Already Ore had nearly finished the chips; Miranda stopped and gave her a reproachful look while she made up for the time she’d lost talking.
“Go on,” Ore said, after a few seconds, raising the cone up above Miranda’s head and out of her reach.
“Well… she didn’t know how she’d get to meet Eden,” Miranda improvised. “So one day she stood outside the gate of her local primary school at home time and called out: ‘Eden, Eden,’ in a motherly sort of voice as all the kids ran out.”
“And?”
“Well. One girl stopped and looked at her, and smiled mysteriously.”
Ore frowned. “And?”
“Well, it was Eden.”
“What, just like that? What’s the twist?”
“There is no twist, it was Eden. The little girl the woman had been dreaming about.”
“So what then?”
“Er… well, then the woman took Eden’s hand and they went home together.”
Ore looked disgusted as she threw the last few chips into her mouth. “And lived happily ever after, I suppose,” she said.
Miranda smiled. “In a way. As they walked home the woman began to remember why she had been dreaming about Eden, and why Eden had been sent to her.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. As soon as they got home she strangled Eden and cooked her for supper. Then she went to bed all drowsy and full and she settled in to get ready for the next dream. The dreams were like a menu, you see, only someone else chose the courses for her.”
Ore laughed, but she seemed aghast. “You just made that up on the spot I suppose,” she said.
“Indeed no, it’s a very old story. Older than the one about the soucouyant,” Miranda teased. “Now. Your turn again.”
Ore thought.
“Okay, this one is true and, I suppose, more boring because of that. For a couple of years I had a birthday every other month. If I wanted my mum to make me a cake I’d just say that I felt as if it was my birthday. My mum would say, It’s not your birthday yet, wait a bit. And I’d be like… I’m not even asking for presents, just some cake to show you’re glad I was born, and Mum would get flustered and say, But it’s not your birthday! And then I’d pull out the silencer, which was: ‘How would you know? You weren’t there, man.’ She’d bake the cake after that. But one day my dad took me aside and said that I couldn’t keep doing it, that I was worrying her. He said my mum thought I was trying to tell her that I didn’t like her. I went through the whole how do you know when my birthday is, you weren’t even there thing with him and he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Let me show you something.’ He showed me my birth certificate. It was just like he’d showed me a gun — suddenly I was looking at something that had no life of its own but was stronger than me. I was eight. I hadn’t known that everyone had a bit of paper that proved the date and place of their birth and all that stuff. I was trapped. And embarrassed. Yeah, so I stopped doing the frequent-birthday thing—”
Miranda interrupted her: “What are you doing?”
“What?” Ore said. “You mean why are my eyes closed? I was trying to see it while I said it. To make sure it was true.”
“And did you?”
“Yes.”
“You might want to keep your eyes open whilst walking,” Miranda said.
“You wouldn’t let me walk into anything,” Ore said.
Miranda took her hand.
SADE
puts the kettle on.
Sade puts the kettle on,
Sade puts the kettle on and sparks fly out. Electric shocks say it’s time to leave, bye bye. They get inside your head and hurt you so you can’t speak you can only tremble and for some time the will to open your eyes escapes you, bye bye. A word that you believe in jangles in your head until it no longer has meaning.
Courage, cabbage, cuttage, cottage.
What was the first word?
Cabbage?
Very good.
Juju is not enough to protect you. Everything you have I will turn against you. I’ll turn sugar bitter for you. I’ll take your very shield and crack it on your head. White is for witching, so ti gbo? Do you understand now? White is for witching, Sade goodbye.
THE MIDNIGHT
I woke up and Miranda was on top of me, clinging to me, I knew she would be lost. Her head was thrown back, and her mind was gone from her eyes. When I tried to move, she clung tighter, her thighs locked over and around mine. Her head was up; her eyes looked down but didn’t follow me. She wasn’t awake. I rolled off the bed and she came down with me. I had to prise her fingers from around my neck one by one. I heard her bones click. That broke the spell, and she came to, weeping.
“I can’t stay here,” she said, and got up, hurrying around the room, gathering things and dropping them. “I’m to go home. The house wants me,” she cried. The moonlight made her look blue. It made her look as if she was dead. She opened my window and sat herself on the ledge; she dangled her bare legs over it. We were four floors up.
I approached her carefully. “Miranda. You can go home in the morning. There aren’t any footholds down this wall — you can’t climb down it. If you try you’ll fall and you’ll… you’ll be hurt. The house doesn’t want that. It wants you back in one piece.” Her back was to me; I couldn’t see her face.
“She doesn’t. She doesn’t care how I come back. You can’t hear how we… how they’re calling me,” she said. She bent forward
(did she mean to fall headfirst?)
wobbled and almost toppled from the sill, but I grabbed her shoulder and dragged her off the ledge with a sharp jerk, sharper than I meant it to be, but I was scared. I lay spread-eagled over her, pinning her to the floor until her struggling turned into giggles. “What are you doing?” I heard her ask, in her usual voice, her waking voice. I let her crawl out from under me, watched her walk up to the window and close it. She got back into bed, but I stayed where I was. The floor felt secure.
•
Ore spent afternoons reading to Miranda. Miranda liked hearing The Arabian Nights best, because then Ore used all her voice, changing accents and tone and speed — when she was a djinn, she threw her voice so that it towered. Miranda was awed by the strange sorceress who could force men to become birds and mules by throwing dust into their faces and commanding: “Wretch, quit thy form!” On the very rare occasion that her necromancy failed and the man stood before her unchanged, the sorceress would laugh coyly and say that she had only been playing.
Miranda lay on her side in her bed, or in Ore’s, and she heard Ore and dreamed with her eyes open. She grew to find a sunlit room bearable; she no longer feared a change of light that she couldn’t control. She stopped taking the pills she’d been prescribed. She washed them down the drain, ripped the labels off the bottles and threw them away. There wouldn’t be any of those doctors’ letters reminding her to make another appointment until after Christmas.
She felt fine, but she began to feel followed. When she passed through the back gate of her college, it took an age until she heard the gate close behind her. But as she turned the corner into New Court, no one else came through the arch. Clare College had prettier grounds than her college, and she took big detours so that she could pass through them on her way to and from supervisions, fanning herself with a rolled-up essay and catching falling leaves in the skirt of her coat. And there came moments when she knew that there was someone behind her, remaining out of sight by taking one step for every five that she took. Other people moved past her over the bridge between the gardens; they carried books and bags and musical instruments, they were on their way to places. But not the person she felt hovering up in the air behind her, doubling the path she’d walked from Ore’s room to her supervision, or from her supervision to hall. She paid attention to the sense of surveillance because it seemed unconnected to the night. She never felt followed at night, and that made this feeling she had less likely to be paranoia. Probably. She was afraid. Afraid that she was imagining the surveillance, afraid that it was real. When she entered a room she tried to look at everyone in it individually, trying to catch the person who had just been looking at her.