“Fuck you Cambridge fuck you Cambridge fuck you,” he chanted.
Eliot and Miranda walked out of school with their arms around each other. They passed Jalil, standing by the results board and running a pensive finger down the list of names. Seeing him she felt her relief in her chest, as strong as if she had just won an impossible race, or a bet.
Tijana was nearby, with her mother. Tijana’s mother was radiant with smiles, but Tijana’s eyes were red and her wrists stuck out of her black sleeves with alarming scrawniness.
•
September ended. The night before Eliot was due to leave, Miranda was so cold in her bed that she knew she couldn’t survive it and knocked on the wall between her and Eliot’s rooms. With minimal grumbling, he came and climbed into bed with her and let her lie with her head on his breastbone, his arms around her a blanket beneath the blanket. She tried to tell him she would miss him, but he said: “I’m asleep, actually.”
The next morning, his preparations were simple. He had one suitcase. He slung his satchel across his body, stuck his hands in his pockets, and he was ready to leave. Sade seemed anxious. She didn’t say it, but she was. Luc patted her arm. “Only two guests booked in, and we’re away for four hours, four and a half max. You and those silver shoes can handle anything.”
Sade smiled, but said nothing. She appeared to be conserving energy.
All the way to the airport, Miranda and Eliot could not stop looking at each other. Luc let them sit in the back together and managed not to mention that he felt like a taxi driver. Miranda and Eliot slid low into their seats and considered each other completely. In November, Miranda and Eliot would be eighteen, and they would be apart. At Departures, Miranda put Eliot’s scarf around his neck.
“Thanks,” he said.
She took Luc’s hand and walked away quickly.
The next day Miranda’s overcoat was ready. She could barely believe that such a simple-looking coat could take so much work, so much staring at rumpled sewing-machine tracks on cloth, wondering what had gone wrong, wondering why the needle had stabbed that place instead of this. It looked so fine on
the mannequin
proved very useful for me when Miranda, Luc and Eliot left for the airport. Especially as I did not have much time. I could not, for example, use the looking people. Things progress quite slowly with them. And Luc’s precision meant that when he said four hours he would most likely be away for a little less than that, even. It was very unlikely that he would be gone for more. Besides, the key thing was to have everything as it was, or almost as it was, by the time Miranda returned. I allowed three hours and forty-three minutes to pass without incident. I was confident. The forty-fourth minute before the fourth hour, began in Eliot’s room.
Eliot had left his room painfully tidy, chair fitted into desk like a puzzle, his bed made (his bed made!), excess clothes folded into each
drawer. But he had left his door open, trusting his sister to lock up after him. He had left his window open. His window is so close to some of the trees that, if the branches were safe, which they are not, he could climb out of his window and crawl straight along a branch. An apple fell in through Eliot’s window. It was an all-season apple. I can make them grow. Do you know the all-season apples? They have a strange, dual colouring. If you pitied Snow White, then you know. One side of such an apple is always coma-white, and the other side is the waxiest red. The apple bounced and rolled across Eliot’s floor, only a little bruised. It made a smooth track to the door of Miranda’s room, where it stopped, because Miranda’s door was closed.
A moment of utter silence throughout me, then the mannequin opened the door. It bent and picked the apple up. I very much enjoy the way that mannequin moves—it rejoices in its limbs, rearranging itself quickly and expertly, ending each sequence of movement with a flourish. It stood holding the apple high, offering it to no one, the empty hand slanted towards the full one, hips jutting jauntily. Then the mannequin skipped downstairs. It is not easy to explain how the mannequin skipped. Just that it was too fast for plastic, too slow for fabric. It sort of rippled. It met the African housekeeper in the garden, where she was quietly knitting. The woman saw the mannequin out of the corner of her eye. She said, “Miranda . . .?”
