The mountains rising dark to touch the stars. It looks as though the world’s been ripped in two. Dip-dyed darkness. Smoothing down the earth, I hold my tongue. Plants can go into shock after repotting. They need water, warmth. Indirect sunlight. Kindness. Care.
I look at Catlin. All confidence and bluster. And I want her to be happy here. Even if I don’t think that I will be. I don’t know if I can be happy anywhere. We both know that I’m not that sort of fish. That sort of plant.
‘Mad?’ my sister asks, her bright eyes kind and lined with perfect kohl. I close my eyes. There’s no point in comparison. Not really.
My hands scrape at my fingernails again. Soil and blood and everything is strange.
4
Broom
Catlin is fishtail-braiding her hair at the kitchen table. She did our nails last night. Hers shiny purple, mine grey. We’re starting school today. My fingers flutter, picking at the oilcloth. I taste something sour in my stomach. The panic builds. I put down my cup of tea, and begin to tidy. Scrub the tea stains out of china cups. I can see Mamó curled over something small in the garden. It’s soft and dark. I cannot tell if it’s a clump of earth or a young bird. Her fingers clasped around it and her expression vacant. She rises, meets my eye before she turns away. I start, as fingers trail across my shoulder.
‘I’ll get those,’ Mam tells me.
‘No,’ I say, shaking off adrenaline. ‘It’s fine.’
‘I’ve time,’ she says. ‘I’m a lady of leisure now.’ She smiles. We both know she’ll be busy all day long. It’s who she is. Mam is a primary-school teacher, and she’s taken a career break, so her job in Cork will be waiting if she needs it. Mam and me are alike that way, I think. Plan for the worst. Except she also hopes for the best. I scrape my toast into the bin, half eaten. Catlin smiles at me, stuffs her second slice into her mouth.
‘We’ll be late!’ she says. ‘We’re meeting Layla at the end of the driveway. In ten.’
The driveway’s very long. We have to run.
Layla Shannon is a tall, blonde wisp of a girl. She looks like she would appear out of a mist. In moonlight. By a lake. Doing ballet. For a prince. A fairy prince. I can’t be dealing with her. She’s our groundskeeper’s daughter, and lives in a lodge on the grounds of our fabulous castle because what has our life become?
Layla waves at us, her long, pale fingers curled together like the wing of a bird. ‘Hey,’ she says. Her voice is low.
‘Hey,’ we both say back. Catlin looks her up and down. Me too, but only because she looks like the sort of person who doles out swords and prophecies in books. Her hair is tied into a high, messy ponytail with what looks like twine. She has a stain on her school skirt.
‘Your lace is untied,’ Catlin points out. When Layla kneels down to tie it, she’s basically still taller than us. It isn’t fair. Catlin rises to her full height. Asks Layla about the school, the village. Her brothers. Where people go to drink. I lean back against the cold stone, my hands stuffed in the pockets of my duffel coat. I think about the bed I left behind. All cosy and warm and not full of people. A space where I could snooze and be alone. I look down at my battered record bag. It has a book and a spare book in it. One is about the Spanish flu epidemic. The other is about the missing girls.
Layla laughs, as though she and Catlin were plotting a hilarious crime. ‘You’re funny,’ she tells my sister. ‘I like that.’
Catlin looks at her with squinty eyes. The sunlight is bright this morning. The mountains bleached, the trees warped like wrought bone. I notice something at Layla’s feet. A soft, small thing. I crouch down, look at it. A little pygmy shrew. Its dead face thin, eyes wide. Little mouth all opened, little blackhead teeth nesting inside. Like ants.
‘What are you doing, Maddy?’ Catlin asks. Her face is horrified.
‘Sorry,’ I say to Layla and Catlin, standing up. ‘I don’t normally examine little corpses.’
‘It was a pygmy shrew,’ says Layla. ‘I had a look at it before ye came. Poor little thing.’
I smile at her. ‘They have the weirdest little noses, don’t they?’
‘They always look so disappointed in life.’
‘Whyfor am I a shrewwwww?’ My shrew-voice comes out squeaky and aggressive, but Layla seems to get what I’m going for.
‘The world is big and it frightens me.’
‘Send help.’
‘Send so much help.’
We giggle. Catlin shrugs, brushes down her skirt. Crouches to the little corpse, takes out her phone and snaps it.
‘Another body found in Ballyfrann.’ She quirks her mouth.
And then the laughter stops. Catlin’s face is all, Why did I say that?
It is an expression I recognise from me.
The bus pulls up.
Layla doesn’t sit near us. Grey roads snake like rivers through the landscape. We roll clunkily through the mountain pass. They were found here, I think. Stare out the window.
Helen Groarke, most recent of the girls.
Amanda Shale. They found her cold and broken on her birthday.
Nora Ginn looked older than fourteen. They think that someone held her for a while.
Bridget Hora, small like us, but older than the others. Not by much though.
I leave my book inside my bag. Remind myself that it’s the sort of thing that people don’t like to talk about. Which is weird. It was so long ago for some of them. Twenty, thirty years. No one that people here would have known, apart from Helen. It isn’t that the deaths of strangers matter less; it’s just they’re not our deaths. We don’t have a responsibility to mourn them.
No one knows who hurt the mountain girls. But in books on unsolved Irish murders, they always get a chapter. At least one chapter.
I look at Catlin, on her phone, scrolling through the news from her friends back home, until her pale face clicks back into repose. Until she has remembered that she matters. I roll my shoulders back until they click.
We pass the green sign, chipped and rusted over. Flakes of paint peel off. Rough brown pokes through. I look back as it shrinks away behind us.
Fáilte go Béal Ifreann
Welcome to Ballyfrann
I crook my mouth at Catlin. It isn’t a smile. And neither is what she gives back to me. She butts her shoulder gently against mine, as the bus rattles through the mountain. It sounds as though the engine is a metal box full of loose bolts. Too loud to put on headphones to block it out.
‘It looks so lonely here,’ my sister says. She says lonely like it could apply to her somehow. Like it is not my word.
‘We won’t be lonely, Catlin. You are magic. And we have each other. We will surely make our own fun. Out of turf.’ I tell my sister things that might be lies.
She nods. ‘I normally don’t worry about stuff, Mad. I don’t put my foot in it. And yet. Here it is. My foot.’ She curls her toes. I hear the crack of bone.
The bus pulls up outside some spiked black gates. Chain ropes around them, like a snake around its dinner. Three separate padlocks are attached. The railings around the school are painted black, but are bright brown with rust.
‘Who’d want to break in here?’ she asks. I shrug. It’s basically a series of abandoned prefabs, clustered around a plump white cottage with curranty little windows. Some of them are boarded up with wood or wavy shed-roof iron. Corrugated.