Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

Luc didn’t know why he couldn’t move. I knew why; it was because I’d leant all my weight, every wall and corridor, on his shoulders. He was lucky I allowed him to stand.

Miranda, on one of the armchairs with her lap full of Barbie dolls and her thumb in her mouth, emptied the dolls onto the floor and crossed the room faster than a thought to grab a handful of Lily’s hair too, wrenching at her head from the other side. Lily’s fingers tightened around the knitting needles, and she let out a long breath. “Eliot,” she said, then: “Miranda!”

She raised her hand to the back of Eliot’s neck and pinched him hard. She did the same to Miranda, dug her fingers into the skin. It looked practised.

The twins let go of their mother immediately.

All three of them laughed, and their eyes were full of tears.

Luc walked away and went out again, let himself in through the front door this time, noisily this time.

“Hello!” he called, before he even reached the sitting room this time.

“Hello!” they all called back.

Good mother, good father, good children, all watched over by me.

•

Miranda avoided dinner on New Year’s Eve by pretending to be asleep when Luc called her. She was ready for him when he came looking for her. She lay on her back and offered her face to him, knowing how she looked, knowing that he saw the dark smudges that wheeled around her eyes. He didn’t try to wake her anymore.

When Luc had gone she locked the door and searched a drawer at the top of her wardrobe for the last remaining strip of a blue plastic spatula she had been working on for two months. Come slowly, Eden…

She put the Crests’ greatest hits album into her CD player and skipped through to “Flower of Love.”

Plastic was usually very satisfying. A fifty-millimetre wad of it was tough to chew away from the main body of the strip, but with steady labour, sucking and biting, it curved between the teeth like an extension of the gum, and the thick, bittersweet oils in it streamed down her throat for hours, so long she sometimes forgot and thought her body was producing it, like saliva.

She changes all the time

It was 6:00 AM in Haiti when she decided on a midnight feast. She touched the knob at the top of her spine, knowing that if the dress she wore fitted her at all she would not have been able to reach it. She knew that the meal she’d missed would wait in the oven long after Luc had called her to the kitchen and scraped the food off the plates and into the bin. Luc was asleep now, in the round bed, surrounded by the blankets, rugs, wall hangings, prints and figurines that Lily brought back from her photography jobs by the armful. It must have been like being locked into a small, cheerful museum for the night. In the morning she’d surprise him with an empty plate. But first a walk, to get up an appetite.

She left her room and knocked on Eliot’s door, to see if he was back from wherever he’d gone for the night. He didn’t answer. She peeked inside his room. He wasn’t in there, but his lights were on and his window was wide open, the wind whisked leaves around his room in bristles, like a broom. She went back to her psychomantium and played some more CDs at low volume. She had not slept for a while, a matter of days, though she could not think how many. She didn’t want to do anything but dance. If Eliot had been there she would have got him to dance with her. Somehow he had the knack of the tuneful wail, oo-wee-ooo , the elbow sway, the fist over the heart, though he had done it mainly for Lily’s entertainment. Miranda checked the time again, watchfully going through the hours between here and Haiti. So. It was 5:00 AM. Eliot where are you walking?

The lift from the ground floor to the first floor, then from first to second, second to third, then from the third floor to the empty attic. She peered up and down the broad passageways and tiptoed past the bedroom doors, feeling like dust, as if she was everywhere at once. She could pull herself tight and then explode and choke everyone in the house. She had never breathed so well or seen so clearly. She could hear one person snoring with the tidy rumble of an engine. In another room, someone murmured to herself or into the phone. Next door to that person a couple quietly crushed each other with sighs and words and their bodies. The fifth and biggest guest room was unoccupied, so nothing from there. A scream came to her, the word “Fire!” but she did not let it leave her, and she didn’t ring an alarm. How dare people sleep, how dare they lie so blankly in the dark?

In the dining room she looked glumly at the plate on the table before her. Beef stew and potatoes, the meat drowned in wine and limp onions, she saw brown fat running over white. She took a knife and divided the plate, pushing food aside so that there was a clear line in the middle of the plate, a greasy path of sanity. The light overhead was the deep orange of church candles. She would eat all the meat first, then vegetables. She started with a knife and fork, but soon resorted to bending over her plate with her hands planted on the table, desperately hauling food up into her mouth as if in the final seconds of an all-you-can-eat contest. She thought, There is no way that taking this stuff into my body is doing me any good. Sauce ran across her nose and cheeks and there were tears in her plate. Tears improved the flavour of the vegetables. Perhaps that was in a cookbook somewhere — a Gaelic one, probably, for a people who saw the kind of spirit that did nothing but weep and bode ill.

When she paused to chew, she bumped noses with someone who lifted their head from her plate at the same time. She smelt the beef and potatoes, reheated by the breath from their lips. She started and jumped up from her chair. There was no one else at the table.

“Who’s there?” she said, ridiculously, because the kitchen was empty. She grabbed some kitchen towel, wiped her face, then walked around the dining table and put her hand on the back of the chair that had been opposite her. After a moment she sat down in it and drew her plate towards her again.

All the vegetables had disappeared. She had eaten the meat first, as she had told herself she would, but someone else had eaten the vegetables. There was the line she’d drawn in the middle of the plate, and there was a residue of gravy on her side, and then on the other side there was… nothing. As clean as if the plate had been washed.

The girl sitting across from her smiled. Her teeth were jagged. She had been there since Miranda had walked into the dining room, but because she looked exactly like Miranda she had not been noticed. After all, she might have been a reflection in the window. The difference was the teeth, and when she showed her teeth she became noticed. She was not quite three dimensional, this girl. And so white. There couldn’t be any blood in her. She was perfect. Miranda but perfect. She was purer than crystal, so pure that she dissolved and Miranda couldn’t see her anymore but still felt her there.

The front door slammed. The noise of it was like language, and, obedient to it, Miranda put her coat on, her scarf, her shoes.

The street outside was strewn with bits of houses, whole window frames lying halfway across shattered sheets of glass, as if trying to shield them. She climbed over a raft of shingled slate, picked her way through heaps of bricks that released smoke carefully, almost grudgingly. There were pale people all along the street, the perfect people Lily had drawn. They were spaced out carefully, like an army of tin soldiers, and they watched Miranda without moving or smiling. She called out to them and, though they said nothing, she felt safe. They didn’t have eyelids because you missed things when you blinked. They didn’t need gas masks because they didn’t breathe. One of them had a pipe in his mouth, or rather, the pipe was part of his mouth; Lily had been a cruel artist. When Miranda came to Bridge Street she walked faster, rubble or no rubble, because of what was behind her