On Saturday morning, Fiona texts me and asks if I want to come to a party at her house.
What kind of party? I ask.
Just some food and music with my aunts and cousins
I don’t know how formal the party is, but I figure it’s only polite to wear something nice, so put on a light-blue knit dress that I last wore a year ago to a christening. Fiona opens the door and I can smell meat and garlic and onions. My mouth starts to water.
“You’re here!” she says, delighted. “Wow, nice dress. You’re going to want an apron.”
“Why?”
“My mum’s food is basically barbecue. You will have stains.”
“How come you’re not wearing an apron?”
“Because I’m a professional.”
I kick off my shoes and Fiona leads me into the kitchen, where a bunch of women are hovering over hot trays, yelling at one another about where a certain kind of bowl is.
“Mum!” Fiona says, putting her arm around a pretty woman that I assume is her mother. “This is Maeve. Do we have anything she can put over her dress?”
“Maeve!” her mum says, putting both arms on my shoulders. “We’ve heard so much about you! I’m Marie. It’s always a thrill when Fifi brings home someone who isn’t at that stage school.”
Fiona makes a face, and I can’t tell if she’s more annoyed by “Fifi” or her stage school being dissed. Her mother catches it.
“Ni, it’s true. They’re all so pretentious. So serious. Maeve, I hear you’re fun.”
“I try to be fun,” I reply.
“Do you sing?”
“No.”
“See, more of this. I married an Irish man, thinking that the Irish are so musical, and he doesn’t sing either. Well, he does now. Fifi, where’s your daddy?”
“Upstairs.”
“Get him down! Maeve, have you met everyone? Fiona, introduce Maeve to your titas.”
I meet everyone. Fiona has two titas, Sylvia and Rita. They have two brothers who still live in Manila, who they talk about like they have just popped out and will be back any minute now. Clutches of cousins and family friends move in and out of the kitchen, grabbing plates of meat and rice, then wandering back into the living room to play Mario Kart. Fiona’s dad arrives, surprisingly introverted compared to her outgoing mother, and then joins the other husbands standing and drinking beer at the kitchen’s perimeter.
I’m just finishing my second plate of food and my fourth game of Mario Kart when Fiona taps me on the arm. “C’mon,” she says. “Follow me through the kitchen.”
We glide back through the kitchen, where a karaoke machine has been set up and two of Fiona’s aunts are singing “Vogue”. Fiona walks into the room, claps and sings along, and then seamlessly wraps her hands around a bottle of red wine and hides it under a dishcloth. She winks at me, and I follow her up the stairs and into her room.
“Slick,” I say, impressed.
“Like cat shit on a linoleum floor,” she replies with a grin.
She tips the wine into two plastic cups.
“Thanks, Fifi.”
“Shut your damn mouth.”
“Your family are very cool.”
“Oh God, don’t. If you say that around my mother, she’ll get her sax out.”
“Her saxophone?”
“Drink your stupid wine.”
The wine tastes like dirt and blackberries, bitter and stinging on my palate. I cough.
“You don’t drink wine?”
“No, I do. Just usually … white.”
Lie. One the rare occasions that I drink, it’s usually some vile vodka mix sipped out of a Coke bottle. I take another gulp, and it goes down easier this time.
“Mmm. Earthy.”
I peer over my cup to see that Fiona is also grimacing slightly, and that she doesn’t really drink wine either. I catch her eye and we both burst out laughing, delighted that we were both willing to put on a show for the other.
Fiona opens her laptop. “So I looked up Children of Brigid, and there’s not that much out there. Just the closed Facebook group that weird girl mentioned. I mean, who even uses Facebook any more?”
“See-Oh-Bee. CoB! Children of Brigid. OK, sorry, I just got it.”
“Thank you, Miss Chambers, for joining the rest of the class.”
“Shut up. I got there eventually. Did you request to join?”
“Are you joking? Imagine if people saw – they’re a fundamentalist protest group.”
