Perfectly Preventable Deaths

1 Sage

When Dracula came to England, he arrived in a box full of earth. That’s kind of what the boot of our car looks like now. We’re taking half Dad’s garden to Ballyfrann with us. The indoor plants mainly, but some cuttings from the garden as well. I’m excited to start growing things there. It’s always soothing, helping something live.

Brian sent moving vans for all our stuff. Large, brown, unmarked things. Men from the village, loading, putting, driving. Collinses and Shannons, Brian told us. As if that made it clearer who they were. ‘In Ballyfrann we help each other out,’ he said.

And Mam said, ‘That sounds nice. A real community.’

The men kept grimly lifting boxes out, and drinking thick dark tea with too much milk. Brown like earth. Like copper grass on mountains. Crisp and dead and waiting for the spring. Catlin tried to establish how many sons they had and how hot they were, based on genetics. She was not subtle. Horny never is.

The whirr of tyre on gravel. The flat mess of what used to be a cat. A mangled stain that no one seems to notice except me. It is quiet in the car. Catlin’s earphones in. The radio. It will be a long drive. We got up early, loaded up the boxes in the vans. They flanked our car for the first forty minutes, then we stopped for petrol and they left us. Brian says they know exactly where to go. It’s home for them. For us it will take time.

The fur, what was left of it, looked brown.

I trace a pattern on my legs, a dizzy little triskele. In my pocket is a pack of salt. The kind you get in chip shops. Candle wax. Some berries on their stalks. My clothes are always manky in the pockets. I do peculiar things to ward off threat. Detritus gathers. It isn’t very scientific of me. But I am odd, and where we’re going’s new, and full of dangers.

I see their faces.

All the mountain girls.

The ones that died.

When Mam and Brian first told us about the place he came from, it didn’t quite seem real. Still doesn’t, to be honest. I wonder, when we see it for ourselves, if it will be different. It’s strange, isn’t it, to be moving somewhere we have never been. We haven’t set foot there. Even though it isn’t very far. Nowhere in Ireland is. A country the size of other people’s cities. We have seen photographs, on Brian’s phone. On Mam’s. He took her there for weekends when they started going out.

They got engaged inside the castle walls.

We weren’t there.

‘My father built this castle,’ Brian told us. ‘He was a strange man. Very big ideas. There was a ruin here before, and he bought the land with a view to rebuilding what had been, but then … he went a bit mad. There are places in the castle even I don’t know about. He had a lot of secrets, my aul’ fella.’

Going ‘a bit mad’ is different when you’re rich apparently. Brian’s father built a castle out of castles. He stole the bits he liked from where he’d been. There’s some Versailles in there, a little of Kilkenny, a fair amount of that big German one the Disney castle’s based on. Neuschwanstein. From the outside though, Mam says, it looks medieval. It’s hard to picture, the mountains more suited to the clutch of cottages, white as eggs, where the Collins family live in their weird commune. Brian says they are the ‘backbone of the village’, but I feel like in a village of a hundred or so people it is not hard to be a backbone, if there are enough of you. Like, everybody’s something. They’d have to be, or things would fall apart. The Collinses have been part of the village since before Brian’s dad. Brian went to school with Ger Collins, Mike Collins, Pat Collins and Tim Collins, for example. And that was not a lot of Collinses, considering.

‘There’ll be a few Collinses at school with ye as well,’ Brian tells us. ‘Edward and Charlene. They’re good kids.’

I stare at a patch of unshaven hair on Brian’s chin, trying to be interested. The black and grey strands forcing through the pale. I wonder what he is of the village. The brain perhaps. I wouldn’t say the heart.

Since she found out about the deaths, Catlin calls Brian’s place ‘the murder palace’. I try to shrug her off. It wasn’t in the castle that they found them, after all. But something of it sticks inside my gut. A heavy sort of worry. My fingers scratch at skin through layers of cloth. She pokes me in the ribs and does the eyebrows. I do them back. And it will be OK. I know it will. We pass a green sign: Fáilte go Béal Ifreann – Welcome to Ballyfrann, and Brian stops in the village to pick up teabags, milk. We drift into the little shop behind him, stare at the magazine racks, all the women’s faces, looking out.

