Nyasha nods but doesn’t move.
“All right then.” Liyana sinks down under the water, her knees and nipples still exposed to the chill air.
Her aunt knocks the bottle off the edge of the bath. It rolls behind the loo.
Liyana rises. “Okay, what’s going on?”
“I’m . . . financially, we’re . . .”
“Oh, spit it out.”
Her aunt takes a deep breath. “We’re broke.”
Liyana frowns. “An interesting perspective—I think most people would argue we’re indecently rich.”
Nyasha gets down on her hands and knees, searching for the shampoo bottle.
“Nya?”
Her aunt looks up, bottle in hand.
“What exactly do you mean by broke?”
“It means we don’t have any money.”
Liyana narrows her eyes. “Yes, I know what it means. I just don’t know why you’re saying it.”
Nyasha sits back down on the loo, returning the bottle to the rim of the bath. “I’m saying it because my accountant called, and it seems to be true.”
“What? No, that can’t . . .” Liyana longs to submerge herself again, to hide beneath the still quiet of the water. “But how does that mean . . . ? We can’t be—this house alone must be worth a fortune.”
“Yes, it is.” Nyasha circles a slippered foot. “Which is why I, um, remortgaged it a while ago.”
“You what? Why?”
“Well, it seems that we . . . Well, we’ve been . . . living a little beyond our means.”
“Oh?” Liyana is tempted to object to her aunt’s use of the plural but decides to let it go. “Go on.”
Her aunt doesn’t look up. “We’re, um, in a bit of debt.”
“How much?”
Her aunt, always so sculpted, so poised—a rock smoothed into shape by the ocean over a thousand years—looks as if she’s suddenly crumbling. She mumbles.
“Nya?”
Finally, Nyasha meets Liyana’s eye. “Once we sell the house . . . After that, it’ll be a hair under, um . . . six hundred and eighty-six thousand pounds, or thereabouts.”
Liyana sits up so fast that the bathroom floor is sluiced with bathwater. She looks at her aunt, unable to respond.
“I’m sorry, vinye.” Nyasha studies her feet again. “I—I went a little off the rails when he who shall not be named left me for that . . . infant. I might have developed, well, it seems I sort of . . .”
“What? Spit it out!”
Nya coughs. “Well, I suppose I channelled my feelings, suppressed my feelings, with a bit of”—she tightens her dressing gown—“A gambling habit.” A flush of shame colours her cheeks.
“No, Dagã. Seriously?”
“I thought I could fix it. I didn’t want to worry you. I tried, but I . . .” Her aunt’s eyes fill. “I never should have signed that prenup. It was monumentally naive of me. But I thought—I thought that this time . . .”
When Liyana was a child she’d felt fragile as cracked glass, ready to shatter at a touch. The stoical solidity of her aunt, who’d taken her under her wing, hadn’t allowed it. Now Liyana’s the adult and her aunt the child. She wants to reach out and wipe Nya’s tears, but she also wants to slap her. And then she realizes something else.
“But—but I’m starting at the Slade . . .” Liyana feels as if she’s slipping under water. “Term starts soon—less than three weeks. I—I . . .”
Studying at the Slade, arguably the best art school in England, has been all Liyana’s wanted since she was fourteen, since that torn ligament ripped away her Olympic dream.
Nyasha gives a barely perceptible nod. “I know, vinye, I know. It’s okay, we’ll postpone . . . I’ll write to them, I’ll explain. I’m sure they’ll let you take a gap year, while we get the funding. You can start next October.”
Liyana stares at her aunt, incredulous. “I don’t want to wait another year. I’m ready, I’ve got so much to—I need to go now.”
“I know, I know,” her aunt says, stricken. “But the fees, we can’t possibly—”
“And what if it’s not okay?” Liyana starts to shiver, the water suddenly icy. “What if they won’t defer my place? What then?”
“No, they will. Of course they will,” Nya says. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right, Ana. I’ve got an idea, I just—”
“What?” Liyana snaps. “You’re going to get a job?”
