Perfectly Preventable Deaths

4 Broom

Catlin is fishtail-braiding her hair at the kitchen table. She did our nails last night. Hers shiny purple, mine grey. We’re starting school today. My fingers flutter, picking at the oilcloth. I taste something sour in my stomach. The panic builds. I put down my cup of tea, and begin to tidy. Scrub the tea stains out of china cups. I can see Mamó curled over something small in the garden. It’s soft and dark. I cannot tell if it’s a clump of earth or a young bird. Her fingers clasped around it and her expression vacant. She rises, meets my eye before she turns away. I start, as fingers trail across my shoulder.

‘I’ll get those,’ Mam tells me.

‘No,’ I say, shaking off adrenaline. ‘It’s fine.’

‘I’ve time,’ she says. ‘I’m a lady of leisure now.’ She smiles. We both know she’ll be busy all day long. It’s who she is. Mam is a primary-school teacher, and she’s taken a career break, so her job in Cork will be waiting if she needs it. Mam and me are alike that way, I think. Plan for the worst. Except she also hopes for the best. I scrape my toast into the bin, half eaten. Catlin smiles at me, stuffs her second slice into her mouth.

‘We’ll be late!’ she says. ‘We’re meeting Layla at the end of the driveway. In ten.’

The driveway’s very long. We have to run.

Layla Shannon is a tall, blonde wisp of a girl. She looks like she would appear out of a mist. In moonlight. By a lake. Doing ballet. For a prince. A fairy prince. I can’t be dealing with her. She’s our groundskeeper’s daughter, and lives in a lodge on the grounds of our fabulous castle because what has our life become?

Layla waves at us, her long, pale fingers curled together like the wing of a bird. ‘Hey,’ she says. Her voice is low.

‘Hey,’ we both say back. Catlin looks her up and down. Me too, but only because she looks like the sort of person who doles out swords and prophecies in books. Her hair is tied into a high, messy ponytail with what looks like twine. She has a stain on her school skirt.

‘Your lace is untied,’ Catlin points out. When Layla kneels down to tie it, she’s basically still taller than us. It isn’t fair. Catlin rises to her full height. Asks Layla about the school, the village. Her brothers. Where people go to drink. I lean back against the cold stone, my hands stuffed in the pockets of my duffel coat. I think about the bed I left behind. All cosy and warm and not full of people. A space where I could snooze and be alone. I look down at my battered record bag. It has a book and a spare book in it. One is about the Spanish flu epidemic. The other is about the missing girls.

Layla laughs, as though she and Catlin were plotting a hilarious crime. ‘You’re funny,’ she tells my sister. ‘I like that.’

Catlin looks at her with squinty eyes. The sunlight is bright this morning. The mountains bleached, the trees warped like wrought bone. I notice something at Layla’s feet. A soft, small thing. I crouch down, look at it. A little pygmy shrew. Its dead face thin, eyes wide. Little mouth all opened, little blackhead teeth nesting inside. Like ants.

‘What are you doing, Maddy?’ Catlin asks. Her face is horrified.

‘Sorry,’ I say to Layla and Catlin, standing up. ‘I don’t normally examine little corpses.’

‘It was a pygmy shrew,’ says Layla. ‘I had a look at it before ye came. Poor little thing.’

I smile at her. ‘They have the weirdest little noses, don’t they?’

‘They always look so disappointed in life.’

‘Whyfor am I a shrewwwww?’ My shrew-voice comes out squeaky and aggressive, but Layla seems to get what I’m going for.

‘The world is big and it frightens me.’

‘Send help.’

‘Send so much help.’

We giggle. Catlin shrugs, brushes down her skirt. Crouches to the little corpse, takes out her phone and snaps it.

‘Another body found in Ballyfrann.’ She quirks her mouth.

And then the laughter stops. Catlin’s face is all, Why did I say that?

It is an expression I recognise from me.

The bus pulls up.

Layla doesn’t sit near us. Grey roads snake like rivers through the landscape. We roll clunkily through the mountain pass. They were found here, I think. Stare out the window.

