Perfectly Preventable Deaths

by Deirdre Sullivan

I can hear the fear whining through my voice. Annoying me. I want to be more calm. I should be calm. It’s only a dead animal. I see them at the bus stop, on the road. A normal part of living in the country. Nothing to be frightened of at all.

  Mamó tilts her head at me, like an owl would, looking at a mouse.

  ‘Plenty of things that you can do with blood,’ she says, ‘and some of them leave things behind you after.’

  ‘Is that what the fox was? A …’ I try my best to find the proper word. ‘… sacrifice or something? Did a person do it, like?’

  ‘We’ll say no more of it,’ she tells me, ‘until we’re finished. We don’t know what is listening.’

  ‘Ha,’ I say. I think she might be joking. She did a thing with her eyebrows that was definitely either a joke or a threat. She pulls in at a sort of moonlight glade and grabs a lamp and the shovel from the boot.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ she says, holding the light aloft like an old-timey night watchman.

  We move, walking for what seems like forever. It’s hard to gauge the distance in the dark. Everything looks wild and unfamiliar. I can feel the give of leaves under my feet.

  When we stop, she gestures to the shovel. ‘Dig.’

  ‘How deep?’ I ask.

  ‘I know people say six feet under, but I prefer a healthy ten,’ she says.

  I raise an eyebrow, but I get to work.

  She looks through the canvas bag and makes some sounds that aren’t quite disapproval, but come close.

  ‘You forgot the Hart’s tongue,’ she points out.

  ‘How was I supposed to know what to bring?’ I ask.

  She doesn’t answer.

  Digging a grave in silence takes forever. The slice of shovel into earth, the lifting. My biceps hurt. The last time I dug a hole was on the beach, when we were small. This is nothing like that. Forcing the blade in, scooping out the velvet black, the rocks. The discordant sound of metal hitting stones.

  I’m standing in it when she tells me, ‘Stop.’

  She pulls me out. She has really strong arms for an old woman, rippling muscles. She should have dug the hole herself, I think. It would have been faster.

  ‘Let’s find this fox,’ she says. We set off to the crossroads, at a pace. The woods are darker now, I use my torch to light the way. It makes the things it touches ashen grey. Devoid of colour. Mamó strides ahead. She doesn’t seem to need or want the light. She leads. I follow. Everything is still. A photograph of something I once knew. I can feel a warmth beginning to build within me like a fever.

  I remove my coat. She looks at me, and nods. We do not speak. The fox is still there when we reach the crossroads. I step on something soft. It doesn’t give. A kidney? Mamó bends down to smell the fox, to look.

  ‘It’s fresh,’ she says.

  ‘How fresh?’

  ‘A couple of hours.’

  ‘So we might have disturbed whoever …?’ I let the question hang unfinished, in the air. And there it stays.

  Mamó calmly opens her doctor’s bag and takes out some binocular-looking things. She peers through them. Up and down and around. It should look more ridiculous than it does.

  ‘There’s something heavy here,’ she says. ‘Some wrong.’

  I nod. The sweat is beading on my face. I want to curl into a ball and sleep. I want to run.

  ‘The wounds are strange,’ I tell her. ‘And the fur … is roasting hot.’

  ‘It senses you,’ she says. ‘You need to push through that. Can you feel the weight of it as well? The nudge?’

  I nod. She’s right. Something is pulling at me, straining like a peculiar aftertaste at the edges of my brain. Something heavy and bilious. Something like a threat, or like a plea. But the kind of plea a bully makes for your pocket money. Something that needs fixing, rearranging. My gathering squirms and fattens in the pit of my belly.

  ‘I can feel something.’

  ‘That’s the Ask,’ she says. ‘You won’t like the Answer. I need three orange leaves, as orange as the fox, and three red leaves, as red as freshest blood. And holly berries.’

  ‘What’s the Ask?’ I ask.

  ‘Did I misspeak?’ she snaps. ‘Bring me the things I need to make this right.’

  ‘Fine.’

