All Our Hidden Gifts

by Caroline O’donoghue

  Harriet summoned the Housekeeper in 1990. Harriet’s conjuring brought about the 1990 cold snap and the runaway cats; mine brought the snow, the rainbow trout, the surge in public aggression. Harriet was a sensitive, too. Maybe even a witch. Two sensitives, thirty years apart.

  Harriet must have done something to end it. And Ireland got divorce eventually: not for five years, but it happened.

  I can’t wait for Lily for five years, though. I need her now. Or, at the very least, by the new moon on Saturday night.

  I put the jewellery boxes full of memories back together, carefully slipping Harriet’s one into my school bag.

  I finish cleaning the car as quickly as I can, then bring the buckets back to the basement. This changes everything, I keep thinking, sometimes whispering it out loud. “This changes everything.”

  Even as I’m making my way out of the basement, I have one hand on my phone, googling Harriet Evans. Maybe she’s on Facebook. If she was seventeen in 1990, how old is she now? Forty-seven? Definitely on Facebook, then.

  My blood is bubbling with excitement. Maybe she still lives in the area. Maybe I could walk right into her living room and ask her how to lift the curse. I start searching the Facebook app for Harriet Evans. My heart sinks. There are thousands. I’ll have to enlist Roe and Fi to help me message them, but we could do it. Then, there’s always the possibility that Harriet got married and changed her name. Suddenly, the job doesn’t seem so simple.

  With my head still in my phone, I end up colliding right into Sister Assumpta, leaving her office.

  “Oh,” I say. “Sorry, Sister. I didn’t see you.”

  She blinks at me behind her owl glasses, her pupils huge, her skin puckered and thin, like wet tissue. Intellectually, I know that no one is born old. But looking at Sister Assumpta, I find it impossible to imagine her as anything other than the doddering old founder, keeping herself busy at the school because she has nothing else to do. I remember the newspaper clippings: I force myself to confront the fact that Sister isn’t just a cardboard cut-out of a person, but a real person. A person who knows Harriet Evans.

  “Sister,” I say, as respectfully as I can. “Would you mind if I asked you something?”

  “Skirt lengths must fall no higher than one inch above the knee,” she says sharply. “And strictly no trousers. I don’t care how many signed petitions you have.”

  We’ve had optional trousers as part of the school uniform for about four years, but I don’t correct her. No one wears them, anyway.

  “No Sister, I have no problem with the uniform. I was wondering if I could ask you about a former pupil.”

  Her face softens. “I always knew Anthea Jackson would win the Olivier for Streetcar.”

  “No, Sister, not Anthea Jackson. I’m talking about someone else. A non-famous pupil. I was wondering if you remembered a Harriet Evans.”

  The old nun stares at me, her eyes glistening. It’s hard to tell if this is emotion, because her eyes are always a little wet. We are, for a moment, in a silent stare-off. The deeper I look into her big swimming pool eyes, the more I notice a glimmer of something. A pale white that could be a shadow, a ghost, or a cataract.

  Slowly, she begins to speak.

  “How do you know about Harry?”

  There’s no way of answering this truthfully without admitting that I was snooping in Sister Assumpta’s car.

  “I’m looking to do a project,” I say quickly. “About the legalization of divorce. I thought she might be a good person to ask?”

  “Harry wrote an essay,” she says fondly. “They sent her to America to read it.”

  “Yes,” I urge. “I’ve heard. Maybe you could dig out the essay. Or, maybe you could give me her phone number?”

  Sister’s face screws up in confusion. She looks like she has just eaten a bad grape.

  “No,” she says, then looks at me as if she’s just seen me for the first time. “Harriet’s not with us any more.”

  “No, I know that Sister, she graduated a long time ago, but…”

  Sister Assumpta shakes her head again.

  “She died.”

  Silence.

  “What?”

  “She died,” Sister repeats, her voice cracking. “She died, and that gurrier father of hers, that lout – he didn’t even come to our memorial service. The poor mother shows up with both her eyes black. The little sister, Fionnuala Evans bawling her eyes out. I ask you. I ask you.”

  She takes a long inward breath, and closes her eyes.

