Last night I broke the cold snap and melted the snow. It’s not Lily being back in her bed, but it’s progress: the light trace of cracks appearing on an eggshell before it hatches. This is the one that will pull her out. I’m sure of it.
I try to refine my slapdash methods from last night. This time, I don’t use random objects to represent Earth, Air, Fire and Water. I’m more thoughtful. I pocket small items from the house all evening: a box of fancy-looking hotel-room matches for Fire, some decorative seashells for Water, a quill pen from a museum gift shop for Air. I fill a freezer bag full of thawing soil from the garden. I find a picture of me and Lily in Mum’s shoebox of endless unframed photos. We are eight and she is on holidays with us, her dirty-blonde hair bleached white in the Spanish sun. We are eating ice cream out of a plastic penguin’s head.
At around two I creep into the bathroom and repeat the bath cauldron, throwing rosemary, honey and a bay leaf into the water. I’ll have to buy more ingredients, proper ones, from Divination.
This spell is from the book. It’s called the Sailor’s Loss. It involves taking two ropes of white silk, and knotting them with a sailor’s knot over and over again until you have one long plait. As you tie the knots, you’re supposed to visualize finding a lost item bobbing in the middle of a vast ocean, and then lassoing the lost thing and pulling it closer and closer to you.
I make my spell circle – set up my shells, my matches, my feather, my earth. I’m getting good at this. I just feel a natural understanding of this stuff without having to try very hard. It comes to me like verb conjugations come to Joanne.
Before I begin, I select a few tarot cards that I think represent what I want from the spell. I pick a card that most resembles Lily’s character, and decide on the Page of Cups, a noble young guy who lives half in a dream world. I lay it face up in the middle of the spell circle, and find two friends to join it. The Four of Wands, for homecoming. The Chariot for willpower, focus and mastery.
I start the plait, focusing on the photograph of me and Lily the entire time. The silk is the cord from my dressing gown, cut in half with kitchen scissors. I close my eyes. I visualize.
Lily is lying in the Beg, floating on the water. It feels like early dawn; a mist hovers over the river, pierced by an orange light in the corner of my vision. Her hair is in long mermaid strands around her; her bug eyes are staring at the sky. I am paddling towards her.
I start looping the rope around my head, like a cowboy. I focus in on this action, trying to correctly visualize what the rope would feel like if it were a proper lasso. How heavy it would be.
In the river I am lassoing, but on the bathroom floor I am knotting, knotting, knotting. Staring at the photo. Knotting. Knotting. Knotting.
Back in the Beg, my arms are starting to ache and I’m growing weak. I’m too far away from her. A few times, I throw the rope and it splashes next to her, flecks of water landing on her face. She doesn’t move, doesn’t blink.
C’mon, c’mon, I urge. Get the rope around her. Get it around her.
Why is this so hard? It’s my imagination, after all. I can do whatever I want with it. I could get a drone to fly in and bring Lily right to me. But for some reason I can’t do it. I can’t get the rope around her in a way that feels convincing or real. When I try to force it, my concentration just breaks and I’m too aware of myself. Too aware of being a sixteen-year-old girl on my parents’ bathroom floor.
I push through.
Just make the rope go around her feet, Maeve! It’s not that hard! It’s your fecking brain!
I do it.
The rope loops around her ankle, and I pull her in.
But it doesn’t feel real. The Beg at dawn falls away and it’s a cardboard scenery version of it. The more I pull, the more the reality disappears.
A sound of a car alarm outside. A dog barking somewhere far away.
It’s gone. My concentration is broken, and there’s no room left to knot.
The candle has burned out.
I know the spell hasn’t worked before I even go to bed, but I can’t figure out why. I tie the silken knots around my wrist like a bracelet. Lily and I never went through a friendship bracelet phase, strangely enough. It seemed redundant: we were the only friend the other one had, so making a bracelet seemed beside the point. I wish I had given her one. I think she would have liked it.
