Perfectly Preventable Deaths

15 Cowslips

The forest is harsh on the way home, the crossroads almost flickering in the moonlight. I keep an eye behind us in the night, and so does Catlin. The path is oil-slick dark, a black snake’s tongue. I feel as though we should have been dropping breadcrumbs on our way to meet Layla. To guide us home, like children in a story. Catlin’s hands are cold and she is shaking.

I rub my sister’s back.

‘Madeline, it reminds me of something …’ she tells me. ‘I can’t think what. But looking at that fox, it didn’t feel like it was a dead animal. It felt like it was someone that we knew. Like, gut-punch hard.’

I swallow. ‘I felt it too,’ I say. ‘And I kind of …’

‘Do you want to throw salt at it?’ she asks, her mouth a little crooked. Catlin knows me well. Salt for danger. Metal objects buried in the ground and wrapped in cloth.

‘Oh, so much salt,’ I tell her. ‘Like, ocean-level salt. Poor little dude.’ I’m trying to keep my voice light, but it isn’t working.

‘It feels as though the forest’s not for humans,’ Catlin tells me. ‘It’s like it’s uncharted. Off the map.’ She’s murmuring again, she’s saying the Hail Mary. I know it calms her down, but it’s making me so anxious here right now. My breath comes fast. She quiets then. She knows me.

‘I want to know …’ she begins, and then trails off. ‘Do you remember? Something about the fox …’

‘Catlin, you’re not making sense.’

‘You know,’ she says, ‘when you’ve had, like, this really detailed dream and then you wake up and all you can remember is, like, images? The general sense of it. The how-it-made-you-feel. And, like, you’re turning bits inside your mind, and waiting for other bits that will never come. And then you see, like a bowl of cereal or the colour blue and get a little flash?’

‘If you’ve been getting a little flash, Catlin, you should report it.’

‘Stop, Madeline. I’m trying to explain.’ Her hand is ratting through her hair, as though it were more tangled than it is. As though this were a thing that she could fix, if her ponytail were smooth enough.

‘You know that book that Dad had when we were small?’

I nod, and then I realise it’s dark, so I also say, ‘The stories, yeah?’

‘Was there one about a fox or something? Something like the thing we saw? A fox?’

‘There was that Mr Fox guy, I remember. The murderer.’

‘I remember him. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold,’ she chants. ‘No, no, it wasn’t that. I’ve … I’ve lost it.’

Her voice is sad, frustrated. We’re almost halfway down the castle driveway. It’s wrong that it’s so normal. Everything’s the same shape that it was. Except our brains, and small bits of our hearts.

The castle, when we get to it, is empty. We call and call and run through rooms and halls, sheet-covered furniture like odd-shaped ghosts. Sometimes, when you leave a scary thing, the normal stuff around you makes you almost forget that it has happened. With this, though, the strange of it keeps bleeding through. Statues look as if they’re about to move. Shadows are dangerous. My breath sounds harsh, like it’s someone else’s breath. We can’t find Mam or Brian. We try their phones, but they don’t even ring. My body hums with action.

Catlin looks at me. ‘We have to do something, Maddy.’

‘I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. It won’t bring it back, like.’ It sounds lame and lying, coming out of my mouth. Not that I think we’ll resurrect the fox, but there has to be a thing. A concrete thing. To mark the little murder that we found.

Catlin’s mouth keeps moving, and her hands. Her head tilts up.

‘You need to see Mamó,’ she says, and her face is very sure. I’m glad that someone’s sure. I feel too young to deal with this myself. It’s too much death.

And that is why we knock on Mamó’s door. The smooth dark wood of it. The iron knocker, shaped like leaf and moon. I swallow down. I can’t hear any movement, but Catlin’s leaning in. She nods.

‘Someone’s inside.’

I knock again. The door cracks open. Mamó is wearing men’s flannel pyjamas. Her hair is in a braid all down her back. She looks quite put-upon and strangely normal. I never thought about her asleep before. She doesn’t seem the type. Unless it was with one eye open, watching.

‘What is it now?’ she barks, as though this were something we often do.

‘There was a thing,’ I say to her, so helpful. We step inside. Catlin looks at everything. I can see her big eyes drinking in the jam jars full of things, the many plants. Mamó sees it too, turns to her as though she were an unexpected mouse. An inconvenience.

‘A thing?’ she repeats, her face impassive. ‘Be more specific.’

‘We found a slaughtered fox in the woods. It isn’t safe.’

She makes a disdainful sound, but goes to pull on her boots and a long brown duster. She grabs her car keys from the kitchen counter.

‘Go home, Catlin,’ she says. Catlin looks at me. I look at her. She doesn’t move.

Mamó glares at her, and in a tone of I shouldn’t have to explain this to you but it seems I do, she adds, ‘Wait for Brian and your mam. They’ll worry if neither of ye are there.’

