‘Why haven’t I heard of it so? You’d think it’s be all over the Internet, or at least on postcards and things, like Knock or Ballinspittle.’
‘My father says people here like their secrets kept,’ Oona says.
Do you have secrets, Oona? I wonder. I flinch a little as she reaches out to pick a bit of something off my shoulder. It’s unexpected. Why would her lovely hands want to touch me?
We leave the shop and walk out past the pub, over the roads towards the mountains, and talk and talk. After a while, she links her arm through mine and rests her head a little on my shoulder. I can feel her soft hair against my cheek. It’s still a little damp. But she is warm. A pleasant sort of moisture. She smells like lavender, fresh water. So easy to breathe deep. I’m hyper-aware of her, the movement of her body. Her warmth beside my own. Her little face. Underneath my skin is almost humming. Like I’m about to start collecting things, but not so worried-nervous. Leaves crunch and shine beneath our feet as we walk on. It must have rained while we were drinking tea.
I look down at my hands. The cuticles are rough, the nails are chipped. Nothing about me is good enough for anyone. When Oona sits, she crosses her legs twice, around and around again, curling in on herself like an ampersand. She’s different to every other person that I’ve met. There’s just … this thing about her. This warmth, this depth. I want more and more.
We walk until the stars are in the sky. Until Mam rings to ask me where I am.
19
Ragged Robin
Oona’s mother drops me home. She looks like an older version of Oona, but taller, more angular. She asks how I am settling in to the village. I ask her the same. We both say grand. She has some paint on her jeans, and I remember she’s an artist, ask her about painting. She loves the landscape here, the colours, she says. So stark. Oona has less to say to me when her mother is there. They speak in English to each other though, for my benefit, I assume.
When I get off at the driveway, Elodie Noone tells me to ‘be careful’.
I laugh and thank her, but her face is still. Oona is in the passenger seat, so I can’t tell if she waves goodbye to me as the car pulls off. I hope she did. I waved to her. Awkwardly, like everything I do.
Catlin and Mam are already at the kitchen table. I feel the heat against my night-cold cheeks. We must have walked for miles and miles. I try to keep the smile off my face. The warmth in my heart is just for me right now. I’m not ready to voice it.
‘I think she met a boy, but she won’t tell me anything,’ Mam says. Her voice is high. Mam gets all excited when she suspects there’s gossip. It’s annoying and adorable.
‘Did she now?’ I put the kettle on and get some biscuits.
Mam rests her hands on her chin and looks between the two of us. Catlin tells her little bits of what happened. She doesn’t say Lon’s name. Or that he’s older. Just that they met, he showed her places in the village he likes and then he bought her tea. They held hands walking all day long, she says. He didn’t once let go.
Her voice is low and strangely sweet. The top button of her blouse is undone now, and she’s rolled up her sleeves. Just a bit of artful disarray. She laughs a bit, when she is telling the story. Looks out the window. Says, ‘I feel all special.’
As if she wasn’t special all along. I never think of Catlin doubting that about herself. But maybe lately, with all of this change, she needed this. If I didn’t know who he was, if I hadn’t met him yet, I think I’d like the idea of Lon. The way she sees him. Quiet and sound and tall and dark and kind. A proper human being, and not a creep who’s mostly made of things that look cool from the outside.
‘He held me so tightly, Maddy. Like he was never going to let me go. It felt like in my dreams,’ she says to us. ‘It’s so romantic. Like, he is literally the man of my dreams.’
I roll my eyes. Mam tells me to ‘lighten up’, that ‘my turn will come soon’. As if love were a turn on one of those little rides for kids outside a supermarket. She doesn’t understand me, not at all.
I think about the fox between two roads. Someone asked for something. And could that something be my lovely sister? I don’t like the weight of secrets on me. I haven’t been able to articulate what happened between me and Mamó that night. Not properly. Not even to myself.
But it was something. The law of conservation of energy states that it can be neither created nor destroyed. The charge I felt – it had to come from somewhere. And was that heat the little fox’s life?
Nora Ginn.
Helen Groarke.
Bridget Hora.
Amanda Shale.
I think of Lon. His dull, copper-penny eyes. His wide, white smile. The smattering of stubble he contrives. He looks so bland, so normal. I don’t get it. Though Catlin doesn’t either. Me and Oona. Our ‘friendship’ – it isn’t just a friendship. I think that we both know that, but it is up to me to say the words, and I can’t. No more than magic. Some things are too big to let be true.
Mam and Catlin, with me joining in, of course talk about Lon until bedtime. Catlin goes through every interaction since we moved to Ballyfrann, framing them so differently to me that it’s hard to know who’s telling the truth. It’s all one picture; we’re probably just using very different filters. Or something.
He texts her goodnight kisses before bed. She kisses her phone, and I call her a fool and she laughs at me.
‘I feel like a fool,’ she says. ‘I feel like I’m losing brain cells every time I’m near him. It’s like he’s kicking out the stuff that normally lives inside my head and replacing it with all of this new happy.’
‘That doesn’t sound so bad,’ I say to her.
‘Madeline?’ she asks me, her voice lower. ‘Will you come with me to the pub thing?’
‘Really, Catlin?’ I was kind of resigned to going anyway.
‘Yeah. I need you there. In case none of the others want to talk to me.’
‘You’ll have Lon though.’
‘I know. But I want both of you. He might think I’m weird if I’m only talking to him all the time. Please?’ She holds out her little finger for a promise. I think of the jut of rib outside the fox, the harsh white flash of it against the red.
I sigh. I grasp her pinkie.
It is done.
‘There’s something drawing him and me together, Maddy,’ she says to me, eyes widening. ‘I think it might be fate. I’ve never felt so attracted to anyone before. I mean, I think about him all the time. Like, all the time. Like, even when I’m praying. Or plucking my eyebrows. When he kisses me, I feel he’s marking me. That now I’m his. With other boys, it was always mostly about me and them. The me was first. My happiness. My needs. But with Lon, it feels like he’s the most important thing.’
‘He’s not,’ I tell her. ‘You are. You’re my sister.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know it’s not feminist and it’s not right, but I just want to please him. I want him to look at me and feel the way I feel, and when he does it feels like it’s a present from the Gods.’
I throw a facecloth at her.
‘Don’t be weird. What’s pushing you together is your genitals. Your genitals fancy each other. Well, yours do him. It’s hard to say. With genitals.’