When she saw what it was, she was so afraid that she became stupid and babbled senselessly. The mannequin stood over her, displaying its apple like a child proud of its prize. It had no lips, so it said nothing to her. The African woman looked at the apple and
(this had not at all been accounted for)
her heart stopped beating. It was some sort of trick, for I was certain that the woman was still alive. For one, she continued to blink. There was a dark, lean intelligence in her eyes, something that stirred yet did
not know itself. Stillness, stillness. The mannequin bent over her and rearranged the white wool on her lap, like a solicitous waiter preparing her for her meal. It seesawed forward so that its body was halved, seized her chin, opened her mouth with its fingers and pressed the white side of the apple, the bad side, against her mouth.
She bit at the white side—she bit! In my distraction I lost hold of the other black guests, the couple on the second floor who I had kept in their bed the past three days, curved around the bed like fitted sheets with their faces crusting over. The African with the silent chest chewed, swallowed and opened her mouth for more, while the couple picked up their cases and fled, leaving money on the hallway desk as payment for their stay. Then, precise as ever, Luc Dufresne’s car pulled up outside, the car with my Miranda inside it, and there was nothing more to be done at that time.
The next day, the frock coat was the last thing Miranda took on her way out of her room; she pulled it off the mannequin, put it on and left for Cambridge.
On the first day of Freshers Week the sunlight turned the stone buildings silver. Dad got so baffled by the one-way system that we ended up parking, walking up to my college and borrowing a luggage trolley from a porter to wheel my suitcases up to my room. Mum kept dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, but when I asked her what she was sniffling about she said, “Ore, I’m fine.” Each college we passed stood as taut and strong as a flexed arm and had its flag flying from a pennant. Both road and pavement were full of people on foot, laughing and calling out to each other. I thought it could be Camelot, or Lyonesse. I thought, I can’t live here. I was relieved when it finally got dark and the town became more anonymous. By then people had started sharing their A-level results, and when they had exhausted that topic, they started on their GCSEs. You could tell who’d gotten 5 A’s at A level because they’d ask the question, yet hold out on contributing their own answer until the last possible moment.
Everyone seemed upbeat, except for Tijana. I discovered her at matriculation dinner. She was sullen until tricked into smiling. Her accent was gentle, she had long, dark hair and the high forehead of a romantic heroine. She smelt of some sweet fruit, or a jam. She had put her arms
through only one of the two pairs of slits in her college gown, but I decided not to offer her any advice about that—she probably knew already, also she looked very dignified sitting there with these enormous black sleeves that were too important for food. She drank her wine and she listened patiently to the rules of a game that a mockney guy from the year above us explained to her.
The game was to flip penny coins into each other’s wineglasses. If you found a penny in your wine, then you had to drain the glass in one go. I listened in on what the guy was saying to Tijana, and I looked up and down the table (boys outnumbered girls by about three to one) and thought it was a cheap trick for getting girls drunk. But there was more. The guy explained that the rules were the same if a penny piece was dropped onto your dinner plate—if you were “up for it” then you ate the food on it as quickly as you could, and with your hands behind your back. Tijana’s face was expressionless as she listened. Once he had finished explaining about the game, the guy dropped a penny into Tijana’s glass. She didn’t even wait half a second. She picked up her dessertspoon, fished out the penny and went to drench the guy in wine. I disliked his chat so much that I almost let her do it, but then a sense of responsibility kicked in. I took her glass from her and put it down on the table. “You don’t have to play,” I said, at the same time as the guy, who drew back from her (he was already quite drunk, so he nearly fell off his seat) and said, “Calm down, it’s just a bit of fun.”
Tijana turned to me and nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re right. I was being unreasonable. The wine is not bad.” She toasted me and took a small, deliberate sip, then looked about her uneasily. Like me, she seemed actually menaced by the faces that observed us from enormous frames arranged all around the candlelit hall. Apparently they were all former masters of the college, but aside from differences in weight and degree of facial-hair coverage, they could not be told apart. During
lulls in the awkward conversation, I examined the portraits nearest to me but couldn’t get past the sensation that here was the same man over and over, crouched in old boxes, readying himself to spit on my plate.
Tijana broke the silence by asking the question that sat between me and the others at our table. “Were those your parents who dropped you off?”
