I nod and roll my eyes like, she always does this.
And it’s true. I have been ignored at house parties, in parks and once on her friend John’s cousin’s boat while Catlin was off being Catlin. This is partly why I always bring a book and a spare book, but … I don’t know … I had my own friends too and my own life, and there was never anyone at the end of the day who mattered to her more than me, I knew. And I feel like Lon is beginning to matter to her in that strong way, that important-person way. And it’s not anything I can put into words, but there’s a feeling of being left behind. And it’s really stupid, because nothing has happened between them that I can put my finger on. But she’s never had an every day boy before. A boy who was more interesting to talk to than about. And that’s what worries me. Because without her here? I’ll be alone.
But I can’t say any of this because it would be moaning, and I need her on my side for the inevitable conversation about how flawed I am with Mam. And I am flawed. But nature is imperfect. The bus pulls in, and myself, Catlin and Layla get off.
‘Would you like to come up to the castle for a cup of tea or something?’ I ask, surprising myself.
Layla looks at me, with clear, dark eyes. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Sorry, I have plans.’
‘Another time,’ I say.
‘Yeah.’ She grins at me and turns down the pathway to her house. She walks so quickly with her long legs that it seems unnatural. Fiachra and Cathal are still biking in and out, though it must be dangerous with the frost filming the mountain roads. I wouldn’t like it, I think, pressing on.
Catlin is still staring at her phone. I don’t think she even registered the conversation.
‘Catlin?’ I say.
‘Mmm?’ she murmurs back. And, ‘Just a second.’
She types away as we move down the path beside each other but not with each other. I look at a sycamore leaf, desiccated, hanging by a fibre from a tree. It’s hunched like it’s in pain. Like it is hanging. I reach up to the branch and pluck it off.
It’s too weak to resist.
12
Elder
(rheumatism, flu, traumatic injury)
When we get back from school, we eat with Mam. She’s made chops. Mine has a little circle of bone inside the middle, full of marrow. I lift it to my mouth and suck it out. It tastes like blood and fat. Mam’s teeth tear at a little cube she’s chopped up on her fork. The meat is tender, brown to almost pink. I think about the life that we have taken. Maybe more than one. The sheep on the mountains, fleece and dirt and little sunken faces. I swallow something like them down my throat.
Mam has been trawling through the attic, finding things. She wants to redecorate the castle, make it a little bit quirky and a lot cosier. She has her work cut out for her there, I think. Battlements and cosy don’t really gel.
‘I’m just a little bored,’ says Mam. ‘I don’t miss work, but I miss working. I think I need a project.’
‘It’s good to have a thing,’ Catlin says. ‘Maybe Brian would let you use the good Internet in his office to google pretty castles.’
‘I don’t know,’ says Mam. ‘He’s pretty protective of that office. I brought him up a cup of tea the other day, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.’ She smiles and rolls her eyes.
Catlin gets up. ‘Off to change my tampon,’ she announces. ‘Before the castle is bathed in blood. It’s kind of nice not having Brian around too much. I can talk about periods and things. I mean, not that I’m censoring myself, but we’ll ease him slowly in to my menstrual cycle.’
‘One awkward moment at a time,’ I say. It’s weird that I’m not having my period too. Like, we’re normally creepily in sync. We got our periods on the same day, and everything. I feel a worry in me. Brewing like a tea until it’s strong. Something’s wrong with us. We don’t belong here.
Mam interrupts my internal worrying with some lovely external worrying. It’s that mixture of annoyance and concern. Don’t be weird and why are you so weird, both at once.
‘Madeline?’
I swallow. I know exactly what this is about.
‘I’ve cleaned it up. I don’t want to have this conversation again.’
I hate how odd she gets about this. I’m not doing drugs or having sex. I barely even drink. I study hard and I’m nice to her and Catlin most of the time. Mam needs to recognise how privileged she is if salt is all she’s worrying about.
Catlin bounces back into the room. ‘I’m all plugged up like a beautiful sink.’
‘Catlin.’ Mam sighs.
