Secret Garden

Whenever I left home for a longer length of time than usual, say to go on a school trip abroad, or when I went on shopping trips to London with friends, I always used to bring something with me to remind me of home‑just something small. One Christmas we were at a buffet in a hotel and my dad stole a little plastic penguin that was sitting on top of a pudding and he put it in my dessert. He was trying to be funny but I was having one of those days, which was much like most days, where nothing he said or did could possibly be conceived of as funny, and so somehow the penguin ended up in my pocket that day. Then months later, when I was away, I put my hand in my pocket and found the little penguin, and laughed. Dad’s joke, though months way too late and not in his presence, I finally found funny. Somehow on that trip, it ended up in my washbag, and it travelled the world with me.

You know one of those things that you only have to look at and it instantly connects you to something else? I’m not a sentimental person; I never felt that attached to anything or anyone at home. Not like some people, who just have to look at something, like even a piece of fluff, and it sends tears to their eyes because it vaguely reminds them of something somebody once said once upon a time at home, when hindsight, whispering into their ear like the devil, tells them they were happy. No, bringing something with me was just a little ammunition really, to make me feel like I wasn’t totally and utterly alone, that I had a little piece of home with me. Not sentimentality, just simple plain old insecurity.

I certainly wasn’t attached to the gatehouse in any way. I’d only been there for a couple of days but during my great escape to Zoey’s house, I brought the book I’d found in the travelling library with me. I still hadn’t managed to unlock it and I certainly had no intentions of reading it while I was there, not when they were so busy telling me about their new source of entertainment‑wait for it‑going out without underwear on. Honestly, I had to laugh. There was a photo of Cindy Monroe, a six‑and‑a‑half‑stone, five foot tall, American reality star, getting out of a car to go to a club the day of her release from forty‑eight hours spent in gaol for drink‑driving, and she wasn’t wearing any knickers. Zoey and Laura seemed to think this was a great new leap forward for women. I think that when the women’s lib took off their bras and burned them, this wasn’t exactly what they were hoping for. I said this to Zoey and she studied me thoughtfully, her eyes squinting almost closed like she was the Queen of Hearts about to decide whether to chant ‘Off with her head!’ or not. But then she opened her eyes wide and said, ‘No it’s fine, my top was totally backless so I couldn’t wear a bra either.’

Totally backless. Very dead. Another one of those phrases. It was either backless or it wasn’t. I’ve no doubt that it was.

Anyway, when I was sent away to Zoey’s house‑‘sent away’ being the operative words‑I felt like I’d been told to go sit on the naughty step to think about what I’d done. Despite the fact I should have felt that I was heading home, that I was heading towards feeling more whole again, I didn’t feel like it at all. And so, I brought a piece of the new world with me. I brought the book. I knew it was there in my bag when I was sleeping on the pull‑out bed in Zoey’s room, and as we stayed up all night talking about everything, I knew that it was listening to me, this foreign thing from my detested new life, gaining an insight into the life I once had. I had a witness. I felt like telling it to go home and tell what my life used to be like to all the other things there that I loathed. The book felt like my little secret from Laura and Zoey, a pointless and boring one but a secret all the same, lying beside me in my overnight bag.

And so when Arthur’s Land Rover turned into the side entrance to Kilsaney Demesne, and I was gobbled up again by my new desperate non‑life, I decided to take the book and go for a walk with it. I knew it would kill Rosaleen if I didn’t arrive back and fill her in on the no‑knickers‑wearing trend, and as it was always my duty to punish, I set off. I also knew that Mum would still be in the same place, sitting in that rocking chair, not rocking, but I allowed my mind to pretend she was doing the exact opposite, like out in the garden doing naked pirouettes or something.

I’d never walked around the grounds before. To and from the castle, yes, but around the one hundred acres, no. All of my previous visits had been made up of tea and ham sandwiches in a quiet kitchen while Mum talked about things I didn’t care about with my strange aunt and uncle. I’d do anything‑eat twenty sloppy egg sandwiches and two slices of whatever cake was going‑to get out of that kitchen and wander in the front garden that wrapped its way around to the back. Nowhere else interested me. I wasn’t much of an explorer, anything that involved movement bored me. I was never intrigued enough by anything to take things that little bit further. On that day I still wasn’t, but I was bored and so I dumped my overnight bag, which Arthur snot‑snorted at and brought into the house for me, and I was gone.