  And it is fine, even though my muscles are aching. I want to collect the leaves. My urges are in tune with what Mamó wants and it truly is the weirdest thing, but it is right as well. I feel validated. I turn the worry off and click into a sort of focused calm. Turn the torch on my phone to the brightest setting. I have this. It is winter, but leaves litter the forest floor. I crawl along on hands and knees, feeling for the textures that I want. When I find one I like, I raise it to the phone and check the colour. It can’t be mottled. I need it to be smooth and bright and whole.

  I get them, and run back towards the crossroads. Mamó is bent over the fox, holding a beeswax candle. Her brow is furrowed.

  ‘Now, rub the leaves over him while I say the words.’

  I look at her in disbelief. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I was a jokester.’

  I shrink a little and do what she says.

  As I rub the leaves along the fur and nose and blood and bone she mutters in a tongue that isn’t English or Irish but kind of like a mixture of the two that’s maybe spliced with German. I feel a hum within the fox’s body begin to shift. It isn’t unpleasant exactly. Pins and needles, deadening the flesh.

  It ebbs into the leaves. My body cools.

  We put the leaves inside an old marmalade jar ‘to contain it’. Then it’s time to bury the fox.

  ‘We’ll use your coat,’ Mamó says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have it taken off. It’s dirty anyway,’ she tells me. And she’s right, but scooping all the parts of fox into it isn’t the best use of my coat or my time, I think. The fox is cooler now, slimy and disgusting on my hands. I feel the give of flesh as I grasp at it.

  That could be me, I think. We’re all so delicate.

  We burn the leaves over the fox’s grave. She wipes the jar on the last clean part of my coat and puts it back in her bag. I think of Dad again. How easily we’re hurt. It only takes a minute for the leaves to smoulder into nothing. They were already dead. They weren’t in pain.

  I feel a ripple suck out of the leaves and down into the ground.

  ‘That’ll shut it up,’ declares Mamó, brushing grave soil off her big flat hands.

  ‘Shut what up?’ I ask. I shiver, and she hands me my coat. It’s damp and reeks of fox. I glare at her and do not put it on.

  She sighs, her face impassive.

  ‘I have to know,’ I say, my voice quiet. She looks at me, and even though it’s dark I think she sees.

  She sighs again. As if I were an inconvenient guest. I can sense her brain, working out how to phrase it best to such an idiot.

  ‘Somebody invited something in. They left the door unlocked, to make it easy. Could you feel a signal off the fox?’

  ‘Like heat?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s different things to different people. But what got called, it could decide to come.’

  ‘Does it have a name?’ I wonder, as though it matters. As though a name would put my finger on exactly what it was, and what it did.

  ‘Names are for ordering things,’ she tells me, ‘and this yoke is disordered, cruel and angry. And when you call a thing like that, it bashes through quite strongly. Leaves a hole behind it in its wake. And other weaker things can use that hole to get into the forest. And even though they’re weaker, they aren’t weak at all. Compared to us. There are people in the world who want things, Madeline. And they don’t much care how they get them.’

  ‘I see.’ I do not see, but I want her to go on, at least a little.

  She pauses, and I can see her trying to twist her words into the sort of language that I will understand.

  ‘When you call someone on the telephone for the first time, because
you have not called the number before, you can’t be sure, precisely sure, it’s theirs. There may have been some error. Someone else may pick up. And they may not be who you want at all.’

  She says the word telephone like the way Mam says app, I realise. How old is Mamó?

  ‘And even if you think you’re hearing the right voice, in the end it’s just a voice. There’s no blood or bone to it. It’s nothing you can lay your hands on, touch. I like my help to come from things that I can get a handle on. The other sort of help’s too close to hurt.’

  Listening to her, I’m distracted by how crazy this all sounds. It’s like a story, not like something real. And I don’t like it. I don’t like the way that I believe her. I don’t want this world to be the world. I want the one I know. The one that’s safe. Or safer, anyway.

  ‘Was someone trying to summon something, Mamó?’ I ask.

  She barks a ha at me. As though what I’ve said were thoroughly ridiculous. I shrink a little and she takes a breath.

  ‘The Ask is an invitation, not an order. You wouldn’t last long out here, trying to boss the big fellas around.’

  The trees are very tall, and I am very tired. This is too much, I think. I want my mam.