Catlin quietly nods. Mamó nods back.

She turns to me. ‘Take some jars with you. You’ll know which ones,’ she says, offering me a black canvas shopper. It has a strawberry embroidered on it. It is the least Mamó bag I’ve ever seen.

I scan the shelves, and pluck and choose a few things. I do not need many. I close my eyes and let my fingers find them. My breathing slows, as this clicks into place. I find my calm.

Mamó decidedly picks up a little brown doctor’s bag from beneath the coat rack. And a massive shovel. Why does she have shovels in her house, the way that normal people have umbrellas? She lashes it over her shoulder, and we stride towards the car. She doesn’t lock her door. I notice that.

The trip consists of Mamó, hands grimly on the steering wheel, firing question after question at me, about what we were doing in the forest. About the things we saw. The temperature. The placement of the organs. How decomposed or otherwise it had been. The gender.

‘It was male, I think,’ I offer. ‘But it was hard to tell. The pieces were all … moved around and things.’

‘What things?’ she barks.

‘Like bitten off or cut. And there were pins.’

And she says, ‘Hmmm.’ And glares. Mamó loves glaring. It’s probably her favourite thing to do. Except for glowering.

‘There’s something in the fox,’ I say, and amn’t sure exactly why I’m saying, ‘a kind of … something … It’s warm there. Much too warm.’

I can hear the fear whining through my voice. Annoying me. I want to be more calm. I should be calm. It’s only a dead animal. I see them at the bus stop, on the road. A normal part of living in the country. Nothing to be frightened of at all.

Mamó tilts her head at me, like an owl would, looking at a mouse.

‘Plenty of things that you can do with blood,’ she says, ‘and some of them leave things behind you after.’

‘Is that what the fox was? A …’ I try my best to find the proper word. ‘… sacrifice or something? Did a person do it, like?’

‘We’ll say no more of it,’ she tells me, ‘until we’re finished. We don’t know what is listening.’

‘Ha,’ I say. I think she might be joking. She did a thing with her eyebrows that was definitely either a joke or a threat. She pulls in at a sort of moonlight glade and grabs a lamp and the shovel from the boot.

‘Let’s walk,’ she says, holding the light aloft like an old-timey night watchman.

We move, walking for what seems like forever. It’s hard to gauge the distance in the dark. Everything looks wild and unfamiliar. I can feel the give of leaves under my feet.

When we stop, she gestures to the shovel. ‘Dig.’

‘How deep?’ I ask.

‘I know people say six feet under, but I prefer a healthy ten,’ she says.

I raise an eyebrow, but I get to work.

She looks through the canvas bag and makes some sounds that aren’t quite disapproval, but come close.

‘You forgot the Hart’s tongue,’ she points out.

‘How was I supposed to know what to bring?’ I ask.

She doesn’t answer.

Digging a grave in silence takes forever. The slice of shovel into earth, the lifting. My biceps hurt. The last time I dug a hole was on the beach, when we were small. This is nothing like that. Forcing the blade in, scooping out the velvet black, the rocks. The discordant sound of metal hitting stones.

I’m standing in it when she tells me, ‘Stop.’

She pulls me out. She has really strong arms for an old woman, rippling muscles. She should have dug the hole herself, I think. It would have been faster.

‘Let’s find this fox,’ she says. We set off to the crossroads, at a pace. The woods are darker now, I use my torch to light the way. It makes the things it touches ashen grey. Devoid of colour. Mamó strides ahead. She doesn’t seem to need or want the light. She leads. I follow. Everything is still. A photograph of something I once knew. I can feel a warmth beginning to build within me like a fever.

I remove my coat. She looks at me, and nods. We do not speak. The fox is still there when we reach the crossroads. I step on something soft. It doesn’t give. A kidney? Mamó bends down to smell the fox, to look.

‘It’s fresh,’ she says.

‘How fresh?’

‘A couple of hours.’

‘So we might have disturbed whoever …?’ I let the question hang unfinished, in the air. And there it stays.

Mamó calmly opens her doctor’s bag and takes out some binocular-looking things. She peers through them. Up and down and around. It should look more ridiculous than it does.

‘There’s something heavy here,’ she says. ‘Some wrong.’

I nod. The sweat is beading on my face. I want to curl into a ball and sleep. I want to run.

‘The wounds are strange,’ I tell her. ‘And the fur … is roasting hot.’

‘It senses you,’ she says. ‘You need to push through that. Can you feel the weight of it as well? The nudge?’

I nod. She’s right. Something is pulling at me, straining like a peculiar aftertaste at the edges of my brain. Something heavy and bilious. Something like a threat, or like a plea. But the kind of plea a bully makes for your pocket money. Something that needs fixing, rearranging. My gathering squirms and fattens in the pit of my belly.