‘Don’t make me ashamed of my body. I’m a moon-blood miracle and I will not be silenced by the likes of you.’
‘Yeah, Mam,’ I say. ‘You need to be more respectful of Catlin’s flow.’
We decide to head upstairs to roam around and scavenge fancy items from the many crates of stuff. The only clothes shop in Ballyfrann sells the kind of things that people Mam’s age wear to weddings. Fussy, structured dresses, fascinators. Support garments.
I give out a bit to Catlin about Mam and the salt.
‘What’s her problem, Catlin? Does she not want me to be crazy in front of her fancy new husband?’
Catlin wraps a blue silk piano shawl around her shoulders. ‘She took the salt out from under my bed too, as if it’s any of her business what my sister does in my bedroom in the middle of the night while I’m fast asleep.’
‘You’re not making me feel like less of a freak, Catlin,’ I say miserably.
‘Fuck them, Mad,’ she says. ‘We’re here for two more years. Just enough time for me to get Lon pregnant and feck off to college while he cries into his pint.’
I prise open a box, which turns out to be full of old swords. Catlin takes some out and rubs them. Grumbles that they’re blunt.
‘What were you going to do if they were sharp?’ I ask her.
‘Wreak havoc … Ooh! Some skulls!’ She has found a steamer trunk of skulls. They’re mostly sheep, but also several birds, a deer and some dogs. One of them is human though. I touch it. It is small. A woman’s head. I think of Nora Ginn. Of Helen Groarke.
We all end up as old, forgotten bones. It just takes time.
‘I can’t believe he has a human skull,’ I say to Catlin.
‘I know,’ she squeals. ‘It’s amazing! Would it be weird to spray-paint it a colour?’
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘It used to be a person. A girl, I think. The shape of it. The size.’
Bridget Hora, Nora Ginn, Helen Groarke. Whose head was it? The one they didn’t find? Catlin touches my elbow.
‘Catlin, we should tell Brian about the skull, I think. It isn’t normal. Having human bones inside a house.’
‘You’re right,’ my sister tells me. ‘I love this place. It’s fully, fully haunted.’
‘Have you seen anything?’ I ask her.
‘Sometimes when I’m praying before bed … Don’t roll your eyes at me, salt-girl.’
‘Oi. But go on.’
‘I hear what Brian says are “the pipes”. But it doesn’t sound like pipes at all. It sounds like … something else – little shrieky breaths and sometimes footsteps.’
‘Why have I heard none of this?’
‘I assumed you had. Because salt. Anyway, you know the way I am.’
I do. Catlin has a vivid imagination – when we were little she used to see people that weren’t there, like all the time. They’d be in her nightmares, and then bleed out into the daytime too. Praying helped. And maybe that’s why I started doing what I do, with the gathering. To protect her.
I wonder …
‘Did you put back the salt Mam took out of your room?’ I ask her, concerned.
‘No. But if you do, I won’t say a word.’ She looks at me. ‘The sounds don’t frighten me, Madeline. They’re not … They’re not the thing we need to be scared of.’
‘What do we need to be scared of?’ I ask her.
Her face is very serious. ‘That Brian will take all of my cool skulls a
way when you tell him about the human one. Murder palace problems.’
‘In fairness, Catlin, you want to decorate with someone’s head.’
‘Brian decorates with heads. He has that shrunken one in his office. Oh! Maybe that’s where the skull is from. The two might go together, like a set.’
‘I don’t know what to do with you. You’re scarier than ghosts sometimes.’
‘Skulls!’ exclaims Catlin happily again. It doesn’t take that much to please her, really. ‘They’re going to look fantastic on my altar. I wonder if he has any Marys?’
Catlin’s Marys have graduated, and now she basically just has a massive altar in her room. It’s getting bigger as she gathers stuff. It has her pictures, icons, Mass cards, miraculous medals, nazars and Hands of Fatima. And now, apparently, the skulls as well. This altar is fine with Mam, apparently. It counts as decoration, not a symptom. It does look cool. But so does everything she fecking does.
