by A. M. Shine
‘Please, Madeline,’ Mina said, taking a step forward, ‘don’t hurt her.’
She jerked Ciara even higher, her limbs seemingly able to stretch on command. It was too dark to discern Madeline’s face. But her profile against the candlelight was unrecognisable. There was little to no trace of a nose protruding. The jaw almost seemed to expand, if only to contain the teeth that sprouted like nails from her mouth.
‘You don’t have to be one of them,’ Mina shouted.
Madeline’s head turned to face Mina. Ciara’s legs hung, dangling above the floor. The life was being choked out of her. The hellish body that bound her was unmoving.
‘Please,’ Mina said, moving even closer, her arms held aside in surrender. ‘Just let her go.’
Ciara’s feet had kicked off the wall as she fought hopelessly to free herself. But she was fading, turning limp as she gasped for air but found only Madeline’s gnarled fingers locked around her throat.
‘It’s done,’ Mina shouted, fearing for Ciara’s life. ‘I burned Kilmartin’s papers. They’re all gone! And you have my word, we won’t tell anyone! You don’t have to kill her. Please, Madeline! I don’t have anybody else! We don’t have anybody else!’
Madeline threw Ciara to the floor. Her head and shoulders bore the brunt of the impact, and in the ill light of the hallway she came to lie like a pile of bones; unconscious or dead, she wasn’t moving. Madeline’s attention now turned to Mina. She strode towards her, stopping so close that their faces were inches apart, eyes locked, though only one could see in the absence of light. Madeline’s spine was arched. Her arms, like a mantis, flanked Mina on either side; elongating through the shadows to the sickly sound of splitting bone. Please, make it quick, Mina thought as she heard Madeline’s claws grow from her bony, branchlike fingers.
‘You’re just as scared as we are,’ Mina said, tears now streaming down her cheeks. ‘None of us belonged in that place, Madeline. I know you think that the coop was your home but it wasn’t. This is a home! And if Kilmartin cared for you at all he wouldn’t want you there, always angry and alone.’
The cracking of Madeline’s bones loudened. Were her arms stretching around her like a spider draws in the fly. The darkness was a gift. Mina didn’t want to see what Madeline had become.
‘You should never have left us,’ she continued. ‘We’re in this together. Isn’t that what we said?’
The darkness receded slightly as Madeline’s arms shrank back. Mina expected, with each passing second, to die; to feel that hand fasten around her neck, or the swift slice of a claw through skin. She thought of Ciara’s wooden floor. Would the blood pool around her, or would it reach the stairway and wash like a waterfall all the way to the front door?
‘If you’re going to kill me,’ Mina said, breathing through the tears, ‘then hurry up and fucking do it. Or you can stop being one of them and go back to being one of us.’
Madeline jumped back with such force that the whole house seemed to quake. The candle’s flame was extinguished, its hot wax splashing on the table, leaving the corridor in darkness. The sight of her silhouette had fleeced Mina of faculty. But knowing what stood before her and being unable to see it was somehow even more mentally destructive. Madeline’s presence was exposed only by the delicate crepitation of her bones. Mina edged away, until both hands felt the doorframe.
‘Is Ciara okay?’ she asked.
‘She’s alive,’ was Madeline’s reply, sounding like her human self again.
Madeline could have snapped her neck if she so pleased. Then why hadn’t she?
‘What happens to us now?’ Mina said.
In that dark, suspended moment she waited for an answer. As complex as it may have seemed, it was a simple case of life or death; compassion or cruelty – human traits that Madeline could only mimic.
‘Keep your promise,’ she said.
‘We will,’ Mina replied.
She listened as Madeline descended the stairs. One step creaked halfway down. Her feet crunched over broken glass. The door’s single lock opened, and she was gone.
MARCH
28
Life was similar in some aspects to what Mina remembered. Sights and sounds mostly. Some memories felt redundant now, as though they belonged to somebody else. That Mina was the reflection in the glass. And that Mina wasn’t the one who made it home. The woman who walked into the forest and the one who fell out its south side were two different people.
