Reluctantly Charmed (10 page)

Maura Ni Ghaora

Maura gave her phone number and an e-mail address.

My heart sank. There were quite a few people I’d hoped the flowers might be from, but Maura Ni Ghaora wasn’t one of them.

“They’re from a friend, Dudley. All right?”

“Tsk, tsk. The attitude on you!” He bobbed off, walking with his neck first, and I picked up the orchid in its pot.

“Dudley!” I shouted after him.

He screwed his heel into the ground and spun around, looking at me goggle-eyed.

“You never said hello,” I said, dismayed.

“Hello, Kate,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“Not to me, to the flower. It’s upset. You never said hello.”

“To the flower?”

“Yes, to the flower,” I replied with great determination. As I held the orchid in my hands I could sense a feeling of distress. It was all out of sync, upset, and that upset
me
. I can’t explain it other than to say that I absolutely, positively had to fix the situation. There was no way I couldn’t address this. And I didn’t care that it seemed a bit weird—well, more than a
bit
weird.

Dudley looked at me and his expression changed. He chewed on his underbite nervously. “Hello, flower,” he said quietly.

I smiled back happily at him, immediately feeling better. “Thanks, Dudley.”

He shuffled off, looking anxiously over his shoulder.

The orchid was beautiful—majestic, heavy-headed, almost sad. I put it beside my yellow plant and marveled at how the flowers complemented and blended with each other. I quietly
whispered hello to the orchid and introduced them. “This is yellow plant. Yellow plant, this is orchid.” And then I thought that maybe I’d gone mad. Seriously. I was talking to flowers, giving them feelings, and I’d made Dudley greet one. Flowers! Weirdly, it did make me feel better, though. There couldn’t be any harm in it. Who knows? I really wasn’t sure what to think.

I wondered what Maura Ni Ghaora had uncovered. I had already googled life in Ireland in the 1870s, and from what I could gather it was bleak and shoeless, an era that could foster madness, maybe even encourage it. It didn’t sound romantic and magical at all. I doubted that Maura Ni Ghaora and I would see eye to eye on that.

It was Tuesday, so I was due to post the second Step. There were 157 comments on the first Step now, which seemed like a lot, most of them misspelled or abbreviated. Nearly all were okay, though. They were about hugging trees and giving nettles and ivy a big thumbs-up, stuff that I was half into doing, anyway. The one thing I didn’t like, and it was the thing that was driving a lot of the comments, was the connection to Drake Chandler. The words of the Red Hag (I couldn’t really stomach thinking of her as “Kate McDaid”—it was too strange) were being interpreted as a prophecy. Visitors to the site had posted messages that she’d foreseen Drake’s death, and that his suicide was a direct result of not enough “Celtic souls” greeting nature and acknowledging fairies. These grieving fans of Drake Chandler, desperate to make some sense of a tragic death, were becoming avid fairy followers.

And now the second Step had arrived. Seamus MacMurphy had hand-delivered it, calling in on me at work. I’d told him just
to send it by courier, but he insisted, claiming he couldn’t wait to see what was inside the envelope. His long limbs folded into my guests-only chair, and he rubbed his knees excitedly like a kid on Christmas morning. “This is funny, isn’t it?” he said, letting down his lawyer’s guard.

I broke the wax seal and read aloud.

Step Two

When grief burdens your shoulders and

you can take the pain no more,

When the ghost of loss is in you and

heavy clouds blacken each shore,

May a soft wind whirl these words around

and reach your depths of sorrow,

As sure as storms turn into calm,

there will be hope tomorrow.

We have seen it with immortal eyes,

your hurt, your woe and pain,

The circle of life continues,

as before and will again,

Go forth alone to nature, walk in her woods,

cherish healing seas,

Whisper your heart’s desire, clear your head of noise—

we will listen and we will please.

The world is full of more joy than

you can now understand,

Feel us with you, take our message—

we are holding your hand,

With the gifts that we have given,

watch for those who cannot see,

Their mouths are struck with sores,

for no cure can there be.

Seamus looked at me disappointedly, like Santa had forgotten to bring his Scalextric set again. He shrugged his shoulders. “Walk in the woods? I thought there might be a bit more hocus-pocus.”

“Let’s wait and see. I have a hunch that the hocus-pocus is only just starting.”

8

I
was meeting my parents for tea. Not tea as in the English version of supper, but for a cup of tea.

Tea is Ireland’s other religion. Most of the world associates Irish drinking with alcohol, but our first love is tea. It’s the cornerstone of every Irish home. We drink more tea per head than any other nation, even India. The biggest insult an Irish person will give to another Irish person is to invite them into their home but not offer a cup of tea. You might as well stick a knife in them.

Mam and Dad wanted to meet in the Shelbourne. That really tipped me over and poured me out. The Shelbourne is the poshest hotel in Dublin. It overlooks the ducks on Stephens Green, and you could happily lie down on the plush-carpeted stairs and fall into a deep slumber for a thousand years. You can see your reflection in the polished flowers, and it’s rumored that geisha girls wash the sheets with their own tears. It’s all heels on marble and the gentle tinkle of chandeliers. I was very happy to go along.

I cycled over from my flat off Camden Street. At the Shelbourne, the doorman’s eyes shot down his long pointy nose when I asked him where I could park my bike. His elegantly gloved fingers gestured toward a murderous-looking alley, where,
I suspected, he wanted to get rid of me, my bicycle-clipped jeans, and my luminous armbands.

