“Lily couldn’t stop her,” Miri said.
“Leave your GrandAnna alone.” Lily sounded as if she was unable to believe that she had to say it. Miri’s first proper meeting with our GrandAnna was at the home; I was there and I don’t remember her any other way. When I think of her I see a white-haired woman kneeling on the carpet with us, motioning to the sunlight outside the window of her room and saying with desperate smiles, “Come and play, please come and play children.”
I remember once I raised my voice at Miri and our GrandAnna jumped and burst into tears that seemed to come straight from her heart, as if it was her I’d shouted at and not Miri. I found that so strange that I shut up for the rest of the visit. GrandAnna had a heart attack a few days afterwards, and she died.
Miri looked at me narrowly and I went and sat in a corner because we thought it was my fault; I’d done it with my shouting.
And I don’t remember Miri saying anything about the goodlady before that.
•
I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home, I’m the Braille on your wallpaper that only your fingers can read — I tell you where you are. Don’t turn to look at me. I am only tangible when you don’t look.
Luc knows this feeling, from an early visit he made here with Lily and the twins. He knew that I was nothing like that flat of theirs in London. One day he came in from the back garden and stood in the sitting-room doorway, smiling while his wife sat on the floor knitting a tiny jacket for one of Miranda’s dolls and using a socked foot to wheel Eliot’s spare trains across the carpet so he could have train races. It was summer, Lily had tied streamers to the ceiling fan and her freckled shoulders were covered with sun cream. And the twins had four years of life between them, Eliot in a pink T-shirt that hugged his pot belly and Miranda in a dark-blue dress and a little sailor’s hat. There was a thing that Lily, Eliot and Miranda tended to do when they were together and he joined him. They pretended he wasn’t there at first. He knew that on some level it was intended for his benefit, so he could look at his rosy little English family as if they were in a portrait. When he said hello they’d come alive to him, but first he had to say it.
Before Luc could speak this time, Eliot wobbled over to Lily, wearing a look of grim determination peculiar to children who have only just learned to walk, reached out and yanked her hair hard. Lily didn’t stop knitting, but she eyed Eliot sternly and said: “Eliot, you are hurting me.”
Eliot didn’t answer, and he didn’t let go of her hair. He sat down hard, trying to drag Lily’s forehead to the floor.
Luc didn’t know why he couldn’t move. I knew why; it was because I’d leant all my weight, every wall and corridor, on his shoulders. He was lucky I allowed him to stand.
Miranda, on one of the armchairs with her lap full of Barbie dolls and her thumb in her mouth, emptied the dolls onto the floor and crossed the room faster than a thought to grab a handful of Lily’s hair too, wrenching at her head from the other side. Lily’s fingers tightened around the knitting needles, and she let out a long breath. “Eliot,” she said, then: “Miranda!”
She raised her hand to the back of Eliot’s neck and pinched him hard. She did the same to Miranda, dug her fingers into the skin. It looked practised.
The twins let go of their mother immediately.
All three of them laughed, and their eyes were full of tears.
Luc walked away and went out again, let himself in through the front door this time, noisily this time.
“Hello!” he called, before he even reached the sitting room this time.
“Hello!” they all called back.
Good mother, good father, good children, all watched over by me.
•
Miranda avoided dinner on New Year’s Eve by pretending to be asleep when Luc called her. She was ready for him when he came looking for her. She lay on her back and offered her face to him, knowing how she looked, knowing that he saw the dark smudges that wheeled around her eyes. He didn’t try to wake her anymore.
When Luc had gone she locked the door and searched a drawer at the top of her wardrobe for the last remaining strip of a blue plastic spatula she had been working on for two months. Come slowly, Eden…
She put the Crests’ greatest hits album into her CD player and skipped through to “Flower of Love.”
Plastic was usually very satisfying. A fifty-millimetre wad of it was tough to chew away from the main body of the strip, but with steady labour, sucking and biting, it curved between the teeth like an extension of the gum, and the thick, bittersweet oils in it streamed down her throat for hours, so long she sometimes forgot and thought her body was producing it, like saliva.
She changes all the time
It was 6:00 AM in Haiti when she decided on a midnight feast. She touched the knob at the top of her spine, knowing that if the dress she wore fitted her at all she would not have been able to reach it. She knew that the meal she’d missed would wait in the oven long after Luc had called her to the kitchen and scraped the food off the plates and into the bin. Luc was asleep now, in the round bed, surrounded by the blankets, rugs, wall hangings, prints and figurines that Lily brought back from her photography jobs by the armful. It must have been like being locked into a small, cheerful museum for the night. In the morning she’d surprise him with an empty plate. But first a walk, to get up an appetite.
She left her room and knocked on Eliot’s door, to see if he was back from wherever he’d gone for the night. He didn’t answer. She peeked inside his room. He wasn’t in there, but his lights were on and his window was wide open, the wind whisked leaves around his room in bristles, like a broom. She went back to her psychomantium and played some more CDs at low volume. She had not slept for a while, a matter of days, though she could not think how many. She didn’t want to do anything but dance. If Eliot had been there she would have got him to dance with her. Somehow he had the knack of the tuneful wail, oo-wee-ooo, the elbow sway, the fist over the heart, though he had done it mainly for Lily’s entertainment. Miranda checked the time again, watchfully going through the hours between here and Haiti. So. It was 5:00 AM. Eliot where are you walking?
The lift from the ground floor to the first floor, then from first to second, second to third, then from the third floor to the empty attic. She peered up and down the broad passageways and tiptoed past the bedroom doors, feeling like dust, as if she was everywhere at once. She could pull herself tight and then explode and choke everyone in the house. She had never breathed so well or seen so clearly. She could hear one person snoring with the tidy rumble of an engine. In another room, someone murmured to herself or into the phone. Next door to that person a couple quietly crushed each other with sighs and words and their bodies. The fifth and biggest guest room was unoccupied, so nothing from there. A scream came to her, the word “Fire!” but she did not let it leave her, and she didn’t ring an alarm. How dare people sleep, how dare they lie so blankly in the dark?
In the dining room she looked glumly at the plate on the table before her. Beef stew and potatoes, the meat drowned in wine and limp onions, she saw brown fat running over white. She took a knife and divided the plate, pushing food aside so that there was a clear line in the middle of the plate, a greasy path of sanity. The light overhead was the deep orange of church candles. She would eat all the meat first, then vegetables. She started with a knife and fork, but soon resorted to bending over her plate with her hands planted on the table, desperately hauling food up into her mouth as if in the final seconds of an all-you-can-eat contest. She thought, There is no way that taking this stuff into my body is doing me any good. Sauce ran across her nose and cheeks and there were tears in her plate. Tears improved the flavour of the vegetables. Perhaps that was in a cookbook somewhere — a Gaelic one, probably, for a people who saw the kind of spirit that did nothing but weep and bode ill.