It tastes and smells like nail-polish remover. ‘Thank you?’
‘You are welcome,’ she says, and replaces the bottle in the glove compartment. ‘Father Byrne makes his own brand too. But mine is better.’
‘Who’s Father Byrne?’ I ask.
She snaps, ‘A priest. A man of God. One of them, at any rate.’
‘Everyone has secrets here. Even Brian. I wonder –’
‘Madeline,’ she says, ‘haven’t you enough to worry about, without putting names on everyone around you? And you can’t just dip your toe in and out again with this sort of thing. Either I’m training you or I am not. And currently I’m not. So save your questions.’ Her face is impassive, but not unkind.
‘Whatever happens though, we live here now. And surely I’m entitled to some sort of explanation of what is going on around us, in the place.’
‘Entitled. That’s you, right enough.’ Her tone is contemptuous. ‘You can’t refuse to turn around and ask someone to draw you a picture of what’s behind you instead of facing it. There are things you don’t know because you don’t have to know them yet. Accept it. Or turn around and LOOK.’
‘But Catlin –’ My voice slices through the air, more whiney than I had intended.
‘Look, Madeline. Your stepfather is trying,’ Mamó tells me. ‘And Lon won’t get very far with everyone watching your sister. Reporting back. And believe me, they will be.’
‘What happened with Helen Groarke? And Lon, before?’
‘No one’s sure of anything in this life. But if I had a daughter. Or a sister. Or a stranger. I wouldn’t want them spending time with that.’ She spits on to the dashboard. It leaves a white slick mark. An eye inside a face.
I look down at my shoes. They’re wet and filthy.
‘Sorry about the floor,’ I say, ‘and the lock.’
‘Sure they’re just little things,’ she says. ‘You’ll make amends for them. It isn’t complicated.’
I look down at my feet. I rub my boots, and smell my fingertips and rub again.
‘Mamó?’ I say.
‘What?’ she asks, and I shrink a little, but keep on going. ‘There’s blood on my boots, and it isn’t mine. Look.’ I thrust a grubby hand at her. ‘It’s old, I think. But it smells like …’
She pulls my hand to her nostrils, takes a sniff.
Our eyes meet.
She turns her face back towards the windscreen, grunts again. A different kind of grunt. Surprise, I think.
We reach the driveway. ‘I’m in a hurry, so I’ll leave you here,’ she tells me. ‘Also, I have to give you this. It was made with yourself in mind, so it’s no use to me. I know enough.’
I take it. It’s the small round sphere from in Bob’s beak. So black it’s blue and somehow also milky. I stare at it. It isn’t smooth. It’s pitted like a peach pit. On the surface, tufts of something cling.
‘What is it for?’
‘Just keep it in your pocket,’ Mamó tells me. ‘It’s not a charm, but it is good to have.’
I step out of the car, still none the wiser, and she speeds away. I stumble down the path towards my home that doesn’t feel like home. The sun is pale in the sky. The air is freezing. I feel the shadow of the yew trees on my face, and carry on going, shivering and limping. Cobwebs in my hair and dirty fingers. I need to shower and I want to sleep.
I lift my hands to my nose and take a breath.
She took her eyes off the road.
This blood surprised her.
And you can’t tell, from blood, where it came from. But when I smelled it, flash of recognition. Fear and fur, the forest.
And a blade.
31
Hazel
(inspiration, snakes)
I smush my face into the soft, soft pillow and ignore the beeping of my phone. They will be fine without me, I think. Yesterday, no one had even noticed I was missing, except Brian. He said he didn’t want to worry Mam, that he felt really guilty that I’d gotten lost. He’d known about the door, but it hadn’t been in use since his father’s time.
He caught me in the hallway of the castle, pulled me into a very gangly hug.
‘I told her you’d gone for a walk,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why. I panicked, and all of a sudden, there I was, lying to my wife about her child.’ Guilt doesn’t suit Brian. His face looked gaunt. Shadows underneath his eyes, and what else is he hiding?
Doors inside the walls and blood on stone.
