Perfectly Preventable Deaths

8 Bay Leaf

The castle is grave quiet, statue still. I call for Catlin or Mam, but no one answers. It’s a little bit of a relief. Reporting back about the day at school is exhausting. I take off my shoes so they don’t leave wet footprints on the flagstones and traipse to the kitchen, to make a cup of tea and start my homework. I need to wrap my head around some stuff – our maths teacher is of the ‘it makes sense to me so it will clearly make sense to you’ variety, and I don’t want to end up sobbing into my maths paper. Catlin says I shouldn’t worry about college till final year, but Catlin would say that. The only medicine she wants to practise is drinking too much cough syrup ‘to see what will happen’. (She threw up sugar-vomit is what happened.)

Too much trigonometry later, I raise my head. Mamó is at the kitchen table, drinking from a brown ceramic mug filled with what looks like dishwater and twigs.

I cannot tell how long she has been there, watching me work. Annoying me silently. Like a spy. Her face is disinterested and her skin remarkably smooth for a woman who is, in Catlin’s words, ‘as old as balls’.

I rise and begin putting my things back in my schoolbag.

‘You’ll have a cup of tea with me,’ she states. It is in no way an invitation. I incline my head and sit opposite her. She busies herself with mugs and spoons and teabags. She knows where everything is.

The urge to rearrange things just to mess with her is strong. I swallow down. I am calm. I am mature. I am impermeable.

Like granite.

‘Any visitors today?’ I ask. My voice is smug. I cannot help myself. I’m wasting all my energy not raising an eyebrow.

‘A few clients, yes.’ She tilts her head. The way owls do. Her eyes are very large and very bright. Her hair is grey. Her face is buttered leather, only paler. Her sleeves rolled up. She has a farmer tan.

‘And what did you do to them?’ My voice comes out meaner than I intend. Something about her makes me want to kick things.

‘Helped them, mostly. Except for this one woman, who wanted me to –’ Mamó swallows – ‘… cleanse her aura, with the help of some healing crystals she had purchased on the Internet. And so it fell to me, to explain to her, the things I will and things I will not do.’

Her face is implacable.

I look at her.

And Mamó looks at me.

‘What won’t you do?’ I ask.

‘I don’t engage with things that are not useful,’ she tells me, her bright eyes taking in my face. I feel as if she is counting every pore.

‘I thought you’d be into all that New Age stuff,’ I offer.

‘People often assume as much, until they know me.’ She takes a long sip of the brew. It’s tea but thicker, blacker. More treacly.

‘Brian tells us you’re a homeopath.’

‘Does he now? I’m something of a herbalist. My mother handed down her skills to me, from a young age. And if you have a skill, and stay in one place long enough, people come to you. Sometimes I will help them. Sometimes not.’

I look at the cup in front of me, thick with milk. She didn’t ask me how I took my tea. And when she plonked it down I didn’t thank her.

‘Catlin has some crystals,’ I tell her. Thinking of the little quartzes, polished lapis, unakite and moonstone she litters through the Marys in her room. Only for the look of them though, really.

‘Catlin would,’ Mamó says. ‘But you’ve a bit more sense.’

I take another sip and tell her that I hate homeopathy.

‘Don’t waste your energy,’ she tells me, ‘hating useless things.’

‘But it kills people,’ I start to tell her. ‘I read that –’

‘Life kills people, Madeline,’ she tells me. ‘Sometimes people help their life along though. It can be … frustrating.’

‘I want to be a doctor when I’m older,’ I tell her, and she nods.

‘You’re not afraid of work, so. That makes sense. I’ve seen you with the plants. You like to heal things.’ She pauses. ‘That little tree of yours needs far more water though. Don’t be afraid to drench it. It won’t hurt.’

‘They all have different needs, the different plants. I mean, it makes sense. But it’s hard to know.’ I shrug. ‘I do my best. And thank you.’

She moves her head. It isn’t quite a nod. Her hair is in a bun at the back of her head, not like the kind that ballet dancers have, lower but somehow neater. She wouldn’t look out of place with a headscarf. Her blouse is buttoned up to the very top. Her fingernails are several different colours, not painted, like with varnish. Maybe stained from leaf and clay and root.

‘What do you make of the village?’ she asks.

‘It’s OK, I suppose,’ I tell her.

She says, ‘Hmmm,’ in a way that makes me feel like I should say more things. Like at a job interview where they ask you your strengths and you say, ‘I work hard,’ and then they look at you and you get stressed and offer, ‘… like a badger?’ and you know you aren’t going to get the job so you look at your feet until they speak again.

I have only done, like, three job interviews, for summer jobs, but I’m fairly confident that they went very badly.

I could tell.

‘There aren’t very many people our age. Which is hard on Catlin. She always has a lot of friends and things.’

‘And you?’

‘That doesn’t bother me,’ I say, and realise it’s true. ‘I was nervous going to school, but it’s OK. I kind of like my space.’

