by Unknown
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 fou
ght 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.