Three days later Miranda met me at Dover Priory and tucked her arm through mine. The town wasn’t that different from the Kent I knew. More shops and cars than Selling, more height and dizzying views than Faversham, but the people were pretty much the same. A group of white girls in their early teens, chains clanking from their baggy jeans as the music from the boom box one of them was carrying inspired them to make the street they walked on into an impromptu mosh pit. Women with Sainsbury’s bags and kids in prams, lost in the tight-lipped silence of the deeply annoyed. Granddads going into and coming out of a granddad pub. These didn’t look like people who’d stone refugees. If I didn’t see the refugee-stoners as I walked from the station to Miranda’s house with Miranda beside me, then where were
they, the baddies? Did they (“They”) spring up at night like toadstools? It was hard to believe in their existence.
Miranda rummaged in her handbag for her door keys, then she said, “Oh!”
I thought we were locked out, but, keys in hand, she raised her wrist to her ear and listened. “The watch has stopped.”
She’d explained to me about Haitian time; now she meant that the watch really wasn’t telling any time at all. She turned the tiny dial on its side over and over. “It was my mother’s,” she said.
She wouldn’t let me handle the watch, but it looked alright to me. Undented. “It probably just needs a new battery.”
She didn’t reply. She looked stiff, as if in shock.
When we got indoors, Miranda said, “I’m going to go and wake Eliot up—wait and we’ll come and find you,” and disappeared. Her dad led me upstairs—he’d kept a guest room unbooked so I could stay over. He looked like a model or something—he was wearing an impossibly white shirt with the collar and sleeves unbuttoned, jeans and pristine navy-coloured Nikes. I followed him up the stairs.
“What are you studying?” he asked.
“Arch and anth,” I said.
A woman with an armful of leaflets came down the stairs—she wove between Miranda’s dad and me. She brushed against me. I automatically said, “Sorry,” and walked closer to the wall so as not to jog her. The leaflets were red, blue and white. The woman winked at me.
“Any good?” Miranda’s dad asked.
“What?”
“Arch and anth?”
“Oh. I recommend it.”
My room was the first door after the staircase on the second floor.
“Are you vegetarian?” he asked, showing me in. “Have you any allergies? What foods disgust you?”
His voice was endearingly melancholy. “No, no, and I can’t think of any off the top of my head,” I told him.
He turned to me, smiled and pressed my hand. I thought perhaps he had some kind of mental checklist—friends Miranda brings home are alright if they a) like their studies and b) aren’t fussy eaters. He said, “See you at dinner,” and left.
The room I’d been put in had big windows that looked out onto the road. Across the road was a bank of grass and some trees. The view was a winter view, grey and dispirited. But it wasn’t just the season. All the light in the house was subterranean, as if the place had been built out of mildew. I switched on the light and drew the curtains in the room open as far as I could, to little effect. I dropped my bag onto the bed.
There was an apple on my pillow.
It was white.
The apple had not been there when I came into the room with Miranda’s dad. I am certain that it hadn’t been there. It had arrived while my back was turned, while I had been at the window. My first instinct was to look up. It must have fallen from somewhere. The ceiling looked innocent and ordinary. I touched the apple; it was very cold, so cold that it was hard to run my fingers over it in a single smooth line. It was only white on one side. The other side was red. Paint? I scratched at the white side; there was plain fruit flesh underneath.
I dropped the apple into the bin on my way out of the room.
I don’t have a lift phobia, but the lift in that house daunted me from the first. It was a steel cage with lots of ornamental coils in the metal. It rattles as it arrives at the floor you’re standing on, but the doors open smoothly and silently. I took the stairs—Miranda had told me that it
was only a flight up to hers and Eliot’s rooms. It seemed more like four. But in an unfamiliar house, when you’re uncertain where you’re going, every movement is prolonged by the sense that you’re going to try the wrong door or get in someone’s way and bother someone. It doesn’t matter how big or small the space—if you don’t know it, you get lost in it. Somehow I was at the top of the house, looking at a door with a twist of rancid-smelling cloth nailed to it. I turned away to try my luck with the staircase again, but turned back when I heard whispering. It was as soft as snowfall, but it took over all my hearing. I couldn’t hear what exactly was being said, but the murmuring glowed in my skull and didn’t stop, not even when I covered my head with both hands. There was more than one voice.
