Date: 21 March, 2012
Trigger Warnings: None but O God
Summary: Bridget O’Malley’s sixteenth birthday
Notes: I love to suffer. Chloe is my girlfriend.
“In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill... and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into.” — Rust Cohle, True Detective
He feigns innocence. “Nourooz? The Persian holiday, what is it, the New Year? Ah, no, the Spring Equinox, the days are going to start getting longer now, aren’t they.” He nods towards her bag, slung over one of the chairs at the breakfast table. “I know. Slavoj Žižek was born today.” She’s too old for this now, but her cheeks turn pink anyway, ducking her head before her father can ruin her hair, plaited so Niamh can cover her in flowers. “Breithlá shona duit, sweet girl.”
“Save me a Guinness?” Bridget says, picking up her glass and draining it before she leans in to steal the last piece of bacon from her da’s plate. Sixteen’s old enough, isn’t it?
“Don’t get cheeky, Bridget Sahar O’Malley,” he says, glancing towards the door, “Go to school.”
Niamh’s waiting, wide-eyed and dark-haired as always, just outside the door like always, linking arms with her best friend, their bags bumping together. “I saw your uncle,” she says, “I’m probably ruining something, but he was carrying a big parcel.” She lets go to spin in the middle of the grass they walk along to get to their classes, the grass they lay on when it’s sunny, grinning up at the sky, the fields they stomp through in their boots when it’s raining.
Bridget makes a face. “I think it’s for the bar,” she says, because her father’s taken to calling it the bar lately, even though it will always be their pub to her, “Or he’s finally starting to make his own lager, like he’s been threatening us with.”
The path becomes crowded quickly, when they turn onto the right street, and even in spring, before the country blossoms again, their little village is crowded with foreign faces holding maps and staring up at houses that mean nothing like they mean everything. “The cliffs are that way, aren’t they, Harold,” Niamh whispers, Ireland tainting her attempt at an American accent, and Biddy laughs, nudging her shoulder.
“Don’t be mean, they’re the entire reason I can afford to steal you pints,” she says, but there’s a wide grin to it, and when a woman with a high, nasal, American voice passes them, she has to turn her head, laughing into Niamh’s shoulder, covered by the forest green jumpers they wear for school. Soft, but not something she wants to taste. She raises her head again.
“Do you think any of them would throw Euros at me if I started singing Danny Boy? I could pay you back. The summer's gone, and all the flowers — ” she warbles, and Bridget covers her mouth before she can finish. Niamh bites her fingers playfully.
“It’s my birthday, please don’t subject me to any more of this,” Bridget says, but she’s still laughing, bumping her best friend’s hip with her own. They keep walking, past the crowds that look increasingly worried by the dark clouds, ‘Not enough umbrellas in the airport shops, apparently,’ Niamh whispers, but the Irish girls continue on, delighted at the prospect of running the rest of the way and standing in the halls dripping wet.
“You don’t get to kill me for this,” she says, as they approach the school gates, “It was Chlo’s idea. Or Freya’s. I don’t know. Don’t kill us.”
She nearly makes the mistake of asking what they did, because they all have a little too much nerve, their parents like to say, trouble when they’re together, but Doolin is not a place that can withstand too much trouble, and they respect that, at least, running wild in the farmland that surrounds them, dipping their toes in the Atlantic, taking the buses to Ennis, wreaking havoc anywhere but where they come from.
Her father, crouching down in front of her, one hand on her shoulder as she sniffled, seven years old, or maybe eight, through the misery of boys her age, through the punishment her teacher handed down to her for yelling at them, told her that their blood was impossible to tame.
He still told her that, sometimes, but he made her swear not to tell anyone else he had, especially not the parents of her best friends, because it was already bad enough he had a pub they lay on the floor and talked about their classmates and RTÉ presenters and how much work they didn’t want to do and their leaving certs — according to her father and her uncle and their patrons, the girls talked on and on, sat behind the bar or sitting in corners or pretending to help clean up when the doors shut early.
“Biddy!” It’s a chorus of teenage girls, surrounding her before she can understand what’s happening, looking helplessly at Niamh, who holds up her hands and flicks her raven hair over her shoulder, an undeniable smirk on her pretty mouth, eyes shining. “Babes, I didn’t know it was your birthday, I’m soooo sorry.”
‘It’s okay,’ she tries to tell her classmate, ‘You can all go, you don’t have to celebrate me, please don’t.’ She’s going to kill Chloe. Or Freya. Or Niamh, for God’s sake, because she knew this was going to happen and she said nothing until it was too late.
