposite her. After a moment she sat down in it and drew her plate towards her again.

All the vegetables had disappeared. She had eaten the meat first, as she had told herself she would, but someone else had eaten the vegetables. There was the line she’d drawn in the middle of the plate, and there was a residue of gravy on her side, and then on the other side there was… nothing. As clean as if the plate had been washed.

The girl sitting across from her smiled. Her teeth were jagged. She had been there since Miranda had walked into the dining room, but because she looked exactly like Miranda she had not been noticed. After all, she might have been a reflection in the window. The difference was the teeth, and when she showed her teeth she became noticed. She was not quite three dimensional, this girl. And so white. There couldn’t be any blood in her. She was perfect. Miranda but perfect. She was purer than crystal, so pure that she dissolved and Miranda couldn’t see her anymore but still felt her there.

The front door slammed. The noise of it was like language, and, obedient to it, Miranda put her coat on, her scarf, her shoes.

The street outside was strewn with bits of houses, whole window frames lying halfway across shattered sheets of glass, as if trying to shield them. She climbed over a raft of shingled slate, picked her way through heaps of bricks that released smoke carefully, almost grudgingly. There were pale people all along the street, the perfect people Lily had drawn. They were spaced out carefully, like an army of tin soldiers, and they watched Miranda without moving or smiling. She called out to them and, though they said nothing, she felt safe. They didn’t have eyelids because you missed things when you blinked. They didn’t need gas masks because they didn’t breathe. One of them had a pipe in his mouth, or rather, the pipe was part of his mouth; Lily had been a cruel artist. When Miranda came to Bridge Street she walked faster, rubble or no rubble, because of what was behind her

— she saw the moon turn away

and the trees thrashing to save their roots

dogs in every house around that still stood, their barking distant as if from inside a single locked safe, the metal syncopating the sound of fear, saying dance, dance, don’t look around, dance

which she did, kicking and yelling like the first day in her GrandAnna’s house, only she was going so fast, where, why?

(Because plastic is not satisfying this night

As for beef, as for his Frenchie beef and fucking potatoes, ha ha)

Across the cliffs, Dover Castle was black. The sun was rising and the sea was changing colour, but the castle stayed within its lines, hunched in a black mess of shapes, and the vast bank of chalk it stood on seemed to stir in the water as if fighting the darkness that tried to climb down it.

Miranda knelt, her hands holding tight to the safety bars. Someone floated facedown at the foot of the cliff. The sea refused to take the body far from the shore and contented itself with tossing the corpse back and forth between its gentler waves.

We died this morning, she thought, then saw a scrap of colour. The body wore green. Whoever was floating, it was not her.

Sleep came at last, so miraculously and completely that she walked home through the empty streets unawake, her steps guided by the slightness of her shadow.

•

She didn’t realise she was asleep until a tapping on her door woke her.

“Yes?” Miranda said.

Her father came in, squinting, pretending he couldn’t see her in the dark of her room.

“Morning, Miri.”

“Morning,” she said, holding the question mark back with effort. She was no longer sure what the time was, or how to calculate. Also she thought she had locked her door.

“I’m about to interview someone to replace Ezma, but someone else is about to check out,” Luc began apologetically.

Miranda waved a hand. “Take their money, take the room key, print out a receipt,” she recited.

Luc nodded. “And check the room, please. So I know what needs doing.”

Miranda got out of bed to show her intention of moving soon. When he left, she sat down again. Her knees felt weak.

The woman Luc was interviewing was a black woman, short and round, with a placid gaze. An orange head wrap and an orange gown that made her formless, a vapour sinking through the sofa. She had a big, grey-black bird printed on each sleeve at the elbow; one was visible every time she lifted her teacup to her mouth. The birds had iron feathers and claws as long as their beaks, but they hid their heads behind their wings. She was wearing sandals despite the cold, and her toenails were painted bright orange. Her eyelids were daubed with a green that dotted her gown in emerald specks but turned khaki coloured on her skin. The woman spoke to Luc, unhurriedly and with a heavy African accent.

Miranda couldn’t take her eyes off the scars across the woman’s cheekbone, four horizontal stripes that cut a little farther along her face at each stage, like arrows at different stages of flight. They were smooth now but the cuts would have had to be made again and again on the same spot to make them hold. It took all she had not to ask the woman if she could still feel it. Miranda pressed the keys of the newly vacated room into Luc’s hand and the form with pencilled ticks beside items that needed tidying and replacing. Towels, sheets and so on.

“Thanks, Miri.” Luc looked at the woman who sat beside him on the sofa, then back at Miri. “This is Sade,” he told Miranda, then: “Sade, this is my daughter, Miranda.”

The introduction meant that Sade must be the one who was getting the job. Miranda, Luc and Sade got caught in a triangle of gazing. Luc cleared his throat and stood. “Sade, let me show you the house,” he said.

They started at the bottom and climbed up. Sade stopped in one of the guest rooms, her hand on the windowsill. “It’s so quiet,” she said.

All three of them listened without speaking. Now that she’d said it, it was true. The sounds in the other rooms were muted into vibrations. Someone closed a door, someone else ran down the stairs and you didn’t really hear these things, you felt them.

JENNIFER SILVER

lived quite long. She didn’t die until 1994. A reason why Lily never felt motherless was that her mother was there with her, a door and a curtain away. It is a pity that Lily never understood this in a literal sense, but the concealment was necessary. Jennifer really meant to abandon her daughter, and how could I allow that? Jennifer was going to walk away from Anna and Lily in broad daylight. Anna was playing with her granddaughter, lying on her back in trapdoor-room with baby Lily on her stomach, cooing at her and comparing curl for curl. Jennifer had convinced herself that she hated them both, the child and the crone. She was modern and couldn’t countenance being held by four walls just because she’d had a baby at a young age. She was going to Milan with her Italian photographer boyfriend, and he would make her face famous. Anna and Lily could have each other, for all she cared.

One blessing born from Lily’s never knowing her mother is that Lily never knew how selfish her mother was. Jennifer was nineteen years old and thought a lot of herself and how she looked; her smooth ponytail, the crowded patterns on her silk shifts, the shine of her go-go boots. She had a tiny replica of a yew tree that she used to hold her earrings, Perspex hoops dangling off the branches. Each month or so the little tree had to be replaced because she’d gnawed it to an aged apple core. The earring tree was the last thing Jennifer put in her bag. It had to go on top of all her other things so that it wouldn’t get damaged. Jennifer had catlike eyes that she made stranger with kohl. Her gaze was cold and self-reflective

— am I pretty? Yes

— am I pretty?

— Yes — am I pretty?

Maybe she was not really like that. It’s just that I would prefer you to think that what happened to her was justified. I opened up for her. That is to say, I unlocked a door in her bedroom that she had not seen before, a door in the wall behind her dressing table.

She exclaimed, but not overmuch. She wasn’t particularly clever. She picked up her bag and went exploring. When she was safely down the new passageway, I closed the door behind her. It was the best sort of winter morning, cold but bright. That was the only sort of light Jennifer saw after that — it came through great windows and she couldn’t find her way away from them and out of me. Not that she tried hard. She was dazed.

I am not sure if she was lonely. She smiled to herself, and played little games of dress-up with herself, pulling clothes out of her bag and repacking them, switching earrings and examining herself in window glass when night fell. When her little earring tree was gone, she bit at her fingers until I brought her branches from the garden. For years and years, yes. Her hair greyed quickly, but she didn’t notice. When her shift dresses grew too dirty and tattered to play dress up with, I let Jennifer back into the main part, where Lily and Anna lived. Lily was a teenager by then. I had to be very careful, and quick, letting Jennifer in. Jennifer thought that Lily’s room still belonged to her. She ignored the new pictures and posters and tried Lily’s clothes on. She marvelled at them. She loved them. “When on earth did I buy this?” she’d ask herself, stroking the sleeves of a suede jacket, unbuttoning and rebuttoning a pin-striped waistcoat.

Don’t feel sorry for Jennifer. Why should you? She lived long and relatively well, and she was kept safe from those fears and doubts peculiar to her times. She was safe from the war that sickened what it touched from miles away, the new kind of image that lashed the conscience to the nerves, the pictures of Phnom Penh burning with a kind of pagan festivity, the young bones in the mud at Choeung Ek, the Cambodians and yellow-skinned priests sprawled in graves dug poorly and in great fear, graves they dug for themselves. It is true that Jennifer Silver never did leave home, but she had longed for an unusual life, and she certainly had that.

