I comb my fingers through my damp-lank hair. So many missing girls, lines and lines of them, like beads on string. Why do they haunt me when they’re not my business? Why is it so warm here at night? Everything outside is icy, freezing. The pelt of rain against the windowpanes. I must ask Brian to turn the heating off. I end up kicking blankets, tossing, turning. And thinking of the other girl I know once lived near here. Helen Groarke. Catlin told me at the time that people only cared because she was hot, and was she even hot, like, Maddy, really? Anyone can look that way in one photo, from the right angle, with the right filter.
A girl can turn into an ellipsis so easily.
I reach out for my phone.
And there she is. And there she is. And her.
Their faces when you google Ballyfrann.
A tiny village somewhere in the mountains.
They never found Bridget Hora’s skull. Just bones and hair and little scraps of fabric. I look at her. Zoom in on her eyes. There is no way to tell with people, is there? She’s small. The skull was small. We’re small. Our skulls would look like that. If something happened.
The bodies were spaced out. Bridget died the year that Mam was born. They think that they were killed in different places. Different ways. Four girls is not a lot. In the scheme of things. Even in the scheme of missing girls.
Myself.
Catlin.
Oona, Layla.
When you put a face on death, it hurts.
Helen Groarke had long, dark, pretty hair. She wore it poker straight. And she was pale, with freckles on her cheeks. She’s wearing orange nail polish in the photo they all used. It really suits her. She was wearing a little purple dress when she went missing. Brown boots, black tights. A fluffy yellow coat.
Salt under the bed to keep the ghosts at bay. I breathe away the stories.
Helen Groarke. Whose friends held vigils here, but something’s missing. There’s a chunk of something I can’t find. I get up. I need air. I need fresh air.
Amanda Shale. I’m running down the stairs like there’s a fire.
I dig, but not for treasure, in the night.
Nora Ginn. I get a bunch of keys from in the larder. They hang on an iron loop. Cold to touch. I press them to my face.
Bridget Hora. The moon is brighter now that I’m outdoors, and it is colder. I can think. My brain is getting sharp. There’s something in my room that makes me warm and tired. The window’s open, but it doesn’t work.
Every brutal death becoming story. Girls that turn to bones that turn to ghosts. Someone dumped them here like they were rubbish. I think of Catlin, Oona, me.
Hot feet on freezing grass. I run my hands through plants and something’s easing. Something’s better now that I am here.
Help me, I ask the earth.
What’s wrong with me? Too many things to count, like salty grains.
Basil. Bay. Calendula or camomile.
Bay might be alive out here. It’s cold. I fumble in the dark. I should have brought my phone, I think. Their faces though. I didn’t want to carry them. I couldn’t.
A light approaches.
Bodies in the hills, skulls in the attic. I crouch down closer to the ground, hands pressed on frost.
‘Madeline,’ a voice says. It is Mamó.
‘Um. Hi,’ I say. She looks at me. She’s wearing one of those headbands with the torch on, like miners have on their hats, only without the helmet, but apart from that, she’s dressed like a normal person. No pyjamas with rabbits on them for Mamó. I blink a little in the light. It’s hard to focus on her face. The halo all around it is too bright. She looks like she’s the patron saint of wagons.
‘Tea?’ she asks. And then, and not unkindly, ‘Do you need help?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say. I’m breathing.
‘OK then.’ She turns to go. ‘Goodnight, Madeline.’
I watch her fade back into the garden. There isn’t any tentativeness at all. And what would it be like to have that surety, to be a person, firm inside a place? I cover my face with my hands. The cold seeps through.
I feel the cramps begin.
The blood is coming.
14
Chicory
Catlin and I are walking through the forest. The evening is burning into night. The trees are sad and skinny. Needle pale. We see the white tail of a rabbit running. It bobs beneath the furze and disappears.
We’re meeting Layla. She messaged us to ask. She goes fell-running here, moving quickly through the dangerous slopes. She ends up here most evenings, apparently. Ballyfrann is full of the bizarre.
I’m sleeping a little better, at the moment. Water beside salt and six old nails. It keeps on taking more to keep me calm though. More objects gathered. More of me to hide away from Mam. I need for them to work. I want to focus hard in school, even if it means drinking the tea Mamó gave Mam for me, after the night she found me in the garden. Anything that cools me down at night. It’s fever-warm inside my bedroom, weirdly. And when I open windows, there are sounds my brain turns into ghosts. Sharp mountains and dark valleys. Hollowed out like the eyes of a skull.
Oona has insomnia as well. We talk about it, sometimes, on the bus. I sit beside her now, on the way home. Today she wore a little lacy vest beneath her blouse and I could see her collarbones above it. She’s so beautiful. Not in an I-want-to-look-like-that way, but in an I-want-to-look-at-her way. I kind of can’t believe she’s friends with me. Or getting to be friends, anyway.
The tea came in a small brown bag, with a message scrawled in crow-black script.
For Copping On.
‘She’s kind of a magnificent bastard,’ is Catlin’s take on Mamó.
I’m not so sure, but I’m still drinking the passive-aggressive tea before I go to bed. Anything that helps me not have freak-outs. To be more like a normal human being.
‘I wonder,’ Catlin muses, ‘if Mamó has a Lon-attracting tea.’
‘You wouldn’t need it,’ I tell her.
‘I know.’ She smirks. ‘He looooooves me.’
It is true. He does loooooove her. They have become a sort of little gang. The last day, when I tried to join her for a smoke break, Lon told me, ‘You don’t smoke, you’re not allowed.’
Catlin laughed, and then I was genuinely made to go back in. Which was some nonsense.
On her phone, she has a special beep that’s just for him. A wolf-whistle. It is, apparently, hilarious. One of their little in-jokes. And if she doesn’t reply, he rings, to make sure she’s safe. It’s a little creepy, but she likes it.
‘Why hasn’t he kissed me yet, Mad?’ she asks me.
‘Because sneaking into school to kiss a student is a level of creepy even he’s uncomfortable with?’ I ask. ‘Like, maybe he wants to kiss you on a burning Viking boat, or a rocket that’s going to the moon.’
Catlin looks sceptical. And she’s right to. I don’t know much about the business of kissing. I’ve only kissed, like, five or six guys. The ‘or six’ is because he didn’t use tongue even though his mouth was open. I’m not sure what we did together, House-Party-Paul and I, but I wouldn’t call it kissing. Not exactly.
‘I’m not a Disney princess though,’ Catlin tells me. ‘I am a proper girl. With proper lusts.’
‘Maybe it’s not about you though,’ I tell her. ‘It could be about him.’ This feels wise. I have the idea that a lot of things Lon does are mostly about Lon.
‘Working up the courage,’ Catlin says, and I restrain my side-eye. Hold my tongue.
We reach the crossroads, both paths up the mountain. One up left, another to the right. We take the right one. It curls around the rocks and comes out at this jutting, flat sort of ledge. If you want to go beyond that lip, there is no path, you have to climb it properly, like a mountaineer. We sit and wait for Layla. Catlin has a little bottle of whiskey and Coke. She took it from Brian’s press. The whiskey, not the Coke. It’s probably expensive. It tastes heavy. We sit and drink and look back at the castle, the hanging bits of trees and lichen, moss. The sheep have gone inside now for the winter. The only creatures we see are crows. There are always crows around the castle. It’s like they know they’re being picturesque.