But Miranda… you are listening too.
Miranda.
Look at me.
Will you not?
It is useful, instructive, comforting to know that you are not alone in your history.
So I have done you good
and now,
some harm.
WHEN MIRANDA
finally discharged herself from the clinic, Eliot and her father came to collect her. They looked at her strangely. She didn’t know what it could be; she was more normal then she had been in months. She sat in the back of the car and looked very seriously at her suitcase while her brother and father looked at her, looked away, looked at her again. She passed a hand over her hair, which lay meek and wispy against her neck. Her hair had been bobbed out of necessity at first. Miranda had been admitted to the clinic because one morning Eliot had found her wordless and thoughtful. It had been a long night, a perfect full moon tugging the sky around it into clumsy wrinkles. Miranda had been bleeding slightly from the scalp and her wrists were bound together with extreme dexterity and thin braids of her own hair.
It had been six months since then but her hair had been kept short. She didn’t know why, she couldn’t remember having expressed a preference. There was much that she was unable to remember. Especially unclear were the days immediately after she and Eliot had had the news of Lily’s death. She remembered going into school and everyone being very sorry for her loss, but Eliot said that he had gone to school and she had stayed at home. The incident with the hair was completely lost; it seemed that when she’d left herself she’d left completely and it was not worth trying to fetch the images back, pointless trying to identify what exactly it was that had made her snap.
The two doctors who had been “working with” her at the clinic had mistook her resignation for stubbornness and constantly hovered on the edge of pressing her to remember. She objected mildly, with a sense of wasting her father’s money. The clinic was a private clinic. Her room at the clinic had its own phone line and plush curtains and in the common room people checked their e-mail and played snooker. She had agreed to be admitted to an adolescent psychiatric unit because no-one at home knew how to help her feel comfortable.
She had had such a strong feeling that she needed to talk to someone who would tell her some secret that would make everything alright. She had been unable to think who it was. She had sat awake long hours downstairs, looking into the empty white arch of the fireplace, her hands on her rib cage. Who was it that needed to talk to her, that she needed to talk to? She had gone through lists of people it could be. She could only think of people that it couldn’t be. It wasn’t Lily, it wasn’t her father, it wasn’t Eliot, it wasn’t any of the poets whose words stuck spikes in her, not even Rumi. It wasn’t God. She did not think it was someone who was alive. She did not think it was anyone who existed, this messenger. So, the morning after the bad night she went with her father to see a doctor, a different doctor from the one who had, through no fault of his own, been unable to help her with her pica. She had signed a form, her name near her father’s, and admitted herself to the clinic.
Whenever she tried to think about the long night before the bad morning on which Eliot had found her, nothing came to mind. The sedatives had done their work and she’d gone away and now she was coming home again. Exactly as if she’d been put in an envelope and posted abroad, then returned to sender. Even if alive the package doesn’t, can’t, note events, only the sensation of travel. All Miranda had been left with was a suspicion that she had spent much of her first night at the clinic clapping. She thought there might have been a bout of bringing her hands together over and over after the lights in the room went out, her body held in frightened rigidity because if she dared stop clapping then a bad thing would come.
She hadn’t told Eliot about it when he came to visit; instead she had taken to asking him whether he thought it would rain. He had said yes every time.
Eliot was wearing his reading glasses now; he’d climbed into the car with a hardback about the history of doubt. The way he held it on his lap as their father drove, she could tell he was unsure of the ensuing protocol; no one was saying anything, so there was no reason for him not to continue reading. But at the same time, if he started reading it would be a confrontational act somehow. His pockets weren’t big enough to put the book out of sight, either. Eventually he pushed his glasses up to the top of his head and looked out of the window. To make conversation, Miranda said, “Why are you reading that book? Are you in doubt about something?”
Eliot yawned, as he did when uncomfortable. “I told Cambridge that I’d read it and now I’ve got to make it true.”
She said, “You’re applying to Cambridge?”
Uncertainty worked his mouth. She thought she had wobbled in her seat, then realised she hadn’t moved at all; the thought don’t go had flashed through her like a swarm of pins. Eliot was one of those boys that made girls go quiet. He was so beautiful that it seemed certain he was arrogant or insensitive or stupid. He’d taken Luc’s contrast of fair skin and dark hair and he’d taken Lily’s curls and lively wide-set eyes. His bone structure was scary and unnatural and flawless. Besides that he was her knight.
The first week Miranda and Eliot had moved to Dover, they’d played King Arthur’s Court with Martin, Emma and Emma’s older brother, Mark. Martin was Merlin, Miranda was Morgan La Fay, Emma was Nimue, the Damosel of the Lake, and Mark was King Arthur. Eliot said he didn’t care which knight he was — they were all badasses. He’d pulled the green ribbon down through Miranda’s ponytail, tied it around his sleeve and he’d said to her, “I’m your knight.” Miranda pushed him. He took a single step back and scowled. Miranda said loudly, “I’m Morgan La Fay — I’ve got spells and I can stick up for myself.”
He’d said, “I know, but just in case.” Eliot at ten was slight and earnest, his face all eyes. He’d been quick to feel and quick to anger, and when he was angry he would smile very deliberately and with incredible sweetness before walking away. He didn’t care that the others heard what he said and sniggered, but Miranda cared. That’s why she’d thought, but hadn’t said, I’m your knight too.
Now she looked at him, at the awkward length of him, so carefully arranged to fit the space in the front of the car. The sleeves of his jumper and coat were rolled up to his elbows and he was goose-bumping under the cold. He would get into Cambridge, of course he would go.
She said plaintively, “Is it too late to apply?”
She felt Luc and Eliot not looking at each other.
“I didn’t know you even wanted to go there. If you want you can apply next year,” Luc offered.
Miranda waited, then said, “But what will I do for a whole year?”
Neither of them answered her. She supposed the answer was, Get better. The thought of a slow and measured crawl back to health filled her with black sand. She said, “I want to try.”
Eliot twisted around in his seat. “Look Miri, it’s not… you can’t just… you need to really think hard about it. There are all these different colleges and you’ve got to pick a college, a course, everything.”
Miranda spun the combination locks of her suitcase. “Well, what course are you applying to? What college are you applying to?” She looked at him and waited, she refused to pick up the thread of any other conversation.
Luc didn’t make a sound, but he looked into the rearview mirror and she saw the groan on his face. Eliot breathed out through his nostrils. His glance was disbelieving, sent her way to check that she was serious. “What the fuck,” he said. Finally, in tones of outrage, he told her. Miranda noted the name of the college on the back of her hand so she wouldn’t forget. Eliot said something about her having to write a personal statement. Suddenly she wanted to make him angrier; it took everything she had to stay quiet and not ask him to help her write her application.