Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

“There’s a war on,” GrandAnna said, slowly, clearly, and with great severity.

“It’s safe in here,” Lily added. “Us Silver girls together.” She sounded sarcastic, but looked sincere.

Miranda’s fall had been cushioned by clothes. The clothes were familiar: jeans, a short-sleeved T-shirt, a hooded jacket, and a pair of trainers. The fifth person. Oh, she knew where he was; he was there, right beside her head. There were holes bored into the wall. She knew that they numbered ten when a finger inched out of each hole with a sluggishness that fascinated her. The way the fingers twitched, she got a sense that they weren’t attached to a body, only to each other, and that she was watching ruptured nerve endings in denial. The hands were brown. Jalil’s party trick hands, the hands he could turn in a full circle without putting stress on his wrist bone

(he should have kept away from her)

oh no oh no oh oh no oh

Miranda knew that she had done this, in a period of inattention. It was not unlike watching someone else take her hand and guide it and the pen it held into putting down a perfect copy of her signature.

More , Jennifer and GrandAnna said, but Lily came and ran a pitying hand over Miranda’s hair and her face as she cowered in the corner, blood sticking her clothes to her body. Lily understood, she understood everything. Lily gave Miranda a padlock. Miranda gratefully kissed its cold loop. Jennifer and GrandAnna moaned and beat the table, pushing dishes and jugs off its edges as Miranda climbed back up into the main house. Miranda passed the hallway mirror and she was clean again. She looked at her reflection and saw a cube instead, four stiff faces in one. She went outside and climbed back into the hammock. The sun rose and that made it morning.

Her father was in the deck chair beside the hammock, his notebook on his lap. He’d fallen asleep with his glasses on. He looked happy in his sleep. Miranda ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth— what can I taste, what can I taste, what can I Luc’s head drooped and, in raising it with a guilty jerk, he woke himself up. He smiled at her.

Miranda was on the point of saying that she might need to go away again. Only she wasn’t sure what good it would do. Hadn’t it begun while she was away?

“You should have made me get out of the hammock,” Miranda said.

Luc shook his head. “You looked far too peaceful for me to interrupt.”

Miranda laughed emptily. She asked, “What are you writing?”

Luc took his glasses off and closed them back into their case. “A recipe book, I hope. Based around seasonality. Every other word seems to be ‘Lily’, or ‘my wife,’ or ‘the twins’ maman .’ ”

“Father,” Miranda said. She could only lie there and look at him.

“What if we sold the house?” Luc said. “What if I went back to food writing and we went back to London?”

Miranda held her hand out to him, even though she had no chance of touching him from where she was.

“I don’t mind. I’m sure Eliot is the same. We’ll do whatever you like,” she told him, not really believing that they would be allowed to leave. They had never lived in London, they had always lived in her GrandAnna’s house.

“Miranda,” Luc said. “You look… so different, since… I don’t think you understand how different you look.”

“I cut my hair and lost some weight — which I’ll put back on, really I will — that’s all.”

Luc put his glasses on again and looked her over. He shook his head.

“Something misgives me.”

Miranda said nothing. What was there to say?

“What’s your date of birth, daughter of mine?”

“Father.”

“Well?”

“November 12th,” she said, and laughed. Her father did too.

“And the year?” he asked.

And the year, and the year, and the year. There was no answer anywhere. She tried not to panic. Four numbers came to her, but they were upside down and she couldn’t read them. She tried to count back from the year 2000. To do that successfully she would need to know how old she was, and she didn’t know. Rather than make a wrong guess, she said, “Father,” as scornfully as she could manage. He smiled.

“But seriously, Miranda. What if we left? I would not even sell the place, just rent it or something.”

Miranda waited for more, but there wasn’t any more.

“We’ve been happy here,” she said, gently. “Moving here was a good thing. You’re not to be a Calvinist about it — I promise you’ll go to heaven. I’ll even put it down in writing if you’d like.”

