Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

I didn’t send it.

Neither did I send the messages to Miri that said: Can you help me, I do miss her, you are the only one who knows where to find her, I think you talk to each other when I can’t hear.

So what did I do while Miri fed her intellect amongst the greatest minds in the country?

I drank coffee.

I moved the furniture in the place I slept in

(moved it and moved it and moved it),

I walked down alleyways with a camera stuck to my face as if I couldn’t see without it.

I got good at cooking Mormon funeral potatoes. They’re basically just potatoes fried in a batter made extra crunchy with cornflakes. The trick is to get the proportion of cornflake to batter right. Mormon funeral potatoes are the sort of thing that would pain Dad to serve. They’re the sort of thing Miri would beg to be excused from having to eat.

I got back the day before Miri came home. Dad had offered to pick me up, but I told him not to worry about it. There was a Christmas tree in the hallway, a giant, pointy witches’ hat quivering with red-and-silver ribbons and lights, scraping the ceiling like something out of The Nutcracker Suite . We’d never had a Christmas tree before. I half expected Dad to spring out from behind the tree dressed as Santa.

Sade was by the telephone table, and I was about to make a comment about the tree, but she was standing with the receiver in her hand, listening, looking huge and sad. Her eyes were just pinpricks above her cheeks. I said hello, and she didn’t answer me. I was halfway up the stairs before I realised that when I’d walked past her I hadn’t heard anything but the dial tone.

Dad found me in Lily’s studio, trying to see what I could make from the film I’d transferred from the bottom shelf of the fridge in the flat to a mini-cooler for the journey. I was wearing one of Lily’s aprons, and my gloves were doused with solution. I was well aware that the goggles on my face only added to my look of idiocy.

“Welcome home,” Dad said. Red light met daylight.

“Can you come in or stay out, Dad?”

He came in. I told him about Sade and the phone, and he nodded thoughtfully.

“Is that all? Nod nod? She’s… mad.”

It was too late to tell him how she’d nearly burnt the house down. I said again: “She’s mad.”

“She’s taking medication,” Dad said, abruptly.

“What?”

“Her problem isn’t anything dangerous, just a perception thing — visions, voices since childhood. Information supplementary to life, assurances of an afterlife, that sort of thing. She didn’t hide it from me when she was applying. Think of her as a modern-day St. Bernadette.”

“St. Bernadette would’ve made a brilliant housekeeper, wouldn’t she,” I said.

Dad said very seriously, “I don’t know about that, but Sade is very good.”

I asked, “Does Miri know?”

He said he’d had no reason to tell her.

About an hour before Dad went to pick Miri up, I heard hammering in Miri’s room and put down the photography book I was reading next door. Dad was in the psychomantium with the light on, nailing Miri’s drawers shut, fixing the closed compartments in her wardrobe so that they wouldn’t open again. I waited for a break in the hammering, then asked Dad if he needed a hand nailing any other cupboard doors in the house shut. It would stop the guests from stealing clothes hangers, I suggested.

He gestured towards Miri’s bed. An array of chalk packets were heaped on the bedspread, alongside a mass of plastic, which I poked and watched fall into separate components — it seemed they were the remains of spoons, curved with tooth marks. I felt vaguely nauseous. It was like looking at leftover bones in a KFC bargain bucket.

“She’s been hiding them all over her room,” Dad said. “The whole time she’s been saying, yes, yes, I’ll eat properly, yes, I’ll get better, and she’s been doing this.”

He stood, still holding the hammer, and stared at me. His pupils looked black.

“Did you know about this?”

I looked back at him steadily. I shook my head.

“She won’t do this anymore,” he vowed.

“I don’t see how this is going to work. She’ll just find new hiding places. And, Dad… she’s going to be pissed off that you went through her stuff.”

He turned to her desk drawer and swung the hammer with much more force than he needed to. He didn’t even hit any of the nails he’d already embedded in the wood.

“It’s got to work,” he said. His voice as he said it made me respond immediately: “I know.”

“While you’ve been gone I’ve been working on—” he laid the hammer on the table, inhaled deeply “—new recipes for her. Appetizing things. I know what to do. It’ll work, Eliot.”

“Okay,” I said.

“It’ll work,” he said. “It’s not going to be easy, but I know she wants to stop all this. I know she wants to get better.”

“No one likes being sick,” I agreed, and walked backwards, softly, into my room. After a moment the hammering began again.

•

Miranda and her father sat in the Dean’s office with the Dean himself, nodding and smiling soberly at each other, taking turns to talk and to listen. All three of them had expressed their sorrow at the fact that Miranda’s change of environment had worsened her condition. Miranda watched the Dean’s goatee beard move as he explained that, if she continued as she was for the next two terms, she would fail her first year and be sent down.

Everything in the room was quietly powerful; leather-bound books, an antique globe, near-black wooden chairs and surfaces, stiff, richly coloured drapes. The window cases swooped into domes, like those of a chapel. There might as well have been stained glass, but it seemed someone had thought that would be too much. Outside the Dean’s windows, people yelled goodbye to each other across New Court, luggage wheels chattered on cobblestones.

Miranda took out her notebook despite the fact that the discussion was still ongoing. She began writing. Luc’s and the Dean’s eyes followed her pen with astonishment, but neither of them asked her what she was scribbling. To calm herself she scrawled:

I am lucky , in her GrandAnna’s mountainous hand. She was lucky. Had it been the fifties, her father wouldn’t be taking her home from here, he’d be dropping her off at a clinic that specialised in electroshock therapy. She’d be on her way to the gag and ball.

Behave yourself , she wrote. Eat.

How had Lily managed it? It was like dancing with a mask that was attached to a stick — she dared not lower it, no matter how tiring it was to hold the mask up. She was the ugly girl at the ball, hungry but plastic was nothing anymore.

Last night had been the fifth, perhaps the sixth night that Miranda had lain by Ore, smelling her, running her nose over the other girl’s body, turning the beginning of a bite into a kiss whenever Ore stirred, laying a trail of glossy red lip prints. Ore’s smell was raw and fungal as it tangled in the hair between her legs. It turned into a blandly sweet smell, like milk, at her navel, melted into spice in the creases of her elbows, then cocoa at her neck. Miranda had needed Ore open. Her head had spun with the desire to taste. She lay her head against Ore’s chest and heard Ore’s heart. The beat was ponderous. Like an oyster, living quietly in its serving-dish shell, this heart barely moved. Miranda could have taken it, she knew she could. Ore would hardly have felt it.

The watch had ticked loudly, with the sound of a tongue slapped disapprovingly against the roof of a mouth. Then came the recoil — would I really? and she’d bitten her own wrist, to test the idea of Ore not feeling a thing. Beneath her teeth the skin of her wrist bulged, trying to move the veins away from the pressure, trying to protect them.