White Is for Witching

by Unknown

  Miranda found out about a rock ’n’ roll dance night at Fisher Hall, and she fetched a flared skirt with a poodle embroidered on it from her wardrobe. The skirt was pink, and she tied a pastel-pink scarf around her neck in a jaunty bow. I think that was the only time I saw her wearing a colour other than black. I couldn’t find anything similar, so I settled for wearing a crinoline under a strapless polka-dot dress that already had a big skirt. She tied pink ribbons to the ends of my plaits. I left my room with her kisses tingling on my shoulder blades.

  When we got to Fisher Hall, I found out that Miranda could jive. She grabbed my hand and shimmied in circles, flicking her heels and flapping her hands as if the music the Elchords were making was mowing her down. She said she had learnt the style from a videotape. I just shuffled and two-stepped and let her use me as a prop. I couldn’t get five minutes’ rest, either—the other dancers stayed away. They cast admiring glances but stuck with their partners.

  At the end of the dance Miranda was so exhausted that she lay flat on the floor by the emptied drinks table, unable to move even to minimise the effort of the people who laughed nervously and stepped over her. I made her drink lemonade through a straw, and got her back to her room on a sugar rush, singing too lay too lay peppermint stick. I wanted to say something to her, something like “Hey I like you,” or “You’re so so pretty. You’re actually gorgeous.” She had a black sash tied around her head; it drove stray strands of hair behind her ears and suddenly even her ears were beautiful.

  “Why don’t you take a picture,” she said, flapping her hand at me. “It’ll last longer.”

  I climbed onto her bed and tucked myself around her, my knees against the backs of her knees, my stomach against her back. We were both trembling.

  “Nice ears,” I said.

  Our bodies struck like matches; she changed form under my hands, I went slowly, slowly,

  (only do as much as we both want)

  her nipples hard under my lips, her stomach downy with the fuzz that kept it warm, the soft hollows of her inner thighs. She said, “Please stop.”

  I flopped down beside her, turning her face towards me, stroking her hair. Her hair felt endless in the dark. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” Then, surprisingly, she asked me if I was okay.

  “Not really, not if I’ve upset you. Did it feel weird?”

  “No. Well, a little, perhaps. It was . . . I don’t know. Too much, probably. I’ve never . . . not even with a boy.”

  I know I said something, but whatever I said made no sense. She was so worried that there was no way for me to assure her that I was no marauder out to feast on the shattered remains of her hymen or something. My fingers snagged in her hair and her head jerked on the pillow. She got up and got dressed and I did too, trying to think of a way to stop this becoming a crisis.

  I caught up with her at the college gate. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  We both smiled, embarrassed, not at each other, in different directions. “What are you sorry for?” we said.

  I felt every vein in me move closer to the surface of my skin, all veins plucked in one direction as if I was a stringed instrument.

  She opened the college gate with her key and stepped out onto the street. I followed her; she hadn’t said that I couldn’t. It was full moon. No one was out, and it was so cold that our breath stained the air around our heads. Birds chirped. I don’t know what kind of bird chirps at night. We walked towards the mill pond.

  “My mental health is questionable anyway,” she said, not looking at me. She told me she’d been in a clinic for just over five months because she’d had a breakdown and forgotten who she was. I sat down on a low wall; the river was at my back. She sat down too.

  “What, the breakdown came just all of a sudden?”

  “No. There was this one night when something went wrong. Some kind of splinter swerved in my brain or something.”

  “What happened on splinter night?” I asked.

  “Splinter night?”

  “The night everything went wrong.”

  She paused. “I can’t remember.”

  “Can’t you?”

  She took a deep breath and rested her chin on her hand. “I have a theory,” she said. I nodded at her to continue and she said, “There’s this fireplace downstairs. I think I went down there for some reason. To hide, maybe. I thought it was all my fault my mother died. And I hit my head on the marble. My brain bled. I died.”

  She watched me.

