Miranda sighed. “Very funny,” she said. She picked up her teacup. “That’s me. I suppose it’s quite an old picture. It was taken nearly two years ago.”
I stared at her, and when she didn’t smile to show she was joking, I looked at the picture again. I suppose I could have drawn an association from the black dress that the girl was wearing. But otherwise the girl in the picture was not the girl who stood in the room with me; I can unequivocally say that it wasn’t her. The eye colour matched, the hair colour matched, but that was all.
I found myself nodding uncontrollably
(get away from this girl and do not go near her again)
“You’ve… changed a lot,” I said.
She said, “Let’s go for that walk.”
I nodded again. Maybe it was just that I needed air. We stopped at the kitchen on my staircase while I filled a bag with food — bread, brazil nuts, brie, half of a dented pork pie, a six-pack of Cadbury Creme Eggs that I’d been saving since Easter for a special occasion and should probably have poisoned us. I wanted it to be a long picnic; if necessary, as long as we might have slept. Miranda sat on the kitchen counter and suggested fruit, so I added two of someone else’s apples and two of someone else’s oranges.
I didn’t have any particular direction in mind, and we ended up wandering towards Newnham Village, passing through the hedge corridor that led to Midsummer Common. It was around midnight and the passage was pitch-black; it ticked over with the sound of our footsteps on the leaves, and insects hissed above. Miranda was carrying the food, her steps were sure and she didn’t put her arms out to feel ahead. Not once. We didn’t really speak. Walking in the dark behind her there was a thing I noticed that can’t be true. It’s this:
Occasionally, to tease her for walking slowly, I’d put a hand to the small of her back and gently push her forward. Whenever I did, her hair swished over my fingers like torn silk. I felt this more than once, but I can’t explain it. Her hair only came down to her shoulders, but when I couldn’t see her clearly, her hair was very long.
When we came out of the hedge, we faced each other. In her stilettos she was taller than me. She asked, “So how is this going to work, are you going to kiss me?”
“No,” I said. I had been thinking about kissing her.
She seemed amused. “Why not?”
All I could give her was an “Um.”
She didn’t take her eyes from mine. “I’m not saying I’m amazing or anything, but I’m decent-looking. Why shouldn’t a decent-looking girl expect to be kissed?”
She sounded bold, but there was so much terror in her eyes. She thought I didn’t want her.
Walking over Midsummer Common at night on minimal sleep is like trying to cross a place-between without a map. You suspect that you might be walking back in the very direction that you came from. It doesn’t feel like Cambridge. It doesn’t feel like anywhere. The ground is suspended and the sky pins it down on one corner, like an elbow. You can hear the river, and feel how close the running water is. We knelt down on our coats, nibbling at olives — now I remember there were olives — then sat cross-legged for the sandwiches and pie, then lay down with the chocolate and the apples. I’d never been so hungry — it tied in to my tiredness somehow, the tautness I felt in my arms and back. We were both very rude. We lay facing each other, eating like mad, each stuffing cheese fast and hard, as if to prevent the other from getting more than their share.
“Hall food really is rubbish,” Miranda said. She had finished everything and was eating the peel of her orange.
I picked up a piece of my own orange peel and considered it lazily. “Are you sure that’s alright to eat?”
“It’s just a bit harder to digest, that’s all.”
“If you say so, Miranda.”
“Tell a story,” she said. She scratched the ground and began eating earth. I began to think I was dreaming.
“What are you doing? You’ll get sick.”
She looked quizzical, but let me take her hands and wipe them on the grass. The mud around her mouth. She ate without smudging her lipstick.
“I’m already sick,” she said. She held up her arm and closed her thumb and second finger around her elbow. Which she shouldn’t have been able to do. I didn’t wince, but it was close. “You can see exactly how sick I am. That’s why you don’t want to touch me.”
I said, “Miranda.”
“For a year I’ve been trying and trying to fill out the dresses I wore before I got ill. And I just can’t,” she said. “Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.”
I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?”
“From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her.”
“You don’t want her to be happy and good?”
“I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.”
I was silent. I couldn’t think of a single story she would want to hear.
Finally she sighed and said, “Alright. What’s your favourite story?”
Our hands were joined across our coats. I hadn’t seen it happen, but since it had I drew her closer and told her, very quietly, about the soucouyant. The night didn’t listen to us — it had a noise of its own, wind murmuring in the branches. I told Miranda about the girl who killed the soucouyant.
That girl had grown up friends with her shadow, grown up hugging herself and singing to herself, so happy alone that everyone in her village thought that she was retarded. While they slept the girl took herself out dancing, put her arms around the moon and travelled to see things no one else in the village would ever see, not even if they lived to be a thousand. She saw the wicked soucouyant feast on the girls and boys in her village and the next. She saw where the soucouyant slept, and was bold enough to follow her there. She saw where the soucouyant put her skin when she walked in her true form. Her lover the moon told her: “If you cared to, you could kill the soucouyant. Treat her skin 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.” The girl cared to protect the lives of the young in her village, and she knew you cannot bargain with a thing inhuman. So the girl reached right inside the old-woman skin and rubbed salt and pepper all along it; she stretched past bone and sinew because she was herself entire, and knew she could not be consumed. She hid and watched as the ball of flame returned to its tree hollow at dawn, searching for its skin. She watched as it filled the old woman skin, watched as the body rose and bulged with life, then screamed and fell deflated. She watched as the soucouyant, having no other option, rushed to join her flame with that of the rising sun.
I stammered finishing the story, because of Miranda’s gaze, her eyes like swords. We were nose to nose.
“Thank you,” she said. “That was just the thing.”
“The girl doesn’t get away. It’s not a story about her getting away. She was born free.”
“The soucouyant gets away though. Doesn’t she count as a girl?”
I drew back. “No, she doesn’t,” I said. “She is a monster. She dies.”
“Does she?”
“All monsters deserve to die.”
Miranda didn’t say anything.
“Miranda,” I said. “Come on. The soucouyant is bad. She sucks the life out of people.”
“That is true.” She smiled in a way that undid every knot in me. There was no way I could be afraid to kiss her when she smiled like that, so I kissed her, and she kissed me back and we were like that until we gasped for air and laughed at each other, her eyelashes scraping my cheek so when I blinked they felt like my own.