Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

“She’s lying, man. It’s her,” one of the other girls said, then, to Miranda, “Now you tell us how the fuck you’re involved with this or I cut you.”

“Hold on,” Tijana said. “Maybe she means it. It may be. She wasn’t at school for months.”

Miranda took a close look at the back of her mind while the other two girls considered. She thought she might faint. Whoever Agim was, she didn’t want him to come. Because if these girls thought she was someone else, then Agim would too. She had to get away. The girls lessened their grip on her while they argued, and Miranda stepped out of her shoes. Miranda bent over and retched and when they jumped clear, she ran.

She pushed and kicked Eliot’s bike so that it rattled far ahead of her until the way was smooth enough for her to scramble onto it, nearly tipping it over, and she pedalled harder even than her heart was thumping. She didn’t know where she was going; she had forgotten the way home. She weaved through Market Square, narrowly avoiding riding straight into the fountain, then she passed through side streets that branched off the high street, slowing and remembering herself once she was sure she’d lost Tijana and the other girls. She made her way home and sat on the flint steps, freezing and mourning her beautiful, black pointy-toed court shoes, whose leather would be destroyed by the inquisitive tongues of the sheep that wandered on the cliffs.

When she finally went into the house, there were three cardboard boxes on the staircase that led up from the ground floor. Sade, the new housekeeper, and her father were arguing and laughing in the dining room.

“Sade. First of all let me tell you that you can’t put pepper in the baked beans, you really can’t.”

“Why not? They don’t taste of anything.”

Miranda looked inside one of the boxes, not knowing what she expected to see — garish prints, a Bible, a huge cross — but the box was packed solid with books. Dickens and the Brontës, even. She picked a couple of them up — each had a huge white S slashed across the title page.

Two houseguests picked their way around the first of the boxes on their way downstairs. They were a black couple from London who had enthused about their love of British history while Miranda had swayed, glassy-eyed and dead on her feet, and drawn red circles around the Cinque Ports on a map of Kent for them.

In order to avoid a repeat occurrence, she sidestepped into the sitting room and looked through the old newspapers for the issue of The Dover Post that Eliot had handed her when Luc had brought her back from the clinic. There was Tijana’s cousin’s name, Agim Hajdari. He’d sustained serious wounds but had recovered. He’d been found curled up in a ball between a wall and a tree on Priory Lodge road, arms crossed over himself. As if to hold his insides in, Miranda thought.

After some time she noticed Eliot had come home. He was standing in the sitting-room doorway with his arms crossed.

“I’m sorry I took your bike! But I think it was fated. Some girls tried to kill me,” she said, as soon as she saw him. “And the bike revealed itself as my trusty getaway steed.”

By the time she’d explained properly, he was pacing the room worriedly. “We have to sort this out,” he said. “These girls sound deluded enough to keep coming after you, especially if… anything else happens.”

“What shall I do?” Miranda asked.

“Two choices. Number one — Martin and I go after these girls and beat them with sticks — okay, you’re not keen, fair enough — number two, we talk to Tijana tomorrow and meet this cousin of hers and get him to tell them that you’ve got nothing to do with all of this.”

He stopped and looked at her carefully.

“Because you haven’t got anything to do with this,” he reminded her. “I mean, what? The very idea of it is…”

Miranda crumpled the sheets of newspaper on her lap.

“I am very concerned,” she said, in a small voice, “that this will not end well. They seemed convinced that they’d seen me before.”

Eliot pulled her to her feet. “There is no way, Miri,” he said. “No way in the world.” Grey eyes convince so well, burying the person they look at in truth like flung pebbles. But Miranda could never do that with her eyes; convince. Anyway she was never sure about anything.

“Come and have some dinner,” he said.

“In a minute,” she said. “Go. I’ll see you in there.”

“The new housekeeper is interesting,” he said, on his way out of the room. “She asked Dad if he had any shirts he didn’t want, and now she’s slashing his old shirts by hand in the kitchen. I think she’s, er, making something. Arts and crafts.”

“I don’t like her,” Miranda said. Then, confused, she said, “Oh, I do.”

Eliot rolled his eyes. “You don’t have to make an immediate decision about it.”

That night it rained and a disconsolate wowowowow came down the chimney and flew around the rooms. Miri, Eliot and Luc watched TV and read in Luc’s room. Eliot lay under Miranda’s elbows, reading Moby-Dick while she used his back to prop up her collected works of Poe.

“What do you think of Poe?”

“He’s awful. He was obviously… what’s the term… ‘disappointed in love’ at some point. He probably never smiled again. The pages are just bursting with his longing for women to suffer. If he ever met me he’d probably punch me on the nose.”

“I think Poe’s quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say ‘Oh you know, I’m just afraid of Death’ and then they keep on with the screaming.”

“Hm,” said Miranda. “I’d rather they talked to someone about this fear.”

“A psychiatrist couldn’t put up with all the screaming.” Eliot had marked his place in his book with his finger, and now he stirred restlessly, impatient to get back to it.

“Oh, not a psychiatrist, a priest. Priests can put up with screaming.”

“A priest,” said Eliot, “would not say anything constructive to someone who was scared of death. A priest would say ‘Death is great! You get to go to heaven!’ ”

“True. But they’d put up with the screaming,” Miranda insisted. “A psychiatrist would sedate you and act as if it wasn’t normal to be so scared. In a situation of Poe’s kind I would always, always go to a priest before I went to a psychiatrist. I’d be out of that House of Usher like a shot and off looking for Father Joe. And I’d have gotten rid of Ligeia with holy water.”

“Would you now,” Eliot muttered, and Luc, lolling in his armchair with the newspaper spread across his lap, looked up and said, “Easy to see the solution when you’re not in the story, isn’t it.”

Miranda had found a pen somewhere. She fixed it into Eliot’s hair. She wrapped four strands around it and it stayed.

“Thanks,” Eliot said, sounding as if he meant it.

“How’s Moby-Dick ?” Miranda asked.

After a few seconds, Eliot admitted, “I don’t… get it. Dad, did you get it?”

Luc put his paper down, cleared his throat, changed the TV channel.

“Yes, I understood it. It is about many things.”

Miranda and Eliot waited, but Luc didn’t elaborate. Eliot sniggered, and the pen fell out of his hair. It was getting to 1:00 AM and Miranda knew that soon Luc would kick her and Eliot out, and Eliot would go to bed and then it would be her and Poe until morning.

“Father,” she said, “my sleep’s bad again. Please give me something to do, or give me something to make me sleep, or give me death.”

Luc raised an admonishing finger. “I lie in bed until I fall asleep, no matter what; I lie there until I have no choice but to sleep,” he began.