“Oh, come on.”
“Everything is balance, weights and counterweights. Like a see-saw, you know? If your left leg hurts, your right leg carries the weight. Right?”
“Right,” we all say at once.
“It’s the same thing with energy.” She makes a see-saw with her arms. “If energy on one side is moved, energy on the other will come to meet it. Grief calls to spirits. Fear calls to demons.”
“What about happiness?” Fiona asks.
“Happiness –” Sylvia smiles, looking from me to Roe – “calls to love.”
“Oh Christ, Tita! Stop embarrassing them.” Fiona buries her forehead in her hand.
“Sssh. Come on, your mum will have dinner almost ready.”
Roe and I take this as a cheerful hint that it is time for us to leave.
“Sylvia,” Roe says politely. “Do you think … that something like the White Lady, or the Housekeeper, or whatever – do you think my sister could have willed her into existence?”
I bite my lip. Lily didn’t will the Housekeeper into existence. I did. I said the words. I wished she would vanish. But Roe can’t know that. He’d never speak to me again. Fiona sneaks a glance at me but quickly fixes her face back to neutral.
Sylvia gives Roe a look of concerned surprise; this is the first time we have referred to Lily as Roe’s sister. This, I realize, is intentional. Fiona knew that her mother wouldn’t have allowed a speculative conversation about the occult if she knew a direct family member was sitting right there.
“Oh, love. I’m so sorry. I’m sure she’s going to be fine.”
“Thank you,” Roe says mechanically, already exhausted by strangers’ sympathy. “But do you think that maybe the Housekeeper…”
“I think your sister is probably trying to find her way home to you right now, and you should focus on being with your family.”
“Yes, but,” Roe stresses, “if you believe that the physical and the emotional world can overlap, the way you said, do you think that my sister could have summoned the Housekeeper? Even without meaning to?”
“Jos!” Sylvia calls, looking around for her son. “Where are you? Have you washed your hands?”
Sylvia could not be in a bigger hurry to leave the room.
“Tita,” Fiona says, tugging her sleeve. “Please. He’s so worried.”
Sylvia looks at him pleadingly, begging him to not ask her anything else.
“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I just … I just want to know what it is you think.”
“I think, in answer to your question, that the physical and emotional worlds are much more connected than people think, yes. And I think sometimes the spirit world – the thing in our souls that creates ghosts and demons and hellhounds – I think that world sometimes serves as a bridge between the two.”
“Right,” Roe says, his brow furrowed. “OK.”
“Please don’t ask me any more, Roe. I don’t want to…”
“No,” he says putting his hand up. “I know.”
“We’d better go,” I say. “My mum wants me home for dinner tonight, too.”
Sylvia smiles at me, the grateful small smile of someone who has been let out of a corner.
“Thank you for telling us about the White Lady, Sylvia. It was really interesting.”
And it was. It’s almost too big a thought to keep in my head.
We say goodbye to Fiona and make our way through the kitchen, where Jos is hovering around Marie. He turns to look at us.
“Sausages,” he says, sternly.
“OK.”
I awkwardly go to pat his head and miss it entirely. I smile at Fiona’s mother. “Thanks for letting us come over, Marie.”
“Any time, Maeve! You too, Roe.”
Roe nods. We go through the narrow hallway and I have one hand on the front door when we hear it. Marie’s singing voice. Completely different from the high, flutey sound of Fiona’s Disney Princess voice. This one is low, gravelly but completely controlled. A voice that could easily pass for Amy Winehouse, travelling aimlessly out of Fiona’s kitchen.
We cock our ears.
“Ladies, meet the Housekeeper card.”
Roe looks at me sharply, his eyes like saucers. He puts his finger to his lips: that ciúnas signal again.
“Now, she can be your downfall,
or she can be your start…”
Marie is singing about the Housekeeper. Singing.
“And she only wants the best for you,
like she never got for herself.
She sees you at the bottom,
and she’s coming down …”
We burst back through the door, Roe and I practically falling over each other to get to Marie.
“… to help.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“IT’S A SONG,” MARIE SAYS, PUZZLED BY OUR ASTONISHED expressions. “It’s a country song.”
“Did you hear us talking about that, Mum? The Housekeeper card?”
“I don’t know. I was only half paying attention, Fifi. I must have.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“America. We learned all kind of songs when we were over there. This is why I keep saying that music is better than plays, Ni. There’s an exchange. You learn more about the world.”
“Could you write down the lyrics, Marie?” I ask, trying to stop the conversation developing into a debate about the performing arts.
She furrows her brow. “I don’t know, pet. It’s been so long. I think I just remember the chorus. Anyway, Fiona, your daddy will be home in a minute. Set the table.”
“What about after dinner, Mum? Do you think you could sit down with a pen and paper and try to remember the rest?”
Marie looks at her daughter slyly. “If I didn’t have to clean up, maybe.”
“I’ll clean. But you’ll sit down? You’ll write it up?”
“I’ll try, Fifi, but later. Now stop crowding me.”
Roe and I leave, our minds boggling.
“I can’t believe it,” he says. “We thought this was some mystical magical thing, but it’s a song? A friggin’ song?”
“I mean, it could be both.”
“What were the lyrics again?”
“She can be your downfall,
or she can be your start.”
“Where does that leave Lily?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, is this her downfall? Or is this her start?”
The