I walked away from the house, away from the castle, along a narrow roadway. The route was heavily shaded by the thirty‑metre‑tall native oaks, ash and yew which lined it. It smelled sweet. The ground was soft, thousands of years of falling foliage and bark laid on the earth, giving me a spring in my step as if I could run from corner to corner in Lycra doing somersaults. It was a hot day, but I was cool under the elderly trees. The birds were like hyperactive monkeys, with constant chirpy calls and doing Tarzan‑like swoops from one tree to another. Tired from my all‑nighter with my friends, I just kept walking, my head bursting with their conversations, the things I had learned‑Laura had had to take the morning‑after pill‑but none were as loud as the conversations I was havingwith myself in my head. That, I could never switch off. I don’t think I’d ever thought so much, and talked so little, in my life.

Every now and then, when the trees broke their security barrier, I could see the castle in the distance, looking out over its lawn, at the lakes that dotted the grounds, at the majestic trees that stood alone punctuating the landscape. Lone tall and elegant poplars raised up like feathers to tickle the sky, wide oaks with heavy caps spread like wild mushrooms. Then the castle disappeared again, playing peekaboo with me, and the pathway began to curve to the left so that I would soon be able to turn and face the keep head on. Another twenty minutes’ walk and I could see the main gateway further up ahead on my right. I immediately slowed. The darkened gothic entrance did not appeal to me, all chained up like some prisoner of war left to rot along the side of the road. Long grasses and whatever else decrepit weeds there were climbed the relatively new gate and poked out through the rusted bars, like long gangly starved arms waving at passing cars to be fed or released. The once grand roadway that led directly to the castle had been ignored, unused and unmaintained. It was overgrown and hidden by grasses, like the yellow brick road in the Return to Oz. I shuddered. Despite losing its glory, I didn’t take to it as I had to the castle. Its scars were grotesque. Unlike the castle’s which made me want to raise a hand and trace them with my finger, these scars were ugly and made me want to look the other way.

I decided to find another route to take, anything to prevent me from passing that ghastly gothic gate and so I broke through the trees and walked across the grounds instead. I felt safer then, cocooned in the bosom of the trees rather than on that well‑worn path which Normans and their horses had pounded, wildly waving in the air peasants’ severed heads on the tips of their swords.

The tree trunks were fascinating, aged and wrinkled like elephants’ legs. They twisted around one another like lovers. Some rose from the ground arched as though in agony and reaching out, then growing on, turning and shifting to a new position. The roots snaked their way from under the surface, rising above the ground and back down again gracefully, as though they were slippery eels in the waters. I tripped often on a raised root, and was caught each time by a helpfully placed tree trunk. The trees did that‑tripped me and caught me, tickled me with their leaves and webs, and smacked me in the face with their branches. I pulled back branches in order to pass by, and felt them immediately spring back like catapults to spank me cheekily on the behind.

From one city of trees I made my way to another. The air smelled sweet, bees filled the flowering trees, greedily hopping from one cluster of petals to another, wanting it all, too impatient to choose just one. Around me on the floor was fruit of some kind, there from seasons ago, some decayed and rotten, some dried out like prunes. I stopped to pick one up and tried to decipher what it once was. I smelled it. Vile. As I dropped it and wiped my hands, I realised the trunk beside me was covered in engravings. The poor tree had been carved into over and over again, like a pumpkin emptied of its flesh to bear its fangs. Clearly it hadn’t been inscribed all on the same day, nor the same year, not even the same century. From seven feet up all the way down it was covered in various names etched into the bark, some framed by hearts, others in boxes, but all declaring eternal friendships and loves.

I ran my finger over the names ‘Frank and Ellie’, ‘Fiona and Stephen’, ‘Siobhan and Michael’, ‘Laurie and Rose’, ‘Michelle and Tommy’. All declared eternal love. ‘2gether, 4ever’. I wondered if any of them still were. None of the other trees bore the same scars. I stepped back to examine the area and discovered why. There was more of a clearing around this tree. I could imagine blankets laid down, picnics and parties, friends gathering and lovers sneaking out to be together under the fruit tree.

I left the orchard and searched for the next tree town. A wall came into view ahead of me and suddenly my game with the trees was over.