“Well . . .” Her aunt nibbles the edge of her thumbnail. “Yes, I’m certainly looking into that, but also I was thinking . . .”
“What?”
“Well . . . marriage.”
Liyana lets out a blurt of laughter, casting ripples across the water, warmer now. “You’re going to get married again?”
“Nye me nya o,” her aunt mumbles. “Ao . . .”
“English,” Liyana says. “You know—”
“Well, no. Not exactly . . .” Nya loses the word in the folds of her dressing gown. “I was, um, thinking perhaps it could be you.”
Liyana stares at her aunt. “What?”
“Well . . .”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“Wait, let me—”
“I’ve got to get out.” Liyana stands, sending waves over the bath’s rim, splashing her aunt’s feet. “The water’s freezing.”
Pulling her towel from the radiator, Liyana strides towards the door. In her wake, silence swells in the room like a sudden flood.
6:32 p.m.—Bea
“Do you believe in free will?”
Bea looks up from Logic and Knowledge to see a student sitting across the table gazing at her. He is rotund, bearded, and has hope in his eyes.
“No talking,” she mouths, then returns to her book.
The student coughs. Bea ignores him and focuses on Russell. He coughs again.
“What?” Bea hisses.
“Do you—?”
“No, I don’t believe in free will,” Bea snaps, eliciting pointed looks from several other students sitting along the same long table. “Or, yes, I do. Which one do you want to hear?”
“The first,” he says, giving a quick tug of his beard. “I thought perhaps . . . if you believed in predeterminism you might . . .”
“Might what?”
He drops his voice to a whisper. “Might go for a coffee with me after you’ve finished your date with Russell?”
Bea frowns at him, thrown. The frown shifts to a scowl once she realizes what he means. “That is, without a doubt, the most pretentiously ridiculous pick-up line I’ve ever been subjected to,” she says. “And no, I don’t believe in fate. So no.”
He looks crestfallen, then smiles. “Well, I do. So I hope our paths will cross again.”
Bea returns the smile, the one in her lexicon reserved for lecherous creeps. “Hold your breath on that hope,” she hisses. “And we’ll see what fate has in store for you then.”
Over a decade ago
Everwhere
You step out of a glade, where stones give way to a thick carpet of moss that sinks pleasantly under your feet. You go on and the moss springs back. You stop walking to stand and glance up at the trees flanking this hidden space, so closely pressed together that their boughs entwine. You see a canopy of branches and leaves so dense that the sky is no longer visible. And yet, as you squint into the darkness, all at once it becomes brighter: the shadows retreat, the sounds fall silent, the air stills. Gradually, the fog rolls back and the mists lift. The veins of the leaves glimmer silver in the moonlight.
You notice you feel lighter too. You begin to realize that each of your senses is sharper. You see the imprint of the shadows as they flit away; you sniff the ebbing scent of bonfire smoke, burning peat and kindling; you hear the call of a bird in the distance and you know, without knowing how, that it’s a raven. The beat of its wings disturbs the air as it takes flight. You reach out to touch the nearest tree and realize that your fingertips are tracing the grooves of the bark before
they’ve even been pressed to the trunk. You taste the dew on your tongue, though you’ve not opened your mouth: wet earth and salt.
You feel clear. You find that you know answers to questions you’ve been wondering about for weeks, solutions to problems that have been plaguing you for months. You feel calm. Well-stoked anxieties crumble and dissolve to dust. You feel content. Violent wounds soften and fade, leaving no scars inside or out. You stand and breathe the moonlit air, slowly and steadily, until you no longer know what is breath and what is air. Until you no longer feel where you end and the forest begins.
Goldie
I always had vivid dreams and always remembered them when I woke. Sometimes they told me things, things that were going to happen. Sometimes I went somewhere special. That night, the first time, I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d pressed my head under the pillow, trying not to hear Ma and my stepfather in the other room arguing. They argued about silly things. Usually money. Ma would say he should earn more so we could get out of this flat; he would say she should stop nagging and, if she cared so much about moving, ought to get a job herself. She’d say she couldn’t, because of her panic attacks. They fought about babies. She wanted one; he didn’t. Sometimes the fights ended in silence, sometimes in sex. I preferred the silence.
