Spellbook of the Lost and Found by Moira Fowley-Doyle

Author:Moira Fowley-Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RHCP
Published: 2017-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

Saturday 13th May

Found: Tin medal (St Anthony); fingernails (rainbow-coloured, acrylic); human hair; puddles of blood

Something was building and it wasn’t the storm.

The morning started cloudy. I went to Holly’s before school. We had a two-hour optional revision class on Saturday afternoon and although we were all behind on our study she didn’t cycle down with me.

‘I’ll meet you there,’ she said.

I wanted to tell her what happened last night with Jude, to confess. Maybe I wanted to warn her about him. But I lost my nerve.

She was sitting in the middle of her bed, surrounded by some of the things we’d found in the forest. Christmas lights, reading glasses, odd socks. Hairpins lined up like picket fences. And bottles of red nail varnish, half-empty cans of hairspray, photographs of the three of us. There were no photographs of Jude.

‘He talks about Icarus,’ she whispered through the ever-present scarf around her neck. ‘But he’s more like Orpheus. I think his voice could bring me back from the dead.’

I wanted to shake her. ‘You’re not dead,’ I said. ‘You’re just infatuated. He’s only a boy, for God’s sake.’

‘Oh, no.’ She clutched her scarf tighter to her throat. ‘He’s so much more than that.’

If I was the kind of girl who believed in vampires, I would have torn the scarf off her, but Holly has always been that pale and, no matter what either of them say, Jude is just a boy like any of the other boys in school, in town, in our families. He’s no different from the three of us.

The very first time I asked Holly what she thought of him, before he’d kissed her, or Ash, or me, before he tore our friendship apart like the pages of a diary, she said, ‘I think I love him.’

I wanted to be mean, wanted to say, You thought you loved John Calhoun in Fourth Year, you thought you loved Seamus from Salthill, you thought you loved your aunt’s new boyfriend. You’re always falling in love with somebody.

I wanted to be cruelly truthful, wanted to say, I think I do, too. And so does Ash. We just don’t have the guts to tell you.

I wanted to tell her what I’ve been thinking all along: And he knows it, our beautiful Jude – he knows very well how we feel about him. Can’t you tell? Don’t you see the way he looks at each of us in turn, how he eats up our affection and leaves only the pips spat out on to the forest floor?

Instead, I left her to her bed full of found things, and I cycled to school.

There was a storm coming. The radio in the staff room next door was staticky; the forecast crackled. West by south-west, twelve knots, falling slowly. The newspaper my sisters read that morning was less poetic: Highs of twenty to twenty-three degrees. Winds will reach gale force on all Irish coastal waters and on the Irish Sea. Halfway through the revision class the wind began to blow and Holly still hadn’t come.

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