Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

A pair of hands slipped over her eyes and rested there, heavy and warm. The screwdriver fell.

“Hello Gretel,” her brother said in her ear. She heard the screwdriver roll across the floor and knew he had kicked it. No more music, and Lily and her GrandAnna stopped talking. Their silence had breath in it, though, as if they were simply waiting.

“Hello Hansel.” She laid her own hands on his wrists; he kissed the tip of her ear.

“So we’re in a fairy tale… I knew it,” she said, as he led her out of the laundry room, steering her into the sitting room, switching the light on with his elbow. “You weren’t in South Africa, you were in a gingerbread house, getting fattened up, weren’t you? And there weren’t any telephones in there.”

He uncovered her eyes, sat her down on the sofa and handed her a stick of chalk. She held it and looked up at him, blinking at the sudden rush of light. He rubbed his head and left flecks of chalk in his hair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just really shit.”

“You are a bit,” she said, and tried to look at him as if she forgave him everything.

“Dad’s just trying to help you,” he said, and as he continued speaking she found she could tune him out, swap his words for the conversation between Lily and GrandAnna. They were talking about her. She licked the chalk and their voices filled the room; she kept looking at Eliot to see if he heard. Lily and GrandAnna were on her side. “Luc shouldn’t have nailed Miranda’s drawers shut,” Lily was saying. “That was the wrong thing to do. Miranda didn’t deserve that. She has always tried to be good.”

Whenever Eliot paused in his speech, Miranda nodded politely. Eventually he fell asleep with his head on her shoulder, their hair mixing together. She made no move to disturb him.

I am good, Miranda thought. I am good, I am.

•

Mum was in Dad’s minicab and parked, probably illegally, outside the station at Faversham. I started to get into the car, but she got out first. “What’s this?” She picked up one of my arms and let it drop. She tapped my wrist, pinched my cheek, poked me in the stomach. “Did you leave the rest of you in Cambridge?”

Her hair was greyer. I forgot to look at her eyes. Instead I could see the smiling and the frowning she’d done while I was gone, her face quietly folding itself away into some scary distance. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I hugged her. She smelt of flour and vanilla.

“I made you a birthday cake,” she said. “In case you decided to have a birthday today. Remember that, eh?”

Inside the car I buckled up my seat belt, wanting to wrestle the tip of my tongue out of my mouth with my hands, to see if that would encourage sound. She didn’t seem to notice that I hadn’t said anything, not even hello. She looked over at me as she started up. She said, “You probably won’t be having any cake, though, by the looks of you. Cambridge has turned you bougie, hasn’t it. I’ll make you a nice cup of tea instead.”

At last: “ Bougie? Are you really calling me bourgeois? What are you on about, Mum?”

Mum grinned. “Your figure’s all boyish now. You know, like one of those girls with skin from a makeup ad who goes off to a lovely house in Italy and has the most beautiful breakdown because the philosophy books she’s reading are too much for her brain.”

“Oh one of those girls,” I said. “And she lounges around in a lace nightie and a silk dressing gown all day. She is also called Cecily.”

“Or… Laura . Our poor darling Cecily-Laura couldn’t put away so common a thing as a piece of cake. It would… hurt her.”

Mum’s “posh” accent was hilarious. She was laughing at it before she’d even finished speaking.

“Oi,” I said. “I’m going to hurt that cake.”

“Hm,” said Mum.

“Jam and cream, yeah?”

“ ’Course.”

The cake was Mum’s best yet, but I ate more of it than I wanted to. I couldn’t have Dad shaking his head and thinking I’d changed. I sat cross-legged in front of the TV with Mum and Dad on the sofa behind me, watching EastEnders and eating so much cake I couldn’t taste it, licking cream off my fork to let them know I was still theirs.

“Mel’s coming round later. Leave some for her, will you,” Mum said, astonished.

We had a crowd at Christmas dinner, because Mum insisted that everyone come over even though there wasn’t that much room. Me, Dad, Mum, aunts and uncles (three of the former and two of the latter), and my cousins, Melanie, Sean, Adam and Abbie.

Abbie was eleven and kept saying that everything was “so weird,” We had rare roast beef and potatoes because none of us really liked turkey, and Abbie said, “It’s so weird to be having beef for Christmas dinner.” She also said, “It’s so weird not to have the fairy on top of the tree this year,” and “If you think about it, gravy is so weird.”

Sean’s and Adam’s dogs chased each other around the room — Sean and Adam said that the dogs weren’t allowed to have names, so when they were in earshot we just identified them by colour — the black one was Sean’s and the brown one was Adam’s.

When Adam and Sean weren’t around I whispered the dogs’ names into their ears. The black one was Puck and the brown one was Marco-Polo, because he had knowing eyes, as if he’d been around. I knew that Mel called Puck “Melchior” and she called Marco-Polo “Monty.” I don’t even know what Abbie called them. Without being sure why, Abbie, Mel and I agreed that nothing can live without a name. The dogs were confused, but patient, on the whole unusually sweet-tempered for Staffordshire terriers. Uncle Terry had brought them home to give my boy cousins something to keep them out of trouble. What Uncle Terry didn’t know was that Sean and Adam were trying to train their dogs to viciousness so that they could be taken to late-night dogfights in Gillingham. Apparently good money changed hands those nights. Sean and Adam kicked their dogs and subjected them to periods of hunger that were unpredictable in length and frequency. Sean and Adam set their dogs on each other round the back of Sean’s house and acted confused when Aunt Jan came out and asked what on earth was going on.

I’d known that they’d do these things even before Uncle Terry gave them the dogs — Sean and Adam were just like that somehow. If they’d lived in Victorian England they would have been the guys shouldering their way to the front of the crowd to get the best view at a public hanging. If you had to pay to see public hangings, they would pay.

Sean’s my age, and Adam’s two years older. I swear they’ve been skinheads since birth. Mel’s a year younger than me and is probably the only cousin of mine that I would even have contemplated introducing to Miranda. Mel is unflappable. She got her nose pierced because I dared her to, and almost immediately after that she became so sexy that her parents are all worried about her and are constantly asking where she is and where she’s going and who she’s with. Nothing tawdry, she just sits there and quietly smoulders, as if she’d quite like to be undressed. Dark blonde hair and narrow brown eyes. She sticks up for me when Sean gets stupid.

Some local British National Party bright spark had spent the week before Christmas posting leaflets into every accessible letter box in Faversham, and Sean had kept one to piss me off. So far I hadn’t given him a reaction, but in front of the TV after dinner, his tactic was working. It might have been because there was so little room — he, Mel and I were squashed together on the sofa while Abbie and Adam arm-wrestled each other for the remote in the space between their armchairs. Adam was clearly torn between exercising his obviously greater strength in order to watch the show he wanted to watch and the nobler option of letting Abbie win. He won, and Abbie jeered, “Do you feel like a big man now, beating an eleven-year-old at arm-wrestling, eh?”