All Our Hidden Gifts

by Caroline O’donoghue

  Beneath the rich girls are the party girls, who get drunk a lot and are always betraying one another. And beneath the party girls are the mid-leagues: that’s where Michelle and Niamh come in. Nice middle-class girls who get invited to most things and do pretty well in school, prone to occasional spots but never acne. This is the crowd I am, thirteen months ago, so desperately trying to join. Everything below that is not worth considering. The nerdy girls have an authority of their own, what with their perfect French plaits and bright futures, but I’ll never be one of them. There are a few arty girls on the fringes, who view St Bernadette’s as a thing to survive so they can resume their real lives. This is how I thought of Fiona until she decided, for some reason, to be my friend. But right now, thirteen months ago, she means almost nothing to me.

  I don’t have the confidence or the ingenuity to have a rich life outside of school. It is Michelle and Niamh, or nothing.

  I need a clique to survive.

  I can feel myself telling Roe this, as he sits in my head like a movie-goer who the usher is continuously interrupting with his flashlight.

  The teachers have instructed us to branch out, and a Secret Santa has been arranged. The teachers insist that the pairings are random, but it’s immediately clear to everyone that this is meant to be a bonding exercise, pairing high with low. Party girls with nerds. Rich, shallow girls with Fiona-types, in the hopes their depth of character will rub off on them.

  I have Tanya Burke. She’s getting a lip gloss set from Boots. Easy. Lily has Michelle. From the moment they’re paired, I am in a state of constant anxiety. I want to protect Lily from Michelle; equally, I want to protect Michelle from Lily.

  Why are you so frightened? It’s just a bloody Christmas present.

  In retrospect, I know that Lily is just trying to make an effort. She knows that I am trying to become proper friends with Michelle. She wants to show Michelle that, even though they’re different, they’re still capable of getting on.

  It’s easy to see Lily’s good intentions in retrospect. But in the moment, watching Michelle unwrap her Secret Santa gift, all I could feel was horror at the invisible line Lily was stepping over.

  Roe can see this. Roe is watching.

  What is this?

  Nothing. Get out. Stop.

  Why is Lily crying?

  Lily, acknowledging Michelle’s fondness for looking at herself, has made Michelle a portrait. She has made Michelle a steampunk vision: her shoulder a giant cog, her school uniform transformed into a Victorian lady’s gown, with buttons up to the collar and down the sleeves. It is an incredible drawing, one of her best, illustrated with her special watercolours.

  “What’s best is that I’m under the ten-euro budget,” she says cheerily, announcing it to the class. “The frame is from Dealz and it was only two.”

  I don’t say anything. I know Michelle thinks the portrait is weird.

  “Er, thanks, Lily,” she says. “It’s really … uh, yeah.”

  Michelle quickly puts the portrait away, and Lily’s face flickers slightly in disappointment. She shrugs it off. She has held up her side of the bargain. She has done Secret Santa.

  Why on earth did you want to be friends with these gowls?

  I don’t know, Roe. I don’t know.

  At lunchtime, Lily comes back to class to find the picture back on her desk. With a word, a word I had once heard someone throw at Jo written on it.

  “Well,” Lily says quietly, “I don’t think they mean a river dyke, do they?”

  But she keeps her cool. She keeps it together. It isn’t until home time, when she walks into the toilets and finds them emptying her school bag into the sink, that the penny really drops.

  “Why are they doing this?” Lily screams at me. “Why do you want to be friends with these … these bitches?”

  The white-hot rage I am so bad at containing bubbles up in me again. I am so sick of her shadowing me. So sick of her destroying my chances of legitimate friendship with girls who could actually do something to improve my miserably unhappy school life. I am sick of being on the bottom rung with Lily. The time for hints is over. I need to send a message, loud and clear.

  Maeve, no.

  I’m sorry, Roe, I’m sorry.

  Michelle and Niamh are watching me, waiting for a response. There’s no use in saying they’re not bitches. They are. The only thing left to do is become one of them.

