Wise creatures, p.1
Wise Creatures, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Also by Deirdre Sullivan
Copyright
Dedication
things that almost touch you in the night
a thing that will not die
questions you can’t answer
things that never got the chance to die
an exposed throat
a puzzle
when family stops being family
a glimpse of something other than yourself
a stranger you can hate
an ailment, a complaint
a shadow in the corner
something that you almost wouldn’t notice
nothing you can put your finger on
a girl, just a girl
softly, slowly, quickly
stories people tell
stories that need telling
a spy
angry things and sometimes cruel
a talisman, a threat
a victim
times that melt together
remnants, fragments
a force you can’t control
a debt
the pressure of her hands on my shoulders
hate and who you come from
the smell of her
wise creatures
each one unique
not child’s dreams
lies you tell to strangers
a question
an answer
a noise
tap
something you can’t put your finger on
a fright
words
an unexpected jolt
a weight on your chest
a trace
images that flicker
a scar
good at hiding
hard to see
a dull surprise
an ellipsis
a power
a favour
an unexplained chill
different things to different people
secrets
dead decaying things
friendly
a change
stains
but this is something else
humiliation
a decision
collective memory
figment
an embarrassment
a wall between you and other people
rearranging everything
someone else’s eyes
the thing about ghosts is
someone you can blame
hungry memory
my mouth my hands my throat
full of you
repetition
a hopeless heart
tap
reflections
tap
stones and bones
tap
bang
parasites
with you always
a presence felt
Acknowledgements
Deirdre Sullivan
ALSO BY DEIRDRE SULLIVAN
Perfectly Preventable Deaths
Precious Catastrophe
Savage Her Reply
Tangleweed and Brine
Needlework
First published in Great Britain in 2023 by
HOT KEY BOOKS
4th Floor, Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square
London WC1B 4DA
Owned by Bonnier Books
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden
bonnierbooks.co.uk/HotKeyBooks
Text copyright © Deirdre Sullivan, 2023
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The right of Deirdre Sullivan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781471411212
This eBook was produced using Atomik ePublisher
Hot Key Books is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
bonnierbooks.co.uk
For Clare Wallace
The girl is looking at you.
Her back is straight.
Chest out.
Her eyes …
her eyes are haunted.
things that almost touch you in the night
Sometimes I feel I’m mostly made of spaces. The early parts at least – whole chunks of childhood with these yawning gaps. It’s probably a good thing really. Only sometimes, without warning, they grow mouths, attack me. Razor sharp. Images that take my breath away. That leave me reeling.
Shards of broken glass on the surface of a road.
My friends from school, when they tell stories about things that happened back in the day, will say, ‘When I was a kid …’ But I kind of feel like I was never a kid. For as long as I can remember, there’s been something very old and tired inside me.
A part of me I keep behind a wall.
That isn’t for other people.
That isn’t really even for myself.
What I call my childhood in my head is the time before I came to live with Susan and Nina. When I lived with Mam and Dad.
And Them.
a thing that will not die
Nina probably knows the most about me. Definitely more than other people do. And part of it is that we’re sort of sisters, or that’s what everyone assumes at first. We’re actually cousins, which is only complicated because it means they want me to go into how and why and who. Show them the pieces of myself that hurt me most. Mam and Dad. The accident. Separate myself from them with tragedy. And after that, I’ll always be the person who was taken in.
An exposed throat.
That doesn’t mean I don’t care about my other friends – Megan, Conchur, Abigail and Piotr and everyone – or that they don’t know me. They know the me that I want people knowing. The me I am now. Not who I was back then. Not the broken, frightened, messed-up parts. Susan says there’s no need to share more than I’m comfortable with. That we all come into ourselves in our own time.
I kind of feel like my own time is never.
The people who know you best can hurt you most.
When parts of me that I don’t like spill out, Susan says that there is nothing wrong with it, that I’m no different from anyone else, it’s just that bad things happened to me when I was young and that changes the way I move through the world. It gives me something to carry, that other people may not have. And sometimes it’s a light thing, like a handbag, but other times it’s heavy like a rock. It’s there, and it is hard. It’s not my fault, she says.
She wasn’t there.
I let her hug me, and almost believe her.