I tried to tread carefully without making a sound, but the woods gave me away. Exaggerated sounds and echoes of twigs snapping and crunching beneath my feet and leaves rustling as I pushed through them alerted the walls to my arrival. I didn’t know what building was ahead of me but it wasn’t the castle, for that was too far away. I didn’t know of any other buildings on the grounds apart from the dilapidated cottages at the other three gate entrances, long closed up as though there was a day, the unspoken day, when everybody upped and left. The stone of the wall wasn’t the same as the castle’s but to my unexperienced eye it wasn’t far off. It was old and crumbling. The top of the wall was uneven, it no longer touched what it once reached for. There was no roof, just a wall. I couldn’t see a door or a window for the wall’s entire length, and for the most part, unlike the castle, it had survived the bites life liked to take for energy to keep going. I stepped to the edge of the woods, feeling like a hedgehog that has just left its natural habitat to be faced with a main road, revealed by headlights, and tentative. I left my tall friends behind, and under their watchful eyes I walked the length of the wall.

When the wall ended, I turned the corner and saw it continue down another way. Then suddenly I heard a woman humming, from behind the wall. I got a jolt. Apart from my uncle Arthur, I wasn’t expecting to come across any other human. I hugged the book close to my chest and listened to the humming. It was soft, sweet, happy, far too liberated to be Rosaleen, too joyous to be my mother. It was passing‑the‑time kind of humming, a distracted sound, a tune that wasn’t familiar to me, if it was a real one at all. The summer breeze blew and it brought a sweet smell and her song along with it. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall, directly the other side from her and I listened.

As my head touched the brick, she stopped humming and my eyes opened quickly and I straightened up.

I looked around. She wasn’t in sight, and so I couldn’t have been spotted. When my heart slowed to its normal rhythm she began humming again. I moved along the wall, my fingers trailing over the grey stone, tracing the wall, cobwebs, crumbling rock, the smooth of some parts, the rough edges of others beneath my hot fingers. The sun beat down on me, the trees no longer my personal parasol. The wall came to an abrupt stop and I looked up to see a large ornamental stone archway marking the entrance.

I peeked my head inside so that I wouldn’t be revealed to the mystery hummer and discovered a walled garden, immaculately kept. From my position outside the arch I could see a rose garden, large formal beds set against the backdrop of climbing roses, fully bloomed, which lined both sides of the footpath from another entrance. I dared to move a little more to see the rest of the garden. In the centre were more flowers‑geraniums, chrysanthemums, carnations, others I couldn’t name. Flowers tumbled out from hanging baskets and oversized ornamental stone pots that lined the central walkway through the garden. I couldn’t quite believe this little oasis amidst all the green, as though somebody had taken a fizzy drink, shaken it and opened it here in the middle of these crumbling walls and this colour had burst out, spraying every inch with different shades. Bees were flying from one flower to the other, vines climbed up the walls twined around beautiful flowers. I could smell the rosemary, lavender and mint of a nearby herb garden. There was a small greenhouse in the corner of the garden, beside that a dozen or so wooden boxes on stands, and then I realised that swept away by my curiosity I had unknowingly wandered into the garden and the humming had stopped.

I wasn’t sure what to expect but I definitely wasn’t expecting what I saw. At the end of the garden the source of the humming, and the person that was currently staring at me as though I had arrived from another planet, was dressed in what appeared to be a white spacesuit, her head covered in a black veil, her hands in a pair of rubber gloves and on her feet a pair of calf‑length rubber boots. She looked like she’d just stepped off a spaceship and into a nuclear disaster.

I smiled nervously and waved my free hand. ‘Hi. I come in peace.’

She stared at me for a little longer, frozen still like a statue. I felt a little bit nervous, a little bit awkward, and so when that happens, I did what I usually do.

‘What the fuck are you staring at?’

I don’t know how she took that, seeing as she had a Darth Vadar helmet on. She stared at me a little longer and I waited for her to tell me that I was Luke and she was my father.

‘Well, now,’ she said brightly, as if snapping out of a trance, ‘I knew I had a little visitor.’ She took her entire head attire off, revealing herself to be far older than I expected. She must have been in her seventies.

She came towards me and I half expected her to jump from one foot to the other as though there was no gravity. She was wrinkled, very wrinkled, her skin falling downward as though time had melted her. Her blue eyes sparkled like the Aegean Sea, reminding me of a day out on Dad’s yacht where when you looked down, the sea was so clear you could see the sand and hundreds of multicoloured fish beneath. But there was nothing beneath her eyes, so translucent they practically reflected back all of the light. Then she took off her gauntlets and held her hands out.