‘These are my daughters,’ Brian tells the bored-looking woman behind the counter as she waves his wallet away.

‘Consider it a wedding present, Brian.’ Her voice is animated but her face is slack. ‘Nice to meet you, girls. I’m Jacinta.’

Catlin looks at me, as if to say, Of course she is.

Catlin doesn’t like anyone called Jacinta. She met one before who bored her somehow, and has never forgiven the name. We pile back in the car, and Brian switches off the emergency lights. Apparently it’s OK to park on double yellow lines here if you’re ‘just nipping in’.

I’m not so sure about that.

Rules are there for reasons.

We keep driving.

On the way, I find myself searching for something I can’t really place. A clue, an omen. Catlin’s hand brushes mine, and I see the same sort of thing I’m feeling, filtered through her face. Like me but not like me.

Helen Groarke was like us too, at one time. A human being, before she was a story. A girl who disappeared around four years ago, when she was our age, just a little older. On the fifteen-minute walk home from school. They found her in the mountains six months on. A recent corpse, they said. They analysed the parts they could locate. An arm, the fingers painted glitter-purple. Several teeth with bits of brace attached. The remnants of a ribcage. When you are dead, your shell becomes a puzzle. Something to be looked at, piece by piece.

Without the body, or without all the body, it’s hard to tell what was the cause of death. They can test and look and hazard guesses. Try to determine which parts were eaten, cut. There were bite marks, mammalian in nature. I remember wondering what sort of animal would eat a person. We don’t have wolves in Ireland any more. We don’t have bears. So maybe like a fox or massive stoat?

Catlin listed all the dead girls’ names as reasons she was nervous to move here. Amanda Shale and Nora Ginn and little Bridget Hora. Fifteen years ago. Twenty. Sixty. They were all our age, or close enough. Her friends researched them, read about them, talked in that vulture way that people do. The gory details. Bits of femur, spattered blood on rocks. The mountains here are paler, leached of colour. There is a grey tone underneath the green. It’s not like where we’re from. Anything that grows here has to work. It isn’t hard to picture death around us. There is a hungry look about this place.

We drive by the post office, the little church. The school we’ll start on Monday. The petrol station, one vintage-looking pump beside a big plastic 99. The brown stuff on the flake is peeling off. It looks like the kind of place where the sell-by date of everything would be long before we were born.

Sheep litter the hills like puffs of cotton wool after you’ve cleansed your face, all flat and filthy. We stop to let them pass us on the road. My eyes on scenery, earbuds in and listening to music. I worry at our future like a bone.

Back in Cork, when we still had our home and things around us, it was easier to feel like this would be an adventure. That it would all work out, in spite of the distance and my personality. We were moving to a castle. A proper massive castle in the hills. It did occur to me that a house that looms on a hillside is rarely a good thing in books and movies, unless you want to fall for a brooding man with at least one terrible secret. Which, in fairness, sounds a bit exhausting. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I remember telling Catlin, and also myself in the mirror. And our friends. And Mam. And the plants. But all the while I found myself fingering the little paper rectangle in my pocket. The small rough grains inside.

It wasn’t fine.

Catlin was, in the run-up to the move, and, to be honest, every day since birth, mainly worried about not getting enough attention. Our friends are obsessed with her, and I’m the side dish. There’s something special in my sister’s eyes. Her face. The way she carries herself. She draws them in. They love her right away. I’m more of an acquired taste. Like fish eggs. Catlin’s truffle chips, served in a bowl with cosmic patterns on. Delightful, and probably cooler than you.

