“The curse.”
“It happens at the age of seventeen. Like some kind of fairy tale. If you’ve lived a life on the straight and narrow, the curse may never find you. But, if you’re considered rotten by the rest of the family, you’re doomed.”
I stared at her. “Doomed? What does that mean exactly?”
Mandy stared right back. “It means deaths and disappearances. Terrible losses and tragedies. Things you’ll carry with you always.”
“But, Mandy—”
“I’m telling you, Deena, if the family thinks you’re rotten, you’re doomed.”
The rain battered at her bedroom window.
“You’ll know for sure if you hear the banshee scream.”
The icing of my birthday cupcake was pastel paste on my fingers, sticky and too sweet. “The banshee,” I repeated. “This is a metaphor, right?”
“It’s not a metaphor. There are three of them. The first is the one whose screams mark you as cursed. Then you’ll find gray hairs fallen from the second’s bone comb tangled on the threshold of your home. You’ll know there’s no hope left when the third scores your skin with her sharp nails as you sleep.”
I placed my half-eaten cupcake back on Mandy’s bedside table. This was not how I’d expected this chat to go. Mandy believed in many things—ghosts, UFOs, conspiracy theories. It made sense that she would believe in banshees, in family curses. But what she was telling me now I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand.
“I’m afraid,” said Mandy. “I’m afraid this is the curse. I’m afraid you’re another bad apple ready to fall from the tree.”
My heart was hit with hammers. “I’m not a bad apple,” I whispered. “This doesn’t make me a bad apple.”
Mandy stared right through me. I wanted her to say Of course not. I wanted her to say I know that.
“You’re cursed,” she whispered. “This has to be the curse.”
“Mandy, I’m gay, not cursed. I didn’t know Dad was home yet. I didn’t know he would hear me. I would never have said anything if—”
Mandy was speaking too fast and too loud. “I didn’t think it could happen to you. I’ve made a huge mistake. If Dad heard you—You can’t tell anyone else. Nobody can find out. Maybe if you keep your head down this year, maybe if you just pretend—”
“Pretend?” The books on the desk mocked me, unboxed, covers loud.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Don’t worry. I can fix this.”
I stood and went with heavy feet to her bedroom door. I could have sunk all the way to the ground floor. “I don’t need fixing,” I said to my sister, but she just let me walk away.
* * *
—
Finn found me later, down by the beach past the wooden bridge. The rain had stopped and the world was wrung out and blanketed in puddles. I was sitting on my jacket underneath the statue at the end of the walk down to Dollymount Strand: a seventy-foot-high Virgin Mary towering over the bay. Our Lady, Star of the Sea. I was on my third coffee (which wasn’t helping the pace of my heartbeat), the paper cups stacked neatly on the ground beside me, and I was scrolling on my phone, dangling my legs above the water.
Finn dropped down to the ground beside me.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“Since half past twelve.”
A ferry rolled slowly out of the port at East Wall, and Finn and I watched it—this colossal monster of a thing—sending waves washing toward the strip of land we sat on, under the feet of the Virgin Mary.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” he asked.
I put down my phone and kicked out my legs. Softly, I sang, “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me.”
“Deena.”
“Happy birthday, dear Deena, happy birthday to me.”
“You cut class, for the first time in your life,” Finn said. “You go dark online for the whole day until you ask me to meet you here. You’re acting weird. Er.”
“Very ha.”
“So either you’re deciding to try out a bit of good old-fashioned teenage rebellion on your seventeenth birthday, in which case I applaud you and wish you only the best, or . . .” Finn paused for breath. “Or something happened today.”
The ferry picked up speed.
“So far,” I said slowly, “I think it’s safe to say that this has been the worst birthday in the history of birthdays.”
“Did something happen in school?”
“I can’t go back there,” I told him. “Ever, probably.”
Finn turned to look at me, his features blurry in my peripheral vision. I stared in silence through my glasses at the sea.
“Okay.” He rubbed his hand twice over his close-cropped black hair. “So what’s the plan?” he asked. “You go on the run? Get Rachel to home-school you? Good luck with that.”
Three tears ran silently down my cheeks before I could stop them. “I might not be able to go home either.”
“Shit,” said Finn. “Come on, Deena. What happened?”
“They had a vote at school.” Of everything that had happened so far, this was the easiest to open with.
“What? Who had a vote? Is this about the talk they’re protesting?”
“No,” I said. “No. They had a vote about me.”
Finn shook his head. “You’re going to have to fill in the gaps for me here, Rys.”
I filled in the gaps. I started with school. I began to cry when I told him about my dad. By the time I’d gotten to Mandy’s reaction I was having trouble breathing. Finn put a careful arm around my shoulders. There were certain things that only my best friend could understand, being bi himself. He may not have completely understood why I was so terrified of my father finding out, seeing as how Dad didn’t even live with us, but Finn did understand not wanting to be out loudly and publicly at school. Only a small handful of his friends in class knew. Until this morning, I hadn’t been out to anybody but Finn.
