Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

The room under the trapdoor downstairs was her bedroom. “After the war she was scared of bombs for the rest of her life. It was the noise, she said. She couldn’t sleep anywhere else,” Lily told us. It was the Christmas before Lily died and she was sitting on my bedroom floor with handmade notepaper spread across her knees. She had a tinsel flower tucked behind her ear and she was writing thank-you notes for our Christmas presents. She liked to do it and we liked her doing it.

“Where did you sleep, then? Not down there?” I asked.

The psychomantium used to be Lily’s room. There was a dressing table in there, and a velvet, high-backed chair, faint smudges on the walls where posters had been, and a mirror that crawled across the wall in a wooden frame. When I go into Miri’s room all I can see, all I can think of is that enormous mirror, like a lake on the wall. Sometimes I talk to her reflection instead of her, and she doesn’t seem to find anything strange in that. As a child, Lily had had the whole floor to herself.

“Weren’t you scared?” Miri had asked.

Lily shook her head. “I liked it. I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.”

Miri and I looked at each other. “Alive,” we said. “Alive like how?” I added.

Lily laughed. “Alive like they were alive. They talked and moved and told me who I was. I’ll never forget.”

“What did they say to you?” I can’t remember which of us asked that.

“Lily Silver, you are more precious than gold,” Lily chanted, and she looked a little bit different, the lines of her face were finer, she looked like a drawing herself. Miri yawned.

“Is that all they said?”

“Yes.”

“Booooooooooring.”

Lily gave me a handful of notes to sign; I scrawled my name and passed them to Miri.

“It was all I needed. I’m not even sure if they spoke out loud. I was very lonely. Nobody’s fault, though. I hate blame culture.”

I didn’t say anything, but I knew what I thought; it was her mother’s fault for abandoning her. Babies get me down, but I’d seen photos of Lily as a baby and she looked robust and fun. There was a consciousness in her eyes that made her pudgy helplessness seem sarcastic. She looked as if she could easily have been adapted into an accomplice for many practical jokes. And she’d only been a year old. Our grandma Jennifer was pretty, an indifferent student (we’d seen her photographs and report cards bound with pink ribbon) and she’d run off with someone dashing and foreign, a different dashing and foreign someone to whoever Lily’s dad had been.

Miri and I wanted to know what they looked like, the people that Lily drew. Lily laid five stamps on her palm, licked them all in one go, and flicked them onto envelopes. “People,” she said. “Just… people. No one I’d ever seen. People I made up. They looked the way I felt they should look. I stuck them on my walls. In fact I left them there when I went to college; when I brought you two back to visit your GrandAnna here, I sort of expected the pictures to be still there.”

“We used to visit? Here?”

“We did, and your dad too. Then when you were three, your GrandAnna had a crack-up. A… well, a really big crack-up, and she had to go into a home. You wouldn’t remember,” Lily said.

“I remember,” my sister said. This was news. I stared at her but she didn’t look up from the cards on the floor in front of her. She dotted the i ’s in her name with sharp hearts.

Lily stretched her legs out in front of her and cricked her neck. “Oh yes? What do you remember, my Miranda?”

“GrandAnna’s crack-up. It was like the heraldic pelican,” Miri said. She put her pen in her mouth, the inky end on her tongue, then hastily removed it when Lily narrowed her eyes.

“Oh was it… was it like the heraldic pelican ?” I said.

Lily tugged my earlobe. “Let your sister speak.”

“It was,” said Miri. “The bird that pecks itself to death to feed its children. She tried to give us her blood but we didn’t want it.”

I looked at Lily. “I did say you wouldn’t remember,” Lily said, calmly. “I can’t think where you got that from.”

Miri turned to me. “She rubbed it on our lips, Eliot, but you wiped it off.”

“Er… I think I’d definitely remember that,” I said.

“Miranda,” Lily said, and we knew she was getting annoyed because the music in her voice was stronger. “I did say you wouldn’t remember. You were three. You can’t remember everything.”

“Her whole hand was covered with blood, and she had her hand over her face and we could see her looking through her fingers, and she got down between our beds and—”

“There is nothing… mysterious and gothic about a crack-up. If anything it’s just… sad.” Lily was so angry she was almost singing, her temper changing the stress she put on her words. “There is no need to make up stories about it.”

“Lily couldn’t stop her,” Miri said.

“Leave your GrandAnna alone.” Lily sounded as if she was unable to believe that she had to say it. Miri’s first proper meeting with our GrandAnna was at the home; I was there and I don’t remember her any other way. When I think of her I see a white-haired woman kneeling on the carpet with us, motioning to the sunlight outside the window of her room and saying with desperate smiles, “Come and play, please come and play children.”

I remember once I raised my voice at Miri and our GrandAnna jumped and burst into tears that seemed to come straight from her heart, as if it was her I’d shouted at and not Miri. I found that so strange that I shut up for the rest of the visit. GrandAnna had a heart attack a few days afterwards, and she died.

Miri looked at me narrowly and I went and sat in a corner because we thought it was my fault; I’d done it with my shouting.

And I don’t remember Miri saying anything about the goodlady before that.

•

I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home, I’m the Braille on your wallpaper that only your fingers can read — I tell you where you are. Don’t turn to look at me. I am only tangible when you don’t look.

Luc knows this feeling, from an early visit he made here with Lily and the twins. He knew that I was nothing like that flat of theirs in London. One day he came in from the back garden and stood in the sitting-room doorway, smiling while his wife sat on the floor knitting a tiny jacket for one of Miranda’s dolls and using a socked foot to wheel Eliot’s spare trains across the carpet so he could have train races. It was summer, Lily had tied streamers to the ceiling fan and her freckled shoulders were covered with sun cream. And the twins had four years of life between them, Eliot in a pink T-shirt that hugged his pot belly and Miranda in a dark-blue dress and a little sailor’s hat. There was a thing that Lily, Eliot and Miranda tended to do when they were together and he joined him. They pretended he wasn’t there at first. He knew that on some level it was intended for his benefit, so he could look at his rosy little English family as if they were in a portrait. When he said hello they’d come alive to him, but first he had to say it.

Before Luc could speak this time, Eliot wobbled over to Lily, wearing a look of grim determination peculiar to children who have only just learned to walk, reached out and yanked her hair hard. Lily didn’t stop knitting, but she eyed Eliot sternly and said: “Eliot, you are hurting me.”

Eliot didn’t answer, and he didn’t let go of her hair. He sat down hard, trying to drag Lily’s forehead to the floor.