Mam swoops into the room like a raven and grips me by the shoulders. I try to burrow away, like a mole, but a girl can only be a mole for so long when her mother is removing blankets and making statements like, ‘We need to talk.’
Of course she wants to know about the Catlin thing. Brian told her all about it. Mam can’t bring herself to say the name Helen Groarke – she calls her ‘that girl’ or ‘that poor girl’. The horror on her face. The weight of that. I should have told them sooner. Which is of course another thing she tells me. And I agree. Lon’s big white hands. The dark bruise on Catlin’s neck. Mam looks at me, her eyes reflecting my worry.
‘Why did you go to Brian and not to me?’ she asks, the furrows digging sideways in her brow. Two-thirds of a triangle. I don’t want to have hurt her feelings. I’m just so tired.
‘He’s family now, Mam. And he’s from here. I didn’t want to worry you with nothing.’ The heat is heavy, clinging to my skin. I poke a foot from under the duvet and flip my pillow. Cooler now, I shut my eyes, but only for a second.
‘This Lon,’ Mam asks, ‘how long have they been …?’
‘It happened really quickly after we moved here,’ I say. ‘She’s properly in love.’
Mam scoffs at this. ‘She’s sixteen years of age.’
‘So am I. That doesn’t mean our feelings aren’t real. Catlin thinks he’s her soulmate or something,’ I say. ‘I tried to tell her what I thought before. It didn’t help.’
‘She always was headstrong,’ Mam says, and not like it’s the good thing it once was.
She grips my hand. ‘The two of you are the most important things in my life,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to think that there’s this whole side to you I don’t know about. I mean, you lived in here.’ She cradles her abdomen beneath her dress.
‘Don’t make me go back there,’ I say, pretending to be frightened, and she laughs.
‘I couldn’t if I tried,’ she says. ‘And sometimes I think that’s almost a pity.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘So. What’s the fecker like?’ Her voice is heavy, trying to be light.
‘He’s got this stupid, handsome face.’
‘That could be anyone she’s gone out with before,’ Mam says.
I snort.
‘He calls her Catalina. And he talks over her all the time.’
‘What a prick,’ she says.
‘I know. He’s terrible, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She wants to tell him that she loves him, like.’ I gesture helplessly.
‘Urgh,’ says Mam. ‘If only that were all. What can we do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘She’s properly smitten.’
‘And this peacock’s the one doing the smiting.’ Mam is angry. She fixes her dress like she is angry with it, eroding creases out with both her hands.
‘Peacock’s a good word for him,’ I say. ‘He loves himself.’
‘It is OK to love yourself, Madeline,’ Mam tells me.
‘Not the way he does it.’
There is a pause. So many things unsaid. I close my eyes. I open them again.
And I betray her.
‘I think,’ I say, ‘he put his hands on her. She has these bruises.’
I feel the weight of worry and of guilt press down, press down.
She will never forgive me if I ruin this love for her. But can you even ruin a dangerous thing?
Mam sighs. She puts her two hands over her face for a second. Like she’s playing peekaboo. I see her struggle to relax her shoulders. To calm herself.
&
nbsp; ‘Brian guessed as much,’ she said, ‘when you approached him. And I just think, How dare he! The cheek of him. I can’t …’ Her voice is hoarse with fear, or rage, or maybe both. ‘We’ll handle it, love. He won’t hurt her any more,’ she says, grasping my hand a little too tightly. I see cogs turning in her tidy-woman brain. Colour-coding strategies to take. Prioritising. She wants to make a list she can check off. To turn the threat into a series of small tasks. Tickable goals. But I’m not sure that Lon is even fixable. I think of his big, perfect shark smile. His shiny, even teeth. His superior chin. I’d love to slap him. Hard.
‘We’ll take her phone away,’ Mam tells me. ‘Brian can get Liam Donoghue to change his rota for a week or two, keep him away from her, he says. He knows the family.’
‘Wow,’ I say. Maybe this is why they all respect Brian, with his hidden talents and deep pockets.
‘My husband is very protective,’ Mam says, like it’s a point of pride.
‘It’s a shame that Catlin needs protecting though,’ I tell her.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I’m scared. And I’m honestly not sure what the best course of action is, to keep her safe.’
