by Unknown
“Oh was it . . . was it like the heraldic pelican?” I said.
Lily tugged my earlobe. “Let your sister speak.”
“It was,” said Miri. “The bird that pecks itself to death to feed its children. She tried to give us her blood but we didn’t want it.”
I looked at Lily. “I did say you wouldn’t remember,” Lily said, calmly. “I can’t think where you got that from.”
Miri turned to me. “She rubbed it on our lips, Eliot, but you wiped it off.”
“Er . . . I think I’d definitely remember that,” I said.
“Miranda,” Lily said, and we knew she was getting annoyed because the music in her voice was stronger. “I did say you wouldn’t remember. You were three. You can’t remember everything.”
“Her whole hand was covered with blood, and she had her hand over her face and we could see her looking through her fingers, and she got down between our beds and—”
“There is nothing . . . mysterious and gothic about a crack-up. If anything it’s just . . . sad.” Lily was so angry she was almost singing, her temper changing the stress she put on her words. “There is no need to make up stories about it.”
“Lily couldn’t stop her,” Miri said.
“Leave your GrandAnna alone.” Lily sounded as if she was unable to believe that she had to say it. Miri’s first proper meeting with our GrandAnna was at the home; I was there and I don’t remember her any other way. When I think of her I see a white-haired woman kneeling on the carpet with us, motioning to the sunlight outside the window of her room and saying with desperate smiles, “Come and play, please come and play children.”
I remember once I raised my voice at Miri and our GrandAnna jumped and burst into tears that seemed to come straight from her heart, as if it was her I’d shouted at and not Miri. I found that so strange that I shut up for the rest of the visit. GrandAnna had a heart attack a few days afterwards, and she died.
Miri looked at me narrowly and I went and sat in a corner because we thought it was my fault; I’d done it with my shouting.
And I don’t remember Miri saying anything about the goodlady before that.
•
I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home, I’m the Braille on your wallpaper that only your fingers can read—I tell you where you are. Don’t turn to look at me. I am only tangible when you don’t look.
Luc knows this feeling, from an early visit he made here with Lily and the twins. He knew that I was nothing like that flat of theirs in London. One day he came in from the back garden and stood in the sitting-room doorway, smiling while his wife sat on the floor knitting a tiny jacket for one of Miranda’s dolls and using a socked foot to wheel Eliot’s spare trains across the carpet so he could have train races. It was summer, Lily had tied streamers to the ceiling fan and her freckled shoulders were covered with sun cream. And the twins had four years of life between them, Eliot in a pink T-shirt that hugged his pot belly and Miranda in a dark-blue dress and a little sailor’s hat. There was a thing that Lily, Eliot and Miranda tended to do when they were together and he joined him. They pretended he wasn’t there at first. He knew that on some level it was intended for his benefit, so he could look at his rosy little English family as if they were in a portrait. When he said hello they’d come alive to him, but first he had to say it.
Before Luc could speak this time, Eliot wobbled over to Lily, wearing a look of grim determination peculiar to children who have only just learned to walk, reached out and yanked her hair hard. Lily didn’t stop knitting, but she eyed Eliot sternly and said: “Eliot, you are hurting me.”
Eliot didn’t answer, and he didn’t let go of her hair. He sat down hard, trying to drag Lily’s forehead to the floor.
Luc didn’t know why he couldn’t move. I knew why; it was because I’d leant all my weight, every wall and corridor, on his shoulders. He was lucky I allowed him to stand.
Miranda, on one of the armchairs with her lap full of Barbie dolls and her thumb in her mouth, emptied the dolls onto the floor and crossed the room faster than a thought to grab a handful of Lily’s hair too, wrenching at her head from the other side. Lily’s fingers tightened around the knitting needles, and she let out a long breath. “Eliot,” she said, then: “Miranda!”
She raised her hand to the back of Eliot’s neck and pinched him hard. She did the same to Miranda, dug her fingers into the skin. It looked practised.