‘Places pick up energy from bad stuff, Maddy,’ she told me, behind the hall at school, near the skips, where people go to smoke. A week ago, when this seemed like a story we were being told, rather than a real thing about to happen. ‘They drink it in, and it just lies there. Waiting …’

I looked at her, her uniform hanging elegantly on her in a way mine never bothered to. Her hair was piled into an elastic band, and somehow even that looked right. Like hair ties were too obvious, too try-hard.

I grinned. ‘Catlin, you were born to live in a castle. Relax.’

The car still moving, I remember her face, the suppressed smile, the twinkle in the eyes. The love of drama. But the mountain girls – they were people, not seasoning for stories. It feels heavy in my chest, the layers of death Catlin has pasted on this place. On Brian’s home. My body warm, too warm. Bile in my gut, I’m thinking, How much longer?

Brian’s thin shoulders hunch towards the steering wheel. He always looks a little tense. This man my mother married weeks ago. Blue dresses in the registry office. His hand on hers, his ring where Dad’s once was. In our hands we held the ring to warm it as a blessing. It felt so heavy, weightier than gold.

‘I want to be a father to you, girls,’ he told us on the night before the move. ‘A good one. Not like the kind of man my father was. He wanted my respect, but it didn’t go both ways.’ He closed his eyes. ‘After he died … He had a lot of secrets. And I’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort sorting out his mess. Not that he’d thank me for it.’

‘Your dad sounds like a douche,’ said Catlin, and I elbowed her. Brian looked at us with an even gaze. His face was very smooth and very clean, except for one small gorse-dark patch he’d missed. I stared at it, distracted.

‘… perhaps you’re right. He was a lot of things, as the fella says.’ He sighed. ‘I want to be a better man than he was. But the more that I unravel, the more I see … it’s complicated. Tax stuff mostly. I won’t bore you with it.’

But I wondered.

The fields fly past our window. Getting close. There are crosses on the road. Small, hard tooth-white things poking out like artefacts. I count them.

Ten … Eleven.

Twelve.

Thirteen.

‘Did people die here, Brian?’ I ask.

He nods. ‘A family from near Athlone. They were passing through, on their way to somewhere else. Most people are. The father had a seizure at the wheel, drove into a tree.’ He gestures to the side. ‘It’s been cut down.’

Catlin looks at me, mouths, ‘Murder palace.’ I kick her on the shin.

‘Madeline’s kicking me,’ she whines, and Mam rolls her eyes.

‘You probably deserve it. You and your murder palace,’ she says, her hand on Brian’s. His on the gear stick. She loves him. This quiet man whose father built a palace in the wild.

‘It’s not a palace,’ Brian says. ‘It’s a castle.’

‘What’s the difference?’ I ask.

‘A castle’s fortified,’ he says. ‘A palace is just fancy.’

‘Fortified how?’ Catlin asks.

Brian smiles at us. Mam tells him to wait. ‘I want to see them see it.’

The car knots through the land, tangling us away from who we are. I feel the disconnect and swallow down. And then we’re there. Here.

We thought we knew what to expect. But suddenly we find ourselves driving down a smooth, wide private road, cut through a forest, and little by little turrets, battlements and grey stone walls. A quasi-moat that’s filled with shrubs and plants instead of water. Brown and green weeds poking, thick green moss. Large grey and black crows collect on the awnings. Staring dully out at everything.

This is our house. It is the place we live.

I cannot over-emphasise how much of a castle Brian’s castle is. It has turrets for Christ’s sake, walled gardens and a groundskeeper. It looks like it was carved from fairy tales. As we drive in, we see the other sides. It’s sort of a collage. Four miniature castles, linked around a courtyard with a big kitchen garden, with a Victorian-style greenhouse. And a fountain. Because why not a fountain? This is a castle. Opulence is kind of the deal. A glass dome rises somewhere in the centre, like the hyacinth bulbs on Dad’s grave. Fortification means we are protected, but why would we need that? It’s just for show. No need to feel the itch my fingers feel. They trace the grains of salt through thinning paper. I’ve almost worried it to shredding point.

What can you do?

We put the kettle on.