The Butterfly Shell Page 5
That night – not because I was upset but because I felt good – I cut my other arm, up high so it wouldn’t show even when I was wearing the short-sleeved gym shirt.
9
I got a book out of the library called Poltergeists and Other Mysteries of the Paranormal. Some of it was a bit hard to understand but the part I did get said that most poltergeists are actually girls my age who can move things around really quickly so that no one notices. So it isn’t really a ghost in the house, more like it’s a girl who has gone a bit crazy.
I found this fascinating but not that helpful as I was more interested in finding out about people making contact from the other side. I was sure Other Marie had some kind of message for me. Or maybe there is a completely scientific explanation for what is happening. I wanted to ask Stella because even though I was sure she didn’t believe in ghosts she would probably listen to me without laughing and more importantly without telling anyone. But there never seemed to be the right time.
*
Every Thursday night I did Rachel’s composition for her and every Friday I folded it and put it on her desk. And every Friday Stella watched but didn’t say anything. Rachel never said anything either. She never mentioned going to Dundrum Town Centre with them. My only thanks seemed to be that she didn’t always call me Other Marie. I knew I should just stop doing her homework but I kind of enjoyed pretending I was someone else and besides if I stopped, Rachel would do something. I just knew it.
Mam and Dad kept asking me if everything was okay and I just lied and said of course and tried to sound really cheerful. Up until then I never lied, apart from the time I stole gum when I was six and my bright idea for hiding it from my dad was putting the entire packet in my mouth, insisting there was nothing in my mouth and then (when there seemed no escape from the reality of the gum’s existence) insisting I had bought it with my own money. But I was only six so it hardly counts.
Now lying was getting to be second nature to me. After asking me if everything was okay, Dad usually said, ‘Tell us – what did you learn today that you didn’t know yesterday?’ So I told them amusing anecdotes based on just enough truth to keep me going. It was getting exhausting, but I figured it was good practice for when I became a published writer.
I told them how nice Samantha was and how she asked me to call her Sammy and how her aunt has a horse on her farm in Mayo and how she asked me to go with her next summer to visit. Completely making someone up seemed like a good idea at the time but I hadn’t really thought it through and then they wouldn’t stop talking about her and would I like to have her over. I was going to have to make her move or something.
After that I more or less stuck to the truth but made it all sound like lots of fun. I couldn’t believe they believed me. I told them things like ‘Art was really fun – we made pen and ink drawings of our favourite animals’ when in fact we did do pen and ink drawings and they were of our favourite animals but ‘really fun’ is about as far away from the truth as you could get.
When Sister Pauline left the room Claire and Marie took out their phones and started taking pictures of each other and then they said they were going to take pictures of our art and put the best ones on Facebook with our names under them. My picture was okay – a sort of lying down dog, a cocker spaniel which is the most gorgeous of dogs I think.
Then Rachel said, ‘Oh that’s so good.’ She sounded like she meant it and for a minute I thought, ‘Oh no please don’t ask me to do your art for you as well,’ but all she said was, ‘Why don’t you sign it?’ and when I went to sign it Jill just ‘happened’ to bump my elbow and the ink just ‘happened’ to blob on top of the dog and then Sister Pauline came back.
Her shoes are so noisy you can hear her coming for miles so everyone was in their seats and working away when she arrived back.
And then – this is the worst part – I started to cry. I really couldn’t help it. I told Sister Pauline I had allergies and could I please be excused and so I was.
On my way out I saw Stella’s picture and it was fantastic. Mind you, you wouldn’t have known the assignment was to draw an animal as nearly every inch of the paper was covered with flowers. Even though they were black and white they looked so real I couldn’t believe it. There was an extremely small cat in the corner so technically she followed the instructions. Anyway I doubted she’d end up on Facebook as the Stupid Six acted like she hardly existed which in my opinion was a lucky thing.
*
One Saturday I asked Mam if we could go to Nutgrove Shopping Centre and it turned out that was a big mistake. Mam doesn’t like going shopping because she is so fat but I thought if she got some new clothes she might feel better. The Warehouse has really regular clothes and I was pretty sure she could find something that fit her and maybe I could get something new as well. Now if I had been completely honest with my mam about the shopping I would have said, ‘I am 99 per cent sure that no one I know will be there which really is the main reason I suggested Nutgrove.’ I never in my wildest nightmare scenario imagined I’d run into Rachel.
Mam was looking through the sweatpants when I heard Rachel’s stupid laugh. The sweatpants were right near the door and Rachel was with a gorgeous girl who looked about two years older than her. When she saw me she said in a loud oh we are such good friends voice, ‘Marie! What are you doing here? The shops have absolutely nothing here. We had to come here because my cousin is visiting and we have to pick up chocolates because we’re on our way to my aunt’s and we totally forgot to get something to bring but why are you here?’