Before I drift off to sleep, I remember the Divination shopkeeper again.
“You have to give big to get big.”
I flex my hand, looking at the delicate scar where the keys had cut into my palm. Of course. Blood was the sacrifice that turned an old shower-gel bottle, toiletries and a bathtub of junk into a real spell.
I need to figure out a way to give bigger.
I feel awkward with Fiona in school the next day. Luckily, Fiona is impervious to awkwardness. She plonks herself at the edge of my desk and looks me right in the eye.
“Why didn’t you text me back yesterday?”
“Uh…”
“I tried to invite you over.”
“Sorry, my phone was out of battery.”
“Yeah, I thought that was it. When did it come back on?”
“I don’t know. Eight?”
“But you didn’t text back?”
“I thought the party would have been over.”
“It was, but we still could have…” She breaks off, as if she is presuming too much about our friendship. After all, we haven’t known one another very long.
“I thought that maybe …” I say bashfully, “you wouldn’t want to talk to me.”
“Why?”
“Because of Roe.”
She scrunches her face. “I mean, I know he’s not happy with you at the moment, but it’s, like, a lover’s tiff, right?”
“Did he tell you what the tiff was about?”
“He mentioned the lie,” she says, screwing her mouth to one side. “But as I said to him, how were you to know? I mean, sure, in hindsight, maybe don’t freak out at someone and wish them dead while the Housekeeper is present. Grand. We know that now. But how on earth were you supposed to know that then?”
“I guess,” I say, the beginnings of a smile on a face.
“I mean, imagine if I was held accountable every time I wished Jos would disappear so I didn’t have to babysit him. I’d be in prison, Maeve.”
I laugh. She’s right. Roe is entitled to hate me, but she’s still right.
“Thanks,” I say, laughing. “I’m glad I have you on my side, at least.”
“You’re my friend. I wasn’t going to let him talk shit about you. But I wanted to make sure you were OK, because he seemed pretty depressed.”
“Really?” I say, eagerly.
“Yeah. I mean. He was sound, like, same as he always is, but he didn’t stay long. I kept waiting for you to text me back so we could sort it all out. But you didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” I say lamely. And then I remember the spell.
I grab her arm. “I need to tell you something.”
Her face lights up.
“Not here, though,” I mutter. “Art room? Lunch?”
She nods and rushes back to her seat as class begins.
At lunchtime, I tell her everything. Well, almost. I tell her about the spell that broke the cold snap, the cogs that cut me in the river, the failed spell last night.
“And so, I think, the issue is,” I finish, practically frothing, “I think I have to find a bigger sacrifice? Like, maybe a little bit of blood? I could reopen the old wound? Do you think that might help?”
Fiona looks at me blankly. “You want to cut yourself?”
“What? No! I don’t want to cut myself. I just think, like the lady said, you need to give big to get big, y’know? Sacrifice. It worked when I cut my hand in the river.”
She does her little thinking pose again – the prayer hands in front of her mouth, a little Hollywood ‘namaste’-type gesture she obviously picked up from watching Inside the
Actors Studio. She closes her eyes for a second.
“Maeve. I love you.”
“Oh. OK,” I reply, slightly startled by the response. “I love … you?”
“I love you, and I’m telling you this because … you’re worrying me.”
This was not the response I was expecting. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
She busies herself with a piece of lint on her sleeve, trying to avoid eye contact.
“Fi?”
“I just think you might be putting two and two together and making five.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“The snow melting … like, it probably just melted on its own, Maeve.”
“But… It didn’t.”
“Do you have any proof of that, though?” asks Fiona, with a face like she’s picking a scab off a little too soon.
I think for a moment. “Well, no,” I admit. “But I know it was. I was in the circle and…”
“And the water drops fell on your head. It sounds very cinematic and everything, but…”
“Cinematic?”
“It’s just hard to believe.”
I’m silent. How could she think this? After everything we’ve been through? After everything else she’s been willing to believe, this is where the line is?
