“Listen,” she whispered across the window ledges. “I could do with a smoke.”
I shook ash into the garden. It was good for the plants. “I’m afraid I can’t help you; this is my last one.”
“Liar. You look like a boy with a pocketful of smokes.”
“Do you even smoke?”
“No. But it looks so relaxing.”
“Alright. But it’ll cost you.”
Ore smiled. “Look at you, all brave when there’s a room between us.”
She ducked back into Miri’s room and I opened my bedroom door. She’d wrapped up in Miri’s dressing gown. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Smells like pure tar,” but accepted the cigarette I handed her. She made herself at home on my window seat, wadding a pillow under her knees. I didn’t stare at her. I didn’t talk about Mormon funeral potatoes or the fact that golliwog was just one slang term for Gauloises. I maintained a cool silence. I lit her cigarette for her, looked away when she gave an astonished cough, held her cigarette while she bent double and tried to thump herself on the back.
“Okay, you can put my one out,” she said, when she’d recovered. I didn’t for a while—I smoked both our gollies, with narrowed eyes and nervous intensity, like a Beat poet facing out his typewriter at dawn. Maybe. I hoped. The girl was making me reveal idiocy even in my silence.
“Insomniac?” I ventured.
She nodded. “Tonight, yes. Miranda’s sleeping like a baby for once.”
“So she wasn’t sleeping well at college either.”
“No.”
“Do people talk about her at college? Do they talk about the way she looks?”
Ore said, “What do you mean?”
“Come on. Look at her. She’s starving.”
Ore leaned back against the pillows. “Oh, so you can see that, can you? And what about this lovely house you live in?”
I stubbed out the cigarettes and dropped them out of the window. “What about it?” I was wary, thinking she was going to give me some kind of Marxist chat. Miri had told me and Dad that Ore’s dad drove minicabs and her mum was a dinner lady, that they had fostered her until they could adopt her. The information was interesting but of no significance; we hadn’t even asked after it. And if Ore was going to make some sort of point based on her history I didn’t want to hear it.
She started to speak, then shook her head and looked at the ground. I reached out and followed the line of her jaw with my finger. She looked at me then, with that strange half smile that said she’d forgive me if I kissed her. I kissed her and she let me. I kissed her again and she let me. By the third time it was ridiculous and really sort of painful, that she was just letting me and letting me, her lips slightly parted but not kissing back.
“I don’t think I fancy boys,” she explained, when I’d given up.
“You’re . . . you only like girls?”
“Well. Never say never.”
I reached for another cigarette, then changed my mind. I asked, “So do you fancy my sister?”
She shot back: “Why did you lock Miranda off all term?”
“I doubt you’ll win Miri round,” I told her.
She studied me. “Were you trying to punish her for getting in? Or was it brotherly concern, like you thought ignoring her was a way to help her out of her whole starving thing?”
“Not a chance,” I said, knowing I sounded dogged and not caring.
“I know,” she said. I watched her walk to the door; her legs. Mild agony, if such a thing is possible. And embarrassment at my clumsiness.
It took me a long time to get to sleep.
•
What was the rule to observe? What offering could I make?
By the time Miranda woke up I’d consulted the yellow pages and been to Deal, fifteen minutes’ train ride there, fifteen minutes back and half an hour of waiting at the watch shop on the high street while a guy with white sideburns replaced Miranda’s watch battery. I’d asked him, possibly more urgently than normal, not to set the watch to “the right time” and bought her two more batteries, just in case; each one was only a little larger than a five-penny piece, but each battery held five years bunched into increments of sixty seconds.
I was by Miranda’s bed, trying to hold my breath because it seemed too loud, when she woke up. She looked at me uncomprehendingly for a long moment, her eyes dark through the hair tumbled over her face. She closed one eye, then the other, then opened them both again.
“I dreamt you were the soucouyant,” she said, finally, then giggled. “Silly.” A dream, she said.
I knew I would have to go home. I dropped the watch onto the pillow beside her head, then added the batteries. I watched her pick up the watch, stroke it, hold it to her ear. I watched her listen to the ticking
of the watch. Tears rolled down her face. She looked at the watch, not at me.