Helen Groarke, most recent of the girls.

Amanda Shale. They found her cold and broken on her birthday.

Nora Ginn looked older than fourteen. They think that someone held her for a while.

Bridget Hora, small like us, but older than the others. Not by much though.

I leave my book inside my bag. Remind myself that it’s the sort of thing that people don’t like to talk about. Which is weird. It was so long ago for some of them. Twenty, thirty years. No one that people here would have known, apart from Helen. It isn’t that the deaths of strangers matter less; it’s just they’re not our deaths. We don’t have a responsibility to mourn them.

No one knows who hurt the mountain girls. But in books on unsolved Irish murders, they always get a chapter. At least one chapter.

I look at Catlin, on her phone, scrolling through the news from her friends back home, until her pale face clicks back into repose. Until she has remembered that she matters. I roll my shoulders back until they click.

We pass the green sign, chipped and rusted over. Flakes of paint peel off. Rough brown pokes through. I look back as it shrinks away behind us.

Fáilte go Béal Ifreann

Welcome to Ballyfrann

I crook my mouth at Catlin. It isn’t a smile. And neither is what she gives back to me. She butts her shoulder gently against mine, as the bus rattles through the mountain. It sounds as though the engine is a metal box full of loose bolts. Too loud to put on headphones to block it out.

‘It looks so lonely here,’ my sister says. She says lonely like it could apply to her somehow. Like it is not my word.

‘We won’t be lonely, Catlin. You are magic. And we have each other. We will surely make our own fun. Out of turf.’ I tell my sister things that might be lies.

She nods. ‘I normally don’t worry about stuff, Mad. I don’t put my foot in it. And yet. Here it is. My foot.’ She curls her toes. I hear the crack of bone.

The bus pulls up outside some spiked black gates. Chain ropes around them, like a snake around its dinner. Three separate padlocks are attached. The railings around the school are painted black, but are bright brown with rust.

‘Who’d want to break in here?’ she asks. I shrug. It’s basically a series of abandoned prefabs, clustered around a plump white cottage with curranty little windows. Some of them are boarded up with wood or wavy shed-roof iron. Corrugated.

‘At least it’s safe?’ I venture.

‘Nothing’s ever safe in Ballyfrann,’ Layla mutters as she passes by. ‘Have ye had your tetanus injections?’

I pull my black polyester jumper down over my grey polyester skirt. Button up my duffel coat again, as wind bites skin.

And it begins.

This school is very different to our Cork one, way less sanitary. Lots of greys and browns and terracottas, holes worried in paint, where you can see the colours from before poking through time. Like the rings on a stump. The prefabs must be older than they seem. Brian went here, we know that. When it was just the cottage. The culture shock is strong. I almost cry with relief when I see a plastic chair with a penis drawn on it. I look at Catlin. See she’s happy too.

‘Just like home,’ she says to me. ‘Do you see the detail on the balls?’

I nod. It does look old. ‘Maybe it’s Brian’s,’ I say, instantly realising my mistake when she makes retching noises. ‘I meant his work, Catlin. Jesus. His work. Argh.’

Over the course of the long, cold day, Our Lady of the Mountain Village School starts to grow on me. Like a fungus, or an oddly comforting series of warts. The bathrooms, in a separate sort of shed-yoke, smell of cigarettes and wee. Someone has taken the batteries out of the smoke alarm. It beeps unsafely every now and then. Punctuating the silence all around.

I kind of like it here. It isn’t bothered with unimportant things like appearances or adequacy and that’s fine. There are only about thirty of us in the entire building. Like, one per cent of the population of our old school. It’s ridiculous. We basically met everyone today. It took five seconds.

Layla has two brothers, Fiachra and Cathal. They mountain-bike to school, ‘too active for the bus’. Catlin pokes my ribcage when she hears this. Twice. One for each physically fit possible Galway boyfriend. I don’t know. I suppose I can see it a little. If you like your David Bowies young, and with acne.