There are balloons, and they’ve hung a banner that will surely be taken down soon enough over the door of their first class, Irish, the way they start every day: LÁ BREITHE SHONA DUIT BRIDGET, followed by what looks like sixteen exclamation points.
“Girls are idiots,” a boy says behind her, “Don’t do that for my birthday.” She could kill him too, looking on her friends’ excitement, looking at the way they made her smile and her lashes wet with tears she won’t cry, and deeming it unworthy of him.
“We woke up at six to get in here early enough for this,” Freya says, standing next to her, “Everyone who was awake was staring at us, carrying all this shite down the streets. I think we frightened half the village when Chlo dropped your presents. Boom!” She kisses Biddy’s cheek. “Happy birthday, old girl. We couldn’t just let you turn sixteen with a Facebook message.” Her nose wrinkles at the idea, and her freckles, her sunlit, adorable freckles crease too.
“Don’t make that face, we’re nice enough not to make you open your presents in front of Sean and Fionn, but you can if you want to.” Chloe’s eyes roll: she’s always been the oldest, first birthday, in October, the fall, when they all follow suit in March and May, first kisses, first break-up, first break-up they all decided needed to happen, first one to be completely over boys their own age. “We’re taking you for lunch.”
“In Dublin. On Saturday. Niamh’s stealing Ryan’s car,” Freya says, nonchalantly, like that’s nothing, Niamh taking her older brother’s car when she barely has her learner’s licence, going to Dublin, across the country, without their parents knowing. They’ve done it before, and that’s what makes her pulse leap. Four times was too many. Five times, their luck could run out.
“Don’t worry about what you’ll wear,” Chloe croons, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and pulling her in close to kiss her cheek, “You look like Laura Whitmore, but with red hair. You’re going to break our hearts if you don’t come.”
“Máire Ní Mháille, Máire Uí Faracháin, Máire Ní Fionnáin, Máire Mhic Cairbre.” Chastised, they slip into their seats, not daring to whisper to each other during their lessons. They’ve done enough. It’s Bridget’s sixteenth birthday and their entire school knows.
Date: Unspecified day in February 2016
Trigger Warnings: Mentions of suicide, thinly-veiled references to self-harm, prostitution
Summary: Post-heist, post-revelations, post-hell, post-Milo, so on, come down
Notes: Thank you to Beyoncé, who knows what she has done
“Haven’t seen you in months but you asked me to come close and I was powerless, what have you done to me?” — breakup text
Civilisation could have ended below her and she wouldn’t have known it, eyes closed, head cradled by the wind. She could jump; she’d done it before, stood at the edge dreaming of it, she could perch on the edge of understanding and the balcony, dangling over it, watching lights sparkling below only if someone made her open her eyes and look at them.
Cowards keep their eyes closed.
She’s alone, now, but God, when is she not?
It’s always so quiet so far above the streets she could kiss the clouds, save for the electric hum of gravity and what lies below and possibility — and the rush of blood in her ears, like waves crashing, like the Thames flooding. She could jump. Just for a moment, that moment, if she does it, she might be the most beautiful thing on earth, with her silk dress following in her wake and the diamonds at her throat glinting and she wouldn’t struggle as she fell.
The stillness breaks, and her head snaps back up and Esme turns and watches. A glass, clinking with another, a promise and an apology. “Divine,” one of the men sighs, and maybe he means her, white gown and golden hair and diamonds adorning her wrists and tight around her neck but maybe he means standing next to her at the edge of the known world, the point where nothing but monsters lie beyond.
They leave as quickly as they came, wandered, stumbled into her. It must be unbearable, even just a minute standing next to her, January, just under the horizon, fog looming, but she doesn’t feel it and that means something she can’t name. She’s always felt cold where there was none. He has found his way under her skin. And she thought he loved her, he said it, didn’t he, that he loves her and that she saved him and he saved her but how could he do this?
Esme’s fingers tremble into fists.
She could set this roof on fire.
“Selene, darling, come back to us.” She chose that name herself, for nights like these, like Esmeralda was a name she needed to protect, because it had been taken by the moon first. She doesn’t jump, coming closer to him instead and he takes her wrist, the empty one. He had slipped the bracelet onto the other before they had left his flat, calling it a ‘gift’ for his pretty little bird, the one that would make the room sing with jealousy.
Her fingers lace with his. She thought she could lose herself in this, everything she could have, everything she wants, but she must be so hot under his fingertips, with her lips pressed to his when he leans in to kiss her, he doesn’t dare to trap her. Someone’s son. They usually are, so used to getting everything they could possibly desire, privilege disguised as perfume, flashing bright white smiles not out of place in the mouths of sharks and crisp euros plucked from bank vaults and their pockets.