“This is my mother’s watch,” she said.
After breakfast we walked up to Dover Castle and skipped the medieval court reconstructions, moved more slowly through the displays in First and Second World War army barracks, the caps and medals and coloured card in glass boxes bigger than us. From the grass behind the ramparts the sea was mossy peace—the weather had almost frozen it, and there was so much mist that you couldn’t see where it led. Miranda sat on a heap of rock and tapped it. “Chalk,” she said. The mist hung in her hair.
“Of course,” I said, shivering. If either of us smoked cigarettes we’d have been warmer in some small way.
“My train leaves in half an hour,” I told her.
She looked up at me. She smiled with her red lips.
“So you’re running away,” she said.
My eyes were watering and my nose was running. It was the cold, but I knew it would look as if I was crying.
“I’ll see you at college,” I said.
She didn’t say anything. She sucked chalk from out under her fingernails. She looked tired.
Well? Is it the black girl? Or Eliot? Or me? Our talk depends upon the fact that you weren’t there and you don’t know what happened. At the very least I hope you take Eliot with a pinch of salt. He is a terrible liar. For example, he doesn’t even need reading glasses. He just wanted something that differentiated him from Miranda, some way to get back at her for her pica. His lenses are plain and untreated, an indulgence earned from his mother when he confided in her at a trip to the opticians when they were ten. And to keep it up so long when he can see perfectly well . . . what a liar he is. I can’t think how many times he’s squinted and scrunched his face up, struggling to follow the print when Miranda has handed him a sheet of paper and his reading glasses aren’t to hand. She would have found him out eventually. Besides the boy is strange, very strange. You couldn’t guess what he has between his mattress and his bedstead—or could you?
It’s a single A4 envelope, full of photographs of a girl in black. There she is, leaning over Kings College Bridge, hand raised to greet someone on a punt passing below. There she is again, the same girl, a dark
figure passing geometrically laid flower beds and hedgerow so hazy green it’s as if she’s dreaming it. The girl again, at the barred back gate of a college, strands of her hair whipping the air as she watches for her watcher. Lack of variety in subject aside, the photographs aren’t bad.
Where was Eliot from September to December? Africa? Really? How funny.
They are better off apart now.
•
Someone had been in my room—I mean that someone had been in the guest room that I’d been put in. My bag, which had hardly had anything in it anyway, had been emptied onto the floor, and the bed and dressing table were covered with leaflets. The disorder was so blatant that I already knew nothing had been taken. I wasn’t as bothered as I could have been. I had my wallet and phone on me, this was my own fault for not locking the door, and besides, I was leaving. I stuffed my books and my spare pair of jeans back into my bag. The leaflets were BNP flyers with helpful tips for citizens, the same as the leaflet Sean had kept to piss me off.
Do you know how many immigrants are in the U.K.? Neither does the U.K. government . . .
There were so many leaflets that it took me nearly fifteen minutes just to gather them into the guest-room bin, which I dragged to the centre of the room when I could no longer bear to have my back to the door.
When I stepped out of the room with my bag over my shoulder, the corridor mixed twilight and green and I could hear a whistling sound from upstairs, like air gliding around something of great mass. I could have been inside a cannon. But I did not run. I took a deep breath and set myself a march—
I’m get-ting out I’m get-ting out, no mat-ter
what, I’m get-ting out
. The lift doors were open. I walked past them, then backtracked. There was a little girl in the lift. I can’t describe her; she was unexpected. She stood on tiptoe in the corner of the lift, and she had something cupped in her hands—she gazed and gazed at it, amazed.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
The thing in her hands was covered in flies. It was bloody and she seemed to have brought it out from inside her. There was a gap in her nightgown, at the stomach.
I pressed the lift button to go down
(take her down, she belongs in a grave)
but nothing happened.
“What is it?”
The girl’s eyes were plaintive. She held the thing out to me. It wobbled in her hands like dirty jelly. I was very sorry for her.
“Please stay,” she said. “Or I’ll get into trouble. You’ve got to stay. You’ll hardly feel it.”
