All Our Hidden Gifts
Page 31
We all thought it would be water. We looked for rain and leaky plumbing. It wasn’t that simple. Nothing ever is, I suppose. Then things started happening. Lightbulbs exploded. Watches stopped working. Some popcorn caught fire in the microwave. Lily kept on accidentally breaking things that Roe inevitably had to fix.
“Some gift,” she grumbled.
Then a CoB head followed us down the street, demanding to know why Roe was wearing a skirt and holding hands with a girl at the same time. He shoved a leaflet into Lily’s hand and immediately yelped, dropping the pile of paper on the floor. Lily froze, and we hustled her into the nearest cafe.
“What was that?” Roe asked, his arm around her.
“Sparks,” she whispered. “My gift is electricity.”
We sit under the trees, and Roe complains about his exams. We make grisly faces about the fact that next year, we’re going to be sitting ours, and that I will almost certainly have to do night study every evening to even scrape the points for a decent college. If, as I keep qualifying to my friends and my parents, I even want to get into college.
Fiona says she’ll help me, and I move my head closer to Roe’s chest. Lily’s eyes rest peacefully on the Beg. She has promised Roe she won’t try to go back, but I’m not sure how committed she is to keeping that promise. If Lily can find a way to become the river again, she will take it.
But I try not to think about that. I try not to think about the news, which is only getting worse. Or my sister, whose mood is only getting bleaker. Aaron, who still walks the edges of my dreams on the nights my protection spells aren’t strong enough to keep him out.
I try to exist now, here, in the spring. With everything to fight for, and all our hidden gifts to help us.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The acknowledgements are the part of the book where you thank people for the part they played in your story, and for this story, it’s hard to know where to begin. I could start in 2016, when my friend Harry Harris and I wrote a song called “The Housekeeper Card”. We prowled around the subject of tarot for a while, but eventually landed on what we both deemed to be a killer opening line: “She appears in rare readings, and only to young women, and only in times of crisis.” Or, I could start it a week later, when we showed our bandmate Ellie Cowan the song, and then practised it for an entire summer – at gigs, to our friends, in voice notes – cementing the Housekeeper as lore that I would keep returning to in my head, again and again. Thanks, to both of you, for helping to create an earworm so good it eventually became a book.
True to the song, the Housekeeper did appear again, and in a time of crisis: when, after years away, I found myself spending weeks in my family home in Ireland, waiting on bad news about my sister’s health, all of us under one roof again. It was like being fifteen again: the youngest in a long line of big personalities, holed up in the smallest bedroom, waiting for something to happen. Something did happen, and it was the first ten thousand words of this book. I don’t think I’ll ever be done being relieved that my family are my family, so in the absence of heaped praise, let me just name them, and thank them: Peter, Noelle, Jill, Shane and Rob. Thank you.
Thank you to Ella Risbridger, who from the beginning has been the main reader and supporter of this book. Before these characters were real to anyone else, they were real to you and me. We have walked the length and breadth of south London, talking about Maeve, Fiona, Lily and Roe. I hope we keep walking, as they get older and weirder. I hope we get older and weirder too.
Thank you to Tom McInnes, for being the songwriter for Small Private Ceremony. Thank you to Wren Dennehy, for your guidance, your sensitivity, and your showtunes. Thank you to Karen Tongson for your guidance and help in researching Filipino culture. Thank you to Natasha Hodgson, for feedback and praise. Thank you to Gavin Day, because you can’t write a teenage love story unless you’re in one, and that’s exactly how this feels.
Thank you to Walker Books, for acquiring this book and pushing to make it the best story it can be. Thank you to Bryony Woods, for loving this project as passionately as she has. And finally, thank you to an English teacher I had when I was fourteen, who went by Miss Cotter then, but who I’m pretty sure got married and is called Mrs Richards now. You liked my stories, you thought I was funny, and you introduced me to Margaret Mahy. You, I think, were there when the story really started.
Caroline O’Donoghue is an Irish writer and host of the award-winning podcast Sentimental Garbage. Her two adult novels, Promising Young Women and Scenes of a Graphic Nature, are published with Virago. She has a weekly column in The Irish Examiner, as well as frequent bylines for Prospect, Grazia and Lonely Planet. She currently lives in London with her partner and her dog. All Our Hidden Gifts is her first novel for young adults. Visit Caroline on Twitter: @Czaroline
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.
First published in Great Britain 2021 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
Text © 2021 Caroline O’Donoghue
Cover design © 2021 Helen Crawford-White
The right of Caroline O’Donoghue to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4063-9934-9 (epub)
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