A hand brushes past her hip. She inhales sharply.
It had appeared on her thigh like an omen, a purple oil slick of a bruise. It’s impossible to trace, she could have bumped it or fallen or someone could have grabbed it but she knows, in the back of her head, where it comes from. She shouldn’t have done it. Told him. Thought her name and thrown herself at the ground over and over again until it hurt, and she could feel again. Redemption always comes at a cost: her legs ache when she moves and if he asks her to take off her gown like she’s supposed to he will see it.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” the son says, guiding her, she hasn’t bothered to learn his name because she never has to know it until her hips are squeezing their thighs together and she’s expected to throw her head back and exhale their names. She’ll learn it quickly enough.
“I used to come here as a child, they’ve been throwing these parties for ages, you know,” he says it nonchalantly, like she would know that, and she nods, attentive, “I spent my formative years smoking on their balcony. You could see the Thames, I swear it, before this city developed and went to hell.” And made everyone in this room a thousand times richer. “You’re from London, aren’t you, darling?”
“Yes,” she purrs, “While you were at your parties —” she’s teasing him, but that’s what he pays for, “I used to climb that little pirate ship in Diana’s park, begging my mum to take me for hot chocolate after.” No, no, she grew up by the sea, with salt in her hair and seeping into her veins and he made her remember that and now she can’t even choke out his name because they were friends and she can’t look at him anymore —
“I think,” he says, and he looks so young in this light, the age’s he’s supposed to be, really, a few years older than her, and his smile slips into something a little more predatory, “We should leave now, shouldn’t we. Après-fête, toi et moi.”
Men are weak, aren’t they, and here stands proof looking down at her as she looks up through her lashes and gives him the half-smile that Omar calls dangerous when she uses it on him.
It’s so easy to change their minds, to say certain words in certain ways and break them. She should have learned sooner. She should have been taught sooner, by a dead mother, by a mother who abandoned her, and she’s so full of rage now that her entire body trembles.
Her lover takes it as cold, and he’s one of the rare ones, taking off his jacket and draping it over her shoulders, pulling her close to share his heat and she doesn’t mind that, not really.
She called herself his girlfriend when he introduced her to his friends, to his parents’ friends, and spun a story about the debauchery that followed them in Paris, where they met, and she recited French love songs and dazzled and he watched approvingly. The moon-goddess of the Victorian is always worth what she asks. And even if she wasn’t now, she will be, when they leave and she slips a hand in his pocket and finds her way to his unbruised-thigh and what lies next to it.
She’s stumbling through lucidity when she leaves him again, the bracelet still around her wrist, and she didn’t drink at the party because she never drinks when she’s working but Esme could be drunk anyway, pausing under the glow of a window with the back of her head on cold stone. Girls should never walk home alone at night, but she wants to. She has to. Her bracelet can be her brass knuckles, sharp enough, hard enough, to make every blow she lands hurt.
She should call someone.
She can’t call anyone, because Omar must be asleep and Zephora must be pacing in her study, by her husband’s side, and Anika is in a club if she knows her, and she wouldn’t want to bother Rosie with this, not if she looks at her and sees him, and she likes to think she has friends now, like she used to, but her eyes are wet and she doesn’t, really, she can’t call anyone even though she’s standing outside in the cold with nothing but a gown made of white silk and a diamond necklace and a jacket the man she slept with tonight lent her.
Esme’s tried so hard to never be consumed by her guilt, by that voice that screams at her that what she does is so wrong, but she can’t drown it out now, it is wrong, she shouldn’t have to be here, she should have called a cab or stayed the night or been born to another life and thrown chairs at them when they came for Jack, for her father.
One of the boys had given her a lecture once, another nightbird cloaked in secrets and sex, he had been a scholar before they had found themselves in the same places at the same time: the formation of the universe, Newton and Einstein, Bohr, the unsung hero. She had gone home to her flat and read, String Theory, evolution, primordium, and every page had sworn that the past could not be altered and the future was impossible to see.
She had asked him, again, a few weeks later, and he had told her it was true, nothing could be changed and the future was set and infinite but she could be happy without answers. 'You'll know it when you feel it,' he said, 'And then come see me.'
He’d vanished, another little raven who slipped through Zephora’s fingers and maybe he was dead but she liked to think, like all of her scholars, that he was sitting on marble steps surrounded by students.
But he was wrong. She saw her future in the stars in Milo’s eyes, that very first night surrounded by blossoms in a place she’d come to call Eden.
She waits, the moon lighting her up in silver, and then Esme floats on.
