“But seriously, Miranda. What if we left? I would not even sell the place, just rent it or something.”
Miranda waited for more, but there wasn’t any more.
“We’ve been happy here,” she said, gently. “Moving here was a good thing. You’re not to be a Calvinist about it — I promise you’ll go to heaven. I’ll even put it down in writing if you’d like.”
“I like you,” her father said, and got up to start seeing about breakfast orders.
Miranda went to her psychomantium and turned it upside down looking for her passport. She couldn’t find it. She sat on the floor with her eyes closed and tried to recall the years before now. She tried to recall games, arguments, secrets, toys, trips, TV shows. Just like the night before she’d checked into the clinic, they had not happened. It was 11:00 AM in the place where Lily had died.
Miranda knocked on Eliot’s door, and when he didn’t reply, she went into his room and took his passport out of the top drawer of his desk. He slept so heavily that she felt no particular need to move quietly. Nineteen eighty-two. November 12, 1982. In her room, Miranda wrote 1982 large on a sheet of paper and blu-tacked it to the wall above her mirror. She didn’t look into the mirror itself. She was becoming someone, it seemed. She had read somewhere that you only became a woman once your mother had died. But that wasn’t what worried her. She worried about becoming as perfect as the person shown to her on paper in Lily’s studio.
•
Dad packed all Lily’s things up one day in the middle of August. Miri knew what he was doing, and she let herself out of the house quietly and just disappeared. If I hadn’t caught Dad in the actual act of dragging bags full of her clothes over to the lift, no one would have said anything to him. I took a bag in each hand and asked him where he was taking it all. Suddenly there was the smell of rose attar all around us. I couldn’t keep my grip on the bags — the way they bulged — in my mind I saw Lily in them, in clean pieces. Put me back together and I’ll stand up. I nudged one of the bags with my foot. Soft. Just clothes.
“They’re all going to charity,” Dad said. “Miranda won’t wear these things, use these things. It wouldn’t be good for her if she did. These things are being wasted here.” Something about the slow way he spoke made me think he hadn’t known what he was going to do with Lily’s things until he’d said it aloud. He walked past me and into the bedroom, brought out more bags, more boxes. I met him at the door and threw bags back into the room. One of them hit him, then sagged across the floor. Multicoloured scarves flowed out. Dad said: “Eliot. Eliot, I know. But it’s got to be.”
I thought briefly of pulling the door shut and locking him in somehow (how?). I thought, Don’t take her away. “Just… don’t give her stuff away, Dad. Not now. Alright?”
Dad opened his arms. The bare room seemed to settle around his shoulders like a cloak. It took me a moment to interpret the gesture as a request that I come across the room to him. I started to go, I really did, but in the time it took me to make a step he’d dropped his arms. He sat down on one of the boxes.
“Listen,” he said. “I cannot endure that dream again.”
“What dream,” I said.
“The one where it’s dark, and the house gets warm, warmer. Then it’s hot and I’m all… dried out. I drink from the kitchen tap and go out into the garden to breathe. After a few moments I feel much better and I try to get back into the house, but my key won’t work. I walk around to the back door and the key for that doesn’t work either. The key breaks when I try to turn it in the lock, the handle breaks under my hand. It’s pathetic, really, but I walk around to the front of the house and start pleading. Let me in! I don’t know who I’m talking to. The house just stands there, dark, absolutely silent. I put a rock in my pocket and climb a tree in the garden, thinking I can open a window, and climb in. But I can’t even touch the windowsill — it gives off a strange, feathered static that bites me. Back on the ground I shout out, Lily. I shout out, Lily can you let me back in? A light goes on in the house. It goes on on this floor. And each time I dream this, I try to work out what room the light goes on in, as if that matters. But I just can’t work it out. It’s not mine, not yours, it’s not the light in the psychomantium. It’s not the bathroom light. It’s like there’s an extra window, or an extra room I haven’t seen before. Three figures come to the window. One is in the middle and has her arms around the other two. I can’t see them, just their silhouettes through the blind. They’re standing there watching, waiting for me to go away. They want me to go away. I know who they are; it’s Lily and Miranda. I don’t know who the other one is. But suddenly I’m glad that the blind is over the window, because I have this feeling that they look different, not the way I thought they did. I’m cold then, as cold as I was hot. Then I wake up.”
I had nothing to say. I picked up a box and walked out to the lift with it. That’s what I did instead of telling him that I had had that dream too, that exact same dream, only I had been calling Miri. Sometimes our subconscious is so transparent it’s boring. I would have written that in my diary, but I’d stopped keeping one.
•
By the end of August, Eliot’s scarf was ready, and the fat dove-grey band of wool took pride of place on the mannequin’s neck. By then Miranda had moved the mannequin closer to her bed so that it didn’t seem so lonely anymore. Sade’s trips to the Immigration Removal Centre no longer included Miranda, who forgot even to be apologetic, enthralled as she was by her sewing machine, her courtier-like hovering around a still white figure, her hands smoothing cloth, and her mouth full of pins. At one point Miranda became convinced that she had hurt the mannequin. She carefully checked the material she’d draped over the mannequin, and she found a pin embedded in the right shoulder where she’d pressed too hard. She didn’t say sorry aloud, but she was sorry.
Later, Eliot dragged her down to the beach to swim, but she wasn’t strong enough, so he stayed on the sand with her and bought her ice cream. He mocked The Dover Post: “Remember how a guy hung himself at the Immigration Removal Centre months ago?”
“Yes,” Miranda said.
“No one wrote in or said anything about it — not one letter,” Eliot said. “I checked.”
Miranda’s ice cream was melting onto her hand.
“It’s an über-local paper,” she said, when Eliot wouldn’t let her get away with not responding. “The upstanding citizens probably saved their letters for The Times or something.”
“Hm,” said Eliot. “There were letters from people complaining about misanthropic parking attendants.”
A boy who was building a sandcastle nearby looked over at them. Miranda pointed at his handiwork and held her head as if the sandcastle had given her a headache of admiration.
Gruffly, the boy called out: “You can kick it over if you like.”
“You are very kind,” Miranda said, and stayed where she was.
“Can I kick it over?” Eliot asked. The boy shook his head. His eyes were almost the same grey as theirs.
•
They opened each other’s envelopes on results day, and Miranda felt that the rows of numbers and percentages that added up to three perfect A’s beneath Eliot’s name belonged to her. She smiled and nodded at them, as if the panic of the momentarily misplaced lucky Biro was hers, as if the five-minute amnesia regarding Gladstone and Disraeli was hers. Eliot ripped Miranda’s envelope open so hurriedly that a corner of the paper inside fell off. He cast a glance over the page, seemed to make some quick calculations, then whooped and lifted her off her feet. Both their grades got tattered in the crush between them — Eliot spun her round with her results envelope fanned out against her back.