Ore perched herself on the stair rail and closed her eyes.
“Well,” she said, after a moment, “I’ve never won a prize.”
They walked back upstairs together, arm in shaky arm. Ore wouldn’t let Miranda talk because, she said, she needed silence to get her lies in order.
Miranda thought about Ore throughout her interview, even when it descended into a semi-aggressive debate over her assertion that Thackeray’s Becky Sharp would easily beat Brontë’s Cathy in a fistfight. The only criticism she would have accepted was that she was giving patriarchy precedence over the female consciousness explored in the Gothic. But since that criticism wasn’t offered, she stood her ground. She didn’t remember her interviewers after the fact of her interviews — the professors didn’t have features, they were learnedness dressed up as people and housed in armchairs.
“Well? Where’s my prize?” Ore said, when Miranda came out. There were two others waiting outside now, a boy and a girl, both wearing blazers and silently reading thick books. They looked up when Ore spoke.
“How did it go?” Miranda asked.
“Wonderful. Really unbelievably good.” Cheerfully, Ore mimed stabbing herself. “If I don’t get that prize, the day might as well not have happened at all.”
She held her hand out expectantly.
“Alright, here it is,” said Miranda, and laid Ore’s purse on her palm. “You wouldn’t have got very far without it anyway,” she said. “Would you?”
Ore skipped a beat, then said: “I hope you get in. It’ll keep you off the streets, at least.”
She demanded the time of the boy nearest her and rushed down the college steps. The nervousness in her brought an otherwise gawky frame together in concentration — she delayed reaching out to push doors to the very last second, moving towards them as if, Miranda thought, they would slip aside for her or she would pass through them.
•
Since Azwer and Ezma were leaving, Miranda felt she should give their daughters something. Suryaz and Deme would each need a talisman, an object that smelt lovely, or that felt kind to the hand; such things are little suitcases to put sad feelings in so that they can go away by themselves.
Miranda didn’t have to go back to school until after the Christmas holidays, so for Suryaz she spent five nights under her bedroom lamp, making a cloth doll with a seed pearl smile and rose petals for eyes. She slept sparingly and unwillingly. Rest seized her and kept her until she twitched awake two or three hours later.
When Suryaz and Deme came home in the afternoons and sat down in the kitchen for their after-school snacks, Miranda mustered the energy to shuffle downstairs. She poked her head around the kitchen door for a brief but fond sighting of Suryaz, who was invariably a creature of jam, all sticky mouth and gooey ringlets. She thought, Soon I will have something to give you, and you don’t know it yet.
Each night Miranda worked on the doll and then she spent the day in bed, half dreaming of her needle in a circle of white. On the night that Suryaz’s doll was finished, she took her big bottle of attar of roses, unplugged its glass stopper and filled a bowl, then swam Suryaz’s doll in it. When the doll was slack and fat with liquid, she removed it and dropped it on the floor, where it lay beside her with arms and legs spread until the morning, by which time it had dried out.
Deme was harder to think of a gift for — Deme who’d stood on tiptoe in a box in the night, looking at the Alarm button. Deme wouldn’t want a thing that flopped charmingly and had nothing to tell her. When Azwer and Ezma began loading things into Luc’s car, Miranda went to find Deme. “Please come and choose a going-away present for yourself. Anything I have that you like,” she said, feeling shy now under the younger girl’s glossy stare. The girls had become steely since the lift broke down; they seemed full of resolutions not to smile anymore. Deme wouldn’t come without Suryaz, so the three of them stood in Miranda’s room, peering around in the gloom. Miranda covered the face of Lily’s watch with her hand and thought to herself, be giving. She watched Deme’s eyes move from her books to the sticks of chalk that she kept in a Marlboro cigarette box.
“Never smoke,” she told Deme, firmly. Deme put her hand out and pointed at a hairbrush that Lily had given Miranda. It was bone backed, with tiny skulls carved into it. Some of the skulls faced each other and were blended together at the jaw. Miranda had only recently realised that these were the skulls that were kissing. Deme chose that hairbrush, and Miranda wrapped it up in a silk scarf and gave it to her gladly. Suryaz stood by, rocking her new doll in the big pocket of her dress.
Suryaz bowed her head and her curls swung before her closed eyes, her face scrunched as if she was about to describe something and was trying to remember it with exactness and close attention. But she only seemed able to say, “Oh Miranda. Be careful.”
And Deme urged, “It is true. You’re nice, and you haven’t been well. Do be careful.”
Ezma called her daughters from the floor below. Suryaz said something to Deme in Azeri. Deme replied to her in Azeri, then turned a sweet smile on Miranda and dropped a square of lined writing paper onto Miranda’s pillow.
Miranda shook hands with Suryaz. Deme shook hands with Miranda. Each said goodbye.
Miranda stretched, then sat for a while after the noise of their departure had died in her ears. She was feeling fragile and had missed her morning dose, so she took more pills than was customary for her and washed them down with vinegar. She poured rose attar onto her tongue to mask the sourness her drink brought. She knelt down with her neck bowed as though for an axe and ran her perfume-wettened fingers through her hair.
Then she opened Suryaz and Deme’s letter. It was written in a round and extra neat hand that was unmarred by the splotches the fountainpen nib had made in several places.
The letter read:
Dear Miranda Silver,
This house is bigger than you know! There are extra floors, with lots of people on them. They are looking people. They look at you, and they never move. We do not like them. We do not like this house, and we are glad to be going away.
This is the end of our letter.
Yours sincerely,
Deme and Suryaz Kosarzadeh
Miranda folded the letter several times and put it in her pocket. She tried to smile, and managed, but not for long. She took the letter out and read it again. She was thinking things, but she couldn’t understand her thoughts. It wasn’t necessarily about Suryaz and Deme. It was more about the exhaustion of having finished Suryaz’s doll, of having worked her eyes and her nerves for someone different and distant, someone who had lived in a different house from her when she’d thought they were all living in the same house, safe as little fishes in folds of the deep blue sea.
Miranda went down through the trapdoor and curled up in a corner of the indoor bomb shelter. She cried with her face turned into the wall. Lily had told her and Eliot that this house, with their great-grandmother inside it, had escaped the effects of a bomb in 1942, that the houses a short distance away had been torn apart, their roofs whirling away to reveal cakes of brick with savage bites taken out of them. The house was lucky. Or storing its collapse.
To live here without Lily… Miranda found that the sadness was far far bigger than her, and it was forcing her back. The wall she leant against had a damp, high temperature to it, like tears on skin.
•
Christmas was dismal. We went to Paris as usual, to stay with our grandparents (Dad’s parents, I mean) on the Île Saint-Louis. There was too much food. There’s always too much food at Christmas, but this time it kept getting stuck in my throat and each bite turned into this choice between eating and breathing, as if you should ever have to choose.