Before it happened, I peered out from under my pillow up at the clock, the luminous hands of the White Rabbit ticking across the numbers. It was very late, or very early—nearly half past three. I worried about falling asleep at my desk in school the next day, since Miss Drummond hated me to do that. She’d tell me I was “wasting my potential.” I told her I was only seven. She told me I “ought to have higher aspirations.” I’d distract her by asking for definitions of her favourite words, like “onomatopoeia.” That always worked. Miss Drummond loved the sound of her own voice; you needed only to ask her to explain or enunciate something and you were free and clear.
Anyway, that was the last I remember of being in bed or, rather, on the sofa where I slept. Then I was in a place full of trees and rocks and everything was muted white, a bit like Christmas but with leaves falling instead of snow. It was dark, except the moon was bright enough for me to see where I was walking, and, strangely, though I’d never been to this place before, I knew where I was going. To meet my sisters. Which was stranger, since I didn’t have any sisters. My stepfather was winning that fight.
I walked a path of stones scattered with white leaves, still falling all around me. I clambered over slippery rocks and fallen trees, their trunks wider than I was tall. Sometimes clouds covered the moon and the air was mist and I couldn’t see so well. I hurt my knee and cut my hand, but I didn’t care. I felt the urge to fly, since I could often fly in my dreams.
For a while the path disappeared, leaving no signs of the direction to take, but I wasn’t scared and didn’t have any doubt about which way to go. I knew whether to cross a stream; I knew to take a left path or a right without thinking. It felt nice, to know. In my non-dream life, I wasn’t like this. I usually felt lost, considering choices for hours, and even then, after finally deciding on something, I still wondered about it, worrying that I’d made the wrong choice. Here I didn’t think, I simply followed wherever I took myself. Also, it was a relief to be alone, free from Ma and her fears for me.
Then I wasn’t alone anymore. I slipped down over another rock, covered in moss, and fell into a clearing where the ground was entirely covered in ivy. It knitted itself into a carpet of white-veined leaves and twisted up the trunks of four gigantic willow trees. Three girls were playing there, running and laughing and calling to one another. They stopped when they saw me. For a second I was scared again, as if I were back in the playground at school. Then the tallest one, with red hair that curled down her back, smiled and beckoned me. The other two—one with dark skin and a puff of dark dandelion hair, the other delicate as a bird with long brown hair—waved.
My sister, my sisters.
I stepped forward to meet them.
Scarlet
“What’s your name?”
“Goldie.”
“I’m Scarlet,” she said. Of the three girls, she seemed to be the leader. “This is Liyana—”
“Liyana Miriro Chiweshe,” the girl with the dandelion hair interjected, holding out her hand.
I stared at her hand, unsure of what to do, then took it. She shook for us both, then let me go.
“You can call me Ana,” she said, adding as an afterthought, “If you like.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“—and Bea,” Scarlet said, nodding at the bird-girl, who didn’t offer her hand. “We’re playing It. Want to join?”
I nodded again but didn’t say that, although I knew the rules, I’d never played before. It wasn’t a game that was possible without friends, unless you were good at conjuring imaginary ones, which I was. And good at not caring what other kids thought, which I wasn’t.
“Okay,” Scarlet said. “You can start. Count to ten to give us a chance—and the trees are safe, all right?”
I nodded a third time.
“Watch out for her.” Scarlet looked at Bea. “She’ll fool you into catching her—she always wants to be It.”
“All right,” I said, as Bea laughed. But if she wanted to be It, I’d happily let her. I’d rather stand under one of the willow trees and watch.
Scarlet gave the signal and my sisters flew off, shrieks of delight streaming like ribbons behind them. Liyana darted to the nearest tree and clung on, while Scarlet raced around the edge.
