by Unknown
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 fiv
e 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.