Believe it, don’t believe it, as you will. Of course there is the idea that Anna caught Jennifer and tried to stop her from leaving, that the two fought, that Jennifer strangled to death in a circle made of Anna’s fingers. But that is unrealistic for a number of reasons. And besides, without a corpse there is no proof of what may have come

before

Lily died Eliot and Miranda had gone to school separately, Eliot coasting away on his bike each morning, leaving Miranda to inch sedately schoolwards in heels so high and thin that they would have got jammed in bicycle pedals. But Eliot walked Miranda to school on her first day back. As usual he had a half-pint bottle of full-fat milk sticking out of his blazer pocket. It bobbed as he walked. For some reason Eliot and all the boys he knew at school drank copious amounts of milk straight from the bottle. When they finished their first bottle, they’d all be at the cornershop at breaktime, buying more. No matter which one of the boys you asked why, he’d only knock his forehead with his knuckles and say, without smiling, “For the bones.”

Miranda asked if she could try some of the milk. Eliot obliged her without comment and nodded sagely when she wrinkled her nose and said, “It’s just milk.”

At assembly she realised she’d forgotten her hymnal at home. She looked around helplessly as the head of the sixth form approached. Appealing to him would have no effect. On Monday mornings he handed out detentions to people who weren’t holding small books covered in red leather, and that was all. Help came unexpectedly; a hymnal landed in her lap and she hurriedly opened it and sang loudly until the teacher had passed. When she searched the row of girls for her saviour, Emma Roberts, safe in an area that had already been patrolled, smiled at her and held up a little note that said: Welcome back. Emma’s hair was almost as short as Miranda’s; it made her look much less substantial than she had before; the heavy gold hearts she wore in her ears seemed to weigh her down. Miranda suddenly realised that Eliot wasn’t sitting beside Emma. She decided that he must have bunked assembly. Everyone knew that Eliot and Emma always sat together — they’d so comfortably and easily brought their mutual crush from the playground to lower school and from lower school to sixth form. You couldn’t picture Eliot with his arm around the back of anyone else’s chair, or Emma throwing fries like darts at any other boy. Eliot could be tricky, but Emma made him simpler for everyone. Miranda saw him now, two rows ahead, beside Martin. She didn’t look at Emma again for the rest of assembly, not even when the headmaster read aloud a list of upper sixth formers who’d had Oxford and Cambridge offers and she desperately needed someone vaguely friendly to lock eyes with. All the girls on Miranda’s row eyed her with great curiosity, and, when Tijana’s name was called, the same was done to Tijana in the row in front. Miranda looked at the back of Tijana’s head and felt worried. Tijana had been part of the pack of girls who had chased their car after she was released from the clinic. Tijana, sitting cross-legged in her chair, popped up the collar of her school shirt. The headmaster stood on the varnished stage, with a large portrait of the queen behind him and a marble crucifix to the right of him, and he started clapping. It took everyone a second to follow his lead. Miranda reddened and was glad that she’d chosen a more low-key lipstick that day, a dark pink that matched the inside of her mouth. She was okay intelligence-wise, but she knew that she wasn’t as clever as Eliot. One of the teachers had said that Oxbridge looked for teachability. So it must be that she was more teachable than Eliot. She could picture Tijana at Cambridge, though, grey hood pulled up over her head as she moved through the stone arches with calm eyes.

When the bell rang for lunch, Miranda unchained Eliot’s bike and rode downhill and then uphill again, feeling the wheels cling to the earth’s descent as shops shot by, and the dour water that split Bridge Street. A couple of white gulls raced her, their wings flapping about her head. The only way she could ride a bike in shoes like hers was fast, legs pumping in a way that outwitted the conspiracy of pegs and holes. She stopped when the ground jutted and sent her body leaning back, protesting the steepness. She got off the bike and drew it along behind her. She heard and smelt the water at the bottom of the cliffs, but it felt like a long time before she’d walked long enough to glimpse the sea crashing and breaking against the shore, foam eating into stone. England and France had been part of the same landmass, her father had told her, until prised apart by floods and erosion.

She was not sure what time it was; when she looked at the sun she could understand that it had changed position but she did not dare to say how much. There were cruise ships coming in, vast white curved blocks like severed feet shuffling across the water. She waved halfhearted welcome. She felt the wind lift her hair above her head. In daylight the water was so blue that the colour seemed like a lie and she leant over, hoping for a moment of shift that would allow her to understand what was beneath the sea. Was this where the goodlady lived? That was how you caught a magical creature, you found out where it lived and you laid traps for it.

Her hands were pinned behind her and she was knocked down by a deft kick to the back of her knee. All this was done in complete silence. She lay and frowned into the grass, began to get up and was stopped by the fact of a knife held near her face. It was so sharp. Where it cut, her flesh would hang neatly but separated, like soft dominoes.

“Oh God,” said Miranda. “Come on. Really?”

A girl she recognised but had never spoken to was crouched by her, holding the knife. She was one of the Kosovan girls. The girl hissed at her. “Why don’t you stay away from our boys?”

Miranda said, “May I get up, please?” She was lying on her front and it was hurting her neck to have to look up so steadily.

“No, you certainly may not,” the girl said, mimicking Miranda’s accent. Then she grew serious again. “Did you hear me? I said, why don’t you stay away from our boys?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Another girl came into view, looking so much like the first girl that Miranda thought she might be hallucinating.

“We saw you,” the second girl said. “You and Amir, you and Farouk, you and Agim, you and whoever. Then they end up getting stabbed.”

Miranda thought about screaming. But she’d never been one for raising her voice, and an unpractised scream would just dissolve into seawater.

Instead she said, “Listen, I really don’t know what or whom you are talking about. You have mistaken me for someone else.”

Tijana appeared behind the first two girls.

Miranda said, “Tijana—”

“Agim is my cousin.” She said it flatly, and she said it in such a way that Miranda understood that these girls really and truly meant to hurt her. She struggled to her feet, and the girls were around in a tight circle, their arms linked. Their hair, which looked so rigid, was soft and greasy and synthetically perfumed. Miranda gagged, and they rocked her, the three of them, rocked her close enough to the cliff edge to make her stutter, “Don’t, please don’t.”

“Agim is my cousin,” Tijana repeated.

“Who is Agim?” Miranda asked, desperately.

Silence and adamant eyes.

“I’ve been away for months,” Miranda babbled. “Doing my lessons in bed. I’ve been… away. If you’re talking about the stabbings I’ve no idea…”

Tijana looked into Miranda’s eyes and seemed, for the first time, unsure.

“She’s lying, man. It’s her,” one of the other girls said, then, to Miranda, “Now you tell us how the fuck you’re involved with this or I cut you.”

“Hold on,” Tijana said. “Maybe she means it. It may be. She wasn’t at school for months.”

Miranda took a close look at the back of her mind while the other two girls considered. She thought she might faint. Whoever Agim was, she didn’t want him to come. Because if these girls thought she was someone else, then Agim would too. She had to get away. The girls lessened their grip on her while they argued, and Miranda stepped out of her shoes. Miranda bent over and retched and when they jumped clear, she ran.

She pushed and kicked Eliot’s bike so that it rattled far ahead of her until the way was smooth enough for her to scramble onto it, nearly tipping it over, and she pedalled harder even than her heart was thumping. She didn’t know where she was going; she had forgotten the way home. She weaved through Market Square, narrowly avoiding riding straight into the fountain, then she passed through side streets that branched off the high street, slowing and remembering herself once she was sure she’d lost Tijana and the other girls. She made her way home and sat on the flint steps, freezing and mourning her beautiful, black pointy-toed court shoes, whose leather would be destroyed by the inquisitive tongues of the sheep that wandered on the cliffs.

When she finally went into the house, there were three cardboard boxes on the staircase that led up from the ground floor. Sade, the new housekeeper, and her father were arguing and laughing in the dining room.

“Sade. First of all let me tell you that you can’t put pepper in the baked beans, you really can’t.”

“Why not? They don’t taste of anything.”

Miranda looked inside one of the boxes, not knowing what she expected to see — garish prints, a Bible, a huge cross — but the box was packed solid with books. Dickens and the Brontës, even. She picked a couple of them up — each had a huge white S slashed across the title page.

Two houseguests picked their way around the first of the boxes on their way downstairs. They were a black couple from London who had enthused about their love of British history while Miranda had swayed, glassy-eyed and dead on her feet, and drawn red circles around the Cinque Ports on a map of Kent for them.

In order to avoid a repeat occurrence, she sidestepped into the sitting room and looked through the old newspapers for the issue of The Dover Post that Eliot had handed her when Luc had brought her back from the clinic. There was Tijana’s cousin’s name, Agim Hajdari. He’d sustained serious wounds but had recovered. He’d been found curled up in a ball between a wall and a tree on Priory Lodge road, arms crossed over himself. As if to hold his insides in, Miranda thought.

After some time she noticed Eliot had come home. He was standing in the sitting-room doorway with his arms crossed.

“I’m sorry I took your bike! But I think it was fated. Some girls tried to kill me,” she said, as soon as she saw him. “And the bike revealed itself as my trusty getaway steed.”

By the time she’d explained properly, he was pacing the room worriedly. “We have to sort this out,” he said. “These girls sound deluded enough to keep coming after you, especially if… anything else happens.”