I nod, picturing a photograph of her and Dad together, in the back garden. They aren’t smiling, but they are both kind of shining with each other. I wonder what our lives would have been like. There wouldn’t have been Lon in them, for one thing. I wonder how Mam stops those kinds of thoughts from coming all the time, whenever something happens.
‘Madeline?’ she says, and her voice is kind and serious and low.
‘Mmmm?’
‘Don’t do that stuff with salt and things any more. Please.’ She looks at me. ‘I know we’ve had this conversation before, but I don’t want to have it again. Not with all of this Catlin stuff about to boil over. When I see that kind of thing in your room, it makes me worry. You know?’
A bubble pops. I don’t say anything.
‘I know the move hasn’t been easy on ye. But it hasn’t been easy on me either. I’m lonely here, and I need a bit of support right now. You have to try.’
There is so much that I could say to her. I feel the anger welling up inside me, the urge to yell that maybe I can’t help it, and maybe if she had left the salt under Catlin’s bed, maybe she would have been a little less obsessed. That I’ve been trying my best to be as normal as I can. I’ve turned down ACTUAL magic. Which exists. I can’t put any more on Mam today though. I nod.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I say. To hide it, I mean. You cannot stop the tide. This lives in me. All that I can do is work around it. But I will try my best to keep it quiet. I get a horrid feeling in my stomach. A sort of swell. I am the broken twin. The one that’s not as good. The other daughter. My face is wet before the door clicks shut.
The foxes screaming, screaming outside.
Mourning for their friend.
The Ask.
Me and Catlin walking in the forest.
A fox is very small, somewhere between cat and dog.
So much blood in such a little case.
And on my boots.
And on the passage walls.
There is something that I cannot read. I need to see it.
I don’t want this.
I don’t want any of it.
None at all.
32
Foxglove
(slows the pulse or stops it)
We are staging an intervention for Catlin. In the library. Because Brian apparently learned his parenting skills from reality television, and Mam is going along with it for some reason. I sit on a pinstriped cream-and-white chair. It’s gilded at the edges. Catlin is on the chaise longue, having a meltdown.
‘I can’t believe this,’ she shouts. ‘I can’t believe you. And you. And you.’
She points at me, deciding I’m the one she hates the most.
‘Be that as it may, Catlin …’ says Brian in a neutral voice, holding his hands open in front of him, like a hip teacher who tries to get you to talk about your feelings because this is a safe space and, like, no judgement. ‘… we love you and we need you to trust the three of us on this. He is not a good person. You need to stop seeing him.’
‘He IS a good person. He’s the best person I’ve ever met.’ The pitch of Catlin’s voice is beginning to rise. I look up at the stacks and stacks of books that line the shelves. If they could talk, I think they’d probably say, Shut up, Catlin.
‘I know it feels that way now, love –’ Mam starts, and Catlin whips around to stare her down.
‘You don’t know HOW it feels,’ she screeches like a righteous romance-harpy. ‘Because if you DID know how it felt, if you even had an INKLING how it felt, how much I LOVE that boy, you would be THRILLED for me.’
‘Catlin –’
‘COULD YOU SHUT UP? I haven’t finished speaking.’
Why are they trying to interrupt her? It’s like saying excuse me to the sea.
‘What I was GOING to say –’ she continues, waving her extended pointer finger over us as though it were a sort of magic wand – ‘before you rudely interrupted my train of thought, is that Lon and I are in LOVE. Proper LOVE. The kind you obviously know nothing about, seeing as you’re not supporting me. And that makes you all PRICKS.’
She glares around the room, like twelve Mamós on speed. Her face is flushed and sweaty, like her anger is also a workout.
‘Catlin,’ says Mam, ‘your BOYFRIEND, who you claim to LOVE, was a suspect in a murder. He hurt that girl while they were together, Brian says. That is not OK. Would you like Madeline to be with someone who is physically abusive?’
‘Catlin, he tells you how to dress,’ I say. I feel like Judas Iscariot.
