In my bookcase there’s a collection of old refill pads and exercise books that Mum is always trying to get me to throw out. She says I should make more room for real books. To which I answer: “Mum, what books?” I haven’t read a novel since the second Harry Potter, when I decided that Ginny was too annoying and that I couldn’t stomach reading about her any further.
Lily always told me that there isn’t that much of Ginny in the subsequent books, but I never bothered regardless. Instead, I keep the bookcase as a shrine to memory. Here are the jotters where me and Lily drew maps and plans and rules for new civilizations. There are worlds within worlds in here, false fantasy universes that reflected whatever phase we were going through.
I flick through one pad, from the year we both turned eleven. It was a design for a water world. A dirty, scuzzy sort of landscape where everything is pond scum and emerald-green with algae. There are tadpoles and frogspawn, trout and mackerel. Mullet, the worst fish of all, because, according to everyone, they feed on human waste.
And there, in writing drawn to look like it’s dripping out of a tap, Lily has written one sentence:
NOBODY SWIMS, NOBODY DROWNS.
I didn’t know what it means. I still don’t. But the drawings of frogspawn make my teeth clench. I stare at the cuts on my hand.
Did Lily send me the cogs and keys?
Or is she attacking me with them?
The cut on my hand begins at the base of my ring finger, where the skin goes soft and padded like a snake’s belly. It jags across one of my palm lines, my life or my wisdom, I don’t know which. Flexing my fingers back and forth, I can feel the skin stretching and peeling, stinging painfully. A giant, bloody sign from Lily. A big Suck on this, Maeve.
Painful as it is, this is better, somehow. Better to be in some kind of dialogue with Lily than to have nothing at all.
At nine, the power goes out. Each of us are in our bedrooms. We mosey out onto the landing to see what’s happened. Dad stands on a chair with a flashlight to flick the fuse button, but it doesn’t work.
“It’s all over Twitter,” Jo says, her face illuminated by her phone in the darkness. “The whole Kilbeg area is blacked out. Some trees fell on power lines, or something.”
“Why?” I say, my voice high. “There hasn’t been a storm, or anything. It’s just snow.”
“Snow falls on trees. Trees get heavy. Trees fall over,” answers Jo in a sarky “I still haven’t forgiven you for being a bitch to me earlier” voice. “Duh.”
“Well, this is a bit of an adventure,” Dad says, trying to look whimsical. “Will we crack out the candles? Ghost stories?”
“The rads have gone out,” Mum says, putting her hand on the rapidly cooling radiator behind her. “Well. We’re going to need double blankets on everyone’s beds. Girls, I think it’s best if you sleep together.”
“What?”
“For warmth. This house is going to be an icicle within the next hour, mark my words.”
And it is. Even with two pairs of socks on, every step on the bathroom floor sends a chill through my legs. When Jo and I refuse to sleep together, Mum insists I go to bed in a fur coat.
“Where the hell did you get this rotten old sheep’s arse from?” I ask, mortified that Roe’s accusation that my family is rich was probably right.
“It was your great-granny’s, and it’s grey rabbit fur, I’ll have you know.”
“Why do we have a dead woman’s coat? A dead woman’s amoral coat?”
“I inherited it when I was about your age. I could never throw it out. The poor old creature gave its life so she could stay warm; it feels like a crime to just bin it.”
She is uncharacteristically protective in this newfound Siberia. She sits next to my bed and lights two long white dining candles, both wrestled into wine bottles salvaged from the recycling bin.
“Take one to the toilet with you if you need to go in the middle of the night,” she says, settling them down on my nightstand. “I’ll leave the matches here.”
“Thanks, Mum.”
I keep my hands folded inside the sleeve of the rabbit-fur coat so she doesn’t see the cut.
“Are you warm enough?”
“As warm as I’m going to be.”
“It’s a funny old time,” she says, and I try not to reply by saying that it’s funny, her sitting on my bed like this in the first place. She had just earned her PhD when she found out that she was pregnant with me, and according to Abbie she had a full-on freak-out that she would never get to use it. So she kicked her career into hyper-drive, and sort of palmed me off on a mixture of childminders and sibling supervision. “You were an easy baby,” she often says, fondly. “Like you would know,” Abbie sometimes retorts.
But I must look uncomfortable, or like I want her to leave, because she glances at me sort of sadly and sighs.
“I know it’s been hard for you lately, old beast,” she says. “Lily going missing. And Jo says you have a boyfriend now, too.”
“Oh God…”
“No, no, don’t worry, I won’t make you tell me anything … unless you want to, of course … but then again, why would you want to?”
Her eyes are suddenly glassy in the low, flickering candlelight. I don’t say anything.
“You know, when I first started a family, I never felt like I had a choice. It was either work or kids. So I chose kids. But then when I went back to school, everything seemed so hopeful, like I could do anything. Sometimes I wonder if I fooled