Who is it?
Bent double trying to find a place in the air where the whispering was not, I opened the attic door.
She was in there alone, kneeling by her bed, a woman dressed entirely in silver and fire-engine red. She didn’t look at me, but a strength stood behind her—I’m thinking of the tarot card with the image of the smiling woman subduing a lion at the jaw with nothing but a gleaming hand.
La force.
“What was happening in here?”
She looked at me then. Her face was notched with scars, but her gaze was soft. “What are you doing here? Go home.”
“I’m Ore,” I said, lamely. “Miranda’s friend.”
“I’m Sade,” she said. “Please go home.” She got up and closed the door in my face.
•
I almost walked into Miranda’s brother on the landing outside his room. Miranda came out behind him. They were holding hands.
When Miranda introduced us, Eliot turned the handshake into a complicated back-patting and finger-snapping thing he’d picked up in Cape Town. He did it with enough irony for me not to dread him. He was milder than I’d expected. Like Miranda, he smiled a lot, but more as if he was amused than as if he was trying to fend off the anger of the person he was speaking to. By the end of an hour’s lolling around in the sitting room I’d decided that he was alright. The sitting room was severe and full of space—the chairs were arranged a respectful distance away from the television screen—you could sit and converse in the armchairs by the window, or sit in the chairs in the middle of the room and switch the TV off so it wasn’t part of the conversation. It wasn’t the sort of room where you sat and ate snacks or meals while watching
Neighbours.
For example there were no cushions. My family uses cushions to protect our laps from hot plates.
I sat on the sofa beside Eliot and Miranda took an armchair miles away and began turning her watch dial. I smiled at her and she smiled back, nervously. We watched a film from their dad’s collection—a German film in black and white, about a serial killer who abducted only children, I think.
Eliot kept making comments and asking questions, which I welcomed, because after the first ten minutes the film became very slow. Eliot was obviously a stoner and collector of trivia—you could probably sit in companionable silence with him for half an hour and then he’d mention something about a rare toad or a semi-plausible conspiracy theory and then shut up for another half hour, or longer. For some reason he decided to address me by my surname only.
“Now look here, Lind . . . are you a Kentish maid, or a maid of Kent?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well. Where do you live?”
“Faversham.”
He reached across and went through the whole jazzy handshake thing again; I was better at it the second time.
“Maid of Kent, maid of Kent!” he and Miranda shouted.
“What?”
“You’re a Kentish man or maid if your home is west of the Medway—so places like Orpington are Kentish. You’re a man or maid of Kent if your home is east of the Medway, like Dover is, and Faversham is,” Miranda told me.
“Oh,” I said. So she and her brother carried maps of Kent in their heads. “But why?”
Eliot shrugged. “Ancient distinctions, man. Ever since the Angles and the Saxons . . .”
“What happened to them,” Miranda sighed. “The Angles and the Saxons and the Druids and the Celts and the Picts and the . . . who else?”
“Jutes,” I supplied, bored.
Miranda’s question was rhetorical, but Sade came in and answered with a great deal of satisfaction: “They died out oh.”
Sade bossed me into the kitchen, her hand on my elbow as she murmured, “Sorry about earlier,” and she poured me a drink. The drink looked like beer and it was bottled like beer, but it tasted of sugared vomit. I smiled politely at her over the top of the glass, but she tutted. “You are feeling like you can’t ask for what you want,” she said, and got a Guinness out of the fridge for me.
I pointed at the first drink she’d offered me. “What is that stuff?”
Sade raised an eyebrow. “Come on, get out. You don’t know Power Malt?”
“Never had it.”
“Never had malt? Heyeyeye.” She looked at me even more closely
than before and washed her hands with invisible water. “Well. It happens sometimes.”
“So you live here?”
Sade snorted. “I keep house. As far as it can be kept.”