There are six people from the village in our year, apart from us. Charley Collins, a broad-shouldered girl with the fiercest eyebrows I have ever seen, her brother Eddie, Layla, Fiachra, Cathal and another new girl who’s starting sometime soon. Some kids bus in from the towns near Ballyfrann, but not too many. The nearest town is an hour away, and lots of kids from there just go to Galway city for their lessons. The kids from Carraig stick out, with their normalness and polo shirts. They look like regular country kids. Who knows what side of a GAA pitch their bread is buttered on.

There’s, like, a glow of health and muscle off the kids from closer to the castle. Does everyone here exercise? What’s wrong with them? Have they no Netflix? I don’t like it and I don’t trust it. I glare down at my hands like I’m Mamó. Mamó, who, by the way, refused to leave the village to come to Mam and Brian’s wedding despite her actual name being the Irish word for grandmother. We should be glaring at her.

‘What are the teachers like?’ asks Catlin, not really caring, but wanting to fill up space. She’s eating salad with a travel fork she uses to stab her question into the air. It has pomegranate seeds in it, and feta. Mam is over-compensating. It won’t last.

‘OK. I mean, we don’t really get to know them or anything. The teachers don’t stay long, maybe for like a year,’ Charley says. ‘It’s too far out. There’s nothing to do, if you’re not from here. They fill up their CVs, move somewhere else.’ She says somewhere else like other people say Paris or New York. I remember her father from the wedding, and the move. A wide, red-faced man, surrounded by wide, red-faced brothers. Hairy fists.

‘The Collinses,’ Brian had told us. ‘I’m related to them, distantly. Everyone in Ballyfrann has Collins blood. In their veins – or on their hands, they say.’ And then he laughed. ‘It works out well. They take care of their own.’

The wedding was a deeply awkward day.

‘What do people who are from here do?’ asks Catlin hopefully.

Charley shrugs.

I look out the window, the teacher’s voice becoming background noise. The mountains dark and angry, blurred by clouds. The trees blade-sharp. I shiver. So does everyone, in fairness. The heating in the building doesn’t work.

Miss Feehlihy, the principal, is a creep. She shakes our hands and tells us several times how great Brian is, offering no helpful information before retreating off into her little office. Her bottle-blonde hair looks fire-hazard dry.

‘What’s the deal with her loving the hole off Brian?’ I ask my sister, who raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow.

‘Your eyebrow has some innuendo on it,’ I tell her.

‘Jesus, sorry. How embarrassing.’ She wipes it off with a hand that she then uses to give me the finger. Her nail polish is flawless. Mine’s already in bits. This place is full of splinters, and other things that bang and catch and snag.

‘She definitely has the horn for him,’ Catlin says. ‘Mam probably cock-blocked her.’

I shake my head and point to the poster on her door. Puppies and kittens. It is the crappest thing either of us has ever, ever seen.

‘She cock-blocked herself, Catlin,’ I tell her.

Our faces sombre. Recognising tragedy.

The Ballyfrann kids are friendly but distant. Like we were their aunts or nerdy cousins. We eat together at break and try to make our way into a group at lunch by asking about where things are and following them.

Here is a sample exchange:

‘So, what’s Miss Edwards like?’

‘Like a teacher.’ Thank you Cathal or Fiachra, one of Layla’s brothers. The way he says it isn’t like a dig. More a why-are-you-asking-me-things.

‘Do you know the castle?’ asks Catlin. Looking at her face, I can see the physical effort all this trying-to-make- bored-people-interested is taking. She isn’t used to this.

‘Yeah.’ It was more syllable than word. My sister needs this, Eddie, I think. Please try to care.

Eddie has a babyish, open face and wouldn’t have gotten the time of day off Catlin in our old school. I look at Catlin’s face and notice an almost imperceptible twitch. She was tallying. Eddie runs his big, thick fingers through his tufty, red hair and doesn’t notice.

‘We live there now,’ she offers.

He says, ‘OK.’ As though castles were caravans.

We eat in silence.

Sometime later, a terrible thing happens. Catlin says to Charley, ‘I like your pixie cut.’

