Catlin doesn’t like anyone called Jacinta. She met one before who bored her somehow, and has never forgiven the name. We pile back in the car, and Brian switches off the emergency lights. Apparently it’s OK to park on double yellow lines here if you’re ‘just nipping in’.
I’m not so sure about that.
Rules are there for reasons.
We keep driving.
On the way, I find myself searching for something I can’t really place. A clue, an omen. Catlin’s hand brushes mine, and I see the same sort of thing I’m feeling, filtered through her face. Like me but not like me.
Helen Groarke was like us too, at one time. A human being, before she was a story. A girl who disappeared around four years ago, when she was our age, just a little older. On the fifteen-minute walk home from school. They found her in the mountains six months on. A recent corpse, they said. They analysed the parts they could locate. An arm, the fingers painted glitter-purple. Several teeth with bits of brace attached. The remnants of a ribcage. When you are dead, your shell becomes a puzzle. Something to be looked at, piece by piece.
Without the body, or without all the body, it’s hard to tell what was the cause of death. They can test and look and hazard guesses. Try to determine which parts were eaten, cut. There were bite marks, mammalian in nature. I remember wondering what sort of animal would eat a person. We don’t have wolves in Ireland any more. We don’t have bears. So maybe like a fox or massive stoat?
Catlin listed all the dead girls’ names as reasons she was nervous to move here. Amanda Shale and Nora Ginn and little Bridget Hora. Fifteen years ago. Twenty. Sixty. They were all our age, or close enough. Her friends researched them, read about them, talked in that vulture way that people do. The gory details. Bits of femur, spattered blood on rocks. The mountains here are paler, leached of colour. There is a grey tone underneath the green. It’s not like where we’re from. Anything that grows here has to work. It isn’t hard to picture death around us. There is a hungry look about this place.
We drive by the post office, the little church. The school we’ll start on Monday. The petrol station, one vintage-looking pump beside a big plastic 99. The brown stuff on the flake is peeling off. It looks like the kind of place where the sell-by date of everything would be long before we were born.
Sheep litter the hills like puffs of cotton wool after you’ve cleansed your face, all flat and filthy. We stop to let them pass us on the road. My eyes on scenery, earbuds in and listening to music. I worry at our future like a bone.
Back in Cork, when we still had our home and things around us, it was easier to feel like this would be an adventure. That it would all work out, in spite of the distance and my personality. We were moving to a castle. A proper massive castle in the hills. It did occur to me that a house that looms on a hillside is rarely a good thing in books and movies, unless you want to fall for a brooding man with at least one terrible secret. Which, in fairness, sounds a bit exhausting. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I remember telling Catlin, and also myself in the mirror. And our friends. And Mam. And the plants. But all the while I found myself fingering the little paper rectangle in my pocket. The small rough grains inside.
It wasn’t fine.
Catlin was, in the run-up to the move, and, to be honest, every day since birth, mainly worried about not getting enough attention. Our friends are obsessed with her, and I’m the side dish. There’s something special in my sister’s eyes. Her face. The way she carries herself. She draws them in. They love her right away. I’m more of an acquired taste. Like fish eggs. Catlin’s truffle chips, served in a bowl with cosmic patterns on. Delightful, and probably cooler than you.
‘Places pick up energy from bad stuff, Maddy,’ she told me, behind the hall at school, near the skips, where people go to smoke. A week ago, when this seemed like a story we were being told, rather than a real thing about to happen. ‘They drink it in, and it just lies there. Waiting …’
I looked at her, her uniform hanging elegantly on her in a way mine never bothered to. Her hair was piled into an elastic band, and somehow even that looked right. Like hair ties were too obvious, too try-hard.
I grinned. ‘Catlin, you were born to live in a castle. Relax.’
The car still moving, I remember her face, the suppressed smile, the twinkle in the eyes. The love of drama. But the mountain girls – they were people, not seasoning for stories. It feels heavy in my chest, the layers of death Catlin has pasted on this place. On Brian’s home. My body warm, too warm. Bile in my gut, I’m thinking, How much longer?
Brian’s thin shoulders hunch towards the steering wheel. He always looks a little tense. This man my mother married weeks ago. Blue dresses in the registry office. His hand on hers, his ring where Dad’s once was. In our hands we held the ring to warm it as a blessing. It felt so heavy, weightier than gold.
‘I want to be a father to you, girls,’ he told us on the night before the move. ‘A good one. Not like the kind of man my father was. He wanted my respect, but it didn’t go both ways.’ He closed his eyes. ‘After he died … He had a lot of secrets. And I’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort sorting out his mess. Not that he’d thank me for it.’
‘Your dad sounds like a douche,’ said Catlin, and I elbowed her. Brian looked at us with an even gaze. His face was very smooth and very clean, except for one small gorse-dark patch he’d missed. I stared at it, distracted.
‘… perhaps you’re right. He was a lot of things, as the fella says.’ He sighed. ‘I want to be a better man than he was. But the more that I unravel, the more I see … it’s complicated. Tax stuff mostly. I won’t bore you with it.’
But I wondered.
The fields fly past our window. Getting close. There are crosses on the road. Small, hard tooth-white things poking out like artefacts. I count them.
Ten … Eleven.
Twelve.
Thirteen.
‘Did people die here, Brian?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘A family from near Athlone. They were passing through, on their way to somewhere else. Most people are. The father had a seizure at the wheel, drove into a tree.’ He gestures to the side. ‘It’s been cut down.’
Catlin looks at me, mouths, ‘Murder palace.’ I kick her on the shin.
‘Madeline’s kicking me,’ she whines, and Mam rolls her eyes.
‘You probably deserve it. You and your murder palace,’ she says, her hand on Brian’s. His on the gear stick. She loves him. This quiet man whose father built a palace in the wild.
‘It’s not a palace,’ Brian says. ‘It’s a castle.’
‘What’s the difference?’ I ask.
‘A castle’s fortified,’ he says. ‘A palace is just fancy.’
‘Fortified how?’ Catlin asks.
Brian smiles at us. Mam tells him to wait. ‘I want to see them see it.’
The car knots through the land, tangling us away from who we are. I feel the disconnect and swallow down. And then we’re there. Here.
We thought we knew what to expect. But suddenly we find ourselves driving down a smooth, wide private road, cut through a forest, and little by little turrets, battlements and grey stone walls. A quasi-moat that’s filled with shrubs and plants instead of water. Brown and green weeds poking, thick green moss. Large grey and black crows collect on the awnings. Staring dully out at everything.
This is our house. It is the place we live.
I cannot over-emphasise how much of a castle Brian’s castle is. It has turrets for Christ’s sake, walled gardens and a groundskeeper. It looks like it was carved from fairy tales. As we drive in, we see the other sides. It’s sort of a collage. Four miniature castles, linked around a courtyard with a big kitchen garden, with a Victorian-style greenhouse. And a fountain. Because why not a fountain? This is a castle. Opulence is kind of the deal. A glass dome rises somewhere in the centre, like the hyacinth bulbs on Dad’s grave. Fortification means we are protected, but why would we need that? It’s just for show. No need to feel the itch my fingers feel. They trace the grains of salt through thinning paper. I’ve almost worried it to shredding point.