“What shall I do?” Miranda asked.

“Two choices. Number one — Martin and I go after these girls and beat them with sticks — okay, you’re not keen, fair enough — number two, we talk to Tijana tomorrow and meet this cousin of hers and get him to tell them that you’ve got nothing to do with all of this.”

He stopped and looked at her carefully.

“Because you haven’t got anything to do with this,” he reminded her. “I mean, what? The very idea of it is…”

Miranda crumpled the sheets of newspaper on her lap.

“I am very concerned,” she said, in a small voice, “that this will not end well. They seemed convinced that they’d seen me before.”

Eliot pulled her to her feet. “There is no way, Miri,” he said. “No way in the world.” Grey eyes convince so well, burying the person they look at in truth like flung pebbles. But Miranda could never do that with her eyes; convince. Anyway she was never sure about anything.

“Come and have some dinner,” he said.

“In a minute,” she said. “Go. I’ll see you in there.”

“The new housekeeper is interesting,” he said, on his way out of the room. “She asked Dad if he had any shirts he didn’t want, and now she’s slashing his old shirts by hand in the kitchen. I think she’s, er, making something. Arts and crafts.”

“I don’t like her,” Miranda said. Then, confused, she said, “Oh, I do.”

Eliot rolled his eyes. “You don’t have to make an immediate decision about it.”

That night it rained and a disconsolate wowowowow came down the chimney and flew around the rooms. Miri, Eliot and Luc watched TV and read in Luc’s room. Eliot lay under Miranda’s elbows, reading Moby-Dick while she used his back to prop up her collected works of Poe.

“What do you think of Poe?”

“He’s awful. He was obviously… what’s the term… ‘disappointed in love’ at some point. He probably never smiled again. The pages are just bursting with his longing for women to suffer. If he ever met me he’d probably punch me on the nose.”

“I think Poe’s quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say ‘Oh you know, I’m just afraid of Death’ and then they keep on with the screaming.”

“Hm,” said Miranda. “I’d rather they talked to someone about this fear.”

“A psychiatrist couldn’t put up with all the screaming.” Eliot had marked his place in his book with his finger, and now he stirred restlessly, impatient to get back to it.

“Oh, not a psychiatrist, a priest. Priests can put up with screaming.”

“A priest,” said Eliot, “would not say anything constructive to someone who was scared of death. A priest would say ‘Death is great! You get to go to heaven!’ ”

“True. But they’d put up with the screaming,” Miranda insisted. “A psychiatrist would sedate you and act as if it wasn’t normal to be so scared. In a situation of Poe’s kind I would always, always go to a priest before I went to a psychiatrist. I’d be out of that House of Usher like a shot and off looking for Father Joe. And I’d have gotten rid of Ligeia with holy water.”

“Would you now,” Eliot muttered, and Luc, lolling in his armchair with the newspaper spread across his lap, looked up and said, “Easy to see the solution when you’re not in the story, isn’t it.”

Miranda had found a pen somewhere. She fixed it into Eliot’s hair. She wrapped four strands around it and it stayed.

“Thanks,” Eliot said, sounding as if he meant it.

“How’s Moby-Dick?” Miranda asked.

After a few seconds, Eliot admitted, “I don’t… get it. Dad, did you get it?”

Luc put his paper down, cleared his throat, changed the TV channel.

“Yes, I understood it. It is about many things.”

Miranda and Eliot waited, but Luc didn’t elaborate. Eliot sniggered, and the pen fell out of his hair. It was getting to 1:00 AM and Miranda knew that soon Luc would kick her and Eliot out, and Eliot would go to bed and then it would be her and Poe until morning.

“Father,” she said, “my sleep’s bad again. Please give me something to do, or give me something to make me sleep, or give me death.”

Luc raised an admonishing finger. “I lie in bed until I fall asleep, no matter what; I lie there until I have no choice but to sleep,” he began.

“Tried that,” Miranda said.

There was an especial horror in lying with her eyes closed and her thoughts coming too quickly and strongly to be deciphered. At such times she saw herself twice, the girl lying down and the woman in the trapdoor room sitting directly beneath the fireplace, delicately wiping her beautiful mouth again and again.

“Hot milk and honey, Nytol, a nice long warm bath…?” Luc ticked the options off on his fingers.

“Tried that, tried that, tried that.”

“I have heard,” Eliot murmured, “that marijuana is a good sleep aid.”

Luc snapped his fingers. “I can give you some work. I was going to give it to Eliot, but…”

He went to his desk and sorted through the envelopes on it. He handed her one. A friend of his had started working for an advertising agency, his job was to get feedback on television advertisements they’d filmed before they were sent for approval to the companies who had commissioned the product advertisements. Things like crisps, contact lenses, house and car insurance. There were sheets to fill in for each advert she watched. She had never realised that anyone cared so much; besides there were some terrible adverts on TV. “I’ll do it,” she said, picking up the pen that had dropped out of Eliot’s hair.

After Luc and Eliot had gone to bed, she watched as many adverts as she could and scribbled notes, poking at her eyelids with her pen so that she could pay better attention to the dancing life-sized tadpoles that, to her surprise, made her feel like buying the soft drink they were promoting. A pungent smell of stewing meat crept out of the kitchen, getting bolder and bolder until it was wadded up behind the bones of Miranda’s face. Sade was cooking vigorously, her curly perm trapped in a hairnet. She jiggled from countertop to countertop, chopping chillies, crushing garlic, tossing handfuls of spice into pots. The smell made Miranda realise how hungry she was; not for the sharp-toothed fireworks that Sade was lighting in Luc’s pot. Not for chalk, not for plastic…

Uneasily, Miranda came into the light. She did not feel steady on her feet. She thought she had better sit down and tried to sit on the wall nearest her, forgetting that it was horizontal and high instead of vertical and low.

Sade took her arm and led her to a kitchen stool, then, when Miranda was unable to climb onto it, Sade lifted her onto the stool herself.

“They’re calling you, aren’t they?” Sade asked her.

Miranda found it easy to look into Sade’s eyes. The pupils were simple, and the whites were slightly yellow.

“Who?”

Sade brought Miranda some water and a small plate of fried, crispy batter. The pieces looked like broken doughnuts, but Miranda could see shreds of chilli puffed up inside them like a red rash.

“Your old ones,” she said. “I know it’s hard.”

She shrugged and took a piece herself when Miranda waved the plate away.

“No, nothing like that. I’m not sure what you mean, actually. Everything is fine,” Miranda said. Her lips missed her glass and she spilled water down her front and into her lap, then put the glass down on the nearest counter. The water was so cold on her skin that it felt dry. “Please tell me more about old ones calling,” she said.

Sade looked so alarmed that Miranda thought the topic must be the utmost taboo. Then she saw herself on the floor. Water makes a mirror of any surface. She’d sucked her cheeks in so far that the rest of her face emerged in a series of interconnected caves. Her eyes were small, wild globes. The skull was temporary, the skull collected the badness together and taught it discipline, that was all. Miranda wanted to say, That is not my face. No, it wasn’t hers, she had to get away from it, peel it back. Or she had to leave and take this face with her, defuse it somewhere else. Eliot and Luc, she had to protect them.

Sade turned Miranda’s head away from the terrible face.

“Thank you,” Miranda said, limply. “Thanks.”

(I’m very hungry)

Sade offered her the plate of fritters again, then, after some hesitation, a handful of peanut shells. As Miranda nibbled at peanut shells, Sade pulled up a stool and sat herself on it. She began plaiting strips of Luc’s old shirt and dragging them through a saucer of red fat on the counter beside her. Every now and again she looked about her, checking on her cooking projects. Miranda watched.

“What are you making?”

“Juju.”

“What’s that?”

She pulled her finger through a knot.

“Company.”

The figure Sade was making looked like two hanged men holding fast to each other. She spun black thread around a hook, breaking the thread with a sharp jerk of her arm when the hook was completely covered. She spoke without looking at Miranda, she spoke as if to herself. “Something is wrong.”

“That is true,” Miranda said, for want of any other comment. She was the something wrong. It was she who had fallen asleep and lost Lily’s life. Now sleep wouldn’t come anymore. Sade’s talisman was a thing worked against her.

•

During one English lesson Martin sat next to her. She was surprised; they hadn’t spoken properly since he’d asked her to the cinema months before and she’d said, rashly and unconvincingly, that she didn’t like films because they hurt her eyes. When put on the spot she became terrible.

At the end of the lesson, he put his arm around the back of her chair.

“It’s Friday!” he said.

“Yes,” said Miranda. “It is.”

She wondered when it was coming, the stupid thing she was going to say to him.

“Coming to the pub tonight?” he asked. “We haven’t seen you for ages.”

He kicked the back of Emma’s chair and Emma turned around. “Yeah, come,” she said.