I’m not brave. I remembered the salt I had in both pockets, and the pepper of the wickedest kind wrapped in plastic. I coated my hands in salt. I crumbled pepper in my palms. I stepped into the lift and, expecting to touch nothing, I tore at the little girl’s face until Miranda’s came through.
Miranda struck at me, spitting and hissing. I said, “Oh God, oh my God, sorry, I’m sorry, oh my God,” over and over, but kept her pinned against the back of the lift, both my hands around her throat.
The doors closed and the lift went up. She stopped struggling. She licked the back of my hand, slowly, making tracks in the salt. I screamed, but made no sound. I couldn’t turn the volume up. I screamed and didn’t let go. I concentrated on making myself colourfast, on not
changing under her tongue. I know what I look like. The Ore I signed onto paper in the letters of my name, the idea of a girl that I woke into each morning. Arms, stay with me. Stomach, hold your inner twists.
The lift doors opened onto a floor of the house I hadn’t seen. The walls were bare, and nails stuck out of the floorboards, so many, scattered but with an order to them, like ants in a crazed game of hopscotch. The corridor only stayed empty for a second—the next moment it was flooded with people who stared and said nothing. Their eyes were perfect circles. I didn’t see them move, yet every second they were closer to the lift.
Miranda politely flicked my hands away from her and sashayed out among them. They all looked at her and smiled slavishly. When she had passed through them, they looked at me again. They were alabaster white, every one of them. I went after her. They looked at me, crowded so close, murder in their eyes. If I didn’t believe in the salt I would be lost. Believe, believe. Salt is true. Salt is true. Kill the soucouyant, salt and pepper.
I closed their eyes. “Be blind,” I said, rubbing salt on their eyelids. It was like stirring melted wax. “Don’t look. Don’t see me.”
I looked behind me and there they stood, eyes closed, lips pursed in consternation, their arms out in front them.
I walked into a shuttered room full of the sound of a sewing machine. The machine was set on a stand and juddered away, sewing at nothing. There was a dirty white coat hung on a hook on the wall, newspapers, and other things that made me think it was a room belonging to someone small and sad.
Miranda was in the corner with her arms folded around her knees. She looked blissful, like one of the lotus-eaters, someone hearing comforting voices. When she saw me she looked astonished.
“What’s this?” she said.
I didn’t speak to her. If I was going to help her I shouldn’t speak to her. I knelt beside her and rested my hands on her head. She tensed, and I cracked her open like a bad nut with a glutinous shell. She split, and cleanly, from head to toe. There was another girl inside her, the girl from the photograph, all long straight hair and pretty pearlescence. This other girl wailed. “No, no, why did you do this? Put me back in.” She gathered the halves of her shed skin and tried to fit them back together across herself. I fell down and watched her, amazed, from where I sat.
“I don’t want to come out. Put me back in,” the girl insisted. “Please. I can’t . . . cope.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
She stopped for a moment. “I’m Miranda Silver. Who are you?”
I didn’t answer her, but I pointed at the rubbery skin she clutched so desperately. “Who is that?”
“It’s the goodlady,” she said. “Please help me get back in. I need her.”
I got up.
“Don’t become her,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t listen. This new Miranda’s gaze was weak. She seemed soft in the head. Before I’d even walked out of the room, she was lying under the sewing machine, trying to sew herself back into the skin.
Outside the room, the floor had gone
(where is the floor?)
I fell down into a pickled-lime smell that had frightened me as a child when we visited the plague graves in Deptford. My friend and I, we thought that that was how rotten marrow smelt. The blind faces (I felt them nuzzle at me as I passed, their sucking and sly biting), even with no light to see them by, I know they looked at me.
Below someone threw their hands out and white flew from their
fingertips. Someone red and silver, the spirit in the flame. I bounced. I couldn’t see anything. Then I could, through white squares. I was in a net. Tens of feet of white cotton bunched around me. I was crying like a newborn: “Don’t let me die.”
When I opened my eyes I was in the room that had nothing in it but the white fireplace. I saw, through gauze, a figure walking towards me. It frowned and bent closer to me. Sade. I didn’t move. With my eyes I told her that I might not survive this after all.