‘Don’t have me ask you again. Even if you don’t want to play the game, I still do.’
‘Thirteen from the top,’ she says, then lets out an exasperated sigh. ‘Sandra, you must know you need help.’
‘Edgar is going to give me all the help I require.’
‘Good. That’s good.’
‘Oh, and, Alice …’
‘Yes?’
‘I meant what I said earlier, I am going back to the woods.’
‘I told you, that’s futile.’
‘You never understood, Alice, did you?’
‘I understood it was a game.’
‘It was more than a game.’
I hang up the phone, spreading the Tarot cards out like a fan on the floor, picking the one that’s thirteen from the top. I’m satisfied with the result. It’s the Death card again. The one I picked when the witch and her huntsman died. Some might find the black skeleton ominous, surrounded by the dead and dying. They fail to understand the importance of the sickle he carries in his hand, emblazoned with the white flower from the crashing towers of the moon, the sun rising behind. It’s the ending of a cycle. The spread makes sense now. We’re back to the beginning, ready to renew.
Despite our friendship, I know my betrayal has forged an invisible wedge between Alice and me. She never guessed. But then again, how could she know I wanted her father for myself? She has always been far too possessive of me, criticising all my relationships. That day in the woods, when I took him for myself, I returned later to the spot where we had made love. I stood in the high grasses, my shadow covering the ground on which he entered me, hard and wanting. His whimpering afterwards I took as a good sign.
Shadows are tricky things, you know. When you paint, you want to capture them, but depending on how long you’re standing there, the shadows move. If you catch them in a photograph, you trap them in that space. They’re forced to be still. I took the self-portrait of my shadow hovering above the high grasses using a Polaroid camera. Once it was solidified in time and space, the slut of a girl, with her red tartan skirt pulled up high, was left behind. I could move on.
I can hear Edgar returning. Everything is perfect now. This time the shadows will be multiplied. I have every mirror we possess in the studio, facing different directions, my reflection repeated in each one. The lights are angled well, creating a tapestry of form. Before he arrives, I hold the camera, smiling beneath the lens, facing the largest mirror, seeing myself looking at me, capturing the many multiples of self.
‘Sandra, are you okay?’ I hear Edgar’s stifling words from the hallway.
‘I won’t be long, darling,’ I reply, clicking the button, before glancing at the Death card, strategically positioned on the floor, completing the perfect picture.
RATHIN ROAD, LEACH, COUNTY WICKLOW
LILY BRIGHT WAS a fit and healthy woman, despite her advanced years. She had the kind of pep in her step, thought Kate, which had probably defined her throughout her adult life. Less than five feet tall, slight of frame, with permed white-grey hair, and a dress code that would have fitted well on a sixties cover of Woman’s Way, the ex-postmistress was the quintessential respectable spinster about town. To the front of her house, an old bicycle was parked, with a small wicker basket for groceries, and a note stuck to the letterbox, saying, ‘No junk mail’.
‘No tea for us,’ Lynch jumped in, as Lily went to fill the kettle.
‘Very well.’ She ushered them to seats at the kitchen table, which was covered with a polka-dot tablecloth in cream and luminous yellow. ‘I hear you want to talk to me about the Connolly family.’ Her voice was croaky, but clear.
‘News travels fast around here,’ Lynch replied, his words light-hearted and mildly condescending, almost as if Lily Bright’s eighty years warranted positive discrimination.
She picked up on it immediately. ‘There’s no need to patronise me. I’ve been using the telephone for more years than you’ve been on this earth.’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘No need to apologise, just get on with asking your questions. I have a busy afternoon ahead of me.’
‘Very well, Lily. Why don’t you start by telling us what was unusual about the Connollys’ mail? I hear it caused you some bother.’
‘A nuisance it was, the two of them going off like that, and that insolent granddaughter of theirs wasn’t much help. I mean, at their age, you’d have imagined they’d look after things properly, paid the postal redirection fee, and I wouldn’t have been left to pick up the pieces.’
‘How did you pick up the pieces?’ Kate asked.
‘Well, I knew they weren’t in the town any more, and her ladyship, their granddaughter, said they wouldn’t be back. I mean, it wasn’t right that she was receiving their mail, and I told her that, yet she point-blank refused to sort it out.’