‘I’m Sister Ignatius,’ she smiled, not shaking my hand, but holding it in both of hers. Despite the hot day and the heavy gloves, they were as smooth and as cool as marble.

‘You’re a nun,’ I blurted out.

‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘I am a nun. I was there when it happened.’

It was my turn to smile, and I laughed, everything making sense then. The cabinet of honey jars, the dozens of boxes around the walled garden, the ridiculous spacesuit on an old woman.

‘You know my aunt.’

‘Ah.’

I didn’t know quite how to take that response. She didn’t register surprise but nor did she question me. She was still holding my hand. I didn’t want to move my hand, seeing as she was a nun, but it was freaking me out. I kept talking.

‘My aunt is Rosaleen, and my uncle is Arthur. He’s the groundskeeper here. They live in the gatehouse. We’re staying with them for…a little while.’

‘We?’

‘Me and my mum.’

‘Oh.’ Her eyebrows lifted so high I thought they were caterpillars about to become butterflies and flutter away.

‘Didn’t Rosaleen tell you?’ I was a little insulted, though quite thankful for Rosaleen’s respect for our privacy. At least the whole one‑horse town with no horse wouldn’t be talking about the new folk.

‘No,’ she replied. And then without a smile and with an air of finality she repeated, ‘No.’

She seemed a little cross and so I jumped in to defend Rosaleen and save whatever friendship they did or didn’t have. ‘I’m sure she was just protecting our privacy, giving us a little time to deal with…it…before she told people.’

‘Deal with…’

‘The move here,’ I said slowly. Was it bad to lie to a nun? Well I wasn’t exactly lying…I kind of panicked then. I felt my body heat up and go clammy. Sister Ignatius was saying something, her mouth was opening and closing, but I couldn’t hear a word of it. I just kept thinking about lying to her and of those Ten Commandments and hell and everything, but not just that, I thought about how nice it would be to say the words aloud to her. She was a nun, I could probably trust her.

‘My dad died,’ I blurted out quickly interrupting whatever nice thing she’d been saying. I heard the terrible tremble in my voice as I said that sentence and then all of a sudden, from absolutely nowhere, just as it had happened with Cabáiste, tears were gushing down my cheeks.

‘Oh, child,’ she said, immediately opening her arms and embracing me. The book separated us as I still clung to it, but even though she was a total stranger, she was a nun, and I rested my head on her shoulder and didn’t hold back, making snotty and throaty noises and all, while she rocked me a little and rubbed my back. I was in the middle of a really embarrassing wail of, ‘Why did he do it? Whyyyyy …?’ when a bee flew directly into my face and bounced off my lip. I screamed and pushed myself out of Sister Ignatius’ arms.

‘Bee!’ I shrieked, hopping about and trying to dodge it as it followed me. ‘Oh my God, get it off me.’

She watched me, her eyes lighting up.

‘Oh my God, Sister, please, get it off me. Shoo, shoo!’ I waved my arms around. ‘They must listen to you. They’re your bloody bees.’

Sister Ignatius pointed her finger and shouted in a deep voice, ‘Sebastian, no!’

I stopped jerking around to stare at her, my tears gone now. ‘You are not serious. You do not name your bees.’

‘Ah, there’s Jemima on the rose, and Benjamin on the geranium,’ she said perkily, eyes bright.

‘No way,’ I said, wiping my face, embarrassed by my breakdown. ‘I thought I had mental problems.’

‘Of course I’m not serious,’ and then she started laughing, a wonderful clear throaty childish laugh that instantly made me smile.

I think that’s when I knew I loved Sister Ignatius.

‘My name is Tamara.’

‘Yes,’ she said, looking at me and studying me as if she already knew.

I smiled again. She had a face that made me do that.

‘Are you allowed to, like, talk? Shouldn’t you be quiet?’ I looked around. ‘Don’t worry I won’t tell.’

‘Many of the sisters would agree with you,’ she chuckled, ‘but yes, I’m allowed to talk. I haven’t taken a vow of silence.’

‘Oh. Do other nuns look down on you for that?’

She laughed again, a sweet, clear, singsong laugh.