“I like you,” her father said, and got up to start seeing about breakfast orders.

Miranda went to her psychomantium and turned it upside down looking for her passport. She couldn’t find it. She sat on the floor with her eyes closed and tried to recall the years before now. She tried to recall games, arguments, secrets, toys, trips, TV shows. Just like the night before she’d checked into the clinic, they had not happened. It was 11:00 AM in the place where Lily had died.

Miranda knocked on Eliot’s door, and when he didn’t reply, she went into his room and took his passport out of the top drawer of his desk. He slept so heavily that she felt no particular need to move quietly. Nineteen eighty-two. November 12, 1982. In her room, Miranda wrote 1982 large on a sheet of paper and blu-tacked it to the wall above her mirror. She didn’t look into the mirror itself. She was becoming someone, it seemed. She had read somewhere that you only became a woman once your mother had died. But that wasn’t what worried her. She worried about becoming as perfect as the person shown to her on paper in Lily’s studio.

•

Dad packed all Lily’s things up one day in the middle of August. Miri knew what he was doing, and she let herself out of the house quietly and just disappeared. If I hadn’t caught Dad in the actual act of dragging bags full of her clothes over to the lift, no one would have said anything to him. I took a bag in each hand and asked him where he was taking it all. Suddenly there was the smell of rose attar all around us. I couldn’t keep my grip on the bags — the way they bulged — in my mind I saw Lily in them, in clean pieces. Put me back together and I’ll stand up. I nudged one of the bags with my foot. Soft. Just clothes.

“They’re all going to charity,” Dad said. “Miranda won’t wear these things, use these things. It wouldn’t be good for her if she did. These things are being wasted here.” Something about the slow way he spoke made me think he hadn’t known what he was going to do with Lily’s things until he’d said it aloud. He walked past me and into the bedroom, brought out more bags, more boxes. I met him at the door and threw bags back into the room. One of them hit him, then sagged across the floor. Multicoloured scarves flowed out. Dad said: “Eliot. Eliot, I know. But it’s got to be.”

I thought briefly of pulling the door shut and locking him in somehow (how?). I thought, Don’t take her away. “Just… don’t give her stuff away, Dad. Not now. Alright?”

Dad opened his arms. The bare room seemed to settle around his shoulders like a cloak. It took me a moment to interpret the gesture as a request that I come across the room to him. I started to go, I really did, but in the time it took me to make a step he’d dropped his arms. He sat down on one of the boxes.

“Listen,” he said. “I cannot endure that dream again.”

“What dream,” I said.

“The one where it’s dark, and the house gets warm, warmer. Then it’s hot and I’m all… dried out. I drink from the kitchen tap and go out into the garden to breathe. After a few moments I feel much better and I try to get back into the house, but my key won’t work. I walk around to the back door and the key for that doesn’t work either. The key breaks when I try to turn it in the lock, the handle breaks under my hand. It’s pathetic, really, but I walk around to the front of the house and start pleading. Let me in! I don’t know who I’m talking to. The house just stands there, dark, absolutely silent. I put a rock in my pocket and climb a tree in the garden, thinking I can open a window, and climb in. But I can’t even touch the windowsill — it gives off a strange, feathered static that bites me. Back on the ground I shout out, Lily. I shout out, Lily can you let me back in? A light goes on in the house. It goes on on this floor. And each time I dream this, I try to work out what room the light goes on in, as if that matters. But I just can’t work it out. It’s not mine, not yours, it’s not the light in the psychomantium. It’s not the bathroom light. It’s like there’s an extra window, or an extra room I haven’t seen before. Three figures come to the window. One is in the middle and has her arms around the other two. I can’t see them, just their silhouettes through the blind. They’re standing there watching, waiting for me to go away. They want me to go away. I know who they are; it’s Lily and Miranda. I don’t know who the other one is. But suddenly I’m glad that the blind is over the window, because I have this feeling that they look different, not the way I thought they did. I’m cold then, as cold as I was hot. Then I wake up.”