And unlike in school where she never talked to me or cared what I said, she was actually waiting for an answer when Mam called me. It was only when I heard Mam’s voice calling me that I knew I didn’t want Rachel to see her – to see how fat she was. So I didn’t answer Mam and thankfully Rachel’s gorgeous cousin said, ‘Come on, we’ll be late,’ and off they went, and Mam came over to me just as I saw Rachel look back at us before turning the corner at the formal dress shop. She just looked at me and smiled. I’m not sure which was worse – that smile or me not wanting to be seen with Mam but ever since then I had real trouble getting to sleep.
*
Sometimes I cut myself, and that helped for a bit, and then I tried to think up different stories I could write, and sometimes that distracted me but the sick feeling in my stomach wouldn’t go away. Sometimes I heard Other Marie crying and woke up only seconds after finally getting to sleep. I was so tired the next day I could hardly get out of bed. And while I brushed my teeth I looked at the calendar of ‘Lighthouses around the World’ that Dad gave me last year, and I counted the days till Christmas break.
Two more Fridays.
Two more essays for Rachel.
*
The day before the Christmas holidays Stella came up to my locker and said, ‘Do you want to come to my house my house? I’d like to show you something something.’ The way she talked still made me kind of nervous. But I wanted to go, so after school we walked to her house and she didn’t say a word on the way. When we got there we went straight to her bedroom which was a sort of lime green colour – not a bit bedroomy but sort of nice too.
To get into the room you had to step over her row of shells. She’d been collecting them since she was eight and she had them lined up on the floor up against the walls around the whole room and on the edge of the windowsill and on the edge of her bookshelf and even across the doorway so you had to step over them to get into the room.
She made a big deal before we went into her room about not moving anything anything. Stella said it wasn’t that her brother Pete went in her room that bothered her – which by the way sounded like a perfectly normal thing to get mad at – but it was the moving of things even by one inch that b
ugged her. I didn’t ask why. I figured it was just another Stella thing so I tried not to move anything even by one inch as I sat on her bed.
Then out of the blue she said, ‘I know you think I’m crazy but I really did have a twin. It was a brother and he died in the womb when we were seven months old because he didn’t have enough room.’ Even though that was a very sad thing to hear, I suddenly felt really happy, like I had found a soulmate – someone who also had a dead sibling. I was about to give her a hug or say ‘Oh sorry to hear that wait till I tell you about my dead sister and how she haunts me at night,’ but suddenly Stella was gone from the room. When she came back she said, ‘I’ll show you something I don’t usually show people and I have to ask you to swear not to tell anyone about it because I don’t want people to think I’m weird.’
I almost said, ‘People already think you are weird,’ but that would have been mean so I said, ‘Okay, swear.’
Then she showed me a white bag that looked like a make-up bag but in it was a needle and some liquid in a small jar. I’ll say this about Stella: for someone who has weird social skills she can be very interesting. And before I knew it she was telling me about the time she almost died – when they first realised she was allergic to peanuts.
She was four and at a birthday party of a boy who lived next door. His name was Keith which was the name her mam said they would have called her brother if he lived. ‘Synchronicity,’ said Stella.
I pretended I knew what that meant but I had to look it up in the dictionary and now it is one of my favourite words though it’s quite hard to slip it into everyday conversation. It means ‘the coincidence of events that seem related but are not obviously caused one by the other.’
Anyway back to the near death experience. At the party Stella ate something – she says it was a chicken nugget but her parents say it was a peanut butter and chocolate brownie and her face literally turned blue in seconds. Apparently she’s allergic to peanuts and even if she just gets a whiff of them her throat swells and she has twenty minutes to get to a hospital or she’ll die. So they called an ambulance and on the way to the hospital she got an injection that stopped the swelling and now she has to carry this everywhere with her in case she comes across some peanuts.
I asked her if someone had been eating peanut butter and then kissed her would that count. Stella said she didn’t know but maybe. She said they are developing pills that will work as well but so far she hasn’t had them. And nothing has happened to her since she was four.
I was glad Stella didn’t think my kissing question was stupid. The whole near death by peanuts story was so dramatic that I forgot to say anything about her twin or tell her about Marie.
When I was leaving she said, ‘I sometimes think my parents must see a murderer when they look at me.’ I wasn’t exactly sure what she was talking about so I just said, ‘I doubt that,’ and Stella kind of smiled so I guess that was the right thing to say.
10
Every year we go to Connemara for Christmas and I love it. I have four cousins and an aunt and uncle and their house is very messy and I love it. Mam and Aunt Sinead talk for hours in the kitchen, and Dad and his brother Brian go for walks although I think they actually just walk to the village to go to the Red Fox which is a pub with a pool table that I am sometimes allowed to play on if it’s before 5 o’clock.
Mam was worried about me. I heard her saying to Aunt Sinead, ‘She isn’t herself and I can’t get her to talk to me about it and she isn’t sleeping at night.’ And before I could hear any more my cousins came tearing through the hall where I was trying to eavesdrop. My cousins Sean and Darren are eight years old and they look so much alike that they make me wish I was a twin.
I wondered if Marie would visit me in Connemara. Do ghosts know where you are? Could she see me or did she only have a connection to our house because that was where she lived?
