Perfectly Preventable Deaths

19 Ragged Robin

Oona’s mother drops me home. She looks like an older version of Oona, but taller, more angular. She asks how I am settling in to the village. I ask her the same. We both say grand. She has some paint on her jeans, and I remember she’s an artist, ask her about painting. She loves the landscape here, the colours, she says. So stark. Oona has less to say to me when her mother is there. They speak in English to each other though, for my benefit, I assume.

When I get off at the driveway, Elodie Noone tells me to ‘be careful’.

I laugh and thank her, but her face is still. Oona is in the passenger seat, so I can’t tell if she waves goodbye to me as the car pulls off. I hope she did. I waved to her. Awkwardly, like everything I do.

Catlin and Mam are already at the kitchen table. I feel the heat against my night-cold cheeks. We must have walked for miles and miles. I try to keep the smile off my face. The warmth in my heart is just for me right now. I’m not ready to voice it.

‘I think she met a boy, but she won’t tell me anything,’ Mam says. Her voice is high. Mam gets all excited when she suspects there’s gossip. It’s annoying and adorable.

‘Did she now?’ I put the kettle on and get some biscuits.

Mam rests her hands on her chin and looks between the two of us. Catlin tells her little bits of what happened. She doesn’t say Lon’s name. Or that he’s older. Just that they met, he showed her places in the village he likes and then he bought her tea. They held hands walking all day long, she says. He didn’t once let go.

Her voice is low and strangely sweet. The top button of her blouse is undone now, and she’s rolled up her sleeves. Just a bit of artful disarray. She laughs a bit, when she is telling the story. Looks out the window. Says, ‘I feel all special.’

As if she wasn’t special all along. I never think of Catlin doubting that about herself. But maybe lately, with all of this change, she needed this. If I didn’t know who he was, if I hadn’t met him yet, I think I’d like the idea of Lon. The way she sees him. Quiet and sound and tall and dark and kind. A proper human being, and not a creep who’s mostly made of things that look cool from the outside.

‘He held me so tightly, Maddy. Like he was never going to let me go. It felt like in my dreams,’ she says to us. ‘It’s so romantic. Like, he is literally the man of my dreams.’

I roll my eyes. Mam tells me to ‘lighten up’, that ‘my turn will come soon’. As if love were a turn on one of those little rides for kids outside a supermarket. She doesn’t understand me, not at all.

I think about the fox between two roads. Someone asked for something. And could that something be my lovely sister? I don’t like the weight of secrets on me. I haven’t been able to articulate what happened between me and Mamó that night. Not properly. Not even to myself.

But it was something. The law of conservation of energy states that it can be neither created nor destroyed. The charge I felt – it had to come from somewhere. And was that heat the little fox’s life?

Nora Ginn.

Helen Groarke.

Bridget Hora.

Amanda Shale.

I think of Lon. His dull, copper-penny eyes. His wide, white smile. The smattering of stubble he contrives. He looks so bland, so normal. I don’t get it. Though Catlin doesn’t either. Me and Oona. Our ‘friendship’ – it isn’t just a friendship. I think that we both know that, but it is up to me to say the words, and I can’t. No more than magic. Some things are too big to let be true.

Mam and Catlin, with me joining in, of course talk about Lon until bedtime. Catlin goes through every interaction since we moved to Ballyfrann, framing them so differently to me that it’s hard to know who’s telling the truth. It’s all one picture; we’re probably just using very different filters. Or something.

He texts her goodnight kisses before bed. She kisses her phone, and I call her a fool and she laughs at me.

‘I feel like a fool,’ she says. ‘I feel like I’m losing brain cells every time I’m near him. It’s like he’s kicking out the stuff that normally lives inside my head and replacing it with all of this new happy.’

‘That doesn’t sound so bad,’ I say to her.

‘Madeline?’ she asks me, her voice lower. ‘Will you come with me to the pub thing?’

‘Really, Catlin?’ I was kind of resigned to going anyway.

‘Yeah. I need you there. In case none of the others want to talk to me.’

‘You’ll have Lon though.’

‘I know. But I want both of you. He might think I’m weird if I’m only talking to him all the time. Please?’ She holds out her little finger for a promise. I think of the jut of rib outside the fox, the harsh white flash of it against the red.

I sigh. I grasp her pinkie.

It is done.

‘There’s something drawing him and me together, Maddy,’ she says to me, eyes widening. ‘I think it might be fate. I’ve never felt so attracted to anyone before. I mean, I think about him all the time. Like, all the time. Like, even when I’m praying. Or plucking my eyebrows. When he kisses me, I feel he’s marking me. That now I’m his. With other boys, it was always mostly about me and them. The me was first. My happiness. My needs. But with Lon, it feels like he’s the most important thing.’

‘He’s not,’ I tell her. ‘You are. You’re my sister.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know it’s not feminist and it’s not right, but I just want to please him. I want him to look at me and feel the way I feel, and when he does it feels like it’s a present from the Gods.’

I throw a facecloth at her.

‘Don’t be weird. What’s pushing you together is your genitals. Your genitals fancy each other. Well, yours do him. It’s hard to say. With genitals.’

I am aware I should stop saying genitals. Thankfully, Catlin looks at me as though what I’ve just said makes a kind of sense. ‘His genitals totally fancy my genitals, Madeline. I know for a fact they do. I have evidence.’ She grins. ‘Hard evidence.’

I cover my face with my hands, and glare at her through the gaps between my fingers.

‘I cannot believe you just said that.’

‘Me neither,’ she says in a small voice.

‘Are you ashamed of yourself?’ I look at her, furrowing my brow like an angry teacher.

She swallows once and then decides she’s not.

‘No. I regret nothing. Which is also what I will say to Lon when I lose it to him the night of the lock-in.’

‘Argh. Too much information. And also, no.’

‘I didn’t ask your permission,’ Catlin snaps.

‘I know you didn’t. But … first of all, too soon, and secondly, do you want to have an audience?’ Lon probably wouldn’t mind an audience at all, I think.

‘Look, it’s my body and I get to do what I want with it. And I want you to support me.’

‘What, to stand at the side of the bed waving pompoms and cheering?’

‘Lon would probably love that.’

‘Eww.’

‘You just hate feelings and the people who have them.’

‘Maybe I just hate Lon?’

‘You can’t hate Lon. Because then I would hate you.’

God help us both, I think. And I say goodnight. I think we’d end up having a proper screaming row if this kept going. And I don’t want that. I don’t want us to move further apart than we already are.

I get a glass of water with fresh mint in, and make sure the window’s open wide. I’m going to bed later and later these days, avoiding sleep and all the fear it brings. Outside the window something howls, probably a rogue husky. I open up my book, turn on the bedside lamp and settle in. My phone vibrates. It is a picture of Oona. She says, ‘Bonne nuit.’ She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt to bed, and her hair’s all sticking up. I send her back a picture of my toes poking out from the bed. A little kiss.

The world’s not bad or good. It is both, and kind of all at once.