The phone rang. No one moved. We don’t answer the landline after twelve noon. After twelve noon, that’s our parents’ job. Mel and I reason that anyone we really want to talk to calls before noon, or will call us on our mobiles.
Mum came in and said to me, “It’s for you, lazybones. Your friend Miranda. What if I never answered the phone? You would’ve missed it.”
I muttered that she would have called back and took the phone.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. Then: “Are you cross?”
“No,” I said. “But couldn’t you have called me on my mobile?”
“I lost it. I had to look you up in the phone book. I’ve phoned four other Linds asking for Ore.”
I laughed.
“I miss you,” she said.
I had to let a moment pass for credibility before I said I missed her too. I did. I wasn’t tired of sleeping alone yet. But I’d been having that feeling again. The one that came that night outside college when I thought I’d lost her, the force that worked against my marrow. So scared I had to hold on to her to stay upright. I still can’t sort out how I feel about Miranda. Even worse, I can’t sort out how much any of what I feel about her has to do with her.
“That one of your Cambridge chums?” Mel asked amiably, when I went back into the sitting room.
It wasn’t worth making a retort, so I just said, “Yup.”
“What’s she saying?”
“She wants me to visit her.”
“Where? In Buckinghamshiiiiiiiire?” Sean said, suddenly, without taking his eyes off the TV.
“Is she fit?” Adam wanted to know. I ignored him.
“Piss off, Sean. Dover, actually,” I said.
Adam leaned forward. “Is it… Dover is a fucking mess. Bare refugees pissing off the locals. A short piece ago some Kosovan brer and his landlady got stoned. On the actual doorstep of the landlady’s house! That’s dark, man. You’d better take care of yourself in Dover, or they’ll fucking bury ya. You can take my dog down there with you, if you like.”
I could tell his offer was only half a joke.
“Take mine too, if you like,” Sean said, not to be outdone. Mel laughed until she was too weak to sit up.
Tijana had told me about a good half hour spent on a bench in Dover’s main square while some old black guy had explained to her that refugees were a drain on the resources provided by the taxpayer, so I don’t know exactly what I thought Dover would be.
Three days later Miranda met me at Dover Priory and tucked her arm through mine. The town wasn’t that different from the Kent I knew. More shops and cars than Selling, more height and dizzying views than Faversham, but the people were pretty much the same. A group of white girls in their early teens, chains clanking from their baggy jeans as the music from the boom box one of them was carrying inspired them to make the street they walked on into an impromptu mosh pit. Women with Sainsbury’s bags and kids in prams, lost in the tight-lipped silence of the deeply annoyed. Granddads going into and coming out of a granddad pub. These didn’t look like people who’d stone refugees. If I didn’t see the refugee-stoners as I walked from the station to Miranda’s house with Miranda beside me, then where were they, the baddies? Did they (“They”) spring up at night like toadstools? It was hard to believe in their existence.
Miranda rummaged in her handbag for her door keys, then she said, “Oh!”
I thought we were locked out, but, keys in hand, she raised her wrist to her ear and listened. “The watch has stopped.”
She’d explained to me about Haitian time; now she meant that the watch really wasn’t telling any time at all. She turned the tiny dial on its side over and over. “It was my mother’s,” she said.
She wouldn’t let me handle the watch, but it looked alright to me. Undented. “It probably just needs a new battery.”
She didn’t reply. She looked stiff, as if in shock.
When we got indoors, Miranda said, “I’m going to go and wake Eliot up — wait and we’ll come and find you,” and disappeared. Her dad led me upstairs — he’d kept a guest room unbooked so I could stay over. He looked like a model or something — he was wearing an impossibly white shirt with the collar and sleeves unbuttoned, jeans and pristine navy-coloured Nikes. I followed him up the stairs.
“What are you studying?” he asked.
“Arch and anth,” I said.
A woman with an armful of leaflets came down the stairs — she wove between Miranda’s dad and me. She brushed against me. I automatically said, “Sorry,” and walked closer to the wall so as not to jog her. The leaflets were red, blue and white. The woman winked at me.
“Any good?” Miranda’s dad asked.
“What?”
“Arch and anth?”
“Oh. I recommend it.”
My room was the first door after the staircase on the second floor.
“Are you vegetarian?” he asked, showing me in. “Have you any allergies? What foods disgust you?”
His voice was endearingly melancholy. “No, no, and I can’t think of any off the top of my head,” I told him.
He turned to me, smiled and pressed my hand. I thought perhaps he had some kind of mental checklist — friends Miranda brings home are alright if they a) like their studies and b) aren’t fussy eaters. He said, “See you at dinner,” and left.
The room I’d been put in had big windows that looked out onto the road. Across the road was a bank of grass and some trees. The view was a winter view, grey and dispirited. But it wasn’t just the season. All the light in the house was subterranean, as if the place had been built out of mildew. I switched on the light and drew the curtains in the room open as far as I could, to little effect. I dropped my bag onto the bed.
There was an apple on my pillow.
It was white.
The apple had not been there when I came into the room with Miranda’s dad. I am certain that it hadn’t been there. It had arrived while my back was turned, while I had been at the window. My first instinct was to look up. It must have fallen from somewhere. The ceiling looked innocent and ordinary. I touched the apple; it was very cold, so cold that it was hard to run my fingers over it in a single smooth line. It was only white on one side. The other side was red. Paint? I scratched at the white side; there was plain fruit flesh underneath.
I dropped the apple into the bin on my way out of the room.
I don’t have a lift phobia, but the lift in that house daunted me from the first. It was a steel cage with lots of ornamental coils in the metal. It rattles as it arrives at the floor you’re standing on, but the doors open smoothly and silently. I took the stairs — Miranda had told me that it was only a flight up to hers and Eliot’s rooms. It seemed more like four. But in an unfamiliar house, when you’re uncertain where you’re going, every movement is prolonged by the sense that you’re going to try the wrong door or get in someone’s way and bother someone. It doesn’t matter how big or small the space — if you don’t know it, you get lost in it. Somehow I was at the top of the house, looking at a door with a twist of rancid-smelling cloth nailed to it. I turned away to try my luck with the staircase again, but turned back when I heard whispering. It was as soft as snowfall, but it took over all my hearing. I couldn’t hear what exactly was being said, but the murmuring glowed in my skull and didn’t stop, not even when I covered my head with both hands. There was more than one voice.
Who is it?
Bent double trying to find a place in the air where the whispering was not, I opened the attic door.
She was in there alone, kneeling by her bed, a woman dressed entirely in silver and fire-engine red. She didn’t look at me, but a strength stood behind her — I’m thinking of the tarot card with the image of the smiling woman subduing a lion at the jaw with nothing but a gleaming hand. La force.