Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

It took her a moment to place him. Jalil. They had had once done a presentation to their class on Lamia . She had liked the air of fey tragedy about him, his wide eyes and artfully mussed hair. Once she knew who he was, she smiled at him.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You’re feeling better now, yeah?”

“Weren’t you in my English class?”

“I dropped English. For economics.” He groaned and stared into his pint. “So neekish to be talking about this. Change the subject.”

“What is your opinion on curses?”

“What?”

“For example, do they really persist unto the third generation?”

As if watching a slide show, she saw a series of gashes on arms and faces. They emerged so naturally and normally that she wasn’t sure whether she was seeing them in conjunction with her view of the smoky room, or whether the gashes were all she could see. They were of different shapes and sizes. They were healing over, the new skin shuddering over the blood like intricate lace. She was fascinated. She was falling asleep. To wake herself up, she reached for the circle of flesh beneath Lily’s wristwatch and pinched it.

Unexpectedly, he smiled. “Can I buy you a drink?”

She shook her head. He offered to show her a strange thing he could do instead. With an expression of the utmost gravity, he planted his hand on the table and swivelled his wrist 360 degrees without changing the position of his hand. All this without audible sign, as if his bones were oiled. Miranda squeaked obligingly. He relaxed, looked pleased and sat back on his stool. She noticed his jacket was hooded.

“Pull your hood up,” she said.

He looked around the room. “Why?

“I just want to see.”

Half smiling, waiting for the joke to catch up with him, he pulled his hood up. Its shape around his head was lumpen. It was obviously the first time he’d ever pulled this hood up over his head. He looked at her and said, “Anything else?”

Would he let her? She kissed him, gently, tentatively at first, her hand cupping his face, her fingers inside the heavy cotton of his hood. When he opened his mouth for her tongue, she drew him up and closer to her, pushing his hood back and using his hair like a leash until she could bring him no closer. Someone in the group she had left shouted, “Get a room, will you?”

She took Jalil’s hand and held it, pretending, for a minute, to be in love. She looked attentively at him. Open pores grained his skin, and the shade of its brown varied from forehead to neck. He didn’t know what to make of her staring and stirred uncomfortably. She was holding the hand he’d have used to lift his pint. When she said she was going home, he offered to walk her back.

“It’s fine,” she said, and got off her stool.

“But it’s dark,” Jalil protested.

“It’s fine,” Miranda said again. She was already walking away. Jalil wrapped an arm around her waist and tried, awkwardly, to kiss her goodbye, but she stepped away politely. She didn’t want to anymore.

•

I’d written to lots of media training schemes and independent film companies trying to get a placement for the summer, for the majority of my year out, if possible. I didn’t particularly want to travel; there was nowhere I wanted to go. But I couldn’t stay. So I’d applied to things in as many different places as possible and hoped that ultimately wherever I had to go, it would be because of work. As long as English was spoken there, wherever it was, I’d go. One morning a couple of weeks into the new year I got lots of letters back and sat on the staircase, shuffling through them, looking for something encouraging. Most of them were “no”s.

Emma texted me: Jean de Bergieres — they searched for her in the oven(!) and found her in the attic…

I texted back: And what did they do when they found her?

Her: Raped her — seven of them.

Me: O no!

Her: Breathe. This was in 14thC France. Church had outlawed brothels and locals were desperate.

Me: Actually just about to commit a couple of v brutal crimes. Wld be helpful to see them put into historical context first.

Her: I miss you. Also miss my hair. Can we forget drunk pre-Christmas stupidness (mine)?

One of the houseguests wandered out of the dining room and said to me, “Something’s burning…?”

As soon as she said it, I smelt it. In fact I’d been sitting in a cloud of smoke; ridges of it drifted around my head as I moved, like a blurred fingerprint.

“Shit.” A pan had been left on the stove, with the gas burning. It was like… “ Fuck. Fuck me. ” I hadn’t known oil and bacon could do that. It must have been a different kind of oil. Flame rose from the blackened pan, almost solid, like a ragged soufflé.

For a second I couldn’t do anything but stare and swear powerfully and brace myself for the smoke alarm to go off. The smoke alarm didn’t go off. One of the guests, a different one from the one who’d approached me, shouted “Do something!” and threw a napkin in the direction of the pan. The pan growled and ate most of the napkin, letting a scrap fall to the floor where it blazed on the lino.

I went to the tap, wetted some more napkins and threw them onto the cooker, reserving the first one for the floor. I was encouraged by the sputtering sound of drowning flames and the lessening of smoke, and ended by covering the cooker and floor with wet towels that someone pushed at me. Then I went into the dining room, and the guests trooped in after me. “I don’t think there’ll be any breakfast served here this morning,” I told them. “But there is a McDonald’s, right by the square.” There was some grumbling so, struck by inspiration, I said, “Hand your receipts in when you’re checking out and you’ll be reimbursed.”

I couldn’t find Dad, so I went straight up to the attic. There was an oily, twisted doughnut of cloth hung on a nail in the centre of the attic door, all knots and tails. I didn’t want to touch it or the door, and I settled for kicking at the door with the toe of my trainer. No answer, so I kicked harder, said “Sade” a couple of times, then gave up and went downstairs. The guests had dispersed, though I’d passed a woman on the stairs who looked as if she was ready to go back to bed. Sade was in the kitchen. She was a vision in nuclear red and blue. She was scrubbing at the cooker with her elbow turned in awkwardly, as if it was hurting her.

“I am so very sorry,” she said, with such force I felt I had to turn aside to deflect it.

“Where were you?”

“Here, I was here.”

“No you weren’t,” I said, flatly.

When I moved past her I saw that she’d hurt her hands; she had a plaster wrapped around each fingertip. She looked at me looking at her hands. I got a stool, climbed up onto it and poked at the smoke alarm. There was nothing wrong with it, except that it had been switched off.

“Oh that was me,” Sade said. “I was cooking last night and I didn’t want to wake everyone up so I switched the thingie off just to make sure.”

She gestured towards an array of lidded tubs she’d stacked up on the counter nearest the fridge.

I nodded to show that I understood, stuffed my letters into my back pocket and left the kitchen. I had an interview in London to get to. Sade called me back.

“What will you tell your father?”

“About what?”

She looked me over, and for a horrifying moment I thought she might touch me, fuss over me, lick her finger and wipe away something on my chin, or smooth my hair out of my eyes. She let me go, but called: “Eliot, do you have a girlfriend?” across the passageway.