  And in one fluid motion, I turn on the faucet.

  Lily watches, her mouth gaping in shock. The contents of her entire school bag – her watercolour pencils, her books, her stripy little scarf and hat – are being slowly drenched in cold water. She doesn’t move a muscle.

  Even I know I’ve gone too far. Further than it is possible to find your way back from. I have drenched a lifetime of committed friendship in a school sink.

  “Sorry,” I say lamely, and push past her, linking arms with Niamh and Michelle as I move. She stays in the toilets, watching silently as the water spills over the rim of the sink and onto the floor.

  Now, she can be your downfall, or she can be your start.

  Ladies, meet the Housekeeper card.

  Something changes then. Like a wave washing away a drawing in the sand, fifteen-year-old Lily slowly dissolves and Lily at sixteen comes to replace her. This is a more recent memory. Much, much more recent.

  We are at St Bernadette’s again, a crowd of girls gathered around us. The tarot cards are spread in front of us. Lily’s eyes fill with tears as she stares forlornly at the Housekeeper.

  Oh no oh no oh no…

  Is this it? Is this the reading?

  “Tell me, Maeve. I’m not too much of a baby to know.”

  “I don’t know what it means.”

  Fiona is next to me making soothing noises, trying to defuse the situation. But it’s useless. No one watching wants this moment to end. It’s the ultimate in mid-afternoon entertainment: two ex-best friends spitting venom at each other over a stupid card game.

  “This is so like you. This is so Maeve.”

  “Lily. Stop. I genuinely don’t know what it means, OK?”

  “You’ll do anything for a bit of attention, won’t you, Maeve? But then, when all eyes are on you, you’ve got nothing to back it up.”

  “I can’t believe we were ever friends,” Lily says. “You’re not a good friend, Maeve.”

  Oh God. It’s coming. It’s coming. Roe. I’m sorry.

  “I wish I had never been friends with you,” I reply, my teeth bared. “Lily, I wish you would just disappear.”

  I feel for Roe in my head, searching for his presence.

  Where are you? Talk to me. Please.

  I open my eyes and I’m back in the hedge, my hair caked in dirt. I look around, groping for a hand to help me up.

  But there’s none. Roe is gone.

  I scramble out just in time to catch the back of him crossing the football pitch and eventually, he disappears.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I CALL HIM AND CALL HIM, AND HE DOESN’T ANSWER. Eventually, he WhatsApps.

  Stop calling, he writes.

  I just want to explain what happened

  A brief pause.

  I saw what happened.

  The familiar bubbles of typing and stopping, stopping and typing. After a while he gives up.

  I’m sorry, I write.

  You let me believe that Lily summoned the Housekeeper. But YOU did.

  I am about to tap out my response, but his next message comes too quickly.

  You WISHED she would just disappear? And you didn’t think that was relevant information?

  I know I should think carefully about what I say next, but the panic is too strong. I type and type, sending long essay-length texts full of guilt and bargaining and misery. I stipulate over and over how we still don’t know what summons the Housekeeper, that it could have been both of us, or the concentrated energy of all the girls in the room. That these were all just theories, really, and w
e didn’t have any actual proof that the Housekeeper existed at all.

  Another silence.

  I just want to be alone right now.

  I write and delete a million messages to him over the course of the evening. Do you still want to go out? And, Am I still invited to your gig on Saturday? And, most pathetically of all, Do you still like me?

  Thankfully, I have enough self-preservation not to send them.

  There’s something on the radio about global warming and gulf streams and fish migration patterns. A scientist is explaining to Alan Maguire about a warm current coming up from Brazil, and Alan Maguire is reading messages from listeners about how, in the good old days, everyone would go skating when the river froze over. Why hasn’t the river frozen over?

  Joanne is in for the evening. She hasn’t been around much, lately. Her romance with Sarra is in full swing again, and she’s spending every other night at hers. I have a feeling she’s going to move out, and I’ll be alone with Mum and Dad again. Alone for, at the very least, another two years. Who am I kidding? It’s only two years if I go to a college in a different county, and at the moment it’s difficult to imagine me getting accepted into any college at all. I wince thinking about Mum getting me into the local university, or using her pull to get me a job in the bookshop.

