Miranda dropped her hand and came out of the fitting room, passing the woman who had been talking to her father as the woman returned to her cubicle. One of them smiled with all her teeth, and the other looked blank.
When her father saw her, he rubbed his eyes and leaned his elbow on one of the racks. He bit his knuckle and stared at her knees until she was compelled to cross and uncross them, dancing an impromptu Charleston. He didn’t smile.
“Not this one either?” she asked. “But this is the last one.”
“It’s not the dresses,” he said.
“What is it then?”
He raised his head. “You’re… so thin.”
She turned to a mirror and looked at herself quickly. “I’m not that thin.”
“Miranda. No one who is well looks the way you look at the moment.”
“I’m alright,” she said.
“You are not alright. None of these dresses will do. They will not do at all. Nothing that fits you now will do, do you understand?”
“I suppose so, but what am I going to do about clothes, then?”
He looked around. Was his cue written on the walls?
“You will have to eat. You will wear your other clothes until they fit. It will be good for you.”
Miranda nodded and her reflection nodded, so that was twice. She crossed her hands over her stomach, as if that would stop her from retching. She blushed because the light in the fitting rooms was stark and hot, like being stared at.
(I’m not that thin, I’m not that thin)
She smoothed the pleated skirt of the dress she had on. She liked it. He had chosen the perfect dress for her. Or, at least, for the girl she wanted to be.
“That’s just gorgeous on you,” the shop assistant said, stopping in front of Miranda. She clasped her hands to her chest and shaped her mouth into a lipsticked “ooh.” When neither Miranda nor Luc replied her, her smile faltered and she said “Alrighty then,” and walked back into the main shop.
“You haven’t even looked at the price yet. It might be reasonable,” Miranda tried, once the shop assistant was completely out of earshot.
Luc lightly touched Miranda’s shoulder.
“Getting healthy won’t be so bad,” he said. “I’ll try to make it delicious, I promise.”
She nodded again, everything paralysed but her head and neck. You are being silly, she told herself desperately, but the words had no effect. Because she didn’t move to face him, her father kissed the top of her head, the point of the triangle where her parting dissolved into the rest of her hair. She felt the kiss on her actual skull, the skin of her scalp crinkling between his lips as they broke through. She endured it because he didn’t know what this kiss did to her, how could he know?
He held her coat for her so she could put her arms into it. He buttoned her coat up for her and walked her out of the shop. He smiled and said goodbye for both of them. When he suggested having dinner in town she said, lightly, without looking at him, “Sorry, Father, I really can’t.”
They drove into Dover through the dark. Eventually Luc put on a CD and Hildegarde von Bingen’s canticles of ecstasy spilt misty cries out through the car windows. Miranda concentrated on keeping her mouth completely closed.
A houseguest met them at the front door. He was holding a candle fixed to a saucer with its own wax, red on white. His name was Terry, Miranda was almost sure. “Hello there, Luc. There’s been a power cut,” he said, grinning. “Me and some of the others found some Famous Five books and we’ve been reading those and telling ghost stories for the past couple of hours. What larks…”
Luc shook the hand that wasn’t holding the saucer, said warmly that he was very glad it hadn’t been too much of an inconvenience and strode into the midst of the group of houseguests who had come out to offer theories and suggestions. Before Luc could call her, Ezma arrived suddenly at the centre, as if ejected from the floor. Her hair had tumbled out of its tidy coronets. Her face was grey.
“You’d better get an electrician, Mr. Dufresne,” she said. “Azwer has looked at the fuse box, but obviously he is no expert at these things.”
Miranda went to see if Deme and Suryaz were alright.
“Who is it?” the girls said together, when she knocked on the attic door.
“It’s me,” she said.
They wouldn’t answer after
that
evening, Emma and I broke up. Her parents were out and her house was full of music, music and every light in every room was on. She even had fairy lights twined around table legs. “Hello, Eliot…” She pulled me in through the front door, wrapped my arms around her waist and led me from room to room, dancing ahead of me. She was wearing a short black dress and when she turned to face me I saw she was wearing lipstick. I had never seen her wearing lipstick, but knew better than to say so in case she did that mysterious alchemy some girls do and transformed the comment into my accusing her of having gained weight.
“You look good,” I said, and kissed her. The music upstairs (’90s R&B from the sound of it) was different from that downstairs (Alanis Morisette), and it was unnerving somehow, like a discordant echo, as if the music upstairs was creeping up on me and if I turned around Mariah Carey would abruptly trill in my face.
“Is Miranda back?” Emma asked. I twirled her and caught her, partly because it was so inappropriate to do that while Morisette was whining unhappily.
“How did you know?”
Emma put her arms around my neck and tried to make me slow dance.
“Because you look nervous,” she said.
“Yeah. Well. It’s hard to know what to expect, isn’t it.”
She said solemnly: “Would you like a beer?”
I nodded, and she went into the kitchen. The room was so bright that I couldn’t look at anything for long.
What is all this?
I called out: “Emma are you alright?”
She came back with a glass of red wine, a can of beer, and a pair of scissors.
“Yeah I’m fine. Why?” she asked.
I sat on the sofa. I looked at the scissors, which she laid on the coffee table with the handles wide open. I drank some beer. She climbed onto my lap, drawing her bare legs against mine, leaning into me so I could feel the curve of her.
“No,” she said. “Don’t touch me.”
She breathed against my mouth but she wouldn’t let me kiss her. I said “Emma” without meaning to. The glass of wine she was drinking from now was clearly not her first.
She yawned and, from nowhere, offered me a cigarette. I couldn’t think about a cigarette; I leant back and just looked at her. She smoked one without me. “Look,” she said. She showed me the cigarette she was smoking. They were red and white. “Red tips,” she said. “An idea from the forties, you know. For the glamorous girl who doesn’t want to leave lipstick marks on her cigarette.”
“Oh,” I said, stupidly.
She slid slowly down my lap and onto the floor. I didn’t make a sound. It was a matter of principle. She walked around the sofa, smoking her red-tipped cigarette, then she picked up the scissors and handed them to me.
“What am I meant to do with these?”
She said, “Wait a sec, I need this for courage,” and took a long drag on her cigarette before putting it out. Then knelt on the sofa beside me and gathered the dark mass of her hair up into a ponytail, the hair band tied round at the neck. She hesitated, then, without taking her eyes off me, pulled the hair band up a little higher, a little tighter. She turned her back on me.
“There, where the hair band is.”
“Why?”
“I said cut it right here, Eliot.” She touched the hair band.