“We’re underage,” Miranda said. Ah, there it was, the stupid thing. Luckily they laughed.

“She doesn’t want to come,” Eliot called from across the room.

“Yes I do,” she said, because she hadn’t been asked before.

She had no idea what people wore to the pub. She had better wear what she always wore. Later she hopped in and out of the shower, sent a hot iron skating over her black linen dress with the pouch pockets, brushed her wet hair and painted her lips with a bright red dot in the centre that grew outwards and dulled as it did. She threw rose attar over herself in a hasty splash, as if it were a liquid jacket. Then she stood, shivered, and sneezed. She would drink the juice of grapes, she told herself. From a glass. And be comfortable, and be liked, like Eliot.

Their group sat at a corner table, the girls all strawberry lip gloss, halter-neck tops and bare legs, the boys wearing so much gel that their hair didn’t move when blown on at close quarters (Miranda experimented surreptitiously when they had their heads turned). Everyone was touching each other, heads on shoulders, arms around waists, and all she could smell was skin and smoke. She could hardly see — the world was fogged over.

Emma was kind, asking her neutral questions about music and TV from her precarious position on the lap of a boy called Josh. But it soon became clear that Miranda didn’t watch TV, and had no opinion on any record released after 1969. Eliot sighed, got up and added a song to the jukebox selection, then went to play snooker. A few of the others got up and followed him about like ducklings. Martin stayed and spoke to her and she thought, Help, I will die, and struggled out of the corner, asking if anyone wanted anything from the bar. It was as if she hadn’t spoken. Finally: “You’re alright,” Emma said. Josh kissed her shoulder, and she squirmed and giggled.

Miranda went and sat down at the bar. She asked for peanuts and made a circle with them in an ashtray. A vaguely familiar boy turned to her and said: “Miranda. How are you doing?”

It took her a moment to place him. Jalil. They had had once done a presentation to their class on Lamia. She had liked the air of fey tragedy about him, his wide eyes and artfully mussed hair. Once she knew who he was, she smiled at him.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You’re feeling better now, yeah?”

“Weren’t you in my English class?”

“I dropped English. For economics.” He groaned and stared into his pint. “So neekish to be talking about this. Change the subject.”

“What is your opinion on curses?”

“What?”

“For example, do they really persist unto the third generation?”

As if watching a slide show, she saw a series of gashes on arms and faces. They emerged so naturally and normally that she wasn’t sure whether she was seeing them in conjunction with her view of the smoky room, or whether the gashes were all she could see. They were of different shapes and sizes. They were healing over, the new skin shuddering over the blood like intricate lace. She was fascinated. She was falling asleep. To wake herself up, she reached for the circle of flesh beneath Lily’s wristwatch and pinched it.

Unexpectedly, he smiled. “Can I buy you a drink?”

She shook her head. He offered to show her a strange thing he could do instead. With an expression of the utmost gravity, he planted his hand on the table and swivelled his wrist 360 degrees without changing the position of his hand. All this without audible sign, as if his bones were oiled. Miranda squeaked obligingly. He relaxed, looked pleased and sat back on his stool. She noticed his jacket was hooded.

“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.

•

Monday was the day I got the letter from the South African production company, offering me their internship. The acceptance sank my heart. My Dad knows magazine people who wrote me glowing, if vague, references. I tried to remember if Lily had been in Cape Town — if she had then I would have something to connect the words to. Then I remembered that Lily had been there, and she’d hated it. “It’s that mountain… Table Mountain. It stands there and glowers like some kind of club bouncer, and you just can’t get away from it — no matter what part of town you look around and somehow the mountain is there. If it doesn’t block your light then you feel it.”

Monday was also a day Miri said she’d stay at home. I went out to the garden to get my bike and she emerged from the shelter, looking vague. She said that she wanted to help Sade take some snacks up to the Immigration Removal Centre.

“Are you avoiding that brer?” I asked her.

“That… brer,” she said after me, looking inquisitive.

“The fellow you pulled in the pub.” I tried to stop, but couldn’t stop myself from adding: “The one who came yesterday, with the sunflowers.”

“Jalil.”

“Okay. Yes, him.”

“His name is Jalil.”

“I know.”

“I’m not avoiding Jalil. Get the homework for me.”

“Are you not planning to go in tomorrow either, then?”

“I don’t think school suits me at the moment,” Miri said. She was holding on to the side of the shelter so hard that her knuckles were white. She kept looking somewhere to the left of me. Her concentration was unflickering. The thing she was watching, whatever it was, moved from a point just behind my head to somewhere near my kneecaps, and by the time the thing (and her gaze) had reached the ground, I realised she wasn’t watching anything, she’d lost consciousness. Almost as soon as she’d fallen, she opened her eyes again. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she said. I picked her up and carried her inside the house, worried by how little effort it took to lift her. She laughed. “Oh, are you actually carrying me? Am I heavy? Eliot you are such a gentleman—”

She threw her head back as if on a ride.

“I’ll drop you and see how you feel about that,” I warned her.

She whispered in my ear, suddenly serious. “I’m scared of those girls. They’re going to come after me.”

I set her on her feet in the lift. “Get some sleep. I’ll find out about the homework for you. And I’ll sort the thing with Tijana out.”

“Promise?”

“Er… I’m not in a boy band.”

The lift door closed on her smile.

On my way back from lunch I saw Tijana standing at the school gate. She had her blazer thrown over her shoulders like a cape, and her hair was loose and sort of stumbling down her back in different stages of curl. She was talking to a boy, and their body language was interesting. They were talking loudly (and not in English) but the volume wasn’t hostile and it seemed to increase and increase despite the fact that they were standing almost close enough to simply whisper. I should have realised just by that token that Tijana and the boy she was talking to were related. The boy sat on his bike, one foot on a pedal, as if ready to ride off at any second. He stared at me when I walked up to Tijana, and I stared back, then ended up having to look away because he looked so sick. He had big yellow rings around his eyes.

“I need to talk to you for a minute,” I said to Tijana. Tijana raised her eyebrows. She looks like a fortune-teller. I’m not sure what I mean by that, but it’s true.

“What is it?” she said.

The boy on the bike looked at me patiently, waiting for me to go away. He looked as if he hoped he wouldn’t have to exert himself.

“I need to talk to you about the thing with Miranda,” I said, and I moved away as an indication that she should step aside too. Tijana didn’t move. She did something with her hair that made me realise what writers mean when they say “she tossed her head.”

“Talk then. This is my cousin, the one who was attacked. Agim.” He winced at her introduction; I was glad not to be the only one, except my wince stayed inside my face.

I turned to Tijana and got on with it. “Did you think it was clever to come after my sister with knives? Say you cut her, do you think you would have got away with that?”

Tijana didn’t even open her mouth. She just rolled her eyes at me.

“No, they would not have got away with it,” her cousin said. “It’s only the other way around that nothing is done.”

“You’re pretty stupid. And you’re lucky I didn’t call the police when she told me,” I said, simply.

“Why didn’t you?” Tijana asked.

“Because there’s obviously been a misunderstanding, and I’d rather sort it out between us.”

“I wish you had called the police,” Tijana said.

I sighed.

“She ran away before I could go and get Agim—”

“Because you were waving knives in her face,” I finished.

“She ran away before I could go and get Agim to confirm that it was her,” Tijana insisted.

To Tijana’s cousin I said, “You really think you’ve met my sister?”

I had pulled a photo off the wall above my dad’s desk. It was at least a year old, from a holiday in Cornwall with Dad and Lily. In the photo Miri and I are sitting on a fence at dusk with an eerily empty square of grass behind us. I took the photo out of my rucksack and showed it to him. “Are you sure?”

He looked at the photo, and I saw his relief.

“That’s Miranda?”

I didn’t answer, and he said, hastily, “Okay, well that’s different. I don’t know that girl. The girl I meant has short hair and smokes these weird red and white cigarettes, and she said her name was Anna. It’s the same word backwards and forwards, the same word in a mirror, she said.”

“Miranda has short hair now,” Tijana said.

“She doesn’t smoke though,” I said. I didn’t put the photo away. The sight of it seemed to calm him down.

Over Agim’s shoulder I could see, through the gritty windowpanes of the Old Building, Martin furtively fetching a hammer out of his locker. Martin had been smoking a lot. It gave him these unrealisable ideas for arts and crafts. He was with Emma, and she was chatting blithely as he stowed the hammer in her bag. I think all my friends at school smoked too much. There really isn’t much else you can do regularly if you’re young and there’s no one thing you’re really into. Miri was the only friend I had who didn’t smoke at all.

“Agim,” Tijana said. “Just tell the truth if you recognise her. Don’t be scared.”

Agim turned to her. “I swear to you… this isn’t the girl.”

“But…” Tijana took the photo herself and looked at it closely. “I don’t understand this.”

I took the picture out of her hands. “Not interested. If either of you bother my sister again, I’m going to the police. Nothing long.”

