White Is for Witching (6 page)

“Eliot!” she said through the gap.

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

“I want to talk to you.”

“Later.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t answer. Let him worry.

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

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

or

a photograph gone astray.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(How excellent a body, that

Stands without a bone)

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

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

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

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

“Did you take something?”

“What?”

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

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

“What do you really do in here?”

“What d’you think?”

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

Azwer kept his eyes fixed on Luc.

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

Azwer spread his hands. “We cannot stay.”

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

Azwer shrugged. “To London.”

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No! I can’t be bothered.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Faversham.”

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

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

“Miranda.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How did it go?” Miranda asked.

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

She held her hand out expectantly.

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

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

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