If you’d go inside them other houses on Slanbeg, and I always did—I was always looking for something—you’d see into lives from long ago.
These are wrecked on the inside as well as the outside. Mam let me at it okay, but Maeve didn’t like me going in. She said we’d learned all we could already from ghosts, and I wasn’t to go digging around in lives not belonging to me. Mam and Maeve had been in the houses as well, though—I could see their prints—and that took the shine off Maeve’s argument.
They’ve got away with a lot, these houses. They’ve their four walls standing and the roofs, too, for the most part. I’d get in where I could; there was usually somewhere that was easy on all of them, which I’d know by heart. So I’d slip through the window that was broken or never had any glass or even sometimes just plain through the front door.
Everything is covered in dust and dirt, but you can nearly see, you can guess at the lives that went on inside them walls. All the presses with electrical things inside them that haven’t moved, and the chairs that were last sat on by live people in families. So many things still neat after all this age. Upstairs are the beds, same as ours, and books and papers I’d pilfer, and the other stuff that now seems only sadder the more I look at it or think on it. The empty beds. The little socks, no bigger than my palm. Your heart would break for them, so it would.
There’s a feeling in some of the houses that you’re near the families, that they’re only outside the back and will come in again for their tea in a moment. They’re so present, these dead people, the dead kids my own age and the littler ones.
The desperate came looking, so they did. People wanting shelter from the skrake, and then from the hunger, trying to get into the houses here, to take whatever these people had. You see it around the island—the smashed windows, remnants of small, desperate battles, the dusted bones. All gone a long time ago now, whether by hunger or sickness or the hands of one another. No skrake got this far, Mam and Maeve told me, and that is a warning as well—there’s warnings all around us on this island about monsters that aren’t skrake. If there were any of them left when I was a child, Mammy and Maeve would have made sure they were no danger to us anyway.
On the outside, ours is as wrecked as the others, or worse, and boards on the windows, but mostly so that you can’t see that behind them the glass is in one piece still.
The inside of ours is a living house. Mam and Maeve stole and pilfered and looted, if you can do those things to the dead and undead and never born, which I’d argue you can’t, until they had ours looking the way they wanted it. Like a home. You wouldn’t know we were in a ghost house in a ghost estate and a ghost country, the way I was reared in that house.
I’d everything I needed, nearly, food and clean water and baths and beds, and there were books I was allowed and others I was not. We had comfort, rugs and blankets, and plants brought inside to save them from the winter. We had the stories Mam would tell about heroes, making me want to be brave, stories about Gráinne the pirate queen, and the Morrígan and Brigid and Maeve, who I confused with our Maeve.
In a painting on our wall, there’s a man who might be dead or might just be sleeping, and there’s just a little bit of blue in the gray of the bleak clouds. You can see mountains, and the man might be looking at them, if he isn’t dead. My mother loved this picture. I’m named Orpen, even, after the painter.
There’s other pictures—a naked man, and a woman asleep in an orange dress with a calm sea—but this one with mountains is the best; it’s the one that looks most likely to me. I wonder was the artist some kind of prophet that he could see the trouble we’d be getting into, making a picture like this so long ago when the world was whole. That’s what painters were, maybe.
I looked a long time at these pictures growing up, trying to figure them out, and I did in the end. It’s a warning, not to be caught out on your own, not to get left on your own, ever, not if you can help it. It made sense to me, then, when I realized this was the problem I had here on the island, this was the cold space I felt within me.
There was evidence of it all around us, of people living together in families and groups. There’re no houses off on their own on this island, they’re together. People are meant to be together, and I knew that and the painter knew that, but here we were, on our own. Especially me.
I kept looking. I looked all around the island with a hunger in me to know more about how it was when the world was whole. I read everything. In the houses, in old papers, there was more of it, signs of people all gathered up. I went farther all the time, out to places I wasn’t meant to go on my own, and I ate up the pictures of businesses and towns and cities and countries. I kept going till I first read that word “banshee,” and that was only the start, so it was.