This is what happened to Mam.
A figure in the distance. It catches the scent of her on the wind. Out there somewhere, out in the battleground of Ireland; Mam and Maeve looking around, making sure things were quiet. Imagining me with them, the next time, thinking about what they’ll show me and teach me. The skrake scents them both or sees them and starts coming, awkward and fast. Too fast. I try to call up an image of the two of them in which they are not ready, and I cannot.
Still and all, the skrake gets on Maeve, and then Mam has to get between them.
I wonder if there’s that sudden connection between them, Mam and the skrake, like fire, like the moment my knife leaves my hand to bring down a gull. Mam would know it, this feeling. She’d know she was caught, and then she would have thought of me, and that hurts to think about. That hurts a lot.
Or, maybe it was different, quicker. Maeve was off getting firewood, and she never saw it, maybe. She stumbles, and it grabs her and goes for the first thing it can get its mouth to. And Mam comes between them, in the nick of time. It bites hard just as Maeve’s knife comes down on its skull. Just a fraction too late. A blink earlier and she’d have been home with a lesson on it, and telling Maeve to keep quiet and not be scaring the child with a story of near-miss.
That fraction of time is why we train, Maeve’d say. And still she was too late.
Mam’d know when it bit her, though; she’d know everything then about what would happen.
Maybe that’s why when I hear Maeve shouting furiously up to me from down the road, my first feeling is anger. As soon as she cries out to me, I know what has happened, and I feel rage for a pure moment before the grief comes.
Maeve has my mother in the barrow we’d left at the little jetty. She is going quickly despite that. I meet her a hundred meters from the house, but she barely glances at me.
“Oh, Mam,” I say, when I see her body in the barrow, her eyes closed and head thrown back. There’s a smear of something dried on her cheek and her hair is caked with mud, but her expression is calm and gentle; her eyes closed, her eyebrows raised just a little. Her head is banging off the barrow with light thuds, but Maeve doesn’t notice.
I’m crying loudly, sobbing. “Maeve. Maeve.”
She hasn’t slept; she is thinner than even a few days ago. That strength she carries around with her like an extra skin is gone; it has been flayed off her.
She doesn’t stop so I move with them.
“Maeve,” I bawl.
“Whisht,” Maeve tells me.
I try not to look at the body of my mother. One side of her is covered in blood from shoulder to hip. Maeve forces the barrow along broken tarmac, then through weeds and long grass.
“Get in the house,” she tells me, wincing as she stands. I climb up through the bathroom window and turn round to watch Maeve sit my mother up in the barrow, drape her over her shoulder, and then stand. Her legs shake, and for a moment I think she won’t make it, but then she’s up, and she turns toward me and tells me to take my mother’s hands and pull her in while Maeve pushes. I am delicate at first, afraid to touch Mam’s hot, livid skin, but Maeve shouts at me again and her hoarseness pinches through my fear, and I grab on and pull. My mother comes through the window, and we both fall, hard. She lands on top of me and I am pinned by her dead weight to the tiny bathroom’s floor, my head jammed awkwardly against the wall. The breath is knocked out of me, and I try to inhale and can’t. I gasp, rasping, breathing in the scent of my mother, which is not like herbs anymore but something rotting.
“Maeve.”
I can’t get the cry out, but then she’s there. She’s getting through the window with her steady old grace and she lifts my mother off me, and I let out a great heaving sob before I can even try to grab hold of it, and I nearly expect a clout around the ear, but instead, Maeve pulls me to her and holds me tight.