Perfectly Preventable Deaths

Prologue Honeysuckle

Our father died in flames when he was twenty-six and we were two.

We don’t remember. All we have is story. Sense memory, the feeling of soft earth. His name upon a pitted slab, limestone, lichen-pocked. Orange, white and crinkled dry as paper. The smell of grave implanting in our nail beds. Our fingers scraping through to trace his name.

They found him lying in the woods, a group of children on a nature walk. In a small, round glade between the trees – the beech, the oak, the hawthorn and the elm. The leaves beneath him weren’t even burnt.

‘He always cared for everything around him,’ Mam said once. ‘Even in death, he kept the forest safe.’

It’s not something we talk about too often.

The images I have might not be real. A voice. A lap. Helping plant the flowers in our garden. Little hands and big ones thick with earth. Memories are versions of what happened, stories that we’ve told ourselves enough. The fiction ivy-winding around the real, to strangle out the bad, promote the good. If you’re not careful, ivy eats a house. It lets in rot.

Sometimes I remember things about plants. Little facts I don’t know how I came by. And I wonder if I know because he told me when I was very small. More likely it all filtered down through Mam. We never really knew my dad to miss. But something in me turns him over, over. Stretched like a yawn, arms out and thick with char.

And, maybe that’s why Catlin goes to Mass. Or why I sometimes wake up taut with terror, looking for some unknown thing to make me safe, or safer in that moment.

The world isn’t predictable at the best of times. But if you’re scientific about it, then all the strangest things can be explained. Maybe not right now and not by you, but always there’s a reason. You can divide things into true and false, proven and unproven. Analysed, predictable, if not preventable. The more you know, the more that you can do to make things right. Knowledge is a real-life magic power, gathered up like spells to use in time.

Vinegar, a candle. Salt and sage. There’s always been a comfort in the tangible. In things that you can gather round you. Hold. We all have little talismans to cherish.

Beech for wisdom. Elm for your throat.

The things you hold – they will not keep you safe though.

In the end, there’s not a thing that can.