“What was happening in here?”
She looked at me then. Her face was notched with scars, but her gaze was soft. “What are you doing here? Go home.”
“I’m Ore,” I said, lamely. “Miranda’s friend.”
“I’m Sade,” she said. “Please go home.” She got up and closed the door in my face.
•
I almost walked into Miranda’s brother on the landing outside his room. Miranda came out behind him. They were holding hands.
When Miranda introduced us, Eliot turned the handshake into a complicated back-patting and finger-snapping thing he’d picked up in Cape Town. He did it with enough irony for me not to dread him. He was milder than I’d expected. Like Miranda, he smiled a lot, but more as if he was amused than as if he was trying to fend off the anger of the person he was speaking to. By the end of an hour’s lolling around in the sitting room I’d decided that he was alright. The sitting room was severe and full of space — the chairs were arranged a respectful distance away from the television screen — you could sit and converse in the armchairs by the window, or sit in the chairs in the middle of the room and switch the TV off so it wasn’t part of the conversation. It wasn’t the sort of room where you sat and ate snacks or meals while watching Neighbours. For example there were no cushions. My family uses cushions to protect our laps from hot plates.
I sat on the sofa beside Eliot and Miranda took an armchair miles away and began turning her watch dial. I smiled at her and she smiled back, nervously. We watched a film from their dad’s collection — a German film in black and white, about a serial killer who abducted only children, I think.
Eliot kept making comments and asking questions, which I welcomed, because after the first ten minutes the film became very slow. Eliot was obviously a stoner and collector of trivia — you could probably sit in companionable silence with him for half an hour and then he’d mention something about a rare toad or a semi-plausible conspiracy theory and then shut up for another half hour, or longer. For some reason he decided to address me by my surname only.
“Now look here, Lind… are you a Kentish maid, or a maid of Kent?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well. Where do you live?”
“Faversham.”
He reached across and went through the whole jazzy handshake thing again; I was better at it the second time.
“Maid of Kent, maid of Kent!” he and Miranda shouted.
“What?”
“You’re a Kentish man or maid if your home is west of the Medway — so places like Orpington are Kentish. You’re a man or maid of Kent if your home is east of the Medway, like Dover is, and Faversham is,” Miranda told me.
“Oh,” I said. So she and her brother carried maps of Kent in their heads. “But why?”
Eliot shrugged. “Ancient distinctions, man. Ever since the Angles and the Saxons…”
“What happened to them,” Miranda sighed. “The Angles and the Saxons and the Druids and the Celts and the Picts and the… who else?”
“Jutes,” I supplied, bored.
Miranda’s question was rhetorical, but Sade came in and answered with a great deal of satisfaction: “They died out oh.”
Sade bossed me into the kitchen, her hand on my elbow as she murmured, “Sorry about earlier,” and she poured me a drink. The drink looked like beer and it was bottled like beer, but it tasted of sugared vomit. I smiled politely at her over the top of the glass, but she tutted. “You are feeling like you can’t ask for what you want,” she said, and got a Guinness out of the fridge for me.
I pointed at the first drink she’d offered me. “What is that stuff?”
Sade raised an eyebrow. “Come on, get out. You don’t know Power Malt?”
“Never had it.”
“Never had malt? Heyeyeye.” She looked at me even more closely than before and washed her hands with invisible water. “Well. It happens sometimes.”
“So you live here?”
Sade snorted. “I keep house. As far as it can be kept.”
I looked out at the garden through the kitchen window. The sun was setting into storm clouds; there was smoky brightness outside, as if the world was being inspected by candlelight. I saw the woman who’d brushed me on the stairs the first time I’d gone up them. This time when I saw her I knew she wasn’t a houseguest. She was standing under one of the trees, standing so deep in the ground that the earth levelled around her ankles. As if she had no feet, as if she was growing. Her presence made the branches behind her jerk and contract, like hands trying to close around her but not quite daring to. She had her hand spread over her face. She was looking at me through her fingers. Miranda knew her. It was Miranda who had said: “Tell me about that woman, the woman with the covered face? Is she your mother?”
My hand moved to the window latch, making sure the window was locked, making sure the window was really there, keeping her out. More than anything else, I wished she couldn’t see me. I forced the need to blink into a second of something like prayer — go away, with my eyes squeezed shut — and when my eyes opened, she was gone. It took minutes for the trees to recover from their shivering fit.
“Sade,” I said. “Did you see—?”
Sade put her hand over my mouth. She had seen, but she seemed untroubled.
“Better don’t, it’s bad luck,” she said. “But… if anything, come to me.”
Her eyes begged me not to make a fuss. “Okay,” I said, but I scanned the entire garden all over again. Then I sat down. Sade had a book on the counter. When I asked her what she was reading she held up the cover so I could see. It was a Mills and Boon romance; a white nurse swooned in the arms of a white doctor. I told her about the soucouyant. While telling her I realised that the story of her is much more to do with how she is ended than how she began. We know that the soucouyant has preyed on younger souls for years and years, longer than anyone can remember. It’s as if she’s so wrong that even in the mind of the storyteller she must be killed immediately.
“That’s a good one,” Sade said. “I had not heard that before.” Then she asked: “Will you tell Miranda?” She wasn’t talking about the story I’d just told her.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I said.
“She wouldn’t understand. She’s different from us.”
I resented the “us.”
“Different from us how? As in, we are clairvoyant and she is not?”
“I’m sorry,” Sade said, eyeing me. “You are a maid of Kent, are you not?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not mocking you,” she continued. “I believe it. But does she believe it?”
“Who are you talking about, Miranda, or the soucouyant?”
“Maid of Kent, do you want to know what your name means?”
“No, thank you.”
“It means…”
I put my hands over my ears and growled, but I still heard. She said my name meant “friend.”
“I heard those… voices in your room,” I said. “I almost thought there were other people in there with you.”
“Yes there are,” said Sade. “They’re always there.” She held up three fingers.
“Two of them tell me: You have no one. Jump. Open the window and jump. Join your old ones. It would be so easy. Jump, you have no one. On and on and on.”
I eyed her. “Do you ever think you’ll jump?”
Sade sipped at her Power Malt, her gaze distant. “It’s true that I have no one, you know. But the third one says, ‘Wait.’ Her voice is so kind. I don’t know who she is, I don’t know who any of them are, but all this other one ever says is ‘Wait.’ So I don’t even try to jump.”