  “Hey, stranger,” Jo says as I descend the stairs. She’s baking again. A kind of oaty, honey biscuit that’s great dipped in tea. “Haven’t seen a lot of you lately.”

  “Yeah,” I shrug. I can feel the three of them being cautiously optimistic about how much I’ve been out of the house lately. They still talk about me like they suspect I’m deaf. It’s good she’s keeping busy, etc., etc.

  “A little birdy told me they saw you kissing someone.”

  “What? When?”

  “One of the girls asked if my sister had a boyfriend. I said not that I knew of…”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Well? What’s his name?”

  I say nothing, and focus instead on dabbing my finger in the flour on the countertop.

  “All right,” Jo says, a smug smile in her voice. “You’re lucky you’re straight, y’know. It’s all so simple. Girl meets boy. No one has to come out as straight.”

  “Sure,” I say bleakly. “Lucky me.”

  “I remember,” she chuckles, laying down a baking sheet, “getting off with boys and just desperately trying to like it. I flung myself at them, imagining these great romances, to get away from the fact that I was completely gaybones.”

  Oh God. That’s not what Roe has been doing all along, is it?

  “What are you trying to say, Jo?”

  “What?”

  “That I’m just someone’s pretend girlfriend, I suppose.”

  “That is not even slightly what I was saying.”

  “God, I’m just so sick of it,” I say, my voice suddenly loud and cracked. “I’m sick of being everyone’s third choice.”

  “Maeve, you need to calm down and tell me what the hell you’re talking about.”

  She tries to meet my eye, but I can’t let her see how shiny they are.

  “I’m taking the dog for a walk,” I announce. “Tutu? Where’s Tutu?”

  I find him on Pat’s bed, his head buried under a pillow. He’s already had his walk today, and is enjoying his evening ritual of ignoring us all until my dad comes home.

  “Come on,” I say, and he trots amiably after me. I fasten his lead and take him out, hoping that Roe will be hanging around the underpass again.

  He isn’t.

  After a solid twenty minutes of staring at my phone waiting for Roe to text, I start throwing a stick for Tutu. He fetches it dutifully, a bit too old to be excited by the game. I nestle his big blond head between my hands and call him a very good boy, as though I can compliment myself out of my own problem. We got him when I was eight, after my cat Tom died. My imagination wasn’t great then, either. We named the dog Tom Two, which eventually became Tutu.

  We were always a cat family before Tutu. There was the other cat, the one that ran away before I was born. I’ve seen pictures of him. A fat black scoundrel who once ruined Christmas by climbing up on the kitchen counter, eating the turkey, and getting explosive diarrhoea on said turkey. I wasn’t there for any of this, of course. But I’ve heard the story so many times I might as well have been.

  Tutu is snuffling around in the snow, a little bored of it already. We all are, at this stage.

  I throw the stick for Tutu. It ends up in the river, and he barks at it floating on a nest of green algae.

  “Oh God, you don’t want me to fish it out for you, do you?”

  He barks.

  “Fine. I suppose I don’t have the luxury of pissing you off, too.”

  I lean on the water’s edge and pluck the stick out. It’s disconcerting how warm it is. Tutu gazes into the water with me, and for a moment, our reflection – him with his puzzled expression, me with my long woolly hair falling over my face – is frightening. I keep gazing, even as Tutu loses interest and wanders away. And then it hits me.

  The dog. The hair.

  I look like her.

  The Housekeeper.

  I think about all the things I’ve done today. I lied to Roe. I’ve shown him the ugliest side of myself. I’ve suspected Fiona of trying to steal him away from me, as though he were a piece of property. I’ve yelled at my sister for no reason at all. And why? Because I was scared. Because I was insecure. Because I felt like a girl who no one could possibly love, and I acted like a girl who no one would want to.