  “Right,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Why don’t you think it’s possible?” she asked. “Because everyone can see me?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that it seems to me that the dead only return for love or for revenge. Who did you come back for?”

  Neither of us smiled. I felt light-headed. I couldn’t believe that we were discussing this.

  “Love or revenge,” she sighed. “Neither.”

  “Miranda,” I said. “You’re not dead. Okay?”

  “Ore,” she said. “I’m not alive.”

  I had found the bottle of purple water that Tijana had given me; I ran my thumb over its lid in my pocket.

  “Let’s suppose that what I say is true,” she said. “Just as a thought experiment. Let’s say I’m not alive anymore. What would be helping me to maintain the appearance of life? That’s the baffling thing.”

  “That rouge of yours,” I said, giving in. I touched the dip between her collarbones, it was like touching thin paper as breath shifted through it.

  “You should run,” she said, mournfully.

  “No, you should,” I said. I pulled the bottle out of my pocket and shook it.

  “What is that,” she said. Her pupils were huge satin cavities. There was no curiosity in them.

  “Run,” I said, and threw some water at her. It didn’t touch her, but she blenched, turned and ran away between the trees.

  I followed her. For someone with so little energy, she ran fast. She was really and truly running from me. She crossed the mill pond bridge, sprang right and headed back towards college. I tossed the exorcism water into a bin a second before I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. She slowed down immediately. She was crying angry tears.

  “If you don’t believe me just say you don’t believe me. Don’t go along with me and then make fun,” she said. She shrugged my hand off her arm and collapsed onto the zebra crossing. There were no cars coming. I sat down beside her.

  “I wasn’t taking the piss out of you,” I said, unsure whether I was lying. “I just wanted to give you some way of knowing for certain. It was an experiment. That was exorcism water.”

  She sniffed. When I dared to look at her, she was smiling.

  “Why was it purple?” She wore her tears like tiny crystals that tipped her lashes.

  “Because . . . I don’t know.” I didn’t have the heart to make anything up.

  “It’s so quiet,” she said. Three AM and as usual, the town was dead. She lay down with zebra stripes stacked behind her, and she pulled me down beside her. “Don’t you care where you come from? Don’t you wonder why you do the things you do and like the things you like?”

  “Er . . . not really,” I said.

  “Do you think it is her fault,” she said, without inflection.

  “Whose?”

  She didn’t repeat herself.

  We looked at the moon and the moon looked at us. I had thought we would be able to hear when a car was coming, or feel the rumble of its wheels through the tarmac, but headlights were the only warning, and even then I noticed them so late that when we scrambled up from the road the car’s driver took fright and blared his horn at us as he went past.

  We went back to college. I went to my room and Miranda went to hers.

  I wanted to ask her something. I wanted to say, “If you’re dead, then why did you get up when the car came? Why bother?” But I didn’t want her
to run from me again. And, I suppose, having died once there is no reason to die again.

  I went home on the last weekend of term. I left most of my things in my college room, so all I had to take to the train station with me was a Reebok bag filled with dirty clothes. The last thing I did before leaving college was check my pigeonhole in the post room. Tijana was in there, checking for post herself. The mockney guy from the year above us, the one who’d wondered aloud whether Tijana had a boyfriend, was holding her hand and whispering in her ear while she giggled and read a letter. I was amazed. I shook my head. The mockney guy saw someone he wanted to speak to out of the post room window and bounded out of the door like a badly made puppy. As soon as he’d left, Tijana turned to me and said, “What are you all shaking your head for?”

  “Well,” I said. “Are you with him?”

  “What if I am?”

  “Nothing. I just wouldn’t have thought you’d go for that type.”

  “That type?”

  I pointed at him. He was standing in New Court with another guy who looked just like him, laughing from only one side of his mouth. Couldn’t she see what he was?

  “Tijana. He’s a public-school wanker.”

  “How can you say that? You don’t even know him.”

  “Have a good Christmas, Tijana.”

  “Not knowing people doesn’t bother you, does it? That’s why you have this thing with the girl who hardly even exists. I mean, do you want to be with her, or is it that you want to be her?”