“He nearly died,” Tijana said. Then she spat in my face.

I wiped my face and went in for the next lesson. The duty to speak when Miri couldn’t, to make sense when she didn’t. I checked that no one was around, then put my forehead to my locker and stood against it just like a plank, with all my weight in my head. I stood like that until I stopped feeling like breaking something. Otherwise I could snap the Biros in my pocket, go into the nearest empty classroom and spin the chairs into the bookshelves, then what? Go home and smash Lily’s camera? Thank you, Lily, for leaving me in charge of someone I just can’t be responsible for. She won’t forget or recover, she is inconsolable.

•

There were protestors outside the Immigration Removal Centre. Miranda and Sade walked into a bristle of placards that tilted as people moved to let them through. “What’s the matter, what’s happening?” Miranda asked. She didn’t notice how tightly she was clutching Sade’s arm until Sade gently removed her hand. They were surrounded by grim faces and black print.

“Another inmate hung themselves.” It was a wiry woman that had spoken; her sleeves were pushed elbow high. “No social visits today.”

Sade made a short, low keening sound that seemed not to come from her mouth.

It was strange on the Western Heights, you could see both town and sea, one seeming to hold the other back with its split brick and glass. On the Heights you were high and not at all secure, you felt as if you could fall at any moment, and that gave the stones and water a vitality of colour — if these things were to be the last you saw while falling, then they belonged to you.

Miranda had known the address of the detention centre before she had come, she knew that the place was called The Citadel, but she had forgotten that it actually looked like a citadel. She had reimagined the building as white and similar to a hospital. But now she understood that that would have been silly. A building of this size would not blend on the Western Heights if it was

white

was a colour that Anna Good was afraid to wear. Her fear reflected her feeling that she was not clean. She had, of course, been baptised in white. As a child she had been buttoned into frilly white pinafores and had subsequently been too frightened to move. At school, her gymnastics class had been filmed for a programme on British sports and pastimes, and she’d been picked to wear a bronze-coloured helmet and a white gown and a blue sash and sit at the top of a chariot built of the other girls’ bodies. She was Britannia, and her shield was a round tea tray covered with coloured crepe and ribbon. There was no lion, but some of the girls dug their fingernails into her thighs, and it was just like being bitten. She had still smiled, though, and waved her arms at the camera. Britannia had to have pluck. Anna never thought she would have a granddaughter who didn’t know what Britannia meant; Lily said that patriotism was embarrassing and dangerous. Who gave you your mind? Anna would wonder, when Lily said such things. She couldn’t believe her ears. How had Britannia become embarrassing and dangerous? It was the incomers. They had twisted it so that anything they were not part of was bad.

When Anna met Andrew she was wearing a cream-coloured dress, the material having been the cheapest she’d seen on sale and easily slid beneath the needle of her sewing machine. Anna smoothed the cloth of her dress over her lap as he, Andrew, walked past the desk she shared with Alice Williams at the newspaper office. Andrew was on his way to see the editor; you could tell he was someone important because of the way he wasn’t afraid to be caught looking at whatever interested him. He stopped and nodded at Liz Welles, who had a little band of scarlet ribbon fixed around a spare scroll on her typewriter. Was it a charm to help her type faster, he wanted to know. His smile was charming, but very dark somehow. Liz laughed shyly and said she didn’t know, her daughter had made it.

“He’s stinking rich, that Andrew Silver,” Alice Williams whispered to Anna. “From an American merchant family, but they had him schooled over here and he’s almost English. Isn’t he handsome? It’s just him in that big house on Barton Road.”

“Stow it, will you, he’s coming,” Anna muttered desperately, smiling hard at her typewriter as he passed.

His manners were strange. He didn’t speak to her, but he looked at her for longer than was polite, and she knew that they had met now, that everything real that had ever been going to happen to her would happen now. She inspected the entire front of her dress once he was gone, convinced that some vast stain had left her and entered the cloth. It was summer. She was sweating slightly, but that was all.

White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them. At a pinch, cream will do.

Four years later Anna Good put the cream dress on again, and an expensive white coat that Andrew had bought her, and she did some witching.

Andrew Silver was a Dover Queensman, one of the “buffs,” as they were called, a brave man in brown who flew a plane to Africa to fight the Germans there. One morning someone knocked on my door and gave Anna a telegram, which said that her husband was dead. She looked at it and then she wandered up and down my staircases, in and out of my rooms, flinching, hearing bombs far away. I curved myself into a deep cup, a safe container for her. I did not let her take any harm to herself, I did not let her open the attic window to jump. I was like a child with its mouth obstinately closed, refusing speech, refusing air. She had bought some rat poison the week before, and though she did not turn to that, I shook the pellets so that they fell deep into my recesses. Just in case. She was pregnant, you see. It was two Silvers at stake. My poor Anna Good, my good lady.

“They killed him,” she wept. I could not respond. Her fear of her pica and the whispers and her fear of shrapnel and fire and, yes, her fear of me, of being left all alone in a big silent house. Her fear had crept out from the whites of her eyes and woven itself into my brick until I came to strength, until I became aware. I could keep Anna Good from killing herself and her child, but I had no other gift.

“I hate them,” she said. She sat down on the kitchen floor, the telegram rumpled on her lap. A rat scampered past her, putting its feet on her white coat. Her hair fell from its pins. She was supposed to go to the newspaper office and type, but she would not that day. Instead she gave me my task.

“I hate them,” she said. “Blackies, Germans, killers, dirty… dirty killers. He should have stayed here with me. Shouldn’t have let him leave. Bring him back, bring him back, bring him back to me.” She spoke from that part of her that was older than her. The part of her that will always tie me to her, to her daughter Jennifer, to Jennifer’s stubborn daughter Lily, to Lily’s even more stubborn daughter Miranda. I can only be as good as they are. We are on the inside, and we have to stay together, and we absolutely cannot have anyone else. It’s Luc that keeps letting people in. To keep himself company, probably, because he knows he is not welcome (if he doesn’t know this he is very stupid). They shouldn’t be allowed in though, those others, so eventually I make them leave.

•

Since GrandAnna’s washing machine was there, the ration-book larder became a mini-laundry, washing powder scattered over its tiles, its shelves stocked with small piles of clothes. If you were a guest and had booked in for three days or more, you got your clothes washed, dried and delivered back to you for free. “Just human kindness,” Luc said. The clothes on the shelf were sorted according to whether they had been washed but not dried, or whether they had been both washed and dried and were ready to be returned to their owners. There were no tags or coloured dividers; Miranda had no idea how Sade managed to keep track, but she did it effortlessly.

From her place by the door, where she sat with her course-work notes spread over her knees, Miranda watched as Sade picked up a pair of Eliot’s jeans and laid them over the ironing board. “Please, you mustn’t iron Eliot’s denim, he hates it.”

Sade looked up from the ironing board with eyes like liquidized stars.

“Are you — are you alright?” Miranda stammered.

Sade seemed to laugh; at least, her shoulders shook.

“I’m thinking of the shame. To make a man hang himself. That place is a prison. You come without papers because you have been unable to prove that you are useful to anyone, and then when you arrive they put you in prison, and if you are unable to prove that you have suffered, they send you back. That place up there is a prison. He didn’t deserve that.”

“Yes,” said Miranda. She touched her own cheek, expecting it to be wet. It wasn’t.

Sade laid her hands down on the ironing board and stared at the plasters on her fingers. “I hate them,” she said, in a voice that seemed to include Miranda.

Miranda picked up her notes and said she was sorry from behind them. She left the larder quietly, walking backwards. She knew then that Sade had not personally known the dead man. Her grief was almost theoretical. It didn’t mean any less, but it was a different sort of grief from Miranda’s. It was the sort of grief you didn’t have to suppress because letting it out made it smaller instead of bigger. The sort of grief you could say something about because you instinctively understood that it could not continue, rigid inside your breathing apparatus like a metal stem. Miranda made a face at herself in the hallway mirror. Deep thoughts. Why didn’t she just draw a diagram of the different kinds of grief?

•

June was bread and nuts and berries. It was also uncharacteristically hot, but Eliot and Miranda didn’t let thoughts of summer come until after exams. Before exams came limbo, spent on the roof, squinting at old notes through sunglasses. Neither of them tanned in the slightest, though the sun’s heat brought into view messages they’d written to themselves in lemon juice on the margins of their pages. Miranda rotated her three halter-neck dresses. Eliot didn’t stoop to shorts, but folded up the bottoms of his jeans and wore flip-flops.

