White Is for Witching

~ ~ ~

On the first day of Freshers Week the sunlight turned the stone buildings silver. Dad got so baffled by the one-way system that we ended up parking, walking up to my college and borrowing a luggage trolley from a porter to wheel my suitcases up to my room. Mum kept dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, but when I asked her what she was sniffling about she said, “Ore, I’m fine.” Each college we passed stood as taut and strong as a flexed arm and had its flag flying from a pennant. Both road and pavement were full of people on foot, laughing and calling out to each other. I thought it could be Camelot, or Lyonesse. I thought, I can’t live here. I was relieved when it finally got dark and the town became more anonymous. By then people had started sharing their A-level results, and when they had exhausted that topic, they started on their GCSEs. You could tell who’d gotten 5 A’s at A level because they’d ask the question, yet hold out on contributing their own answer until the last possible moment.

Everyone seemed upbeat, except for Tijana. I discovered her at matriculation dinner. She was sullen until tricked into smiling. Her accent was gentle, she had long, dark hair and the high forehead of a romantic heroine. She smelt of some sweet fruit, or a jam. She had put her arms through only one of the two pairs of slits in her college gown, but I decided not to offer her any advice about that — she probably knew already, also she looked very dignified sitting there with these enormous black sleeves that were too important for food. She drank her wine and she listened patiently to the rules of a game that a mockney guy from the year above us explained to her.

The game was to flip penny coins into each other’s wineglasses. If you found a penny in your wine, then you had to drain the glass in one go. I listened in on what the guy was saying to Tijana, and I looked up and down the table (boys outnumbered girls by about three to one) and thought it was a cheap trick for getting girls drunk. But there was more. The guy explained that the rules were the same if a penny piece was dropped onto your dinner plate — if you were “up for it” then you ate the food on it as quickly as you could, and with your hands behind your back. Tijana’s face was expressionless as she listened. Once he had finished explaining about the game, the guy dropped a penny into Tijana’s glass. She didn’t even wait half a second. She picked up her dessertspoon, fished out the penny and went to drench the guy in wine. I disliked his chat so much that I almost let her do it, but then a sense of responsibility kicked in. I took her glass from her and put it down on the table. “You don’t have to play,” I said, at the same time as the guy, who drew back from her (he was already quite drunk, so he nearly fell off his seat) and said, “Calm down, it’s just a bit of fun.”

Tijana turned to me and nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re right. I was being unreasonable. The wine is not bad.” She toasted me and took a small, deliberate sip, then looked about her uneasily. Like me, she seemed actually menaced by the faces that observed us from enormous frames arranged all around the candlelit hall. Apparently they were all former masters of the college, but aside from differences in weight and degree of facial-hair coverage, they could not be told apart. During lulls in the awkward conversation, I examined the portraits nearest to me but couldn’t get past the sensation that here was the same man over and over, crouched in old boxes, readying himself to spit on my plate.

Tijana broke the silence by asking the question that sat between me and the others at our table. “Were those your parents who dropped you off?”

She meant the grey-haired couple with the Kentish-farmer accents who had hugged me golf club — shaped and cried when it was time for them to leave.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m adopted. Obviously. Neither of them went to university, so it’s a big deal for them.”

Across the table, a girl with a freshly scrubbed-looking face began telling a story about a friend of hers who was adopted. Tijana and I eyed each other, not sure which of us was supposed to respond to her, and in what order. I don’t think either of us wanted to.

After dinner Tijana and I walked back to the foot of her staircase. Someone had said that our college had been built in the fourteenth century. Our bedrooms ate into the walls of the college buildings, small pockets lined with posters and printed fabric. But from the outside I could see we had made our beds in a tomb. I already knew that that night I would be afraid to fall asleep, almost as afraid as when I was a kid and no one could promise me that I would absolutely, definitely wake up. It took me about a minute to notice that Tijana was crying.

At first it just seemed as if her eyes were sparkling excessively. Aside from the wetness of her eyes, she seemed alright — she giggled and ran across the square of grass in the centre of New Court that we didn’t have permission to walk on — she touched my hand lightly and pulled me along behind her by my fingertips.

The porter’s lodge was lit up and I could make out the large shape of one of the porters behind his desk, pretending not to be able to see us. New Court was spiked with light, but I couldn’t see its source. The sparkle in Tijana’s eyes lengthened and slipped down her face. She simply wiped her cheeks and continued to talk as if nothing was happening to her. We sat down on the cold steps leading up to her room. She cried and talked about Buffy the Vampire Slayer for another ten minutes; that Tijana could really cry. Finally I offered to cry too, to keep her company.

“My cousin drank bleach and died this summer. He was all fucked up over something that happened to him. I don’t know what happened to him. No I do, but I don’t understand it. Why did it happen to him? No one can tell me why,” she said.

“I’m sorry the summer was like that,” I said.

She was drunker than she knew. Before I could say anything she’d convinced herself that she was being silly. She nodded. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. I just wasn’t… ready today.”

“Ready for what?”

“I don’t know. I feel looked at.”

“You’ve been fine,” I assured her. “Nothing out of the ordinary, I promise. I would have subtracted a point for dashing your wine at the guy next to you at dinner, but you didn’t, so it’s fine.”

She smiled, a real smile. “Good night. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

My room was almost opposite Tijana’s. Walking back around New Court, I saw a girl struggling through the door-sized gap in the college gate. I remembered her from my interview. The one who wore a stopped watch. I noticed again how pale she was. In her black coat, she seemed to fade into the air behind her.

“So you got in,” I called out to her.

She twirled so that her hair and the full skirt of her coat flew out around her, and then she curtseyed.

In my room at college, the walls have a strange relationship with the ceiling. The room feels as if it has more than four corners. I tried to sleep, but kept waking and walking to the window, looking down onto the cobbled street and wondering where I was. I ended up opening the present my mum had sneaked into my suitcase. She thought I hadn’t seen her, but she’s no good at hiding her intentions. She can’t help tiptoeing around with a finger to her lips at key moments. The gift was a book of Caribbean legends “for storytellers,” and she’d tucked a note in between the first two pages: Tried to find a book of Nigerian ones but they all seemed to do with a tortoise! Have these and our love, we are so very proud of you — love, Mum (and Dad)

I had already bought the book for myself, with pocket money years ago. I opened it (its cover was crowded with anachronistic woodcuts of nubile women carrying water jugs on their heads)

and read my favourite story again. I read about the soucouyant, the wicked old woman who flies from her body and at night consumes her food, the souls of others — soul food! — in a ball of flame. At dawn she returns to her body, which she has hidden in a safe place.

I read to the walls. “Kill the soucouyant.” Dawn tore a rosy line through the clouds. “Find her skin and treat it with pepper and salt. How it burns her, how it scratches her. Only the night gives her her power, and if she is unable to reenter her body by sunrise, she cannot live. Kill the soucouyant, that unnatural old lady, and then all shall be as it should.”

I folded that page over at the corner and read on, no longer aloud. As always, the soucouyant seemed more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so you couldn’t decide if she was a monster. Still, I wondered if the salt and pepper were really necessary — they seemed too cruel when it would be easier to despatch her by blowing out her flame before it grew, or by holding a mirror up to her wrinkled face and saying, “I don’t believe in you.” But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruellest way to kill a monster.

My mum keeps worrying that she’s not filling the space left by my birth mother. My dad was the same as well, forcing me to spend hours at the park with him and a football until he realised that, like him, I was much better at watching football than playing it, plus if I wanted to talk to him I’d do it without using sport as a crutch. But Mum… she keeps finding stuff in the African folklore section of the local library that she feels bound to tell me because she thinks my mother might have. Mum kept calling me Ore even though she really wanted a daughter called Rose. My name is not a big deal to me — if it was Rose it would’ve worked better with my surname and people would be able to spell it without that moment of uncertainty before putting pen to paper. Rose Lind is easily filed, she is a delight, she is Shakespearean, sort of. My birth mother was a legal immigrant. She and whoever my birth father was weren’t together. Aside from that, all I know about her is that she suffered from quite serious postnatal depression and couldn’t cope with me. Postnatal depression is common enough for me to assume that there were other factors that led to me being put in care. I’m assuming she hurt me, my birth mother. I wasn’t even a year old. I’m glad I don’t remember anything.

During the first few weeks, I saw Tijana every day. We went to the Freshers Fair together and debated buying membership to the union, finally deciding in favour when someone at the stall told us that not only was Ben and Jerry’s sold at the union at cheaper prices than those at Sainsbury’s, but it was sold there long after Sainsbury’s closed, too. When students handing out flyers for the Assassin’s Guild started circling us, an expression of distaste crossed Tijana’s face and she was, quite suddenly, gone. I wasn’t fast enough. One of them, a very large guy, and brooding, not unlike like a manatee with matted hair, was wearing red-and-white-checked trousers and a top hat with a tag in it for ten shillings and sixpence. He started hovering across my path, his arm out, doing something very like cornering me, smiling and cajoling, saying I looked like the sort of girl who was really game. Game for what? Pretend murder. I smiled, took a flyer, then pretended I saw someone I knew and strolled away without looking back.

Someone else called out to me from a stall — their accent was African—“Hello my sister!” I knew he was only joking, but I bridled anyway. He was tall and shaven-headed, good-looking if you liked tall and shaven-headed, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt as a nice touch of irony. He waved his clipboard at me. “You should put down your e-mail address for the Nigeria Society mailing list,” he said.

I frowned and said “No,” and tried to pass him, but he pressed a leaflet into my hand anyway. I walked away with it, wanting to drop it on the floor, but I thought he might still be watching, then wondered why I cared if he was watching, then wondered why I was so upset. Because I was upset.

Tijana caught up with me, looking pleased with herself. “What were those strangely dressed people?” she asked. I told her, but she’d already lost interest and plucked at the leaflet in my hand. “What’s that? The Nigeria Society? Did you sign up?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

(I will really resent you if you persist with this)

“Too busy.”

“For what? Don’t you want to meet people? I think you should join.”

“Yeah? And why don’t you join the fucking refugee society?” I knew as soon as I said it that she would probably never speak to me again. If I were her I would never speak to me again. I walked away to spare her the trouble of having to get away from me. Wanker. I was such a wanker. I gritted my teeth and ran across Parker’s Piece, slapping savagely at lampposts as I passed them. I was almost back at college when I noticed Tijana was walking silently behind me. She smiled when I looked at her.

“I didn’t mean to say what I said,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I could hear you calling yourself a wanker this whole time.”

She tutted, hugged me and kissed my cheek. I hugged her back, harder.

In the first couple of weeks I only caught glimpses of Miranda — Miranda in the phone booth across from our college, dialling, waiting and hanging up, dialling, waiting and hanging up. I saw her leaving the college library one morning, her arms crammed with more books than we were allowed to take out.

“How’s it going?” I asked her.

“I’m just trying to read everything I can,” she said. She seemed out of breath.

“You’ve got all term,” I said, and she nodded politely and wobbled away.

Miranda wasn’t among us gowned girls in cocktail dresses at formal hall. She didn’t come to the Freshers Week events, she didn’t watch TV in the common room, she wasn’t anywhere. I remembered something from a short story I’d read, about how the girl you want is the girl you see once and then she is nowhere to be found. The girl who does not appear in the crowded room.

Tijana and I got into the habit of 2:00 AM visits to the Van of Death. Apart from the men who worked the van, we were often the only sober people there. Everyone else was on their way back from a club or something. As we stood in queue, watching fat melt and resolidify between busy spatulas and the heat of the grills, I heard someone behind me, probably an English student at our college, mention the name Miranda Silver. I eavesdropped intently then, but all the guy said was that she was an affected little goose. “She almost didn’t go to matric dinner, you know. She said she didn’t care for dinners, and compared cutlery to cages.”

He sounded indulgent of her, but that didn’t change the fact that “affected little goose” was quite an affected thing to say in and of itself. We got to the top of the queue, and, as usual, Tijana ordered salad in a bap, which I continued to consider a pointless choice. She eyed me sternly, daring me to say anything as she opened the bap and splashed chilli sauce all over the inside of it. I talked. I touched on a variety of subjects unrelated to Miranda Silver — the parallels between hall food and the meals served in old people’s homes, the fact that getting drunk was already boring, concerns surrounding my inability to actually answer either of the essay questions I’d been set so far.

Tijana took one of my chips and said, “Miranda was at my old school.”

