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.
2
Hawthorn
(soft belly and strong heart)
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 of
ten 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.
3
Milk Thistle
(spares the liver)
There are many things about this castle that are surprising. Number one: we live here. Number Two: battlements. We’ve been having a good explore, because that’s what you do if a place has so many rooms you need two people’s fingers and toes, and possibly, like, seven extra hands, to count them. Brian showed us some rooms, the ‘main’ ones, he called them. The library, the bedrooms, toilets, kitchen, the blue sitting room, the red sitting room, his office. His father’s taste in decor was very castle, and Brian’s stuck to it.
His office has a coat of arms on the wall. And, on the lintel, something even worse. A little leather fist of a thing, peering down from the door of his office. I somehow knew what it was right away. A shrunken head. It should be ghoulish, but it just seems sad, the icing on the strangest cake that I have ever eaten. The cake of our life here now. I told Catlin that it probably wasn’t real. I didn’t think it could be.
Brian says it is.
Catlin thinks it’s grand. It fits the castle aesthetic. Like the swords and suits of armour we found in a small room behind the downstairs toilet. But armour’s just clothes. This little thing – it was a person once, or something living anyway. And now it’s just an oddment, on the thick ledge over his door, dented eyes the size of little thumb prints, hollowed out, and long hair sewn on. When we asked him, Brian told us how they used to make them. First remove the skull. Then cut the back open and scoop out all the fat. Put some special seeds under the eyelids. Sew them shut and pin the lips together. Then boil it. Afterwards dry it out with rocks, mould the features with your hands while the flesh is still moist. You make it into anything you want. A boy. A girl. A thing.
And when you’re done, you sprinkle it with ash.
‘Where did you get it, Brian?’ we asked our head-collecting stepdad.
‘My father picked it up. On his travels.’ He smiled. ‘It’s supposed to be protection from your enemies. You kill them, and you shrink their heads, and for as long as you keep that head, their ghost must serve you.’ He waggled his fingers, making light of it. But I felt strange.
‘It’s a little sad,’ I told him, thinking of a tired ghostly slave.
‘It is,’ he said, a little smile on his face, ‘but people don’t do that stuff now. Most heads are made from hides, to sell to tourists.’
‘Who was this?’ asked Catlin, still staring at it, like it was a friend whose name she was trying to place.
‘A girl,’ he said. ‘I don’t know any more about her though.’
There was a pause, and then he said, almost to himself, ‘I don’t know if I’d want to. There’s such a thing as knowing too much.’
He smiled at me, like I knew what he meant. And I thought of all the times I have known too much. They’ve mainly involved things Catlin has told me. Secrets people wouldn’t want me knowing about their lives. The messy stuff. Not much actual mess here though – it is immaculate. Too immaculate for one Brian to do all by himself.
‘How does he keep this place, like, clean? Do we have servants now? It feels like this level of clean would take at least one servant,’ I ask my sister, ratting at the small white flecks of skin around my nail, as frayed as afterfeather, but not as soft.
‘Stop being weird, Maddy,’ says Catlin. ‘The servants will talk.’
‘We don’t have servants. They would have greeted our arrival on the stairs,’ I tell her, picturing the awkwardness of that. I’m really glad we don’t have, like, a staff. Imagine all the extra interaction, having to thank people all day long. Ugh.
‘But I’m invested now. I would like to fool around with an attractive butler. Named Higgins. He would school me in the ways of love, and I would use those skills to marry well.’
‘Take me, Higgins!’ I gasp, caressing a trowel, as though it were an ab. ‘Meh. It doesn’t work. And don’t exploit the servants, dear. It isn’t classy.’
‘I don’t have to be classy, Mad. We’re new money … I will say it’s not the sexiest name I could have chosen,’ she says. ‘But I stick by it. And by my beloved Higgins, who gives me fresh bedclothes and screaming orgasms.’
‘Catlin, what of Ultan? Don’t break his rural heart.’
‘Don’t slut-shame me,’ she says.
‘I amn’t shaming you. You have no shame for me to shame you with. But can we keep the orgasms more gaspy than screamy, please? We have adjoining rooms. And I sleep light.’
My sister thinks about it, and she nods. ‘You have yourself a sexy, sexy deal.’
Catlin and me decide to do some re-potting and planting in the greenhouse, smoky glass in a green-tinged frame. It looks like a massive jewellery box from the outside. Spanish moss trails from the roof like lace.
I keep finding little grey-brown woodlice in the corners, some whole and others worn to almost dust. Mam calls them ‘pigs’, those little tank-like insects. You see them teeming underneath dead wood. There is something tomb-like about this place. It’s too big for one man, and for four people it is still too big. And all the little deaths inside the corners,
heaped up neatly, like they died polite.
My two hands are flat on the ground, feeling for the best place to put this little sapling. It’s a baby sycamore. I grew it in a yoghurt pot at first, from a helicopter. Mam says I have green fingers, like my dad. It’s not that hard – you read up what they need and just do that. I am quite good at knowing when plants are a little unhappy though. Takes one to know one. Probably I just like healing things. Plants are my version of mindfulness or yoga, all that other stuff they demand you do at school to reduce your stress, as though they haven’t stressed you with that stress, at least in part. It’s soothing to help a green life out. And a lot of stuff is just like us. They need to eat, they need the space to grow, the air to breathe. To not be hurt.
Catlin’s sorting peace lilies. They take over when they’re in the pots, like mint. She rips them apart, a vulture at a carcass. I put my hand on her arm.
‘Let me do it.’
‘You’ll take ages,’ she says. ‘I want to unpack more and go exploring.’
‘I know, but Catlin …’
‘Hmmm?’ She quirks a lip that way she has, like when a cat shows you one of its teeth, just so you know they’re there and don’t get notions. My fingers rummage softly through the soil and gently tease the networked roots apart. Catlin’s face is focused on her phone, the shine of the screen. I can see it reflected in the whites of her eyes, as the light dims in the garden. She almost looks like an alien. Not of this world. A beautiful anomaly. She smiles, and her teeth glint soft. Like little pearls. Our big teeth look like baby teeth. Everything about us is tiny. When you complain about it, people tell you to shut up. To eat a sandwich. Which is fair enough, but I would like to need less help with shelves.
The greenhouse is lit with strings of LED lights. It’s adorable. Like somewhere you’d get married. If Mam and Brian hadn’t had their small ‘big day’ already.
‘I bet this place would be amazing for parties,’ Catlin says. ‘We could get all our friends from Cork. Invite them down. Not right away – I know Brian doesn’t like guests he doesn’t know. But, in a while, I think we could convince him.’
Perfectly Preventable Deaths Page 2