He got through the exam period on the “brain bread” that Luc baked — the loaves were round and coarse and filled with all sorts of seeds that neither of the twins had heard of. It seemed that every time Miranda looked at Eliot he had some of that bread in his mouth — with Luc’s champagne marmalade, or mackerel, or honey, or butter. Miranda tried not to judge him, but it was hard. In revision sessions at school, Eliot leaned forward and answered the teacher’s questions around a wad of bread. The Sunday before their last set of exams, Miranda and Eliot tested each other on key dates and terms beneath a giant picnic umbrella in the garden. Miranda’s last module was for her history paper; Eliot’s was for politics. They answered so many of their practice questions correctly that it seemed like a jinx.

Sade sat at the other end of the garden, by the back door, in case she was called. For months she had been knitting something white that grew wider and longer. She didn’t seem to have a final form in mind for it. It lathered her lap like beaten egg white, full of sun, and she paused to brush leaves off it. As she worked she lowered her head and hummed, smiling as if the work was for someone she thought tenderly of.

“What will you do when it’s really summer?” Miranda asked Eliot.

When Sade glanced over, she picked up the thick smoothie that Sade had blended for her and pretended to drink. She let the fruit sit on her lips, then, when Sade looked away, she wiped it off. Her heart wasn’t in the subterfuge. The summer before last, Eliot had refused to go on holiday without Lily and spent much of August up on the roof wearing a black balaclava and writing poetry, which he then balled up and threw as far and as hard as he could, in various directions. Lily, contacted in Mumbai, had said that he was clearly exploring the role of the poet as incendiary. When she came home she’d advised that Eliot cut his hair, unless he preferred cheaply acquired androgyny.

“Will you go to South Africa straight away?” Miranda asked.

Eliot drank from her glass and suddenly half her smoothie was gone.

“Thanks,” she said.

“South Africa’s not until October,” Eliot told her. Perhaps he would spend summer on the roof again, then.

“What will you do when it’s summer?” he asked.

Miranda had spent the previous weekend looking through her GrandAnna’s prudent, economical knitting and sewing patterns, and she felt sorry for the old black Singer sewing machine, which seemed never to have had any fun.

“First I will knit you a scarf, as I’ve read that South Africa won’t really get warm for you until November. Next I think I will make myself an overcoat, with a violently coloured lining.”

•

After their last exam, Eliot vanished with a group of friends whose schoolbags clanked with bottles, while Miranda went straight home and returned the notes she’d taken to school to the bundle beneath her bed. She had not answered many of her exam questions completely — she had too much to tell the examiner, and everything she had to say was of the greatest urgency. She’d been reduced to summarising points for the final questions, to give illusions of answers.

Miranda found Sade and they went down to London together, in search of suitable scarf and coat fabrics at Petticoat Lane Market. Miranda liked the market very much. It was steps away from a main street full of fast-food restaurants, a street that glowed with buses like wheeled danger signs, but the market itself smelt like fried spice and flour and the musk of cloth before it is ever worn.

Sade bought a brown bag full of peppers more wizened and vicious-looking than chillies, tie-dyed fabric, and a pair of square-toed silver shoes with diamanté buckles that silenced Miranda for a full ten minutes. There was no time or place or event fancy enough for those shoes. She knew that Sade would have to wear them as house slippers.

Miranda bought plenty of purple thread and some unassuming polyester and viscose mix that fell well and warmly when she held a sample length of it up against herself. She decided that she wanted her overcoat to be a full frock coat, and got some black petticoat gauze too. Then Sade persuaded her to buy a big square of red and purple tie-dyed into shadowy mandalas. “For your violently coloured lining,” Sade said, as they held the cloth out between them and gaped at it and then at each other. There was too much cloth, but that was a good thing, as Miranda had not yet learnt to sew with a machine and was bound to get it horribly wrong at first.

Sade and Miranda paid for the fabric and the silver shoes together, and the shop owner bantered with Sade while finding her change, peppering his talk with Yoruba words as he wrapped the cloth in tissue paper. He was Indian. He saw Miranda’s surprise and laughed. “Why wouldn’t I know some of this lady’s language? My best customers are Yoruba…”

He also let them take, for only ten pounds, a mannequin that he no longer used because it was too old and he’d had too many complaints about its proportions from his mainly full-figured female customers. The mannequin had no hair, no face, was very white under a film of grime, and had a fifties waist and a nonexistent bust, which pleased Miranda because that way she would be able to see how the coat would look on her even as it was being made.

At home, she put the mannequin in the bath and washed it with a flannel, from face to torso to heels, until it was completely clean. The mannequin was taller than her, but as she pulled it out of the bath by its hands, she felt as if she was its mother. In her room she covered the mannequin’s nakedness with one of the long T-shirts she slept in. The mannequin stood beside her wardrobe, arms at its sides, looking cowed somehow.

Miranda put a knitted hat on its head and started work on her coat. The lack of light in her room made it the coolest part of the house. She had her windows open beneath the closed curtains, and humidity drew the curtains and the window together, giving the impression of a gaunt head looking out of her wall. Its skin was loose, and it gasped vacantly.

An influx of new guests in search of the perfect beach-to-town balanced holiday meant that Sade couldn’t help Miranda with her knitting for another three days, and it was four days before Miranda saw Eliot for longer than the time it took for him to stumble indoors in the early morning, toss food into his mouth, go to bed, then, in the late afternoon, rise from his bed, toss food into his mouth and leave the house again.

Eliot came and found her in the garden, where she sat beside Sade and her enormous crochet project, a book on her lap, her face turned up to meet a butterfly that flitted in place just above her nose.

“What the fuck is that in your room?”

The butterfly veered away.

“It’s a mannequin,” Miranda murmured. “Have you been having fun?”

“Yeah. But I start work tomorrow. What’s the mannequin for?”

“Work?” Both Sade and Miranda looked at Eliot.

“Indeed. Junior reporter at The Dover Post. Probably just retyping memos from the council on their new initiatives or something. What’s the mannequin for?”

“My coat,” said Miranda.

“Oh.” Eliot looked at the scarf she’d begun for him, nodded politely and grabbed his bike.

Agim died — it was in The Dover Post. Unexpected medical complications were cited — even Eliot was unable to explain what that was supposed to mean. Miranda hid the newspapers for that day under an armchair in the sitting room and resumed work on her coat. Her hands shook, and her stitches kept failing.

In the evening Sade took advantage of the empty sitting room and watched a Nigerian film. She put her feet up and divided her attention between a bowl of salted peanuts, some warm Guinness drunk from a glass she’d left to chill in the fridge all afternoon, and the film, which brought tears of silent laughter into her eyes. The film seemed not to be a film at all; rather it was a competition between a cast of actors to see who could shout and moan the loudest and show the greatest amount of agony at the death of a close relative.

Miranda got up and wandered out to the garden just as Sade called out to Luc— “Mr. Dufresne, Mr. Dufresne! This part you will love — Wole now knows that Yemisi is the one who poisoned Mama Atinuke’s chin-chin.”

Luc smiled at Miranda as he passed her. Sade had been teaching him how to make chin-chin, which was basically pastry, thickly folded and heavily buttered. Luc couldn’t bear to bake anything as dense as the chin-chin Sade produced, and his version of the snack was closer to mini-palmiers than anything else. Sade disapproved, but she took some on her weekly trips to the detention centre and said that they had been declared passable.

Miranda moved Luc’s spectacles and notebook onto a nearby deck chair and climbed into the hammock that Luc had set up between two of the trees. She rocked, but the moon wouldn’t let her sleep. Its light was faint, yet, like the breeze that soothed her bare arms and legs, it kept moving. She had to watch the moon through the apple-tree branches. It was easier to watch through her fingers.

When she grew tired of watching and realised she couldn’t drop her hand, she began to think it possible that in those months of her madness she had been supplanted by someone that she could only be vaguely aware of. Her nails locked into her forehead, but there was no pain.

Interesting, all is very interesting.

She closed her eyes.

Heavy footsteps crossed the grass and stopped just behind her.

“Miranda,” her GrandAnna whispered in her ear. Her words met the air with difficulty, as if there was something in her mouth she had to talk around. “You must eat.”

Miranda said nothing. She had decided the key was to pretend as if she hadn’t heard. Her hand came loose, the moon let her alone, and she tried to sleep on an empty stomach, which everyone says not to do.

After a while she pushed herself out of the hammock, rolled confusedly on the grass, then picked herself up, arms above her head in case the trees fell on her. The air was full of the smell of burning. There was screaming. It wasn’t human, it was mechanical and without pause. There wasn’t a house light on for miles and miles. She had to get into the shelter, they were calling her, they were waiting. She moved through the pitch-black house and she was the only thing that stirred. She came through the trapdoor, and Lily stood beside a table laid for four. Miranda put her arms around her mother, and they held each other for longer than a greeting took; the house shook as the ground outside was beaten — just one hit, but the vibrations went on for so long that Miranda realised it was only her ears refusing to forget the sound.