The other cousins are girls – Mairead, who is almost a year younger than me, and Gemma, who was nineteen months old although I don’t get why they didn’t just say she was a year and a half. Babies are hard enough work without having complicated ways of keeping track of their ages.
There was a baby down the road from them who Aunt Sinead said was sixteen weeks old. Then she said he was twenty-four inches long which gave me no idea of what he looked like till we saw him and he looked like a normal baby, though as for how many inches he was who could tell as he had about four blankets on him and a hat and a jacket with a hood. No wonder they don’t do much at that age.
Mairead is amazing and although she is a year younger than me, when it comes to outdoor age she’s a million times older and smarter. For one thing she was allowed to go anywhere she wanted. I could barely go into town without being interrogated about what bus and exactly what time, and Dad would meet me at the bus stop to walk me home even when it wasn’t dark. Everyone in my class was allowed to do way more. And much and all as I love my parents I do think they are stuck in a time warp and don’t have a clue what the real world is like.
When Mairead said, ‘We’re going to the second hill with Brunt,’ I couldn’t believe that the only thing her mam said was, ‘Be back for dinner and take a light with you.’
Brunt was the most gorgeous sheep dog in the world and I think he really liked me. When we arrived he went crazy jumping on me and didn’t even look at Mam or Dad which was a good thing as they probably wouldn’t have been mad about him jumping all over them.
So off we went. Mairead was like a mountain goat and I was so happy not to be worrying about what to wear or say that I sort of started crying as we got to the top of the mountain. It didn’t matter because I knew I could always say the wind made my eyes water and anyways Mairead was ahead of me so she didn’t see. When I saw her at the top with the sun behind her, she looked so cool and strong that for a brief minute I thought maybe I would tell her about school and cutting myself and doing Rachel’s homework. It was only for a minute though and soon I forgot about that – no good having Mairead think I was a loser.
We walked for miles down the other side of the mountain to the shore and she showed me her secret place which was a sort of cave that you could only get to at certain times of the tides. She said she went there when it got too crazy at home and I was so lucky not to have younger brothers and sisters to take care of and that she secretly wished she could be me. That sort of settled whether or not I’d be telling Mairead about the Rachel business – no use telling her what my life was really like.
That night when we were getting into our pyjamas Mairead noticed some of the scratches on my arm and asked me what they were from and I had to lie and say my best friend Rachel had an adorable kitten who loved climbing up my arms and I knew she believed me because (a) I was an expert liar at that point and (b) she never in a hundred years would have believed how those scratches really got there.
By the time I got into bed I had forgotten all about cutting myself and I didn’t think of anything else but being in the most beautiful place in the world with the sea putting me to sleep. It was a fierce winter sea but I loved it and was never afraid of the sound of storms.
*
It was the best Christmas ever. Sean and Darren nearly killed each other trying to be the first to get downstairs to see what Santa left which of course woke everybody even though it was about six in the morning. We all went into the living room and the tree was lit and it was still dark and the wind sounded like it was going to blow the house down but not really. There were loads of presents under the tree and pandemonium as the twins got confused about whose were whose and they opened a nail polish set that was meant for me.
I felt so happy I thought I would cry again – that happens a lot these days – especially when Uncle Brian lit the fire and Aunt Sinead made hot chocolate which both the twins immediately spilled and no one seemed to mind.
I got some really nice presents including a gorgeous jumper from Top Shop that I really wanted but never thought I’d get and lots of boo
ks and some pens with very narrow nibs in lots of excellent colours. So I really – and I mean really – had no idea that I would get anything else. Everyone started whispering to each other and I didn’t know what was going on and Dad said, ‘Back in a minute.’
Then Mairead said, ‘Will you help me get the eggs, Marie?’
I love collecting the eggs from their crazy chickens that live at the side of the house. And even though it was really windy and wild outside we just put on some wellies over our pyjamas and grabbed two of the long raincoats they have hanging by the door and went out back. When we got there Dad came around the side of the house with the most beautiful cocker spaniel and said, ‘Marie do you mind taking this monster off my hands? It’s yours after all!’
Turns out Dad had caved in and finally got a dog. I had given up asking ages ago because I thought he’d never change his mind.
The dog was a shared present for me and Mam. I think Dad thought that would be a good way to get her to exercise. Mam came out then too and we all just hugged each other. Dad said I could name him so I called him Pause which Dad thought was very funny – no one would know it wasn’t ‘Paws’ because you don’t get much opportunity to write down a dog’s name. Everyone loved it and he does have four white paws so any way you look at it, it was a perfect name.
On Steven’s Day Mam and I were up first so we took Pause for a walk. Mam didn’t walk that fast which was a drag for Pause who had to keep running back to us but it was very good for chatting. She asked me if I wanted to talk about school or anything – she said I’d gone very quiet at home these past few months. Every part of me wanted to tell her everything but I knew once I started it would all come out and then the holiday would be wrecked so I kind of did a fake laugh and said, ‘I’m grand’ and then I ran to get Pause. When I got back to her she looked a bit sad but didn’t bring it up again and we laughed about the chaos at the house and everything seemed okay again.