I wonder what Mamó would think of all of Catlin’s talismans. I think I’d like to show her. See her face. Catlin has been getting more and more into religious iconography over the past while. She always liked the pictures. Pretty ladies in white and blue, stars around their heads, snakes at their feet. She has all these old Mass cards in a shoebox. The only person that she really knew in there’s our dad. The rest are Mam’s friends, and some strangers. I saw her steal one from a friend’s house once.
‘She won’t need it,’ she told me, grinning. ‘She didn’t even like her Auntie Méabhdh.’
Catlin’s morals are like those optical illusion pictures people share. Sometimes you have to tilt your head to spot them. I help her with the skulls, because I am a good sister.
‘This is the closest we have ever come to disposing of a body. Bonding,’ I tell her.
‘Sisterly bonding. We’re skull-pals now. Bone twins.’ She’s carrying, like, seven skulls in her two teeny hands.
‘Bone twins sounds like a porno.’
‘It does at that.’ She pauses. ‘Do … Do … you girls do everything together?’
This is a question we’ve actually been asked, and more than once. I make bass-line sounds, and then pretend to vomit.
Sometimes, when Catlin gets stuck in an evil laugh, it keeps on going. And I join in. We cackle until we have to sit down because our ribs hurt too much. It’s the kind of laughing I really only do when she’s around.
I love my sister. Skulls and bones and all. But still, there are some troubling facts emerging. Like the fact that she had another sex dream. About Lon. This time he was interviewing her for a job, and it turned into another sort of job altogether and I stopped her there because NO.
A world of NO.
‘No.’
‘But it was –’
‘NO.’
Catlin hates when I don’t let her finish. It is one of her pet peeves. She squints at me.
‘You really don’t like him?’
‘No. I really don’t.’
She smiles at me. ‘I’m going to kiss him anyway.’
My stomach twists. My eyes on the dark hollows of the skulls.
13
Wild Cherry
(prepare the stalks of drupes to soothe or bind)
I wake up, sweating like I have been running. Rain beats on the windows. Dreams of foxes interspersed with screams. We’re high up, but the mountains here cast shadows, day and night.
When we told Brian about the skull we found, he laughed at us. Gently, but he laughed. ‘Typical Dad,’ he said. ‘He didn’t ever open half the trunks he bought at the estate sales.’ His hand outstretched. ‘I’ll give it to the guards though, just in case.’
He tucked the pitted bone into his satchel. The light caught grooves upon it. Carved by time, or maybe something else.
The moon is waxing, fatter slices building.
Skulls in Catlin’s room of things long dead.
I blink, and try to think of salt and safety.
My ears strain for the breathy creak of pipes.
What can my sister hear that I can’t hear?
Girls go missing all the time in Ireland. You hear about the right ones on the news, the ones with parents, girls who come from money, pale-skinned, pretty. Missed. I’ve shared the photos, seen the posters peeling on the lamp posts, bins and walls. Sellotaped or glued. The pictures bleeding into text with rainfall. Printed out by families or friends. Loving, hopeless hands that clutch at nothing.
And, in time, they might be found, in isolated places. The mountains that we drive through on the bus – I picture them, the faint trodden paths from years of feet that line the slopes like slender threads a foot’s breadth wide, through bush and grass, like veins upon a leaf. You have to know, or really look, to notice. It would be the same, I think, with bodies. You’d have to look, but mightn’t think to look.
I comb my fingers through my damp-lank hair. So many missing girls, lines and lines of them, like beads on string. Why do they haunt me when they’re not my business? Why is it so warm here at night? Everything outside is icy, freezing. The pelt of rain against the windowpanes. I must ask Brian to turn the heating off. I end up kicking blankets, tossing, turning. And thinking of the other girl I know once lived near here. Helen Groarke. Catlin told me at the time that people only cared because she was hot, and was she even hot, like, Maddy, really? Anyone can look that way in one photo, from the right angle, with the right filter.
A girl can turn into an ellipsis so easily.
