Chapter Seventeen
Nanny Bet and I stare at each other in silence.
‘What do you know about the visions?’ Meg’s voice is level and strong.
Nanny Bet takes a breath. ‘You need to go now, Meg,’ she says calmly, but her eyes don’t leave mine. ‘I have to speak to Michael.’
The hairs on my arms rise. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t have to apologise. You’ve done nothing wrong,’ says Meg.
Nanny Bet turns to face Meg, her chin raised. ‘Excuse me, this is my house and I need to speak to my grandson, alone. Please leave. Now!’
Her anger pulls me back into myself. She’s never like this.
Meg folds her arms and raises her chin too.
I start to sweat. ‘Meg, you should go. It’s fine.’
But she continues to stare at Nanny Bet, who glares back at her.
‘Meg…’
She keeps her gaze on Nanny Bet but talks to me. ‘I’ll go, but give me the camera.’
‘What?’
She lowers her voice. ‘I’ll keep it safe, Michael.’
Nanny Bet steps forward. ‘I don’t want the camera. I want to talk to my grandson.’ She smiles thinly. ‘To tell him the truth about the visions.’
I stare at her. ‘You know?’
‘Of course I know. I watched your dad discover them too. We need to talk.’
I place a hand on Meg’s shoulder. ‘I’ll be all right.’
‘Fine.’ She narrows her eyes at Nanny then leaves through the garden gate.
Nanny Bet lets out a breath and rubs her head. ‘I can’t believe this.’
Guilt thumps me. ‘I’m sorry. I should have told you and I shouldn’t have come here without checking.’
She turns to me and the tension in her face melts. ‘Oh, love, no. You’re welcome here any time. This is your family home.’ She points at the pinhole camera. ‘It’s hard seeing that again.’
‘You know what it is?’
A nod. ‘My granda made it for me.’
My mouth actually drops open.
‘Come on,’ she says, ‘it’s time we had a proper chat about our powers.’
‘Our powers?’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘We are the filí báis.’
I need to learn Irish.
‘We’re what?’
‘The death poets.’
She refuses to say any more until she has a coffee. As the kettle boils, I sit on a garden chair and try to gather my thoughts.
Meg texts to see if I’m OK and I promise her I’ll message her as soon as I’m home.
Nanny Bet returns with two coffees. ‘You’ll need this, trust me.’
I clutch the mug as she sits opposite me, Fergal settling at her feet.
‘So,’ she says, ‘I guess there’s no point asking if you’ve been using your powers.’ She glances at the camera.
‘I wanted to tell you.’
She sighs. ‘I’ve suspected you were having visions since you got here. I should’ve spoken to you before. I was hoping your father could’ve been the one to have this conversation with you, but he…’ Her voice cracks. ‘But he can’t at the moment. So I’d better do it, before you get in trouble.’
I breathe in sharply. ‘What?’
‘Like I said, we’re death poets, Michael. The filí báis. We see visions of the past, visions of death, murder or battle. Our powers come from—’
‘The Morrigan.’
Her eyes widen. ‘Be careful how you speak that name. How do you know?’
‘Meg worked it out.’
She lifts her chin. ‘You shouldn’t have included other people in this, Michael.’
‘Meg’s different. She’s been with me when I’ve seen the visions and she’s even felt some of them. It was her that worked out it was the Morrigan in the photographs.’
Nanny Bet sets her cup on the garden table. ‘What?’
‘The Morrigan. They appear in the photos, right?’
Nanny Bet grips the arms of her chair. ‘You…’ she whispers. ‘You can see them?’
I’m scared now. ‘I mean, yeah. Just like Dad could. I found one of his old photos upstairs.’
‘Where? Show me.’ I flinch at her tone, and she takes a breath. ‘Please show me. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
I stop myself from reaching for my bag. There’s something not right. Dad didn’t want Nanny Bet to know about that photo. I don’t know why, but I can’t show her.
I swallow. ‘I don’t have them. They’re all at Meg’s.’
Her knuckles are white. ‘You left them at a stranger’s? You can’t gossip about these things. Do you know what they do to us when we break our vows?’
‘What vows? I’ve made no vow.’ There’s a rush of heat behind my eyes. ‘And Meg’s my friend.’ I stand up. ‘She’s the one who’s been trying to help me make sense of what’s been happening. Why didn’t you tell me?’
Nanny Bet reaches out her hand, but I stay where I am.
‘You’ve every right to be angry. These bloody powers are a curse.
No good comes from them. I didn’t want you to get hurt, but you’re right.
You deserve to know and I’ll tell you everything.
’ She takes a notebook from her bag. I get a flash of a headache when I see the book, but it subsides just as quickly.
‘But first tell me how you got my camera.’
I blush. ‘We found it in Dad’s room.’
‘Where?’