Over Lily’s shoulder, Miranda counted — four places, four people — Lily made one, Miranda made two, for number three there was Jennifer, Lily’s mother, and the fourth was her GrandAnna, her white hair gleaming. Jennifer and GrandAnna sat side by side with their elbows on the table. They leaned forward, anticipating a meal. They were naked except for corsets laced so tightly that their dessicated bodies dipped in and out like parchment scrolls bound around the middle. They stared at Miranda in numb agony. Padlocks were placed over their parted mouths, boring through the top lip and closing at the bottom. Miranda could see their tongues writhing.

“Who did this to them?” Miranda asked Lily, curling her arms around her mother’s neck.

Lily turned her head away. “I did,” she said. She sounded proud.

The long table was made of pearl, or very clean bone, and it was crowded with plates and dishes; there was fruit, and jugs of the spiced wine her father would make in a cauldron at the beginning of November. There were jugs of the pithy lemonade that her father made in the very same cauldron when May came. Miranda knew exactly what was on the table because she and Lily joined hands and walked up and down its length, looking for something, anything, that Miranda might like to eat. Food steamed and sizzled and swam in juices and sauces hot and cold and rich and sweet, there were even sticks of chalk and strips of plastic, but all they did was make Miranda hungrier for what was not there, so hungry that she released her mother’s hand and held her own throat and gagged. Her hunger hardened her stomach, grew new teeth inside her.

“Miranda you must eat something,” Lily said, sorrowfully. “What will you eat? Tell me and I’ll bring it to you.”

Miranda shook her head. She didn’t know. No, that was wrong. She knew, but she couldn’t say it.

Lily sat down at the table, opposite Jennifer and GrandAnna. Lily played with a padlock. She looked angelic, too pure to be plainly seen. Her combat trousers and vest top were badly crumpled, the way they usually got when she took night flights and spent the hours squirming in her plane seat. Her hair was a little longer.

Miranda began to speak, but Lily raised a finger to her lips — there was a fifth in the room, someone listening. Miranda looked very carefully at each thing in the room, waiting for the fifth person to appear. She looked under the table — maybe the fifth person was there. They were not. As she straightened up, she met her GrandAnna’s gaze. Her GrandAnna’s eyes spoke to her; they said, Eat for me.

“Eat for us,” Jennifer slurred through her padlock.

Another bomb struck, with such force that Miranda fell. She lifted herself up on her hands and crawled into the corner, feeling as if she’d broken her shoulder on the floor. None of the others had even moved. They were used to this.

“Will there be another one after this?” Miranda asked. No one answered her. “Oh my God,” she said. She was shaking already, in anticipation of the next drop. “Please don’t let there be any more.”

“There’s a war on,” GrandAnna said, slowly, clearly, and with great severity.

“It’s safe in here,” Lily added. “Us Silver girls together.” She sounded sarcastic, but looked sincere.

Miranda’s fall had been cushioned by clothes. The clothes were familiar: jeans, a short-sleeved T-shirt, a hooded jacket, and a pair of trainers. The fifth person. Oh, she knew where he was; he was there, right beside her head. There were holes bored into the wall. She knew that they numbered ten when a finger inched out of each hole with a sluggishness that fascinated her. The way the fingers twitched, she got a sense that they weren’t attached to a body, only to each other, and that she was watching ruptured nerve endings in denial. The hands were brown. Jalil’s party trick hands, the hands he could turn in a full circle without putting stress on his wrist bone

(he should have kept away from her)

oh no oh no oh oh no oh

Miranda knew that she had done this, in a period of inattention. It was not unlike watching someone else take her hand and guide it and the pen it held into putting down a perfect copy of her signature.

More, Jennifer and GrandAnna said, but Lily came and ran a pitying hand over Miranda’s hair and her face as she cowered in the corner, blood sticking her clothes to her body. Lily understood, she understood everything. Lily gave Miranda a padlock. Miranda gratefully kissed its cold loop. Jennifer and GrandAnna moaned and beat the table, pushing dishes and jugs off its edges as Miranda climbed back up into the main house. Miranda passed the hallway mirror and she was clean again. She looked at her reflection and saw a cube instead, four stiff faces in one. She went outside and climbed back into the hammock. The sun rose and that made it morning.

Her father was in the deck chair beside the hammock, his notebook on his lap. He’d fallen asleep with his glasses on. He looked happy in his sleep. Miranda ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth—what can I taste, what can I taste, what can I Luc’s head drooped and, in raising it with a guilty jerk, he woke himself up. He smiled at her.

Miranda was on the point of saying that she might need to go away again. Only she wasn’t sure what good it would do. Hadn’t it begun while she was away?

“You should have made me get out of the hammock,” Miranda said.

Luc shook his head. “You looked far too peaceful for me to interrupt.”

Miranda laughed emptily. She asked, “What are you writing?”

Luc took his glasses off and closed them back into their case. “A recipe book, I hope. Based around seasonality. Every other word seems to be ‘Lily’, or ‘my wife,’ or ‘the twins’ maman.’ ”

“Father,” Miranda said. She could only lie there and look at him.

“What if we sold the house?” Luc said. “What if I went back to food writing and we went back to London?”

Miranda held her hand out to him, even though she had no chance of touching him from where she was.

“I don’t mind. I’m sure Eliot is the same. We’ll do whatever you like,” she told him, not really believing that they would be allowed to leave. They had never lived in London, they had always lived in her GrandAnna’s house.

“Miranda,” Luc said. “You look… so different, since… I don’t think you understand how different you look.”

“I cut my hair and lost some weight — which I’ll put back on, really I will — that’s all.”

Luc put his glasses on again and looked her over. He shook his head.

“Something misgives me.”

Miranda said nothing. What was there to say?

“What’s your date of birth, daughter of mine?”

“Father.”

“Well?”

“November 12th,” she said, and laughed. Her father did too.

“And the year?” he asked.

And the year, and the year, and the year. There was no answer anywhere. She tried not to panic. Four numbers came to her, but they were upside down and she couldn’t read them. She tried to count back from the year 2000. To do that successfully she would need to know how old she was, and she didn’t know. Rather than make a wrong guess, she said, “Father,” as scornfully as she could manage. He smiled.

“But seriously, Miranda. What if we left? I would not even sell the place, just rent it or something.”

Miranda waited for more, but there wasn’t any more.

“We’ve been happy here,” she said, gently. “Moving here was a good thing. You’re not to be a Calvinist about it — I promise you’ll go to heaven. I’ll even put it down in writing if you’d like.”

“I like you,” her father said, and got up to start seeing about breakfast orders.

Miranda went to her psychomantium and turned it upside down looking for her passport. She couldn’t find it. She sat on the floor with her eyes closed and tried to recall the years before now. She tried to recall games, arguments, secrets, toys, trips, TV shows. Just like the night before she’d checked into the clinic, they had not happened. It was 11:00 AM in the place where Lily had died.

Miranda knocked on Eliot’s door, and when he didn’t reply, she went into his room and took his passport out of the top drawer of his desk. He slept so heavily that she felt no particular need to move quietly. Nineteen eighty-two. November 12, 1982. In her room, Miranda wrote 1982 large on a sheet of paper and blu-tacked it to the wall above her mirror. She didn’t look into the mirror itself. She was becoming someone, it seemed. She had read somewhere that you only became a woman once your mother had died. But that wasn’t what worried her. She worried about becoming as perfect as the person shown to her on paper in Lily’s studio.

•

Dad packed all Lily’s things up one day in the middle of August. Miri knew what he was doing, and she let herself out of the house quietly and just disappeared. If I hadn’t caught Dad in the actual act of dragging bags full of her clothes over to the lift, no one would have said anything to him. I took a bag in each hand and asked him where he was taking it all. Suddenly there was the smell of rose attar all around us. I couldn’t keep my grip on the bags — the way they bulged — in my mind I saw Lily in them, in clean pieces. Put me back together and I’ll stand up. I nudged one of the bags with my foot. Soft. Just clothes.

“They’re all going to charity,” Dad said. “Miranda won’t wear these things, use these things. It wouldn’t be good for her if she did. These things are being wasted here.” Something about the slow way he spoke made me think he hadn’t known what he was going to do with Lily’s things until he’d said it aloud. He walked past me and into the bedroom, brought out more bags, more boxes. I met him at the door and threw bags back into the room. One of them hit him, then sagged across the floor. Multicoloured scarves flowed out. Dad said: “Eliot. Eliot, I know. But it’s got to be.”

I thought briefly of pulling the door shut and locking him in somehow (how?). I thought, Don’t take her away. “Just… don’t give her stuff away, Dad. Not now. Alright?”

Dad opened his arms. The bare room seemed to settle around his shoulders like a cloak. It took me a moment to interpret the gesture as a request that I come across the room to him. I started to go, I really did, but in the time it took me to make a step he’d dropped his arms. He sat down on one of the boxes.

“Listen,” he said. “I cannot endure that dream again.”

“What dream,” I said.