“Not friends?”

Tijana said, “No,” and she smiled at her own seriousness.

At college, my inability to sleep became terrible. Very quickly I learnt to seek Tijana out late at night. There were other people that I had begun talking to, people on my course, people who lived on my staircase and swapped CDs with me, but no one I could legitimately ask to climb graveyard gates at 4:00 AM with me for Fortean experiments in spirit photography. No one but Tijana, who yanked her hair up out of her face in a Buffy-esque ponytail and said, “Let’s go.”

She trembled all over as the notched shadow of the church fell on her, but she kept her hands steady enough to set my tripod up properly. She insisted on setting the tripod up, as if my doing it would somehow skew the results. We drank sugared tea from flasks and talked and measured each other’s Nosferatu-like shadows while the camera clicked serenely and independently.

Once I rolled her onto her back on the grass and looked into her face to learn her opinion about that. She laughed. I kissed her. She kissed me back, hard, and wrapped her legs around me as if she wanted to climb up me. Her skin was fever hot. When I kissed her neck I felt her breath catch in her throat. She rolled me over and sat up on top of me, and we kissed and fumbled with buttons and put hands and lips to bare skin until one or the other of us said, “I can’t,” and if it was me I don’t know why because I wanted to. Maybe I’m just remembering it wrongly to help me get over the rejection.

Once before I have been the scared one, in a best friendship brought from primary school to secondary school. It was the hugest secret that Catriona and I had ever had. It had to be. Adorned with yin-yang “best friend forever” necklaces and whatever else glittered on the racks of Claire’s Accessories we were, are, Faversham girls. By the time she and I were nine we were using the word “dyke” as a deep insult, even though our parents told us not to — we’d even use it on boys. There was something in the way my mum would say, “Don’t say that,” that let me know that calling someone a fat dyke wasn’t as bad as swearing.

Cat had red hair and so did her brother, Paddy, who kept chatting me up. Red hair didn’t work on Paddy. The first kiss with Cat might have been in a public place — at the cinema, I think. It’s hard to say because I was so scared that it felt as if we were kissing in front of everyone every time. I let Cat go farther and farther with me, and I touched her as little as possible. She allowed that poor love of mine. It was the dread that comes about when you are allowed to have something that seems costly and yet you’re not asked for payment.

In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?

The thing with Cat took about a year to grow, and about a week to be finished. The whole thing was so intense, so full of hurt that when I look back at it I squint. I want it forgotten. Not the way she was — she brought her body to mine with this strange and shocking innocence, when she came the first time she said “I love you” into my ear, words convulsive and unintended, not needing a reply. It’s the way that I was that needs forgetting. I behaved like a boy or something. The ending was clumsy and stupid and the friendship couldn’t survive it.

Tijana and I stuck to Scrabble and neutral talk on the other nights. She worked at essays, her flashlight steady between the gravestones as she crashed through her reading list hundreds of pages at a time, marking significant lines with sticky index tabs. She was not easily distracted; when it was her turn at Scrabble, she looked up from her notes and I could feel the words she’d just read still migrating from the pages and into her.

The guy who’d sat on the other side of Tijana at matric dinner came up to me while I was in the computer room and started talking about this and that. I kept my answers brief and shrugged a lot. Finally, he came to his point.

“Tijana’s probably got a boyfriend, hasn’t she,” he said. He still seemed like a fool to me. A low-key fool, but a fool all the same. So I said “Yeah.” Actually I didn’t know. Did she? Maybe at home.

The University Library is a mouth shut tight, each tooth a book, each book growing over, under and behind the other. The writing desks are placed in front of bookshelves, some of them between bookshelves so that whoever is sitting at the desk gets a feeling of something dusty, intangible and unspeakably powerful, something like God, watching them through tiny gaps in the shelves. People kept trooping past the desk I’d chosen, in search of books and free seats, and within half an hour I’d stopped looking up when someone passed. I wanted to read about the soucouyant. I wanted to write about her, I still do. What do I want to write? Just a book, probably, another tooth for the UL’s mouth. Something that explores the meaning of the old woman whose only interaction with other people was consumption. The soucouyant who is not content with her self. She is a double danger — there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to me?

After a listless half hour flipping through critical essays on Dracula, I went in search of the likeliest-looking soucouyant-related titles that came up on the computer. I found Miranda at a desk beside a staircase on one of the wings. She had her head down, and her hair blackened the pages of her opened book. I thought she was sleeping, but as I came closer I saw that her eyes were open and she was looking sideways at me. I said, “Whoa,” before I could check myself.

“Hello Ore.” She didn’t sit up. Maybe she couldn’t actually bring herself to. She hadn’t even taken her coat off.

“How’s it going,” I said. She was much too thin. She was serene, like someone accustomed to sickness, someone who lay back to back with it in bed. For a second her face made no sense to me. Her enormous eyes, the curve of her lips, they locked me out. I couldn’t imagine ever touching her.

She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gun-point. She said she wished she could sleep more.

I looked around for a seat, so I wouldn’t have to stand up and crick my own neck in order to see her properly.

She’s unreal,

she’s an affected little goose

The nearest empty seat was two bookshelves away. I tucked the three books I had under my arm (I looked too studious just holding them) and stayed standing.

“I haven’t been sleeping that well either,” I told her.

She didn’t say anything and I racked my brains to fill the silence, but before I could add to what I’d said, she said, “I think it is the moon.” She said the words softly, to some tune of her own devising, and she drew the word “moon” out for a long moment. It was so odd and unnecessary that something told me that I had to proceed carefully.

“The moon?”

“What do you do when you can’t sleep?”

“Walk about,” I said.

We looked at each other for a decade, or at least eight months.

“Let’s walk about tonight,” she said. She gave her night away so easily that it was almost impersonal — this conversation could have happened between her and anyone who’d come up the stairs and said they had trouble sleeping. But it wasn’t like that somehow. It was like at the interview, when I was so panicked that I heard myself singing “Frère Jacques” under my breath and sat feeling detached from my mouth while my voice got louder and louder and I had to get up and take the song home, locked up under my temples. I had known that I was going to apply to Cambridge since I was fourteen. I have always tried to do more than anyone else, crouched over essays carefully ticking boxes I’d drawn on a separate sheet of paper to remind myself of all the key points so I would drop as few marks as possible. I type everything, and if typing is impossible I write in block capitals, so safe in the perfect spaces formed inside my O’s and P’s and Q’s that I could step into one of them and throw it around me like a hula hoop. I may be adopted, but I know exactly who I am. I am desperately trying to earn my keep. No one told me I had to, but in a way that’s why I’m trying. Other people’s parents expect things from their futures, but mine say nothing, as if, after the fact of my childhood rescue, I don’t need any future. I suppose they think they’re helping by not putting any pressure on me. Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Suis-je mort? Am I dead? Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines! Miranda had come and looked at me and stopped “Frère Jacques” up with her soft, light voice, and she’d known she could do it before she did.

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

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

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

“How’s it going,” I said.

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

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

“Yeah?”

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

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

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

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

I whacked her with the pillow. “What?”

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

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

“Bitch! It’s exorcism water.”

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

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

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

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

“Come on,” I said. “Eat your dinner.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please don’t be cross,” she said.

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

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

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

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

“And who’s she?”

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

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

I found myself nodding uncontrollably

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

“You’ve… changed a lot,” I said.

She said, “Let’s go for that walk.”

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

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

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

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

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

She seemed amused. “Why not?”

All I could give her was an “Um.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If you say so, Miranda.”

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

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

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

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

I said, “Miranda.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I stammered finishing the story, because of Miranda’s gaze, her eyes like swords. We were nose to nose.

“Thank you,” she said. “That was just the thing.”

“The girl doesn’t get away. It’s not a story about her getting away. She was born free.”

“The soucouyant gets away though. Doesn’t she count as a girl?”

I drew back. “No, she doesn’t,” I said. “She is a monster. She dies.”

“Does she?”

“All monsters deserve to die.”

Miranda didn’t say anything.

“Miranda,” I said. “Come on. The soucouyant is bad. She sucks the life out of people.”

“That is true.” She smiled in a way that undid every knot in me. There was no way I could be afraid to kiss her when she smiled like that, so I kissed her, and she kissed me back and we were like that until we gasped for air and laughed at each other, her eyelashes scraping my cheek so when I blinked they felt like my own.

Miranda woke to find Ore smiling at her from a cushioned window seat across the room. The curtains were wide open. It was more sun than Miranda could tolerate. She threw the covers over her head, then changed her mind and got out of bed, reaching for her bag, which she’d spotted on top of Ore’s bookshelf.

Ore said: “Do you never go a day without that red stuff?”

Miranda dropped her rouge back into her purse without opening it.

Ore saw her expression and put her books down. She drew Miranda to the window seat. There wasn’t room for the two of them and their legs were happily entangled.

Miranda looked down. “Is it alright to say how much I like this?”

Ore kissed her forehead. “What?”

“The way our skin looks together.”

Ore’s beautiful lips. Before she could reply, Miranda kissed her mouth, first the top lip, then the bottom, then both together, then a tiny bite on the bottom lip for good measure. There. So this was kissing, a thing she could probably do forever. Decent sleep after so long made her feel elastic. Even when she’d left Ore’s room and sat through two lectures and muttered her contribution to a supervision on an essay question about The Tempest, a song called “Earth Angel” played in her head all morning — also three trumpets and a piano.

Miranda’s father came to visit her — they went to Browns and he scoffed languidly when the baked camembert arrived at their table. Miranda counted out the acceptable number of bites of food she’d agreed with Lily, then doubled them to please him. He didn’t notice. He only noticed the food that she didn’t manage.

Everything was fine at home, he said, but he missed the sound of her sewing machine and doo-wop CDs, and he even missed the badly disguised smell of Eliot’s marijuana.

“Où le marché est?” Miranda asked, smiling.

Luc sighed.

“Have you spoken to Eliot?”

“Yes, some days ago.”

“Oh,” Miranda said. She had been trying to call Eliot from pay phones nearly every day, shivering as she dialled, her gloves slipping around her fingertips as she pressed the numbers that Eliot had written on her hand on the way to the airport. He hadn’t answered once.

Luc scanned Miranda’s face. “I think he only called because he needed a certain sum of money, half of which I allowed him.”

As a diversion Luc spread some of the illustrations for his cookbook out onto the restaurant table. The cookbook was to be published, and the final plan was to combine photographs of each dish with little ink drawings done by a friend of a friend who had already read parts of the manuscript. In the illustrations, the chef was a round-faced stick man in a puffy chef’s hat — his face was free of all features except a neatly curled moustache, which twitched when he was moderately excited by his work and spun around like a windmill when he was extremely pleased. When Luc packed the drawings up, Miranda, at a loss for things to do, offered to show him the Botanical Gardens, or to take him around her college.

“Has it changed since you moved in?”

Miranda’s college “aunt” was a pigtailed girl from the year above that Miranda had not spoken to again after the first day. The college aunt had given Luc and Miranda a tour of college. Miranda confessed that nothing had changed.

“Then I’ll be off,” her father said. His glance skipped sternly off her three-quarters-full plate as he stood up from the table.

She wrote an essay in her room until evening, tossing her responses to what she’d read onto paper without even checking it for sense. She followed Eliot’s rule of always making recourse to the essay question at the beginning and end of every paragraph, no matter how obvious the connection. He had sworn to her that teachers loved it, and it seemed to be true. She didn’t know how it could be that she hadn’t spoken to Eliot properly for weeks. She felt she had done something wrong, but what?

Ore was so stark in her mind that Miranda bypassed her name; she didn’t so much think of Ore as think her. On days before this one Miranda had lingered on her way back from the post room and looked at Ore in the common room, reading Varsity over someone else’s shoulder; it seemed Ore never saw fit to pick up her own copy, even though there were plenty of each recent issue stacked under the snooker people. Ore read the student newspaper without a smile or a snigger — everything she read seemed very grave to her. But sometimes Ore read things aloud and the person whose shoulder she was reading over would laugh. Ore had a gap between her front teeth and wore her jumpers too big so that the neck slipped down on one side and bared her shoulder and the strap of her vest. Now Ore had kissed her. She had tasted Ore’s mouth. A tisket, a tasket… momentarily, she wondered what the goodlady would have to say about that, then forced herself to knit meanings out of the words in the book before her. Don’t concentrate on Ore. Don’t witch her to death, Miranda.

