White Is for Witching

by Unknown

  She took the slice he offered her and tossed it into the bin, saucer and all. She peered at him. Why couldn’t she see him properly? It was hard to talk to him without opening her mouth fully. If she stood at a distance and in the dark, he would not notice. She stepped out into the passage and switched off the light. The air was crowded with droplets of rose attar and loomed behind her.

  “I can’t see you properly,” she said to him. “Come out here.”

  He meant something by the pie. He meant to poison her in some way, to disable her. Or, misguidedly, he meant to cure her.

  “Why did you use the winter apples?” she asked. He wouldn’t come into the dark.

  “What are you talking about?”

  She beckoned him frantically, but he stayed where he was.

  “Why did you use the winter apples?”

  “Miri,” he said. His eyes were wet. Or maybe not, it wasn’t clear. The goodlady called to her. She should not have to go to trapdoor-room alone.

  “Bad. You are bad.” They were the only words she could fit her astonishment inside.

  He said something, but she could no longer bear his voice. When he left her and went upstairs, she followed him, silent and intent, delaying her steps until he was safely in his room. Bob Dylan crooned scratchily. Her breath on the wood of his closed door. She could see him, her thoughts bent against him, if she wanted to she could strip him down to true red, the thing hinted at in rouge and roses

  (no he’s eliot eliot is me we were once one cell)

  he would be sour.

  She ran downstairs, away from him. There was someone strange at the front door. They stood where the Christmas tree had stood until the day after Boxing Day, when Sade had dismantled it for fear of bad luck. The stranger wore a big black hat and she didn’t dare to pass them. Their back was to her, and they stood very straight, with a shapeless coat draped over them in such a way as to put the existence of limbs in doubt. And yet they stood. It was in trapdoor-room that she fell, and the house caught her. She had thought she would find the goodlady below, or Lily, or Jennifer, or her GrandAnna, but there was no one there but her. In trapdoor-room her lungs knocked against her stomach and she lay down on the white net that had saved Ore but would not save her. Two tiny moons flew up her throat. She squeezed them, one in each hand, until they were two silver kidneys. Acid seeped through her.

  •

  It’s July. I’ve been listening to one song by the Shirelles over and over. Will you still love me tomorrow? It’s July and the low-growing plants in the garden are choked with humidity, but I’ve caught a cold in my head. It might be the song. I think this is the song that Miri liked to play, but I’m not sure, I just can’t be sure. Her favourite songs sounded just like each other—she stuck to one musical era, twelve years in a row, holding hands like shy sisters going out into the world.

  Dad has closed the bed-and-breakfast. That was three weeks ago. He couldn’t run the place without help, and I haven’t been any help. I’d push the Hoover down hallways with my foot, wishing the sound it made was quieter. What if the phone rang? What if it had news to tell? Miri may have been found drowned, washed up at the foot of the cliff with tiny seashells in her ears. Dad was aware of the phone too, of its power. When he answered a call he’d twist the wire between his fingers, moving down as far as he could, as if checking and double-checking that all was as it should be, that the line was in order and the phone was actually connected.

  We couldn’t find a recent photo of Miri to give to the police, so her missing person’s poster features a girl with long hair and dreamy eyes that don’t see the fracture coming. I tried to explain to the police officer who visited, but she nodded and said, “We’ll mention that she wears a shorter hairstyle now.” She was right to say that, there was nothing else she could say. Shadadapsha, shadadapsha.

  I didn’t even know Dad was going to close the bed-and-breakfast until I saw him unscrewing the sign that said The Silver House from the gate. He made me set an answer-machine message saying that reservations are no longer being accepted. At first I said I wouldn’t do it. Why should I? He was the one closing the place down. He picked up the receiver and slammed it into my chest. He didn’t do it angrily; he did it as if he’d seen a groove in my chest that fitted the shape of the receiver. He wrote the message on some notepaper and I said the words, stumbling, for no real reason, over the last part: “We regret any inconvenience caused.”

  Sylvie and The Paul came to stay for the fifth time since Miri left, even though Dad told them not to come this time. I was glad to see The Paul. Every day we got The Times and The Daily Telegraph, because there was more in them to read than in tabloids. I think Sylvie expected that by now she would have to cook for us and take care of us, but Dad made three meals a day in the kitchen, chopping and whisking with a grim energy that pushed her out, pushed all of us out. Sylvie kept looking at us with doe-eyed shock, as if she couldn’t believe that Dad and I hadn’t died of grief. Sylvie phoned Lind. To ask if Miri had been upset by a boy. “Why else would a young girl run away? It must be love.”

  “She’ll come back,” The Paul said to me, over the top of The Guardian. “All the best people run away from home when they’re young. I ran away when I was just twelve years old, and I came back when I was bored of it.” Sylvie and The Paul only ended up staying for a week. Dad spent most of his time blatantly avoiding them (I mean ducking into rooms and stepping hastily around corners when he saw them, as if he was regressing into boyhood) and it was getting tense.

  “Telephone if you want anything, or if you want to come to us,” Sylvie said.

  She kissed my cheek and then dabbed at it with her perfumed handkerchief.

  “Take care of your father,” The Paul said.

  Dad and Lily would never have this, they would never be old together and think inside each other’s clockwork.

  Sylvie and The Paul went back to Paris, and Dad moved around the house normally again.

  The Shirelles block my nose. I breathe with my mouth open and my mouth is dry. Headaches mean that from my seat on the roof I mistake the cliffs for Table Mountain. The headache that comes with this cold is invisible assault, like being thrown into a sack and pummelled with rocks.

  Sometimes Dad comes and stands in the garden while I’m on the roof. We don’t address each other, but we’re aware of each other. I look at the top of his head while he looks out in the direction of the road behind our house. He tries to find it, whatever it is he wants to say, then he gives up and goes back inside.