He hid this from her for a reason. ‘Under the bed.’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘You’re a terrible liar, Michael.’ She sips her coffee. ‘Where was it?’
‘In the wardrobe.’
‘Ah.’ She nods. ‘His old hiding place.’
‘You knew?’
She shrugs. ‘He wasn’t very good at lying either.’ Her eyes settle on the camera. ‘I’ve not seen it in so long. May I?’ She reaches out.
I feel that tug again. An instinct that makes me want to pull it close. But I catch myself and pass it over.
Nanny Bet sets it on her lap and runs her fingers along the polished wood. ‘My granda Michael made me this to capture the visions.’ She laughs. ‘I wanted a Polaroid, but we couldn’t afford one.’
‘You took pictures too?’
She nods. ‘For reference. For my poems.’
I lean forward. ‘When did you start having visions?’
‘When I was fifteen. I was brought down to the docks to see the past.’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘Let me guess, you saw that bloody ship too?’
‘The Titanic?’
‘My mother had the gift – she was a singer. She never met her granda Patrick, but she would always bring me down to the shipyard hoping she’d see a vision of him from before he left…’
‘Did she?’
A sigh, her eyes gaze past me. ‘Never. We saw the ship. We saw people on the deck, but never him.’ She drains her cup. ‘It’s become a bit of a tradition since then. I brought your daddy down too, to pay our respects to Patrick and that big coffin of a ship he helped build.’
‘I think I saw it too. On the ferry over.’
Her eyes narrow. ‘But you forgot?’
I nod. ‘That was my first vision, but I’m nearly seventeen. Why didn’t I see them earlier? You said you started seeing them at fifteen?’
‘Well, it varies. Plus, it only seems to work in Ireland.’
I frown. ‘So if I’d never come here, I’d not have my powers. And if I left, I wouldn’t have them any more?’ A thought drops into my head. ‘Is that why Dad left?’
Nanny Bet’s eyelids flicker. ‘This power is an awful burden, Michael. Terrible things happened in this place. We don’t talk about the Troubles here for a reason.
Your father and I lived through it like everyone else, but then we kept having to relive it.
We had to see the bombs that tore lives apart.
People shot, tortured. Families grieving.
This city is infested with the ghosts of misery, and your father saw them everywhere.
He got the visions young, too young.’ She clears her throat.
‘It changed him. He couldn’t live here.’
‘Was it hard to see him go?’
‘It broke my heart, but he had to leave. I told him that.’
‘You let him go?’
A pause. A nod. ‘I made him. He had to get away from the visions. I think it was the same for my great-granda Patrick. He was born not long after the famine. My heart breaks at the thought of what he would’ve seen.
I didn’t want my son to go through that too.
Once he was away from here at university he was able to make art for himself, not for them.
He travelled the world and showed people the pain that is happening now.
Not dredging up the horrors of the past.’
I ball my hands into fists. ‘Except he was still miserable. He wasn’t happy at all. He drank and…’ I dig my nails into my palms. ‘Leaving didn’t work.’
She nods. ‘It didn’t work for Patrick, either. She won’t let us know peace.’
‘She?’
‘The Nightmare Queen, the Queen of the Slain, the battle furies. So many awful names.’
I shiver. I’ve been haunted, maybe even hunted, by this goddess for the last week, but I know so little about her. ‘What does she want from us?’
‘To tell stories of death and war. That’s our purpose.
’ She smiles then. ‘In ancient times, poets, the filí, held one of the most important positions in Irish society.
They were second only to the kings and queens.
The filí would tell the stories of the deeds of their people.
They were gifted prophecy from the gods themselves, and could crumble a kingdom with the truth and power of their words.
All the filí were feared and respected, but none more so than us: the filí báis, death poets of the Morrigan.
Our ancestors made a blood vow with her. Her essence runs through our veins.
‘We’re sworn from birth to tell her stories.
For millennia we’ve seen the past and told the tales.
We sang the songs and carried her words on the wind long before pen was put to paper.
We’ve been storytellers, bards, painters, poets, writers and photographers of death. We make people feel what we saw.’
Excitement buzzes in my chest. That’s what I did for Meg at the docks. She was transported by my words to see what I saw. Me, Dad, Nanny Bet, all our ancestors – we had a purpose, and we’re artists. ‘But why? Why do we do it.’
She exhales. ‘Death and war, son. We were tasked to strike fear, awe and courage into the hearts of the Irish. But I think under it all she wants the world to know who she is, what the Tuatha Dé Danann were. When people here turned from the old ways, they wanted their stories to carry on.’ She looks at the sky. ‘The vanity of gods!’
A crow caws from the garden fence and I flinch.
She glares at it.
‘Are the crows watching you, Michael?’
I follow her gaze and the crow stares back. ‘I think so.’