‘So have you not seen people for ages? Is this against the rules? Don’t worry, I won’t tell. Though Obama’s the US President now,’ I joked. When she didn’t respond, my smile faded. ‘Shit. Are you not supposed to know stuff like that? Stuff from the “outside world”? It must be a bit like being in Big Brother, being a nun.’

She snapped out of her trance and laughed again, her face seeming so childlike in a Benjamin Button way when she did that.

‘Aren’t you a peculiar thing?’ She’d said it with a smile and so I tried hard not to be insulted.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ she asked looking at the book that I was still hugging.

‘Oh, this.’ I finally stopped squeezing it. ‘I found it yesterday on the…oh, actually, I owe you a book.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘No, really I do. Marcus, I mean, the travelling library came by the day before yesterday looking for you and I didn’t know who you were.’

‘Then you owe me a book,’ she said, a twinkle in her eye. ‘Let me see, who’s it by?’

‘I don’t know who or what it is. It’s not the Bible or anything, you might not like it,’ I said, reluctant to hand it over. ‘There could be sex scenes in it, swear words, gay people, divorced people, things like that.’

She looked at me and pursed her lips, trying not to smile.

‘I can’t open it,’ I said finally, giving it to her. ‘It’s locked.’

‘Well, I’ll see to that. Follow me.’

She immediately set off out the other entrance of the walled garden with the book in her hand.

‘Where are you going?’ I called after her.

‘Where are we going,’ she corrected me. ‘Come and see the sisters. They’ll be delighted to meet you. And I’ll open the book while you do so.’

‘Uh. No, it’s okay.’ I ran to catch up with her and take the book back.

‘There’s just the four of us. We don’t bite. Particularly when eating Sister Mary’s apple pie, but don’t tell her I said,’ she added under her breath and chuckled again.

‘But, Sister, I’m not very good with holy people. I don’t really know what to say.’

She laughed that laugh again and waddled in her funny‑looking suit towards the orchard.

‘What’s the deal with the tree with all the engravings on it?’ I asked, skipping alongside her to keep up.

‘Ah, you’ve seen our apple orchard? You know, some people say the apple tree is the tree of love,’ she said, her eyes widening, and when she smiled dimples pierced her cheeks. ‘Many of the young ones around here have declared their love to one another on that tree.’ She power‑walked on, snapping out of her magical love story. ‘Plus, it’s great for the bees. And the bees are great for the trees. Oh, that rhymes,’ she chuckled. ‘Arthur does a wonderful job of keeping it. We get the most delicious Granny Smith apples.’

‘Oh, so that’s why Rosaleen makes three thousand apple tarts a day. I’ve eaten so many apples they’re literally coming out of my…’

She looked at me.

‘Ears.’

She laughed and it sounded like a song.

‘So,’ I panted, trying to keep up with her pacy strides, ‘how come there’s only four of you?’

‘Not so many people want to be nuns these days. It’s not, what you’d say, cool?’

‘Well, it’s not just that it’s not cool, which it totally isn’t by the way but, no offence to God or anything, it’s probably just a sex thing. If you were allowed to have sex I’d say loads of girls would want to be nuns. Though the rate I’m going, I’ll be joining you,’ I rolled my eyes.

Sister Ignatius laughed. ‘All in good time, my child, all in good time. You’re only seventeen. Almost eighteen, my word.’

‘I’m sixteen.’

She stopped walking then and examined me, a curious expression on her face. ‘Seventeen.’

‘Seventeen in a few weeks.’ I caught my breath.

‘Eighteen in a few weeks,’ she frowned.

‘I wish, but seriously I’m sixteen, but people always think I’m older.’

She stared at me as though I were a foreign object then, thinking so hard I could almost smell her brain frying. Then she took off on her heel again. Five minutes’ power‑walk away, I was panting but Sister Ignatius had barely broken a sweat and we came across some more buildings, more like outhouses, and old stables. First, there was a church.

‘There’s the chapel there,’ Sister Ignatius explained. ‘It was built by the Kilsaneys in the late eighteenth century.’

Remembering that part from my school project I couldn’t take my eyes off it, unable to believe that what I’d stolen from the internet essay wasn’t just homework, it was actually real. It was a small chapel, grey stone, two pillars in the front as cracked as a desert earth that hasn’t seen water for decades. On the top was a bell tower. Beside it was an old graveyard protected by three thin rusty iron railings. Whether it was to keep the buried in or the wanderers out, it wasn’t clear, but it made me shudder just looking at it. I realised I’d stopped walking and was staring at it‑and Sister Ignatius was staring at me.

