Perfectly Preventable Deaths

13 Wild Cherry

I wake up, sweating like I have been running. Rain beats on the windows. Dreams of foxes interspersed with screams. We’re high up, but the mountains here cast shadows, day and night.

When we told Brian about the skull we found, he laughed at us. Gently, but he laughed. ‘Typical Dad,’ he said. ‘He didn’t ever open half the trunks he bought at the estate sales.’ His hand outstretched. ‘I’ll give it to the guards though, just in case.’

He tucked the pitted bone into his satchel. The light caught grooves upon it. Carved by time, or maybe something else.

The moon is waxing, fatter slices building.

Skulls in Catlin’s room of things long dead.

I blink, and try to think of salt and safety.

My ears strain for the breathy creak of pipes.

What can my sister hear that I can’t hear?

Girls go missing all the time in Ireland. You hear about the right ones on the news, the ones with parents, girls who come from money, pale-skinned, pretty. Missed. I’ve shared the photos, seen the posters peeling on the lamp posts, bins and walls. Sellotaped or glued. The pictures bleeding into text with rainfall. Printed out by families or friends. Loving, hopeless hands that clutch at nothing.

And, in time, they might be found, in isolated places. The mountains that we drive through on the bus – I picture them, the faint trodden paths from years of feet that line the slopes like slender threads a foot’s breadth wide, through bush and grass, like veins upon a leaf. You have to know, or really look, to notice. It would be the same, I think, with bodies. You’d have to look, but mightn’t think to look.

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.