She took a stick of chalk from her cigarette box, but before she could raise it to her mouth it broke in her hand. Her palms were clammy. She licked her lips and asked Lily a question; she asked Jennifer and her GrandAnna the same question: How is consumption managed?

She heard stones rattle against her window and pushed it open. Down on the street, Ore closed her hand over her remaining pebbles and stepped out of the path of a cyclist. She was wearing a blue dress over her jeans, and at least four belts around her waist. Her eyelashes were neon blue. It was complicated just to look at her.

“Can I come in?”

They tried to cook dinner for themselves, something with rice and dried beans and fresh tomatoes and nutritional value, but the water in the pot shrank much faster than expected and everything burnt black while they kissed and kissed and kissed on Miranda’s sofa. The food burnt even though they’d left the door open so they would smell an emergency.

Ore rose, her lips stinging, to turn the cooker off before anyone else on the staircase complained, and while she was gone Miranda crossed her arms over her body and watched, out of the corner of her eye, the perfect Miranda, who had taken Ore’s place on the sofa and crossed her arms too. She was giddy with hunger.

Ore came back and said, “So much for nutrition. Let’s go and fatten our calves.”

They went arm in arm and kissed in the street, bumping into people because they couldn’t keep an eye on where they were going and kiss at the same time. Boys thought they were drunk and whistled at them. Ore’s skin was hot, and her lips were dry. She touched Miranda’s face and said: “You’re burning up.”

There was a chip shop just off Market Square that displayed photos of its customers on one of its walls. Hardly anyone looked good in these photos. These were photos taken at the end of nights out — the featured subjects had spent hours rising in sweaty heat and then blithely collapsed, like soufflés. There was a photo of Tijana near the bottom. She was with two girls and a guy, none of whom Miranda knew. There was glitter in Tijana’s hair and the photo seemed to have been taken while she was in the middle of saying “What?” Miranda was surprised. But then what had she expected Tijana to do when they got here; evaporate?

They bounced down from the shop doorstep, and Ore commanded: “Now you tell me a story.” She held the paper cone full of chips between them as reverently as if it had been a ring to bind them. Miranda took a chip.

“Once upon a time, there was a woman who kept dreaming about a little girl called Eden. She knew exactly what Eden looked like, how tall she was, what her voice sounded like, how she smelt, all sweet and powdery. Everything. But she had never met a little girl called Eden.”

Already Ore had nearly finished the chips; Miranda stopped and gave her a reproachful look while she made up for the time she’d lost talking.

“Go on,” Ore said, after a few seconds, raising the cone up above Miranda’s head and out of her reach.

“Well… she didn’t know how she’d get to meet Eden,” Miranda improvised. “So one day she stood outside the gate of her local primary school at home time and called out: ‘Eden, Eden,’ in a motherly sort of voice as all the kids ran out.”

“And?”

“Well. One girl stopped and looked at her, and smiled mysteriously.”

Ore frowned. “And?”

“Well, it was Eden.”

“What, just like that? What’s the twist?”

“There is no twist, it was Eden. The little girl the woman had been dreaming about.”

“So what then?”

“Er… well, then the woman took Eden’s hand and they went home together.”

Ore looked disgusted as she threw the last few chips into her mouth. “And lived happily ever after, I suppose,” she said.

Miranda smiled. “In a way. As they walked home the woman began to remember why she had been dreaming about Eden, and why Eden had been sent to her.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. As soon as they got home she strangled Eden and cooked her for supper. Then she went to bed all drowsy and full and she settled in to get ready for the next dream. The dreams were like a menu, you see, only someone else chose the courses for her.”

Ore laughed, but she seemed aghast. “You just made that up on the spot I suppose,” she said.

“Indeed no, it’s a very old story. Older than the one about the soucouyant,” Miranda teased. “Now. Your turn again.”

Ore thought.

“Okay, this one is true and, I suppose, more boring because of that. For a couple of years I had a birthday every other month. If I wanted my mum to make me a cake I’d just say that I felt as if it was my birthday. My mum would say, It’s not your birthday yet, wait a bit. And I’d be like… I’m not even asking for presents, just some cake to show you’re glad I was born, and Mum would get flustered and say, But it’s not your birthday! And then I’d pull out the silencer, which was: ‘How would you know? You weren’t there, man.’ She’d bake the cake after that. But one day my dad took me aside and said that I couldn’t keep doing it, that I was worrying her. He said my mum thought I was trying to tell her that I didn’t like her. I went through the whole how do you know when my birthday is, you weren’t even there thing with him and he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Let me show you something.’ He showed me my birth certificate. It was just like he’d showed me a gun — suddenly I was looking at something that had no life of its own but was stronger than me. I was eight. I hadn’t known that everyone had a bit of paper that proved the date and place of their birth and all that stuff. I was trapped. And embarrassed. Yeah, so I stopped doing the frequent-birthday thing—”

Miranda interrupted her: “What are you doing?”

“What?” Ore said. “You mean why are my eyes closed? I was trying to see it while I said it. To make sure it was true.”

“And did you?”

“Yes.”

“You might want to keep your eyes open whilst walking,” Miranda said.

“You wouldn’t let me walk into anything,” Ore said.

Miranda took her hand.

SADE

puts the kettle on.

Sade puts the kettle on,

Sade puts the kettle on and sparks fly out. Electric shocks say it’s time to leave, bye bye. They get inside your head and hurt you so you can’t speak you can only tremble and for some time the will to open your eyes escapes you, bye bye. A word that you believe in jangles in your head until it no longer has meaning.

Courage, cabbage, cuttage, cottage.

What was the first word?

Cabbage?

Very good.

Juju is not enough to protect you. Everything you have I will turn against you. I’ll turn sugar bitter for you. I’ll take your very shield and crack it on your head. White is for witching, so ti gbo? Do you understand now? White is for witching, Sade goodbye.

THE MIDNIGHT

I woke up and Miranda was on top of me, clinging to me, I knew she would be lost. Her head was thrown back, and her mind was gone from her eyes. When I tried to move, she clung tighter, her thighs locked over and around mine. Her head was up; her eyes looked down but didn’t follow me. She wasn’t awake. I rolled off the bed and she came down with me. I had to prise her fingers from around my neck one by one. I heard her bones click. That broke the spell, and she came to, weeping.

“I can’t stay here,” she said, and got up, hurrying around the room, gathering things and dropping them. “I’m to go home. The house wants me,” she cried. The moonlight made her look blue. It made her look as if she was dead. She opened my window and sat herself on the ledge; she dangled her bare legs over it. We were four floors up.

I approached her carefully. “Miranda. You can go home in the morning. There aren’t any footholds down this wall — you can’t climb down it. If you try you’ll fall and you’ll… you’ll be hurt. The house doesn’t want that. It wants you back in one piece.” Her back was to me; I couldn’t see her face.

“She doesn’t. She doesn’t care how I come back. You can’t hear how we… how they’re calling me,” she said. She bent forward

(did she mean to fall headfirst?)

wobbled and almost toppled from the sill, but I grabbed her shoulder and dragged her off the ledge with a sharp jerk, sharper than I meant it to be, but I was scared. I lay spread-eagled over her, pinning her to the floor until her struggling turned into giggles. “What are you doing?” I heard her ask, in her usual voice, her waking voice. I let her crawl out from under me, watched her walk up to the window and close it. She got back into bed, but I stayed where I was. The floor felt secure.

•

Ore spent afternoons reading to Miranda. Miranda liked hearing The Arabian Nights best, because then Ore used all her voice, changing accents and tone and speed — when she was a djinn, she threw her voice so that it towered. Miranda was awed by the strange sorceress who could force men to become birds and mules by throwing dust into their faces and commanding: “Wretch, quit thy form!” On the very rare occasion that her necromancy failed and the man stood before her unchanged, the sorceress would laugh coyly and say that she had only been playing.

Miranda lay on her side in her bed, or in Ore’s, and she heard Ore and dreamed with her eyes open. She grew to find a sunlit room bearable; she no longer feared a change of light that she couldn’t control. She stopped taking the pills she’d been prescribed. She washed them down the drain, ripped the labels off the bottles and threw them away. There wouldn’t be any of those doctors’ letters reminding her to make another appointment until after Christmas.

She felt fine, but she began to feel followed. When she passed through the back gate of her college, it took an age until she heard the gate close behind her. But as she turned the corner into New Court, no one else came through the arch. Clare College had prettier grounds than her college, and she took big detours so that she could pass through them on her way to and from supervisions, fanning herself with a rolled-up essay and catching falling leaves in the skirt of her coat. And there came moments when she knew that there was someone behind her, remaining out of sight by taking one step for every five that she took. Other people moved past her over the bridge between the gardens; they carried books and bags and musical instruments, they were on their way to places. But not the person she felt hovering up in the air behind her, doubling the path she’d walked from Ore’s room to her supervision, or from her supervision to hall. She paid attention to the sense of surveillance because it seemed unconnected to the night. She never felt followed at night, and that made this feeling she had less likely to be paranoia. Probably. She was afraid. Afraid that she was imagining the surveillance, afraid that it was real. When she entered a room she tried to look at everyone in it individually, trying to catch the person who had just been looking at her.

•

For at least ten minutes most evenings I’d taken to waiting outside a phone box on King’s Parade while Miranda tried to call her brother. I watched her stiffen expectantly and then slump, and it made me dislike her brother. There was no way that he was so busy that he couldn’t answer the phone just one of the times that she called. There was no way he couldn’t find five minutes to e-mail her or something. When Miranda came out of the phone box I’d get her a hot chocolate in the yellow-tinged gloom of a vaulted underground café on Market Square. She’d make excuses for him.

I said, “I think he is probably just self-absorbed.”

She kicked me in the shin. It’s no joke being kicked in the shin by a chick wearing stilettos. I was in pain.

Miranda found out about a rock ’n’ roll dance night at Fisher Hall, and she fetched a flared skirt with a poodle embroidered on it from her wardrobe. The skirt was pink, and she tied a pastel-pink scarf around her neck in a jaunty bow. I think that was the only time I saw her wearing a colour other than black. I couldn’t find anything similar, so I settled for wearing a crinoline under a strapless polka-dot dress that already had a big skirt. She tied pink ribbons to the ends of my plaits. I left my room with her kisses tingling on my shoulder blades.

When we got to Fisher Hall, I found out that Miranda could jive. She grabbed my hand and shimmied in circles, flicking her heels and flapping her hands as if the music the Elchords were making was mowing her down. She said she had learnt the style from a videotape. I just shuffled and two-stepped and let her use me as a prop. I couldn’t get five minutes’ rest, either — the other dancers stayed away. They cast admiring glances but stuck with their partners.

At the end of the dance Miranda was so exhausted that she lay flat on the floor by the emptied drinks table, unable to move even to minimise the effort of the people who laughed nervously and stepped over her. I made her drink lemonade through a straw, and got her back to her room on a sugar rush, singing too lay too lay peppermint stick. I wanted to say something to her, something like “Hey I like you,” or “You’re so so pretty. You’re actually gorgeous.” She had a black sash tied around her head; it drove stray strands of hair behind her ears and suddenly even her ears were beautiful.

“Why don’t you take a picture,” she said, flapping her hand at me. “It’ll last longer.”

I climbed onto her bed and tucked myself around her, my knees against the backs of her knees, my stomach against her back. We were both trembling.

“Nice ears,” I said.

Our bodies struck like matches; she changed form under my hands, I went slowly, slowly,

(only do as much as we both want)

her nipples hard under my lips, her stomach downy with the fuzz that kept it warm, the soft hollows of her inner thighs. She said, “Please stop.”

I flopped down beside her, turning her face towards me, stroking her hair. Her hair felt endless in the dark. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” Then, surprisingly, she asked me if I was okay.

“Not really, not if I’ve upset you. Did it feel weird?”

“No. Well, a little, perhaps. It was… I don’t know. Too much, probably. I’ve never… not even with a boy.”

I know I said something, but whatever I said made no sense. She was so worried that there was no way for me to assure her that I was no marauder out to feast on the shattered remains of her hymen or something. My fingers snagged in her hair and her head jerked on the pillow. She got up and got dressed and I did too, trying to think of a way to stop this becoming a crisis.

I caught up with her at the college gate. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

We both smiled, embarrassed, not at each other, in different directions. “What are you sorry for?” we said.