‘Great. I live on the grounds of a graveyard. Just swell.’

‘All generations of the Kilsaneys are buried there,’ she said softly. ‘Or as many as possible. For the bodies they couldn’t find they planted headstones.’

‘What do you mean, “for the bodies they couldn’t find”?’ I asked, horrified.

‘Generations of war, Tamara. Some of the Kilsaneys were sent off to Dublin Castle to be imprisoned, others left through travel or revolution.’

There was a silence while I took in the old headstones, some green and covered in moss, others black and lopsided, the inscriptions so faded you couldn’t read the letters.

‘That’s fucking creepy. You have to live beside that?’

‘I still pray in there.’

‘Pray for what? For the walls not to cave in on your head? It looks like it’s about to fall apart any second.’

She laughed. ‘It’s still a consecrated church.’

‘No way. Are there weekly masses in there?’

‘No,’ she smiled again. ‘The last time it was used was…’ she pinched her eyes shut and her lips moved open and closed as though she was doing decades of the rosary. Then her eyes popped open wide. ‘Do you know what, Tamara, you should check the records to get the exact date. The names of everybody are included too. We have them in the house. Come in and have a look, why don’t you?’

‘Eh. No. You’re grand, thanks.’

‘You will when you’re ready, I suppose,’ she said and moved along again. I rushed to keep up with her.

‘So how long have you lived here?’ I asked, following her into an outhouse, which was used as a tool shed.

‘Thirty years.’

‘Thirty years here? Must have been so lonely here all that time.’

‘Oh, no, it was far busier back then when I arrived, believe it or not. The three sisters were a lot more mobile then. I’m the youngest, the baby,’ she said, and laughed that little‑girl laugh again. ‘There was the castle, and the gatehouse…they were indeed busier times. But I like the quiet now too. The peace. The nature. The simplicity. The time to be still.’

‘But I thought the castle was burned down in the twenties.’

‘Oh, it was burned out many times in its history. But it was only partly burned on that occasion. The family worked hard to refurbish it. And they did a wonderful job. It was truly beautiful.’

‘You’ve been inside it?’

‘Oh, indeed.’ She looked surprised by my question. ‘Lots of times.’

‘So what happened to it?’

‘A fire,’ she said, and looked away, located her toolbox on the cluttered work table and opened it. Five drawers slid out, each filled with nuts and bolts. She was like a little DIY magpie.

‘Another one?’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Honestly, that’s ridiculous. Our smoke alarms were connected to the local fire station. Want to know how I found out? I was smoking in my room and I didn’t open the window because it was absolutely freezing out and whenever I opened my doors they used to just slam shut, which was a total head wreck. So I’d turned my music up really loud and next minute my bedroom door was being bashed down by this hot fireman, pardon the pun, who thought my room was totally on fire.’

There was silence, while Sister Ignatius listened and looked through the toolbox.

‘By the way, he thought I was seventeen too,’ I laughed. ‘He called the house afterwards looking for me but Dad answered the phone and threatened to have him put in gaol. Talk about dramatic.’

Silence.

‘Anyway, was everybody okay?

‘No,’ she said, and when she looked at me briefly I realised that her eyes filled with tears. ‘Unfortunately not.’ She blinked them away furiously while she noisily rooted through the drawers, her wrinkled but sturdy‑looking hands pushing through nails and screwdrivers. On her right hand was a gold ring that looked like a wedding ring, so firmly on her finger, her flesh growing around it, I doubt she could ever take it off even if she wanted to. I would have liked to ask more questions about the castle but I didn’t want to upset her further and she was making such a racket as she rooted through her tool box for the correct screwdriver I wouldn’t possibly be heard.

She tried and tested a few and I grew bored and shuffled lazily around the garage. Shelf upon shelf of junk filled the walls. A table spanning the three walls was also filled with knick‑knacks and contraptions that I didn’t know the use for. It was Aladdin’s cave for the DIY obsessed.

I looked around but my head hopped with new questions about the castle. So it had been lived in after the fire in the 1920s. Sister Ignatius had said she’d been here thirty years and had been in the house after the refurbishment. That would take us back to the late seventies. I was under the impression the castle had been lying idle for so much longer than that.

