Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

“The moon?”

“What do you do when you can’t sleep?”

“Walk about,” I said.

We looked at each other for a decade, or at least eight months.

“Let’s walk about tonight,” she said. She gave her night away so easily that it was almost impersonal — this conversation could have happened between her and anyone who’d come up the stairs and said they had trouble sleeping. But it wasn’t like that somehow. It was like at the interview, when I was so panicked that I heard myself singing “Frère Jacques” under my breath and sat feeling detached from my mouth while my voice got louder and louder and I had to get up and take the song home, locked up under my temples. I had known that I was going to apply to Cambridge since I was fourteen. I have always tried to do more than anyone else, crouched over essays carefully ticking boxes I’d drawn on a separate sheet of paper to remind myself of all the key points so I would drop as few marks as possible. I type everything, and if typing is impossible I write in block capitals, so safe in the perfect spaces formed inside my O ’s and P ’s and Q ’s that I could step into one of them and throw it around me like a hula hoop. I may be adopted, but I know exactly who I am. I am desperately trying to earn my keep. No one told me I had to, but in a way that’s why I’m trying. Other people’s parents expect things from their futures, but mine say nothing, as if, after the fact of my childhood rescue, I don’t need any future. I suppose they think they’re helping by not putting any pressure on me. Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Suis-je mort? Am I dead? Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines! Miranda had come and looked at me and stopped “Frère Jacques” up with her soft, light voice, and she’d known she could do it before she did.

After my lecture that afternoon I phoned home. I called to see if I missed home more than for any other reason. My mum answered, and I knew I did. It was like being kicked in the chest. That first term — every term, in fact — I was constantly negotiating reprieve from execution. Everything, every essay, every conversation, even casual ones in the bar, seemed so final. Everything rested on being right, or at least insisting that I was not incorrect. I was taking the whole thing too seriously. Or I was taking steps to blindfold myself so that when I came out of the door of my college room this morning I didn’t see the glass windows glaring at me out of the fourteenth-century walls. Walls and windows forbade me. They pulled at me and said, You don’t belong here . Again and again, over textbooks and plates of mush in hall, I gritted my teeth and said, Yes I do . Everyone else seemed to blend into the architecture. Even Tijana had already lost her perturbed look. My mum wanted to know whether I’d met my future husband yet, and my dad wanted to know if I’d met any snobs, whether I’d run into anyone who was “being funny” with me. I said no. I wondered what he would have said if I’d told him yes.

I went and knocked on Tijana’s door just before dinner, to see if she was going to come to hall.

“Come in,” she said. She was in bed with a big book and a multitude of pens. She didn’t look as if she’d be going anywhere for days.

“How’s it going,” I said.

“Fine. I can’t come to dinner. I probably won’t be around later, either.” I was about to ask her what she’d do for dinner, but she gestured towards a box of Nutri-Grain bars and a sandwich on the floor by her bed.

“Cool,” I said. “See you… later, then.” It wasn’t just the work. I knew she was retreating from me. “Wait,” she said. “I have something for you.”

“Yeah?”

She put her pen behind her ear and pulled distractedly at her pony-tail, looking around, trying to remember where she’d put the thing she’d just mentioned. She pointed. “There. On the table. Beside my pencil case… the bottle.” There was a photograph on her desk; Tijana in the midst of a crew of girls, all wearing variations of the same hairstyle, lots of ringlets and clips. The loose, tousled way Tijana wore her hair at college suited her better. The girls in the photo with Tijana were a tangle of arms thrown round each other, mischievous, warm. They looked like the sort of girls who started trouble just so they got the chance to stick up for each other.

I picked the bottle up — it was see-through plastic, and filled with purple water. “Nice,” I said. Tijana threw a pillow at me. It bounced off my head, but I picked it up and advanced on her with it. She was about to learn not to start what she couldn’t finish.

“What’s in the bottle?” I asked, pillow held high.

“A light when all other lights go out,” Tijana whispered dramatically. She had a sexy whisper, even when she was being stupid.

I whacked her with the pillow. “What?”

“Oh God,” she cried. “You’re so violent.”

I bopped her again, gentler than the first time, but she dropped flat beneath her covers as if I’d dropped a slab of rock on her.

“Bitch! It’s exorcism water.”

“Ah,” I said. I put the pillow back on her bed and carefully moved her head so that it rested on the pillow. I patted her neck. She burst out laughing.

“Where did you get it from? Is it meant to be purple?” I asked. Tijana tapped the side of her nose and winked. I picked the bottle up and told her I’d use it as bubble bath.

In hall, I gave up on trying to eat my dinner. It had been listed on the menu as shepherd’s pie, but the description seemed inaccurate. Miranda came in carrying a tray. Everyone in hall looked at her, then went back to their conversations, some of them adding “Who is she?” to their cluster of topics. I nodded at Miranda and she sat opposite me. The others said hello to her and introduced themselves, but she didn’t answer them, or even look at them. She looked at me, and she smiled at me, and I looked back, and smiled back. It got awkward. Neither of us was eating anything.

I looked down and felt Miranda smile at me, but when I looked up again she was thoughtfully regarding the ceiling.

“Come on,” I said. “Eat your dinner.”

She dropped a napkin over her plate. “It’s gone.”

That seemed a sound idea to me, so I did the same and we left.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked. I had to be honest; I don’t like tea.

“Would you like to watch me drink some tea?” she asked. “It’s a very ordinary sight, but ordinary in a way that’s good because then you could use it as part of a representative sample in a study on the habits of the English tea-drinker, a dying breed.”

Her room was much bigger than mine. Its darkness was softened by scent — it reminded me of a nature documentary, a simulation of the inside of a flower that had closed its petals for the night. She had a piece of cloth hung over the mirror on her wardrobe. She took her coat off, pointed out a chair I could sit on and sat opposite me, stuffing tea filters with dried leaves from a bowl beside her chair. Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then she started talking about the blend she was making, a mix of jasmine tea, black tea and rose petals. She said her father always drank it in the colder months. I nodded and looked around. Her bookshelf was quite good— Grimm’s Fairy Tales . Perrault, Andersen, Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins, E. T. A. Hoffmann. No Poe, which surprised me, considering the presence of the others. There was a small cluster of images on the wall above her desk. A white-haired woman in a dark-red dress, a school photo of a girl with a sleek ponytail and eyes like smoke fixed in ovals, a short-haired woman who looked as if she was trying very hard not to burst out laughing. Beside that was a photo of a girl and a boy sitting on a fence, cousins of hers, I assumed. I nodded towards them. “Who are the pictures of?”