Perfectly Preventable Deaths

12 Elder

When we get back from school, we eat with Mam. She’s made chops. Mine has a little circle of bone inside the middle, full of marrow. I lift it to my mouth and suck it out. It tastes like blood and fat. Mam’s teeth tear at a little cube she’s chopped up on her fork. The meat is tender, brown to almost pink. I think about the life that we have taken. Maybe more than one. The sheep on the mountains, fleece and dirt and little sunken faces. I swallow something like them down my throat.

Mam has been trawling through the attic, finding things. She wants to redecorate the castle, make it a little bit quirky and a lot cosier. She has her work cut out for her there, I think. Battlements and cosy don’t really gel.

‘I’m just a little bored,’ says Mam. ‘I don’t miss work, but I miss working. I think I need a project.’

‘It’s good to have a thing,’ Catlin says. ‘Maybe Brian would let you use the good Internet in his office to google pretty castles.’

‘I don’t know,’ says Mam. ‘He’s pretty protective of that office. I brought him up a cup of tea the other day, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.’ She smiles and rolls her eyes.

Catlin gets up. ‘Off to change my tampon,’ she announces. ‘Before the castle is bathed in blood. It’s kind of nice not having Brian around too much. I can talk about periods and things. I mean, not that I’m censoring myself, but we’ll ease him slowly in to my menstrual cycle.’

‘One awkward moment at a time,’ I say. It’s weird that I’m not having my period too. Like, we’re normally creepily in sync. We got our periods on the same day, and everything. I feel a worry in me. Brewing like a tea until it’s strong. Something’s wrong with us. We don’t belong here.

Mam interrupts my internal worrying with some lovely external worrying. It’s that mixture of annoyance and concern. Don’t be weird and why are you so weird, both at once.

‘Madeline?’

I swallow. I know exactly what this is about.

‘I’ve cleaned it up. I don’t want to have this conversation again.’

I hate how odd she gets about this. I’m not doing drugs or having sex. I barely even drink. I study hard and I’m nice to her and Catlin most of the time. Mam needs to recognise how privileged she is if salt is all she’s worrying about.

Catlin bounces back into the room. ‘I’m all plugged up like a beautiful sink.’

‘Catlin.’ Mam sighs.

‘Don’t make me ashamed of my body. I’m a moon-blood miracle and I will not be silenced by the likes of you.’

‘Yeah, Mam,’ I say. ‘You need to be more respectful of Catlin’s flow.’

We decide to head upstairs to roam around and scavenge fancy items from the many crates of stuff. The only clothes shop in Ballyfrann sells the kind of things that people Mam’s age wear to weddings. Fussy, structured dresses, fascinators. Support garments.

I give out a bit to Catlin about Mam and the salt.

‘What’s her problem, Catlin? Does she not want me to be crazy in front of her fancy new husband?’

Catlin wraps a blue silk piano shawl around her shoulders. ‘She took the salt out from under my bed too, as if it’s any of her business what my sister does in my bedroom in the middle of the night while I’m fast asleep.’

‘You’re not making me feel like less of a freak, Catlin,’ I say miserably.

‘Fuck them, Mad,’ she says. ‘We’re here for two more years. Just enough time for me to get Lon pregnant and feck off to college while he cries into his pint.’

I prise open a box, which turns out to be full of old swords. Catlin takes some out and rubs them. Grumbles that they’re blunt.

‘What were you going to do if they were sharp?’ I ask her.

‘Wreak havoc … Ooh! Some skulls!’ She has found a steamer trunk of skulls. They’re mostly sheep, but also several birds, a deer and some dogs. One of them is human though. I touch it. It is small. A woman’s head. I think of Nora Ginn. Of Helen Groarke.

We all end up as old, forgotten bones. It just takes time.

‘I can’t believe he has a human skull,’ I say to Catlin.

‘I know,’ she squeals. ‘It’s amazing! Would it be weird to spray-paint it a colour?’

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘It used to be a person. A girl, I think. The shape of it. The size.’

Bridget Hora, Nora Ginn, Helen Groarke. Whose head was it? The one they didn’t find? Catlin touches my elbow.

