“Mmm, no.”
“Well, good, because they’re all so old.”
“It’s the second one.”
“Huh?”
“He’s been brilliant the whole time. You have been, too, but you were so afraid of anyone who was being themselves that you were afraid of seeing it. Once you gave up on being the same as everyone, you were able to see the advantages of being different.”
“Shut up. What are you drawing?”
“A duck.”
“Show me.”
And she would show me the duck, but the duck, importantly, would have one thing wrong with it: a mechanical beak, or a turn-key on its back. A half-robot duck.
I open my eyes, and it’s just the river again. Filthy and strange and always, always there.
“Come back,” I whisper. “Please, please, please come back.”
That night I dream about the Housekeeper again, but she’s not at the underpass this time. She’s at a different point in the city, where the river is narrower. A shopping trolley has been tipped over, sunlight glinting off its metal body. It is spring. The Housekeeper’s hair covers her face, and she is standing on the other side of the riverbank, pointing at something. I follow her finger.
Halfway between us, floating in the river, there is a shoe. A black suede ballet flat, to be precise, turned greenish by the water. But it’s not sinking, like the shopping trolley. It’s floating. Coasting along like a tiny, stylish boat. The familiar feeling of river water in my guts rises up again.
I wake up, sure I’m going to vomit. I breathe heavily, trying to control the hot surge of spit that is pooling around my jaw. I breathe and swallow, breathe and swallow. I go back to sleep but wake up again just after 5 a.m., the air so cold that I have to get another thick, fleece blanket from the hot press. I check my phone briefly as I get back into bed. There’s a message from Roe.
I had a dream about the Housekeeper. She has Lily’s shoe.
The message was sent at 4.55. Only a few minutes ago.
I had the same dream. Was the shoe floating?
Yes.
What do you think it means?
Bubbles appear, and Roe is “typing” for a long time. Then they disappear again. By the time my phone buzzes with his response, I’m expecting an essay.
I think it means Lily is alive.
The next day Fiona comes into school triumphant, a piece of notepaper wedged inside her homework journal. She grabs me just before registration starts.
“Toilets,” she says. “Now.”
We sit huddled together on an exposed pipe that almost burns our legs. Fiona opens her journal.
“My mum managed to remember the full first verse.”
“That’s amazing!”
“Sure, but I also had to hear about how she met Neil Young in 1994.”
“A worthy sacrifice!”
“Thank you.”
We pore over the page together.
She appears in rare readings / and only to young women,
And only in times of crisis / new truths shuffled into focus.
I dealt her from the deck / two times that same week,
A woman with blood on her wedding gown /
and a knife between her teeth.
Ladies, meet the Housekeeper card.
Now, she can be your downfall, or she can be your start,
And she only wants the best for you, like she never
got for herself.
She sees you at the bottom and she’s coming down to help.
“Oh my God. And did she say anything else about it?”
“She said she learned it off a band they were opening for, and that band were, like, an Irish-American country rock band.”
“What does that mean?”
“I think it means that they did sped-up covers of ‘The Fields of Athenry’.”
“Of course.”
“But that made me think about what Aunt Sylvia said about every culture having its own White Lady. Maybe the Housekeeper is an Irish form of that.”
“Like an Irish folklore thing?”
“Yeah. Think about it. Irish people immigrate with this story about a deadly witch demon, country musicians turn it into a song about tarot cards, someone makes the tarot cards, the cards make their way back to Ireland. And to you, in the Chokey. It is, to quote a certain mother who loves to repeat herself, all part of the cultural exchange.”
“You know, you’re very hard on your mum, considering she’s objectively the coolest mother I’ve ever met.”
Fiona cocks an eyebrow. “You know, you’re very hard on Joanne, considering she’s the coolest sister in the world.”
“I take your point.”
“Thank you.”
We hear people shuffling into their seats and the sound of Miss Harris’s voice. We get off the pipe and dash into the classroom, the lyrics wedged firmly back in Fiona’s journal.
She nods and waits for us to take our seats before she starts talking.
“Girls, I’m sure it won’t have escaped your notice that the weather has been … bizarre lately.”
She purses her lips as thirty girls lean forward in silent, desperate attention.
“We’ve heard this morning that there is forecasted to be black ice on the roads by this afternoon, and many of the bus routes will be closed. In the interests of your safety and your transport …”
You could hear a mouse’s fart in this room, it’s so quiet.
“… all schools have been instructed to close.”
The class descends into giddy chaos. Books are flung into bags and high, hyper laughter envelops us. Fiona throws her arms around me in victory.
“A day off! A DAY OFF! On a flipping WEDNESDAY.”
She does a little victory dance.
“AND tomorrow too, maybe, if it keeps up! If the black ice lasts, we won’t be able to get INTO school, not to mind out of it.”
People are texting their boyfriends at St Anthony’s, trying to arrange a meet-up. I hear one girl arguing with her boy about whose house they’re going to go to, and whose parents get home from work the latest.
A red flush climbs into my face as I listen and suddenly remember that I now have someone to meet up with. I have a boyfriend. Or I think I have a boyfriend. We didn’t actually discuss it.
