Deirdre Sullivan
Perfectly Preventable Deaths
Prologue
Honeysuckle
Our father died in flames when he was twenty-six and we were two.
We don’t remember. All we have is story. Sense memory, the feeling of soft earth. His name upon a pitted slab, limestone, lichen-pocked. Orange, white and crinkled dry as paper. The smell of grave implanting in our nail beds. Our fingers scraping through to trace his name.
They found him lying in the woods, a group of children on a nature walk. In a small, round glade between the trees – the beech, the oak, the hawthorn and the elm. The leaves beneath him weren’t even burnt.
‘He always cared for everything around him,’ Mam said once. ‘Even in death, he kept the forest safe.’
It’s not something we talk about too often.
The images I have might not be real. A voice. A lap. Helping plant the flowers in our garden. Little hands and big ones thick with earth. Memories are versions of what happened, stories that we’ve told ourselves enough. The fiction ivy-winding around the real, to strangle out the bad, promote the good. If you’re not careful, ivy eats a house. It lets in rot.
Sometimes I remember things about plants. Little facts I don’t know how I came by. And I wonder if I know because he told me when I was very small. More likely it all filtered down through Mam. We never really knew my dad to miss. But something in me turns him over, over. Stretched like a yawn, arms out and thick with char.
And, maybe that’s why Catlin goes to Mass. Or why I sometimes wake up taut with terror, looking for some unknown thing to make me safe, or safer in that moment.
The world isn’t predictable at the best of times. But if you’re scientific about it, then all the strangest things can be explained. Maybe not right now and not by you, but always there’s a reason. You can divide things into true and false, proven and unproven. Analysed, predictable, if not preventable. The more you know, the more that you can do to make things right. Knowledge is a real-life magic power, gathered up like spells to use in time.
Vinegar, a candle. Salt and sage. There’s always been a comfort in the tangible. In things that you can gather round you. Hold. We all have little talismans to cherish.
Beech for wisdom. Elm for your throat.
The things you hold – they will not keep you safe though.
In the end, there’s not a thing that can.
1
Sage
When Dracula came to England, he arrived in a box full of earth. That’s kind of what the boot of our car looks like now. We’re taking half Dad’s garden to Ballyfrann with us. The indoor plants mainly, but some cuttings from the garden as well. I’m excited to start growing things there. It’s always soothing, helping something live.
Brian sent moving vans for all our stuff. Large, brown, unmarked things. Men from the village, loading, putting, driving. Collinses and Shannons, Brian told us. As if that made it clearer who they were. ‘In Ballyfrann we help each other out,’ he said.
And Mam said, ‘That sounds nice. A real community.’
The men kept grimly lifting boxes out, and drinking thick dark tea with too much milk. Brown like earth. Like copper grass on mountains. Crisp and dead and waiting for the spring. Catlin tried to establish how many sons they had and how hot they were, based on genetics. She was not subtle. Horny never is.
The whirr of tyre on gravel. The flat mess of what used to be a cat. A mangled stain that no one seems to notice except me. It is quiet in the car. Catlin’s earphones in. The radio. It will be a long drive. We got up early, loaded up the boxes in the vans. They flanked our car for the first forty minutes, then we stopped for petrol and they left us. Brian says they know exactly where to go. It’s home for them. For us it will take time.
The fur, what was left of it, looked brown.
I trace a pattern on my legs, a dizzy little triskele. In my pocket is a pack of salt. The kind you get in chip shops. Candle wax. Some berries on their stalks. My clothes are always manky in the pockets. I do peculiar things to ward off threat. Detritus gathers. It isn’t very scientific of me. But I am odd, and where we’re going’s new, and full of dangers.
I see their faces.
All the mountain girls.
The ones that died.
When Mam and Brian first told us about the place he came from, it didn’t quite seem real. Still doesn’t, to be honest. I wonder, when we see it for ourselves, if it will be different. It’s strange, isn’t it, to be moving somewhere we have never been. We haven’t set foot there. Even though it isn’t very far. Nowhere in Ireland is. A country the size of other people’s cities. We have seen photographs, on Brian’s phone. On Mam’s. He took her there for weekends when they started going out.
They got engaged inside the castle walls.
We weren’t there.
‘My father built this castle,’ Brian told us. ‘He was a strange man. Very big ideas. There was a ruin here before, and he bought the land with a view to rebuilding what had been, but then … he went a bit mad. There are places in the castle even I don’t know about. He had a lot of secrets, my aul’ fella.’
Going ‘a bit mad’ is different when you’re rich apparently. Brian’s father built a castle out of castles. He stole the bits he liked from where he’d been. There’s some Versailles in there, a little of Kilkenny, a fair amount of that big German one the Disney castle’s based on. Neuschwanstein. From the outside though, Mam says, it looks medieval. It’s hard to picture, the mountains more suited to the clutch of cottages, white as eggs, where the Collins family live in their weird commune. Brian says they are the ‘backbone of the village’, but I feel like in a village of a hundred or so people it is not hard to be a backbone, if there are enough of you. Like, everybody’s something. They’d have to be, or things would fall apart. The Collinses have been part of the village since before Brian’s dad. Brian went to school with Ger Collins, Mike Collins, Pat Collins and Tim Collins, for example. And that was not a lot of Collinses, considering.
‘There’ll be a few Collinses at school with ye as well,’ Brian tells us. ‘Edward and Charlene. They’re good kids.’
I stare at a patch of unshaven hair on Brian’s chin, trying to be interested. The black and grey strands forcing through the pale. I wonder what he is of the village. The brain perhaps. I wouldn’t say the heart.
Since she found out about the deaths, Catlin calls Brian’s place ‘the murder palace’. I try to shrug her off. It wasn’t in the castle that they found them, after all. But something of it sticks inside my gut. A heavy sort of worry. My fingers scratch at skin through layers of cloth. She pokes me in the ribs and does the eyebrows. I do them back. And it will be OK. I know it will. We pass a green sign: Fáilte go Béal Ifreann – Welcome to Ballyfrann, and Brian stops in the village to pick up teabags, milk. We drift into the little shop behind him, stare at the magazine racks, all the women’s faces, looking out.
‘These are my daughters,’ Brian tells the bored-looking woman behind the counter as she waves his wallet away.
‘Consider it a wedding present, Brian.’ Her voice is animated but her face is slack. ‘Nice to meet you, girls. I’m Jacinta.’
Catlin looks at me, as if to say, Of course she is.