I suddenly think of Jo, and the day she left college early because there was a protest of some queer exhibition. It seems likely that these are the same crowd, and that they’re after more than just cool shops.
“Well, we could make up some fake profiles, and ask to join as them.”
So we drink wine, and we create fake Facebook profiles. We steal photos from obscure Tumblr pages and call ourselves Mary-Ellen Jones and Amy Gold. We spend a long time trying to make our profiles look like ordinary, real girls and it becomes a sort of game. We try to out-normal each other, turning the traits of other people into jokes about the kind of girls we will never be. We’re being a little cruel, but I can tell that these jokes are as much a balm to her as they are to me.
“OK, OK,” Fiona says, giggling while typing. “I’m going to put, ‘Love my besties for ever’.”
“How about that Marilyn Monroe quote people always use? What is it? ‘If you can’t handle me at my worst’ – or some crap?”
“’If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best’,” she says. “Oh yes, that’s gold. I’m putting that.”
Suddenly, we hear a thick pop of brass travelling up the stairs and I jump.
Fiona’s mum has brought her sax out.
I phone Mum, who says she’ll collect me at eleven. I brush my teeth with my finger in Fiona’s upstairs bathroom before she arrives to try to disguise the smell of alcohol, and say goodbye to her family.
Marie hugs me tight. “You know you can stay for a sleepover if you like? You can call your mother, if she hasn’t left already?”
“That’s OK,” I reply, beaming at her. “But I’ll be back! If you’ll have me.”
“Anyone who eats is allowed to come back. It’s why those actresses haven’t got a second invitation.”
“Mum!” Fiona scolds.
“Fifi, it’s true.”
Luckily, Mum doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve had half a bottle of red wine, or if she has, she’s decided to forgive me for it. She looks at me a little suspiciously on the ride home, her brow furrowed as I talk animatedly about Fiona’s family, telling her that we should have more family parties. I keep reminding myself to slow down, to not slur my words, to hide as best I can that I’m on the slightly-wrong-side of tipsy. She stays silent.
“You know,” I say, slightly huffy with her, “I thought you’d be glad that I was out on Saturday night. With parental supervision.”
Mum continues to say nothing. We are pulling into the driveway of our house.
“They’re such a nice family,” I continue. “And Fiona’s mum Marie plays the saxophone!”
“Maeve,” Mum finally says, turning off the ignition. “There’s been some news.”
In an instant, my sloppy wine buzz turns into pure nausea.
“Good news? Bad news?”
“Neither, really. Just news. It seems someone saw Lily on the night she went missing.”
We sit in the car, and Mum tells me everything Lily’s mum told her. At around 5 a.m. on the morning Lily went missing, a milkman was doing his rounds near the Beg when he spotted a very tall girl with dark-blonde hair wearing a coat over her pyjamas. She was not alone. Walking with the girl was a woman with black hair. The milkman, who was used to bumping into all sorts of unusual characters at that hour of the morning, waved hello to the pair. The woman turned away, hiding her face, but the girl looked straight at him. The girl looked like she had been crying.
“The
milkman apparently assumed that they were mother and daughter, and that they were fleeing some sort of domestic violence,” Mum explains. “Which is why he remembered them. They stuck in his head, and apparently he was worried about them for quite a few days afterwards. He felt very guilty for not offering to do more, to drive them to a refuge or something, so when he heard a description of Lily on the radio he came forward.”
“Oh my God,” I say, sickness rising through my stomach like a tide.
“So, obviously, the next question for everyone is who this woman is. According to the milkman, Lily – or, who we think was Lily – seemed to be upset, but still going with this woman quite willingly. She also didn’t have a bag with her. If this was a planned runaway, wouldn’t she have wanted to take something with her – a toothbrush – at least?”
I assume that Mum means this as a rhetorical question, but when I look at her I realize she wants answers. From me.
“Jesus, Mum, how would I have a clue? You know I haven’t been proper friends with Lily in a long time.”
