Perfectly Preventable Deaths

17 Camomile

I’m sitting beside Oona on the bus, feeling the bump of road under the wheels. This bus is so old and rickety that you can feel the texture of the tarmac, when the road changes from old to new. Oona is fiddling with her hair, twisting the little sticky-out bits at the nape of her neck. It used to be longer, rippling like a river down her back; she cut it off before she moved.

‘I needed change,’ she says, and shows me pictures, her looking like a mermaid that grew legs, smiling with some friends from her old school. One of the girls is in all the pictures. She’s tall and blonde and healthy-looking. With thick eyebrows. She looks like she could shoot an ad campaign for a perfume called ‘Better than Madeline’.

‘Who is that?’ I ask, keeping my voice bright and casual, like a slogan T-shirt.

Oona’s face is just a little sad. ‘My girlfriend, Claudine. I really miss her.’

She touches her finger to the screen and leaves a little trickle of moisture along it, rainbowing their faces with a streak. I wonder if she means girlfriend the way the Americans say it, or the real way.

It’s not the sort of thing I want to ask out loud. Better to play it down. To not use labels. Not to make it a big deal – I mean it isn’t one. There were some kids at our old school who were LGBTQ. No As, as far as I knew. Although sometimes I wondered about myself. The way I felt, when I was kissing guys. It wasn’t special. I don’t know.

I look at the photo of Claudine again.

My stomach twists.

‘She’s really pretty, Oona,’ I say.

And Oona smiles. ‘She is.’ And then she sighs the cutest, Frenchest sigh.

I look at her, and she looks out the window. Oona likes girls, I think. There’s a mixture of relief and fear and something else. Claudine looks like a tool.

Lon is leaning on the bus stop today, reading an old Penguin paperback of On the Road and rolling a cigarette simultaneously. For effect. He has two cups of takeaway coffee by his feet, to help Catlin stay awake after her ‘rough night’. She thinks it’s sweet. I stomp into the yard, with very malicious eyebrows, leaving Catlin curled into his stupid chest, all whispery. Her head almost against his skinny ribcage. He reads her out a section, and she makes an appreciative noise, as though she hadn’t read the book already, found it boring. Bunch of pricks that prick about in a car.

We lie to people that we want to like us, so they think that we are more like them. It is a thing. But I don’t have to like it. There’s nothing worth pretending for in Lon. I mean, he is handsome. If you like that sort of gawky, athletic thing. A male model who also plays guitar and won’t stop going on about it. That vibe. Whiff of desperation to be cool off him. Everything about him reeks of prick.

In fairness though, I would rather see Catlin happy than lonely, and she shines around Lon recently. Like a pregnant woman or a bride. Just glowing. His hand on the small of her back, helping her off the bus, as though she were a princess or a child. I’m trying to be happy for my sister. She likes to be adored. I have no frame of reference for that.

At five to nine she’s still out at the bus stop. I stomp out, to bring her in before the start of class. I hate to be the sex police, but I don’t want her to get in trouble either. Not so early into our time here.

‘You OK, Mad?’ she asks.

I nod my head. ‘Just wrecked. Come on.’

‘It was a long, weird night,’ she says, ignoring my hurry-up eyebrows.

Lon reaches out and actually ruffles my hair. ‘Cheer up, Madeline. It might never happen.’

‘What, finding a tortured fox corpse in the woods and not getting any sleep?’

Lon’s face falls a little, then rises again. Like a villain in a computer game who just. Won’t. Die.

‘Welcome to the country, girls. It’s dog-eat-fox.’

Catlin laughs. I glare. He smiles again. ‘You need to learn to take a joke, Madeline. It’s fine.’

It isn’t fine, but I make the corners of my mouth turn up at him. Oona comes up behind me, links my arm. Her hair is still a little wet from her morning swim. I can see droplets suspended in the strands, as small and perfect as beads of rain on spider webs, shimmering in the ice-white winter sunshine. I wonder what she uses in her hair.

‘The driver really bombed it today,’ I tell her. ‘I could hear every part of the bus clinking.’

‘We survived,’ she says, ‘and that’s the main thing.’ I feel the warmth of her arm on mine, right through my coat and jumper. ‘Do not worry, Madeline.’ She says my name as though it were a pastry. Ma-deh-len. She makes it sound so soft.

‘How was your swim this morning?’ I ask her, and she looks up at me, and she says: ‘Beautiful.’

A thud inside my insides at the word.

Swimming is like breathing for Oona. It isn’t exercise. She really needs it. She’s always coming in with soaking hair and she never catches cold.

Some of us are fridge magnets and some of us are food.

What does that mean?

It doesn’t make any sense.

We catch up with the others. Oona grins at them widely. She has this kind of smile that’s down and sideways but really, really big. Like a fat half-moon is climbing up her face. Like it could crack in two from all the happy. It shouldn’t be attractive but it is. I wonder if she wanted to catch up with them. If I was being boring. I scroll down through my brain for something interesting. There is the fox, but I don’t want to talk about the fox. It’s weird and creepy. I don’t want to be corpse-girl. Know a witch. In the dark it seemed so utterly possible, but now, in the daytime, reality feels far more firm and solid. I need to have a good chat with Mamó, I think. Gather data, establish all the facts.

School passes quickly, and lunchtime isn’t half as dragged-out awkward. Catlin doesn’t mention the fox either. Which is weird, because she’s normally the one to make small things more dramatic than they are. Maybe she’s too busy being happy with Lon. She hops the fence and goes off with him for almost all of break, and when they come back her hair’s a little mussed and she widens her eyes at me in a way that screams ‘NEWS’.

She pulls down the collar of her school shirt a little, and there’s a bright red mark on her neck, about the size of a leech. Of course. Of course he would, like, brand her. She looks all proud. My stomach dips a little. I don’t know why I feel so weird about this thing. It’s not like I am jealous. Or that he’s done anything I can put my finger on. I just have a sense of … I don’t know what. Like doom, but not quite doom. So maybe douche? The niggle lives in the same part of me that needs to put salt under people’s beds. The stupid part. The part I’d like to quash.

‘We went to the stock room in Donoghue’s and … he kissed me. Also hand stuff. It was just like my dream, only he wasn’t a fireman or a rock star or a corrupt policeman …’ (Wait, what?!!) Catlin murmurs to me. I look to see if anybody heard. I swallow down bile. I can see it though, through a vintage filter in her head. A sepia romance. Catlin really likes the look of things. The sound of them. The story. The details and the trappings matter a lot.

When school is over Catlin stays behind. ‘I’m going to hang out with Lon for a bit,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you everything later.’

‘Does Mam know?’ I ask.

‘She’ll be grand. She wants us to make friends.’ This much is true.

I tell her to have fun and tell me everything.

I’m not so sure I want to hear it though.

Beside Oona, I watch my twin’s body curl into Lon’s. He crooks a smile of ownership at her. The two of them get smaller. Her body melts to his and fades from sight.