The perfect person was a girl. Bobbed dark hair, black dress, pearls she was too young for, mouth, nose and chin familiar… Miranda’s, almost. Look, look, remember. This sight might not come again. The perfect person had beautifully shaped hands, but no fingernails. A swanlike neck that met the jaw at a devastating but impossible angle. Me, but perfect. She quickly corrected herself. Before Lily died, Miranda’s hair had been long enough to sit on. Me after the clinic, but perfect. Lily did you know? How did you know? Miranda turned the picture over and ran her hand over the back of it; in one, yes, two, three, four places the paper was rougher, once adhesive, now matted with fine hairs and specks of dust. Lily Silver, the lonely girl on the third floor, had kept herself company with pictures of people, no one she’d ever seen, she’d said. Miranda turned the page over again, and it was blank. So this was what happened when she hit her head.
Eliot collapsed onto the floor beside her. She put her head on his shoulder and he moved his head so that he was combing her hair with his chin. “That was really stupid,” she said, at the same as he said, “That was ridiculous.”
Without raising her head, she ran her fingers over the marks she’d made on his face, kissed each of her fingers and her thumb and touched them to each scratch. Just to be sure she touched his eyelids.
“Did you take something?”
“What?”
“Your eyes… I don’t know, maybe you smoked something.”
“No more than usual.” He crossed his heart.
“What do you really do in here?”
“What d’you think?”
“Develop photos, I suppose. Since when, though?”
He shrugged. She took some chalk out of the pocket of her dress. When she offered him a stick of it he looked surprised, but took it and stuck it in his mouth, pretended to smoke it like a cigar while she ate.
•
Azwer gave his notice the day of Eliot’s and Miranda’s Cambridge interviews. He stopped Luc as he was on his way out to meet the twins by the car. Azwer said, “My wife and daughters are afraid. If we stay they will only become more afraid, and then something bad will happen.” His heavy eyebrows lowered and he made some small, involuntary gesture with his hand that was recognisably superstitious, as if the words “God forbid” had flowed into his body.
Luc said, “Two weeks is too short notice for me to find replacements for you and Ezma. And we’ve had the lift looked at.”
Azwer said quickly, heatedly, “Mr. Dufresne, it’s not just the lift—”
Luc put his car keys down on the hall table, and tension pulled him taller. “Then what?”
Azwer kept his eyes fixed on Luc.
Luc looked at Miranda, then lowered his voice and said to Azwer, “Do you need more pay?”
Azwer spread his hands. “We cannot stay.”
Azwer and Ezma didn’t have papers; as far as the government was concerned, Luc was running the Silver House alone. Luc said, “Azwer, listen. Think about it. Where will you work? Where will you go?”
Azwer shrugged. “To London.”
Luc said, “I see,” in tones that patently signalled that he didn’t.
He took Miranda by the shoulders and turned her in the direction of the door.
She didn’t look like a promising interview candidate at all, she knew. All the colour in her face was in her lips, and her dress was still far too big. The back of it gaped around her shoulder blades as if the dress had been designed for someone who had wings. She would have to talk fast and come to surprising conclusions and smile a lot so no one would notice.
•
Miranda’s first interview was an hour and a half after Eliot’s, so she wandered in and out of the entrances to the college’s stone stairwells. She wondered how Eliot’s interview had gone and where he was, but she couldn’t find her phone; she must have left it somewhere. Cambridge was subdued; it wasn’t just the frost and the puffy felt sky, it was the abundance of massive, old stone. And then the bells, which pealed their deep songs at mysterious intervals. Miranda felt as if she was being pressed to the ground beneath a great grey finger. She had a pocketful of onyx chips
(properties of onyx: it helps you hold your emotions steady; side effects of onyx: it is the sooty hand that strangles all your feeling out of you) and she used her teeth to carve tiny, acrid flakes of onyx onto her tongue. She knew how to do it so that it looked as if she was simply biting her nails.
She collided with another girl on her way back into the waiting area outside the interview room. They both held their heads and moaned.
“Oh Lord! You must have the hardest head in all creation,” the girl said.
Miranda waited until she could look at the girl without it hurting, then lifted her gaze. The girl was black, all long legs and platform trainers, clad in grey school uniform. Her head was covered with tiny plaits that had coloured elastic bands tied around the ends, and her eyes were dark and large like drops of rich ink.
There was an awkward silence. Then Miranda held the door open and said, “Let’s try again, you first,” before she remembered that she had been the one going in. The other girl had been leaving.
“Look… what’s the time?” the girl said.
Miranda said, “I don’t know,” and looked around for a clock.
The girl looked at the watch on Miranda’s wrist.
“It doesn’t work,” Miranda said, rather than explain about Haitian time. “How have your interviews gone?”
“They haven’t. I mean I haven’t been called yet. I’m not doing it after all. Fuck it. I only wanted to know the time because there’s a train I might be able to catch if I leave right now,” the girl blurted.
“You’re… not going to your interviews?”
“No! I can’t be bothered.”
The girl’s hands were shaking. Miranda tried not to stare.
“Er… listen, it will be very demoralizing for me if you leave.”
The girl looked Miranda up and down and quietly advised her that she probably had nothing to worry about.
Miranda frowned. “What are you saying? Do I just walk in and say a secret password?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Do you?”
Miranda pushed the question aside with her hand. “It would be a shame not to bother. After you applied and everything. And… where do you live?”
“Faversham.”
“Right. So you came all the way up from Faversham—”
“Indeed!” the girl said. “Look… what’s your name?”
“Miranda.”
“I’m Ore. Look, Miranda. I’ve already been through all that ‘you’ve already applied and here you are’ stuff in my head. But hear ye, hear ye: only one person from my school’s got in here in the last five years, that’s a very discouraging pie chart to draw, plus I’ve been thinking about my personal statement and there are at least seventeen lies in there and I can’t keep track of them all. Plus I just realised I’m stupid, an actual dunce. I got a C for GCSE maths. It’s very likely that I’ve only been called to interview so they can laugh at me. Anyway thanks for listening, I’m off.”
“Well, I think it’s a terrible waste,” Miranda said, following Ore down the staircase. “And how will you ever know unless you try?”
Ore took Miranda’s hands between both of hers and shook it. “Good luck,” she said. “All the best. Really. I think it’s really nice of you to bother.”
Miranda could see how hard Ore was trying to take full breaths, to be calm. The only thing was to use a strategy of Lily’s.
“I,” said Miranda, “will give you a prize if you stay and do your interviews.”