The twins let go of their mother immediately.
All three of them laughed, and their eyes were full of tears.
Luc walked away and went out again, let himself in through the front door this time, noisily this time.
“Hello!” he called, before he even reached the sitting room this time.
“Hello!” they all called back.
Good mother, good father, good children, all watched over by me.
•
Miranda avoided dinner on New Year’s Eve by pretending to be asleep when Luc called her. She was ready for him when he came looking for her. She lay on her back and offered her face to him, knowing how she looked, knowing that he saw the dark smudges that wheeled around her eyes. He didn’t try to wake her anymore.
When Luc had gone she locked the door and searched a drawer at the top of her wardrobe for the last remaining strip of a blue plastic spatula she had been working on for two months. Come slowly, Eden . . .
She put the Crests’ greatest hits album into her CD player and skipped through to “Flower of Love.”
Plastic was usually very satisfying. A fifty-millimetre wad of it was tough to chew away from the main body of the strip, but with steady labour, sucking and biting, it curved between the teeth like an extension of the gum, and the thick, bittersweet oils in it streamed down her throat for hours, so long she sometimes forgot and thought her body was producing it, like saliva.
She changes all the time
It was 6:00 AM in Haiti when she decided on a midnight feast. She touched the knob at the top of her spine, knowing that if the dress she wore fitted her at all she would not have been able to reach it. She knew that the meal she’d missed would wait in the oven long after Luc had called her to the kitchen and scraped the food off the plates and into the bin. Luc was asleep now, in the round bed, surrounded by the blankets, rugs, wall hangings, prints and figurines that Lily brought back from her photography jobs by the armful. It must have been like being locked into a small, cheerful museum for the night. In the morning she’d surprise him with an empty plate. But first a walk, to get up an appetite.
She left her room and knocked on Eliot’s door, to see if he was back from wherever he’d gone for the night. He didn’t answer. She peeked inside his room. He wasn’t in there, but his lights were on and his window was wide open, the wind whisked leaves around his room in bristles, like a broom. She went back to her psychomantium and played some more CDs at low volume. She had not slept for a while, a matter of days, though she could not think how many. She didn’t want to do anything but dance. If Eliot had been there she would have got him to dance with her. Somehow he had the knack of the tuneful wail, oo-wee-ooo, the elbow sway, the fist over the heart, though he had done it mainly for Lily’s entertainment. Miranda checked the time again, watchfully going through the hours between here and Haiti. So. It was 5:00 AM. Eliot where are you walking?
The lift from the ground floor to the first floor, then from first to second, second to third, then from the third floor to the empty attic. She peered up and down the broad passageways and tiptoed past the bedroom doors, feeling like dust, as if she was everywhere at once. She could pull herself tight and then explode and choke everyone in the house. She had never breathed so well or seen so clearly. She could hear one person snoring with the tidy rumble of an engine. In another room, someone murmured to herself or into the phone. Next door to that person a couple quietly crushed each other with sighs and words and their bodies. The fifth and biggest guest room was unoccup
ied, so nothing from there. A scream came to her, the word “Fire!” but she did not let it leave her, and she didn’t ring an alarm. How dare people sleep, how dare they lie so blankly in the dark?
In the dining room she looked glumly at the plate on the table before her. Beef stew and potatoes, the meat drowned in wine and limp onions, she saw brown fat running over white. She took a knife and divided the plate, pushing food aside so that there was a clear line in the middle of the plate, a greasy path of sanity. The light overhead was the deep orange of church candles. She would eat all the meat first, then vegetables. She started with a knife and fork, but soon resorted to bending over her plate with her hands planted on the table, desperately hauling food up into her mouth as if in the final seconds of an all-you-can-eat contest. She thought, There is no way that taking this stuff into my body is doing me any good. Sauce ran across her nose and cheeks and there were tears in her plate. Tears improved the flavour of the vegetables. Perhaps that was in a cookbook somewhere—a Gaelic one, probably, for a people who saw the kind of spirit that did nothing but weep and bode ill.