I reach out for my phone.
And there she is. And there she is. And her.
Their faces when you google Ballyfrann.
A tiny village somewhere in the mountains.
They never found Bridget Hora’s skull. Just bones and hair and little scraps of fabric. I look at her. Zoom in on her eyes. There is no way to tell with people, is there? She’s small. The skull was small. We’re small. Our skulls would look like that. If something happened.
The bodies were spaced out. Bridget died the year that Mam was born. They think that they were killed in different places. Different ways. Four girls is not a lot. In the scheme of things. Even in the scheme of missing girls.
Myself.
Catlin.
Oona, Layla.
When you put a face on death, it hurts.
Helen Groarke had long, dark, pretty hair. She wore it poker straight. And she was pale, with freckles on her cheeks. She’s wearing orange nail polish in the photo they all used. It really suits her. She was wearing a little purple dress when she went missing. Brown boots, black tights. A fluffy yellow coat.
Salt under the bed to keep the ghosts at bay. I breathe away the stories.
Helen Groarke. Whose friends held vigils here, but something’s missing. There’s a chunk of something I can’t find. I get up. I need air. I need fresh air.
Amanda Shale. I’m running down the stairs like there’s a fire.
I dig, but not for treasure, in the night.
Nora Ginn. I get a bunch of keys from in the larder. They hang on an iron loop. Cold to touch. I press them to my face.
Bridget Hora. The moon is brighter now that I’m outdoors, and it is colder. I can think. My brain is getting sharp. There’s something in my room that makes me warm and tired. The window’s open, but it doesn’t work.
Every brutal death becoming story. Girls that turn to bones that turn to ghosts. Someone dumped them here like they were rubbish. I think of Catlin, Oona, me.
Hot feet on freezing grass. I run my hands through plants and something’s easing. Something’s better now that I am here.
Help me, I ask the earth.
What’s wrong with me? Too many things to count, like salty grains.
Basil. Bay. Calendula or camomile.
Bay might be alive out here. It’s cold. I fumble in the dark. I should have brought my phone, I think. Their faces though. I didn’t want to carry them. I couldn’t.
A light approaches.
Bodies in the hills, skulls
in the attic. I crouch down closer to the ground, hands pressed on frost.
‘Madeline,’ a voice says. It is Mamó.
‘Um. Hi,’ I say. She looks at me. She’s wearing one of those headbands with the torch on, like miners have on their hats, only without the helmet, but apart from that, she’s dressed like a normal person. No pyjamas with rabbits on them for Mamó. I blink a little in the light. It’s hard to focus on her face. The halo all around it is too bright. She looks like she’s the patron saint of wagons.
‘Tea?’ she asks. And then, and not unkindly, ‘Do you need help?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say. I’m breathing.
‘OK then.’ She turns to go. ‘Goodnight, Madeline.’
I watch her fade back into the garden. There isn’t any tentativeness at all. And what would it be like to have that surety, to be a person, firm inside a place? I cover my face with my hands. The cold seeps through.
I feel the cramps begin.
The blood is coming.
14
Chicory
(eliminating parasites)
Catlin and I are walking through the forest. The evening is burning into night. The trees are sad and skinny. Needle pale. We see the white tail of a rabbit running. It bobs beneath the furze and disappears.
We’re meeting Layla. She messaged us to ask. She goes fell-running here, moving quickly through the dangerous slopes. She ends up here most evenings, apparently. Ballyfrann is full of the bizarre.
I’m sleeping a little better, at the moment. Water beside salt and six old nails. It keeps on taking more to keep me calm though. More objects gathered. More of me to hide away from Mam. I need for them to work. I want to focus hard in school, even if it means drinking the tea Mamó gave Mam for me, after the night she found me in the garden. Anything that cools me down at night. It’s fever-warm inside my bedroom, weirdly. And when I open windows, there are sounds my brain turns into ghosts. Sharp mountains and dark valleys. Hollowed out like the eyes of a skull.
Perfectly Preventable Deaths Page 8