Fiona nudges me. “Let’s see what Roe’s up to. We can show him these Housekeeper lyrics.”
She sees my red face and her eyes go wide. “Oh my God! Did something finally happen?”
“It … did.”
“Holy crap! What a day! Tell me everything!”
I tell her everything, and half an hour later, we’re all sitting in Bridey’s drinking milky tea and eating too-sour apple tart. It feels weird to be eating apple tart at 10 a.m. Weirder still to be sitting opposite the boy whose tongue was in my mouth twelve hours previous, and who also happens to be having the same dreams as me.
“She’s alive,” Roe says flatly. “I know she is. It’s the way the shoe was pointing, the way it was just sailing down the river. It was like it knew where it was going. Lily’s alive.”
“Not that I don’t believe in … uh, the inherent value of dreams,” Fiona says politely. “But what are we supposed to do now?”
“We’ve got the dreams. We’ve got the song,” Roe says, practically. “I feel like we need someone who can … I don’t know, interpret them.”
“Sylvia’s out,” Fiona grumbles. “I got a big lecture over dinner last night about how I put too much pressure on her, and how it’s not good to turn to the occult when you’re feeling desperate. Sylvia says it makes people do crazy things.”
“People, or me?” Roe asks.
“You, I suppose.”
“Everyone wants to be protective of the little boy with the missing sister,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I’m not even allowed to mention the river to my mum.”
The river again. I remember my project from primary school, where I made a map of the different ports
of the Beg river: what they were used for over the years; where the grain was shipped out of Ireland during the famine, where people boarded ships to America… Coffin ships, they were called. You either made it to America or you died on the way, and often you were so illiterate that you weren’t even able to write to tell your family which it was.
Then, something clicks.
“We’ll say it’s for a school project.”
They consider it.
“Sylvia won’t buy that,” Fiona says. “She’s onto us already.”
“No, someone else. She can’t be the only one who knows about supernatural stuff. And really, it’s more of a folklore question than a magic question.”
“Who then?” Roe asks, and I see him fiddling with the string around his neck. I can’t help smiling every time I see it.
I know exactly who.
We practise our story, making sure we don’t sound like desperate teenagers. Which, of course, we are.
The door of Divination has a bell on a red ribbon attached to it, and it tinkles lightly as the three of us enter the shop. The woman in the balloon pants is there again.
“Maeve Chambers!” she says, and I’m slightly unnerved by how instantly she recognizes me.
“Hello!” I say cheerily. “I didn’t think you’d remember me.”
She looks from me to Roe and back again, smiling softly.
“Of course I remember you. You have three ‘e’s in your name.”
“Right. Well, my friend Fiona is doing a project on folklore and I thought you might be a useful person to speak to.”
“Well, of course. Fiona, I take it?”
She gestures to Fi, who already has her refill pad and a pen out.
“Hi,” she says sheepishly. “I’m doing a project on shared mythologies. Like why some cultures have shared folklore. Like hellhounds. Do you know, everyone has hellhounds?”
“Sure look it,” chuckles the shopkeeper. “Dogs are trained to be so vicious in so many parts of the world. People are scared of them.”
“Right.” Fiona smiles. “I wanted to know what you knew about this.”
She passes the lyrics to “The Housekeeper Card” across to her. “I think it has an interesting parallel to the White Lady myth, don’t you?”
The shopkeeper studies it in silence.
“The Housekeeper,” she says slowly.
“Do you know her?”
“I haven’t seen her in a good while,” she says, her voice low.
“The song?”
“No, I’ve never heard of the song. But the Housekeeper, I’m … aware of. How did you find out about her, Maeve?”
The three of us look sharply to one another. This is supposed to be Fiona’s school project.
“I heard about it from my mother,” Fiona says, deflecting from me. “She’s a musician, and it’s a song she sings around the house.”
“I see,” the shopkeeper says warily. “Well, what do you want to know?”
“Where she came from,” I push. “What she is.”
The shopkeeper frowns, and then straightens. “It’s an old Irish legend. Have you done the ‘Big House’ in History yet?”
Roe, Fiona and I all make vague noises. The shopkeeper looks disappointed by our lack of knowledge.
“Back in the old days, the ‘Big House’ was what you’d call … well, a big house. A rich house where the wealthy English would swan about and the Irish would serve them. Some houses were all right, paid their workers fairly and all that, but some were rancid. Absolute devils. Whippings, docking wages. Inhumane cruelty.”
“Why did people work there, then?”
“Sure, there was so little work around that you were to count yourself lucky if you got into a Big House. It was either that or emigrate.”
“So … the Housekeeper worked there?”
“Well, I believe there was some story, some kind of disease outbreak, tuberculosis maybe. Children going down like flies. A group of female servants, mothers, pleaded with their employers to send for the doctor and … well, they didn’t. And the children died. The mothers were so bereft that they didn’t come to work. But do you know who did?”
“The Housekeeper,” I whisper.
“The Housekeeper. A woman, or something that looks like a woman, shows up for work. The next day, the house is empty. All the gentry are gone.”
“Where was this?” Roe asks, with scrutiny. “When was this?”
