Sade turned up the volume on the kitchen radio. Up at the port, fifty-eight people had been found dead in the back of a truck. Chinese. They had suffocated. Miranda was a heartbeat away from putting her hands over her ears. What is wrong with Dover, she thought.
Eyes closed, Sade stroked the scars on her cheek.
“Didn’t they call Dover the key to England?” she asked, slowly. “Key to a locked gate, throughout both world wars, and even before. It’s still fighting.”
She drew her scarf around her neck and wriggled into her coat, swinging the heavy carrier bag as if it was nothing. As she left, a gust of wind came through the hallway and the back door slammed. It was the couple who had been picnicking outside. Now they came into the warmth and looked around, and shivered. They were sweating. They passed Miranda and she was troubled. The woman smiled vaguely and gave Miranda the lily from her hair. The man followed the woman up the stairs without even glancing at Miranda.
“Is everything okay?” Miranda asked.
No reply. She tried to add up how many days the couple had booked in for; she should look in her father’s book. The flower in her hand was so large and sweet smelling that she might have been carrying the frozen scent of a lily. She paused halfway up the staircase, looked up and listened to them.
“A tisket, a tasket,” the man sang, off-key, outside the door of the couple’s guest room. “A tisket, a tasket.”
“Stop it,” Miranda heard the woman say, just as she herself mouthed, “Stop it.”
“Something’s killing me.” There was a static quality to their voices, as if they were people on the radio. Miranda’s vision blurred until the staircase was the only thing she could see clearly. A helter-skelter of wood and carpet, a backbone.
“What is it?” the man asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was the apple. Where did it come from?”
The woman began to choke. Miranda, who did not know CPR, ran up to the second floor, but the man had led the woman inside the bedroom, saying, “Sh, sh,” and the horrible coughing was quieted somehow.
The doorbell rang.
“Er…”
Jalil had brought her a bunch of sunflowers. Miranda found sunflowers very ugly, and yellow made her so nervous that she suspected it was the cause of war. She was irritated with Jalil for bringing the sunflowers, and irritated with herself for being ungrateful. She stood at the door, a barrier between him and the house, sniffed at the brown florets that spiralled at the centre of the petals. She couldn’t smell anything, but she said, “Thank you. These are beautiful.” Then she closed the door, praying that no one else would come up and ring the doorbell until he had gone. Jalil stood on the doorstep for three seconds, smiling uncertainly, waiting for her to open the door, but she said, “Goodbye! See you at school!” through the letter box, and then he went off, disconsolately dragging his feet against the gravel.
As soon as he was out of sight, she thought charitably of him. It had been brave to bring the flowers. Once Eliot had come in with a bunch of flowers he’d bought for someone, then had thrown them into the almost-full bin on his way out, slamming the lid again and again to crush the petals farther down into the mass of eggshells and old bread. When Eliot saw Jalil’s sunflowers on the sitting-room mantelpiece, he asked where they had come from. She told him. A look of such extreme sarcasm crossed his face that Miranda rushed to him and covered his mouth with both hands before he could speak.
•
Monday was the day I got the letter from the South African production company, offering me their internship. The acceptance sank my heart. My Dad knows magazine people who wrote me glowing, if vague, references. I tried to remember if Lily had been in Cape Town — if she had then I would have something to connect the words to. Then I remembered that Lily had been there, and she’d hated it. “It’s that mountain… Table Mountain. It stands there and glowers like some kind of club bouncer, and you just can’t get away from it — no matter what part of town you look around and somehow the mountain is there. If it doesn’t block your light then you feel it.”
Monday was also a day Miri said she’d stay at home. I went out to the garden to get my bike and she emerged from the shelter, looking vague. She said that she wanted to help Sade take some snacks up to the Immigration Removal Centre.
“Are you avoiding that brer?” I asked her.
“That… brer,” she said after me, looking inquisitive.
“The fellow you pulled in the pub.” I tried to stop, but couldn’t stop myself from adding: “The one who came yesterday, with the sunflowers.”
“Jalil.”
“Okay. Yes, him.”
“His name is Jalil.”
“I know.”
“I’m not avoiding Jalil. Get the homework for me.”
“Are you not planning to go in tomorrow either, then?”
“I don’t think school suits me at the moment,” Miri said. She was holding on to the side of the shelter so hard that her knuckles were white. She kept looking somewhere to the left of me. Her concentration was unflickering. The thing she was watching, whatever it was, moved from a point just behind my head to somewhere near my kneecaps, and by the time the thing (and her gaze) had reached the ground, I realised she wasn’t watching anything, she’d lost consciousness. Almost as soon as she’d fallen, she opened her eyes again. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she said. I picked her up and carried her inside the house, worried by how little effort it took to lift her. She laughed. “Oh, are you actually carrying me? Am I heavy? Eliot you are such a gentleman—”
She threw her head back as if on a ride.
“I’ll drop you and see how you feel about that,” I warned her.
She whispered in my ear, suddenly serious. “I’m scared of those girls. They’re going to come after me.”
I set her on her feet in the lift. “Get some sleep. I’ll find out about the homework for you. And I’ll sort the thing with Tijana out.”
“Promise?”
“Er… I’m not in a boy band.”
The lift door closed on her smile.
On my way back from lunch I saw Tijana standing at the school gate. She had her blazer thrown over her shoulders like a cape, and her hair was loose and sort of stumbling down her back in different stages of curl. She was talking to a boy, and their body language was interesting. They were talking loudly (and not in English) but the volume wasn’t hostile and it seemed to increase and increase despite the fact that they were standing almost close enough to simply whisper. I should have realised just by that token that Tijana and the boy she was talking to were related. The boy sat on his bike, one foot on a pedal, as if ready to ride off at any second. He stared at me when I walked up to Tijana, and I stared back, then ended up having to look away because he looked so sick. He had big yellow rings around his eyes.
“I need to talk to you for a minute,” I said to Tijana. Tijana raised her eyebrows. She looks like a fortune-teller. I’m not sure what I mean by that, but it’s true.
“What is it?” she said.
The boy on the bike looked at me patiently, waiting for me to go away. He looked as if he hoped he wouldn’t have to exert himself.
“I need to talk to you about the thing with Miranda,” I said, and I moved away as an indication that she should step aside too. Tijana didn’t move. She did something with her hair that made me realise what writers mean when they say “she tossed her head.”