I felt every vein in me move closer to the surface of my skin, all veins plucked in one direction as if I was a stringed instrument.

She opened the college gate with her key and stepped out onto the street. I followed her; she hadn’t said that I couldn’t. It was full moon. No one was out, and it was so cold that our breath stained the air around our heads. Birds chirped. I don’t know what kind of bird chirps at night. We walked towards the mill pond.

“My mental health is questionable anyway,” she said, not looking at me. She told me she’d been in a clinic for just over five months because she’d had a breakdown and forgotten who she was. I sat down on a low wall; the river was at my back. She sat down too.

“What, the breakdown came just all of a sudden?”

“No. There was this one night when something went wrong. Some kind of splinter swerved in my brain or something.”

“What happened on splinter night?” I asked.

“Splinter night?”

“The night everything went wrong.”

She paused. “I can’t remember.”

“Can’t you?”

She took a deep breath and rested her chin on her hand. “I have a theory,” she said. I nodded at her to continue and she said, “There’s this fireplace downstairs. I think I went down there for some reason. To hide, maybe. I thought it was all my fault my mother died. And I hit my head on the marble. My brain bled. I died.”

She watched me.

“Right,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Why don’t you think it’s possible?” she asked. “Because everyone can see me?”

“It’s not that. It’s just that it seems to me that the dead only return for love or for revenge. Who did you come back for?”

Neither of us smiled. I felt light-headed. I couldn’t believe that we were discussing this.

“Love or revenge,” she sighed. “Neither.”

“Miranda,” I said. “You’re not dead. Okay?”

“Ore,” she said. “I’m not alive.”

I had found the bottle of purple water that Tijana had given me; I ran my thumb over its lid in my pocket.

“Let’s suppose that what I say is true,” she said. “Just as a thought experiment. Let’s say I’m not alive anymore. What would be helping me to maintain the appearance of life? That’s the baffling thing.”

“That rouge of yours,” I said, giving in. I touched the dip between her collarbones, it was like touching thin paper as breath shifted through it.

“You should run,” she said, mournfully.

“No, you should,” I said. I pulled the bottle out of my pocket and shook it.

“What is that,” she said. Her pupils were huge satin cavities. There was no curiosity in them.

“Run,” I said, and threw some water at her. It didn’t touch her, but she blenched, turned and ran away between the trees.

I followed her. For someone with so little energy, she ran fast. She was really and truly running from me. She crossed the mill pond bridge, sprang right and headed back towards college. I tossed the exorcism water into a bin a second before I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. She slowed down immediately. She was crying angry tears.

“If you don’t believe me just say you don’t believe me. Don’t go along with me and then make fun,” she said. She shrugged my hand off her arm and collapsed onto the zebra crossing. There were no cars coming. I sat down beside her.

“I wasn’t taking the piss out of you,” I said, unsure whether I was lying. “I just wanted to give you some way of knowing for certain. It was an experiment. That was exorcism water.”

She sniffed. When I dared to look at her, she was smiling.

“Why was it purple?” She wore her tears like tiny crystals that tipped her lashes.

“Because… I don’t know.” I didn’t have the heart to make anything up.

“It’s so quiet,” she said. Three AM and as usual, the town was dead. She lay down with zebra stripes stacked behind her, and she pulled me down beside her. “Don’t you care where you come from? Don’t you wonder why you do the things you do and like the things you like?”

“Er… not really,” I said.

“Do you think it is her fault,” she said, without inflection.

“Whose?”

She didn’t repeat herself.

We looked at the moon and the moon looked at us. I had thought we would be able to hear when a car was coming, or feel the rumble of its wheels through the tarmac, but headlights were the only warning, and even then I noticed them so late that when we scrambled up from the road the car’s driver took fright and blared his horn at us as he went past.

We went back to college. I went to my room and Miranda went to hers.

I wanted to ask her something. I wanted to say, “If you’re dead, then why did you get up when the car came? Why bother?” But I didn’t want her to run from me again. And, I suppose, having died once there is no reason to die again.

I went home on the last weekend of term. I left most of my things in my college room, so all I had to take to the train station with me was a Reebok bag filled with dirty clothes. The last thing I did before leaving college was check my pigeonhole in the post room. Tijana was in there, checking for post herself. The mockney guy from the year above us, the one who’d wondered aloud whether Tijana had a boyfriend, was holding her hand and whispering in her ear while she giggled and read a letter. I was amazed. I shook my head. The mockney guy saw someone he wanted to speak to out of the post room window and bounded out of the door like a badly made puppy. As soon as he’d left, Tijana turned to me and said, “What are you all shaking your head for?”

“Well,” I said. “Are you with him?”

“What if I am?”

“Nothing. I just wouldn’t have thought you’d go for that type.”

“That type?”

I pointed at him. He was standing in New Court with another guy who looked just like him, laughing from only one side of his mouth. Couldn’t she see what he was?

“Tijana. He’s a public-school wanker.”

“How can you say that? You don’t even know him.”

“Have a good Christmas, Tijana.”

“Not knowing people doesn’t bother you, does it? That’s why you have this thing with the girl who hardly even exists. I mean, do you want to be with her, or is it that you want to be her?”

I wanted to wither her with a look followed by a superbly dismissive comment, but instead I said, “What?”

Tijana said, “Look at yourself. You’re disappearing.”

It wasn’t as dramatic as Tijana had put it. But that day I was wearing the jeans that I usually reserved for thinner days, and even though I’d belted them up as tightly as I could, they still slipped down over the spiky new angles of my hips. I couldn’t acknowledge it, though. The trick was not to think about the shrinkage, or how tired I was. I could not say aloud how draining it was to share a bed every night, how it became so difficult to breathe together, because if I said it aloud it would sound like a complaint and then it would become a complaint. I could not say anything against Miranda. There wasn’t anything bad to say, she did nothing wrong. I deferred thinking about the fact that for most of the term I had been eating and eating in my room with the door closed, crisps and chocolate and sausage rolls in the hours when Miranda’s lectures overlapped with my free time. I had never eaten so much, I had never wanted to eat so much. But my clothes kept getting looser. I would think about all this once I’d spent enough time unconscious in my own bed at home, beneath my poster of Malcolm X. “By any means possible”… first I would sleep alone, later I would look for wounds.

•

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

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

I didn’t send it.

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

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

I drank coffee.

I moved the furniture in the place I slept in

(moved it and moved it and moved it),

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can you come in or stay out, Dad?”

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

“Is that all? Nod nod? She’s… mad.”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

I asked, “Does Miri know?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you know about this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

Behave yourself, she wrote. Eat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(is it alright to say how much I like this

the way our skin looks together)

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

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

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

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

For a lullaby that afternoon I played her Vera Lynn’s Greatest Hits — there’ll be bluebirds over/ the white cliffs of Dover…

It was my little joke.

•

Luc and Eliot brought Miranda dinner in bed; the tray was silver and a single white rose flowed through the slim glass vase balanced in its corner. The food wasn’t troublesome: poached egg and a bright jumble of peppers and tomatoes and lettuce that stood for salad. Luc had carefully served the meal onto a saucer. On another saucer he’d placed a single chocolate-covered ganache, cut open with a knife so that she could see and smell the creamy paste inside.

She allowed Eliot to turn on her bedside lamp and sat up to eat with the tray on her lap, laughing as Luc pretended to covet her chocolate, stabbing a fork at it but always missing. This time it was easy to please him, easy to make the food disappear — it was so light and there was so little of it.

Eliot read aloud from Luc’s manuscript. The project, it seemed, had changed, from a book themed around seasonality to a cookbook for reluctant eaters. She recognised meals she’d pretended to like and struggled through as Eliot read them out, and she suppressed a smile. Before each recipe Luc included some small remark or anecdote. Before caramel ice cream he’d written: “Eliot’s first word was ‘mummy’—” Eliot broke off and sighed, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, Dad,” then returned to the text: “and Miranda’s first word, said very firmly a couple of seconds later, was ‘yummy.’ Eliot spent quite some time babbling ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ and looking very pleased with himself, but Miranda maintained a stately silence, as if she felt she had said enough.”

Miranda laughed. She kept forgetting that her father was capable of making her laugh.

Surprised, Eliot looked up from where he was sprawled on the floor with the manuscript, and Luc, seated on a chair he’d drawn up beside her bed, raised a hand as if to touch her face. He began to explain about the drawers he’d nailed shut, but before he finished she said she understood.

That night Miranda’s dreams were of the drawers that had been nailed shut, the ugly grey worms that stuck their twisted heads out of the wood. When she had slept enough, Miranda stumbled downstairs to turn the milky light of her torch on the shelves in the larder cupboard, looking for a screwdriver to undo her father’s work. When she found the screwdriver, she ran the torch beam along it, the bevelled silver of its tip, then she held it to her throat. Just to feel the chill of it. Her drumming pulse.

She heard and felt the life of the house; there was light and a smell of candle smoke outside the half-open larder door. There was music upstairs. Her GrandAnna laughed at something Lily said. They were in a good mood, like guests sipping on aperitifs before a main meal.

Jennifer Silver danced a few steps of a song that came on and Miranda heard their feet on the ceiling and thought, What if I push this point in? She wondered if the house would come down this time.

A pair of hands slipped over her eyes and rested there, heavy and warm. The screwdriver fell.

“Hello Gretel,” her brother said in her ear. She heard the screwdriver roll across the floor and knew he had kicked it. No more music, and Lily and her GrandAnna stopped talking. Their silence had breath in it, though, as if they were simply waiting.

“Hello Hansel.” She laid her own hands on his wrists; he kissed the tip of her ear.

“So we’re in a fairy tale… I knew it,” she said, as he led her out of the laundry room, steering her into the sitting room, switching the light on with his elbow. “You weren’t in South Africa, you were in a gingerbread house, getting fattened up, weren’t you? And there weren’t any telephones in there.”

He uncovered her eyes, sat her down on the sofa and handed her a stick of chalk. She held it and looked up at him, blinking at the sudden rush of light. He rubbed his head and left flecks of chalk in his hair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just really shit.”

“You are a bit,” she said, and tried to look at him as if she forgave him everything.

“Dad’s just trying to help you,” he said, and as he continued speaking she found she could tune him out, swap his words for the conversation between Lily and GrandAnna. They were talking about her. She licked the chalk and their voices filled the room; she kept looking at Eliot to see if he heard. Lily and GrandAnna were on her side. “Luc shouldn’t have nailed Miranda’s drawers shut,” Lily was saying. “That was the wrong thing to do. Miranda didn’t deserve that. She has always tried to be good.”

Whenever Eliot paused in his speech, Miranda nodded politely. Eventually he fell asleep with his head on her shoulder, their hair mixing together. She made no move to disturb him.

I am good, Miranda thought. I am good, I am.

•

Mum was in Dad’s minicab and parked, probably illegally, outside the station at Faversham. I started to get into the car, but she got out first. “What’s this?” She picked up one of my arms and let it drop. She tapped my wrist, pinched my cheek, poked me in the stomach. “Did you leave the rest of you in Cambridge?”

Her hair was greyer. I forgot to look at her eyes. Instead I could see the smiling and the frowning she’d done while I was gone, her face quietly folding itself away into some scary distance. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I hugged her. She smelt of flour and vanilla.

“I made you a birthday cake,” she said. “In case you decided to have a birthday today. Remember that, eh?”

Inside the car I buckled up my seat belt, wanting to wrestle the tip of my tongue out of my mouth with my hands, to see if that would encourage sound. She didn’t seem to notice that I hadn’t said anything, not even hello. She looked over at me as she started up. She said, “You probably won’t be having any cake, though, by the looks of you. Cambridge has turned you bougie, hasn’t it. I’ll make you a nice cup of tea instead.”

At last: “Bougie? Are you really calling me bourgeois? What are you on about, Mum?”

Mum grinned. “Your figure’s all boyish now. You know, like one of those girls with skin from a makeup ad who goes off to a lovely house in Italy and has the most beautiful breakdown because the philosophy books she’s reading are too much for her brain.”

“Oh one of those girls,” I said. “And she lounges around in a lace nightie and a silk dressing gown all day. She is also called Cecily.”

“Or… Laura. Our poor darling Cecily-Laura couldn’t put away so common a thing as a piece of cake. It would… hurt her.”