“I think if you were there, you would understand,” I plead. “If you cast a spell with me, you would know how it feels. Everything feels … more real, somehow?”
“I don’t think I want to know how it feels. It seems a bit … deluded.”
My eyes sting with hurt. Deluded?
“I don’t understand. You believed the whole thing about the White Lady. All that. But this is too far? The fact that … that there’s real power out there, and we can access it?”
Fiona bites her nails and looks uncomfortable. “I’m sorry! I just don’t believe that a sixteen-year-old girl in her bathroom can control the weather! We’re not in X-Men.”
I start packing up my lunch, throwing my uneaten banana back into my school bag.
“Maeve. Don’t.”
I can’t sit with her right now. I love hanging out with Fiona. But I spent too long stuffing myself down to impress girls at St Bernadette’s. The longer I sit here and listen to her tell me that I’m not capable of magic – real magic – the more I’ll believe it, and the less likely I’ll ever be able to do it again. The epiphany of yesterday, the sense that I could channel the bad parts of myself into good things, is not something I can afford to let go of. Not when Lily feels so close.
“I just want to be alone, OK?” I blurt. “It’s not personal.”
“It is.”
“OK, it is, but I’m not mad at you. You don’t have to believe me. But I have to believe me. It’s the only way I can find a way out of this.”
“OK,” she says reluctantly.
“Friends?” I say.
“Friends,” she agrees. She smiles weakly at me in confirmation. “Just promise me you won’t hurt yourself.”
“I promise.”
And I leave. I leave the art room. I can’t believe it. It’s like something from a play: exit Maeve. The only time I ever leave a room is to storm out of it. But I laid a boundary with Fiona, a clear one, and even if it seems objectively crazy to do so, it feels like the right step. Uncomfortable, but correct.
After school I head down to Divination to ask the shopkeeper about spell ingredients.
“Maeve,” she says pleasantly. “How’r’ya keeping?”
“I’m OK,” I smile back. “I’m actually getting into spells, a little bit.”
“That’s gas! Well done, Maeve. Congrats. Any good ones so far?”
“Well, I think…” I venture this slowly, not wanting to convince another person that I’m insane. “I think I might have helped end the cold snap.”
“Ah, now, was that you?” She smiles, her face weary. “Thanks be to God! I’ve been trying to work on that myself for about a week.”
“Is that what you were doing the other day? When we were last here? I thought I heard you chanting something under your breath.”
“I was.” She nods. “I was working away on a few things, to be honest.”
“Like what?”
“Ah, it’s all a bit complicated. But whenever there’s a shift in energy, there’s always a knock-on effect, you know?”
I remember Sylvia, and how she talked about weights and counterweights in the magical world.
“Like a see-saw,” I say.
“Exactly. Although I think of it more like Jenga. Or dominoes. It’s all just games, stuff knocking other stuff out of the way, or pushing it forward. A bar fight between every known force in the universe, all sliding around Kilbeg. I can feel it in the air.”
“And how is that –” I try to look for the most magical word I know – “manifesting, I guess?”
She fixes her eyes on me, considering her answer. “Well, on sensitives, Maeve Chambers. On sensitives.”
My face must look idiotic and confused, because she starts laughing at my blank expression. “Now, tell me this isn’t the first time you’ve heard that word.”
“Sensitive?” I repeat. “Like, when your feelings get hurt easily. Is that what you mean?”
“Not quite. Being a sensitive is a word we use to talk about people who … well, let’s say they’re tuned into a slightly different frequency. They’re on a higher plane.”
I stare at her, mute.
“I’m not being very clear, am I?” She starts again slowly. “A person who is a sensitive might have a greater natural access to magic. They might come to spells or tarot easier. They might … I don’t know, find that certain magical skills, like telepathy, come to them naturally.”
I stop dead. My mouth is completely dry, and I keep flapping it open and closed. “I … uh … am I a …?”
