‘What’s wrong with Catlin?’ Layla asks me. I can tell from her tone she’s just being polite. It’s weird that little deaths are easier to speak about than families here. I shrug my shoulders.
‘Temperature and things.’ I’m really boring. I can feel how boring I am welling up in me, waterlogging my brain … I’m one question away from comparing things to badgers, I can feel it.
‘So, you’re a triplet?’ I ask. ‘Sorry if that’s a really boring thing to say. I hate when people say it to us.’
‘No, it’s OK.’ Layla smiles, her eyes are really brown, like almost black. ‘Actually, I’m a quad. It’s just that Fiachra ate our brother in the womb.’
‘Wait – what?’ I look at her. I can’t tell if she’s joking.
‘I’m joking,’ she says. Which helps a bit. And then there is a pause. ‘Well, kind of joking. Actually, there’s no knowing which of us ate Aodh. He would have been called Aodh. If he’d lived.’ She swallows.
‘Fair enough.’ We stand together quietly for a while, the cold wind biting through our hats and scarves. I see a bright red dot move across a mountain. A drip of blood. It could be Mamó’s car. It’s not my business. There are more important things than creepy old women trying to be friends with me or something. I shake my head.
‘It’s freezing,’ I say.
‘Yup. The wind is horrible.’
The bus arrives, like a beautiful metal angel.
Layla smiles at me and she says, ‘Bye,’ before she sits with Charley. Are we friends now? Is that what that was?
We weave around, gathering people from different places. I think of Catlin, cosy in her bed and I feel jealous. She was good last night. She’s always minded me. Even when we were little. She includes me, and whatever I’m worried about, in her nightly prayers. Which is a very granny thing to do. I don’t believe in Mary, God and Jesus, but it’s nice to be a priority. It’s nice that I am loved like that. Religiously. And it seems to work a bit as well. Like, when Catlin asks for things, they tend to happen. She cares an awful lot about her friends; they take up space inside her heart. I want friends too, but moving here has taken something out of me. I need to calm myself. I need to gather. I wonder if I can leave it for a week this time. I normally last about three days before I give in. I work at that. The trying not to do it.
We’re halfway up the mountain when the bus stops. Past the old quarry. Centuries ago, there was gold and silver in these mountains, Brian told us. Over time, humans came along to leach it out. Maybe that’s why the hills have such a pallor, though they’re massive. They stretch towards the sun, all sickly stark.
‘Hello.’ A girl, her smile brighter than it should be on Tuesday morning riding in a death-coach, sits down beside me. Her eyes are bright and her hair shines with drops of what looks like rain. It isn’t raining though. So cold and dry the earth looks like its thirsty.
I realise I’m staring. Say hello. Her smile broadens. It looks a little like a crescent moon. Familiar-strange.
‘I am Oona Noone.’ Her voice is warm. So warm.
I look at her.
‘You are new here? I am new as well. I come from France.’ She’s still smiling. Her voice is low and clear, with a smoothness to it. A voice that could convince you to do anything. I work the muscles in my face a bit. I show my teeth. It’ll have to do. How did she know I was new? Do I look new? And what does new look like? I look down at my shoes. They’re nicely scuffed.
Oona from France has wide, chocolatey eyes and soft-looking brown skin. She’s even smaller than we are, and we’re barely five foot tall. Oona looks up at me through her lashes when she speaks. She has thick, wavy hair. She’s curvy – but her neck is slender, snappable. Something about her makes me feel protective. I want to mind her, put secret jars of stuff under her bed. To tell her to turn back. This place is harsh. Full of little corpses. Empty nests.
Oona tells me about France, about the move and how she finds Ballyfrann. She likes the landscape. They have a freshwater pond behind their house; her father fishes in it and she swims. The water’s warm compared to the wind apparently. I raise an eyebrow at her, from inside two jumpers and a duffel coat. Warmer than the wind does not mean warm.
‘It is,’ she tells me, putting a hand on the crook of my arm. ‘You’ll have to try it sometime.’
‘That sounds cool,’ I say, and almost mean it. Oona is convincing. She’s so friendly. She doesn’t belong here in this school full of Ballyfrann sullenness and rejection. I don’t want her to bat her eyelashes at cold shoulders. Somehow, Oona’s presence makes me more confident about things. I have a small, perfectly formed, French girl to support now. I am going to be sociable. I am going to say, ‘Hi!’ to people and follow it up with other things as well.
I will not mention badgers. Even once.
‘Oona isn’t a French name,’ I say, presumably like many other idiots before me.
‘I am half-Irish,’ she says. ‘My mother’s French; my father, he’s from here.’ She pronounces father ‘fazzer’, like a cartoon French lady. It shouldn’t be as adorable as it is. I wonder if she has a spare pen.
‘We came here to have more space. To be free. In France it can be … difficult.’ I don’t know what she means. Is she an olden-days Huguenot? Or, like, a naturist? She could just mean racism, I realise. I don’t know what it’s like to be brown in France. Or in Ireland either, for that matter.
‘Difficult how?’ I ask. Her hand is still on my arm. It’s soft and warm. A lovely kind of heavy. I look at it. On me. I swallow down.
She stares at me for a moment, and then says something about people not understanding Irish culture, and her mother being an artist and needing to be somewhere wild, with landscape. Something about the way she phrases things niggles. It feels less real than what she said before. In her almost perfect second language. It’s not the words themselves, but something underneath them. A sort of effort.
Chocolate eyes on mine. There are little flecks of blue inside them.
She says ‘artiste’, not artist, for her mother.
She smiles at me.
I want to be her friend.
‘We just moved here as well,’ I tell her. ‘Mam married Brian, who’s from here, like your dad.’
‘I have heard of Brian,’ she says. Of course she has. Because he is apparently Ballyfrann-famous and possibly metal. ‘You live in the …’
‘Castle,’ I finish her sentence awkwardly. There is no way to tell someone you live in a castle without seeming like an entitled brat. I wish that I could run away and hide somewhere with my salt boxes and pride remnants. But there’s nowhere to run to. Even my enormous castle is a bus ride away. I wish I also had a private jet. Or a Higgins to call in case of emergency.
It’s almost a relief when classes start. But also not. Because there are so few of us, so there’s pressure to interact more. Answer questions. If people talk or pass notes, everyone notices. The Ballyfrann kids are friendlier to Oona than they were to me and Catlin, and I can see why. She’s basically a human ray of sunshine. At lunch, they include her almost right away. What is the secret? Maybe being lovely, and not trying. They’re nicer to me than they were last week as well. Fiachra even compliments me on a well-made sandwich, bless his greedy heart. I give him half. He eats it in two bites. I think about the fourth quad, and shudder.
I wish Catlin were here. I wish I had an oak leaf or some rowan berries in my pocket. I need to stop all that. It isn’t real. I can’t let what I am when I’m all by myself bleed into school. It’s hard enough. I need to do my best. I need to try.
Maybe if Oona likes me, and my sandwiches are on point, I could weasel my way in here. I listen to them talk about people in the village, on TV. About the youth club. They’re all in this youth club and they’re super into it in a very real way. They almost ordered hoodies, but Lon, who apparently facilitates the youth club, said no. Lon detests hoodies, and I am becoming increasingly convinced he is the worst. He is head of a one-man campaign to change the youth club’s name from ‘The Youth Club’ to ‘The Hellfire Club’.