Catlin wraps a blue silk piano shawl around her shoulders. ‘She took the salt out from under my bed too, as if it’s any of her business what my sister does in my bedroom in the middle of the night while I’m fast asleep.’
‘You’re not making me feel like less of a freak, Catlin,’ I say miserably.
‘Fuck them, Mad,’ she says. ‘We’re here for two more years. Just enough time for me to get Lon pregnant and feck off to college while he cries into his pint.’
I prise open a box, which turns out to be full of old swords. Catlin takes some out and rubs them. Grumbles that they’re blunt.
‘What were you going to do if they were sharp?’ I ask her.
‘Wreak havoc … Ooh! Some skulls!’ She has found a steamer trunk of skulls. They’re mostly sheep, but also several birds, a deer and some dogs. One of them is human though. I touch it. It is small. A woman’s head. I think of Nora Ginn. Of Helen Groarke.
We all end up as old, forgotten bones. It just takes time.
‘I can’t believe he has a human skull,’ I say to Catlin.
‘I know,’ she squeals. ‘It’s amazing! Would it be weird to spray-paint it a colour?’
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘It used to be a person. A girl, I think. The shape of it. The size.’
Bridget Hora, Nora Ginn, Helen Groarke. Whose head was it? The one they didn’t find? Catlin touches my elbow.
‘Catlin, we should tell Brian about the skull, I think. It isn’t normal. Having human bones inside a house.’
‘You’re right,’ my sister tells me. ‘I love this place. It’s fully, fully haunted.’
‘Have you seen anything?’ I ask her.
‘Sometimes when I’m praying before bed … Don’t roll your eyes at me, salt-girl.’
‘Oi. But go on.’
‘I hear what Brian says are “the pipes”. But it doesn’t sound like pipes at all. It sounds like … something else – little shrieky breaths and sometimes footsteps.’
‘Why have I heard none of this?’
‘I assumed you had. Because salt. Anyway, you know the way I am.’
I do. Catlin has a vivid imagination – when we were little she used to see people that weren’t there, like all the time. They’d be in her nightmares, and then bleed out into the daytime too. Praying helped. And maybe that’s why I started doing what I do, with the gathering. To protect her.
I wonder …
‘Did you put back the salt Mam took out of your room?’ I ask her, concerned.
‘No. But if you do, I won’t say a word.’ She looks at me. ‘The sounds don’t frighten me, Madeline. They’re not … They’re not the thing we need to be scared of.’
‘What do we need to be scared of?’ I ask her.
Her face is very serious. ‘That Brian will take all of my cool skulls away when you tell him about the human one. Murder palace problems.’
‘In fairness, Catlin, you want to decorate with someone’s head.’
‘Brian decorates with heads. He has that shrunken one in his office. Oh! Maybe that’s where the skull is from. The two might go together, like a set.’
‘I don’t know what to do with you. You’re scarier than ghosts sometimes.’
‘Skulls!’ exclaims Catlin happily again. It doesn’t take that much to please her, really. ‘They’re going to look fantastic on my altar. I wonder if he has any Marys?’
Catlin’s Marys have graduated, and now she basically just has a massive altar in her room. It’s getting bigger as she gathers stuff. It has her pictures, icons, Mass cards, miraculous medals, nazars and Hands of Fatima. And now, apparently, the skulls as well. This altar is fine with Mam, apparently. It counts as decoration, not a symptom. It does look cool. But so does everything she fecking does.
I wonder what Mamó would think of all of Catlin’s talismans. I think I’d like to show her. See her face. Catlin has been getting more and more into religious iconography over the past while. She always liked the pictures. Pretty ladies in white and blue, stars around their heads, snakes at their feet. She has all these old Mass cards in a shoebox. The only person that she really knew in there’s our dad. The rest are Mam’s friends, and some strangers. I saw her steal one from a friend’s house once.
‘She won’t need it,’ she told me, grinning. ‘She didn’t even like her Auntie Méabhdh.’
Catlin’s morals are like those optical illusion pictures people share. Sometimes you have to tilt your head to spot them. I help her with the skulls, because I am a good sister.
‘This is the closest we have ever come to disposing of a body. Bonding,’ I tell her.
‘Sisterly bonding. We’re skull-pals now. Bone twins.’ She’s carrying, like, seven skulls in her two teeny hands.
‘Bone twins sounds like a porno.’
‘It does at that.’ She pauses. ‘Do … Do … you girls do everything together?’
This is a question we’ve actually been asked, and more than once. I make bass-line sounds, and then pretend to vomit.
Sometimes, when Catlin gets stuck in an evil laugh, it keeps on going. And I join in. We cackle until we have to sit down because our ribs hurt too much. It’s the kind of laughing I really only do when she’s around.
I love my sister. Skulls and bones and all. But still, there are some troubling facts emerging. Like the fact that she had another sex dream. About Lon. This time he was interviewing her for a job, and it turned into another sort of job altogether and I stopped her there because NO.
A world of NO.
‘No.’
‘But it was –’
‘NO.’
Catlin hates when I don’t let her finish. It is one of her pet peeves. She squints at me.
‘You really don’t like him?’
‘No. I really don’t.’
She smiles at me. ‘I’m going to kiss him anyway.’
My stomach twists. My eyes on the dark hollows of the skulls.
13
Wild Cherry
I wake up, sweating like I have been running. Rain beats on the windows. Dreams of foxes interspersed with screams. We’re high up, but the mountains here cast shadows, day and night.
When we told Brian about the skull we found, he laughed at us. Gently, but he laughed. ‘Typical Dad,’ he said. ‘He didn’t ever open half the trunks he bought at the estate sales.’ His hand outstretched. ‘I’ll give it to the guards though, just in case.’
He tucked the pitted bone into his satchel. The light caught grooves upon it. Carved by time, or maybe something else.
The moon is waxing, fatter slices building.
Skulls in Catlin’s room of things long dead.
I blink, and try to think of salt and safety.
My ears strain for the breathy creak of pipes.
What can my sister hear that I can’t hear?
Girls go missing all the time in Ireland. You hear about the right ones on the news, the ones with parents, girls who come from money, pale-skinned, pretty. Missed. I’ve shared the photos, seen the posters peeling on the lamp posts, bins and walls. Sellotaped or glued. The pictures bleeding into text with rainfall. Printed out by families or friends. Loving, hopeless hands that clutch at nothing.
And, in time, they might be found, in isolated places. The mountains that we drive through on the bus – I picture them, the faint trodden paths from years of feet that line the slopes like slender threads a foot’s breadth wide, through bush and grass, like veins upon a leaf. You have to know, or really look, to notice. It would be the same, I think, with bodies. You’d have to look, but mightn’t think to look.