I went and knocked on Tijana’s door just before dinner, to see if she was going to come to hall.
“Come in,” she said. She was in bed with a big book and a multitude of pens. She didn’t look as if she’d be going anywhere for days.
“How’s it going,” I said.
“Fine. I can’t come to dinner. I probably won’t be around later, either.” I was about to ask her what she’d do for dinner, but she gestured towards a box of Nutri-Grain bars and a sandwich on the floor by her bed.
“Cool,” I said. “See you… later, then.” It wasn’t just the work. I knew she was retreating from me. “Wait,” she said. “I have something for you.”
“Yeah?”
She put her pen behind her ear and pulled distractedly at her pony-tail, looking around, trying to remember where she’d put the thing she’d just mentioned. She pointed. “There. On the table. Beside my pencil case… the bottle.” There was a photograph on her desk; Tijana in the midst of a crew of girls, all wearing variations of the same hairstyle, lots of ringlets and clips. The loose, tousled way Tijana wore her hair at college suited her better. The girls in the photo with Tijana were a tangle of arms thrown round each other, mischievous, warm. They looked like the sort of girls who started trouble just so they got the chance to stick up for each other.
I picked the bottle up — it was see-through plastic, and filled with purple water. “Nice,” I said. Tijana threw a pillow at me. It bounced off my head, but I picked it up and advanced on her with it. She was about to learn not to start what she couldn’t finish.
“What’s in the bottle?” I asked, pillow held high.
“A light when all other lights go out,” Tijana whispered dramatically. She had a sexy whisper, even when she was being stupid.
I whacked her with the pillow. “What?”
“Oh God,” she cried. “You’re so violent.”
I bopped her again, gentler than the first time, but she dropped flat beneath her covers as if I’d dropped a slab of rock on her.
“Bitch! It’s exorcism water.”
“Ah,” I said. I put the pillow back on her bed and carefully moved her head so that it rested on the pillow. I patted her neck. She burst out laughing.
“Where did you get it from? Is it meant to be purple?” I asked. Tijana tapped the side of her nose and winked. I picked the bottle up and told her I’d use it as bubble bath.
In hall, I gave up on trying to eat my dinner. It had been listed on the menu as shepherd’s pie, but the description seemed inaccurate. Miranda came in carrying a tray. Everyone in hall looked at her, then went back to their conversations, some of them adding “Who is she?” to their cluster of topics. I nodded at Miranda and she sat opposite me. The others said hello to her and introduced themselves, but she didn’t answer them, or even look at them. She looked at me, and she smiled at me, and I looked back, and smiled back. It got awkward. Neither of us was eating anything.
I looked down and felt Miranda smile at me, but when I looked up again she was thoughtfully regarding the ceiling.
“Come on,” I said. “Eat your dinner.”
She dropped a napkin over her plate. “It’s gone.”
That seemed a sound idea to me, so I did the same and we left.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked. I had to be honest; I don’t like tea.
“Would you like to watch me drink some tea?” she asked. “It’s a very ordinary sight, but ordinary in a way that’s good because then you could use it as part of a representative sample in a study on the habits of the English tea-drinker, a dying breed.”
Her room was much bigger than mine. Its darkness was softened by scent — it reminded me of a nature documentary, a simulation of the inside of a flower that had closed its petals for the night. She had a piece of cloth hung over the mirror on her wardrobe. She took her coat off, pointed out a chair I could sit on and sat opposite me, stuffing tea filters with dried leaves from a bowl beside her chair. Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then she started talking about the blend she was making, a mix of jasmine tea, black tea and rose petals. She said her father always drank it in the colder months. I nodded and looked around. Her bookshelf was quite good—Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Perrault, Andersen, Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins, E. T. A. Hoffmann. No Poe, which surprised me, considering the presence of the others. There was a small cluster of images on the wall above her desk. A white-haired woman in a dark-red dress, a school photo of a girl with a sleek ponytail and eyes like smoke fixed in ovals, a short-haired woman who looked as if she was trying very hard not to burst out laughing. Beside that was a photo of a girl and a boy sitting on a fence, cousins of hers, I assumed. I nodded towards them. “Who are the pictures of?”
The kettle boiled. She attended to her teapot, then said, “Me, mostly.”
I took the tea she offered me. It wasn’t bad. I tasted the smell of the rose petals more than anything else.
“Do you like them?” She pressed some rose petals into my hand. “Smell them on their own.”
I did, then reached over and sprinkled petals over her head. The withered pink clung to her hair, and she wrinkled her nose, but didn’t brush it away. She crossed her ankles and sipped at her tea.
I fought the impulse to tilt the chair I was sitting on onto its rear legs. I’d only fall over and look like an idiot.
“Tell me about that woman,” Miranda said. “The woman with the covered face?” She put a hand over her face and spread her fingers so that only her eyes shone through. “Is she your mother?” she asked.
Something told me that Miranda was talking about the soucouyant, that this girl looked at me and saw the soucouyant at my shoulder. I became very aware of the purple water in the pocket of my coat. I don’t know whether I was thinking about dousing myself in it or dousing Miranda. I thought, I’ve got to get out, but she stood up too and tapped my sleeve.
“Please don’t be cross,” she said.
“I was just being silly.” “I’m not cross,” I said. I sat down again and let her tell me about the project on her wall. The white-haired woman was Miranda’s great-grandmother, who had raised the short-haired laughing woman, who was Miranda’s mother. The girl in the old school photo was Miranda’s absentee grandmother. They were all dead.
“My mother had a condition called pica. She ate ladybirds and things,” Miranda said, reflectively. She glanced at me, then back at the picture of her mother. “I only just remembered that recently. And I’m forgetting all sorts of other things of my own.”
I tapped the photo of the boy and the girl. “And these two?” The boy looked out of place in his T-shirt and jeans — he had costume-drama looks, the whole dark windswept hair and scornfully curled lip thing. As if he belonged in a topcoat and tails, menacingly tapping a silver-topped cane. The girl was one of those Gothic victims, the child-woman who is too pretty and good for this world and ends up dying of tuberculosis or grief — a sweet heart-shaped face and a river of blue-black hair.
“That’s my twin brother,” Miranda said, touching the guy’s face. “He’s in South Africa.”
“And who’s she?”