  I wanted to wither her with a look followed by a superbly dismissive comment, but instead I said, “What?”

  Tijana said, “Look at yourself. You’re disappearing.”

  It wasn’t as dramatic as Tijana had put it. But that day I was wearing the jeans that I usually reserved for thinner days, and even though I’d belted them up as tightly as I could, they still slipped down over the spiky new angles of my hips. I couldn’t acknowledge it, though. The trick was not to think about the shrinkage, or how tired I was. I could not say aloud how draining it was to share a bed every night, how it became so difficult to breathe together, because if I said it aloud it would sound like a complaint and then it would become a complaint. I could not say anything against Miranda. There wasn’t anything bad to say, she did nothing wrong. I deferred thinking about the fact that for most of the term I had been eating and eating in my room with the door closed, crisps and chocolate and sausage rolls in the hours when Miranda’s lectures overlapped with my free time. I had never eaten so much, I had never wanted to eat so much. But my clothes kept getting looser. I would think about all this once I’d spent enough time unconscious in my own bed at home, beneath my poster of Malcolm X. “By any means possible” . . . first I would sleep alone, later I would look for wounds.

  •

  Away from my sister it became more and more difficult to tell whether I was alright. Before it had been simple: I could look at her, or think of her at the clinic and then there I was, paper-clipped to my flesh, tidy where she wasn’t. But when her term started . . .

  I was sharing a flat with another guy and a girl. Both of them were in radio production. Both of them laughed too heartily. The guy’s room was next to mine, and at nights he’d knock on the wall between us and ask me what the fuck I was doing in there: feng shui? And every time I’d be about to say something about his mum or how he should fuck his own furniture I’d look, and, yes, my bed had moved from north to west, or my table had moved from beneath the window to beside the door. And it had been me that had moved it without thinking—I could still feel the work of it in my hands. I’d sit on the floor with my back against the bed and my laptop on my knees, trying to send words to Miri, my frail and feather-like problem, to whom I couldn’t write “I love you” because I meant it angrily and she would know. Not just that though; it wasn’t safe to say something like that without Lily between us. Lily was always very careful to pull us apart, to make Miri and I understand that we were not each other, that my pressing my lips to Miri’s nine-year-old heartbeat was not the same as feeling the blood move in myself. Once Miri jumped me in the Andersen shelter, pinned my arms behind my back and kissed my dick through my boxer shorts, so quickly I felt the damp and the presence of spiders more than I felt what she’d done. But Lily still knew somehow—she must have. Why else would she have pinched Miri so hard after dinner? So hard the bruise rose, as if the pain of it had put yeast in her skin. I e-mailed Miri about it; subject line: Do you remember . . .

  I didn’t send it.

  Neither did I send the messages to Miri that said: Can you help me, I do miss her, you are the only one who knows where to find her, I think you talk to each other when I can’t hear.

  So what did I do while Miri fed her intellect amongst the greatest minds in the country?

  I drank coffee.

  I moved the furniture in the place I slept in

  (moved it and moved it and moved it),

  I walked down alleyways with a camera stuck to my face as if I couldn’t see without it.

  I got good at cooking Mormon funeral potatoes. They’re basically just potatoes fried in a batter made extra crunchy with cornflakes. The trick is to get the proportion of cornflake to batter right. Mormon funeral potatoes are the sort of thing that would pain Dad to serve. They’re the sort of thing Miri would beg to be excused from having to eat.

  I got back the day before Miri came home. Dad had offered to pick me up, but I told him not to worry about it. There was a Christmas tree in the hallway, a giant, pointy witches’ hat quivering with red-and-silver ribbons and lights, scraping the ceiling like something out of The Nutcracker Suite. We’d never had a Christmas tree before. I half expected Dad to spring out from behind the tree dressed as Santa.