‘Catlin, we should tell Brian about the skull, I think. It isn’t normal. Having human bones inside a house.’

‘You’re right,’ my sister tells me. ‘I love this place. It’s fully, fully haunted.’

‘Have you seen anything?’ I ask her.

‘Sometimes when I’m praying before bed … Don’t roll your eyes at me, salt-girl.’

‘Oi. But go on.’

‘I hear what Brian says are “the pipes”. But it doesn’t sound like pipes at all. It sounds like … something else – little shrieky breaths and sometimes footsteps.’

‘Why have I heard none of this?’

‘I assumed you had. Because salt. Anyway, you know the way I am.’

I do. Catlin has a vivid imagination – when we were little she used to see people that weren’t there, like all the time. They’d be in her nightmares, and then bleed out into the daytime too. Praying helped. And maybe that’s why I started doing what I do, with the gathering. To protect her.

I wonder …

‘Did you put back the salt Mam took out of your room?’ I ask her, concerned.

‘No. But if you do, I won’t say a word.’ She looks at me. ‘The sounds don’t frighten me, Madeline. They’re not … They’re not the thing we need to be scared of.’

‘What do we need to be scared of?’ I ask her.

Her face is very serious. ‘That Brian will take all of my cool skulls away when you tell him about the human one. Murder palace problems.’

‘In fairness, Catlin, you want to decorate with someone’s head.’

‘Brian decorates with heads. He has that shrunken one in his office. Oh! Maybe that’s where the skull is from. The two might go together, like a set.’

‘I don’t know what to do with you. You’re scarier than ghosts sometimes.’

‘Skulls!’ exclaims Catlin happily again. It doesn’t take that much to please her, really. ‘They’re going to look fantastic on my altar. I wonder if he has any Marys?’

Catlin’s Marys have graduated, and now she basically just has a massive altar in her room. It’s getting bigger as she gathers stuff. It has her pictures, icons, Mass cards, miraculous medals, nazars and Hands of Fatima. And now, apparently, the skulls as well. This altar is fine with Mam, apparently. It counts as decoration, not a symptom. It does look cool. But so does everything she fecking does.

I wonder what Mamó would think of all of Catlin’s talismans. I think I’d like to show her. See her face. Catlin has been getting more and more into religious iconography over the past while. She always liked the pictures. Pretty ladies in white and blue, stars around their heads, snakes at their feet. She has all these old Mass cards in a shoebox. The only person that she really knew in there’s our dad. The rest are Mam’s friends, and some strangers. I saw her steal one from a friend’s house once.

‘She won’t need it,’ she told me, grinning. ‘She didn’t even like her Auntie Méabhdh.’

Catlin’s morals are like those optical illusion pictures people share. Sometimes you have to tilt your head to spot them. I help her with the skulls, because I am a good sister.

‘This is the closest we have ever come to disposing of a body. Bonding,’ I tell her.

‘Sisterly bonding. We’re skull-pals now. Bone twins.’ She’s carrying, like, seven skulls in her two teeny hands.

‘Bone twins sounds like a porno.’

‘It does at that.’ She pauses. ‘Do … Do … you girls do everything together?’

This is a question we’ve actually been asked, and more than once. I make bass-line sounds, and then pretend to vomit.

Sometimes, when Catlin gets stuck in an evil laugh, it keeps on going. And I join in. We cackle until we have to sit down because our ribs hurt too much. It’s the kind of laughing I really only do when she’s around.

I love my sister. Skulls and bones and all. But still, there are some troubling facts emerging. Like the fact that she had another sex dream. About Lon. This time he was interviewing her for a job, and it turned into another sort of job altogether and I stopped her there because NO.

A world of NO.

‘No.’

‘But it was –’

‘NO.’

Catlin hates when I don’t let her finish. It is one of her pet peeves. She squints at me.

‘You really don’t like him?’

‘No. I really don’t.’

She smiles at me. ‘I’m going to kiss him anyway.’

My stomach twists. My eyes on the dark hollows of the skulls.