Mum’s “posh” accent was hilarious. She was laughing at it before she’d even finished speaking.

“Oi,” I said. “I’m going to hurt that cake.”

“Hm,” said Mum.

“Jam and cream, yeah?”

“ ’Course.”

The cake was Mum’s best yet, but I ate more of it than I wanted to. I couldn’t have Dad shaking his head and thinking I’d changed. I sat cross-legged in front of the TV with Mum and Dad on the sofa behind me, watching EastEnders and eating so much cake I couldn’t taste it, licking cream off my fork to let them know I was still theirs.

“Mel’s coming round later. Leave some for her, will you,” Mum said, astonished.

We had a crowd at Christmas dinner, because Mum insisted that everyone come over even though there wasn’t that much room. Me, Dad, Mum, aunts and uncles (three of the former and two of the latter), and my cousins, Melanie, Sean, Adam and Abbie.

Abbie was eleven and kept saying that everything was “so weird,” We had rare roast beef and potatoes because none of us really liked turkey, and Abbie said, “It’s so weird to be having beef for Christmas dinner.” She also said, “It’s so weird not to have the fairy on top of the tree this year,” and “If you think about it, gravy is so weird.”

Sean’s and Adam’s dogs chased each other around the room — Sean and Adam said that the dogs weren’t allowed to have names, so when they were in earshot we just identified them by colour — the black one was Sean’s and the brown one was Adam’s.

When Adam and Sean weren’t around I whispered the dogs’ names into their ears. The black one was Puck and the brown one was Marco-Polo, because he had knowing eyes, as if he’d been around. I knew that Mel called Puck “Melchior” and she called Marco-Polo “Monty.” I don’t even know what Abbie called them. Without being sure why, Abbie, Mel and I agreed that nothing can live without a name. The dogs were confused, but patient, on the whole unusually sweet-tempered for Staffordshire terriers. Uncle Terry had brought them home to give my boy cousins something to keep them out of trouble. What Uncle Terry didn’t know was that Sean and Adam were trying to train their dogs to viciousness so that they could be taken to late-night dogfights in Gillingham. Apparently good money changed hands those nights. Sean and Adam kicked their dogs and subjected them to periods of hunger that were unpredictable in length and frequency. Sean and Adam set their dogs on each other round the back of Sean’s house and acted confused when Aunt Jan came out and asked what on earth was going on.

I’d known that they’d do these things even before Uncle Terry gave them the dogs — Sean and Adam were just like that somehow. If they’d lived in Victorian England they would have been the guys shouldering their way to the front of the crowd to get the best view at a public hanging. If you had to pay to see public hangings, they would pay.

Sean’s my age, and Adam’s two years older. I swear they’ve been skinheads since birth. Mel’s a year younger than me and is probably the only cousin of mine that I would even have contemplated introducing to Miranda. Mel is unflappable. She got her nose pierced because I dared her to, and almost immediately after that she became so sexy that her parents are all worried about her and are constantly asking where she is and where she’s going and who she’s with. Nothing tawdry, she just sits there and quietly smoulders, as if she’d quite like to be undressed. Dark blonde hair and narrow brown eyes. She sticks up for me when Sean gets stupid.

Some local British National Party bright spark had spent the week before Christmas posting leaflets into every accessible letter box in Faversham, and Sean had kept one to piss me off. So far I hadn’t given him a reaction, but in front of the TV after dinner, his tactic was working. It might have been because there was so little room — he, Mel and I were squashed together on the sofa while Abbie and Adam arm-wrestled each other for the remote in the space between their armchairs. Adam was clearly torn between exercising his obviously greater strength in order to watch the show he wanted to watch and the nobler option of letting Abbie win. He won, and Abbie jeered, “Do you feel like a big man now, beating an eleven-year-old at arm-wrestling, eh?”

“Do you know how many immigrants are living in the U.K. at present?” Sean read, for the fifth, sixth or seventh time. The leaflet featured clip art of a bulldog and a British flag on it. He was practically poking me in the eye with a corner of it.

“Sean, you’re so weird,” Abbie said. She fed the brown dog, Marco-Polo, with bits of beef she’d kept in her napkin. “Don’t, that meat is bloody. He’ll run wild,” I told her. I’d read about it in an article on keeping pet tigers, and it probably only applied to tigers, but I wanted to be sure that Abbie didn’t aid Sean and Adam in their pointless mission.

“We don’t know either,” Sean continued. “Neither does the U.K. government. The government lost track of immigration figures years ago.”

“Oh help,” Melanie said. “They’ll take all our jobs. Shut your face, will you, Sean.” She crumpled the leaflet up and threw it on the floor.

“Alright, Margaret Thatcher,” Sean said. He grinned at me. “You don’t take me seriously about that, do you, Ore?” I shook his head. His ears move when he grins. He’s my cousin and I don’t dislike him.

The phone rang. No one moved. We don’t answer the landline after twelve noon. After twelve noon, that’s our parents’ job. Mel and I reason that anyone we really want to talk to calls before noon, or will call us on our mobiles.

Mum came in and said to me, “It’s for you, lazybones. Your friend Miranda. What if I never answered the phone? You would’ve missed it.”

I muttered that she would have called back and took the phone.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said. Then: “Are you cross?”

“No,” I said. “But couldn’t you have called me on my mobile?”

“I lost it. I had to look you up in the phone book. I’ve phoned four other Linds asking for Ore.”

I laughed.

“I miss you,” she said.

I had to let a moment pass for credibility before I said I missed her too. I did. I wasn’t tired of sleeping alone yet. But I’d been having that feeling again. The one that came that night outside college when I thought I’d lost her, the force that worked against my marrow. So scared I had to hold on to her to stay upright. I still can’t sort out how I feel about Miranda. Even worse, I can’t sort out how much any of what I feel about her has to do with her.

“That one of your Cambridge chums?” Mel asked amiably, when I went back into the sitting room.

It wasn’t worth making a retort, so I just said, “Yup.”

“What’s she saying?”

“She wants me to visit her.”

“Where? In Buckinghamshiiiiiiiire?” Sean said, suddenly, without taking his eyes off the TV.

“Is she fit?” Adam wanted to know. I ignored him.

“Piss off, Sean. Dover, actually,” I said.

Adam leaned forward. “Is it… Dover is a fucking mess. Bare refugees pissing off the locals. A short piece ago some Kosovan brer and his landlady got stoned. On the actual doorstep of the landlady’s house! That’s dark, man. You’d better take care of yourself in Dover, or they’ll fucking bury ya. You can take my dog down there with you, if you like.”

I could tell his offer was only half a joke.

“Take mine too, if you like,” Sean said, not to be outdone. Mel laughed until she was too weak to sit up.

Tijana had told me about a good half hour spent on a bench in Dover’s main square while some old black guy had explained to her that refugees were a drain on the resources provided by the taxpayer, so I don’t know exactly what I thought Dover would be.

Three days later Miranda met me at Dover Priory and tucked her arm through mine. The town wasn’t that different from the Kent I knew. More shops and cars than Selling, more height and dizzying views than Faversham, but the people were pretty much the same. A group of white girls in their early teens, chains clanking from their baggy jeans as the music from the boom box one of them was carrying inspired them to make the street they walked on into an impromptu mosh pit. Women with Sainsbury’s bags and kids in prams, lost in the tight-lipped silence of the deeply annoyed. Granddads going into and coming out of a granddad pub. These didn’t look like people who’d stone refugees. If I didn’t see the refugee-stoners as I walked from the station to Miranda’s house with Miranda beside me, then where were they, the baddies? Did they (“They”) spring up at night like toadstools? It was hard to believe in their existence.

Miranda rummaged in her handbag for her door keys, then she said, “Oh!”

I thought we were locked out, but, keys in hand, she raised her wrist to her ear and listened. “The watch has stopped.”

She’d explained to me about Haitian time; now she meant that the watch really wasn’t telling any time at all. She turned the tiny dial on its side over and over. “It was my mother’s,” she said.

She wouldn’t let me handle the watch, but it looked alright to me. Undented. “It probably just needs a new battery.”

She didn’t reply. She looked stiff, as if in shock.

When we got indoors, Miranda said, “I’m going to go and wake Eliot up — wait and we’ll come and find you,” and disappeared. Her dad led me upstairs — he’d kept a guest room unbooked so I could stay over. He looked like a model or something — he was wearing an impossibly white shirt with the collar and sleeves unbuttoned, jeans and pristine navy-coloured Nikes. I followed him up the stairs.

“What are you studying?” he asked.

“Arch and anth,” I said.

A woman with an armful of leaflets came down the stairs — she wove between Miranda’s dad and me. She brushed against me. I automatically said, “Sorry,” and walked closer to the wall so as not to jog her. The leaflets were red, blue and white. The woman winked at me.

“Any good?” Miranda’s dad asked.

“What?”

“Arch and anth?”

“Oh. I recommend it.”

My room was the first door after the staircase on the second floor.

“Are you vegetarian?” he asked, showing me in. “Have you any allergies? What foods disgust you?”

His voice was endearingly melancholy. “No, no, and I can’t think of any off the top of my head,” I told him.

He turned to me, smiled and pressed my hand. I thought perhaps he had some kind of mental checklist — friends Miranda brings home are alright if they a) like their studies and b) aren’t fussy eaters. He said, “See you at dinner,” and left.

The room I’d been put in had big windows that looked out onto the road. Across the road was a bank of grass and some trees. The view was a winter view, grey and dispirited. But it wasn’t just the season. All the light in the house was subterranean, as if the place had been built out of mildew. I switched on the light and drew the curtains in the room open as far as I could, to little effect. I dropped my bag onto the bed.

There was an apple on my pillow.

It was white.

The apple had not been there when I came into the room with Miranda’s dad. I am certain that it hadn’t been there. It had arrived while my back was turned, while I had been at the window. My first instinct was to look up. It must have fallen from somewhere. The ceiling looked innocent and ordinary. I touched the apple; it was very cold, so cold that it was hard to run my fingers over it in a single smooth line. It was only white on one side. The other side was red. Paint? I scratched at the white side; there was plain fruit flesh underneath.

I dropped the apple into the bin on my way out of the room.

I don’t have a lift phobia, but the lift in that house daunted me from the first. It was a steel cage with lots of ornamental coils in the metal. It rattles as it arrives at the floor you’re standing on, but the doors open smoothly and silently. I took the stairs — Miranda had told me that it was only a flight up to hers and Eliot’s rooms. It seemed more like four. But in an unfamiliar house, when you’re uncertain where you’re going, every movement is prolonged by the sense that you’re going to try the wrong door or get in someone’s way and bother someone. It doesn’t matter how big or small the space — if you don’t know it, you get lost in it. Somehow I was at the top of the house, looking at a door with a twist of rancid-smelling cloth nailed to it. I turned away to try my luck with the staircase again, but turned back when I heard whispering. It was as soft as snowfall, but it took over all my hearing. I couldn’t hear what exactly was being said, but the murmuring glowed in my skull and didn’t stop, not even when I covered my head with both hands. There was more than one voice.

Who is it?

Bent double trying to find a place in the air where the whispering was not, I opened the attic door.

She was in there alone, kneeling by her bed, a woman dressed entirely in silver and fire-engine red. She didn’t look at me, but a strength stood behind her — I’m thinking of the tarot card with the image of the smiling woman subduing a lion at the jaw with nothing but a gleaming hand. La force.

“What was happening in here?”

She looked at me then. Her face was notched with scars, but her gaze was soft. “What are you doing here? Go home.”

“I’m Ore,” I said, lamely. “Miranda’s friend.”

“I’m Sade,” she said. “Please go home.” She got up and closed the door in my face.

•

I almost walked into Miranda’s brother on the landing outside his room. Miranda came out behind him. They were holding hands.

When Miranda introduced us, Eliot turned the handshake into a complicated back-patting and finger-snapping thing he’d picked up in Cape Town. He did it with enough irony for me not to dread him. He was milder than I’d expected. Like Miranda, he smiled a lot, but more as if he was amused than as if he was trying to fend off the anger of the person he was speaking to. By the end of an hour’s lolling around in the sitting room I’d decided that he was alright. The sitting room was severe and full of space — the chairs were arranged a respectful distance away from the television screen — you could sit and converse in the armchairs by the window, or sit in the chairs in the middle of the room and switch the TV off so it wasn’t part of the conversation. It wasn’t the sort of room where you sat and ate snacks or meals while watching Neighbours. For example there were no cushions. My family uses cushions to protect our laps from hot plates.