‘I can feel something.’

‘That’s the Ask,’ she says. ‘You won’t like the Answer. I need three orange leaves, as orange as the fox, and three red leaves, as red as freshest blood. And holly berries.’

‘What’s the Ask?’ I ask.

‘Did I misspeak?’ she snaps. ‘Bring me the things I need to make this right.’

‘Fine.’

And it is fine, even though my muscles are aching. I want to collect the leaves. My urges are in tune with what Mamó wants and it truly is the weirdest thing, but it is right as well. I feel validated. I turn the worry off and click into a sort of focused calm. Turn the torch on my phone to the brightest setting. I have this. It is winter, but leaves litter the forest floor. I crawl along on hands and knees, feeling for the textures that I want. When I find one I like, I raise it to the phone and check the colour. It can’t be mottled. I need it to be smooth and bright and whole.

I get them, and run back towards the crossroads. Mamó is bent over the fox, holding a beeswax candle. Her brow is furrowed.

‘Now, rub the leaves over him while I say the words.’

I look at her in disbelief. ‘Seriously?’

‘I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I was a jokester.’

I shrink a little and do what she says.

As I rub the leaves along the fur and nose and blood and bone she mutters in a tongue that isn’t English or Irish but kind of like a mixture of the two that’s maybe spliced with German. I feel a hum within the fox’s body begin to shift. It isn’t unpleasant exactly. Pins and needles, deadening the flesh.

It ebbs into the leaves. My body cools.

We put the leaves inside an old marmalade jar ‘to contain it’. Then it’s time to bury the fox.

‘We’ll use your coat,’ Mamó says.

‘What?’

‘You have it taken off. It’s dirty anyway,’ she tells me. And she’s right, but scooping all the parts of fox into it isn’t the best use of my coat or my time, I think. The fox is cooler now, slimy and disgusting on my hands. I feel the give of flesh as I grasp at it.

That could be me, I think. We’re all so delicate.

We burn the leaves over the fox’s grave. She wipes the jar on the last clean part of my coat and puts it back in her bag. I think of Dad again. How easily we’re hurt. It only takes a minute for the leaves to smoulder into nothing. They were already dead. They weren’t in pain.

I feel a ripple suck out of the leaves and down into the ground.

‘That’ll shut it up,’ declares Mamó, brushing grave soil off her big flat hands.

‘Shut what up?’ I ask. I shiver, and she hands me my coat. It’s damp and reeks of fox. I glare at her and do not put it on.

She sighs, her face impassive.

‘I have to know,’ I say, my voice quiet. She looks at me, and even though it’s dark I think she sees.

She sighs again. As if I were an inconvenient guest. I can sense her brain, working out how to phrase it best to such an idiot.

‘Somebody invited something in. They left the door unlocked, to make it easy. Could you feel a signal off the fox?’

‘Like heat?’ I ask.

‘It’s different things to different people. But what got called, it could decide to come.’

‘Does it have a name?’ I wonder, as though it matters. As though a name would put my finger on exactly what it was, and what it did.

‘Names are for ordering things,’ she tells me, ‘and this yoke is disordered, cruel and angry. And when you call a thing like that, it bashes through quite strongly. Leaves a hole behind it in its wake. And other weaker things can use that hole to get into the forest. And even though they’re weaker, they aren’t weak at all. Compared to us. There are people in the world who want things, Madeline. And they don’t much care how they get them.’

‘I see.’ I do not see, but I want her to go on, at least a little.

She pauses, and I can see her trying to twist her words into the sort of language that I will understand.

‘When you call someone on the telephone for the first time, because you have not called the number before, you can’t be sure, precisely sure, it’s theirs. There may have been some error. Someone else may pick up. And they may not be who you want at all.’

She says the word telephone like the way Mam says app, I realise. How old is Mamó?

‘And even if you think you’re hearing the right voice, in the end it’s just a voice. There’s no blood or bone to it. It’s nothing you can lay your hands on, touch. I like my help to come from things that I can get a handle on. The other sort of help’s too close to hurt.’

Listening to her, I’m distracted by how crazy this all sounds. It’s like a story, not like something real. And I don’t like it. I don’t like the way that I believe her. I don’t want this world to be the world. I want the one I know. The one that’s safe. Or safer, anyway.

‘Was someone trying to summon something, Mamó?’ I ask.

She barks a ha at me. As though what I’ve said were thoroughly ridiculous. I shrink a little and she takes a breath.

‘The Ask is an invitation, not an order. You wouldn’t last long out here, trying to boss the big fellas around.’

The trees are very tall, and I am very tired. This is too much, I think. I want my mam.

‘Mamó?’ I ask. My voice sounds whiney, thin. ‘Can we go home now?’

‘Yes. I think we can.’ I follow her tall back through taller trees.

The castle is dark and quiet when we get back.