  “Mind, he didn’t last long either. He was dead a fortnight later. Fell in the river drunk, and good riddance.”

  I am certain that Sister Assumpta is about to start crying, and I wonder whether I should hug her.

  She’s fidgeting, her right hand fumbling in her skirt pocket. She starts pulling at something, her fingers rotating and moving within the material. Her eyes are still closed. She starts to murmur softly.

  Oh my God, what is she doing?

  I see a brown, beaded string hanging out of her clothes. Rosary beads. Oh, thank God for that.

  “Sister?”

  But she doesn’t hear me, she just moves her fingers up the beads. She is saying a decade of the rosary. I wonder if this is my cue to leave. But I know that this chance might not come again. How often do you get Sister Assumpta alone, with no one else around?

  Instead, I wait.

  She opens her eyes. I know I need to tread carefully. That Sister Assumpta is not the kind of person you can ask direct questions.

  “Do you pray for her, Sister?”

  She nods slowly. “I do,” she says. “I try.”

  Then, a long sigh. “I don’t know if it will do much good.”

  “Why is that?”

  “People like Harry don’t get to be with the Lord.”

  What?

  “What do you mean by that, Sister?”

  “They don’t get to be with the Lord,” she repeats. “So I pray. I pray for Harry. I pray that she gets to be with Him.”

  “Who?” I ask instinctively, and then almost slap myself. Him. God.

  She turns away from me, either bored or upset by the conversation. She puts a hand on the handle of her office door.

  “I think He will forgive her,” she concludes. “The God I know forgives.”

  And she hobbles back into her lemon-walled office, and closes the door.

  I wander to the bus and get the 5.15, hoping that Roe won’t be on it. I need to process this on my own, without the pressure of performing the information for him. So much of being around him is such a fog now. I’m glad we’re friends, but there’s an awkwardness with just the two of us. We’re a Scooby Doo gang now, and I’m Velma to Fiona’s Daphne.

  “They don’t get to be with the Lord. So I pray. I pray for Harry. I pray that she gets to be with Him.”

  I hold on to my knees, a wave of nausea sweeping through me. Did Sister Assumpta mean witches? Sensitives?

  Either?

  Both?

  Am I also barred from heaven for practising witchcraft, or is this just the suspicious ramblings of a deeply religious old woman?

  I look through Harriet’s news clippings again, feeling a little guilty for having stolen them. I’ll just photocopy them on Dad’s scanner, and bring them right back. I start writing down everything in my refill pad, trying to get everything straight in my head. I don’t want to risk forgetting anything that Sister Assumpta has told me. I draw it out, like a flow chart quiz at the back of a magazine.

  Harriet was a divorce activist, and the reason she was a divorce activist was because her father was beating her mother. She went to America, bought a (“haunted???” I write) tarot deck, and probably summoned the Housekeeper to bring justice to her dad. She threw the whole city out of whack, making the snow fall, making the cats run away. Then she died. And her father died quickly afterwards.

  Life for a life: it’s straightforward black magic, isn’t it? Give big to get big.

/>   But how does that apply to me and Lily? I never wanted Lily to die. I just wanted her to go away, and even then, it was just a split second of idiocy, not a lifelong grudge match. If Harriet had died, why hadn’t I? Did that come later? If we got Lily back, would the Housekeeper take me instead?

  No. No, that didn’t make any sense. Especially as Harriet’s father died after Harriet did.

  I google, Harriet Evans death, 1990, and find one listing on RIP.ie. My dad checks it every day. He has that Irish obsession with death, seeing it as a weird Duck, Duck, Goose game that he has managed to stay duck on. “Nora!” he’ll yell across the house, “you’ll never guess who died!”

  There’s one entry for Harriet, but it doesn’t give much detail. A seventeen-year-old who was tragically taken too soon, blah, blah, blah. The family requests that you do not send flowers. The service will be family only, but the school will be holding a memorial Mass.

  That’s it. That’s all there is on Harriet’s death. No cause, no explanation. Just that she was taken too soon.

  My head is so buried in my phone that I don’t look up until I’m almost at the front door and realize there’s a Garda car in the driveway. My stomach turns to ice. What now?