“I know, love, I know. And I want to keep your name out of this as much as we can, but, unfortunately, you’re the only person who knew Lily very well. She’s a very insular kid. Even Rory seems to have been oblivious to what was going on in her head.”
I almost ask, “Who’s Rory?”, forgetting that “Roe” is a title only shared with a trusted few.
“I don’t know, Mum. What do you want me to say? Like, Lily can be odd, but I don’t know why she would just follow a stranger into the street.”
“What about the woman? Do you have any idea who that could be? Is there anyone she was talking to, even online or something?”
“Mum, I keep telling you, I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just –” she tightens her grip on the steering wheel, even though the motor is off – “when a man takes a teenage girl from her bed, you expect it, you … you know what that’s about. But when a woman takes her…”
She stares through the windscreen in silence, blinking hard. Wondering, I think, how she could have possibly raised five children and have nothing like this even cross her mind before. For a moment, I think about what it must be like to be her. To think you’ve seen everything that could hurt children, and then have to contend with something new.
“Mum,” I say, putting my hand on her back. “It will be OK, won’t it?”
She nods and folds me into a hug, holding me tight.
“Let’s go inside,” she says. “You honk of wine.”
Crap.
“And no, I’m not thrilled about it, but I’m glad you’re not getting rat-arsed in a field. If you’re going to drink, please try to only do so in houses where there are at least two parents and at least one saxophone.”
I trudge up the stairs to bed with a pint glass of cold water in my hand. I tell myself that I won’t be able to sleep, but as soon as I pull my dress off and put my head on the pillow, I’m out.
The wine sends me into a heavy, drunken slumber that lends itself naturally to heavy, twisted dreams. Dreams where a dark-haired woman remains constantly in my field of vision, but always just out of my grasp. I can never look at her face-on. I only get flashes. A lock of straggling black hair that doesn’t curl or wave even though it’s soaking wet. A mouth that is full but completely unlined, devoid of any spiderweb lines of cracked skin.
I am following her down the path I walked with Roe, the path that stretches alongside the Beg, tripping behind her and screaming at her to turn around. I keep wanting to call out to her, to command something of her, but my mouth can’t find the words. Who is she? What is she? I grapple at it, like my mind is pawing at a cliff edge that keeps falling away. She’s something. Something in a home. A maid? A cook? Something in a nursery?
Finally, we reach the narrow underpass where Roe and I almost kissed, but didn’t. Where he told me that witches know things by their true names. At this memory, the word “housekeeper” shoots across my brain like a burning comet.
She starts to turn around, and I see the curve of a slightly piggy, upturned nose, and the beginnings of a smile. My mouth starts to fill up with water, dirty river water that tastes like mud, metal and weeds.
I wake up with a pain in my stomach so deep that I have to stumble to the bathroom, holding my belly as though my guts are about to explode out of it.
The vomit is fluorescent pink and tastes like acid, and with each new retch, I vow to never drink red wine ever again. I clutch the side of the bowl, shivering as chunks of barely digested meat are ejected out of me. My thick, frizzy hair keeps spilling forwards, flecks of vomit sticking to it like paint splatters.
Once my stomach is totally empty, I run the ends of my hair under the tap, brush my teeth and wash my face with Mum’s expensive wash. I almost feel OK again, except for a thudding, pulsating headache that’s ringing through my skull. I’m still trying to analyse the dreams, but it’s like trying to transport water from one hand to the other. With each pass, another detail falls away. The feeling, however, stays strong. The woman from the cards has taken Lily. She’s a demon, or a ghost, or a witch, and she sprung to life through the reading I gave Lily three Fridays ago. That’s who the milkman saw. That’s what has taken her.
Back in my bedroom, Tutu has taken advantage of the open door and is lying with his head between his paws, his tail thumping supportively. I pull back the covers and he burrows in, his doggy sense of empathy clearly detecting that I need help.
