All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

home. I keep left, taking a detour along the riverbank. It’s strange how important this place has become to me in the last few weeks. This place that was once just a walk home, and before that, just a school project. I skim stones and throw branches to watch them sink. Green scum swirls. Coke cans float. Cigarette butts gather in an abandoned coot’s nest. I wrap my arms around myself and I think of my kiss, my first important kiss, my first kiss with anyone who matters, who makes my heart race and my blood warm. The first person to make me understand that attraction isn’t a puzzle or an equation, of working out who the best-looking people are and working backwards from there. It’s not maths. It’s magic.

And I want to tell her. I want to tell her that her brother has become the most incredible person I have ever met. That I am falling, so badly, so terribly in love with him, and the only person I want to tell is the person I may never see again.

What would I even say to her? Would she be the kind of friend who would stick her fingers in her eyes, and do the whole “Ew, gross, my brother!” thing?

No. Not Lily. Lily is a lot of things, but she’s not predictable. She’s not boring. She wouldn’t act like a person off an American sitcom. I close my eyes, and remember her. I imagine she’s still here, and that we’re still friends, and that the last year didn’t happen.

And just like that, I see her. Her long hanks of dirty-blonde hair, her eyes that are too wide, almost alien-ish. I imagine telling her while she’s drawing: the quintessential Lily pose. You would talk and talk to her, and she would draw and draw, and you would almost think she wasn’t listening. But then she would look up, ask one question and you’d realize she was paying perfect attention the entire time.

“The thing is, Lil, I can’t even tell whether we’re both just older now, and more mature, or if I’ve become different and he was brilliant the whole time. But the thing is, I strongly suspect he was brilliant the whole time and I was too up my own hole to even realize.”

“Mmmh,” she says, scribbling with a graphite pencil.

“And I know it’s weird for you! I know you don’t want to hear this about your brother!” I rail, spinning around her room. “But if you had a crush on one of my siblings, I would be cool about it. You don’t, do you?”

“Mmm, no.”

“Well, good, because they’re all so old.”

“It’s the second one.”

“Huh?”

“He’s been brilliant the whole time. You have been, too, but you were so afraid of anyone who was being themselves that you were afraid of seeing it. Once you gave up on being the same as everyone, you were able to see the advantages of being different.”

“Shut up. What are you drawing?”

“A duck.”

“Show me.”

And she would show me the duck, but the duck, importantly, would have one thing wrong with it: a mechanical beak, or a turn-key on its back. A half-robot duck.

I open my eyes, and it’s just the river again. Filthy and strange and always, always there.

“Come back,” I whisper. “Please, please, please come back.”

That night I dream about the Housekeeper again, but she’s not at the underpass this time. She’s at a different point in the city, where the river is narrower. A shopping trolley has been tipped over, sunlight glinting off its metal body. It is spring. The Housekeeper’s hair covers her face, and she is standing on the other side of the riverbank, pointing at something. I follow her finger.

Halfway between us, floating in the river, there is a shoe. A black suede ballet flat, to be precise, turned greenish by the water. But it’s not sinking, like the shopping trolley. It’s floating. Coasting along like a tiny, stylish boat. The familiar feeling of river water in my guts rises up again.

I wake up, sure I’m going to vomit. I breathe heavily, trying to control the hot surge of spit that is pooling around my jaw. I breathe and swallow, breathe and swallow. I go back to sleep but wake up again just after 5 a.m., the air so cold that I have to get another thick, fleece blanket from the hot press. I check my phone briefly as I get back into bed. There’s a message from Roe.

I had a dream about the Housekeeper. She has Lily’s shoe.

The message was sent at 4.55. Only a few minutes ago.

I had the same dream. Was the shoe floating?

Yes.

What do you think it means?

Bubbles appear, and Roe is “typing” for a long time. Then they disappear again. By the time my phone buzzes with his response, I’m expecting an essay.

I think it means Lily is alive.

The next day Fiona comes into school triumphant, a piece of notepaper wedged inside her homework journal. She grabs me just before registration starts.

“Toilets,” she says. “Now.”

We sit huddled together on an exposed pipe that almost burns our legs. Fiona opens her journal.

“My mum managed to remember the full first verse.”

“That’s amazing!”

“Sure, but I also had to hear about how she met Neil Young in 1994.”

“A worthy sacrifice!”

“Thank you.”

We pore over the page together.

She appears in rare readings / and only to young women,

And only in times of crisis / new truths shuffled into focus.

I dealt her from the deck / two times that same week,

A woman with blood on her wedding gown /

and a knife between her teeth.

Ladies, meet the Housekeeper card.

Now, she can be your downfall, or she can be your start,

And she only wants the best for you, like she never

got for herself.

She sees you at the bottom and she’s coming down to help.

“Oh my God. And did she say anything else about it?”

“She said she learned it off a band they were opening for, and that band were, like,