Perfectly Preventable Deaths

10 Aspen

Salt. I wake up in a dark room needing salt. The posts of my bed pierce the night like the trunks of skinny trees. I cannot see the branches. Empty nest outside my window waits. I need to look at it. I need to touch it. The shock of the warm floor under my bare feet. Underfloor heating, I tell myself, feeling the faint growls beneath the surface. It’s warm enough to feel as if it’s alive.

I crack the window open and reach my hand out, feel for the small nest. Inside it is a small, fat egg. Round as a raindrop, cold as a stone. It is heavy to the touch. It’s winter. The mountain wind bites into my skin. I hold the egg in my hand. Pull it to me, close the window. The night can stay outside.

I look at it. It’s creamy-coloured, splashed with reddish brown. Smeared old bloodstains. I close my eyes. The wind whips against the window. How lonely to be dead here. All alone. You are a person, then you’re just a body. Evidence. Something to be scooped up and examined. The egg is small inside my palm. I reach my index finger out to touch it.

And it crumbles into dust, like the powdery wings of a childhood butterfly. Before I knew the things you shouldn’t touch. Little particles, small and soft as ash, litter the floor. No clue to what it once was. Life to death.

The need for salt begins to heighten.

I can normally hold it in until I wake up in the morning, but there can be an urgency as well. It’s a little like needing the toilet with your whole being. Ignoring it is not always an option. And there’s a danger there that’s very real. Or feels that way to me … if I need the thing and cannot get it. Sometimes bad things happen. Little ones or big. I cut my finger with a sharp knife, peeling vegetables. Lose my footing and fall down a stairs. Or Catlin does. Or Mam. Coincidence, is what I tell myself. Until the feeling wells in me again, reminding me what I already know on some deep level.

I want to be a doctor, for God’s sake. It makes no sense. The logical part of my brain knows that. But there’s another part. A reptile part, something old and hard and deep inside me. I shake it off. Salt will make me feel much better now. Will soothe me back to sleep.

I throw a towelling dressing gown on and pad downstairs, and downstairs again, and down another stairs and through the kitchen. When our house was left behind, gutted of the things that made it ours, it looked too big. This castle’s layered with stuff, ours and other people’s, and it’s still so empty, still so full of space. Feelings aren’t facts, I tell myself. I’m safe here. The egg was just an egg. An empty egg inside an empty nest outside my window. The small ghost of a bird that might have been. Beady eye and flap of feather dark. I close my eyes. I open them again. I walk along.

It probably would be better if there were fewer things with eyes here. Portraits and animal trophies and statues of people twisting up like they’re in agony but smiling with it. I think of Nora Ginn, who liked to dance. Her face was like a person that you’d know. Brown hair, blue eyes and freckles. Something ate that girl and spat her out. My fingers brush an elbow as I pass. It’s cool and smooth. Marble starts as limestone, then it changes. We steal it from the earth and carve it into waxy human shapes.

The moon a slice of something through the window. I keep on moving, weaving through the halls. It takes a while, particularly because I’m being stealthy. Mam would kill me if she knew what I was at. She hates this part of me that isn’t normal. But I can’t help the way I am. I can’t. I’m almost there. The knowledge calms me down.

Brian’s kitchen is adjacent to the herb garden, which is probably why Mamó was able to ferret her way in so stealthily. Like so much of the castle, it’s a weird hybrid of things that Brian’s dad liked. If a Victorian stately home’s kitchen had a baby with the kitchen in a medieval convent, and that baby were also a kitchen, then it would be exactly how our kitchen is. A pot-bellied stove, a wide fireplace, a massive oaken table. Flagstones and a cauldron. Pots of herbs on the windowsills and burnished copper saucepans hanging up.

I quietly turn the handle of the larder. It creaks a little as it opens wide.

Dried haunches of meat and strands of garlic trailing from the ceiling. Smooth white tiles and rows of wooden shelves with little pots. There’s so much food here. Was it always like this? Who did Brian even have to feed before we got here? There are six kinds of jam.

‘That’s too much jam,’ I mutter as I poke around for salt. I find it, next to pepper. Brian’s as organised as Mam, I think. No wonder they got married.

There are several boxes, cardboard ones, red and white and blue, with little metal spouts that slot out of the side for pouring. I take one down and hold it in my hand. Feel the weight of it. The smooth sides and the sharp corners. The feeling doesn’t go. I take a second. And a third. I want all of the salt. Stacks of it. Enough to satisfy my stupid impulse and then some more and then some more again.

Something smooths inside me as I hold the three boxes in my hands. One for me and two for Mam and Catlin. And not too big a gap left on the shelf. I put them in the centre of the table. I start the kettle boiling for some tea. Tear mint and sage from small ceramic pots and crush them with a spoon into a mug. My body hums with nervous energy. Too keyed up for caffeinated things. When I get collecty, I feel like all of me’s about to shiver, twitch with it or something. There’s energy inside, and not the kind you can exercise away. It’s like your stomach just before a fight. That kind of weight.

Science. Science. Nothing’s going to get me.

The glass looks black, the brightness in the kitchen cancels out the night-time. Something moves beyond the windowpane. I turn the light off, look outside, for ages. It could have been a person or a fox. A ghost that I imagined. The stars are bright. The moon’s a little sliver. Everything in me is stretching taut. The kettle clicks and I turn the light back on. The garden fades away into a smudge.

I draw the blinds, pour the boiling water on the leaves and blow on it to cool, which never works. My brain is chanting: ‘Salt, salt, salt, salt, salt.’

I blow again.

Which is more important – sleep before school or not being a crazy person?

The second is probably not an option though. A spoon of solid honey in the tea. I crush the leaves some more and stir them round.

Clockwise?

Counter-clockwise.

Counter-clockwise, thrice or seven times.

Salt in hand, I pad my way upstairs. Across the floor and reaching under the bed in Catlin’s room. I slide the salt in. And then I go across the wing to Mam. The corridors are dark, the cornicing is twisted. I feel the hum of spiders spinning webs. Everything is sharper, more in focus.

I’m not sure if it’s panic or relief.

Mam is sleeping soundly, Brian beside her. It feels like more of an intrusion now. That she is not alone. That he is here. The blanket’s half off Brian’s torso, and in the moonlight it looks as if something’s written on his body. He snuffles, and he snuggles into Mam. I crouch down low and shove the salt beneath the bed.

When I rise, things look like they’re supposed to. A trick of the light. I make my way down the corridor, feeling exhaustion leach the tension from me. I could sleep for a week. I have three hours, and that will have to do. I climb into my bed and pull the covers over me.

I hear the night-time sounds of Ballyfrann. The rustle of leaves, the clanking of pipes, the screams of cats or foxes having sex. Catlin thinks it’s funny, but I hate it. I always wonder What if it’s a child? A child outside in pain and somewhere, lost.

When we were little, we had a book of stories from our dad. It had been his when he was very small. And some of them were cool, but some were frightening. There was this witch, her house had chicken legs. Her face melts to Mamó’s while I curl up in bed.

She used to lure young girls inside her house. And sometimes she would help you. And sometimes she would eat you. It was up to her. She had the power.

Until you ventured in, you couldn’t know.

Baba Yaga, Aoife from the children of Lir, Mr Fox, even the Virgin Mary. Scary folk, the kind you should appease. They all had secrets. Like here. It feels that way. Like everyone’s a door.

We should be careful.