Mina’s first steps were tenuous and uncertain, like a child learning to walk. She fell so many times. She had hidden away for days on end, enslaved by that crawling suspicion that the watchers’ eyes still followed her every move. But these days became weeks, and little by little she found her footing, steadying herself on Ciara for support, reclaiming the life that the forest had taken from her. Mina’s mum had wanted her to be happy, and she was the only one watching over her now.
A spring shower had splashed the table clean around midday. There were no hand-rolled cigarettes slotted head down, with their legacy of ash staining the ceramic. Not even a few crooked butts. Mina hadn’t revisited that particular habit. The forest had taken so much. It could keep her cigarettes. Her sister would have to focus the criticisms on her drinking and supposedly deluded career choices. She remembered the street so well, where she used to sit and sketch, always searching for the beauty in other people but never seeing it in herself.
The sun hit her like a spotlight. She fumbled in her jacket pocket for her sunglasses. Their lenses were grazed from falling off her face whenever she looked down. Not once did she manage to catch them. Mina couldn’t keep her foot from twitching. The horrors of the woodland were parasitic. She could feel them crawling through her thoughts even now, in the daytime, as she forced her mind to stamp them out. But they never went away. Every day they would reassemble anew, and every day she would try again.
The coop’s mirror always occupied some corner of her mind. And the reflection of her past self would always be there, watching her. Mina’s fears weren’t nocturnal, and they certainly hadn’t stayed behind in the forest. Try as she might to fit in, to sit outside the pub like everyone else, each day was a struggle. The eyes still wandered, led by that enduring curiosity to watch the world around her, but those faces that once inspired her hands to sketch only caused them to tremble. Even now, the din of the voices gathered like a storm on the street; violent and expanding. She would glance and she would look away, and that was enough for now. But still her fingers itched to hold a pencil again. The parasite hadn’t chewed into that part of her brain yet.
Like actors waiting off stage for their mark, the city strollers returned when the clouds spread apart in long loosely knitted sheets. Ruts of rainwater glistened between the cobbles, snaring the sunlight and blinding those walking west. Mina’s eyes fell somewhere around her shoes as she pressed her sunglasses onto her nose for the umpteenth time. She crossed her legs tight to steady her feet.
Layers, Mina’s mother once told her, are the key to spring dressing. She had thrown a denim jacket over her purple hoody. The nest atop her head had been pruned. It had to go. Mina’s options were limited, but the pixie cut suited her. The woman who operated on her head like a world-class surgeon was of the opinion that Mina had the perfect face for it.
The pub’s wicker chairs dried fast in a breeze. What with their rickety legs and the causewayed street, they rocked back and forth when the real wind picked up. The tables were no better. Mina had seen too many glasses slide off and smash to the ground; followed, always, by mortifying applause. It would only be a matter of minutes before people sat down for coffees and pints, seizing the clemency that could abandon them at any moment. For Mina, the open sky was the greatest novelty. The absence of black branches overhead gave her good reason to keep her chin up.
‘Well,’ she whispered to herself, forcing her eyes to look around her, ‘this isn’t so bad now, is it?’
A cluster of tourists – all ponchos and rain jac
kets – had gathered in the centre of the street, where a decidedly German-looking chap with fair hair and a square face as serious as a cinder block regurgitated historical titbits that he had probably memorised on the flight over. His audience huddled around him like sheep to a shepherd, blocking the local few who had places to be.
Mina had yet to take a sip of her wine. She eyed it like a former lover, caressing its stem, resisting its advances. Coffee, black and bitter, was what she came for. But Peter wouldn’t hear of it. He had met her arrival with stunned disbelief; both hands seizing the bar for support as that tawny, shark smile spread over his face. And Peter was sober. Some things obviously had changed in Mina’s absence. Their hug lasted long enough for her to be hopelessly immersed in the mustiness of his wax jacket.
Where had she been? It wasn’t too removed from the truth to say that she had been away. What else could she tell him? Peter threw his head back with laughter when Mina offered to buy the bird. Judging by his reaction, he had to think for a moment to fathom what she was talking about.
‘Jesus, Mina.’ He laughed. ‘You can keep him. I’m sure Tim’s forgotten all about that by now. You never found the buyer’s home? Didn’t I give you a map, or did I not?’