I settle back into bed and open my bedside cabinet, hoping that there’s a Nurofen Plus in there. I dig around, my hands flailing at old colouring pencils, Post-it notes and popped-open Strepsil packets. My palm finally falls across something square and bulky. The precise weight and length of it is so familiar to me, and yet, so terrifying in this context.
The Chokey cards are back.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING, I COME DOWNSTAIRS AND MUM, DAD and Jo are at the kitchen table. The Sunday papers are strewn around them, a pot of coffee steeping on the sideboard. Jo is reading the culture supplement, Dad has the magazine, Mum has the style. They all look so cosy, so blond, so part of the same unit. How can I tell them that a pack of cards that were confiscated from me almost two weeks ago are somehow now back in my possession? How do I tell them that a character from the same deck of cards took Lily away?
Do I even believe that, though? Can I believe that?
“Morning,” Dad says gravely. “I hope I don’t have to have a word with you about last night. The sound of you retching at 2 a.m. better be lesson enough.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Honestly, I only had about three glasses. I don’t think I’m a red wine person.”
“Three glasses of wine is a lot, Maeve. It’s not like having a bottle of beer or something. Wine goes to your head quickly.”
“I know. Sorry,” I mumble again, then turn to Mum. “So, you know those tarot cards that Miss Harris too—”
But I don’t get to continue, because Jo, apparently, has something to say. She glances across at me disapprovingly, her nose wrinkled and annoyed.
“You woke everyone up,” she says dismissively. “Also, where did you even get the wine from? Were Fiona’s parents just giving you…”
“No,” I say guiltily. “Fiona nicked it from their table.”
“Right. So you went over to a new person’s house and stole their parents’ drink? Nice first impression.”
“No, like I just said, Fiona took it.”
“Well, she sounds like a real treasure.”
“Why the hell do you care, Jo?”
“Girls, stop,” Mum says. “Jo, this really has nothing to do with you. And Maeve, if everything with Lily weren’t such a mess, I’d be eating the arse off you. As it stands, this is your first and only warning. Are we clear? Everyone?”
“Whatever,” Jo says, and dramatically flips open the culture section again.
How did we get back here? How is it that when Mum and Dad are aw
ay, Jo can be the best person in the world, but when they’re back, she acts like a total cow?
“And I don’t want to hear a thing about those tarot cards again, OK?”
“But, Mum, the thing with the tarot cards is—”
“Maeve. Nothing. This is a tarot-free house, understood? They were fine for a bit of fun, but you’ve clearly taken them too seriously.”
I hold my head in my hands, the pounding headache back.
“OK,” I say weakly.
I spend the rest of the day in my room, trying not to think about the cards. I’m terrified of taking them out of the top drawer, suspecting that the moment I do, Mum or Dad or Jo will walk in and they’ll be taken away again.
My relationship to the cards has changed. Something physical, something molecular has happened between us. Us. As though the tarot were a person. It’s like there’s some kind of electromagnetic force holding us together. Only I can’t tell if I’m the metal or the magnet. If I go to the bathroom, or downstairs to make a cup of tea, it’s like there’s an invisible string that’s being stretched too far, yanking on my fingers and toes. I used to feel like I was the master of these cards, the only person capable of interpreting their true message. Now I feel like they’re the master of me.
In the afternoon, I take Tutu for a walk down by the Beg, the cards in my coat pocket. I don’t know what I’m trying to achieve, exactly, but somehow it’s the place I need to be. This is where Lily was last seen alive and where I encountered the Housekeeper in my dreams.
As I walk towards the old underpass, I see a flash of scarlet in the rapidly darkening evening, a tousle of shining dark curls winking under the lamplight. It’s him. It doesn’t feel surprising to see him here. He must have found out about the milkman yesterday, too. Maybe he even had the same dreams I did. Maybe he woke up feeling like his lungs were filled with river water.
“Hi,” I say timidly.
He lifts his eyes from the ground. I may not be surprised to see him, but he is very shocked to see me.
“I’ll go,” I say. “Sorry. I just heard about … you know. So I wanted to come down.”
All Our Hidden Gifts Page 10