After breakfast, Sylvie and Dad stayed in and baked, and Miri and I went out for a walk along the Seine with The Paul. I took the bird with us, holding my jacket slightly open for the bird, which I felt shuddering slightly in the inside pocket, a brittle shape with life in it, like a flute playing itself. The Paul was in between Miri and me, and Miri supported him by coquettishly slipping her arm through his. Her high heels slipped on the ice. This happened a lot, but she refused to go out without her heels so she’d adapted to it, fully bending her knees each time she slipped so that she staggered with elegance. The trees were laced with ice and only a few other people were out. When they passed us, they gave friendly nods. I made observations aloud, for the bird’s benefit. “Lovely weather,” I said, and “Fit girl,” I told the bird, when one walked past. I also said, “I hope you don’t shit in my pocket.” The bird raised its beak and its eyes like wet black marbles, and it seemed to listen to me. Either that or it was trying to get a feeling for the sky and when it might fly again. The Paul said sympathetically, “Poor boy. Your old grandparents have bored you eccentric. I understand. A fellow’s got to amuse himself.”
Just before we left for home I tried once more to make the bird fly. I opened the window of my room at Sylvie and The Paul’s house and I set the bird’s dumpy body on the sill, pushed it with a finger, but it only shook itself a little and stayed with its back to me, tail feathers ruffled, a defiant loner against the sunset and against the world. I reinstated it in the inside pocket of my jacket.
Miri spent most of the train journey to Calais trying to flirt with the bird, but it ignored her, snuggled deeper into my pocket and seemed to melt into hibernation — even its claws softened. The other people sitting around us seemed worried by the bird; they kept looking at the top of its head, which was all that was visible, as if they expected it to suddenly rise and start zooming around the train carriage, buzzing like a huge fly with a beak. But the bird relaxed until we’d docked at Dover, where it suddenly chirruped, struggled from my pocket to my shoulder, and threw itself at the air, singing madly. Then it was gone.
Miri squeezed my arm. “What a lazy thing that bird was,” she said. “Outrageous. Don’t you see? It was using you to get across the Channel.”
Dad was ahead of us, weighed down with Miri’s bag and his own. He looked back and said, “Good job you hadn’t given it a name.”
There was a stack of bills for Dad on the doormat when we got in. Also there was a letter postmarked Cambridge. It was for Miri. She held it and looked at me, scared. “I won’t open it until yours comes,” she said.
I spoke even though my lips felt frozen. Not really frozen, actually. Intensely lethargic. My lips couldn’t be bothered to form words. “Come on,” I said. “We applied to the same college for the same subject.”
I took the letter out of her hands and opened it for her. She had been offered a place. I kissed her cheek and said congratulations. She opened her mouth and put one hand on her chest, the other to her cheek. She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she cared about the offer. She was just trying to feel this for me.
Dad read the letter, then put an arm around Miri’s waist and drew her to him. He kissed her forehead. “My clever, darling girl,” he said. Miri smiled at last. When Dad looked at me, I looked at the wall. I wanted to leave, but told myself, stand still, stand still. The floor below, the ceiling above. I stood there until they felt uncomfortable.
THE GOODLADY
“is very beautiful, Miranda, but very strict. Everything she does is necessary, and she makes no exception to any rule. She’s what I had instead of a mother, much stricter than any mother. She’s like tradition, it’s very serious when she’s disobeyed. She’s in our blood. And she’s told me that if I can’t get you to eat, she will. You must eat real food, and you must eat as much as you can manage, or you might end up with the goodlady for your mother. Wouldn’t you rather have me?”
“Of course. Always you, always. How can you even ask me that?”
Lily wasn’t even an hour into her final trip abroad when Miranda fell into conversation with the goodlady herself. There was an essay due for key skills. The topic was suicide, and the essay was to be a discussion of the ethics of ending one’s own life. Was suicide wrong, right, or a value-free choice? Was it even a choice in some cases? And so on.
Eliot was writing his own answer to the question next door in his room. Both Miranda and Eliot understood that they were expected to argue that suicide was wrong. Their school was that sort of school. Eliot would probably argue in favour of suicide. He’d write that suicide was a terrible, wonderful thing, a gift from the intellect to the body. Miranda wanted to give the correct answer. She would say that suicide was wrong, wrong, not a good idea at all, terrible in fact. She just had to hope that such an answer would emerge as the result of proper consideration and would thus be conscionably correct.
She sat at her desk in the psychomantium, pushing her feet in and out of her shoes and sighing as though stricken. She had no idea where to begin. She thought about her mother, gone away again, and she thought about her renewed promise to eat full meals, and she thought about her mother’s forgotten watch. A sharp pain arrived in her stomach and stayed small, like a sting. If she stayed healthy she would live for decades, and there were so many meals left to eat. But she had to keep going, otherwise Eliot would never forgive her. He hated her pica, she knew. She would eat for Eliot, not for Lily, who couldn’t really care all that much if she was always on her way to somewhere else.
Miranda’s hair poured over her face and onto her paper and pen, and she pushed it back so that it all fell to the base of her chair. She turned to a new page in her notebook and began writing questions. Beneath the questions she wrote answers, in a hand as different from the one the questions were written in as possible.
Goodlady, are you really good?
yes
Even when no one is looking?
of course
But do you understand your nature?
my nature?
Did you choose to be good, or were you so created?
i chose to be created
Is that really an answer?
yes
Miranda’s elbow slipped against the pages of her book, and the paper cut her. The room rolled like a dice. No matter how much she pretended bravery Miranda couldn’t stand the sight of blood. She reared back, a hand to her elbow, too late — a bead of blood fell and grew into a large full stop in the middle of her open page, an ending to a sentence she hadn’t written yet. She went in search of cotton wool and a plaster, and when she came back the stain was even bigger — she feared it might smother the page, the entire book.
You are not good, she accused.
The answer she wrote unnerved her because the handwriting was truly different from her own. It was handwriting she’d seen before in Christmas and birthday cards, shaky but elegant, the g’s and the y’s straight legged rather than curled.
neither are you
Miranda tapped her pen against her teeth, read over what she’d written. She ripped the red spotted page out of her book and threw it away. But the page was the reason for the certainty in Miranda’s voice the next night, when she told her brother that the goodlady would take care of Lily. How could she doubt the goodlady? The goodlady was Lily’s creation. Besides, she thought, the blood is the life.