‘That’s a longer story than you’d think,’ she answered honestly.
‘There’s nothing out that side of the world,’ he replied. ‘A few sheep, I suppose. I’m glad you’re back to us.’ He grinned, roping his arm around her shoulder. ‘Let me get you a drink.’
She didn’t blame Peter for what had happened to her. It was nobody’s fault. Bad things happen every day, and Mina would just have to learn to live with it. She was one of the lucky ones. She had been given a second chance at life.
The pub was exactly as Mina remembered. She couldn’t contain her smile when the door sprang closed behind her. The din of cars and chattering schoolboys was silenced; refused at the door. In their stead was the low hum of music and mellow conversation. Smoky light slipped through the panelled windows, and the air was flavoured with coffee beans and steam from the soup cauldron simmering on the counter. The same bodies hunched over the same pints, having the same conversations that Mina could join and abandon as she pleased. Not yet. But hopefully soon. She just needed time.
The window’s alcove in Mina’s apartment – where she used to sit like a cloistered monk wilfully divorced from the dangers below – was bequeathed to the yellow one. The pigeons now flocked to its sill, stealing sideways glances at Galway’s latest exotic addition. Its new cage was twice the size of the old one, with dispensers for food and water that Mina kept filled to the brim. No more berries. No more nuts. The little guy ate the expensive parrot food; the stuff that smelled absolutely horrendous.
Mina had left home without her sketchbook that day. Even though she still couldn’t focus on anything creative – like a needle skipping off a record – its absence made her anxious, like a warrior without her shield. Her hands still toyed with a phantom pencil but gone were the days of searching the street for those perfect faces. Mina was wary to study them too closely. She knew the tell-tale signs to look for, and her eyes were sharp as ever.
How many of them, she wondered, still believed in fairies? Even the most incredulous adults were kids once upon a time. The word alone conjured up sparkling notions of winged Tinker Bells, inspiring joy and wonder wherever their magic took them. How would they react if Mina told them the truth? She would be defined by a single, socially incriminating idea. No, for the sake of a simpler life it was best not to play the girl who thought that fairies were evil, although the role had come so naturally to her.
The tables were aligned by the wall of the pub. Its blue paint shimmered with an ocean’s gloss beneath a sky that was being unusually kind for the month of March. Every chair, with no single exception, faced towards the street. Behind her sunglasses – shelved between people on both sides – Mina felt invisible. She almost felt safe. Even her feet had calmed down.
The other chair at Mina’s table was empty. There was a time when she would have certainly thrown a scarf or some similar deterrent on it, just in the off chance that, God forbid, someone might make a move to sit down beside her. But not on this day. Mina was determined, however reluctant, to stay outdoors. The yellow one was perfectly happy on his own, and the sky held a crystal ocean. She had to put herself out there. That’s what her mum would have wanted.
Every face that caught Mina’s eye made her wish she had brought that sketchbook – the fresh hardback one she had picked up way back in December. Was she finally ready to draw again? All those crisp untouched pages were calling to her. She examined both sides of a beermat. It was far too busy to draw on. Her fingers were starting to fidget. Every artistic bone in her hand ached to put the nightmares down on paper, to purge them from her thoughts the only way she knew how. Her mind’s eye was pinned and forced to suffer an endless cycle of memories. The more she tried to block them out, the faster they flashed through her head, explosions of blood and glass.
Her toes squirmed in her boots at the thought of that inky, gritty sludge that leaked like sewerage through the earth. She could taste the cement as though it had dispersed an invisible powder that had settled forever on her tongue. No manner of brushing could scrape it off. Bright lights made her nervous. The dark nights were worse. Sketching the coop wouldn’t be difficult. Charcoal on white paper could capture all its colours. But then she always thought of Madeline, and the promise she had made to her. There would be no evidence of what they went through, not even a doodle.