I sat on the sofa beside Eliot and Miranda took an armchair miles away and began turning her watch dial. I smiled at her and she smiled back, nervously. We watched a film from their dad’s collection — a German film in black and white, about a serial killer who abducted only children, I think.

Eliot kept making comments and asking questions, which I welcomed, because after the first ten minutes the film became very slow. Eliot was obviously a stoner and collector of trivia — you could probably sit in companionable silence with him for half an hour and then he’d mention something about a rare toad or a semi-plausible conspiracy theory and then shut up for another half hour, or longer. For some reason he decided to address me by my surname only.

“Now look here, Lind… are you a Kentish maid, or a maid of Kent?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well. Where do you live?”

“Faversham.”

He reached across and went through the whole jazzy handshake thing again; I was better at it the second time.

“Maid of Kent, maid of Kent!” he and Miranda shouted.

“What?”

“You’re a Kentish man or maid if your home is west of the Medway — so places like Orpington are Kentish. You’re a man or maid of Kent if your home is east of the Medway, like Dover is, and Faversham is,” Miranda told me.

“Oh,” I said. So she and her brother carried maps of Kent in their heads. “But why?”

Eliot shrugged. “Ancient distinctions, man. Ever since the Angles and the Saxons…”

“What happened to them,” Miranda sighed. “The Angles and the Saxons and the Druids and the Celts and the Picts and the… who else?”

“Jutes,” I supplied, bored.

Miranda’s question was rhetorical, but Sade came in and answered with a great deal of satisfaction: “They died out oh.”

Sade bossed me into the kitchen, her hand on my elbow as she murmured, “Sorry about earlier,” and she poured me a drink. The drink looked like beer and it was bottled like beer, but it tasted of sugared vomit. I smiled politely at her over the top of the glass, but she tutted. “You are feeling like you can’t ask for what you want,” she said, and got a Guinness out of the fridge for me.

I pointed at the first drink she’d offered me. “What is that stuff?”

Sade raised an eyebrow. “Come on, get out. You don’t know Power Malt?”

“Never had it.”

“Never had malt? Heyeyeye.” She looked at me even more closely than before and washed her hands with invisible water. “Well. It happens sometimes.”

“So you live here?”

Sade snorted. “I keep house. As far as it can be kept.”

I looked out at the garden through the kitchen window. The sun was setting into storm clouds; there was smoky brightness outside, as if the world was being inspected by candlelight. I saw the woman who’d brushed me on the stairs the first time I’d gone up them. This time when I saw her I knew she wasn’t a houseguest. She was standing under one of the trees, standing so deep in the ground that the earth levelled around her ankles. As if she had no feet, as if she was growing. Her presence made the branches behind her jerk and contract, like hands trying to close around her but not quite daring to. She had her hand spread over her face. She was looking at me through her fingers. Miranda knew her. It was Miranda who had said: “Tell me about that woman, the woman with the covered face? Is she your mother?”

My hand moved to the window latch, making sure the window was locked, making sure the window was really there, keeping her out. More than anything else, I wished she couldn’t see me. I forced the need to blink into a second of something like prayer — go away, with my eyes squeezed shut — and when my eyes opened, she was gone. It took minutes for the trees to recover from their shivering fit.

“Sade,” I said. “Did you see—?”

Sade put her hand over my mouth. She had seen, but she seemed untroubled.

“Better don’t, it’s bad luck,” she said. “But… if anything, come to me.”

Her eyes begged me not to make a fuss. “Okay,” I said, but I scanned the entire garden all over again. Then I sat down. Sade had a book on the counter. When I asked her what she was reading she held up the cover so I could see. It was a Mills and Boon romance; a white nurse swooned in the arms of a white doctor. I told her about the soucouyant. While telling her I realised that the story of her is much more to do with how she is ended than how she began. We know that the soucouyant has preyed on younger souls for years and years, longer than anyone can remember. It’s as if she’s so wrong that even in the mind of the storyteller she must be killed immediately.

“That’s a good one,” Sade said. “I had not heard that before.” Then she asked: “Will you tell Miranda?” She wasn’t talking about the story I’d just told her.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I said.

“She wouldn’t understand. She’s different from us.”

I resented the “us.”

“Different from us how? As in, we are clairvoyant and she is not?”

“I’m sorry,” Sade said, eyeing me. “You are a maid of Kent, are you not?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m not mocking you,” she continued. “I believe it. But does she believe it?”

“Who are you talking about, Miranda, or the soucouyant?”

“Maid of Kent, do you want to know what your name means?”

“No, thank you.”

“It means…”

I put my hands over my ears and growled, but I still heard. She said my name meant “friend.”

“I heard those… voices in your room,” I said. “I almost thought there were other people in there with you.”

“Yes there are,” said Sade. “They’re always there.” She held up three fingers.

“Two of them tell me: You have no one. Jump. Open the window and jump. Join your old ones. It would be so easy. Jump, you have no one. On and on and on.”

I eyed her. “Do you ever think you’ll jump?”

Sade sipped at her Power Malt, her gaze distant. “It’s true that I have no one, you know. But the third one says, ‘Wait.’ Her voice is so kind. I don’t know who she is, I don’t know who any of them are, but all this other one ever says is ‘Wait.’ So I don’t even try to jump.”

“Sade,” I said. “Does this job pay well?”

She seemed amused at that.

“Then why do it? Do you have a British passport?”

She produced it from the pocket of her cardigan; it was bound in plastic, and inside the pages were as crisp as if she had only just received it.

“Five years,” she said, proudly.

“Then why do this job? You’ve got choices. Get a job that pays better. Go somewhere else. Don’t stay anywhere where people tell you to jump and die.”

“Normally you would be right,” said Sade, “but the other one says, ‘Wait.’ ”

I stared at the tribal marks on Sade’s face. She took my hand and drew it across the scar tissue, her expression matter-of-fact. “Only the men are marked, usually. It would be the men who go to war, I suppose. But I wanted marks. So I copied my father’s.”

“You did these yourself?” I had to touch them again after that.

Sade pressed her hand over mine and smiled into both our hands. “Salt keeps the cuts open until they learn to stay open by themselves.”

“Ouch.”

“Yes, much more than I can say.”

I thought, there is absolutely no one even a bit like you anywhere else.

“Sade, I want to ask you something,” I said. “If you say yes, I’ll believe you. Just tell me. There’s something wrong with this house, isn’t there?”

“It is a monster,” Sade said, simply.

While she had been talking, I’d taken the saltshaker that sat between us, and I’d poured small hills of salt into the pockets of my skirt. Sade made no comment, but when Miranda called me from the sitting room and I got up to go, she grabbed my arm and said, “Wait a second.”

She went to the kitchen drawers and took out some chillies in a plastic bag to give to me. They looked like crooked twigs — brown, but splashed with dark red where autumn had bled on them. She opened the bag and the smell made me cough. You didn’t season food with this kind of pepper, you destroyed nerve endings. I said thank you and attempted a hug. She waved me away.

Miranda showed me the fireplace, the white cave she’d thought she might have lost her life in. She stared at the marble, rubbed its dust onto her fingertips. I tried to get her to look at me without actually saying “look at me.” It didn’t work. Miranda showed me her psychomantium — the place was almost friendly, like being carried on salt water towards yourself. The mirror seemed to cause the darkness. We silently agreed not to raise the matter of the nailheads glinting from her sealed desk drawer, the fact that everything she had seemed to be on view, her underwear folded and stacked beside the heater, even her pens and pencils tied round with a rubber band and placed on her desk amongst papers and tubes of lipstick. I think Miranda was sad that she didn’t have more to show me. A fireplace and a black room were the only places in the whole house that she seemed sure of. In her bed we pulled her covers up to our chins and lay quietly, careful not to bump each other with the sharp parts of ourselves, the elbows and the knees, until our bodies had warmed each other. Then Miranda shifted and opened my mouth with her own. As we kissed I became aware of something leaving me. It left me in a solid stream, heavy as rope. It left from a hurt in my side, and it went into Miranda, it went into the same place in her. I tried hard to breathe, harder than I have ever tried at anything. I tried so very hard that I felt the strain on the blood vessels in my eyes. But I couldn’t. There was so much air passing between our lips but I couldn’t use any of it. It was like having my mouth blown into while my nostrils were pinched together. When I pulled away from Miranda she looked at me with eyes of puzzled slate.

I showered before dinner. I ran the water too hot as usual; I saw my face in the glass of the shower door and I concentrated on it as if it was a talisman or charm. A tune came unbidden, it was “Frère Jacques,” so I was clearly terrified. Hello monster, hello monster, I sang, Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? When I opened the shower door, tiny hooks of steam sank into the lino. There were huge white towels, hotel towels, draped over the towel rack and I took one and dried myself, keeping my eyes on my face. The towel the girl in the mirror was drying herself with—

I frowned and looked at my towel. Where it had touched me it was striped with

black liquid, as dense as paint

(don’t scream)

there were shreds of hard skin in it. There was hair suspended in it

“The black’s coming off,” someone outside the bathroom door commented. Then

they whistled “Rule Britannia!” and laughed.

Bri-tons never-never-never, shall be slaves

My skin stung. Where to put this towel? I grew ugly in my need to make sure no one ever saw it, my face collapsing in on itself as I hand-washed the towel in the sink. I dressed slowly and carefully, and by the time I’d put the towel on the rack to dry and opened the door, the passageway was empty.

Some other guests were booked in, so they ate earlier and Luc, Miranda, Eliot and I ate later. Candles flickered on the table. Miranda’s dad produced a fat thug of a winter stew, full of meat and turnip and other vegetables that crunched. There was red wine in it, too. It looked so rich on the plate that I balked.

“Is everything alright?” Miranda’s dad asked. He was at the head of the table, and Eliot and Miranda were opposite me. Suddenly everyone was looking at me. Eliot and Miranda were so alike. In photographs their twinhood was underwhelming, but in person, when they both had their eyes on you, you couldn’t sort one from the other — or you could, but not quickly enough to stop yourself saying the wrong name by mistake.

“It looks lovely,” I said. I added “sir,” in case I was supposed to call him “sir” and also because he reminded me of a teacher I’d had. I was careful not to let any food or water touch my lips — I tilted my glass and swallowed air, I lifted the fork to my mouth, spoke and rearranged the forkful of food on my plate whilst speaking. I wiped my mouth with a napkin, left red smudges on it, stared and tried to reason the colour away. Was my lip torn? Surreptitiously I lay a finger across my bottom lip; the skin was whole, but there was more red on my fingertip. After about five minutes I remembered what this was: lipstick. Miranda’s lipstick, the imprint of her kisses on my lips. And there we all were, Miranda, her father, her brother and I, sharing oxygen around a dinner table. I scrubbed at my lips as hard as I could without it looking pathological. I don’t know what kind of lipstick Miranda wore but it just wouldn’t come off. At best the smudges on the napkin lightened in shade until they were a decayed pink.

I wanted to hide, or to sleep. I thought if I just slept the discomfort off, the place would make sense to me in the morning. Miranda wanted me to read to her, and I did, the book on the pillow before her so that I had to curl my arm around her to turn the pages. It was a Hans Christian Andersen story about the disadvantages of a mechanical nightingale when compared to the real thing, and towards the end I got quieter and quieter until I was whispering the story into her ear. She was asleep almost before I’d even finished. I turned off the lamp and lay so that there was a small gap between us.

•

“Ore,” Miranda whispered. “Ore. Are you awake?”

I felt the heat rising from her skin. I ran my hands over her arms, her breasts, her stomach; they were covered with sweat. She said she was thirsty. She kissed me and said again that she was thirsty. I said I’d go and get her some water, grabbed a glass from her desk and ran into the bathroom, shaking all over. I jumped when the cold water from the tap hit me; I was trying to fill the glass as quickly as possible. If I brought her water she would be well.

I tried to take the water to her, but I couldn’t find her.

