by Unknown
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.