Cat had red hair and so did her brother, Paddy, who kept chatting me up. Red hair didn’t work on Paddy. The first kiss with Cat might have been in a public place — at the cinema, I think. It’s hard to say because I was so scared that it felt as if we were kissing in front of everyone every time. I let Cat go farther and farther with me, and I touched her as little as possible. She allowed that poor love of mine. It was the dread that comes about when you are allowed to have something that seems costly and yet you’re not asked for payment.
In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?
The thing with Cat took about a year to grow, and about a week to be finished. The whole thing was so intense, so full of hurt that when I look back at it I squint. I want it forgotten. Not the way she was — she brought her body to mine with this strange and shocking innocence, when she came the first time she said “I love you” into my ear, words convulsive and unintended, not needing a reply. It’s the way that I was that needs forgetting. I behaved like a boy or something. The ending was clumsy and stupid and the friendship couldn’t survive it.
Tijana and I stuck to Scrabble and neutral talk on the other nights. She worked at essays, her flashlight steady between the gravestones as she crashed through her reading list hundreds of pages at a time, marking significant lines with sticky index tabs. She was not easily distracted; when it was her turn at Scrabble, she looked up from her notes and I could feel the words she’d just read still migrating from the pages and into her.
The guy who’d sat on the other side of Tijana at matric dinner came up to me while I was in the computer room and started talking about this and that. I kept my answers brief and shrugged a lot. Finally, he came to his point.
“Tijana’s probably got a boyfriend, hasn’t she,” he said. He still seemed like a fool to me. A low-key fool, but a fool all the same. So I said “Yeah.” Actually I didn’t know. Did she? Maybe at home.
The University Library is a mouth shut tight, each tooth a book, each book growing over, under and behind the other. The writing desks are placed in front of bookshelves, some of them between bookshelves so that whoever is sitting at the desk gets a feeling of something dusty, intangible and unspeakably powerful, something like God, watching them through tiny gaps in the shelves. People kept trooping past the desk I’d chosen, in search of books and free seats, and within half an hour I’d stopped looking up when someone passed. I wanted to read about the soucouyant. I wanted to write about her, I still do. What do I want to write? Just a book, probably, another tooth for the UL’s mouth. Something that explores the meaning of the old woman whose only interaction with other people was consumption. The soucouyant who is not content with her self. She is a double danger — there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to me?
After a listless half hour flipping through critical essays on Dracula, I went in search of the likeliest-looking soucouyant-related titles that came up on the computer. I found Miranda at a desk beside a staircase on one of the wings. She had her head down, and her hair blackened the pages of her opened book. I thought she was sleeping, but as I came closer I saw that her eyes were open and she was looking sideways at me. I said, “Whoa,” before I could check myself.
“Hello Ore.” She didn’t sit up. Maybe she couldn’t actually bring herself to. She hadn’t even taken her coat off.
“How’s it going,” I said. She was much too thin. She was serene, like someone accustomed to sickness, someone who lay back to back with it in bed. For a second her face made no sense to me. Her enormous eyes, the curve of her lips, they locked me out. I couldn’t imagine ever touching her.
She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gun-point. She said she wished she could sleep more.
I looked around for a seat, so I wouldn’t have to stand up and crick my own neck in order to see her properly.
She’s unreal,
she’s an affected little goose
The nearest empty seat was two bookshelves away. I tucked the three books I had under my arm (I looked too studious just holding them) and stayed standing.
“I haven’t been sleeping that well either,” I told her.
She didn’t say anything and I racked my brains to fill the silence, but before I could add to what I’d said, she said, “I think it is the moon.” She said the words softly, to some tune of her own devising, and she drew the word “moon” out for a long moment. It was so odd and unnecessary that something told me that I had to proceed carefully.
“The moon?”
“What do you do when you can’t sleep?”
“Walk about,” I said.
We looked at each other for a decade, or at least eight months.
“Let’s walk about tonight,” she said. She gave her night away so easily that it was almost impersonal — this conversation could have happened between her and anyone who’d come up the stairs and said they had trouble sleeping. But it wasn’t like that somehow. It was like at the interview, when I was so panicked that I heard myself singing “Frère Jacques” under my breath and sat feeling detached from my mouth while my voice got louder and louder and I had to get up and take the song home, locked up under my temples. I had known that I was going to apply to Cambridge since I was fourteen. I have always tried to do more than anyone else, crouched over essays carefully ticking boxes I’d drawn on a separate sheet of paper to remind myself of all the key points so I would drop as few marks as possible. I type everything, and if typing is impossible I write in block capitals, so safe in the perfect spaces formed inside my O’s and P’s and Q’s that I could step into one of them and throw it around me like a hula hoop. I may be adopted, but I know exactly who I am. I am desperately trying to earn my keep. No one told me I had to, but in a way that’s why I’m trying. Other people’s parents expect things from their futures, but mine say nothing, as if, after the fact of my childhood rescue, I don’t need any future. I suppose they think they’re helping by not putting any pressure on me. Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Suis-je mort? Am I dead? Sonnez les matines! Sonnez les matines! Miranda had come and looked at me and stopped “Frère Jacques” up with her soft, light voice, and she’d known she could do it before she did.
After my lecture that afternoon I phoned home. I called to see if I missed home more than for any other reason. My mum answered, and I knew I did. It was like being kicked in the chest. That first term — every term, in fact — I was constantly negotiating reprieve from execution. Everything, every essay, every conversation, even casual ones in the bar, seemed so final. Everything rested on being right, or at least insisting that I was not incorrect. I was taking the whole thing too seriously. Or I was taking steps to blindfold myself so that when I came out of the door of my college room this morning I didn’t see the glass windows glaring at me out of the fourteenth-century walls. Walls and windows forbade me. They pulled at me and said, You don’t belong here. Again and again, over textbooks and plates of mush in hall, I gritted my teeth and said, Yes I do. Everyone else seemed to blend into the architecture. Even Tijana had already lost her perturbed look. My mum wanted to know whether I’d met my future husband yet, and my dad wanted to know if I’d met any snobs, whether I’d run into anyone who was “being funny” with me. I said no. I wondered what he would have said if I’d told him yes.