Until I’m by myself.
Then in it creeps.
Susan is the closest thing I have to a parent. My father’s sister. The person who is supposed to take care of me. She never liked my mother, who is dead. Susan thinks it’s a good thing my mother is dead. She doesn’t put it as bluntly as that, but I have a lot of experience reading in between the lines of people. The pauses between words. Tensions and tilts.
She hated her.
Sometimes I think that I should hate her too. But nothing is that simple, is it, ever?
Susan says things like ‘It’s not your fault’ and ‘No child should have been put through that.’
Nina says those things as well. It’s the story she’s always been told.
Neither of them were there, inside my skin
while it was happening.
On the day when everything went.
Tap
Tap
Tap
Tap
Bang
questions you can’t answer
I’m watching Nina arguing with air. It’s oddly compelling. She’s taking a pro-war stance, which isn’t very Nina, but you don’t get to decide which side you’re on in debating. Her hair is wrapped up tightly in a towel, while she goes on about violence being the only language some people will understand. Her face is uncharacteristically vicious, and I snort.
‘Daisy?’
‘Nina, I once saw you apologise to a flower for picking it. And now you’re literally quoting John Rambo. Who isn’t even a real person.’
She nods, as though I was giving her constructive feedback.
‘I need more pro-war quotes. I normally like to throw a poem in, but all the best ones are anti-war.’ Her brow is furrowed as though this is a genuine problem.
‘I wonder why.’
‘You’re not helping,’ she says. ‘I want to get this right. Last time, we were up against St Columba’s and I choked.’
‘You didn’t choke. Piotr says you were good.’
‘Not good enough.’ Her face is dark. ‘I want to wipe the floor with them the next time.’
‘So maybe you are pro-war. Just not the weapony kind.’
‘Hmmm. I wonder if I could do something with that. I must ask Mr Q.’ She smiles.
I smile back.
‘It’s kind of nice to see you out for vengeance,’ I say.
‘It’s not very on-brand. I will give you that. But this year there’s been so much welling up that I just need to let stuff out, yo u know?’
I nod. I mean, in theory it sounds good, but there are certain things you can’t release. Things that need to be housed deep down in the meat of you, away from other people. Behind a big thick wall. I’d never, like, debate the way that Nina does. Even overheard, an argument can make me squirrelly.
‘I think you’re going to be great,’ I say. ‘Just get better quotes.’
She nods. ‘Will you blow-dry my hair before it?’
‘Of course I will. You need armour.’
She grins. ‘I fully do. For school as well. Basically I should just be wearing a full suit of armour at all times.’
There’s something in her face.
‘Was school hard today?’ I ask.
‘What? No,’ she says. ‘Well, no harder than normal. I wrote a lot of this at lunchtime.’
‘You should just come down and sit with us,’ I say.
‘I do have friends, Daisy.’ She doesn’t sound convinced.
‘I know you do, Nina. But my friends are kind of better. I hardly ever choose extra-curricular essay writing over them.’
‘It’s a debate.’
‘No, Nina. It’s a fact.’
She sighs the sigh of a girl who has to put up with a lot. An accurate sigh. Then she gazes out the window. Her face relaxes and she looks like a still image, or a painting, presumably of a person thinking deep thoughts.
‘Daisy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘The light is really good.’ She hands over her phone. ‘Would you mind?’
I roll my eyes. For a shy person, she surely loves to take pictures of herself.
I take about five, and she looks through them.
I see her face begin to fall, and fall.
‘What? Will I go again?’ I ask.
‘No.’ She holds out her phone. ‘It’s only this.’
Memories. A photo from a year ago, when there were four of us instead of three.
‘It doesn’t seem like a year ago,’ she says. ‘But it’s a completely different life as well.’
‘Not that different,’ I say. ‘We’re still us.’
She shrugs. ‘I suppose so. But I don’t know. There’s bits of me that are just different now. And it was a small enough thing. I mean, like, no one died.’
She says this to me a lot when she complains. I think she thinks she’s checking her privilege, or recognising what I’ve been through or something. She doesn’t understand how complicated it is, to lose someone you’re scared of. How it hums through everything. That sense that it was maybe all my fault.
I wanted her to stop.