I walked out of the bathroom door and, I don’t know how, found myself still in the bathroom. The room hadn’t grown any longer; the door was still in front of me; I didn’t feel any change in the ground beneath my feet. But when I tried to pass through the door again I was in the bathroom again, and my neck cricked, as if I’d turned my head too fast. I tried one more time, and came through into the passageway, which was meant to be arranged into an L, with the staircase completing the rectangle. I was on the longest part of the L — the bathroom was meant to be in between Eliot’s room and their dad’s room. But the doors had changed positions. All four doors on that floor were now ranged along one wall, and the rest of the “L” was blank. None of the doors would open. The stairs were still there, and I inched down them carefully, one by one, afraid that they would change too, unsure where they would take me. The staircase ended in the kitchen, every surface heavy in the moonlight.

There was a long shadow behind me. It wasn’t my shadow. From the corner of my eye I saw it grow like a syrup stain, called from nowhere. I went to the counter, spilled salt all over it and ran the flat of a knife through the salt, on both sides. I turned before I could lose my nerve; or more, the knife turned and took me with it.

Kill the soucouyant.

“Ore,” Miranda said. I had her by the throat. It was the principle of knife and fork. You had to hold something down before you could stab it.

She was holding a pair of dressmaker’s scissors to my chest, opened into a stark V. I didn’t feel them there until I looked down. There was a rip in my pajama top. She let the scissors drop onto the counter, and I dropped the knife.

“I thought you were the soucouyant,” I said.

She said, “I thought you were.”

We touched each other’s faces in the dark, trying to be sure.

“Did I look different?”

“I just couldn’t… see you.”

“You’re shaking.”

“The soucouyant—”

“The goodlady—”

We were talking at the same time; until she said “goodlady” I couldn’t tell which of us was saying what.

“The goodlady?” I said.

Miranda fetched a cloth and a newspaper and wiped all the salt off the counter. She didn’t answer.

“I’m off home,” I said.

“You can’t, it’s 2:00 am.”

She drank noisily from the tap, then wiped her forehead. “God. That’s better.”

Miranda led the way through the house’s unlit core. I wished I could see her face.

“Miranda,” I said, but not loudly enough, because she didn’t answer me. “She’s not good,” I said, once we were in her bed, her legs wrapped around mine.

Miranda put a hand on my backbone. Lately it had been starting to show.

“No. I don’t think she is after all. Are you scared?” she asked.

“Aren’t you?”

Very softly she said into my shoulder, “Please understand. We are the goodlady.”

“You and I?” I asked.

“No. The house and I.”

I lay very still. I didn’t know what would happen to me if I moved, if I tried to run. For some time I was aware of her talking to me, but I was concentrating so hard on being quiet and still that I couldn’t understand her. When I finally tuned in, she was sleepy. She had been saying the same thing for minutes, it seemed.

“Miranda can’t get away,” she murmured. “She can let you go, but it will be bad for her because then they will be angry.”

She slept, but I didn’t. I tried to understand her. With my eyes closed, I touched her hair with both hands, found the place just below the curve of her shoulders where her hair continued as a soft phantom, impossible when my eyes were open. I wrapped this hair around my fingers and sought faith in her goodness. When I couldn’t find it I slipped out from under the covers, away from her, and I looked at her as she lay, weak but made of wire. I fought the impulse to part her lips with my fingers, to check her teeth.

You have seen her teeth before

I told myself that no matter what Miranda said, the soucouyant was the old lady. That was the rule. It was the young girl that defeated the soucouyant. The two did not enter the story in each other’s bodies; the two did not share one body, such a thing was a great violation. Of what? I didn’t know.

The moon-coloured mannequin halfway across the room had its arms out, as if it would smoothly and calmly murder me if I moved for the door. Finally, I reached out and switched on the bedside lamp, which didn’t seem to disturb Miranda’s sleep. The light was sickly, but at least everything in the room appeared as it was.

•

It’s hard to believe that there are girls as straightforwardly sexy as Ore Lind who also get into Cambridge. It’s even harder for me to believe that girls that looked like her got into Cambridge and befriended my sister. Ore is almost as tall as me. Plaits and ribbons and a scent of coconut. Big, bright eyes. She had this constantly benevolent expression, somewhere between a smile and a look of preoccupation. She’d brought Miri a lollipop and spent the afternoon in an armchair in front of the TV, languidly licking both her lollipop and Miri’s rejected one, the shoulder of her jumper dress slipping down, her knees drawn up so that her feet didn’t touch the ground. Her legs were long and slim and she’d dressed them in stockings that travelled up and up, marked by a strip of lace where they stopped — I only caught glimpses of those stocking tops, and couldn’t look too long without being blatant.

I kept wanting to ask her if she was cold. I kept wanting to run a finger along the seam of those stockings. I caught Miri catching me looking at Ore, and decided to dub our visitor Lind in the hope that I could inspire gentlemanly feeling in myself. Still, she must have had a reason for wearing stockings and a short dress in winter. Girls who dress for themselves dress like Miri.

I went to Martin’s after dinner — he’d seen Miri and Ore walking over from the station and said, jokingly, that I should “get in there.” Most of our sixth-form posse was there too, sitting and lying on beanbags, drinking beer and chatting breeze, soaking up the last week or so of holiday before trekking back to their essays at Durham, UCL, Kings, Bristol, Oxford, Edinburgh. People kept asking me about South Africa and then pitching in with their accounts of Freshers Week before I could complete a sentence. Dan was proud to have been appointed “the naked fresher” for 2001. I told him I thought that was mighty gay, and he said, “You wish it was, Silver, but I don’t like you like that.” So that was the quality of the evening’s conversation. Emma was there, laboriously making Cosmopolitans for the girls with a cocktail shaker she’d got for Christmas. She’d grown her hair out and dyed it blond. She looked good. She tried to get a game of chess going but no one was interested. All in all that night was intolerable.

The house was dead when I got home, except for a couple watching Sky News in the sitting room. Not Americans then, otherwise they’d have been watching BBC news and loving the Britishness of it. I heard Ore and Miri talking in Miri’s room, and thumped suddenly on my bedroom wall, to scare them. They fell silent. Haha.

I found a box of the Gauloises Dad had given me. As I lit one it came to me that my GrandAnna’s husband, the RAF man, had called them golliwogs. A serviceman was smoking a golliwog in one of his cartoons and when I’d asked Lily what it meant to smoke a golliwog she’d just stared and crooked her finger at me and didn’t relax until I brought her the cartoon.

I stuck my head out of the window and breathed smoke at the half moon. It snagged in the tree branches. I heard Miri’s window opening, and a couple of metres away from me, Ore stuck her head out of the window too. She had a haughty profile, her hair like a ruffled crown. She wasn’t wearing much — I saw a bit of silk and lots of skin. I hoped that, beneath the sill, she was wearing the stockings too. She turned and waved at me, I nodded back.

“Listen,” she whispered across the window ledges. “I could do with a smoke.”

I shook ash into the garden. It was good for the plants. “I’m afraid I can’t help you; this is my last one.”

“Liar. You look like a boy with a pocketful of smokes.”

“Do you even smoke?”

“No. But it looks so relaxing.”

“Alright. But it’ll cost you.”

Ore smiled. “Look at you, all brave when there’s a room between us.”

She ducked back into Miri’s room and I opened my bedroom door. She’d wrapped up in Miri’s dressing gown. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Smells like pure tar,” but accepted the cigarette I handed her. She made herself at home on my window seat, wadding a pillow under her knees. I didn’t stare at her. I didn’t talk about Mormon funeral potatoes or the fact that golliwog was just one slang term for Gauloises. I maintained a cool silence. I lit her cigarette for her, looked away when she gave an astonished cough, held her cigarette while she bent double and tried to thump herself on the back.

“Okay, you can put my one out,” she said, when she’d recovered. I didn’t for a while — I smoked both our gollies, with narrowed eyes and nervous intensity, like a Beat poet facing out his typewriter at dawn. Maybe. I hoped. The girl was making me reveal idiocy even in my silence.

“Insomniac?” I ventured.

She nodded. “Tonight, yes. Miranda’s sleeping like a baby for once.”

“So she wasn’t sleeping well at college either.”

“No.”

“Do people talk about her at college? Do they talk about the way she looks?”

Ore said, “What do you mean?”

“Come on. Look at her. She’s starving.”

Ore leaned back against the pillows. “Oh, so you can see that, can you? And what about this lovely house you live in?”

I stubbed out the cigarettes and dropped them out of the window. “What about it?” I was wary, thinking she was going to give me some kind of Marxist chat. Miri had told me and Dad that Ore’s dad drove minicabs and her mum was a dinner lady, that they had fostered her until they could adopt her. The information was interesting but of no significance; we hadn’t even asked after it. And if Ore was going to make some sort of point based on her history I didn’t want to hear it.

She started to speak, then shook her head and looked at the ground. I reached out and followed the line of her jaw with my finger. She looked at me then, with that strange half smile that said she’d forgive me if I kissed her. I kissed her and she let me. I kissed her again and she let me. By the third time it was ridiculous and really sort of painful, that she was just letting me and letting me, her lips slightly parted but not kissing back.

“I don’t think I fancy boys,” she explained, when I’d given up.

“You’re… you only like girls?”

“Well. Never say never.”

I reached for another cigarette, then changed my mind. I asked, “So do you fancy my sister?”

She shot back: “Why did you lock Miranda off all term?”

“I doubt you’ll win Miri round,” I told her.

She studied me. “Were you trying to punish her for getting in? Or was it brotherly concern, like you thought ignoring her was a way to help her out of her whole starving thing?”

“Not a chance,” I said, knowing I sounded dogged and not caring.

“I know,” she said. I watched her walk to the door; her legs. Mild agony, if such a thing is possible. And embarrassment at my clumsiness.

It took me a long time to get to sleep.

•

What was the rule to observe? What offering could I make?

By the time Miranda woke up I’d consulted the yellow pages and been to Deal, fifteen minutes’ train ride there, fifteen minutes back and half an hour of waiting at the watch shop on the high street while a guy with white sideburns replaced Miranda’s watch battery. I’d asked him, possibly more urgently than normal, not to set the watch to “the right time” and bought her two more batteries, just in case; each one was only a little larger than a five-penny piece, but each battery held five years bunched into increments of sixty seconds.

I was by Miranda’s bed, trying to hold my breath because it seemed too loud, when she woke up. She looked at me uncomprehendingly for a long moment, her eyes dark through the hair tumbled over her face. She closed one eye, then the other, then opened them both again.

“I dreamt you were the soucouyant,” she said, finally, then giggled. “Silly.” A dream, she said.

I knew I would have to go home. I dropped the watch onto the pillow beside her head, then added the batteries. I watched her pick up the watch, stroke it, hold it to her ear. I watched her listen to the ticking of the watch. Tears rolled down her face. She looked at the watch, not at me.

“This is my mother’s watch,” she said.

After breakfast we walked up to Dover Castle and skipped the medieval court reconstructions, moved more slowly through the displays in First and Second World War army barracks, the caps and medals and coloured card in glass boxes bigger than us. From the grass behind the ramparts the sea was mossy peace — the weather had almost frozen it, and there was so much mist that you couldn’t see where it led. Miranda sat on a heap of rock and tapped it. “Chalk,” she said. The mist hung in her hair.

“Of course,” I said, shivering. If either of us smoked cigarettes we’d have been warmer in some small way.

“My train leaves in half an hour,” I told her.

She looked up at me. She smiled with her red lips.

“So you’re running away,” she said.

My eyes were watering and my nose was running. It was the cold, but I knew it would look as if I was crying.

“I’ll see you at college,” I said.

She didn’t say anything. She sucked chalk from out under her fingernails. She looked tired.

WHO DO YOU BELIEVE?

Well? Is it the black girl? Or Eliot? Or me? Our talk depends upon the fact that you weren’t there and you don’t know what happened. At the very least I hope you take Eliot with a pinch of salt. He is a terrible liar. For example, he doesn’t even need reading glasses. He just wanted something that differentiated him from Miranda, some way to get back at her for her pica. His lenses are plain and untreated, an indulgence earned from his mother when he confided in her at a trip to the opticians when they were ten. And to keep it up so long when he can see perfectly well… what a liar he is. I can’t think how many times he’s squinted and scrunched his face up, struggling to follow the print when Miranda has handed him a sheet of paper and his reading glasses aren’t to hand. She would have found him out eventually. Besides the boy is strange, very strange. You couldn’t guess what he has between his mattress and his bedstead — or could you?

