I folded that page over at the corner and read on, no longer aloud. As always, the soucouyant seemed more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so you couldn’t decide if she was a monster. Still, I wondered if the salt and pepper were really necessary—they seemed too cruel when it would be easier to despatch her by
blowing out her flame before it grew, or by holding a mirror up to her wrinkled face and saying, “I don’t believe in you.” But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruellest way to kill a monster.
My mum keeps worrying that she’s not filling the space left by my birth mother. My dad was the same as well, forcing me to spend hours at the park with him and a football until he realised that, like him, I was much better at watching football than playing it, plus if I wanted to talk to him I’d do it without using sport as a crutch. But Mum . . . she keeps finding stuff in the African folklore section of the local library that she feels bound to tell me because she thinks my mother might have. Mum kept calling me Ore even though she really wanted a daughter called Rose. My name is not a big deal to me—if it was Rose it would’ve worked better with my surname and people would be able to spell it without that moment of uncertainty before putting pen to paper. Rose Lind is easily filed, she is a delight, she is Shakespearean, sort of. My birth mother was a legal immigrant. She and whoever my birth father was weren’t together. Aside from that, all I know about her is that she suffered from quite serious postnatal depression and couldn’t cope with me. Postnatal depression is common enough for me to assume that there were other factors that led to me being put in care. I’m assuming she hurt me, my birth mother. I wasn’t even a year old. I’m glad I don’t remember anything.
During the first few weeks, I saw Tijana every day. We went to the Freshers Fair together and debated buying membership to the union, finally deciding in favour when someone at the stall told us that not only was Ben and Jerry’s sold at the union at cheaper prices than those at Sainsbury’s, but it was sold there long after Sainsbury’s closed, too. When students handing out flyers for the Assassin’s Guild started circling us, an expression of distaste crossed Tijana’s face and she was, quite suddenly, gone. I wasn’t fast enough. One of them, a very large
guy, and brooding, not unlike like a manatee with matted hair, was wearing red-and-white-checked trousers and a top hat with a tag in it for ten shillings and sixpence. He started hovering across my path, his arm out, doing something very like cornering me, smiling and cajoling, saying I looked like the sort of girl who was really game. Game for what? Pretend murder. I smiled, took a flyer, then pretended I saw someone I knew and strolled away without looking back.
Someone else called out to me from a stall—their accent was African—“Hello my sister!” I knew he was only joking, but I bridled anyway. He was tall and shaven-headed, good-looking if you liked tall and shaven-headed, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt as a nice touch of irony. He waved his clipboard at me. “You should put down your e-mail address for the Nigeria Society mailing list,” he said.
I frowned and said “No,” and tried to pass him, but he pressed a leaflet into my hand anyway. I walked away with it, wanting to drop it on the floor, but I thought he might still be watching, then wondered why I cared if he was watching, then wondered why I was so upset. Because I was upset.
Tijana caught up with me, looking pleased with herself. “What were those strangely dressed people?” she asked. I told her, but she’d already lost interest and plucked at the leaflet in my hand. “What’s that? The Nigeria Society? Did you sign up?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
(I will really resent you if you persist with this)
“Too busy.”
“For what? Don’t you want to meet people? I think you should join.”
“Yeah? And why don’t you join the fucking refugee society?” I knew as soon as I said it that she would probably never speak to me again.
If I were her I would never speak to me again. I walked away to spare her the trouble of having to get away from me. Wanker. I was such a wanker. I gritted my teeth and ran across Parker’s Piece, slapping savagely at lampposts as I passed them. I was almost back at college when I noticed Tijana was walking silently behind me. She smiled when I looked at her.
“I didn’t mean to say what I said,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I could hear you calling yourself a wanker this whole time.”
She tutted, hugged me and kissed my cheek. I hugged her back, harder.
In the first couple of weeks I only caught glimpses of Miranda—Miranda in the phone booth across from our college, dialling, waiting and hanging up, dialling, waiting and hanging up. I saw her leaving the college library one morning, her arms crammed with more books than we were allowed to take out.
“How’s it going?” I asked her.
“I’m just trying to read everything I can,” she said. She seemed out of breath.
“You’ve got all term,” I said, and she nodded politely and wobbled away.