And then They stopped her.
things that never got the chance to die
After Caroline broke up with Susan, we moved out of her house and into this one. It was a hard time for our family, particularly Susan, who loved Caroline. And Nina, who believed that love endured. When we lived with Caroline, we were in an apartment, but a big, swishy one with art on the walls, two spare rooms and a balcony. It had been two apartments back in the day, and Caroline bought the both of them and turned it into one giant one, long before she met Susan. She didn’t have any kids of her own, and wasn’t exactly a ‘kids’ type of person. I liked her but I didn’t love her. I could see the writing on the wall. She wanted a different sort of life to the one we had. Susan relied on her too much. You can’t do that with people. There was a part of me that was waiting for it to be the three of us again.
We don’t fully know what happened between them; we got a whole spiel about growing apart, but by the end they didn’t even really want to look at each other, and since the split Caroline has been away for work so much. Well, away for work or just not wanting to see myself or Nina. And it hurts. I do miss Caroline. She could be funny. She made Susan smile.
It wasn’t like we were kicked out on the street. Caroline said we could stay as long as we wanted. But in adult-speak that means about six weeks max, apparently. And the house was tense. Not that it wasn’t before, when they were almost broken up, but having your home be tense is different to having your home suddenly not be your home at all. In the end Susan found this place, on an estate that was half built and half being developed, outside of town. It smelled of cement and plaster. One other family had lived here before. We don’t know who they were. But they had children, because when we moved in first, there were all these cartoon Disney eyes gazing through a coat of off-white paint in my room. Nina wouldn’t sleep in there at all.
Susan used to always have time to talk and now she never does. She’s working longer hours and she constantly looks like she’s in a hurry. When we moved here first, I couldn’t sleep, and I got really clumsy in the daytime, like dropping things, or spilling them. And I could feel her getting angrier and angrier each time I did it but that only made me do it more. No one was sleeping properly, and I would hear her walk around at night, or see the coffee cups in the sink the next morning. It was like we were in two separate fish tanks or something, and I was beating at the glass of mine while she was just trying to keep swimming. I do better now, and I try not to bother her with stuff, to do the dishes, hoover the carpets if I see it needs to be done, and she smiles at me and thanks me and ruffles my hair, and it feels a bit like getting back to normal.
At school, myself and Nina just pretend. I mean, I haven’t talked about it much with anyone, and I don’t think she has either. We don’t have friends over now though, either of us. It’s not something we talked about, it kind of just happened, and I think it means that we feel the same kind of way about everything. We didn’t have to change school, which I suppose is a plus. I mean, if we’d had to move county or hours away that would have been much harder. But Nina doesn’t like this house, this life. And I get it – it’s a lot of change, a lot of sadness.
When you’re unhappy, bad things can creep in.
I get this thing sometimes when I’m asleep but don’t know I’m asleep. It feels exactly like I’ve woken up. Can see the borders of my room, the dim shape of the furniture, just the way it always is. But there is something else there as well. Nothing as definite as a shape, it’s like a flicker in the corner of your eye. Only my eyes are all corners. This presence traces the boundaries of my room, and I can feel the shiver of something not unfamiliar pushing against the wall inside myself I’ve worked to build. Flesh puckers, and sweat beads and I can’t move. I cannot make a sound. When I was very small, Dad built a new wall in the garden, and my skin got scraped against it. I remember looking down at broken skin, grey dust, some of it in me, some of me in it. That’s how it works when something gets too close. It hurts like that. It doesn’t really leave you.
‘Sleep paralysis,’ Susan says it is, because of what happened. My ‘trauma’.
But it doesn’t feel like trauma.
It feels like someone’s there.
Someone I know well.
Someone who hates me.
I close my eyes and try not to let any of it in. Try to keep it all walled up. Contained. It isn’t real, like Susan says. These strange beliefs left behind from what Mam did.
The creatures.
an exposed throat
Nina is sixteen and I am fifteen but people often think I’m older than her because she is tiny and I am very tall. I wasn’t always. When I was ten I took a stretch. Before that we could share clothes, and sometimes convince people we were sisters. Proper sisters. I mean, I know there are blood sisters who look nothing alike. But it was more fun lying when the lie felt plausible to us.
