Perfectly Preventable Deaths

2 Hawthorn

Brian gives us a tour as we finish our tea, through sitting rooms and libraries and parlours. It’s all very old-looking, battered fancy furniture, and big, threadbare tapestries draped from floor to ceiling. He tells us there are secret passages as well, inside the walls. His dad designed them, but they aren’t used now. There is too much castle for one person, without adding any more castle. I get it. There are a million rooms Brian doesn’t need, all locked and full of dust-cloth-covered furniture. Downstairs is the granny flat. Brian’s relative Mamó’s basement realm. Mamó means grandmother, but I think that Mam told us she was his aunt. I don’t know why she needs her own apartment, when there is a whole castle, but people are strange, and I get the sense Mamó is even stranger. She works as some sort of naturopath (I could never trust anyone whose job ends in -opath), which means people come to her, and she does stuff to them, and then they think they feel better. It’s not very evidence-based, and as a future doctor I resent that. There are parasites like that dotted all around the country. Who’ll lay their hands on you and say a little prayer for ninety quid.

There are parts of this Mamó littered all over the castle, earthy boot prints, feathers on the floor, a dirty trowel in the sink. A mug on the kitchen table filled with tea leaves and what looks like sediment. Mam looks a bit put out. Which is probably what the old wagon wanted. Asserting dominance, like a dog taking a slash against a wall. We’re in her territory, and I don’t think we’re welcome. I lift the trowel and wipe dark earth away from silver blade.

Brian rolls his eyes. ‘Don’t worry about that, Madeline. She’ll get over herself, as the fella says.’

Brian says as the fella says a lot. I wonder who the fella is. It might just be Brian.

I pick one of the feathers up and look at it. It’s very long and very dark, the quill as wide as someone’s baby finger. I imagine it bending towards me, as though it had a knuckle in the centre, and feel a small throb of repulsion mixed with the familiar need to keep it with me. I tuck it in the pocket of my cardigan. The one furthest away from my skin.

The castle tour continues. And there’s a feather in every single room. The dining hall. The solar. The physic garden and the kitchen garden. The pantry and the larder and the study. Brian’s office. The east wing and the west. The attic full of chests and frames and clunky, ancient things. I keep on reaching for them, until I’m jamming them inside my pockets, feeling the bend of barb, the pinch of calamus. Mam trails a finger across a steamer trunk. A little valley interrupting years and years of dust. She’s yearning to get stuck in, I sense it in her. To air the whole thing out. Clean slate. Fresh start. A blank page of a life untouched by loss.

Catlin’s room and mine are adjoining. They have been chosen for us, based on whatever algorithm Brian has for stepdaughter location. But we got to pick new sets of linen and little accessories and things. We messaged Brian the links to what we liked. And now they’re in the rooms. As if by magic. Being rich is class. My bedroom here has crisp white sheets, dotted with embroidered little flowers. Broderie anglaise, I think it’s called. A properly rich person would know these things. We are new money.

Catlin has pink throws and red and gold and black things all artfully mingled together. Mam says her room looks like ‘a fancy brothel’. But in a fond way. If you were to look at both of our rooms, hers would be the one you’d pick to be a teenage girl’s. Mine would be an aging aunt’s. A nun’s. Even though Catlin’s is full of votive candles and Mary statues, all of her collection and some more. Catlin loves the Virgin Mary’s look. She has a wall of Marys in her room. Mary star of the sea, Mary mourning Jesus. Mary with a shining crown, stomping snakes. I’m not that gone on Mary, as a concept. Lots of things about her feel like lies.

‘Maddy,’ Catlin says, ‘did you hear Brian say the castle costs eleven grand to heat in winter?’

‘I did, because he said it ninety times and I have ears. I think he was trying to encourage the closing of windows.’

‘I felt like saying to him, “We will wear all of our jumpers to bed if you just give us the eleven grand.”’

Sometimes they say twins have a psychic bond. But I don’t think you have to be psychic to want eleven thousand euro. ‘Oh my God. Me too.’

‘You wouldn’t appreciate eleven grand. You’d only spend it on sensible things like college and a pension.’ Catlin is contemptuous.

‘I would not. I’d buy drugs,’ I say. And I would too. A donation to Médicins Sans Frontières totally counts as drugs.

Catlin is sceptical. ‘What sort of drugs?’

‘Um … heroin?’ I offer, to shut her up.

‘Cool,’ she says, ‘but you’re not allowed to get addicted.’

‘Neither are you,’ I tell her. ‘Now, let’s put the bedclothes on your massive sex-bed.’