  I wait outside the house for a moment, trying to calm myself with long, concentrated breaths. They’re probably just here to get a statement from me about the cabaret gig last week. Maybe Detective Griffin had second thoughts; maybe she wants to question me about Children of Brigid. Well, if that’s the case, then fine. I will gladly tell her everything I know about Aaron. In fact, it’s good that he’s being investigated. Finally, an end to this nonsense.

  But what if it’s not about that? What if it’s Lily? What if she’s turned up dead, floating in the Beg with her lips blue? And in that case, why would the Gardaí be at my house, and not Roe’s?

  I stick my keys in the door and hear a sound from the living room. Animal, guttural, feral.

  I cock my ear.

  It’s my mother.

  It’s my mother and she is crying.

  I rush in and everyone’s there: my mum, my dad, Joanne and two police officers. And one other person, a person it takes me a second to recognize at first, partly because I don’t know her very well, and partly because she is covered in blood. Sarra.

  Jo, I realize, is purple in one eye, her irises dyed cranberry. Someone has hit her. Someone has hit them both.

  “Maeve –” my dad stands up – “Maeve, I think you should go to your room.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Darling, I think it’s best if you…”

  “What HAPPENED?” I shout. “Jo, what happened to you?”

  Jo looks at me mutely, utter despair in her eyes.

  “Maeve,” Detective Griffin says, as softly as she can manage, “I’m so sorry that we keep … meeting like this.”

  “Tell me what happened,” I say, panic rising in my voice.

  Griffin looks at my parents. My mother is still crying, my father looks completely shell-shocked. He gives her a tiny nod of confirmation. A nod of “go on, you might as well tell her”.

  “Your sister and Miss Malik were attacked,” she says simply. “We are certain that it was … an act of intolerance.”

  “Where?”

  “At college,” Jo suddenly blurts. “Literally at college. We were just sitting in the Student Union. Having a fecking hot chocolate. A hot chocolate,” Jo spits the words out, then laughs to herself. “I wish it was something stronger. If I’m going to get attacked for being gay, I might as well be drinking whisky. They’d love that, wouldn’t they?”

  “They,” I say. “Who are they? The Children of Brigid? The same people who crashed the gig?”

  “They were pushing pamphlets in our faces. About how we were undermining the natural order, blah, blah, blah. All this ‘hey, can we engage you in a thoughtful conversation about how you’re scum?’ I told them to piss off.”

  “And I told them,” says Sarra, her voice croaky, “that they could shove their propaganda up their holes.”

  “Then one of them pounced on Sarra. Saying that as a ‘woman of colour’ she should be ‘extra-conscious’ of what kind of ‘example’ she was setting for the younger girls in her ‘community’. Oh, they were very pleasant about it.”

  “I said, what community?” Sarra gives a dry laugh. “The basketball team?”

  “Then one of the men just swung for her.”

  “What?” I splutter. “They went from zero to punch-up in sixty seconds?”

  “To be fair, I don’t think it was part of their plan,” Sarra says grimly. “Maybe a brown girl answering back was just a little too far for this guy. Jo hit back, and after that it was a free-for-all. All bets were off.”

  I don’t know what to do, where to look, where to put my hands. I can’t stop staring at Sarra. For so long, I’ve had her written off as the girl who hurt Jo by cheating on her. The girl who was eventually going to steal my sister away from me. Like Sister Assumpta, I’ve never really thought about Sarra as a person in her own right. With her own battles.

  Griffin asks me to step outside so she can finish taking their statements. I go up to my room and bury my face in Tutu’s blond fur.

  For as long as I can remember, Jo has been gay. I don’t remember her coming out. I don’t remember any discussion about it. When she was eighteen and I was eleven, she came home holding hands with a girl called Kris and that was it. Mum and Dad looked at each other and raised their eyebrows, and Abbie gave some condescending declaration about how proud she was of Jo. But that was it. Kris had dinner with us and she hung around for a few months, and then she was gone, and then a few years later Sarra started showing up. There might have been other relationships, too, but I don’t know. Jo’s not the sort to just open up about that kind of thing.