When she paused to chew, she bumped noses with someone who lifted their head from her plate at the same time. She smelt the beef and potatoes, reheated by the breath from their lips. She started and jumped up from her chair. There was no one else at the table.
“Who’s there?” she said, ridiculously, because the kitchen was empty. She grabbed some kitchen towel, wiped her face, then walked around the dining table and put her hand on the back of the chair that had been opposite her. After a moment she sat down in it and drew her plate towards her again.
All the vegetables had disappeared. She had eaten the meat first, as she had told herself she would, but someone else had eaten the vegetables. There was the line she’d drawn in the middle of the plate, and there was a residue of gravy on her side, and then on the other side there was . . . nothing. As clean as if the plate had been washed.
The girl sitting across from her smiled. Her teeth were jagged. She had been there since Miranda had walked into the dining room, but because she looked exactly like Miranda she had not been noticed. After all, she might have been a reflection in the window. The difference was the teeth, and when she showed her teeth she became noticed. She was not quite three dimensional, this girl. And so white. There couldn’t be any blood in her. She was perfect. Miranda but perfect. She was purer than crystal, so pure that she dissolved and Miranda couldn’t see her anymore but still felt her there.
The front door slammed. The noise of it was like language, and, obedient to it, Miranda put her coat on, her scarf, her shoes.
The street outside was strewn with bits of houses, whole window frames lying halfway across shattered sheets of glass, as if trying to shield them. She climbed over a raft of shingled slate, picked her way through heaps of bricks that released smoke carefully, almost grudgingly. There were pale people all along the street, the perfect people Lily had drawn. They were spaced out carefully, like an army of tin soldiers, and they watched Miranda without moving or smiling. She called out to them and, though they said nothing, she felt safe. They didn’t have eyelids because you missed things when you blinked. They didn’t need gas masks because they didn’t breathe. One of them had a pipe in his mouth, or rather, the pipe was part of his mouth; Lily had been a cruel artist. When Miranda came to Bridge Street she walked faster, rubble or no rubble, because of what was behind her
—she saw the moon turn away
and the trees thrashing to save their roots
dogs in every house around that still stood, their barking distant as if from inside a single locked safe, the metal syncopating the sound of fear, saying dance, dance, don’t look around, dance
which she did, kicking and yelling like the first day in her GrandAnna’s house, only she was going so fast, where, why?
(Because plastic is not satisfying this night
As for beef, as for his Frenchie beef and fucking potatoes, ha ha)
Across the cliffs, Dover Castle was black. The sun was rising and the sea was changing colour, but the castle stayed within its lines, hunched in a black mess of shapes, and the vast bank of chalk it stood on seemed to stir in the water as if fighting the darkness that tried to climb down it.
Miranda knelt, her hands holding tight to the safety bars. Someone floated facedown at the foot of the cliff. The sea refused to take the body far from the shore and contented itself with tossing the corpse back and forth between its gentler waves.
We died this morning, she thought, then saw a scrap of colour. The body wore green. Whoever was floating, it was not her.
Sleep came at last, so miraculously and completely that she walked home through the empty streets unawake, her steps guided by the slightness of her shadow.
•
She didn’t realise she was asleep until a tapping on her door woke her.
“Yes?” Miranda said.
Her father came in, squinting, pretending he couldn’t see her in the dark of her room.
“Morning, Miri.”
“Morning,” she said, holding the question mark back with effort. She was no longer sure what the time was, or how to calculate. Also she thought she had locked her door.
“I’m about to interview someone to replace Ezma, but someone else is about to check out,” Luc began apologetically.
Miranda waved a hand. “Take their money, take the room key, print out a receipt,” she recited.
Luc nodded. “And check the room, please. So I know what needs doing.”
