That’s it. That’s all there is on Harriet’s death. No cause, no explanation. Just that she was taken too soon.
My head is so buried in my phone that I don’t look up until I’m almost at the front door and realize there’s a Garda car in the driveway. My stomach turns to ice. What now?
I wait outside the house for a moment, trying to calm myself with long, concentrated breaths. They’re probably just here to get a statement from me about the cabaret gig last week. Maybe Detective Griffin had second thoughts; maybe she wants to question me about Children of Brigid. Well, if that’s the case, then fine. I will gladly tell her everything I know about Aaron. In fact, it’s good that he’s being investigated. Finally, an end to this nonsense.
But what if it’s not about that? What if it’s Lily? What if she’s turned up dead, floating in the Beg with her lips blue? And in that case, why would the Gardaí be at my house, and not Roe’s?
I stick my keys in the door and hear a sound from the living room. Animal, guttural, feral.
I cock my ear.
It’s my mother.
It’s my mother and she is crying.
I rush in and everyone’s there: my mum, my dad, Joanne and two police officers. And one other person, a person it takes me a second to recognize at first, partly because I don’t know her very well, and partly because she is covered in blood. Sarra.
Jo, I realize, is purple in one eye, her irises dyed cranberry. Someone has hit her. Someone has hit them both.
“Maeve –” my dad stands up – “Maeve, I think you should go to your room.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“Darling, I think it’s best if you…”
“What HAPPENED?” I shout. “Jo, what happened to you?”
Jo looks at me mutely, utter despair in her eyes.
“Maeve,” Detective Griffin says, as softly as she can manage, “I’m so sorry that we keep … meeting like this.”
“Tell me what happened,” I say, panic rising in my voice.
Griffin looks at my parents. My mother is still crying, my father looks completely shell-shocked. He gives her a tiny nod of confirmation. A nod of “go on, you might as well tell her”.
“Your sister and Miss Malik were attacked,” she says simply. “We are certain that it was … an act of intolerance.”
“Where?”
“At college,” Jo suddenly blurts. “Literally at college. We were just sitting in the Student Union. Having a fecking hot chocolate. A hot chocolate,” Jo spits the words out, then laughs to herself. “I wish it was something stronger. If I’m going to get attacked for being gay, I might as well be drinking whisky. They’d love that, wouldn’t they?”
“They,” I say. “Who are they? The Children of Brigid? The same people who crashed the gig?”
“They were pushing pamphlets in our faces. About how we were undermining the natural order, blah, blah, blah. All this ‘hey, can we engage you in a thoughtful conversation about how you’re scum?’ I told them to piss off.”
“And I told them,” says Sarra, her voice croaky, “that they could shove their propaganda up their holes.”
“Then one of them pounced on Sarra. Saying that as a ‘woman of colour’ she should be ‘extra-conscious’ of what kind of ‘example’ she was setting for the younger girls in her ‘community’. Oh, they were very pleasant about it.”
“I said, what community?” Sarra gives a dry laugh. “The basketball team?”
“Then one of the men just swung for her.”
“What?” I splutter. “They went from zero to punch-up in sixty seconds?”
“To be fair, I don’t think it was part of their plan,” Sarra says grimly. “Maybe a brown girl answering back was just a little too far for this guy. Jo hit back, and after that it was a free-for-all. All bets were off.”
I don’t know what to do, where to look, where to put my hands. I can’t stop staring at Sarra. For so long, I’ve had her written off as the girl who hurt Jo by cheating on her. The girl who was eventually going to steal my sister away from me. Like Sister Assumpta, I’ve never really thought about Sarra as a person in her own right. With her own battles.
Griffin asks me to step outside so she can finish taking their statements. I go up to my room and bury my face in Tutu’s blond fur.
For as long as I can remember, Jo has been gay. I don’t remember her coming out. I don’t remember any discussion about it. When she was eighteen and I was eleven, she came home holding hands with a girl called Kris and that was it. Mum and Dad looked at each other and raised their eyebrows, and Abbie gave some condescending declaration about how proud she was of Jo. But that was it. Kris had dinner with us and she hung around for a few months, and then she was gone, and then a few years later Sarra started showing up. There might have been other relationships, too, but I don’t know. Jo’s not the sort to just open up about that kind of thing.
But in all that time, I never once remember Jo coming home bleeding, or crying, or upset about any hate she received. Once in a blue moon someone would yell something on the street, particularly when she was campaigning for the equal marriage stuff, but she brushed it off. It didn’t mean anything to her. But there was never anything like this.
I hold Tutu close.
I did this. I was the one who threw the energy of the city out of whack. I pulled the Jenga brick out of the tower and the whole thing started to wobble. The snow, the river, the hate, the blood. Aaron, and his strange ability to both sense and exploit the weakness in Kilbeg. It’s all pouring out of the hole the