‘They’re only rumours, Mam. They aren’t true.’ She turns to me. I know that I’m a prick. She doesn’t have to say it. But she does.
‘And, as for YOU, Madeline, YOU are SUPPOSED to be my SISTER. Not some gossipy sneak, going behind my BACK because you’re jealous that I found love and you’re a LONELY DRIED-UP LITTLE BITCH.’
I gasp. ‘That isn’t fair.’
‘What isn’t fair is that you’re betraying me. That’s what isn’t fair. I am the fairest person in this room.’
‘Love …’ Brian’s voice is calm.
‘Don’t call me that. You cannot use that word around me now. Love is something people like you destroy.’
Mam grasps his hand. They look at Catlin together. Drawing strength. We’re used to her hissy fits, but this is something else. Her eyes are wide, her hair is ratted wild, she can’t sit still. She’s like a crazy person. She picks up a blue-and-white vase. It looks as if she will throw it.
‘Put that down,’ Mam says.
‘Fine,’ says Catlin, and swings it at the wall. It thunks against the paper, and plonks down on the soft maroon carpet. Not even chipped. She goes to pick it up and try again. I see the muscles in Brian’s face twitch a little. He brings his index fingers to his temples. Rotates them back and forth. Twice. His voice is quiet and definite.
‘Enough.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I said, Catlin Hayes, that that is enough. Your sister and your mother and I have had enough abuse. You are forbidden from seeing this boy. He is dangerous, and can’t be trusted. No matter how much you think you love him. You are not to see him. You are not to text him. You are not to email him, or message him in any way. And if you do, we will find out about it. And we will stop you.’
I utterly believe him in that moment. And so does Catlin. She sits down, still hugging the vase to her stomach.
‘So I can still go to school?’ she asks through gritted teeth.
‘Yes. But we will drop you there and pick you up. And you need to apologise to your sister. She cares about you. Which is why she came to me.’
Brian does the hand thing again. Did he attend a course on conflict resolution? I wonder. Did they teach him magic hands of trust?
Catlin’s face looks paler now, and sharp. Her mouth is set.
Brian’s voice drones on about ‘respecting boundaries’ and ‘understanding that adults sometimes know things children don’t’. She doesn’t roll her eyes, but I feel the effort.
‘Are you hearing what we’re saying?’ he concludes.
She meets his gaze. ‘Yes, Brian. Yes, Brian. I am.’ Her voice is deceptively meek. She’s going to explode.
I close my eyes.
‘And what you have to remember, Brian, is that while you are married to my mam, you are in no way my real dad. You’re just Mam’s husband. You do not get to tell me what to do. So you can thoroughly, utterly and completely fuck right off. I’ll see Laurent if I want to. You do not get to tell me who to love.’
Brian opens his mouth and closes it again.
‘And furthermore …’ says Catlin, rising to her feet, ‘I will only apologise to Maddy when she apologises to me for being a weaselly little bitch.’
‘Catlin Hayes!’ Mam’s voice could cut through steel. ‘SIT!’ she barks, as though Catlin were a dog. ‘And let me tell you the way that things will be. There are two rules. One: you will respect your family. And Brian is that now. You need to choose what you are going to say next, Catlin. I’d think about that, and I’d shut my mouth. If I were you.’
Catlin opens her mouth.
‘Sit down. Shut Up.’
Catlin sits down.
‘Two: you will not see that boy again. Give me your phone.’
‘I am NOT giving you my PHONE. That is an invasion of privacy.’
Mam holds out her hand. ‘I don’t care. Give it here.’
Catlin gets up, flounces to the door. She tries it and the door won’t open.
‘I hate you all,’ she yells. ‘I hate you all so much. It isn’t fair.’
‘Catlin.’ I try to keep my voice calm and gentle. ‘The Helen thing … it’s scary. We don’t want that for you.’
Her voice is high and sharp: ‘What about what I want?’ She looks me in the eye, then swings to face Brian and Mam. The one beside the other. Like a unit. ‘And anyway it’s LIES.’
‘It isn’t lies,’ says Brian. ‘And, unsavoury rumours aside, your sister’s right. He isn’t right for you. He’s too controlling.’
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