Miranda got out of bed to show her intention of moving soon. When he left, she sat down again. Her knees felt weak.
The woman Luc was interviewing was a black woman, short and round, with a placid gaze. An orange head wrap and an orange gown that made her formless, a vapour sinking through the sofa. She had a big, grey-black bird printed on each sleeve at the elbow; one was visible every time she lifted her teacup to her mouth. The birds had iron feathers and claws as long as their beaks, but they hid their heads behind their wings. She was wearing sandals despite the cold, and her toenails were painted bright orange. Her eyelids were daubed with a green that dotted her gown in emerald specks but turned khaki coloured on her skin. The woman spoke to Luc, unhurriedly and with a heavy African accent.
Miranda couldn’t take her eyes off the scars across the woman’s cheekbone, four horizontal stripes that cut a little farther along her face at each stage, like arrows at different stages of flight. They were smooth now but the cuts would have had to be made again and again on the same spot to make them hold. It took all she had not to ask the woman if she could still feel it. Miranda pressed the keys of the newly vacated room into Luc’s hand and the form with pencilled ticks beside items that needed tidying and replacing. Towels, sheets and so on.
“Thanks, Miri.” Luc looked at the woman who sat beside him on the sofa, then back at Miri. “This is Sade,” he told Miranda, then: “Sade, this is my daughter, Miranda.”
The introduction meant that Sade must be the one who was getting the job. Miranda, Luc and Sade got caught in a triangle of gazing. Luc cleared his throat and stood. “Sade, let me show you the house,” he said.
They started at the bottom and climbed up. Sade stopped in one of the guest rooms, her hand on the windowsill. “It’s so quiet,” she said.
All three of them listened without speaking. Now that she’d said it, it was true. The sounds in the other rooms were muted into vibrations. Someone closed a door, someone else ran down the stairs and you didn’t really hear these things, you felt them.
JENNIFER SILVER
lived quite long. She didn’t die until 1994. A reason why Lily never felt motherless was that her mother was there with her, a door and a curtain away. It is a pity that Lily never understood this in a literal sense, but the concealment was necessary. Jennifer really meant to abandon her daughter, and how could I allow that? Jennifer was going to walk away from Anna and Lily in broad daylight. Anna was playing with h
er granddaughter, lying on her back in trapdoor-room with baby Lily on her stomach, cooing at her and comparing curl for curl. Jennifer had convinced herself that she hated them both, the child and the crone. She was modern and couldn’t countenance being held by four walls just because she’d had a baby at a young age. She was going to Milan with her Italian photographer boyfriend, and he would make her face famous. Anna and Lily could have each other, for all she cared.
One blessing born from Lily’s never knowing her mother is that Lily never knew how selfish her mother was. Jennifer was nineteen years old and thought a lot of herself and how she looked; her smooth ponytail, the crowded patterns on her silk shifts, the shine of her go-go boots. She had a tiny replica of a yew tree that she used to hold her earrings, Perspex hoops dangling off the branches. Each month or so the little tree had to be replaced because she’d gnawed it to an aged apple core. The earring tree was the last thing Jennifer put in her bag. It had to go on top of all her other things so that it wouldn’t get damaged. Jennifer had catlike eyes that she made stranger with kohl. Her gaze was cold and self-reflective
—am I pretty? Yes
—am I pretty?
—Yes—am I pretty?
Maybe she was not really like that. It’s just that I would prefer you to think that what happened to her was justified. I opened up for her. That is to say, I unlocked a door in her bedroom that she had not seen before, a door in the wall behind her dressing table.
She exclaimed, but not overmuch. She wasn’t particularly clever. She picked up her bag and went exploring. When she was safely down the new passageway, I closed the door behind her. It was the best sort of winter morning, cold but bright. That was the only sort of light Jennifer saw after that—it came through great windows and she couldn’t find her way away from them and out of me. Not that she tried hard. She was dazed.