She met with Ciara every week, sequestering the spare bedroom from a gang of teddy bears that John had given her. There was talk of selling her house. But Mina knew that the good memories far outweighed the bad ones, and Ciara would guard those until the end. She was still the only person she felt genuinely comfortable with. There was no pressure to talk or to act like someone else; she could just be herself. And Ciara didn’t judge her when she arrived at the door each time with a bottle of wine. Their experiences and the secrets they shared would keep them from ever straying apart. And they spoke of John and Daniel often. The wounds would never heal, of course. But whereas the mention of their names once brought tears, they now made them both smile. They handpicked their fondest memories from the past and buried the bad ones as best they could. Neither of them had seen Madeline since that night. They each had their notions as to where she might be. Ciara thought that she would have returned to the woodland, to restore the home that Kilmartin built for her. But Mina doubted that. They just hoped that wherever she was, she was happy and had finally found her place in the world.
The sun soared as though some otherworldly hand had turned the heat up to ten. It blistered in a sky so clear that it was actually hot against Mina’s cheeks. She closed her eyes, savouring each second. She had forgotten how it felt – the sun, happiness, safety. The more that people around her remarked on how wonderful it was the more convincing it became, and almost believable, that summer had skipped over spring. But the days were short. The shade would spread across the street, from the pub to the jeweller’s, swallowing up the cobbles in its cold. Some thought it wise to leave their homes in short-sleeved tops. Regret would race up their bare arms as gooseflesh, making all those sunny smiles chatter.
Jennifer had answered her phone with the cool nonchalance that Mina had expected. If her sister had been worried about her, then she refused to let her voice express it. She dreaded that call. Jennifer was the only close family she had left, and yet there had never been any palpable closeness between them. Not even as children. Her mum always joked about how different they were. But now that she was gone, the joke just wasn’t funny anymore.
‘I tried calling you at Christmas,’ Jennifer had said. ‘I thought maybe there was one day in the year that you might want to talk to your sister.’
‘I wanted to,’ Mina replied, fighting back a flash-flood of tears. ‘Honestly, you’ve no idea how much I wanted to. But I just coul
dn’t. I was…’ she hesitated, conceding to the lie ‘…in a strange place.’
‘That’s not even an excuse,’ she snapped back. ‘That’s just you, always doing your own thing and to hell with the rest of us. I promised Mum that I’d look out for you – did you know that?’
‘Is that why you call me? Because Mum asked you to.’
‘Why else would I bother?’ she said. ‘Do you think I don’t have my own life, Mina, without trying to fix yours? Jesus, you’re so self-absorbed.’
Never had a scolding awoken such a dizzying sense of déjà vu. Every missed call had planted another seed of guilt in Mina’s heart, and she had let them grow, thinking – or perhaps hoping – that her sister hounded her out of love. Mina needed fixing more than ever, but Jennifer wasn’t the one to seal up the cracks. She never was. That was the last time they had spoken.
Someone stepped in front of the sun, draining the day of light, and lingered across from Mina’s table. She didn’t turn her head. It was best not to invite conversation. Maybe after her glass of wine she would consider it, but that wasn’t likely. It was still too soon. But even a staid exchange about the weather would be enough to convince Mina that she had made the effort. She still felt like a caterpillar crawling amidst the social butterflies, trying to fit in.
‘Is this seat taken?’ a man asked.
Mina’s face was still set towards the street, not wanting to meet him face on. She guessed from the voice that he was maybe sixty years old. Irish, but not local, with a light rasp to his words; his throat and lungs were probably piecing themselves back together after a lifetime of hard cigarettes.
‘It’s all yours,’ she said, fixing her glasses in place lest her defences should slide off her nose.
The brakes of a bicycle moaned loud enough to turn every head in the vicinity. Mina jumped forward in her seat but played it off as a twitch from the cold, rubbing her hands frantically together to convince anyone who might have seen her. Even those ensconced in newspapers and paperbacks lifted their eyes. The cyclist seemed oblivious to the bodies that washed on either side of him like shoals of fish. He rested his arms on the handlebars and stood, one foot on a pedal, the other on the ground, casually chatting to some friends; all small talk and big smiles. The blockage on the street was instantaneous, like food caught in a windpipe. The slighter ones weaved and slipped through. Most stopped in their tracks; an epidemic of impatience spreading amongst them. Mina could see it across all their faces, a frivolous distemper that made her smile. To think that this was the worst thing that had happened to them that day.