“Sade,” I said. “Does this job pay well?”
She seemed amused at that.
“Then why do it? Do you have a British passport?”
She produced it from the pocket of her cardigan; it was bound in plastic, and inside the pages were as crisp as if she had only just received it.
“Five years,” she said, proudly.
“Then why do this job? You’ve got choices. Get a job that pays better. Go somewhere else. Don’t stay anywhere where people tell you to jump and die.”
“Normally you would be right,” said Sade, “but the other one says, ‘Wait.’ ”
I stared at the tribal marks on Sade’s face. She took my hand and drew it across the scar tissue, her expression matter-of-fact. “Only the men are marked, usually. It would be the men who go to war, I suppose. But I wanted marks. So I copied my father’s.”
“You did these yourself?” I had to touch them again after that.
Sade pressed her hand over mine and smiled into both our hands. “Salt keeps the cuts open until they learn to stay open by themselves.”
“Ouch.”
“Yes, much more than I can say.”
I thought, there is absolutely no one even a bit like you anywhere else.
“Sade, I want to ask you something,” I said. “If you say yes, I’ll believe you. Just tell me. There’s something wrong with this house, isn’t there?”
“It is a monster,” Sade said, simply.
While she had been talking, I’d taken the saltshaker that sat between us, and I’d poured small hills of salt into the pockets of my skirt. Sade made no comment, but when Miranda called me from the sitting room and I got up to go, she grabbed my arm and said, “Wait a second.”
She went to the kitchen drawers and took out some chillies in a plastic bag to give to me. They looked like crooked twigs — brown, but splashed with dark red where autumn had bled on them. She opened the bag and the smell made me cough. You didn’t season food with this kind of pepper, you destroyed nerve endings. I said thank you and attempted a hug. She waved me away.
Miranda showed me the fireplace, the white cave she’d thought she might have lost her life in. She stared at the marble, rubbed its dust onto her fingertips. I tried to get her to look at me without actually saying “look at me.” It didn’t work. Miranda showed me her psychomantium — the place was almost friendly, like being carried on salt water towards yourself. The mirror seemed to cause the darkness. We silently agreed not to raise the matter of the nailheads glinting from her sealed desk drawer, the fact that everything she had seemed to be on view, her underwear folded and stacked beside the heater, even her pens and pencils tied round with a rubber band and placed on her desk amongst papers and tubes of lipstick. I think Miranda was sad that she didn’t have more to show me. A fireplace and a black room were the only places in the whole house that she seemed sure of. In her bed we pulled her covers up to our chins and lay quietly, careful not to bump each other with the sharp parts of ourselves, the elbows and the knees, until our bodies had warmed each other. Then Miranda shifted and opened my mouth with her own. As we kissed I became aware of something leaving me. It left me in a solid stream, heavy as rope. It left from a hurt in my side, and it went into Miranda, it went into the same place in her. I tried hard to breathe, harder than I have ever tried at anything. I tried so very hard that I felt the strain on the blood vessels in my eyes. But I couldn’t. There was so much air passing between our lips but I couldn’t use any of it. It was like having my mouth blown into while my nostrils were pinched together. When I pulled away from Miranda she looked at me with eyes of puzzled slate.
I showered before dinner. I ran the water too hot as usual; I saw my face in the glass of the shower door and I concentrated on it as if it was a talisman or charm. A tune came unbidden, it was “Frère Jacques,” so I was clearly terrified. Hello monster, hello monster, I sang, Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? When I opened the shower door, tiny hooks of steam sank into the lino. There were huge white towels, hotel towels, draped over the towel rack and I took one and dried myself, keeping my eyes on my face. The towel the girl in the mirror was drying herself with—
I frowned and looked at my towel. Where it had touched me it was striped with
black liquid, as dense as paint
(don’t scream)
there were shreds of hard skin in it. There was hair suspended in it
“The black’s coming off,” someone outside the bathroom door commented. Then
they whistled “Rule Britannia!” and laughed.
Bri-tons never-never-never, shall be slaves
My skin stung. Where to put this towel? I grew ugly in my need to make sure no one ever saw it, my face collapsing in on itself as I hand-washed the towel in the sink. I dressed slowly and carefully, and by the time I’d put the towel on the rack to dry and opened the door, the passageway was empty.
Some other guests were booked in, so they ate earlier and Luc, Miranda, Eliot and I ate later. Candles flickered on the table. Miranda’s dad produced a fat thug of a winter stew, full of meat and turnip and other vegetables that crunched. There was red wine in it, too. It looked so rich on the plate that I balked.
“Is everything alright?” Miranda’s dad asked. He was at the head of the table, and Eliot and Miranda were opposite me. Suddenly everyone was looking at me. Eliot and Miranda were so alike. In photographs their twinhood was underwhelming, but in person, when they both had their eyes on you, you couldn’t sort one from the other — or you could, but not quickly enough to stop yourself saying the wrong name by mistake.
“It looks lovely,” I said. I added “sir,” in case I was supposed to call him “sir” and also because he reminded me of a teacher I’d had. I was careful not to let any food or water touch my lips — I tilted my glass and swallowed air, I lifted the fork to my mouth, spoke and rearranged the forkful of food on my plate whilst speaking. I wiped my mouth with a napkin, left red smudges on it, stared and tried to reason the colour away. Was my lip torn? Surreptitiously I lay a finger across my bottom lip; the skin was whole, but there was more red on my fingertip. After about five minutes I remembered what this was: lipstick. Miranda’s lipstick, the imprint of her kisses on my lips. And there we all were, Miranda, her father, her brother and I, sharing oxygen around a dinner table. I scrubbed at my lips as hard as I could without it looking pathological. I don’t know what kind of lipstick Miranda wore but it just wouldn’t come off. At best the smudges on the napkin lightened in shade until they were a decayed pink.
I wanted to hide, or to sleep. I thought if I just slept the discomfort off, the place would make sense to me in the morning. Miranda wanted me to read to her, and I did, the book on the pillow before her so that I had to curl my arm around her to turn the pages. It was a Hans Christian Andersen story about the disadvantages of a mechanical nightingale when compared to the real thing, and towards the end I got quieter and quieter until I was whispering the story into her ear. She was asleep almost before I’d even finished. I turned off the lamp and lay so that there was a small gap between us.
•
“Ore,” Miranda whispered. “Ore. Are you awake?”
I felt the heat rising from her skin. I ran my hands over her arms, her breasts, her stomach; they were covered with sweat. She said she was thirsty. She kissed me and said again that she was thirsty. I said I’d go and get her some water, grabbed a glass from her desk and ran into the bathroom, shaking all over. I jumped when the cold water from the tap hit me; I was trying to fill the glass as quickly as possible. If I brought her water she would be well.