  In the past couple of weeks he’s been to London and Brighton, Liverpool, also Manchester, I think, to eat at restaurants. He comes back to write about what he’s eaten. When he’s away I eat refried beans cold out of the tin, sometimes with lettuce for nutrition. I’m glad when he’s away because he keeps asking me questions. He thinks he’s Inspector Morse. For some time it was the apples.

  “Where did the apples come from?”

  “They were on the kitchen table when I came down.”

  “Fresh apples? I didn’t put them there.”

  “Maybe Sade did, before she went.”

  “Why would she? She knows that in winter I use preserves.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why did you use them?”

  How was I supposed to answer that one? “For a change?” I said.

  My head ached so fiercely that I actually gasped, and he looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to reveal what I’d just remembered. I hobbled to my room but he followed me.

  “What did you say to her when she said she couldn’t trust you anymore?”

  “Nothing. Not a single thing, Dad, I swear.”

  I couldn’t lie down and groan in front of him, so I sat up straight at my desk. He stood with his hands behind his back, mulling my words over as if this was the first time I’d said them.

  “And she didn’t say anything else after that, she just left?”

  “Yes,” through gritted teeth.
/>   Dad’s questions make me think that there may be some large omission that my memory has made out of ignorance and confusion. For example, did my sister wound her foot? Am I trying to remind myself of that? And if she did cut her foot, is it a clue to something?

  I ask this because of her shoes. They keep filling with a substance that’s only identifiable to one side of my brain. The other side will only say no to it. I first noticed it the night I slept in Miri’s bed instead of mine. Something was moving in the branches outside my window with a flinty rattle; probably a squirrel, but it sounded as if someone hoarse-voiced was laughing at me. Dad was away and I found that the possibility of the phone ringing was too big for me alone, or the house was too small. The phone rang a lot, and each time it did I fell through rooms towards it as if yanked on a leash. Miri’s room was the only one safe from the phone. The psychomantium is detached from the house, even more so than Lily’s studio. I smelt roses stronger than I ever had in my life. Miri’s shoes were lined up at the feet of her coat mannequin. Six neatly polished size 6s with mad heels. The smell came from the shoes.

  The shoes were soaked through with

  (I didn’t make a sound but stood away, tried to think and looked again)

  red water. Water that was red and smelt of roses. It was thick, though. Some of it gathered in viscous lumps. Between the sight of the shoes and my head cold I had to throw up. Then I had to hide the shoes. They had to be hidden or they would expose the omission in my memory so bulky and strange. Miri left the house barefoot so she was supposed to come back. My chalk-sickened sister, shhh. Miri left the house barefoot . . . it would be stupid to hide the shoes or get rid of them. I emptied them and cleaned them as best I could. But would that colour stick to the inside? The smell stuck, but I got rid of the thick water. The next day there was more. I am chained to the shoes. There is nothing to be done. Sometimes, if you sit still beside them, you can watch them filling up, like rain puddles forming before your eyes. I can’t stop the shoes from filling, but I can’t ignore them, either. I have to keep emptying them into the bathroom sink, then rinsing and scrubbing hard with Jif and Dettol, then replacing the shoes exactly where they were so that Dad never knows. What happened that night? I can’t tell anyone. I don’t know. I didn’t see.

  There is no one in Dover who looks like my sister. I tour the town walking and on my bike, shaken by the ratio of water to land. Martin and Emma are together and are spending the summer teaching English somewhere in the Third World. The others don’t come around and only ask me over halfheartedly—I don’t talk and my silences are not mysterious.

  Dad doesn’t notice, but chairs are moved in the house. You leave a room and when you return the chair is scraped back from the table. Doors you leave closed are opened behind your back. And every day, the shoes.

  I will write this down now, before I decide not to:

  This morning I had just put the shoes back in their usual place when I heard someone walking in the attic. They walked slowly, as if weak. Their tread was light.

  I said, “Miri?” It felt as if I hadn’t spoken aloud for days. The walker stood still as soon as I spoke. But she was there, I knew it. If she was there she’d step again.

  Once for no, twice for yes

  Once for no, twice for yes

  hear me

  I whispered, “Miri, are you alive?”

  My question wasn’t loud enough to be heard outside of the room, but two creaks came from above, paired with deliberation.

  I had to hold on to the wall. I’ve read that madness is present when everything you see and hear takes on an equal significance. A dead bird makes you cry, and so does a doorknob. This morning I was not mad. The only thing significant to me in all the world was the creaking upstairs.

  “Where are you? In the house? Where in the house?”

  No sound.

  “Miri. Are you coming back?”

  Step, step, halt.

  I asked, “When?”

  Three creaks. She stepped three times.

  What is the meaning of it? Three creaks, three weeks? If she comes back for her shoes in three days, then I only need to empty them another three times. If it really is three weeks that were meant, what then. If three months, what then. Three years. That’s why I had to write it down now. By then I may no longer believe I heard anything in Miri’s room.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  thank you:

  stan medland, boogie, tophe, leo, ali, bolaji, tracy, jin, choop, car, hazel, ray, chretien, loa.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and raised in London. She wrote her widely acclaimed first novel, The Icarus Girl, before her nineteenth birthday; she graduated from Cambridge University in 2006. Her second novel, The Opposite House, was a nominee for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. White Is for Witching is her third novel.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TYPE

  This book was set in Janson Text, a typeface based on one that was designed in the late seventeenth century by Nicolas Kis, a Hungarian living in Amsterdam. The type is a wonderful example of the influential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England at that time. It is an old-style book face of excellent clarity and sharpness.