  What if I didn’t just summon the Housekeeper because I was angry at Lily? What if the Housekeeper was alive inside of me, all the time? What if the nastiest, darkest parts of me fuelled the Housekeeper?

  What if the Housekeeper is me?

  The concept comes into view like the appearance of a single star into daylight.

  I dip my hand into the water again. Green algae spools around me. I push the sleeve of my coat up further so it bunches around my elbow. I lower my arm all the way, like I am reaching into the chest cavity of a giant.

  I reach in, looking to tickle the base of the river. To find its beating heart.

  I don’t find the soft, squishy dense organs, though. Or slippery, tangled weeds. The thing my hand settles on while groping in the wet infinite darkness is hard. Metal. Jagged.

  I feel around, my fingers caking in silt. Yes. Metal things. Loads of them.

  Small metal objects.

  Keys? Are there … keys down here?

  I clasp a handful and pull out my arm, and whatever I’m holding slices through my skin. Easy, soft, quiet, like a steak knife through a beanbag.

  “Jesus!” I scream, yanking my hand out and cowering over it, dragging my closed fist towards my belly. Tutu bounds over, demanding to see my hand, intrigued by the blood and river water trickling down my arm. I shout at him to go away, more out of instinct than anything else. A small, rodent-like urge to be both frightened and private.

  He backs away, hurt, and goes back to examining the snow. Slowly, I open my palm to try to examine the keys that have cut through me so easily.

  But they’re not keys. Or, at least, not the kind of keys I was expecting: these are the big brass things used to wind up old toys, shiny and yellow like they’ve just fallen off a factory line. There are two in my hand, along with an assortment of rusted cogs of different sizes. A world of drawings and games and tiny little promises, all in the palm of my hand.

  I look from my hand to the river, and wonder how much blood I lost in the exchange.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I BANDAGE MY HAND ALONE IN THE UPSTAIRS BATHROOM, spraying it with antiseptic from the first-aid kit that has been sitting on the top of Mum’s wardrobe for donkey’s years. The cogs go in an old jewellery box. The keys are in my hoodie pocket.

  In my bookcase there’s a collection of old refill pads and exercise books that Mum is always trying to get me to throw out. She says I sho
uld make more room for real books. To which I answer: “Mum, what books?” I haven’t read a novel since the second Harry Potter, when I decided that Ginny was too annoying and that I couldn’t stomach reading about her any further.

  Lily always told me that there isn’t that much of Ginny in the subsequent books, but I never bothered regardless. Instead, I keep the bookcase as a shrine to memory. Here are the jotters where me and Lily drew maps and plans and rules for new civilizations. There are worlds within worlds in here, false fantasy universes that reflected whatever phase we were going through.

  I flick through one pad, from the year we both turned eleven. It was a design for a water world. A dirty, scuzzy sort of landscape where everything is pond scum and emerald-green with algae. There are tadpoles and frogspawn, trout and mackerel. Mullet, the worst fish of all, because, according to everyone, they feed on human waste.

  And there, in writing drawn to look like it’s dripping out of a tap, Lily has written one sentence:

  NOBODY SWIMS, NOBODY DROWNS.

  I didn’t know what it means. I still don’t. But the drawings of frogspawn make my teeth clench. I stare at the cuts on my hand.

  Did Lily send me the cogs and keys?

  Or is she attacking me with them?

  The cut on my hand begins at the base of my ring finger, where the skin goes soft and padded like a snake’s belly. It jags across one of my palm lines, my life or my wisdom, I don’t know which. Flexing my fingers back and forth, I can feel the skin stretching and peeling, stinging painfully. A giant, bloody sign from Lily. A big Suck on this, Maeve.

  Painful as it is, this is better, somehow. Better to be in some kind of dialogue with Lily than to have nothing at all.

  At nine, the power goes out. Each of us are in our bedrooms. We mosey out onto the landing to see what’s happened. Dad stands on a chair with a flashlight to flick the fuse button, but it doesn’t work.