When she paused to chew, she bumped noses with someone who lifted their head from her plate at the same time. She smelt the beef and potatoes, reheated by the breath from their lips. She started and jumped up from her chair. There was no one else at the table.
“Who’s there?” she said, ridiculously, because the kitchen was empty. She grabbed some kitchen towel, wiped her face, then walked around the dining table and put her hand on the back of the chair that had been opposite her. After a moment she sat down in it and drew her plate towards her again.
All the vegetables had disappeared. She had eaten the meat first, as she had told herself she would, but someone else had eaten the vegetables. There was the line she’d drawn in the middle of the plate, and there was a residue of gravy on her side, and then on the other side there was… nothing. As clean as if the plate had been washed.
The girl sitting across from her smiled. Her teeth were jagged. She had been there since Miranda had walked into the dining room, but because she looked exactly like Miranda she had not been noticed. After all, she might have been a reflection in the window. The difference was the teeth, and when she showed her teeth she became noticed. She was not quite three dimensional, this girl. And so white. There couldn’t be any blood in her. She was perfect. Miranda but perfect. She was purer than crystal, so pure that she dissolved and Miranda couldn’t see her anymore but still felt her there.
The front door slammed. The noise of it was like language, and, obedient to it, Miranda put her coat on, her scarf, her shoes.
The street outside was strewn with bits of houses, whole window frames lying halfway across shattered sheets of glass, as if trying to shield them. She climbed over a raft of shingled slate, picked her way through heaps of bricks that released smoke carefully, almost grudgingly. There were pale people all along the street, the perfect people Lily had drawn. They were spaced out carefully, like an army of tin soldiers, and they watched Miranda without moving or smiling. She called out to them and, though they said nothing, she felt safe. They didn’t have eyelids because you missed things when you blinked. They didn’t need gas masks because they didn’t breathe. One of them had a pipe in his mouth, or rather, the pipe was part of his mouth; Lily had been a cruel artist. When Miranda came to Bridge Street she walked faster, rubble or no rubble, because of what was behind her
— she saw the moon turn away
and the trees thrashing to save their roots
dogs in every house around that still stood, their barking distant as if from inside a single locked safe, the metal syncopating the sound of fear, saying dance, dance, don’t look around, dance
which she did, kicking and yelling like the first day in her GrandAnna’s house, only she was going so fast, where, why?
(Because plastic is not satisfying this night
As for beef, as for his Frenchie beef and fucking potatoes, ha ha)
Across the cliffs, Dover Castle was black. The sun was rising and the sea was changing colour, but the castle stayed within its lines, hunched in a black mess of shapes, and the vast bank of chalk it stood on seemed to stir in the water as if fighting the darkness that tried to climb down it.
Miranda knelt, her hands holding tight to the safety bars. Someone floated facedown at the foot of the cliff. The sea refused to take the body far from the shore and contented itself with tossing the corpse back and forth between its gentler waves.
We died this morning, she thought, then saw a scrap of colour. The body wore green. Whoever was floating, it was not her.
Sleep came at last, so miraculously and completely that she walked home through the empty streets unawake, her steps guided by the slightness of her shadow.
•
She didn’t realise she was asleep until a tapping on her door woke her.
“Yes?” Miranda said.
Her father came in, squinting, pretending he couldn’t see her in the dark of her room.
“Morning, Miri.”
“Morning,” she said, holding the question mark back with effort. She was no longer sure what the time was, or how to calculate. Also she thought she had locked her door.
“I’m about to interview someone to replace Ezma, but someone else is about to check out,” Luc began apologetically.
Miranda waved a hand. “Take their money, take the room key, print out a receipt,” she recited.
Luc nodded. “And check the room, please. So I know what needs doing.”
Miranda got out of bed to show her intention of moving soon. When he left, she sat down again. Her knees felt weak.
The woman Luc was interviewing was a black woman, short and round, with a placid gaze. An orange head wrap and an orange gown that made her formless, a vapour sinking through the sofa. She had a big, grey-black bird printed on each sleeve at the elbow; one was visible every time she lifted her teacup to her mouth. The birds had iron feathers and claws as long as their beaks, but they hid their heads behind their wings. She was wearing sandals despite the cold, and her toenails were painted bright orange. Her eyelids were daubed with a green that dotted her gown in emerald specks but turned khaki coloured on her skin. The woman spoke to Luc, unhurriedly and with a heavy African accent.
Miranda couldn’t take her eyes off the scars across the woman’s cheekbone, four horizontal stripes that cut a little farther along her face at each stage, like arrows at different stages of flight. They were smooth now but the cuts would have had to be made again and again on the same spot to make them hold. It took all she had not to ask the woman if she could still feel it. Miranda pressed the keys of the newly vacated room into Luc’s hand and the form with pencilled ticks beside items that needed tidying and replacing. Towels, sheets and so on.
“Thanks, Miri.” Luc looked at the woman who sat beside him on the sofa, then back at Miri. “This is Sade,” he told Miranda, then: “Sade, this is my daughter, Miranda.”
The introduction meant that Sade must be the one who was getting the job. Miranda, Luc and Sade got caught in a triangle of gazing. Luc cleared his throat and stood. “Sade, let me show you the house,” he said.
They started at the bottom and climbed up. Sade stopped in one of the guest rooms, her hand on the windowsill. “It’s so quiet,” she said.
All three of them listened without speaking. Now that she’d said it, it was true. The sounds in the other rooms were muted into vibrations. Someone closed a door, someone else ran down the stairs and you didn’t really hear these things, you felt them.
JENNIFER SILVER
lived quite long. She didn’t die until 1994. A reason why Lily never felt motherless was that her mother was there with her, a door and a curtain away. It is a pity that Lily never understood this in a literal sense, but the concealment was necessary. Jennifer really meant to abandon her daughter, and how could I allow that? Jennifer was going to walk away from Anna and Lily in broad daylight. Anna was playing with her granddaughter, lying on her back in trapdoor-room with baby Lily on her stomach, cooing at her and comparing curl for curl. Jennifer had convinced herself that she hated them both, the child and the crone. She was modern and couldn’t countenance being held by four walls just because she’d had a baby at a young age. She was going to Milan with her Italian photographer boyfriend, and he would make her face famous. Anna and Lily could have each other, for all she cared.