She meant the grey-haired couple with the Kentish-farmer accents who had hugged me golf club–shaped and cried when it was time for them to leave.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m adopted. Obviously. Neither of them went to university, so it’s a big deal for them.”
Across the table, a girl with a freshly scrubbed-looking face began telling a story about a friend of hers who was adopted. Tijana and I eyed each other, not sure which of us was supposed to respond to her, and in what order. I don’t think either of us wanted to.
After dinner Tijana and I walked back to the foot of her staircase. Someone had said that our college had been built in the fourteenth century. Our bedrooms ate into the walls of the college buildings, small pockets lined with posters and printed fabric. But from the outside I could see we had made our beds in a tomb. I already knew that that night I would be afraid to fall asleep, almost as afraid as when I was a kid and no one could promise me that I would absolutely, definitely wake up. It took me about a minute to notice that Tijana was crying.
At first it just seemed as if her eyes were sparkling excessively. Aside from the wetness of her eyes, she seemed alright—she giggled and ran across the square of grass in the centre of New Court that we didn’t have permission to walk on—she touched my hand lightly and pulled me along behind her by my fingertips.
The porter’s lodge was lit up and I could make out the large shape of one of the porters behind his desk, pretending not to be able to
see us. New Court was spiked with light, but I couldn’t see its source. The sparkle in Tijana’s eyes lengthened and slipped down her face. She simply wiped her cheeks and continued to talk as if nothing was happening to her. We sat down on the cold steps leading up to her room. She cried and talked about
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
for another ten minutes; that Tijana could really cry. Finally I offered to cry too, to keep her company.
“My cousin drank bleach and died this summer. He was all fucked up over something that happened to him. I don’t know what happened to him. No I do, but I don’t understand it. Why did it happen to him? No one can tell me why,” she said.
“I’m sorry the summer was like that,” I said.
She was drunker than she knew. Before I could say anything she’d convinced herself that she was being silly. She nodded. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. I just wasn’t . . . ready today.”
“Ready for what?”
“I don’t know. I feel looked at.”
“You’ve been fine,” I assured her. “Nothing out of the ordinary, I promise. I would have subtracted a point for dashing your wine at the guy next to you at dinner, but you didn’t, so it’s fine.”
She smiled, a real smile. “Good night. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
My room was almost opposite Tijana’s. Walking back around New Court, I saw a girl struggling through the door-sized gap in the college gate. I remembered her from my interview. The one who wore a stopped watch. I noticed again how pale she was. In her black coat, she seemed to fade into the air behind her.
“So you got in,” I called out to her.
She twirled so that her hair and the full skirt of her coat flew out around her, and then she curtseyed.
In my room at college, the walls have a strange relationship with the ceiling. The room feels as if it has more than four corners. I tried to sleep, but kept waking and walking to the window, looking down onto the cobbled street and wondering where I was. I ended up opening the present my mum had sneaked into my suitcase. She thought I hadn’t seen her, but she’s no good at hiding her intentions. She can’t help tiptoeing around with a finger to her lips at key moments. The gift was a book of Caribbean legends “for storytellers,” and she’d tucked a note in between the first two pages:
Tried to find a book of Nigerian ones but they all seemed to do with a tortoise! Have these and our love, we are
so very proud of you
—love, Mum (and Dad)
I had already bought the book for myself, with pocket money years ago. I opened it (its cover was crowded with anachronistic woodcuts of nubile women carrying water jugs on their heads)
and read my favourite story again. I read about the soucouyant, the wicked old woman who flies from her body and at night consumes her food, the souls of others—soul food!—in a ball of flame. At dawn she returns to her body, which she has hidden in a safe place.
I read to the walls. “Kill the soucouyant.” Dawn tore a rosy line through the clouds. “Find her skin and treat it with pepper and salt. How it burns her, how it scratches her. Only the night gives her her power, and if she is unable to reenter her body by sunrise, she cannot live. Kill the soucouyant, that unnatural old lady, and then all shall be as it should.”