  ‘Mamó?’ I ask. My voice sounds whiney, thin. ‘Can we go home now?’

  ‘Yes. I think we can.’ I follow her tall back through taller trees.

  The castle is dark and quiet when we get back.

  16

  Hart’s Tongue

  (spleen and fire)

  I follow Mamó back inside her lair and sit on a plump armchair drinking tea. It feels strange that she lives in a place with armchairs and a kettle. A granite countertop, a little stove. It feels as if she should live in the sort of house a hobbit lives in. And always have at least one cauldron on the go. I lean towards her, formulating questions in my brain.

  Before the words come out, she blinks at me, and speaks.

  ‘You did OK tonight. You needed Hart’s tongue, bog butter, basic soil. Those were the ones you missed. You got the rest.’

  She’s speaking like I know what she is talking about. Like I’ve gotten a C+ on a test. I always get at least a B.

  I inhale slowly, push my shoulders back.

  ‘What did we do?’ I ask. ‘I mean, what did it mean?’

  ‘You mean, what did it mean?’ She says this slowly. As though she is being incredibly patient with me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It meant,’ she says, ‘that we were being careful. When you leave the house, you lock the door behind you.’

  ‘You didn’t. Lock the door.’

  She looks at me. ‘My door is always locked. But not with keys.’

  ‘What does that even mean?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t believe in taking stupid risks.’ She takes a long drink from her yellow earthenware mug. It has a star on it.

  I take a breath, and ask a stupid question.

  ‘Was it … magic?’

  Mamó leans back in her seat. ‘I wouldn’t call it that. T’was more insurance. Nothing like the good stuff.’

  ‘So. You can do. Like. Spells and things,’ I say. She inclines her head a little. ‘Are you a witch, Mamó?’ I feel the blood rushing to my cheeks. There’s no way for that question to sound anything but strange, coming out of my mouth. Mamó doesn’t react, her voice is calm. She just continues on.

  ‘I told Brian, when he married that … your mother, that he’d have to be explaining to ye the way things are in the village.’

  ‘And what way is that?’ I ask, ignoring the fact that my lovely, gentle stepfather apparently believes in magic.

  ‘I promised him I wouldn’t say too much. And I am of my word. But, I will say this, be careful. This village is a sort of –’ she scans the room, and settles on the fridge – ‘fridge. And some of us are fridge magnets. And some of us are food.’

  This is not a very informative analogy, but I get the sense that explaining things is not Mamó’s strongest point. She yawns pointedly.

  ‘Do you not have a home to go to, young one?’

  ‘This is my home,’ I point out, wanting more. I want to understand.

  ‘This is my home. It’s just attached to yours, now up the stairs. We’ll speak sometime again.’

  I obey. I don’t know what to think. Dawn is breaking as I venture in. The rooms are dim. I go into the kitchen, grab the salt, and carry it up to my bed beside me.

  Catlin’s waiting for me in my room. Her face is stained, as if she has been crying.

  ‘Madeline!’ she says. As though I had been gone for seven years.

  ‘Catlin?’ I ask. ‘What’s wrong? Are you OK?’

  ‘Ugh. Fine,’ she tells me, wiping at her face. ‘I just got really weird. I felt like you weren’t coming back or something. Like you were being dragged away from me. And then, after you left, I kept thinking about that story in Dad’s book. The one I almost thought of. You know the one I mean.’ She’s looking at me, and I can see the sheen of sweat on her forehead. She absently bites her right index fingernail, peels off a little crescent moon-flake.

  ‘What story, Catlin?’ I ask her, climbing under the covers, wrecked.

  ‘The one I was thinking of before – the forest-devil one. I remember it now.’

  And I remember the stained grey cover and the yellowed pages of Dad’s book, the illustrations black and white and intricate. Mam’s voice stumbling as she read the words.

  ‘I think it was the first thing I ever heard that really frightened me,’ she says, and her voice is low. I close my eyes and picture it, one of us on either side of Mam, listening transfixed. Wanting it to stop, and not to stop.

  Catlin pulls the covers tight around us both.

  ‘Where the woman’s child was sick, and she took a calf and brought it to the middle of the woods and called the devil …?’