“Run, run as fast as you can,” Bea sang, skipping around me in ever-decreasing circles. “You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!”
I stepped forward, reaching out to grab the edge of her sleeve before she pulled away, laughing.
“I’m It,” Bea shouted. “I am, I am!”
I turned and dashed towards a tree. Bea, clearly keen to hold on to her elevated position, let me go.
“Oh, Goldie,” Scarlet said, slowing down to a stop. “What did I tell you? She’ll never catch any of us now.”
Bea marched up and down, echoing her refrain. Despite her irritation, Scarlet smiled. “You’re so weird,” she said to her sister. “I don’t get you at all.”
Bea grinned. “That’s because I’m an enigma.”
“Stop showing off with your fancy words,” Scarlet said, her voice tainted with both annoyance and affection. “You don’t even know what it means.”
Ignoring Scarlet, Bea looked at me. “It’s a shame,” she said, “that you won’t remember any of this in the morning.”
Liyana
Liyana sat at the end of her bed, the stolen cards in her lap. She’d been having strange dreams, the particulars of which she couldn’t quite remember when she woke, though she tried hard, squeezing her eyes shut, struggling to catch sight of the evaporating images. But, though Liyana couldn’t recall what she’d seen or heard, still the sense of the dream lingered, tapping at the edges of her thoughts, trying to catch her attention. She hoped the cards might help, might bring the images back, might turn them into a story. Though not like the story she’d seen before.
Liyana shuffled the cards. Again. And again. And once more for luck. As they sliced into one another, shifting from her right hand to her left, one snapped out of the pack and dropped to the floor.
Liyana slid down from the bed to pick it up. The Four of Cups. She stared at the picture: four women standing in a circle, each holding a star-engraved goblet aloft in a toast. An image tugged at the edges: moonlight on white leaves. Laughter. Girls calling her name.
Folding her legs, Liyana knelt on the bed and set the Four of Cups on the duvet in front of her. She picked another card. The Magician. A woman in a cloak held a shining wand that illuminated the sky. Birds flew beside her, an owl hovered above her, fairies and sprites danced at her feet.
Liyana set this card beside the first and picked a third. The Moon. A purple-haired wolf standing at a river’s edge howled up
at a fat yellow moon. Towering white trees flanked the river, their trunks encircled by a pair of two-headed snakes.
Liyana stared at the cards. All at once, the dream returned.
Bea
“Who wants to hear a story?”
We all looked up. I did, but I wouldn’t say so. I knew who would.
“I do,” Liyana said.
Bea smiled. She looked to Scarlet and me. “You’ll want to listen to this too. You might learn something.”
Scarlet turned her attention from the leaves she was setting alight—none of my sisters seemed alarmed by that, so I pretended I wasn’t either—and looked at Bea.
“Are you all sitting comfortably?” Bea said, as if she were our ma and we her babes. “Then I’ll begin . . .”
Liyana clapped. Scarlet smiled. I did nothing.
“In the time before time,” Bea said, “before the existence of Everwhere or Earth, there was nothing and nowhere, only the light and its shadow.” She waited, a self-satisfied pause. “Then, at last, with the spark of life came the creation of humanity. Such was the explosive force of this creation that the light and its shadow were split apart and, once separated for long enough to forget it was ever whole, one half became the personification of good and the other half of evil.
“When this happened, the forces of good and evil fought a battle to see who’d win influence over humanity. But since both sides were always perfectly matched, no victor ever emerged. Eventually, the powers that be invented the game of chess to decide the fate of humankind, since this method would be both less bloody and over far quicker. However, it didn’t help, since every game still ended in a stalemate.
“Eventually it was decided, by an extremely lengthy and infinitely tedious board meeting, that the influence over humanity would be shared: the forces of good would influence their hearts; the forces of evil would influence their minds. Angels and demons were scattered throughout Earth and Everwhere to exert their influence by these means.
The Sisters Grimm Page 6