I tried to take the water to her, but I couldn’t find her.
I walked out of the bathroom door and, I don’t know how, found myself still in the bathroom. The room hadn’t grown any longer; the door was still in front of me; I didn’t feel any change in the ground beneath my feet. But when I tried to pass through the door again I was in the bathroom again, and my neck cricked, as if I’d turned my head too fast. I tried one more time, and came through into the passageway, which was meant to be arranged into an L, with the staircase completing the rectangle. I was on the longest part of the L — the bathroom was meant to be in between Eliot’s room and their dad’s room. But the doors had changed positions. All four doors on that floor were now ranged along one wall, and the rest of the “L” was blank. None of the doors would open. The stairs were still there, and I inched down them carefully, one by one, afraid that they would change too, unsure where they would take me. The staircase ended in the kitchen, every surface heavy in the moonlight.
There was a long shadow behind me. It wasn’t my shadow. From the corner of my eye I saw it grow like a syrup stain, called from nowhere. I went to the counter, spilled salt all over it and ran the flat of a knife through the salt, on both sides. I turned before I could lose my nerve; or more, the knife turned and took me with it.
Kill the soucouyant.
“Ore,” Miranda said. I had her by the throat. It was the principle of knife and fork. You had to hold something down before you could stab it.
She was holding a pair of dressmaker’s scissors to my chest, opened into a stark V. I didn’t feel them there until I looked down. There was a rip in my pajama top. She let the scissors drop onto the counter, and I dropped the knife.
“I thought you were the soucouyant,” I said.
She said, “I thought you were.”
We touched each other’s faces in the dark, trying to be sure.
“Did I look different?”
“I just couldn’t… see you.”
“You’re shaking.”
“The soucouyant—”
“The goodlady—”
We were talking at the same time; until she said “goodlady” I couldn’t tell which of us was saying what.
“The goodlady?” I said.
Miranda fetched a cloth and a newspaper and wiped all the salt off the counter. She didn’t answer.
“I’m off home,” I said.
“You can’t, it’s 2:00 am.”
She drank noisily from the tap, then wiped her forehead. “God. That’s better.”
Miranda led the way through the house’s unlit core. I wished I could see her face.
“Miranda,” I said, but not loudly enough, because she didn’t answer me. “She’s not good,” I said, once we were in her bed, her legs wrapped around mine.
Miranda put a hand on my backbone. Lately it had been starting to show.
“No. I don’t think she is after all. Are you scared?” she asked.
“Aren’t you?”
Very softly she said into my shoulder, “Please understand. We are the goodlady.”
“You and I?” I asked.
“No. The house and I.”
I lay very still. I didn’t know what would happen to me if I moved, if I tried to run. For some time I was aware of her talking to me, but I was concentrating so hard on being quiet and still that I couldn’t understand her. When I finally tuned in, she was sleepy. She had been saying the same thing for minutes, it seemed.
“Miranda can’t get away,” she murmured. “She can let you go, but it will be bad for her because then they will be angry.”
She slept, but I didn’t. I tried to understand her. With my eyes closed, I touched her hair with both hands, found the place just below the curve of her shoulders where her hair continued as a soft phantom, impossible when my eyes were open. I wrapped this hair around my fingers and sought faith in her goodness. When I couldn’t find it I slipped out from under the covers, away from her, and I looked at her as she lay, weak but made of wire. I fought the impulse to part her lips with my fingers, to check her teeth.
You have seen her teeth before
I told myself that no matter what Miranda said, the soucouyant was the old lady. That was the rule. It was the young girl that defeated the soucouyant. The two did not enter the story in each other’s bodies; the two did not share one body, such a thing was a great violation. Of what? I didn’t know.
The moon-coloured mannequin halfway across the room had its arms out, as if it would smoothly and calmly murder me if I moved for the door. Finally, I reached out and switched on the bedside lamp, which didn’t seem to disturb Miranda’s sleep. The light was sickly, but at least everything in the room appeared as it was.
•
It’s hard to believe that there are girls as straightforwardly sexy as Ore Lind who also get into Cambridge. It’s even harder for me to believe that girls that looked like her got into Cambridge and befriended my sister. Ore is almost as tall as me. Plaits and ribbons and a scent of coconut. Big, bright eyes. She had this constantly benevolent expression, somewhere between a smile and a look of preoccupation. She’d brought Miri a lollipop and spent the afternoon in an armchair in front of the TV, languidly licking both her lollipop and Miri’s rejected one, the shoulder of her jumper dress slipping down, her knees drawn up so that her feet didn’t touch the ground. Her legs were long and slim and she’d dressed them in stockings that travelled up and up, marked by a strip of lace where they stopped — I only caught glimpses of those stocking tops, and couldn’t look too long without being blatant.
I kept wanting to ask her if she was cold. I kept wanting to run a finger along the seam of those stockings. I caught Miri catching me looking at Ore, and decided to dub our visitor Lind in the hope that I could inspire gentlemanly feeling in myself. Still, she must have had a reason for wearing stockings and a short dress in winter. Girls who dress for themselves dress like Miri.
I went to Martin’s after dinner — he’d seen Miri and Ore walking over from the station and said, jokingly, that I should “get in there.” Most of our sixth-form posse was there too, sitting and lying on beanbags, drinking beer and chatting breeze, soaking up the last week or so of holiday before trekking back to their essays at Durham, UCL, Kings, Bristol, Oxford, Edinburgh. People kept asking me about South Africa and then pitching in with their accounts of Freshers Week before I could complete a sentence. Dan was proud to have been appointed “the naked fresher” for 2001. I told him I thought that was mighty gay, and he said, “You wish it was, Silver, but I don’t like you like that.” So that was the quality of the evening’s conversation. Emma was there, laboriously making Cosmopolitans for the girls with a cocktail shaker she’d got for Christmas. She’d grown her hair out and dyed it blond. She looked good. She tried to get a game of chess going but no one was interested. All in all that night was intolerable.
The house was dead when I got home, except for a couple watching Sky News in the sitting room. Not Americans then, otherwise they’d have been watching BBC news and loving the Britishness of it. I heard Ore and Miri talking in Miri’s room, and thumped suddenly on my bedroom wall, to scare them. They fell silent. Haha.
I found a box of the Gauloises Dad had given me. As I lit one it came to me that my GrandAnna’s husband, the RAF man, had called them golliwogs. A serviceman was smoking a golliwog in one of his cartoons and when I’d asked Lily what it meant to smoke a golliwog she’d just stared and crooked her finger at me and didn’t relax until I brought her the cartoon.