The game was to flip penny coins into each other’s wineglasses. If you found a penny in your wine, then you had to drain the glass in one go. I listened in on what the guy was saying to Tijana, and I looked up and down the table (boys outnumbered girls by about three to one) and thought it was a cheap trick for getting girls drunk. But there was more. The guy explained that the rules were the same if a penny piece was dropped onto your dinner plate — if you were “up for it” then you ate the food on it as quickly as you could, and with your hands behind your back. Tijana’s face was expressionless as she listened. Once he had finished explaining about the game, the guy dropped a penny into Tijana’s glass. She didn’t even wait half a second. She picked up her dessertspoon, fished out the penny and went to drench the guy in wine. I disliked his chat so much that I almost let her do it, but then a sense of responsibility kicked in. I took her glass from her and put it down on the table. “You don’t have to play,” I said, at the same time as the guy, who drew back from her (he was already quite drunk, so he nearly fell off his seat) and said, “Calm down, it’s just a bit of fun.”
Tijana turned to me and nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “You’re right. I was being unreasonable. The wine is not bad.” She toasted me and took a small, deliberate sip, then looked about her uneasily. Like me, she seemed actually menaced by the faces that observed us from enormous frames arranged all around the candlelit hall. Apparently they were all former masters of the college, but aside from differences in weight and degree of facial-hair coverage, they could not be told apart. During lulls in the awkward conversation, I examined the portraits nearest to me but couldn’t get past the sensation that here was the same man over and over, crouched in old boxes, readying himself to spit on my plate.
Tijana broke the silence by asking the question that sat between me and the others at our table. “Were those your parents who dropped you off?”
She meant the grey-haired couple with the Kentish-farmer accents who had hugged me golf club — shaped and cried when it was time for them to leave.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m adopted. Obviously. Neither of them went to university, so it’s a big deal for them.”
Across the table, a girl with a freshly scrubbed-looking face began telling a story about a friend of hers who was adopted. Tijana and I eyed each other, not sure which of us was supposed to respond to her, and in what order. I don’t think either of us wanted to.
After dinner Tijana and I walked back to the foot of her staircase. Someone had said that our college had been built in the fourteenth century. Our bedrooms ate into the walls of the college buildings, small pockets lined with posters and printed fabric. But from the outside I could see we had made our beds in a tomb. I already knew that that night I would be afraid to fall asleep, almost as afraid as when I was a kid and no one could promise me that I would absolutely, definitely wake up. It took me about a minute to notice that Tijana was crying.
At first it just seemed as if her eyes were sparkling excessively. Aside from the wetness of her eyes, she seemed alright — she giggled and ran across the square of grass in the centre of New Court that we didn’t have permission to walk on — she touched my hand lightly and pulled me along behind her by my fingertips.
The porter’s lodge was lit up and I could make out the large shape of one of the porters behind his desk, pretending not to be able to see us. New Court was spiked with light, but I couldn’t see its source. The sparkle in Tijana’s eyes lengthened and slipped down her face. She simply wiped her cheeks and continued to talk as if nothing was happening to her. We sat down on the cold steps leading up to her room. She cried and talked about Buffy the Vampire Slayer for another ten minutes; that Tijana could really cry. Finally I offered to cry too, to keep her company.
“My cousin drank bleach and died this summer. He was all fucked up over something that happened to him. I don’t know what happened to him. No I do, but I don’t understand it. Why did it happen to him? No one can tell me why,” she said.
“I’m sorry the summer was like that,” I said.
She was drunker than she knew. Before I could say anything she’d convinced herself that she was being silly. She nodded. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. I just wasn’t… ready today.”
“Ready for what?”
“I don’t know. I feel looked at.”
“You’ve been fine,” I assured her. “Nothing out of the ordinary, I promise. I would have subtracted a point for dashing your wine at the guy next to you at dinner, but you didn’t, so it’s fine.”
She smiled, a real smile. “Good night. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
My room was almost opposite Tijana’s. Walking back around New Court, I saw a girl struggling through the door-sized gap in the college gate. I remembered her from my interview. The one who wore a stopped watch. I noticed again how pale she was. In her black coat, she seemed to fade into the air behind her.
“So you got in,” I called out to her.
She twirled so that her hair and the full skirt of her coat flew out around her, and then she curtseyed.
In my room at college, the walls have a strange relationship with the ceiling. The room feels as if it has more than four corners. I tried to sleep, but kept waking and walking to the window, looking down onto the cobbled street and wondering where I was. I ended up opening the present my mum had sneaked into my suitcase. She thought I hadn’t seen her, but she’s no good at hiding her intentions. She can’t help tiptoeing around with a finger to her lips at key moments. The gift was a book of Caribbean legends “for storytellers,” and she’d tucked a note in between the first two pages: Tried to find a book of Nigerian ones but they all seemed to do with a tortoise! Have these and our love, we are so very proud of you — love, Mum (and Dad)
I had already bought the book for myself, with pocket money years ago. I opened it (its cover was crowded with anachronistic woodcuts of nubile women carrying water jugs on their heads)
and read my favourite story again. I read about the soucouyant, the wicked old woman who flies from her body and at night consumes her food, the souls of others — soul food! — in a ball of flame. At dawn she returns to her body, which she has hidden in a safe place.
I read to the walls. “Kill the soucouyant.” Dawn tore a rosy line through the clouds. “Find her skin and treat it with pepper and salt. How it burns her, how it scratches her. Only the night gives her her power, and if she is unable to reenter her body by sunrise, she cannot live. Kill the soucouyant, that unnatural old lady, and then all shall be as it should.”
I folded that page over at the corner and read on, no longer aloud. As always, the soucouyant seemed more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so you couldn’t decide if she was a monster. Still, I wondered if the salt and pepper were really necessary — they seemed too cruel when it would be easier to despatch her by blowing out her flame before it grew, or by holding a mirror up to her wrinkled face and saying, “I don’t believe in you.” But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruellest way to kill a monster.
My mum keeps worrying that she’s not filling the space left by my birth mother. My dad was the same as well, forcing me to spend hours at the park with him and a football until he realised that, like him, I was much better at watching football than playing it, plus if I wanted to talk to him I’d do it without using sport as a crutch. But Mum… she keeps finding stuff in the African folklore section of the local library that she feels bound to tell me because she thinks my mother might have. Mum kept calling me Ore even though she really wanted a daughter called Rose. My name is not a big deal to me — if it was Rose it would’ve worked better with my surname and people would be able to spell it without that moment of uncertainty before putting pen to paper. Rose Lind is easily filed, she is a delight, she is Shakespearean, sort of. My birth mother was a legal immigrant. She and whoever my birth father was weren’t together. Aside from that, all I know about her is that she suffered from quite serious postnatal depression and couldn’t cope with me. Postnatal depression is common enough for me to assume that there were other factors that led to me being put in care. I’m assuming she hurt me, my birth mother. I wasn’t even a year old. I’m glad I don’t remember anything.