Miranda wasn’t among us gowned girls in cocktail dresses at formal hall. She didn’t come to the Freshers Week events, she didn’t watch TV in the common room, she wasn’t anywhere. I remembered something from a short story I’d read, about how the girl you want is the girl you see once and then she is nowhere to be found. The girl who does not appear in the crowded room.
Tijana and I got into the habit of 2:00
AM
visits to the Van of Death. Apart from the men who worked the van, we were often the only sober people there. Everyone else was on their way back from a club or something.
As we stood in queue, watching fat melt and resolidify between busy spatulas and the heat of the grills, I heard someone behind me, probably an English student at our college, mention the name Miranda Silver. I eavesdropped intently then, but all the guy said was that she was an affected little goose. “She almost didn’t go to matric dinner, you know. She said she didn’t care for dinners, and compared cutlery to cages.”
He sounded indulgent of her, but that didn’t change the fact that “affected little goose” was quite an affected thing to say in and of itself. We got to the top of the queue, and, as usual, Tijana ordered salad in a bap, which I continued to consider a pointless choice. She eyed me sternly, daring me to say anything as she opened the bap and splashed chilli sauce all over the inside of it. I talked. I touched on a variety of subjects unrelated to Miranda Silver—the parallels between hall food and the meals served in old people’s homes, the fact that getting drunk was already boring, concerns surrounding my inability to actually answer either of the essay questions I’d been set so far.
Tijana took one of my chips and said, “Miranda was at my old school.”
“Not friends?”
Tijana said, “No,” and she smiled at her own seriousness.
At college, my inability to sleep became terrible. Very quickly I learnt to seek Tijana out late at night. There were other people that I had begun talking to, people on my course, people who lived on my staircase and swapped CDs with me, but no one I could legitimately ask to climb graveyard gates at 4:00
AM
with me for Fortean experiments in spirit photography. No one but Tijana, who yanked her hair up out of her face in a Buffy-esque ponytail and said, “Let’s go.”
She trembled all over as the notched shadow of the church fell on her, but she kept her hands steady enough to set my tripod up properly.
She insisted on setting the tripod up, as if my doing it would somehow skew the results. We drank sugared tea from flasks and talked and measured each other’s Nosferatu-like shadows while the camera clicked serenely and independently.
Once I rolled her onto her back on the grass and looked into her face to learn her opinion about that. She laughed. I kissed her. She kissed me back, hard, and wrapped her legs around me as if she wanted to climb up me. Her skin was fever hot. When I kissed her neck I felt her breath catch in her throat. She rolled me over and sat up on top of me, and we kissed and fumbled with buttons and put hands and lips to bare skin until one or the other of us said, “I can’t,” and if it was me I don’t know why because I wanted to. Maybe I’m just remembering it wrongly to help me get over the rejection.
Once before I have been the scared one, in a best friendship brought from primary school to secondary school. It was the hugest secret that Catriona and I had ever had. It had to be. Adorned with yin-yang “best friend forever” necklaces and whatever else glittered on the racks of Claire’s Accessories we were, are, Faversham girls. By the time she and I were nine we were using the word “dyke” as a deep insult, even though our parents told us not to—we’d even use it on boys. There was something in the way my mum would say, “Don’t
say
that,” that let me know that calling someone a fat dyke wasn’t as bad as swearing.
Cat had red hair and so did her brother, Paddy, who kept chatting me up. Red hair didn’t work on Paddy. The first kiss with Cat might have been in a public place—at the cinema, I think. It’s hard to say because I was so scared that it felt as if we were kissing in front of everyone every time. I let Cat go farther and farther with me, and I touched her as little as possible. She allowed that poor love of mine. It was the dread that comes about when you are allowed to have something that seems costly and yet you’re not asked for payment.
In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?
The thing with Cat took about a year to grow, and about a week to be finished. The whole thing was so intense, so full of hurt that when I look back at it I squint. I want it forgotten. Not the way she was—she brought her body to mine with this strange and shocking innocence, when she came the first time she said “I love you” into my ear, words convulsive and unintended, not needing a reply. It’s the way that I was that needs forgetting. I behaved like a boy or something. The ending was clumsy and stupid and the friendship couldn’t survive it.