Our beds here can only be described as gothic sex-beds. Four-posters are the size of little fields, all carved with grapes and roses, crucifixes. Little faces peering. Small, blank eyes. I’m surprised there are no shirtless lords striding around the gardens, murmuring Catlin’s name as though in prayer. Give her time, I think, stuffing a fat feather pillow inside a bright pink pillowcase and fluffing it up.

‘It’s not a sex-bed yet,’ says Catlin. ‘Not till I get my hands on a Galway boyfriend.’

Catlin is convinced that we are going to meet our soulmates in Galway. Galway boyfriends with broad shoulders and fluent Irish and possible castles of their own. She has a theory that Oliver Cromwell kicked all the properly Irish men to Connacht, and they’re lurking in the mountains, brimming with testosterone and secret sensitivity. She’s even started a gang: the Galway Boyfriends Gang. She is president, and I am the secretary and treasurer. There are only two members of the GBG, but we’re looking to expand to four when we meet our Galway boyfriends.

‘What will your Galway boyfriend be called?’ I ask.

‘Something pure Galway like Peadar or Ultan,’ she says.

‘Mine will be called Fenian,’ I tell her. ‘Or maybe Mountain. Mountain Boyfriend O’ Galway.’

‘That’s good,’ she says.

I tell her that I know. We make her bed and then we go into my room and make mine. I quite like making beds. When you’re putting the duvet cover on you can pretend to be a ghost. Our rooms are almost identical, mirror images, only with different tapestries and views. Every room in Brian’s castle has a view. It’s a bit much really. All that landscape.

‘Ultan will be able to drive a tractor,’ Catlin says, as though this is an extremely desirable quality in a man.

Which it may well be. We’re in the country. There are different rules.

‘My one will have road frontage,’ I tell her, ‘and feed abandoned baby lambs by the hearth. With his big Galway hands.’ I think I’ve won.

‘Ah. Mountain sounds like a sweetheart,’ she says. ‘Ultan will have a shock of bright red curls.’

‘Mountain will have straw instead of hair. Like a thatched cottage.’

‘That is incredibly Galway of him,’ she says, and I can tell she is impressed. ‘Ultan will often walk about the fields with a calf draped around his shoulders, like a heavy rural scarf.’

‘Mountain will only eat turnips. And he won’t be able to see the English.’

‘Ultan will light me fires with turf he cut himself. And then seduce me beside them.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I know,’ she says proudly.

‘Mountain will be able to fly?’ It comes out like a question.

‘Mountain doesn’t sound real, Madeline. I don’t think you’re taking the GBG seriously.’

‘It’s a practical skill that helps him rescue puppies trapped in slurry pits. And there is nothing wrong with having high standards, Catlin,’ I remind her. And it is true. Though sometimes I worry my standards are a little bit too high. I don’t like boys the same way she does. She’s almost constantly in love with people. The shape of them. Their flesh. The way they sound. The lyrics of love songs make perfect sense to Catlin. It’s always high-romance. Until she gets bored.

I flop down, and feel the compassionate gaze of all those plaster eyes. I’m not sure I could sleep with all those faces there, but I suppose Catlin likes an audience.

‘Madeline?’ she asks, and her voice is different, more serious.

‘Yeah?’ I sit on the flagstones, still stuffing pillows into pillowcases. When you have a four-poster bed you need loads of pillowcases. It is a problem.

‘Wouldn’t it be terrible if we weren’t related?’ she asks.

‘What?’ I mean, it would; of course it would. Half of my immediate family wouldn’t be there. More if she took Mam with her. Which, realistically, she would.

‘Well –’ she’s playing with a loose thread on my blanket – ‘I mean, you’d miss me so much. If I was going, and you were my best friend and not my sister.’

This is true. ‘You’d miss me too, you know.’

She nods. ‘I would. But you’re way more introverted than I am. It would be much harder for you.’

She’s right. But I don’t like the sound of it coming out of her mouth. A statement of fact that doubles as an insult.

‘I’d get over it,’ I assure her. And I would. I totally would. With all my introverting skills. Books and naps and biscuits all the way.

‘No, you wouldn’t.’ She’s confident of this. What does she think I am?

‘You wouldn’t either. You’d waste away from grief.’

‘Ultan would mind me. We’d churn butter on the mountain side and distil our own poitín.’ She smiles, half in love with her pretend man already.

‘There’s no such thing as Ultan,’ I tell her. It comes out sharper than I had intended. Which happens to me a lot.

My sister smiles. ‘Not yet.’ The moment passes.

But later, in the stone walls of my room, the mountains big and silent out the window, it occurs to me that we had both assumed that I would be the one she left behind.