Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

“What, the breakdown came just all of a sudden?”

“No. There was this one night when something went wrong. Some kind of splinter swerved in my brain or something.”

“What happened on splinter night?” I asked.

“Splinter night?”

“The night everything went wrong.”

She paused. “I can’t remember.”

“Can’t you?”

She took a deep breath and rested her chin on her hand. “I have a theory,” she said. I nodded at her to continue and she said, “There’s this fireplace downstairs. I think I went down there for some reason. To hide, maybe. I thought it was all my fault my mother died. And I hit my head on the marble. My brain bled. I died.”

She watched me.

“Right,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Why don’t you think it’s possible?” she asked. “Because everyone can see me?”

“It’s not that. It’s just that it seems to me that the dead only return for love or for revenge. Who did you come back for?”

Neither of us smiled. I felt light-headed. I couldn’t believe that we were discussing this.

“Love or revenge,” she sighed. “Neither.”

“Miranda,” I said. “You’re not dead. Okay?”

“Ore,” she said. “I’m not alive.”

I had found the bottle of purple water that Tijana had given me; I ran my thumb over its lid in my pocket.

“Let’s suppose that what I say is true,” she said. “Just as a thought experiment. Let’s say I’m not alive anymore. What would be helping me to maintain the appearance of life? That’s the baffling thing.”

“That rouge of yours,” I said, giving in. I touched the dip between her collarbones, it was like touching thin paper as breath shifted through it.

“You should run,” she said, mournfully.

“No, you should,” I said. I pulled the bottle out of my pocket and shook it.

“What is that,” she said. Her pupils were huge satin cavities. There was no curiosity in them.

“Run,” I said, and threw some water at her. It didn’t touch her, but she blenched, turned and ran away between the trees.

I followed her. For someone with so little energy, she ran fast. She was really and truly running from me. She crossed the mill pond bridge, sprang right and headed back towards college. I tossed the exorcism water into a bin a second before I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. She slowed down immediately. She was crying angry tears.

“If you don’t believe me just say you don’t believe me. Don’t go along with me and then make fun,” she said. She shrugged my hand off her arm and collapsed onto the zebra crossing. There were no cars coming. I sat down beside her.

“I wasn’t taking the piss out of you,” I said, unsure whether I was lying. “I just wanted to give you some way of knowing for certain. It was an experiment. That was exorcism water.”

She sniffed. When I dared to look at her, she was smiling.

“Why was it purple?” She wore her tears like tiny crystals that tipped her lashes.

“Because… I don’t know.” I didn’t have the heart to make anything up.

“It’s so quiet,” she said. Three AM and as usual, the town was dead. She lay down with zebra stripes stacked behind her, and she pulled me down beside her. “Don’t you care where you come from? Don’t you wonder why you do the things you do and like the things you like?”

“Er… not really,” I said.

“Do you think it is her fault,” she said, without inflection.

“Whose?”

She didn’t repeat herself.

We looked at the moon and the moon looked at us. I had thought we would be able to hear when a car was coming, or feel the rumble of its wheels through the tarmac, but headlights were the only warning, and even then I noticed them so late that when we scrambled up from the road the car’s driver took fright and blared his horn at us as he went past.

We went back to college. I went to my room and Miranda went to hers.

I wanted to ask her something. I wanted to say, “If you’re dead, then why did you get up when the car came? Why bother?” But I didn’t want her to run from me again. And, I suppose, having died once there is no reason to die again.

I went home on the last weekend of term. I left most of my things in my college room, so all I had to take to the train station with me was a Reebok bag filled with dirty clothes. The last thing I did before leaving college was check my pigeonhole in the post room. Tijana was in there, checking for post herself. The mockney guy from the year above us, the one who’d wondered aloud whether Tijana had a boyfriend, was holding her hand and whispering in her ear while she giggled and read a letter. I was amazed. I shook my head. The mockney guy saw someone he wanted to speak to out of the post room window and bounded out of the door like a badly made puppy. As soon as he’d left, Tijana turned to me and said, “What are you all shaking your head for?”

“Well,” I said. “Are you with him?”

“What if I am?”

“Nothing. I just wouldn’t have thought you’d go for that type.”

“That type?”

I pointed at him. He was standing in New Court with another guy who looked just like him, laughing from only one side of his mouth. Couldn’t she see what he was?

“Tijana. He’s a public-school wanker.”

“How can you say that? You don’t even know him.”

“Have a good Christmas, Tijana.”

“Not knowing people doesn’t bother you, does it? That’s why you have this thing with the girl who hardly even exists. I mean, do you want to be with her, or is it that you want to be her?”

I wanted to wither her with a look followed by a superbly dismissive comment, but instead I said, “What?”

Tijana said, “Look at yourself. You’re disappearing.”

It wasn’t as dramatic as Tijana had put it. But that day I was wearing the jeans that I usually reserved for thinner days, and even though I’d belted them up as tightly as I could, they still slipped down over the spiky new angles of my hips. I couldn’t acknowledge it, though. The trick was not to think about the shrinkage, or how tired I was. I could not say aloud how draining it was to share a bed every night, how it became so difficult to breathe together, because if I said it aloud it would sound like a complaint and then it would become a complaint. I could not say anything against Miranda. There wasn’t anything bad to say, she did nothing wrong. I deferred thinking about the fact that for most of the term I had been eating and eating in my room with the door closed, crisps and chocolate and sausage rolls in the hours when Miranda’s lectures overlapped with my free time. I had never eaten so much, I had never wanted to eat so much. But my clothes kept getting looser. I would think about all this once I’d spent enough time unconscious in my own bed at home, beneath my poster of Malcolm X. “By any means possible”… first I would sleep alone, later I would look for wounds.

•

Away from my sister it became more and more difficult to tell whether I was alright. Before it had been simple: I could look at her, or think of her at the clinic and then there I was, paper-clipped to my flesh, tidy where she wasn’t. But when her term started…

I was sharing a flat with another guy and a girl. Both of them were in radio production. Both of them laughed too heartily. The guy’s room was next to mine, and at nights he’d knock on the wall between us and ask me what the fuck I was doing in there: feng shui? And every time I’d be about to say something about his mum or how he should fuck his own furniture I’d look, and, yes, my bed had moved from north to west, or my table had moved from beneath the window to beside the door. And it had been me that had moved it without thinking — I could still feel the work of it in my hands. I’d sit on the floor with my back against the bed and my laptop on my knees, trying to send words to Miri, my frail and feather-like problem, to whom I couldn’t write “I love you” because I meant it angrily and she would know. Not just that though; it wasn’t safe to say something like that without Lily between us. Lily was always very careful to pull us apart, to make Miri and I understand that we were not each other, that my pressing my lips to Miri’s nine-year-old heartbeat was not the same as feeling the blood move in myself. Once Miri jumped me in the Andersen shelter, pinned my arms behind my back and kissed my dick through my boxer shorts, so quickly I felt the damp and the presence of spiders more than I felt what she’d done. But Lily still knew somehow — she must have. Why else would she have pinched Miri so hard after dinner? So hard the bruise rose, as if the pain of it had put yeast in her skin. I e-mailed Miri about it; subject line: Do you remember…