Tijana and I stuck to Scrabble and neutral talk on the other nights. She worked at essays, her flashlight steady between the gravestones as she crashed through her reading list hundreds of pages at a time, marking significant lines with sticky index tabs. She was not easily distracted; when it was her turn at Scrabble, she looked up from her notes and I could feel the words she’d just read still migrating from the pages and into her.
The guy who’d sat on the other side of Tijana at matric dinner came up to me while I was in the computer room and started talking about this and that. I kept my answers brief and shrugged a lot. Finally, he came to his point.
“Tijana’s probably got a boyfriend, hasn’t she,” he said. He still seemed like a fool to me. A low-key fool, but a fool all the same. So I said “Yeah.” Actually I didn’t know. Did she? Maybe at home.
The University Library is a mouth shut tight, each tooth a book, each book growing over, under and behind the other. The writing desks are placed in front of bookshelves, some of them between bookshelves so that whoever is sitting at the desk gets a feeling of something dusty,
intangible and unspeakably powerful, something like God, watching them through tiny gaps in the shelves. People kept trooping past the desk I’d chosen, in search of books and free seats, and within half an hour I’d stopped looking up when someone passed. I wanted to read about the soucouyant. I wanted to write about her, I still do. What do I want to write? Just a book, probably, another tooth for the UL’s mouth. Something that explores the meaning of the old woman whose only interaction with other people was consumption. The soucouyant who is not content with her self. She is a double danger—there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to me?
After a listless half hour flipping through critical essays on
Dracula
, I went in search of the likeliest-looking soucouyant-related titles that came up on the computer. I found Miranda at a desk beside a staircase on one of the wings. She had her head down, and her hair blackened the pages of her opened book. I thought she was sleeping, but as I came closer I saw that her eyes were open and she was looking sideways at me. I said, “Whoa,” before I could check myself.
“Hello Ore.” She didn’t sit up. Maybe she couldn’t actually bring herself to. She hadn’t even taken her coat off.
“How’s it going,” I said. She was much too thin. She was serene, like someone accustomed to sickness, someone who lay back to back with it in bed. For a second her face made no sense to me. Her enormous eyes, the curve of her lips, they locked me out. I couldn’t imagine ever touching her.
She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gun-point. She said she wished she could sleep more.
I looked around for a seat, so I wouldn’t have to stand up and crick my own neck in order to see her properly.
She’s unreal,
she’s an affected little goose
The nearest empty seat was two bookshelves away. I tucked the three books I had under my arm (I looked too studious just holding them) and stayed standing.
“I haven’t been sleeping that well either,” I told her.
She didn’t say anything and I racked my brains to fill the silence, but before I could add to what I’d said, she said, “I think it is the moon.” She said the words softly, to some tune of her own devising, and she drew the word “moon” out for a long moment. It was so odd and unnecessary that something told me that I had to proceed carefully.
“The moon?”
“What do you do when you can’t sleep?”
“Walk about,” I said.
We looked at each other for a decade, or at least eight months.
“Let’s walk about tonight,” she said. She gave her night away so easily that it was almost impersonal—this conversation could have happened between her and anyone who’d come up the stairs and said they had trouble sleeping. But it wasn’t like that somehow. It was like at the interview, when I was so panicked that I heard myself singing “Frère Jacques” under my breath and sat feeling detached from my mouth while my voice got louder and louder and I had to get up and take the song home, locked up under my temples. I had known that I was going to apply to Cambridge since I was fourteen. I have always tried to do more than anyone else, crouched over essays carefully ticking boxes I’d drawn on a separate sheet of paper to remind myself of all the key points so I would drop as few marks as possible. I type everything, and if typing is impossible I write in block capitals, so safe in the perfect spaces formed inside my
O
’s and
P
’s and
Q
’s that I could step into one of them and throw it around me like a hula hoop. I may be adopted, but I know exactly who I am. I am desperately trying to earn my keep. No
one told me I had to, but in a way that’s why I’m trying. Other people’s parents expect things from their futures, but mine say nothing, as if, after the fact of my childhood rescue, I don’t need any future. I suppose they think they’re helping by not putting any pressure on me.
Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Suis-je mort? Am I dead? Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines!
Miranda had come and looked at me and stopped “Frère Jacques” up with her soft, light voice, and she’d known she could do it before she did.