Where was Eliot from September to December? Africa? Really? How funny.
They are better off apart now.
•
Someone had been in my room — I mean that someone had been in the guest room that I’d been put in. My bag, which had hardly had anything in it anyway, had been emptied onto the floor, and the bed and dressing table were covered with leaflets. The disorder was so blatant that I already knew nothing had been taken. I wasn’t as bothered as I could have been. I had my wallet and phone on me, this was my own fault for not locking the door, and besides, I was leaving. I stuffed my books and my spare pair of jeans back into my bag. The leaflets were BNP flyers with helpful tips for citizens, the same as the leaflet Sean had kept to piss me off.
Do you know how many immigrants are in the U.K.? Neither does the U.K. government…
There were so many leaflets that it took me nearly fifteen minutes just to gather them into the guest-room bin, which I dragged to the centre of the room when I could no longer bear to have my back to the door.
When I stepped out of the room with my bag over my shoulder, the corridor mixed twilight and green and I could hear a whistling sound from upstairs, like air gliding around something of great mass. I could have been inside a cannon. But I did not run. I took a deep breath and set myself a march—I’m get-ting out I’m get-ting out, no mat-ter what, I’m get-ting out. The lift doors were open. I walked past them, then backtracked. There was a little girl in the lift. I can’t describe her; she was unexpected. She stood on tiptoe in the corner of the lift, and she had something cupped in her hands — she gazed and gazed at it, amazed.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
The thing in her hands was covered in flies. It was bloody and she seemed to have brought it out from inside her. There was a gap in her nightgown, at the stomach.
I pressed the lift button to go down
(take her down, she belongs in a grave)
but nothing happened.
“What is it?”
The girl’s eyes were plaintive. She held the thing out to me. It wobbled in her hands like dirty jelly. I was very sorry for her.
“Please stay,” she said. “Or I’ll get into trouble. You’ve got to stay. You’ll hardly feel it.”
I’m not brave. I remembered the salt I had in both pockets, and the pepper of the wickedest kind wrapped in plastic. I coated my hands in salt. I crumbled pepper in my palms. I stepped into the lift and, expecting to touch nothing, I tore at the little girl’s face until Miranda’s came through.
Miranda struck at me, spitting and hissing. I said, “Oh God, oh my God, sorry, I’m sorry, oh my God,” over and over, but kept her pinned against the back of the lift, both my hands around her throat.
The doors closed and the lift went up. She stopped struggling. She licked the back of my hand, slowly, making tracks in the salt. I screamed, but made no sound. I couldn’t turn the volume up. I screamed and didn’t let go. I concentrated on making myself colourfast, on not changing under her tongue. I know what I look like. The Ore I signed onto paper in the letters of my name, the idea of a girl that I woke into each morning. Arms, stay with me. Stomach, hold your inner twists.
The lift doors opened onto a floor of the house I hadn’t seen. The walls were bare, and nails stuck out of the floorboards, so many, scattered but with an order to them, like ants in a crazed game of hopscotch. The corridor only stayed empty for a second — the next moment it was flooded with people who stared and said nothing. Their eyes were perfect circles. I didn’t see them move, yet every second they were closer to the lift.
Miranda politely flicked my hands away from her and sashayed out among them. They all looked at her and smiled slavishly. When she had passed through them, they looked at me again. They were alabaster white, every one of them. I went after her. They looked at me, crowded so close, murder in their eyes. If I didn’t believe in the salt I would be lost. Believe, believe. Salt is true. Salt is true. Kill the soucouyant, salt and pepper.
I closed their eyes. “Be blind,” I said, rubbing salt on their eyelids. It was like stirring melted wax. “Don’t look. Don’t see me.”
I looked behind me and there they stood, eyes closed, lips pursed in consternation, their arms out in front them.
I walked into a shuttered room full of the sound of a sewing machine. The machine was set on a stand and juddered away, sewing at nothing. There was a dirty white coat hung on a hook on the wall, newspapers, and other things that made me think it was a room belonging to someone small and sad.
Miranda was in the corner with her arms folded around her knees. She looked blissful, like one of the lotus-eaters, someone hearing comforting voices. When she saw me she looked astonished.
“What’s this?” she said.
I didn’t speak to her. If I was going to help her I shouldn’t speak to her. I knelt beside her and rested my hands on her head. She tensed, and I cracked her open like a bad nut with a glutinous shell. She split, and cleanly, from head to toe. There was another girl inside her, the girl from the photograph, all long straight hair and pretty pearlescence. This other girl wailed. “No, no, why did you do this? Put me back in.” She gathered the halves of her shed skin and tried to fit them back together across herself. I fell down and watched her, amazed, from where I sat.
“I don’t want to come out. Put me back in,” the girl insisted. “Please. I can’t… cope.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
She stopped for a moment. “I’m Miranda Silver. Who are you?”
I didn’t answer her, but I pointed at the rubbery skin she clutched so desperately. “Who is that?”
“It’s the goodlady,” she said. “Please help me get back in. I need her.”
I got up.
“Don’t become her,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t listen. This new Miranda’s gaze was weak. She seemed soft in the head. Before I’d even walked out of the room, she was lying under the sewing machine, trying to sew herself back into the skin.
Outside the room, the floor had gone
(where is the floor?)
I fell down into a pickled-lime smell that had frightened me as a child when we visited the plague graves in Deptford. My friend and I, we thought that that was how rotten marrow smelt. The blind faces (I felt them nuzzle at me as I passed, their sucking and sly biting), even with no light to see them by, I know they looked at me.
Below someone threw their hands out and white flew from their fingertips. Someone red and silver, the spirit in the flame. I bounced. I couldn’t see anything. Then I could, through white squares. I was in a net. Tens of feet of white cotton bunched around me. I was crying like a newborn: “Don’t let me die.”
When I opened my eyes I was in the room that had nothing in it but the white fireplace. I saw, through gauze, a figure walking towards me. It frowned and bent closer to me. Sade. I didn’t move. With my eyes I told her that I might not survive this after all.
“Oh, lazy,” she said. She put a hand to my forehead, rumpling the net against it, then she put a hand to my chest, then she put a hand to my stomach.
I sat up, still in the net. It was knotted at the top, but I couldn’t see how. I sat in a huge white bag, like a stork’s delivery.
Sade looked at me through the net.
“How—” I began, but she tutted. “Don’t talk about it. It’s bad luck, eh.”
She checked her watch. “Alright, I’m leaving now.”
“Where are you going?”
She rolled her eyes. “Better pull yourself together, Ore. You think I belong to you?”