She makes a noise and then stands up. Her cup is empty. Work to do. I feel like I should shake her hand as she leaves.

Did I get the job, Mamó? I wonder.

I still don’t like her, but now the feeling’s mixed with something else.

I look down at my small clean hands and wonder what the future’s going to bring. Will Catlin make all the friends and leave me awkwardly chatting to old women? Is that what life will become?

The thick tea is pooling in my stomach like a hot meal. I wash the cups and look out the window, at the gardens. Mamó is walking past a hawthorn tree. Through the dim, I see the flicker of a wing, the flash of an eye. Her snatching hand towards a branch. Was that a bird? She stuffs it in her pocket. I can’t be sure. She moved so quickly, slinking through the dark. A predator. A weasel. I scrub the brown stains from the white ceramic. I rest the cups upon the draining board. Stare out the window till it’s too dark to see anything at all.

When I mount the wooden staircase, Catlin is in her bed, sipping from a very familiar-looking brown ceramic mug.

‘What is that?’ I ask, pointing at it like it has offended me. Which, in fairness, it has.

‘I don’t know. Mamó gave it to me. Here, smell it.’ She thrusts it out. I hold it up to my face, inhale the scent. It smells a little like sage and a little like seawater, but something about it feels right. Like it’s the opposite of poison.

‘Weird,’ I say. ‘And you just took it? Is it at least working?’

‘I don’t know … I still feel rotten,’ she moans. ‘My stomach and my head.’

‘You poor thing,’ I murmur, feeling a bit smug that Mamó’s stupid tea hasn’t helped much.

‘Stop smirking at me, Maddy. She basically thrust it into my hand like a grenade and stared at me till I started drinking. Then grunted and left. I’m too sick to be dealing with rude strangers.’

‘I’m not smirking. She gave me tea as well. And plant advice.’

‘I’ve been sick one day and you’ve made a new best friend.’ Catlin’s mock-offended.

‘She’s not my friend,’ I say. ‘I get the feeling she is up to something.’

‘You think everyone is up to something.’

‘They usually are. You’re always up to something.’

‘Not today,’ she says, and leans back on the pillow with a sigh. ‘I’m too tired and disgusting. This stupid place will be the death of me.’

‘You’re roasting hot,’ I say, pressing my hand to her forehead. ‘Do you want me to get Mam?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I just want you. Will you sleep here tonight?’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Try hard to be contagious. I’d like a day off school.’

‘You don’t want this,’ she tells me. ‘It’s just … uurgh.’ Her eyes close and she curls in on herself.

‘But you know what isn’t uurgh?’ I ask, like a salesman from the 1950s, with a bright smile and raised eyebrows.

‘Stop,’ says Catlin. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

‘Not in the mood … for a love letter from Lon?’ I ask, waving the envelope in front of her face like a paper fan on a hot day.

‘What?’ She sits up straight. ‘Give me that.’

Her face intent, she reads it twice. I try to look over her shoulder, but she hides it.

‘What did he say?’ I ask.

‘Private sexy things.’ She waggles her eyebrows.

‘He did not.’

‘Of course not. He’s not a creep.’

I let that comment slide, and she shows me the letter. It’s more of a note, really.

Catalina –

I missed your beautiful face today. Return to me soon.

– L

‘Wonderful how he made you being sick all about him,’ I tell her.

‘Maddy, stop. It’s lovely.’ She smiles, and gives the note a little kiss. I leave her there, rereading the note.

I brush my teeth, cleanse my face and lay out tights and knickers for the morning, and then return to clamber in beside her.

‘Don’t billow me,’ she grumps. She’s hot as stoves.

I tell her about school, and tea with Mamó, but she mainly wants to ask me about Lon. How he looked, and what he said exactly. I try to be helpful, but it’s hard because he’s so boring and terrible. Catalina. Who changes someone’s name to please themselves? It’s not a nickname even. When she drifts off, I lie there for ages, trying to get comfortable and failing. There’s a feeling of definite un-safety. Not exactly danger. Just un-safety. Something’s here, clicking through the pipes. It’s lurking in my temples, in my fingers. I can feel my shoulders start to tense, my joints engage. I’m used to this, I know just what it means. Like stomach cramps the day before my period. I’m going to need to gather something soon. I hate this feeling and I hate myself.

Mam taking me aside before we left, to go through all the remnants in my room.

‘You understand that this isn’t normal behaviour, Madeline.’

I nodded.

And I did. I do.

I curl into a little ball and close my eyes and dig my nails into the soft pad below my thumbs and count and count until my breaths ease. Catlin moans and rolls towards me, waking up. I can sense the sick off her. Her hands are clammy, sweating. She rubs my back and tells me things, small gossips about people we both know, imaginary clothes she’d like to wear. The unimportant, fascinating things cover up my worry like a snowdrift. She keeps it up until I fall asleep.

I dream of forests where teeth litter the ground like fallen leaves. When I reach to touch them, the texture is all wrong. They melt against my skin. Mamó is there.

The world is big and soft. And very cruel.