“It’s a folk story,” she answers simply. “It could have happened a hundred years ago, or two hundred, or never at all.”
We’re all silent, in total awe. Fiona pipes up.
“So was this a common thing? Did people like … call on her?”
“Well,” she says again, crossing her arms and thinking hard. “This was still an Ireland that believed in fairies, you know? There was a lot of space for magic and belief. So I imagine there was a summoning practice around it, but it would have been understood to be black magic. The price would have been high.”
“What does that mean?”
“Magic like that, you have to give big to get big,” she says, sucking her teeth.
“You mean like … a life for a life?” Roe asks.
“That’s a bit of a simplification, but something like that, probably. In almost all magic the sacrifice has to match the gain. That’s why people give food at temples. It’s not because they think the spirit is actually eating it. It’s because you need to show that you’re willing to make the sacrifice.”
“Could someone summon the Housekeeper again?” Fiona presses. “By accident, even?”
The shopkeeper cocks her eyebrow. “I thought this was for a school project.”
“It is.”
“Hmmm,” she says absently. “I need to sort some of the books out now, but you three feel free to look around.”
She says it quietly but firmly, as though this were not the first time that three teenagers came into her shop asking about revenge demons.
We look around. Roe gravitates towards the crystals, Fiona to the tarot, and I end up looking at the books next to her. I watch Fi for a moment, testing the weight of the cards in her hands, trying to tell which feels right. It might be cool if she starts reading tarot, too. Something that we could do together, to make it fun again.
I pull a book out at random. The Beginner’s Guide to Spellcraft by Alwyn Prair-Felten.
“Made-up name,” Fiona says derisively, glancing over.
I flick through the waxy pages. It doesn’t look particularly inspired. It’s not a dusty tome with pentagrams and incantations. It is, however, very effusive about how “anyone” can do witchcraft, and it’s only a tenner, so I buy it.
Here are some incantations I use, Alwyn Prair-Felten writes. But using another witch’s chants can feel a little like wearing another person’s underwear. Chant what you want, just make sure that both a) you mean it and b) it’s simple and memorable enough that you can say it over and over. Chants are very do-it-yourself. All magic is.
As the shopkeeper is sliding my book into a paper bag, Fiona gets a phone call from her mum.
“School has been cancelled tomorrow?” Fiona squeals, covering the mouthpiece briefly. Roe and I high-five her quietly.
“Mum, no. It’s a snow day. Basically, a public holiday. I don’t see why that means I have to mind Jos. He goes to creche, for God’s sake!”
A silence as Fiona dutifully listens to her mother.
“I know, I know, I know. But she was going to pay for it anyway, regardless of whether I had the day off…”
Her expression turns grim. It’s clear her mum is lecturing her, and she turns around to take the call outside.
The shopkeeper is gazing at the snow falling thinly outside like shredded tea leaves. Her left hand is fiddling at the gold studs in her ears and she’s murmuring something softly to herself. She seems to have completely forgotten I’m standing in front of her, my receipt still between her thumb and forefinger.
&
nbsp; “Snow to rain, and rain to river;
We won’t be fooled again. River to sea; and sea to sky;
What’s now will not be then.”
“Sorry?” I ask, leaning closer. Her voice is barely above a whisper.
“Sky to snow and snow to rain;
As bud is leaf and bough.
Rain to river and river to sea;
What was then will not be now.”
Fiona crashes back into the shop, muttering angrily.
“Hey,” Roe pipes up. “We ready to go?”
“I just want to buy these.” Fiona lays some tarot cards on the table. “Look, Game of Thrones tarot. Arya Stark is the Death card.”
The shopkeeper turns her head towards Fiona and smiles. She takes the tarot, bags them and then pops a stick of incense into her bag because she’s a “new customer”.
I look from Fi to the shopkeeper and back again. Did anyone else hear her chanting? Did I imagine it?
“What was then will not be now.”
“I can’t believe my mum,” Fiona rages. “The second she hears I have some time off, she thinks: free babysitter. It’s like she doesn’t even care that I get straight As and do theatre and look after Jos most afternoons already. I never get to relax. It’s so unfair.”
This is the most like a stroppy teenager Fiona has ever sounded, and it’s thrilling to witness.
“I mean, Jos seems pretty self-sufficient,” I offer. “You can just plop him in front of cartoons. And you’re so good with him, y’know?”
“I don’t want to look after people, OK?” she storms. “I don’t want to be a doctor or a nurse or a babysitter or a … fucking – I don’t know – a live-in carer for the elderly.”
“OK, Fi,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “I didn’t say you had to be.”
“No, you didn’t,” she says, folding her arms and sighing softly. “You didn’t.”
Roe and I look at each other, and it’s clear he doesn’t know what’s going on either.
“Are you OK?”
“It’s just, that’s what good little Filipino girls are supposed to do, isn’t it? Become a nurse. Watch other people’s kids.”
I bite my lip. “Sorry,” I say, searching for something useful to say. I realize that there is nothing useful I can offer, so I just opt for the plainest expression of truth I can find. “I don’t know what that’s like, Fi.”
All Our Hidden Gifts Page 17