These jeans cost 180 euros, I wanted to shout at him, and I have a very nice top underneath my waterproof jacket. Cycling is not about fashion! But then I thought I’d look like a nutter, screaming at a doorman in the Shelbourne while wearing a helmet with “go faster” stripes painted on the side.

My parents were lounging in a window seat in the bar. Dad was dressed in a brown woolen shirt I didn’t recognize. His arm was casually draped over the back of the couch, and Mam was bent forward, talking on her phone with a look of concentration on her face. She had on a baby-blue jacket tied in a tight bow at her neck.

I eyed their tea enviously. I needed a cuppa—I was stressed. I’d picked up four phone calls that day that I’d thought I’d never receive: two from newspaper journalists, one from a magazine, and another from a radio station. They all wanted to interview me, to ask me some “top-line” questions. I didn’t know how they’d gotten my number and I was reluctant to speak to them. I knew how things could be twisted. I’d turned my phone off early in the afternoon. I needed a plan before I spoke to these people. The second Step had been live for only one day and already they were excited. I had to work out what to say.

“Hello, celebrities.”

Dad jumped up and gave me a bear hug, then ran to the bar, shouting that he’d get me a cup. Mam made a just-a-minute gesture, poking her index finger in the air. When she’d finished her phone call, she leaned over for a tight squeeze across the shoulders.

“Mam,” I said, cutting straight to the chase. “I didn’t appreciate your talking about me on the radio. And anyway, I didn’t have any imaginary friends when I was younger—well, I mean, I did, but no specific ones. I had a healthy imagination.”

“I don’t know about healthy. You had Paulie with the hat and Susie with the big bum.”

“That was Samantha from down the road.”

“Ah, sure. I can’t be expected to remember everything,” said the mother of one child. “But you did have imaginary friends. You were always off in your own world down the garden, talking to yourself.”

“That’s what only children do, Mam. It’s not revolutionary. We’re making up our own brothers and sisters, and it’s not for radio.”

“Exactly,” she said, ignoring me. “They have imaginary friends. You had a lot of them, though. One specifically that you were very fond of, a male, I think. At one point your father and I thought about sending you to a doctor, a head doctor.”

“Seriously?” This was the first I’d heard about it.

“Yes, we did, but then all of a sudden you didn’t have him anymore. You started palling around with the kids on the road, and sure, that was the end of that.”

Dad plonked a cup in front of me. “Did she tell you about the TV?” He eased himself into the couch.

Mam picked up the teapot and started to pour. “We’re naturals.” She beamed at me with pride.

“Natural what?”

“Talkers? Media types? Sure, who knows. Anyway, it’s all a bit of gas.”

“What’s the TV?” I asked, amused.

“TV7.” Ireland’s poor-cousin TV station. “They want us on their breakfast show on Friday. Can you believe it? It’s only a two-minute slot, but who knows where we could end up.” Mam’s voice was shrill, and she clenched her hands into tight fists, her eyes wide with expectant fame.

“Are you going to do it?”

She nodded wildly. “Of course. This is the most exciting thing.”

“What are you going to say? Don’t talk about me,” I said with as much authority as I could muster. And then I started to laugh. This really was very funny. My parents were going to be on TV. Never in my life had I ever thought they’d end up on TV.

“Well, the same stuff as we said to Tom, I suppose.” Tom Byrne was now “Tom.” “Sure, we hardly mentioned you. Anyway, come on, why don’t you do it with us? They’d love to see you.”

I squirmed in my seat. The thought of going on national TV and talking about fairies and witches, neither of which I knew anything about, just didn’t appeal. “Well . . . and don’t take this the wrong way, because if you want to do it, you should, but I just think I’d look like a bit of an eejit.”

She nodded matter-of-factly. “You know, that’s the great thing about being older. You lose all that . . .” She waved her hands at me. “All that self-consciousness. You just don’t care what people think anymore. Your father and I are going to have fun doing this, and we haven’t had fun in a long time.” She looked serious, but quickly changed her tone, readjusted her skirt, and took a sip from her teacup. Smiling, she added: “They’re interested in your great-great-great-grand-aunt Kate, so we’ll tell them about her.”

“You don’t know anything about her.”

They quickly flashed eyes at each other, a nanosecond of a glance. Dad piped up: “Well, I got in touch with my grand-uncle Willy’s second wife, Audrey.”

Willy had scandalously married a woman fifty years younger than him, promising to leave her a fortune in his will. There was no fortune—she ended up nursing an old man with no giant check at the end of the rainbow. But she made up for it with her
second husband, a property tycoon from Belfast. I didn’t know she was still alive. She must have been about a hundred.

“She remembered Willy talking about a Kate. It was near the end, though. He wasn’t making much sense. Audrey didn’t pay much heed to it; he was also singing rebel songs and claiming to be Napoleon at the time. He said his grandfather had a sister, a woman so evil Audrey said his face had washed pale talking about her. That’s why he wouldn’t be buried in Clare. He was scared she’d come for him.” Dad shook his head slowly. “Load of nonsense.”

“How come you never knew about her?”

“Well, from what Audrey said, it sounded like they were all a bit scared of her. No one wanted to mention her.”

“Why? Did you ask her why?”

“Of course I did. She didn’t know.” He looked down at the table. “I never thought there were any women on my side of the family. And there you have it.”