I know they said it could never be love, but I wonder…
My Miranda came home from college and her change had almost come full circle. She looked so beautiful. Tiny. Immaculately carved; an ivory wand. Her eyes were oracle’s eyes, set deep, deep in the smooth planes of her face. She had six and a half ulcers on the insides of her mouth (one was not yet complete), jewels formed by the acid her stomach had hopefully, uselessly produced. She was no longer able to eat comfortably, even if she wanted to. When she kissed her brother hello she had to close her throat for a second, to stop herself from wincing aloud. The layers between her inner and outer cheek were not thick enough.
She had been finding it difficult to see, and as she came in on her father’s arm and hesitantly turned her head from side to side, I saw how heavily she was relying on her hearing — I felt her struggle to perceive shapes. The exact dimensions of doorways seemed dim to her, and they slid around uneasily in the shapes she fixed them in, like magnets repelled by their poles. I depressed my floors for her, made angles of descent that led her across the hallway and through my rooms and up my stairs with the decisiveness of someone who could see properly.
Once Eliot and Luc had left her alone, she set to feeling around her room for me, looking for me. Her fingers trailed across her chair, her desk, her shelves, the back wall of her wardrobe. What’s mine is hers. She noticed the nails, frowned momentarily as she checked for her stash of chalk and found no way to access it, but it didn’t matter. She moved on, even touching her mirror. Searching.
“I’m sorry it took so long,” she told me. “I’m back.”
Only I knew how unwell she was. Really she should have been hospitalised. But what would have become of her beauty then?
I was — there is no correct word to place here — shy. I wanted to show myself to her, in a way she would understand. I wasn’t worried about frightening her. It was not possible for her to be frightened. When she was little I did not allow anyone or anything to do it, and now that she was older, fright was not a thing she understood.
She tucked herself into bed, drawing the blankets up over her head, smoothing them around her so that she was completely covered, as she liked to be.
“I’m in love,” Miranda whispered, once she was hidden.
We saw who she meant. The squashed nose, the pillow lips, fist-sized breasts, the reek of fluids from the seam between her legs. The skin. The skin.
(is it alright to say how much I like this
the way our skin looks together)
Anna was shocked. Jennifer was shocked. Lily was impassive.
Disgusting. These are the things that happen while you’re not looking, when you’re not keeping careful watch. When clear water moves unseen a taint creeps into it — moss, or algae, salt, even. It becomes foul, undrinkable. It joins the sea.
I would save Miranda even if I had to break her.
Miranda slept. How easy to peel the covers back and pinch her mouth shut with one unyielding hand, to close the nostrils with the other. How easy to suffocate. Her heart and lungs were already weak. It would not have taken much to kill Miranda. That moment passed. In the next moment my thought was to let her die. If she continued as she was, that would be soon. Then in the moment after that I resolved to take her away.
For a lullaby that afternoon I played her Vera Lynn’s Greatest Hits — there’ll be bluebirds over/ the white cliffs of Dover…
It was my little joke.
•
Luc and Eliot brought Miranda dinner in bed; the tray was silver and a single white rose flowed through the slim glass vase balanced in its corner. The food wasn’t troublesome: poached egg and a bright jumble of peppers and tomatoes and lettuce that stood for salad. Luc had carefully served the meal onto a saucer. On another saucer he’d placed a single chocolate-covered ganache, cut open with a knife so that she could see and smell the creamy paste inside.
She allowed Eliot to turn on her bedside lamp and sat up to eat with the tray on her lap, laughing as Luc pretended to covet her chocolate, stabbing a fork at it but always missing. This time it was easy to please him, easy to make the food disappear — it was so light and there was so little of it.
Eliot read aloud from Luc’s manuscript. The project, it seemed, had changed, from a book themed around seasonality to a cookbook for reluctant eaters. She recognised meals she’d pretended to like and struggled through as Eliot read them out, and she suppressed a smile. Before each recipe Luc included some small remark or anecdote. Before caramel ice cream he’d written: “Eliot’s first word was ‘mummy’—” Eliot broke off and sighed, “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me, Dad,” then returned to the text: “and Miranda’s first word, said very firmly a couple of seconds later, was ‘yummy.’ Eliot spent quite some time babbling ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ and looking very pleased with himself, but Miranda maintained a stately silence, as if she felt she had said enough.”
Miranda laughed. She kept forgetting that her father was capable of making her laugh.
Surprised, Eliot looked up from where he was sprawled on the floor with the manuscript, and Luc, seated on a chair he’d drawn up beside her bed, raised a hand as if to touch her face. He began to explain about the drawers he’d nailed shut, but before he finished she said she understood.
That night Miranda’s dreams were of the drawers that had been nailed shut, the ugly grey worms that stuck their twisted heads out of the wood. When she had slept enough, Miranda stumbled downstairs to turn the milky light of her torch on the shelves in the larder cupboard, looking for a screwdriver to undo her father’s work. When she found the screwdriver, she ran the torch beam along it, the bevelled silver of its tip, then she held it to her throat. Just to feel the chill of it. Her drumming pulse.
She heard and felt the life of the house; there was light and a smell of candle smoke outside the half-open larder door. There was music upstairs. Her GrandAnna laughed at something Lily said. They were in a good mood, like guests sipping on aperitifs before a main meal.
Jennifer Silver danced a few steps of a song that came on and Miranda heard their feet on the ceiling and thought, What if I push this point in? She wondered if the house would come down this time.
A pair of hands slipped over her eyes and rested there, heavy and warm. The screwdriver fell.
“Hello Gretel,” her brother said in her ear. She heard the screwdriver roll across the floor and knew he had kicked it. No more music, and Lily and her GrandAnna stopped talking. Their silence had breath in it, though, as if they were simply waiting.
“Hello Hansel.” She laid her own hands on his wrists; he kissed the tip of her ear.
“So we’re in a fairy tale… I knew it,” she said, as he led her out of the laundry room, steering her into the sitting room, switching the light on with his elbow. “You weren’t in South Africa, you were in a gingerbread house, getting fattened up, weren’t you? And there weren’t any telephones in there.”
He uncovered her eyes, sat her down on the sofa and handed her a stick of chalk. She held it and looked up at him, blinking at the sudden rush of light. He rubbed his head and left flecks of chalk in his hair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just really shit.”
“You are a bit,” she said, and tried to look at him as if she forgave him everything.
“Dad’s just trying to help you,” he said, and as he continued speaking she found she could tune him out, swap his words for the conversation between Lily and GrandAnna. They were talking about her. She licked the chalk and their voices filled the room; she kept looking at Eliot to see if he heard. Lily and GrandAnna were on her side. “Luc shouldn’t have nailed Miranda’s drawers shut,” Lily was saying. “That was the wrong thing to do. Miranda didn’t deserve that. She has always tried to be good.”