When I had finished, he stood abruptly and said, “That’s it, I’m buying you a chocolate muffin. And when you’ve eaten it we’re going to get my cousin to buy us some cider. Screw those bitches in school. And screw your whole damn family. It’s your birthday. Tonight we’re going to get drunk and talk about girls.”
He strode purposefully back to the little coffee shop by the car park, his hips lean in his gray uniform trousers, his head high. I understood why Rachel had always wanted me to end up with Finn (apart from the obvious fact that he was the only boy who’d ever shown interest in me, romantically or otherwise). Life would be so much simpler if I could just fall in love with my best friend.
Above me, Our Lady, Star of the Sea watched the ferry slide slowly out of sight. When I turned back around, ahead of me in the water there was a woman.
Not a swimmer. Not somebody who’d jumped into the bay on a dare. An old woman so pale her skin seemed gray, submerged past her mouth, her long silver hair tangling through the foam of the small waves around her. A woman with a ravaged, skeletal face, cheeks sunken, eyes set deep in wrinkles, their irises as gray as her hair.
She wasn’t treading water. She wasn’t moving at all. She was staring right at me, unblinking.
A long gray hand came out of the water. Its twisted fingers beckoned.
I couldn’t explain what happened next, only that I must have started so hard I slipped off the rocks at the base of the statue and into the water. There was nobody close enough to push me. The woman was too far from me to have pulled.
A split second and I went under. Not even enough time to feel real fear. Water whooshed around me, filled my ears with roaring and my mouth with salt. I kicked wildly toward the surface.
When I came up, the woman’s face was a hair’s breadth from mine. She opened her mouth and screamed.
* * *
�
��
Suddenly Finn’s hands clamped down on my upper arms and he dragged me out of the water. I helped hoist myself up onto the rocks and I spluttered and coughed and hacked up salt water. Finn pushed my inhaler into my hand and I puffed until I could breathe again.
The second I could find enough air to speak, I said, “Did you see her? Oh God, did you see her?”
“See who?”
“The woman. The woman in the water.” I craned my neck, but there was no one there. “Oh God.” My teeth chattered. “Her face. Her fingers. Did you see her?”
“There’s no one in the water.” Finn brushed me down, flicking water on the rocks. “What happened? Did you fall in?”
Shock sent shudders through me.
“Are you okay?” said Finn. “Let’s just get you back to your place. Get you dry.”
“I was sure I saw her,” I said. “Clear as day. Cold and gray. Those eyes.”
“Did you hit your head or something?” Finn asked, concern threaded through his words.
“I’m fine,” I told him, eyes still on the water. “I didn’t hit my head.”
“Then you need to change out of your clothes or you’ll catch pneumonia or whatever.”
I gave the rocks below us one last searching look. “Yeah,” I said vaguely. “Yeah, you’re right.”
There was nothing there. No one. The scream must have come from me. The vision of the woman must have come from the stress of the scorn of my father’s rage, from the stares of the girls in school, from the fall, from the coffee. From Mandy, who I’d always thought would understand, would love me no matter what. It couldn’t possibly have been real.
Couldn’t possibly have been a banshee, like my sister told me.
Finn and I walked back together along the wooden bridge to the seafront and up the residential roads toward my house.
All the way home, for some reason, I smelled apples.
4.
Bad apples
Dublin, 2012
When Finn and I walked through the kitchen door, with me leaving trails of seawater behind me in the hall, Rachel was sitting at the table, smashing apples with a mallet.
I thought I was hallucinating. After all, I had possibly just seen a banshee in Dublin Bay. Yet somehow the concept of Rachel smashing apples with a mallet (where did Rachel get a mallet?) was almost more unbelievable. Rachel did not smash apples with mallets. Rachel bought apple pies from Marks and Spencer and heated them in the oven in their foil trays. Rachel did the dishes before sitting down to dinner. Rachel kept her sharpened knives neatly lined up in their knife block and got cross if I just shoved them into the cutlery drawer.
My feet squelched. Rachel looked up from the table, mallet in hand.
“Deena!” she said. “What in the world happened to you?”
“Got wet,” I said. Apple bits dripped from the mallet head. “What’s . . . going on here?”
“The juicer broke,” Rachel said.
“Okay.”
“I really wanted some apple juice. And then the juicer wasn’t working, and we had all these apples that were going to go to waste.” Rachel waved the mallet and laughed a little unsteadily. “I guess this isn’t really working,” she said. “But it sure is therapeutic.”
“Right.” This wasn’t about the juicer. This was about Dad, and this morning. Rachel carefully avoided mentioning it, though.
She put the mallet down, started to scoop the apple mess onto a wooden chopping board to dump in the compost. “You should change out of those clothes,” she said, back to her busy, bustling self, not even looking at me as she doled out advice and commands. “Bring them down when you’re done, would you? I’m going to do laundry. Your birthday cake is in the fridge. Banoffee pie, your favorite. I know Finn is staying over tonight, so I’ll leave you to it, but I’ll be home before eleven, just so you both know. There’s money for takeout on the hall table.”