“The one where it’s dark, and the house gets warm, warmer. Then it’s hot and I’m all… dried out. I drink from the kitchen tap and go out into the garden to breathe. After a few moments I feel much better and I try to get back into the house, but my key won’t work. I walk around to the back door and the key for that doesn’t work either. The key breaks when I try to turn it in the lock, the handle breaks under my hand. It’s pathetic, really, but I walk around to the front of the house and start pleading. Let me in! I don’t know who I’m talking to. The house just stands there, dark, absolutely silent. I put a rock in my pocket and climb a tree in the garden, thinking I can open a window, and climb in. But I can’t even touch the windowsill — it gives off a strange, feathered static that bites me. Back on the ground I shout out, Lily. I shout out, Lily can you let me back in? A light goes on in the house. It goes on on this floor. And each time I dream this, I try to work out what room the light goes on in, as if that matters. But I just can’t work it out. It’s not mine, not yours, it’s not the light in the psychomantium. It’s not the bathroom light. It’s like there’s an extra window, or an extra room I haven’t seen before. Three figures come to the window. One is in the middle and has her arms around the other two. I can’t see them, just their silhouettes through the blind. They’re standing there watching, waiting for me to go away. They want me to go away. I know who they are; it’s Lily and Miranda. I don’t know who the other one is. But suddenly I’m glad that the blind is over the window, because I have this feeling that they look different, not the way I thought they did. I’m cold then, as cold as I was hot. Then I wake up.”

I had nothing to say. I picked up a box and walked out to the lift with it. That’s what I did instead of telling him that I had had that dream too, that exact same dream, only I had been calling Miri. Sometimes our subconscious is so transparent it’s boring. I would have written that in my diary, but I’d stopped keeping one.

•

By the end of August, Eliot’s scarf was ready, and the fat dove-grey band of wool took pride of place on the mannequin’s neck. By then Miranda had moved the mannequin closer to her bed so that it didn’t seem so lonely anymore. Sade’s trips to the Immigration Removal Centre no longer included Miranda, who forgot even to be apologetic, enthralled as she was by her sewing machine, her courtier-like hovering around a still white figure, her hands smoothing cloth, and her mouth full of pins. At one point Miranda became convinced that she had hurt the mannequin. She carefully checked the material she’d draped over the mannequin, and she found a pin embedded in the right shoulder where she’d pressed too hard. She didn’t say sorry aloud, but she was sorry.

Later, Eliot dragged her down to the beach to swim, but she wasn’t strong enough, so he stayed on the sand with her and bought her ice cream. He mocked The Dover Post: “Remember how a guy hung himself at the Immigration Removal Centre months ago?”

“Yes,” Miranda said.

“No one wrote in or said anything about it — not one letter,” Eliot said. “I checked.”

Miranda’s ice cream was melting onto her hand.

“It’s an über-local paper,” she said, when Eliot wouldn’t let her get away with not responding. “The upstanding citizens probably saved their letters for The Times or something.”

“Hm,” said Eliot. “There were letters from people complaining about misanthropic parking attendants.”

A boy who was building a sandcastle nearby looked over at them. Miranda pointed at his handiwork and held her head as if the sandcastle had given her a headache of admiration.

Gruffly, the boy called out: “You can kick it over if you like.”

“You are very kind,” Miranda said, and stayed where she was.

“Can I kick it over?” Eliot asked. The boy shook his head. His eyes were almost the same grey as theirs.

•

They opened each other’s envelopes on results day, and Miranda felt that the rows of numbers and percentages that added up to three perfect A’s beneath Eliot’s name belonged to her. She smiled and nodded at them, as if the panic of the momentarily misplaced lucky Biro was hers, as if the five-minute amnesia regarding Gladstone and Disraeli was hers. Eliot ripped Miranda’s envelope open so hurriedly that a corner of the paper inside fell off. He cast a glance over the page, seemed to make some quick calculations, then whooped and lifted her off her feet. Both their grades got tattered in the crush between them — Eliot spun her round with her results envelope fanned out against her back.

“Fuck you Cambridge fuck you Cambridge fuck you,” he chanted.

Eliot and Miranda walked out of school with their arms around each other. They passed Jalil, standing by the results board and running a pensive finger down the list of names. Seeing him she felt her relief in her chest, as strong as if she had just won an impossible race, or a bet.

Tijana was nearby, with her mother. Tijana’s mother was radiant with smiles, but Tijana’s eyes were red and her wrists stuck out of her black sleeves with alarming scrawniness.

•

September ended. The night before Eliot was due to leave, Miranda was so cold in her bed that she knew she couldn’t survive it and knocked on the wall between her and Eliot’s rooms. With minimal grumbling, he came and climbed into bed with her and let her lie with her head on his breastbone, his arms around her a blanket beneath the blanket. She tried to tell him she would miss him, but he said: “I’m asleep, actually.”

The next morning, his preparations were simple. He had one suitcase. He slung his satchel across his body, stuck his hands in his pockets, and he was ready to leave. Sade seemed anxious. She didn’t say it, but she was. Luc patted her arm. “Only two guests booked in, and we’re away for four hours, four and a half max. You and those silver shoes can handle anything.”

Sade smiled, but said nothing. She appeared to be conserving energy.

All the way to the airport, Miranda and Eliot could not stop looking at each other. Luc let them sit in the back together and managed not to mention that he felt like a taxi driver. Miranda and Eliot slid low into their seats and considered each other completely. In November, Miranda and Eliot would be eighteen, and they would be apart. At Departures, Miranda put Eliot’s scarf around his neck.

“Thanks,” he said.

She took Luc’s hand and walked away quickly.

The next day Miranda’s overcoat was ready. She could barely believe that such a simple-looking coat could take so much work, so much staring at rumpled sewing-machine tracks on cloth, wondering what had gone wrong, wondering why the needle had stabbed that place instead of this. It looked so fine on

the mannequin

proved very useful for me when Miranda, Luc and Eliot left for the airport. Especially as I did not have much time. I could not, for example, use the looking people. Things progress quite slowly with them. And Luc’s precision meant that when he said four hours he would most likely be away for a little less than that, even. It was very unlikely that he would be gone for more. Besides, the key thing was to have everything as it was, or almost as it was, by the time Miranda returned. I allowed three hours and forty-three minutes to pass without incident. I was confident. The forty-fourth minute before the fourth hour, began in Eliot’s room.

Eliot had left his room painfully tidy, chair fitted into desk like a puzzle, his bed made (his bed made!), excess clothes folded into each drawer. But he had left his door open, trusting his sister to lock up after him. He had left his window open. His window is so close to some of the trees that, if the branches were safe, which they are not, he could climb out of his window and crawl straight along a branch. An apple fell in through Eliot’s window. It was an all-season apple. I can make them grow. Do you know the all-season apples? They have a strange, dual colouring. If you pitied Snow White, then you know. One side of such an apple is always coma-white, and the other side is the waxiest red. The apple bounced and rolled across Eliot’s floor, only a little bruised. It made a smooth track to the door of Miranda’s room, where it stopped, because Miranda’s door was closed.

A moment of utter silence throughout me, then the mannequin opened the door. It bent and picked the apple up. I very much enjoy the way that mannequin moves — it rejoices in its limbs, rearranging itself quickly and expertly, ending each sequence of movement with a flourish. It stood holding the apple high, offering it to no one, the empty hand slanted towards the full one, hips jutting jauntily. Then the mannequin skipped downstairs. It is not easy to explain how the mannequin skipped. Just that it was too fast for plastic, too slow for fabric. It sort of rippled. It met the African housekeeper in the garden, where she was quietly knitting. The woman saw the mannequin out of the corner of her eye. She said, “Miranda…?”

When she saw what it was, she was so afraid that she became stupid and babbled senselessly. The mannequin stood over her, displaying its apple like a child proud of its prize. It had no lips, so it said nothing to her. The African woman looked at the apple and

(this had not at all been accounted for)

her heart stopped beating. It was some sort of trick, for I was certain that the woman was still alive. For one, she continued to blink. There was a dark, lean intelligence in her eyes, something that stirred yet did not know itself. Stillness, stillness. The mannequin bent over her and rearranged the white wool on her lap, like a solicitous waiter preparing her for her meal. It seesawed forward so that its body was halved, seized her chin, opened her mouth with its fingers and pressed the white side of the apple, the bad side, against her mouth.

She bit at the white side — she bit! In my distraction I lost hold of the other black guests, the couple on the second floor who I had kept in their bed the past three days, curved around the bed like fitted sheets with their faces crusting over. The African with the silent chest chewed, swallowed and opened her mouth for more, while the couple picked up their cases and fled, leaving money on the hallway desk as payment for their stay. Then, precise as ever, Luc Dufresne’s car pulled up outside, the car with my Miranda inside it, and there was nothing more to be done at that time.

The next day, the frock coat was the last thing Miranda took on her way out of her room; she pulled it off the mannequin, put it on and left for Cambridge.