“A sensitive?” The shopkeeper smiles. “Yes, Maeve Chambers. You’re a sensitive. I knew from the first day you came in.”
“Are there … a lot of us?”
“Hard to say. You’re the first I’ve met in a long, long time, and I tend to run in the kinds of circles where you meet more than average. Most never get to find out. They just spend their whole lives feeling a bit too big for their own skin.”
“Are you … are you one?”
“Me? No. Heaven was, and that didn’t go too well, but I’m just an enthusiast. A good study. A kitchen witch,” she laughs. “A village crone.”
Heaven. Her sister. She’s mentioned her before, I think. The first time I walked into the shop, and she started on about having three “e”s in my name.
“But why me? How?”
She shrugs. “Why brown eyes? Why birthmarks? Accident of fate, I suppose.”
“And are they … we – are we powerful?”
The incense stick to her right burns down, the long string of ash falling to the wooden slat beneath it. She takes a new one from a cardboard box, lighting it with a match.
“Mmm, do you smell that?” she says, closing her eyes. “Night-blooming jasmine.”
“It’s very nice,” I reply, still reeling from this new information. A sensitive. I am a sensitive. I ponder it for a few seconds, inhaling the thick sweet scent that I will for ever associate with this moment.
“In answer to your question, they can become extremely powerful. Not all great sensitives are witches, but all great witches are sensitives. And you, Maeve Chambers –” she gazes at me, her bright blonde hair doing nothing to hide her steely grey eyes – “you could be a very good witch.”
She turns to a selection of pale wooden drawers behind the till, opening and closing them to reveal that they are filled with freshly cut herbs. She smiles when she sees my surprised face.
“From the garden,” she laughs. “You should try growing your own herbs. So satisfying to make it all yourself.”
“Thanks,” I murmur, watching her move through the drawers with a tiny silver pail. “Maybe I’ll try that.”
&nb
sp; She shovels little bits of ingredients into a leather pouch, moving between her fresh herbs and pots of spices that she pinches from. She quickly ties it closed with a drawstring.
“There we are, pet,” she says, placing it on the counter. “Dandelion seeds, rosemary, aniseed and a pinch of chilli for intensity. Help you focus your energy. Hang it over your bed for a full menstrual cycle.”
I must be blushing, because she smiles at me. “Oh, sweetheart, you mustn’t be embarrassed. Our menses is a big part of our casting energy, you know.”
I stuff it into my pocket. “Thanks,” I say, still red. “Any tips on how I can be a good sensitive?”
“The only advice for being a good sensitive is not to be a bad one.”
“What do you mean?”
“A bad sensitive,” she says, “can see where people are at their weakest, and they exploit them for it. They crowbar their way into people’s hearts and minds, put all kinds of ideas in there.”
I immediately think of Aaron. And how from the moment I first met him, I knew he could see the holes in people. Were we alike in some way? Both sensitives?
Roe himself had said it, on the bus home from that CoB meeting: “you guys are two sides of the same coin”.
“Who’s your sister?” I ask. “You said she’s a sensitive, too?”
“Was,” she says.
I nod. I don’t ask any follow-up questions. This woman might feel like my friend, but she is, after all, just trying to run a business.
“I’m sorry. About your sister.”
“That will be three euro fifty, if you don’t mind, pet.”
The air in the room has suddenly shifted, and I feel as though I should probably go.
I pay her, thank her and turn to leave. Then, a brainwave. “Do you remember the snow back in 1990?”
A silence. The shopkeeper starts cutting some sprigs of herbs, as though she hasn’t heard me.
“The snow,” I venture again. “The only other time there was snow in Kilbeg, and no other part of the country.”
More cutting. She opens a drawer and distils plant shards into them. She’s trying to hide her face from me, but I can see her lips moving. “Out, out, out.”
She’s trying to cast me out of the shop. A wave of profound stubbornness comes over me. I clutch the silken bracelet made out of my dressing-gown cord, and start whispering, too.
All Our Hidden Gifts Page 21