  ‘It’s coming back a little …’

  ‘And she killed the calf. And prayed and called the devil again. And when he came, she offered him her soul to save her child.’

  ‘Oh, Catlin,’ I say, remembering. ‘You hated that. The way the child recovered but it didn’t love her any more. It couldn’t. The devil had taken her soul. And so, she wasted. Wasted, and when she died, the devil came for her, and took her straight to hell.’

  ‘It’s a horrible story to have in a book for children.’

  ‘I’m not so sure it was meant for children,’ I say. ‘I mean, it has so many deaths.’

  ‘I remember being so scared.’ Catlin’s voice is quiet. ‘That people could stop loving people. That people could go to hell like that. I think that’s when I started praying, really. As insurance.’

  There’s that word again. Two different places, and two different mouths. Does that mean something?

  ‘Madeline?’ Catlin nudges me.

  ‘You’re not that weird,’ I tell her. ‘Have you seen my massive piles of salt?’

  ‘Did you fix the feeling at the crossroads?’ she asks. I squeeze my eyelids. Don’t know what to tell her.

  ‘I hope we did,’ I say. ‘I hope we did.’

  I stay awake, thinking of the fox’s dead mouth, pink tongue lolling limply. The bright stare of Lon’s eyes upon my sister, the smile of him, the way it feels, a promise and a threat. I picture him smiling and smiling wider and wider, his mouth too big to be a human mouth. There are no wolves, but people can be wolves. I feel afraid of something I don’t yet know.

  Being in the world comes at a price.

  17

  Camomile

  (insomnia)

  I’m sitting beside Oona on the bus, feeling the bump of road under the wheels. This bus is so old and rickety that you can feel the texture of the tarmac, when the road changes from old to new. Oona is fiddling with her hair, twisting the little sticky-out bits at the nape of her neck. It used to be longer, rippling like a river down her back; she cut it off before she moved.

  ‘I needed change,’ she says, and shows me pictures, her look
ing like a mermaid that grew legs, smiling with some friends from her old school. One of the girls is in all the pictures. She’s tall and blonde and healthy-looking. With thick eyebrows. She looks like she could shoot an ad campaign for a perfume called ‘Better than Madeline’.

  ‘Who is that?’ I ask, keeping my voice bright and casual, like a slogan T-shirt.

  Oona’s face is just a little sad. ‘My girlfriend, Claudine. I really miss her.’

  She touches her finger to the screen and leaves a little trickle of moisture along it, rainbowing their faces with a streak. I wonder if she means girlfriend the way the Americans say it, or the real way.

  It’s not the sort of thing I want to ask out loud. Better to play it down. To not use labels. Not to make it a big deal – I mean it isn’t one. There were some kids at our old school who were LGBTQ. No As, as far as I knew. Although sometimes I wondered about myself. The way I felt, when I was kissing guys. It wasn’t special. I don’t know.

  I look at the photo of Claudine again.

  My stomach twists.

  ‘She’s really pretty, Oona,’ I say.

  And Oona smiles. ‘She is.’ And then she sighs the cutest, Frenchest sigh.

  I look at her, and she looks out the window. Oona likes girls, I think. There’s a mixture of relief and fear and something else. Claudine looks like a tool.

  Lon is leaning on the bus stop today, reading an old Penguin paperback of On the Road and rolling a cigarette simultaneously. For effect. He has two cups of takeaway coffee by his feet, to help Catlin stay awake after her ‘rough night’. She thinks it’s sweet. I stomp into the yard, with very malicious eyebrows, leaving Catlin curled into his stupid chest, all whispery. Her head almost against his skinny ribcage. He reads her out a section, and she makes an appreciative noise, as though she hadn’t read the book already, found it boring. Bunch of pricks that prick about in a car.

  We lie to people that we want to like us, so they think that we are more like them. It is a thing. But I don’t have to like it. There’s nothing worth pretending for in Lon. I mean, he is handsome. If you like that sort of gawky, athletic thing. A male model who also plays guitar and won’t stop going on about it. That vibe. Whiff of desperation to be cool off him. Everything about him reeks of prick.