Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

“What d’you think?”

“Develop photos, I suppose. Since when, though?”

He shrugged. She took some chalk out of the pocket of her dress. When she offered him a stick of it he looked surprised, but took it and stuck it in his mouth, pretended to smoke it like a cigar while she ate.

•

Azwer gave his notice the day of Eliot’s and Miranda’s Cambridge interviews. He stopped Luc as he was on his way out to meet the twins by the car. Azwer said, “My wife and daughters are afraid. If we stay they will only become more afraid, and then something bad will happen.” His heavy eyebrows lowered and he made some small, involuntary gesture with his hand that was recognisably superstitious, as if the words “God forbid” had flowed into his body.

Luc said, “Two weeks is too short notice for me to find replacements for you and Ezma. And we’ve had the lift looked at.”

Azwer said quickly, heatedly, “Mr. Dufresne, it’s not just the lift—”

Luc put his car keys down on the hall table, and tension pulled him taller. “Then what?”

Azwer kept his eyes fixed on Luc.

Luc looked at Miranda, then lowered his voice and said to Azwer, “Do you need more pay?”

Azwer spread his hands. “We cannot stay.”

Azwer and Ezma didn’t have papers; as far as the government was concerned, Luc was running the Silver House alone. Luc said, “Azwer, listen. Think about it. Where will you work? Where will you go?”

Azwer shrugged. “To London.”

Luc said, “I see,” in tones that patently signalled that he didn’t.

He took Miranda by the shoulders and turned her in the direction of the door.

She didn’t look like a promising interview candidate at all, she knew. All the colour in her face was in her lips, and her dress was still far too big. The back of it gaped around her shoulder blades as if the dress had been designed for someone who had wings. She would have to talk fast and come to surprising conclusions and smile a lot so no one would notice.

•

Miranda’s first interview was an hour and a half after Eliot’s, so she wandered in and out of the entrances to the college’s stone stairwells. She wondered how Eliot’s interview had gone and where he was, but she couldn’t find her phone; she must have left it somewhere. Cambridge was subdued; it wasn’t just the frost and the puffy felt sky, it was the abundance of massive, old stone. And then the bells, which pealed their deep songs at mysterious intervals. Miranda felt as if she was being pressed to the ground beneath a great grey finger. She had a pocketful of onyx chips

(properties of onyx: it helps you hold your emotions steady; side effects of onyx: it is the sooty hand that strangles all your feeling out of you) and she used her teeth to carve tiny, acrid flakes of onyx onto her tongue. She knew how to do it so that it looked as if she was simply biting her nails.

She collided with another girl on her way back into the waiting area outside the interview room. They both held their heads and moaned.

“Oh Lord! You must have the hardest head in all creation,” the girl said.

Miranda waited until she could look at the girl without it hurting, then lifted her gaze. The girl was black, all long legs and platform trainers, clad in grey school uniform. Her head was covered with tiny plaits that had coloured elastic bands tied around the ends, and her eyes were dark and large like drops of rich ink.

There was an awkward silence. Then Miranda held the door open and said, “Let’s try again, you first,” before she remembered that she had been the one going in. The other girl had been leaving.

“Look… what’s the time?” the girl said.

Miranda said, “I don’t know,” and looked around for a clock.

The girl looked at the watch on Miranda’s wrist.

“It doesn’t work,” Miranda said, rather than explain about Haitian time. “How have your interviews gone?”

“They haven’t. I mean I haven’t been called yet. I’m not doing it after all. Fuck it. I only wanted to know the time because there’s a train I might be able to catch if I leave right now,” the girl blurted.

“You’re… not going to your interviews?”

“No! I can’t be bothered.”

The girl’s hands were shaking. Miranda tried not to stare.

“Er… listen, it will be very demoralizing for me if you leave.”

The girl looked Miranda up and down and quietly advised her that she probably had nothing to worry about.

Miranda frowned. “What are you saying? Do I just walk in and say a secret password?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Do you?”

Miranda pushed the question aside with her hand. “It would be a shame not to bother. After you applied and everything. And… where do you live?”

“Faversham.”

“Right. So you came all the way up from Faversham—”

“Indeed!” the girl said. “Look… what’s your name?”

“Miranda.”

“I’m Ore. Look, Miranda. I’ve already been through all that ‘you’ve already applied and here you are’ stuff in my head. But hear ye, hear ye: only one person from my school’s got in here in the last five years, that’s a very discouraging pie chart to draw, plus I’ve been thinking about my personal statement and there are at least seventeen lies in there and I can’t keep track of them all. Plus I just realised I’m stupid , an actual dunce. I got a C for GCSE maths. It’s very likely that I’ve only been called to interview so they can laugh at me. Anyway thanks for listening, I’m off.”

“Well, I think it’s a terrible waste,” Miranda said, following Ore down the staircase. “And how will you ever know unless you try?”

Ore took Miranda’s hands between both of hers and shook it. “Good luck,” she said. “All the best. Really. I think it’s really nice of you to bother.”

Miranda could see how hard Ore was trying to take full breaths, to be calm. The only thing was to use a strategy of Lily’s.

“I,” said Miranda, “will give you a prize if you stay and do your interviews.”

Ore perched herself on the stair rail and closed her eyes.

“Well,” she said, after a moment, “I’ve never won a prize.”

They walked back upstairs together, arm in shaky arm. Ore wouldn’t let Miranda talk because, she said, she needed silence to get her lies in order.

Miranda thought about Ore throughout her interview, even when it descended into a semi-aggressive debate over her assertion that Thackeray’s Becky Sharp would easily beat Brontë’s Cathy in a fistfight. The only criticism she would have accepted was that she was giving patriarchy precedence over the female consciousness explored in the Gothic. But since that criticism wasn’t offered, she stood her ground. She didn’t remember her interviewers after the fact of her interviews — the professors didn’t have features, they were learnedness dressed up as people and housed in armchairs.

“Well? Where’s my prize?” Ore said, when Miranda came out. There were two others waiting outside now, a boy and a girl, both wearing blazers and silently reading thick books. They looked up when Ore spoke.

“How did it go?” Miranda asked.

“Wonderful. Really unbelievably good.” Cheerfully, Ore mimed stabbing herself. “If I don’t get that prize, the day might as well not have happened at all.”

She held her hand out expectantly.

“Alright, here it is,” said Miranda, and laid Ore’s purse on her palm. “You wouldn’t have got very far without it anyway,” she said. “Would you?”

Ore skipped a beat, then said: “I hope you get in. It’ll keep you off the streets, at least.”

She demanded the time of the boy nearest her and rushed down the college steps. The nervousness in her brought an otherwise gawky frame together in concentration — she delayed reaching out to push doors to the very last second, moving towards them as if, Miranda thought, they would slip aside for her or she would pass through them.