‘Ah. Mountain sounds like a sweetheart,’ she says. ‘Ultan will have a shock of bright red curls.’
‘Mountain will have straw instead of hair. Like a thatched cottage.’
‘That is incredibly Galway of him,’ she says, and I can tell she is impressed. ‘Ultan will often walk about the fields with a calf draped around his shoulders, like a heavy rural scarf.’
‘Mountain will only eat turnips. And he won’t be able to see the English.’
‘Ultan will light me fires with turf he cut himself. And then seduce me beside them.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I know,’ she says proudly.
‘Mountain will be able to fly?’ It comes out like a question.
‘Mountain doesn’t sound real, Madeline. I don’t think you’re taking the GBG seriously.’
‘It’s a practical skill that helps him rescue puppies trapped in slurry pits. And there is nothing wrong with having high standards, Catlin,’ I remind her. And it is true. Though sometimes I worry my standards are a little bit too high. I don’t like boys the same way she does. She’s almost constantly in love with people. The shape of them. Their flesh. The way they sound. The lyrics of love songs make perfect sense to Catlin. It’s always high-romance. Until she gets bored.
I flop down, and feel the compassionate gaze of all those plaster eyes. I’m not sure I could sleep with all those faces there, but I suppose Catlin likes an audience.
‘Madeline?’ she asks, and her voice is different, more serious.
‘Yeah?’ I sit on the flagstones, still stuffing pillows into pillowcases. When you have a four-poster bed you need loads of pillowcases. It is a problem.
‘Wouldn’t it be terrible if we weren’t related?’ she asks.
‘What?’ I mean, it would; of course it would. Half of my immediate family wouldn’t be there. More if she took Mam with her. Which, realistically, she would.
‘Well –’ she’s playing with a loose thread on my blanket – ‘I mean, you’d miss me so much. If I was going, and you were my best friend and not my sister.’
This is true. ‘You’d miss me too, you know.’
She nods. ‘I would. But you’re way more introverted than I am. It would be much harder for you.’
She’s right. But I don’t like the sound of it coming out of her mouth. A statement of fact that doubles as an insult.
‘I’d get over it,’ I assure her. And I would. I totally would. With all my introverting skills. Books and naps and biscuits all the way.
‘No, you wouldn’t.’ She’s confident of this. What does she think I am?
‘You wouldn’t either. You’d waste away from grief.’
‘Ultan would mind me. We’d churn butter on the mountain side and distil our own poitín.’ She smiles, half in love with her pretend man already.
‘There’s no such thing as Ultan,’ I tell her. It comes out sharper than I had intended. Which happens to me a lot.
My sister smiles. ‘Not yet.’ The moment passes.
But later, in the stone walls of my room, the mountains big and silent out the window, it occurs to me that we had both assumed that I would be the one she left behind.
3
Milk Thistle
There are many things about this castle that are surprising. Number one: we live here. Number Two: battlements. We’ve been having a good explore, because that’s what you do if a place has so many rooms you need two people’s fingers and toes, and possibly, like, seven extra hands, to count them. Brian showed us some rooms, the ‘main’ ones, he called them. The library, the bedrooms, toilets, kitchen, the blue sitting room, the red sitting room, his office. His father’s taste in decor was very castle, and Brian’s stuck to it.
His office has a coat of arms on the wall. And, on the lintel, something even worse. A little leather fist of a thing, peering down from the door of his office. I somehow knew what it was right away. A shrunken head. It should be ghoulish, but it just seems sad, the icing on the strangest cake that I have ever eaten. The cake of our life here now. I told Catlin that it probably wasn’t real. I didn’t think it could be.
Brian says it is.
Catlin thinks it’s grand. It fits the castle aesthetic. Like the swords and suits of armour we found in a small room behind the downstairs toilet. But armour’s just clothes. This little thing – it was a person once, or something living anyway. And now it’s just an oddment, on the thick ledge over his door, dented eyes the size of little thumb prints, hollowed out, and long hair sewn on. When we asked him, Brian told us how they used to make them. First remove the skull. Then cut the back open and scoop out all the fat. Put some special seeds under the eyelids. Sew them shut and pin the lips together. Then boil it. Afterwards dry it out with rocks, mould the features with your hands while the flesh is still moist. You make it into anything you want. A boy. A girl. A thing.
And when you’re done, you sprinkle it with ash.
‘Where did you get it, Brian?’ we asked our head-collecting stepdad.
‘My father picked it up. On his travels.’ He smiled. ‘It’s supposed to be protection from your enemies. You kill them, and you shrink their heads, and for as long as you keep that head, their ghost must serve you.’ He waggled his fingers, making light of it. But I felt strange.
‘It’s a little sad,’ I told him, thinking of a tired ghostly slave.
‘It is,’ he said, a little smile on his face, ‘but people don’t do that stuff now. Most heads are made from hides, to sell to tourists.’
‘Who was this?’ asked Catlin, still staring at it, like it was a friend whose name she was trying to place.
‘A girl,’ he said. ‘I don’t know any more about her though.’
There was a pause, and then he said, almost to himself, ‘I don’t know if I’d want to. There’s such a thing as knowing too much.’
He smiled at me, like I knew what he meant. And I thought of all the times I have known too much. They’ve mainly involved things Catlin has told me. Secrets people wouldn’t want me knowing about their lives. The messy stuff. Not much actual mess here though – it is immaculate. Too immaculate for one Brian to do all by himself.
‘How does he keep this place, like, clean? Do we have servants now? It feels like this level of clean would take at least one servant,’ I ask my sister, ratting at the small white flecks of skin around my nail, as frayed as afterfeather, but not as soft.
‘Stop being weird, Maddy,’ says Catlin. ‘The servants will talk.’
‘We don’t have servants. They would have greeted our arrival on the stairs,’ I tell her, picturing the awkwardness of that. I’m really glad we don’t have, like, a staff. Imagine all the extra interaction, having to thank people all day long. Ugh.
‘But I’m invested now. I would like to fool around with an attractive butler. Named Higgins. He would school me in the ways of love, and I would use those skills to marry well.’
‘Take me, Higgins!’ I gasp, caressing a trowel, as though it were an ab. ‘Meh. It doesn’t work. And don’t exploit the servants, dear. It isn’t classy.’
‘I don’t have to be classy, Mad. We’re new money … I will say it’s not the sexiest name I could have chosen,’ she says. ‘But I stick by it. And by my beloved Higgins, who gives me fresh bedclothes and screaming orgasms.’
‘Catlin, what of Ultan? Don’t break his rural heart.’
‘Don’t slut-shame me,’ she says.
‘I amn’t shaming you. You have no shame for me to shame you with. But can we keep the orgasms more gaspy than screamy, please? We have adjoining rooms. And I sleep light.’