It’s a single A4 envelope, full of photographs of a girl in black. There she is, leaning over Kings College Bridge, hand raised to greet someone on a punt passing below. There she is again, the same girl, a dark figure passing geometrically laid flower beds and hedgerow so hazy green it’s as if she’s dreaming it. The girl again, at the barred back gate of a college, strands of her hair whipping the air as she watches for her watcher. Lack of variety in subject aside, the photographs aren’t bad.

Where was Eliot from September to December? Africa? Really? How funny.

They are better off apart now.

•

Someone had been in my room — I mean that someone had been in the guest room that I’d been put in. My bag, which had hardly had anything in it anyway, had been emptied onto the floor, and the bed and dressing table were covered with leaflets. The disorder was so blatant that I already knew nothing had been taken. I wasn’t as bothered as I could have been. I had my wallet and phone on me, this was my own fault for not locking the door, and besides, I was leaving. I stuffed my books and my spare pair of jeans back into my bag. The leaflets were BNP flyers with helpful tips for citizens, the same as the leaflet Sean had kept to piss me off.

Do you know how many immigrants are in the U.K.? Neither does the U.K. government…

There were so many leaflets that it took me nearly fifteen minutes just to gather them into the guest-room bin, which I dragged to the centre of the room when I could no longer bear to have my back to the door.

When I stepped out of the room with my bag over my shoulder, the corridor mixed twilight and green and I could hear a whistling sound from upstairs, like air gliding around something of great mass. I could have been inside a cannon. But I did not run. I took a deep breath and set myself a march—I’m get-ting out I’m get-ting out, no mat-ter what, I’m get-ting out. The lift doors were open. I walked past them, then backtracked. There was a little girl in the lift. I can’t describe her; she was unexpected. She stood on tiptoe in the corner of the lift, and she had something cupped in her hands — she gazed and gazed at it, amazed.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

The thing in her hands was covered in flies. It was bloody and she seemed to have brought it out from inside her. There was a gap in her nightgown, at the stomach.

I pressed the lift button to go down

(take her down, she belongs in a grave)

but nothing happened.

“What is it?”

The girl’s eyes were plaintive. She held the thing out to me. It wobbled in her hands like dirty jelly. I was very sorry for her.

“Please stay,” she said. “Or I’ll get into trouble. You’ve got to stay. You’ll hardly feel it.”

I’m not brave. I remembered the salt I had in both pockets, and the pepper of the wickedest kind wrapped in plastic. I coated my hands in salt. I crumbled pepper in my palms. I stepped into the lift and, expecting to touch nothing, I tore at the little girl’s face until Miranda’s came through.

Miranda struck at me, spitting and hissing. I said, “Oh God, oh my God, sorry, I’m sorry, oh my God,” over and over, but kept her pinned against the back of the lift, both my hands around her throat.

The doors closed and the lift went up. She stopped struggling. She licked the back of my hand, slowly, making tracks in the salt. I screamed, but made no sound. I couldn’t turn the volume up. I screamed and didn’t let go. I concentrated on making myself colourfast, on not changing under her tongue. I know what I look like. The Ore I signed onto paper in the letters of my name, the idea of a girl that I woke into each morning. Arms, stay with me. Stomach, hold your inner twists.

The lift doors opened onto a floor of the house I hadn’t seen. The walls were bare, and nails stuck out of the floorboards, so many, scattered but with an order to them, like ants in a crazed game of hopscotch. The corridor only stayed empty for a second — the next moment it was flooded with people who stared and said nothing. Their eyes were perfect circles. I didn’t see them move, yet every second they were closer to the lift.

Miranda politely flicked my hands away from her and sashayed out among them. They all looked at her and smiled slavishly. When she had passed through them, they looked at me again. They were alabaster white, every one of them. I went after her. They looked at me, crowded so close, murder in their eyes. If I didn’t believe in the salt I would be lost. Believe, believe. Salt is true. Salt is true. Kill the soucouyant, salt and pepper.

I closed their eyes. “Be blind,” I said, rubbing salt on their eyelids. It was like stirring melted wax. “Don’t look. Don’t see me.”

I looked behind me and there they stood, eyes closed, lips pursed in consternation, their arms out in front them.

I walked into a shuttered room full of the sound of a sewing machine. The machine was set on a stand and juddered away, sewing at nothing. There was a dirty white coat hung on a hook on the wall, newspapers, and other things that made me think it was a room belonging to someone small and sad.

Miranda was in the corner with her arms folded around her knees. She looked blissful, like one of the lotus-eaters, someone hearing comforting voices. When she saw me she looked astonished.

“What’s this?” she said.

I didn’t speak to her. If I was going to help her I shouldn’t speak to her. I knelt beside her and rested my hands on her head. She tensed, and I cracked her open like a bad nut with a glutinous shell. She split, and cleanly, from head to toe. There was another girl inside her, the girl from the photograph, all long straight hair and pretty pearlescence. This other girl wailed. “No, no, why did you do this? Put me back in.” She gathered the halves of her shed skin and tried to fit them back together across herself. I fell down and watched her, amazed, from where I sat.

“I don’t want to come out. Put me back in,” the girl insisted. “Please. I can’t… cope.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

She stopped for a moment. “I’m Miranda Silver. Who are you?”

I didn’t answer her, but I pointed at the rubbery skin she clutched so desperately. “Who is that?”

“It’s the goodlady,” she said. “Please help me get back in. I need her.”

I got up.

“Don’t become her,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t listen. This new Miranda’s gaze was weak. She seemed soft in the head. Before I’d even walked out of the room, she was lying under the sewing machine, trying to sew herself back into the skin.

Outside the room, the floor had gone

(where is the floor?)

I fell down into a pickled-lime smell that had frightened me as a child when we visited the plague graves in Deptford. My friend and I, we thought that that was how rotten marrow smelt. The blind faces (I felt them nuzzle at me as I passed, their sucking and sly biting), even with no light to see them by, I know they looked at me.

Below someone threw their hands out and white flew from their fingertips. Someone red and silver, the spirit in the flame. I bounced. I couldn’t see anything. Then I could, through white squares. I was in a net. Tens of feet of white cotton bunched around me. I was crying like a newborn: “Don’t let me die.”

When I opened my eyes I was in the room that had nothing in it but the white fireplace. I saw, through gauze, a figure walking towards me. It frowned and bent closer to me. Sade. I didn’t move. With my eyes I told her that I might not survive this after all.

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

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

Sade looked at me through the net.

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

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

“Where are you going?”

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

“But the net—”

“Stand up and it will unravel. Goodbye.”

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

•

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

WHAT IS THE SEASON?

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

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

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

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

I’m sorry for everything, she wrote.

I am going down against her.

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

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

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

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

Her father switched his laptop off without saving the file.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She went home.”

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

“I’m sorry,” he said, crestfallen.

“What for?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am going down against her

I am going down against her

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

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

What am I?

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

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

“I made you something.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you talking about?”

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

“Why did you use the winter apples?”

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

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

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

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

he would be sour.

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Telephone if you want anything, or if you want to come to us,” Sylvie said.

She kissed my cheek and then dabbed at it with her perfumed handkerchief.

“Take care of your father,” The Paul said.

Dad and Lily would never have this, they would never be old together and think inside each other’s clockwork.

Sylvie and The Paul went back to Paris, and Dad moved around the house normally again.

The Shirelles block my nose. I breathe with my mouth open and my mouth is dry. Headaches mean that from my seat on the roof I mistake the cliffs for Table Mountain. The headache that comes with this cold is invisible assault, like being thrown into a sack and pummelled with rocks.

Sometimes Dad comes and stands in the garden while I’m on the roof. We don’t address each other, but we’re aware of each other. I look at the top of his head while he looks out in the direction of the road behind our house. He tries to find it, whatever it is he wants to say, then he gives up and goes back inside.

In the past couple of weeks he’s been to London and Brighton, Liverpool, also Manchester, I think, to eat at restaurants. He comes back to write about what he’s eaten. When he’s away I eat refried beans cold out of the tin, sometimes with lettuce for nutrition. I’m glad when he’s away because he keeps asking me questions. He thinks he’s Inspector Morse. For some time it was the apples.

“Where did the apples come from?”

“They were on the kitchen table when I came down.”

“Fresh apples? I didn’t put them there.”

“Maybe Sade did, before she went.”

“Why would she? She knows that in winter I use preserves.”

“Okay.”

“Why did you use them?”

How was I supposed to answer that one? “For a change?” I said.

My head ached so fiercely that I actually gasped, and he looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to reveal what I’d just remembered. I hobbled to my room but he followed me.

“What did you say to her when she said she couldn’t trust you anymore?”

“Nothing. Not a single thing, Dad, I swear.”

I couldn’t lie down and groan in front of him, so I sat up straight at my desk. He stood with his hands behind his back, mulling my words over as if this was the first time I’d said them.

“And she didn’t say anything else after that, she just left?”

“Yes,” through gritted teeth.

Dad’s questions make me think that there may be some large omission that my memory has made out of ignorance and confusion. For example, did my sister wound her foot? Am I trying to remind myself of that? And if she did cut her foot, is it a clue to something?

I ask this because of her shoes. They keep filling with a substance that’s only identifiable to one side of my brain. The other side will only say no to it. I first noticed it the night I slept in Miri’s bed instead of mine. Something was moving in the branches outside my window with a flinty rattle; probably a squirrel, but it sounded as if someone hoarse-voiced was laughing at me. Dad was away and I found that the possibility of the phone ringing was too big for me alone, or the house was too small. The phone rang a lot, and each time it did I fell through rooms towards it as if yanked on a leash. Miri’s room was the only one safe from the phone. The psychomantium is detached from the house, even more so than Lily’s studio. I smelt roses stronger than I ever had in my life. Miri’s shoes were lined up at the feet of her coat mannequin. Six neatly polished size 6s with mad heels. The smell came from the shoes.

The shoes were soaked through with

(I didn’t make a sound but stood away, tried to think and looked again)

red water. Water that was red and smelt of roses. It was thick, though. Some of it gathered in viscous lumps. Between the sight of the shoes and my head cold I had to throw up. Then I had to hide the shoes. They had to be hidden or they would expose the omission in my memory so bulky and strange. Miri left the house barefoot so she was supposed to come back. My chalk-sickened sister, shhh. Miri left the house barefoot… it would be stupid to hide the shoes or get rid of them. I emptied them and cleaned them as best I could. But would that colour stick to the inside? The smell stuck, but I got rid of the thick water. The next day there was more. I am chained to the shoes. There is nothing to be done. Sometimes, if you sit still beside them, you can watch them filling up, like rain puddles forming before your eyes. I can’t stop the shoes from filling, but I can’t ignore them, either. I have to keep emptying them into the bathroom sink, then rinsing and scrubbing hard with Jif and Dettol, then replacing the shoes exactly where they were so that Dad never knows. What happened that night? I can’t tell anyone. I don’t know. I didn’t see.

There is no one in Dover who looks like my sister. I tour the town walking and on my bike, shaken by the ratio of water to land. Martin and Emma are together and are spending the summer teaching English somewhere in the Third World. The others don’t come around and only ask me over halfheartedly — I don’t talk and my silences are not mysterious.

Dad doesn’t notice, but chairs are moved in the house. You leave a room and when you return the chair is scraped back from the table. Doors you leave closed are opened behind your back. And every day, the shoes.

I will write this down now, before I decide not to:

This morning I had just put the shoes back in their usual place when I heard someone walking in the attic. They walked slowly, as if weak. Their tread was light.

I said, “Miri?” It felt as if I hadn’t spoken aloud for days. The walker stood still as soon as I spoke. But she was there, I knew it. If she was there she’d step again.

Once for no, twice for yes

Once for no, twice for yes

hear me

I whispered, “Miri, are you alive?”

My question wasn’t loud enough to be heard outside of the room, but two creaks came from above, paired with deliberation.

I had to hold on to the wall. I’ve read that madness is present when everything you see and hear takes on an equal significance. A dead bird makes you cry, and so does a doorknob. This morning I was not mad. The only thing significant to me in all the world was the creaking upstairs.

“Where are you? In the house? Where in the house?”

No sound.

“Miri. Are you coming back?”

Step, step, halt.

I asked, “When?”

Three creaks. She stepped three times.

What is the meaning of it? Three creaks, three weeks? If she comes back for her shoes in three days, then I only need to empty them another three times. If it really is three weeks that were meant, what then. If three months, what then. Three years. That’s why I had to write it down now. By then I may no longer believe I heard anything in Miri’s room.