Miranda had spent the previous weekend looking through her GrandAnna’s prudent, economical knitting and sewing patterns, and she felt sorry for the old black Singer sewing machine, which seemed never to have had any fun.
“First I will knit you a scarf, as I’ve read that South Africa won’t really get warm for you until November. Next I think I will make myself an overcoat, with a violently coloured lining.”
•
After their last exam, Eliot vanished with a group of friends whose schoolbags clanked with bottles, while Miranda went straight home and returned the notes she’d taken to school to the bundle beneath her bed. She had not answered many of her exam questions completely — she had too much to tell the examiner, and everything she had to say was of the greatest urgency. She’d been reduced to summarising points for the final questions, to give illusions of answers.
Miranda found Sade and they went down to London together, in search of suitable scarf and coat fabrics at Petticoat Lane Market. Miranda liked the market very much. It was steps away from a main street full of fast-food restaurants, a street that glowed with buses like wheeled danger signs, but the market itself smelt like fried spice and flour and the musk of cloth before it is ever worn.
Sade bought a brown bag full of peppers more wizened and vicious-looking than chillies, tie-dyed fabric, and a pair of square-toed silver shoes with diamanté buckles that silenced Miranda for a full ten minutes. There was no time or place or event fancy enough for those shoes. She knew that Sade would have to wear them as house slippers.
Miranda bought plenty of purple thread and some unassuming polyester and viscose mix that fell well and warmly when she held a sample length of it up against herself. She decided that she wanted her overcoat to be a full frock coat, and got some black petticoat gauze too. Then Sade persuaded her to buy a big square of red and purple tie-dyed into shadowy mandalas. “For your violently coloured lining,” Sade said, as they held the cloth out between them and gaped at it and then at each other. There was too much cloth, but that was a good thing, as Miranda had not yet learnt to sew with a machine and was bound to get it horribly wrong at first.
Sade and Miranda paid for the fabric and the silver shoes together, and the shop owner bantered with Sade while finding her change, peppering his talk with Yoruba words as he wrapped the cloth in tissue paper. He was Indian. He saw Miranda’s surprise and laughed. “Why wouldn’t I know some of this lady’s language? My best customers are Yoruba…”
He also let them take, for only ten pounds, a mannequin that he no longer used because it was too old and he’d had too many complaints about its proportions from his mainly full-figured female customers. The mannequin had no hair, no face, was very white under a film of grime, and had a fifties waist and a nonexistent bust, which pleased Miranda because that way she would be able to see how the coat would look on her even as it was being made.
At home, she put the mannequin in the bath and washed it with a flannel, from face to torso to heels, until it was completely clean. The mannequin was taller than her, but as she pulled it out of the bath by its hands, she felt as if she was its mother. In her room she covered the mannequin’s nakedness with one of the long T-shirts she slept in. The mannequin stood beside her wardrobe, arms at its sides, looking cowed somehow.
Miranda put a knitted hat on its head and started work on her coat. The lack of light in her room made it the coolest part of the house. She had her windows open beneath the closed curtains, and humidity drew the curtains and the window together, giving the impression of a gaunt head looking out of her wall. Its skin was loose, and it gasped vacantly.
An influx of new guests in search of the perfect beach-to-town balanced holiday meant that Sade couldn’t help Miranda with her knitting for another three days, and it was four days before Miranda saw Eliot for longer than the time it took for him to stumble indoors in the early morning, toss food into his mouth, go to bed, then, in the late afternoon, rise from his bed, toss food into his mouth and leave the house again.
Eliot came and found her in the garden, where she sat beside Sade and her enormous crochet project, a book on her lap, her face turned up to meet a butterfly that flitted in place just above her nose.
“What the fuck is that in your room?”
The butterfly veered away.
“It’s a mannequin,” Miranda murmured. “Have you been having fun?”
“Yeah. But I start work tomorrow. What’s the mannequin for?”
“Work?” Both Sade and Miranda looked at Eliot.
“Indeed. Junior reporter at The Dover Post. Probably just retyping memos from the council on their new initiatives or something. What’s the mannequin for?”
“My coat,” said Miranda.
“Oh.” Eliot looked at the scarf she’d begun for him, nodded politely and grabbed his bike.
Agim died — it was in The Dover Post. Unexpected medical complications were cited — even Eliot was unable to explain what that was supposed to mean. Miranda hid the newspapers for that day under an armchair in the sitting room and resumed work on her coat. Her hands shook, and her stitches kept failing.
In the evening Sade took advantage of the empty sitting room and watched a Nigerian film. She put her feet up and divided her attention between a bowl of salted peanuts, some warm Guinness drunk from a glass she’d left to chill in the fridge all afternoon, and the film, which brought tears of silent laughter into her eyes. The film seemed not to be a film at all; rather it was a competition between a cast of actors to see who could shout and moan the loudest and show the greatest amount of agony at the death of a close relative.
Miranda got up and wandered out to the garden just as Sade called out to Luc— “Mr. Dufresne, Mr. Dufresne! This part you will love — Wole now knows that Yemisi is the one who poisoned Mama Atinuke’s chin-chin.”
Luc smiled at Miranda as he passed her. Sade had been teaching him how to make chin-chin, which was basically pastry, thickly folded and heavily buttered. Luc couldn’t bear to bake anything as dense as the chin-chin Sade produced, and his version of the snack was closer to mini-palmiers than anything else. Sade disapproved, but she took some on her weekly trips to the detention centre and said that they had been declared passable.
Miranda moved Luc’s spectacles and notebook onto a nearby deck chair and climbed into the hammock that Luc had set up between two of the trees. She rocked, but the moon wouldn’t let her sleep. Its light was faint, yet, like the breeze that soothed her bare arms and legs, it kept moving. She had to watch the moon through the apple-tree branches. It was easier to watch through her fingers.
When she grew tired of watching and realised she couldn’t drop her hand, she began to think it possible that in those months of her madness she had been supplanted by someone that she could only be vaguely aware of. Her nails locked into her forehead, but there was no pain.
Interesting, all is very interesting.
She closed her eyes.
Heavy footsteps crossed the grass and stopped just behind her.
“Miranda,” her GrandAnna whispered in her ear. Her words met the air with difficulty, as if there was something in her mouth she had to talk around. “You must eat.”
Miranda said nothing. She had decided the key was to pretend as if she hadn’t heard. Her hand came loose, the moon let her alone, and she tried to sleep on an empty stomach, which everyone says not to do.
After a while she pushed herself out of the hammock, rolled confusedly on the grass, then picked herself up, arms above her head in case the trees fell on her. The air was full of the smell of burning. There was screaming. It wasn’t human, it was mechanical and without pause. There wasn’t a house light on for miles and miles. She had to get into the shelter, they were calling her, they were waiting. She moved through the pitch-black house and she was the only thing that stirred. She came through the trapdoor, and Lily stood beside a table laid for four. Miranda put her arms around her mother, and they held each other for longer than a greeting took; the house shook as the ground outside was beaten — just one hit, but the vibrations went on for so long that Miranda realised it was only her ears refusing to forget the sound.