I looked out at the garden through the kitchen window. The sun was setting into storm clouds; there was smoky brightness outside, as if the world was being inspected by candlelight. I saw the woman who’d brushed me on the stairs the first time I’d gone up them. This time when I saw her I knew she wasn’t a houseguest. She was standing under one of the trees, standing so deep in the ground that the earth levelled around her ankles. As if she had no feet, as if she was growing. Her presence made the branches behind her jerk and contract, like hands trying to close around her but not quite daring to. She had her hand spread over her face. She was looking at me through her fingers. Miranda knew her. It was Miranda who had said: “Tell me about that woman, the woman with the covered face? Is she
your
mother?”
My hand moved to the window latch, making sure the window was locked, making sure the window was really there, keeping her out. More than anything else, I wished she couldn’t see me. I forced the need to blink into a second of something like prayer—go away, with my eyes squeezed shut—and when my eyes opened, she was gone. It took minutes for the trees to recover from their shivering fit.
“Sade,” I said. “Did you see—?”
Sade put her hand over my mouth. She had seen, but she seemed untroubled.
“Better don’t, it’s bad luck,” she said. “But . . . if anything, come to me.”
Her eyes begged me not to make a fuss. “Okay,” I said, but I scanned the entire garden all over again. Then I sat down. Sade had a book on the counter. When I asked her what she was reading she held up the
cover so I could see. It was a Mills and Boon romance; a white nurse swooned in the arms of a white doctor. I told her about the soucouyant. While telling her I realised that the story of her is much more to do with how she is ended than how she began. We know that the soucouyant has preyed on younger souls for years and years, longer than anyone can remember. It’s as if she’s so wrong that even in the mind of the storyteller she must be killed immediately.
“That’s a good one,” Sade said. “I had not heard that before.” Then she asked: “Will you tell Miranda?” She wasn’t talking about the story I’d just told her.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I said.
“She wouldn’t understand. She’s different from us.”
I resented the “us.”
“Different from us how? As in, we are clairvoyant and she is not?”
“I’m sorry,” Sade said, eyeing me. “You are a maid of Kent, are you not?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not mocking you,” she continued. “I believe it. But does she believe it?”
“Who are you talking about, Miranda, or the soucouyant?”
“Maid of Kent, do you want to know what your name means?”
“No, thank you.”
“It means . . .”
I put my hands over my ears and growled, but I still heard. She said my name meant “friend.”
“I heard those . . . voices in your room,” I said. “I almost thought there were other people in there with you.”
“Yes there are,” said Sade. “They’re always there.” She held up three fingers.
“Two of them tell me: You have no one. Jump. Open the window and
jump. Join your old ones. It would be so easy. Jump, you have no one. On and on and on.”
I eyed her. “Do you ever think you’ll jump?”
Sade sipped at her Power Malt, her gaze distant. “It’s true that I have no one, you know. But the third one says, ‘Wait.’ Her voice is so kind. I don’t know who she is, I don’t know who any of them are, but all this other one ever says is ‘Wait.’ So I don’t even try to jump.”
“Sade,” I said. “Does this job pay well?”
She seemed amused at that.
“Then why do it? Do you have a British passport?”
She produced it from the pocket of her cardigan; it was bound in plastic, and inside the pages were as crisp as if she had only just received it.
“Five years,” she said, proudly.
“Then why do this job? You’ve got choices. Get a job that pays better. Go somewhere else. Don’t stay anywhere where people tell you to jump and die.”
“Normally you would be right,” said Sade, “but the other one says, ‘Wait.’ ”
I stared at the tribal marks on Sade’s face. She took my hand and drew it across the scar tissue, her expression matter-of-fact. “Only the men are marked, usually. It would be the men who go to war, I suppose. But I wanted marks. So I copied my father’s.”
“You did these yourself?” I had to touch them again after that.
Sade pressed her hand over mine and smiled into both our hands. “Salt keeps the cuts open until they learn to stay open by themselves.”
“Ouch.”
“Yes, much more than I can say.”
I thought, there is absolutely no one even a bit like you anywhere else.
“Sade, I want to ask you something,” I said. “If you say yes, I’ll believe you. Just tell me. There’s something wrong with this house, isn’t there?”