Rachel said not a word about our father, not a word about what I’d told her that morning, and I found I couldn’t say anything either.
The entire kitchen smelled green and sharp.
* * *
—
That night, Finn and I celebrated my birthday with cheap cider, banoffee pie, and Chinese takeout. We sat on the floor underneath my bedroom window, and outside a storm blew up from over the sea, sent gulls circling the suburbs.
One cider deep, we wrote out the names of the girls I knew were behind that morning’s poll and burned them in the bathroom sink. Two ciders deep, Finn held my face and told me not to worry, my dad wouldn’t do a thing, that I was wrong, I couldn’t be cursed, I was the best apple of the bunch. Three ciders deep, we swam between telling each other what our friendship meant, how much we loved each other, and comparing our taste in girls, despite me never having actually tasted one.
“Earth to Deena,” Finn said, four ciders deep, his eyelids drooping, his smile lopsided.
Finn lived three doors down from me, had been my friend since we were kids, playing superheroes in the nearby church parking lot, then video games when we got a little older. In the tricky in-between pre-teen years, we drifted but still met up occasionally to borrow graphic novels, until the day Finn told me, at fourteen, shoulders pushed back and face defiant, that he’d kissed a boy on his summer vacation. I’d been filled with an indescribable jealousy, a recognition. We’d been best friends ever since.
I opened up the window to the rain. “Storm to Deena,” I said. “Sea to Deena.” I swayed.
Finn snorted. “Bullshit to Deena.”
I closed the window. Under my breath I whispered, “Happy birthday to me.”
* * *
—
I woke with a feeling like a bone stuck somewhere in my windpipe, cutting off my breath. My sheets were all in a tangle. I could hear Finn’s snores from the spare room next door. And, in the distance, something like a scream.
I sat up. There was a face at my window, one sunken eye in the gap where the curtains never properly closed. I bolted across the room. When I pulled open the curtains, there was only the quiet street outside and the rain.
The window was open a crack. Around the latch were some long gray hairs.
Three banshees. First a scream; then, when they get closer, gray hairs caught on the threshold of your home.
Fear was a big ship moving fast across the water.
* * *
—
I left Finn asleep, threw on some clothes, and took the bus to Mandy’s. I banged, loudly, on her door. After about three minutes of solid pounding, one of her housemates answered. The corridor behind him was black and he squinted as the daylight poured in.
“Hey, Deena,” he said. “Looking for Mandy?”
I couldn’t think who else I’d have been looking for, but I just nodded. He let me in. I opened Mandy’s door and stopped dead.
The previous day, my sister’s bedroom had been a mess as usual. Books and folders and notebooks, discarded shoes and dirty clothes on the floor, empty coffee cups and the wrappers of biscuit packets on every surface, the ashtray on the windowsill overflowing with cigarette butts and ash.
Now it was pristine. In the wardrobe, her clothes hung neatly, her towels folded, her shoes polished and stacked facing the same way. On her bedside table the coffee stains and cigarette ash and remains of yesterday’s birthday cupcake had been wiped away, and her dog-eared books were arranged alphabetically on her shelves. The bed was perfectly made, with the sheets tucked in and the pillows fluffed up, and a white envelope sitting half camouflaged in the middle of the white bedspread.
Inside the envelope was a piece of paper, folded once: a note written in Mandy’s hand. It was short. The ink at the end had run, as if from tears, and the last few words were smudged.
Going to the end of the world. Give all my love to my daughter.
&
nbsp; 5.
A funeral for someone who was not dead
Dublin, 2012
I never knew my mother. She died of an aneurysm barely four months after my birth. It was sudden, unexpected, and unavoidable. It was not my fault, but I carried it with me.
In the absence of a mother, I had two sisters. Rachel, especially, I told myself, with her busy, no-nonsense nature, her domesticity, her structure and routine, filled the role of mother in my life. Sometimes I even believed it myself.
But sometimes I saw her sitting curled up in an armchair and she looked so tiny, so tiny and still, reading a book or watching TV, that I felt huge looking at her. Huge and wild and restless. Blessed by salt and skull and horns.
If Rachel was like my mother, Mandy was my fairy godmother. The trickster spirit who showed me another world.
Mandy might have been flighty, but she would never leave me. Mandy might have disappeared occasionally, but she said she’d always be there for me. Mandy told stories about ghosts and curses, but she wouldn’t really lie to me.
But Mandy had never left like this.
And Mandy had never told me she had a daughter.
* * *
—
I went back home, dazed. Walked into the kitchen, clutching the letter.
Finn, slightly hungover by the look of him, sat at the table with a plate of rashers and eggs, a pint glass of orange juice. Rachel was frying mushrooms on the stove.
“Where did you come from?” she said, alarmed. “I thought you were in bed.”
I stood in the doorway. “Did you know that Mandy has a daughter?”
“What?” A mushroom slid from the spatula into the pan.
“Did you know. That Mandy. Has a daughter.”
“A what?” Finn said, despite himself.
All the Bad Apples Page 3