  But in all that time, I never once remember Jo coming home bleeding, or crying, or upset about any hate she received. Once in a blue moon someone would yell something on the street, particularly when she was campaigning for the equal marriage stuff, but she brushed it off. It didn’t mean anything to her. But there was never anything like this.

  I hold Tutu close.

  I did this. I was the one who threw the energy of the city out of whack. I pulled the Jenga brick out of the tower and the whole thing started to wobble. The snow, the river, the hate, the blood. Aaron, and his strange ability to both sense and exploit the weakness in Kilbeg. It’s all pouring out of the hole the Housekeeper ripped open in the world, and I am the one who gave her the knife. I squeeze my eyes shut and see my sister’s bleeding eye, the lens of crimson flowering out of her irises. Sister Assumpta’s glowing, moon-like cataract. Harriet Evans and her winged eyeliner.

  I have to fix it.

  I have to fix it.

  I have to fix it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  WE HAVE A HALF-DAY ON THURSDAY AND FIONA SENDS ME with a shopping list to Divination. She’s still in play rehearsals, so her free time is at a premium right now. It’s hard not to accuse Fiona of treating this spell as another new hobby she has to master, yet another string on her ever-growing bow, but I’m trying not to be irritated by it.

  “Maeve Chambers,” the shopkeeper announces as I walk through the door. It’s the only place in the world where someone is guaranteed to call me by my full name. Today there’s a dreaminess to the way she says it, like she’s not completely focused. She’s moving some dried herbs between her fingertips, lavender flowers shredding in her palm.

  “Hey,” I say, unfurling my list. I don’t want or need to fall into another psychic conversation with her. I just need to get some candles and other supplies. I pluck what I need from the various sections. I’m so accustomed to this shop now that I’m half convinced that I could run it for an afternoon, if she ever wanted me to.

  The silence between us is unsettling. I’m used to her chatter, her advice, her weird tidbits about my menstrual cycle. Instead, she has drifted to the window a
nd is staring listlessly at the passers-by. Her blonde hair is messy, falling out of its ponytail. She looks exhausted.

  “So, I was thinking about what you said about sensitives,” I say warily. “You know those Children of Brigid people? I think the reason they’re so powerful right now is because Aaron – he’s, like, their leader, I guess – is one. A bad sensitive.”

  She says nothing. In fact, she doesn’t even register that anyone has spoken.

  “They got to my sister,” I say, trying to provoke some kind of reaction out of her. “My sister and her girlfriend.”

  The word “sister” seems to shake her out of her stupor.

  “You have to look after your sister,” she says, her voice croaky and tired.

  “I know.”

  “Don’t let her slip away, Maeve. Don’t ever let your sister slip away.”

  “I … won’t?”

  This is extremely strange now. I’m used to weird declarations from the shopkeeper, but usually there’s a thread I can catch and follow to the source. She gazes off again, out of the window.

  “Do you know what they used to sell in this shop, before I took over?”

  “No.”

  “Statues of the Virgin Mary. And the Infant Jesus of Prague.”

  “Is that the one holding the little egg thing?”

  She doesn’t answer me. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that, for everyone over thirty at least, religion has played a huge part in their lives. Mum has stories about nuns who used to terrorize her, and Abbie had a famous phase where she was obsessed with becoming a child saint. But no one my own age thinks or talks about the Church at all, even though we’re constantly preparing at school for some Mass or another. But even that is just singing and Hail Marys. Occasionally cracking out the Beatitudes for a special occasion.

  “I didn’t think I should take over the lease. Not after everything that happened.”

  Her eyes go back to the window. I feel I should leave, but I won’t have a chance to come again before the ritual. And we need this stuff, if we are to have any hope of this spell working. I quietly locate the items on my list. Hemlock and mandrake, Saturday’s plants. Black candles for the new moon. I get stuck when it comes to the tanzanite crystals, for communication with the spirit world. There’s a huge display of them by the door, but not all of them are very clearly marked. I keep googling tanzanite and holding the images up to various rocks, but I’m having trouble finding anything that looks like the blue stone on my screen. Eventually, I find a little pot filled with rough, fingernail-sized stones that look like they might be what I’m looking for. I take photos and send them to Fiona for confirmation.