And Charley says, ‘Thanks,’ and bites into her sandwich, like she doesn’t know that when a girl says a nice thing to you, you have to say one back. I can sense the hairs on the back of Catlin’s neck pricking up. Her brain scrolling through all the things about her you could compliment. Her hair, her skin, her eyeliner, her brogues. The little cameo she’s wearing with the Infant of Prague on it. She looks at me in semi-desperation. What is wrong with these people?

I look at Catlin.

‘Smoke?’ I say.

She smiles.

I haven’t started smoking or anything, but escape from social situations is a beautiful thing. When you are a pretend smoker, you can take off for ten to sixty minutes and no one will ever know. We sit at the back of the overgrown school garden, behind a bush, beside a wrought-iron gate. Our fingers move along beside each other, turning flaking brown to something skeletal.

‘Don’t let them get to you,’ I tell my sister.

‘I won’t,’ she assures me, sucking her cancer stick to ash in twenty seconds flat and lighting another.

‘A woman after my own heart,’ says a smooth, deep voice. It’s a lanky yoke of a man. Staring at us through the railings. He’s wearing a leather jacket, jeans. A white T-shirt. His hair is slicked back. All that’s missing is the motorcycle and he’d be a 1950s bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. He puts a large, pale hand on the gate and hops it easily. Dusts off his trousers.

Smiles and waits for us to be impressed.

Only one of us is. Catlin raises her eyes to his, shoulders back, boobs out.

‘You’re Brian’s new children, right?’

‘Stepdaughters,’ I tell him. I want to say ‘step-women’, but that might sound even creepier than children, to be fair. Who says the word children in a flirty manner? Predators, I think. I glare at him.

He holds out his hand.

‘My name is Lon Delacroix. Short for Laurent Delacroix.’ His voice is warm. He raises both his eyebrows plaintively as if to say, Don’t leave my hand alone.

Catlin nods, and takes the strange boy’s hand. Her eyes light up a bit. She’s found a snack. I look at the poor fecker. He doesn’t know what he’s in for.

He chats to us as though we were people until the bell rings, and I can feel it nourishing my twin. An older man, but not like creepy old. Like, college-age. Lon seems grand, maybe a bit up himself though. What’s he doing sneaking around the schoolyard, like? It’s odd.

On the way back into class, Catlin pokes me in the ribs again. She gets the same place almost every time. It’s sore. I can feel a little bruise beginning to form. A little purple welt of boy-potential. The day passes as days do, and by the end of it I’m exhausted. Meeting new people is hard. I feel like I’m doing a series of job interviews and if I don’t get the job I’ll end up lonely for the next two years, doing my homework and watching Catlin flirt with inappropriate older men. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but it wouldn’t be ideal.

We’re quiet for most of the bus ride home. Listening to the Ballyfrann kids interact. I feel like they have cast us as observers. It’s weird and things, but also a little bit refreshing. Why should they be our friends, like? They don’t know us, and we don’t know them.

Travelling back, the sky already dimming, I listen to the rattle of the bus. The bright of the cat’s eyes in the headlights. The hedgerow alongside the road is patchy, bare. I count seven white crosses on the roadside. A cluster and another and another. A little pattern in this unkempt place. The whirr of tyre on road grates loud, louder. Nails on chalkboard, scraping danger deep into my brain. Anything with wheels can be a weapon. I need to leave. I’m stuck. I’m stuck. I’m stuck.

I look at Catlin, on her phone again. Her face is focused, glowing with intent. The other students talk. I can’t hear what they say, not exactly. More the hum of it. Mixing with the harsh metallic clicks. We’re trapped inside a metal shell together. Counting crosses passing on the road.

Eight.

Nine.

Ten.

Eleven …

Mamó slices past us in a blood-red tin can. I only catch a flash of hemp and hair, but I know it’s her. A wave of recognition laced with anger. No wonder there are crosses on the road if that’s the way the locals drive.

Twelve …

Thirteen …

I think of the small shrew we saw this morning. Its little paws. The moisture on its nose. We’re so close to nature here. Lots of hidden life. And hidden death.