‘Where is everybody?’

‘Inside. It’s recreation hour. Murder She Wrote is on now. They love that.’

‘No, I mean, from the Kilsaney family. Where are they all?’

She sighed. ‘The parents moved away to stay with cousins in Bath. They couldn’t take looking at the castle like that. They hadn’t the time nor the energy nor the money, mind you, to rebuild it.’

‘Do they ever come back?’

She looked at me sadly. ‘They passed away Tamara. I’m sorry.’

I shrugged. ‘That’s okay. I’m not bothered.’ My voice was too perky, sounded too defensive. Why? I really wasn’t bothered. I didn’t know them from Adam‑why should I care? But I did care. Maybe it was because Dad had died that I felt every sad story was my story. I don’t know. Mae, my nanny, used to love watching programmes about real‑life cases being solved. When Mum and Dad were out she used to take over the television in the living room and watch The FBI files, which used to freak me out. Not for the gory details‑I’d seen worse‑but by the fact she was so fascinated by how to cover up crimes. I used to think she was going to kill us all in our sleep. But she also made the best lattes and so I didn’t probe her too much in case she got insulted and would stop making them. I learned from watching one of those shows that the word ‘clue’ actually came from ‘clew’, meaning a ball or thread of yarn, because in a Greek myth, a Greek guy uses a ball of yarn to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. It’s something that helps you get to the end of something, or perhaps to the beginning. It’s the same as Barbara’s satellite navigation kit and my line of breadcrumbs from the gatehouse to Killiney: sometimes we have absolutely no idea where we are, we need the smallest clue to show us where to begin.

Finally the lock she’d been working on gave way and unlatched.

‘Sister Ignatius, you’re a dark horse,’ I teased her.

She laughed heartily. As she lifted open the heavy front cover my heart fluttered. The voice of Zoey and Laura told me to be embarrassed about this and I momentarily was until the Tamara of this new world beat them away with a stick. But when Sister Ignatius opened the book that embarrassment came back intensified, bringing anger with it for there was nothing in the book. Nothing at all on the pages.

‘Hmm…well, look at that,’ Sister Ignatius said, flicking through the thick cream woven deckle‑edged pages, which looked as though they’d come straight from another time. ‘Blank pages waiting to be filled,’ she continued with her voice of wonder.

‘How exciting.’ I rolled my eyes.

‘More exciting than an already filled one. Then you definitely wouldn’t be able to use it.’

‘Then I could read it. Hence it being called a book,’ I snapped, once again feeling this place had let me down.

‘Would you prefer to be given a life already lived too, Tamara? That way you can sit back and observe it. Or would you rather live it yourself?’ she asked, her eyes smiling.

‘Eh, you keep it,’ I said, stepping away, no longer interested in the thing I’d been hugging, feeling let down by it.

‘No, dear. That’s yours. You use it.’

‘I don’t write. I hate it. It gives me bumps on my fingers. And headaches. I’d rather email. Anyway, I can’t. It’s the travelling library’s. Marcus will want it back. I have to meet him again to give it back.’ I noticed my voice had softened on the last sentence. Quite immaturely, I fought a smile.

Sister Ignatius noticed everything and she smiled and raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, you can still meet up with Marcus to discuss the book ,’ she teased. ‘He’ll understand, as I do, that somebody must have donated the diary to the library, mistaking it for a book.’

‘If I take it don’t I break a Commandment or something?’

Sister Ignatius rolled her eyes as I had been doing and, despite my bad mood, I had to grin.

‘But I’ve nothing to write,’ I said, a little softer this time.

‘There’s always something to write. Write some thoughts. I’m sure you’ve plenty of those.’

I took the book back, making a song and dance about how uninterested I was in it and ranting about how writing diaries was for dorks. But for all my talk, I was surprisingly relieved to have it back in my arms again. It felt right sitting there.

‘Write what’s up there,’ Sister Ignatius pointed at her temple, ‘and what’s in there,’ she pointed at her heart. ‘As a great man once called it, ‘’a secret garden.’’ We’ve all got one of those.’

‘Jesus?’

‘No, Bruce Springsteen.’

‘I found yours today,’ I smiled. ‘Yours isn’t a secret any more, Sister.’

‘Ah, there you have it. It’s always good to share it with someone.’ She pointed at the book. ‘Or something.’

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 632