Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

I found a box of the Gauloises Dad had given me. As I lit one it came to me that my GrandAnna’s husband, the RAF man, had called them golliwogs. A serviceman was smoking a golliwog in one of his cartoons and when I’d asked Lily what it meant to smoke a golliwog she’d just stared and crooked her finger at me and didn’t relax until I brought her the cartoon.

I stuck my head out of the window and breathed smoke at the half moon. It snagged in the tree branches. I heard Miri’s window opening, and a couple of metres away from me, Ore stuck her head out of the window too. She had a haughty profile, her hair like a ruffled crown. She wasn’t wearing much — I saw a bit of silk and lots of skin. I hoped that, beneath the sill, she was wearing the stockings too. She turned and waved at me, I nodded back.

“Listen,” she whispered across the window ledges. “I could do with a smoke.”

I shook ash into the garden. It was good for the plants. “I’m afraid I can’t help you; this is my last one.”

“Liar. You look like a boy with a pocketful of smokes.”

“Do you even smoke?”

“No. But it looks so relaxing.”

“Alright. But it’ll cost you.”

Ore smiled. “Look at you, all brave when there’s a room between us.”

She ducked back into Miri’s room and I opened my bedroom door. She’d wrapped up in Miri’s dressing gown. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Smells like pure tar,” but accepted the cigarette I handed her. She made herself at home on my window seat, wadding a pillow under her knees. I didn’t stare at her. I didn’t talk about Mormon funeral potatoes or the fact that golliwog was just one slang term for Gauloises. I maintained a cool silence. I lit her cigarette for her, looked away when she gave an astonished cough, held her cigarette while she bent double and tried to thump herself on the back.

“Okay, you can put my one out,” she said, when she’d recovered. I didn’t for a while — I smoked both our gollies, with narrowed eyes and nervous intensity, like a Beat poet facing out his typewriter at dawn. Maybe. I hoped. The girl was making me reveal idiocy even in my silence.

“Insomniac?” I ventured.

She nodded. “Tonight, yes. Miranda’s sleeping like a baby for once.”

“So she wasn’t sleeping well at college either.”

“No.”

“Do people talk about her at college? Do they talk about the way she looks?”

Ore said, “What do you mean?”

“Come on. Look at her. She’s starving.”

Ore leaned back against the pillows. “Oh, so you can see that, can you? And what about this lovely house you live in?”

I stubbed out the cigarettes and dropped them out of the window. “What about it?” I was wary, thinking she was going to give me some kind of Marxist chat. Miri had told me and Dad that Ore’s dad drove minicabs and her mum was a dinner lady, that they had fostered her until they could adopt her. The information was interesting but of no significance; we hadn’t even asked after it. And if Ore was going to make some sort of point based on her history I didn’t want to hear it.

She started to speak, then shook her head and looked at the ground. I reached out and followed the line of her jaw with my finger. She looked at me then, with that strange half smile that said she’d forgive me if I kissed her. I kissed her and she let me. I kissed her again and she let me. By the third time it was ridiculous and really sort of painful, that she was just letting me and letting me, her lips slightly parted but not kissing back.

“I don’t think I fancy boys,” she explained, when I’d given up.

“You’re… you only like girls?”

“Well. Never say never.”

I reached for another cigarette, then changed my mind. I asked, “So do you fancy my sister?”

She shot back: “Why did you lock Miranda off all term?”

“I doubt you’ll win Miri round,” I told her.

She studied me. “Were you trying to punish her for getting in? Or was it brotherly concern, like you thought ignoring her was a way to help her out of her whole starving thing?”

“Not a chance,” I said, knowing I sounded dogged and not caring.

“I know,” she said. I watched her walk to the door; her legs. Mild agony, if such a thing is possible. And embarrassment at my clumsiness.

It took me a long time to get to sleep.

•

What was the rule to observe? What offering could I make?

By the time Miranda woke up I’d consulted the yellow pages and been to Deal, fifteen minutes’ train ride there, fifteen minutes back and half an hour of waiting at the watch shop on the high street while a guy with white sideburns replaced Miranda’s watch battery. I’d asked him, possibly more urgently than normal, not to set the watch to “the right time” and bought her two more batteries, just in case; each one was only a little larger than a five-penny piece, but each battery held five years bunched into increments of sixty seconds.

I was by Miranda’s bed, trying to hold my breath because it seemed too loud, when she woke up. She looked at me uncomprehendingly for a long moment, her eyes dark through the hair tumbled over her face. She closed one eye, then the other, then opened them both again.

“I dreamt you were the soucouyant,” she said, finally, then giggled. “Silly.” A dream, she said.

I knew I would have to go home. I dropped the watch onto the pillow beside her head, then added the batteries. I watched her pick up the watch, stroke it, hold it to her ear. I watched her listen to the ticking of the watch. Tears rolled down her face. She looked at the watch, not at me.

“This is my mother’s watch,” she said.

After breakfast we walked up to Dover Castle and skipped the medieval court reconstructions, moved more slowly through the displays in First and Second World War army barracks, the caps and medals and coloured card in glass boxes bigger than us. From the grass behind the ramparts the sea was mossy peace — the weather had almost frozen it, and there was so much mist that you couldn’t see where it led. Miranda sat on a heap of rock and tapped it. “Chalk,” she said. The mist hung in her hair.

“Of course,” I said, shivering. If either of us smoked cigarettes we’d have been warmer in some small way.

“My train leaves in half an hour,” I told her.

She looked up at me. She smiled with her red lips.

“So you’re running away,” she said.

My eyes were watering and my nose was running. It was the cold, but I knew it would look as if I was crying.

“I’ll see you at college,” I said.

She didn’t say anything. She sucked chalk from out under her fingernails. She looked tired.

Well? Is it the black girl? Or Eliot? Or me? Our talk depends upon the fact that you weren’t there and you don’t know what happened. At the very least I hope you take Eliot with a pinch of salt. He is a terrible liar. For example, he doesn’t even need reading glasses. He just wanted something that differentiated him from Miranda, some way to get back at her for her pica. His lenses are plain and untreated, an indulgence earned from his mother when he confided in her at a trip to the opticians when they were ten. And to keep it up so long when he can see perfectly well… what a liar he is. I can’t think how many times he’s squinted and scrunched his face up, struggling to follow the print when Miranda has handed him a sheet of paper and his reading glasses aren’t to hand. She would have found him out eventually. Besides the boy is strange, very strange. You couldn’t guess what he has between his mattress and his bedstead — or could you?

It’s a single A4 envelope, full of photographs of a girl in black. There she is, leaning over Kings College Bridge, hand raised to greet someone on a punt passing below. There she is again, the same girl, a dark figure passing geometrically laid flower beds and hedgerow so hazy green it’s as if she’s dreaming it. The girl again, at the barred back gate of a college, strands of her hair whipping the air as she watches for her watcher. Lack of variety in subject aside, the photographs aren’t bad.