  Sade was by the telephone table, and I was about to make a comment about the tree, but she was standing with the receiver in her hand, listening, looking huge and sad. Her eyes were just pinpricks above her cheeks. I said hello, and she didn’t answer me. I was halfway up the stairs before I realised that when I’d walked past her I hadn’t heard anything but the dial tone.

  Dad found me in Lily’s studio, trying to see what I could make from the film I’d transferred from the bottom shelf of the fridge in the flat to a mini-cooler for the journey. I was wearing one of Lily’s aprons, and my gloves were doused with solution. I was well aware that the goggles on my face only added to my look of idiocy.

  “Welcome home,” Dad said. Red light met daylight.

  “Can you come in or stay out, Dad?”

  He came in. I told him about Sade and the phone, and he nodded thoughtfully.

  “Is that all? Nod nod? She’s . . . mad.”

  It was too late to tell him how she’d nearly burnt the house down. I said again: “She’s mad.”

  “She’s taking medication,” Dad said, abruptly.

  “What?”

  “Her problem isn’t anything dangerous, just a perception thing—visions, voices since childhood. Information supplementary to life, assurances of an afterlife, that sort of thing. She didn’t hide it from me when she was applying. Think of her as a modern-day St. Bernadette.”

  “St. Bernadette would’ve made a brilliant housekeeper, wouldn’t she,” I said.

  Dad said very seriously, “I don’t know about that, but Sade is very good.”

  I asked, “Does Miri know?”

  He said he’d had no reason to tell her.

  About an hour before Dad went to pick Miri up, I heard hammering in Miri’s room and put down the photography book I was reading next door. Dad was in the psychomantium with the light on, nailing Miri’s drawers shut, fixing the closed compartments in her wardrobe so that they wouldn’t open again. I waited for a break in the hammering, then asked Dad if he needed a hand nailing any other cupboard doors in the house shut. It would stop the guests from stealing clothes hangers, I suggested.

  He gestured towards Miri’s bed. An array of chalk packets were heaped on the bedspread, alo
ngside a mass of plastic, which I poked and watched fall into separate components—it seemed they were the remains of spoons, curved with tooth marks. I felt vaguely nauseous. It was like looking at leftover bones in a KFC bargain bucket.

  “She’s been hiding them all over her room,” Dad said. “The whole time she’s been saying, yes, yes, I’ll eat properly, yes, I’ll get better, and she’s been doing this.”

  He stood, still holding the hammer, and stared at me. His pupils looked black.

  “Did you know about this?”

  I looked back at him steadily. I shook my head.

  “She won’t do this anymore,” he vowed.

  “I don’t see how this is going to work. She’ll just find new hiding places. And, Dad . . . she’s going to be pissed off that you went through her stuff.”

  He turned to her desk drawer and swung the hammer with much more force than he needed to. He didn’t even hit any of the nails he’d already embedded in the wood.

  “It’s got to work,” he said. His voice as he said it made me respond immediately: “I know.”

  “While you’ve been gone I’ve been working on—” he laid the hammer on the table, inhaled deeply “—new recipes for her. Appetizing things. I know what to do. It’ll work, Eliot.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “It’ll work,” he said. “It’s not going to be easy, but I know she wants to stop all this. I know she wants to get better.”

  “No one likes being sick,” I agreed, and walked backwards, softly, into my room. After a moment the hammering began again.

  •

  Miranda and her father sat in the Dean’s office with the Dean himself, nodding and smiling soberly at each other, taking turns to talk and to listen. All three of them had expressed their sorrow at the fact that Miranda’s change of environment had worsened her condition. Miranda watched the Dean’s goatee beard move as he explained that, if she continued as she was for the next two terms, she would fail her first year and be sent down.

  Everything in the room was quietly powerful; leather-bound books, an antique globe, near-black wooden chairs and surfaces, stiff, richly coloured drapes. The window cases swooped into domes, like those of a chapel. There might as well have been stained glass, but it seemed someone had thought that would be too much. Outside the Dean’s windows, people yelled goodbye to each other across New Court, luggage wheels chattered on cobblestones.