It began with a song, an earworm to be exact. That annoying tune you can’t quite get out of your head but don’t actually know the lyrics to. Once I find and read the lyrics, somehow, don’t ask me why, the song dies in my head, probably from exposure. Anyways, that’s how I think of it.

So, I went online looking for the lyrics, but if you don’t actually know it, how do you find the title of the blooming song in the first place? You look for the musician instead. It was a minor miracle remembering his name. These days, my memory is more like a ratty blanket, the kind with holes in it.

That’s when I saw the picture, the first picture. To be honest, I hadn’t paid that much attention to it. I wasn’t looking for a picture. The internet likes to throw surprising things at you. I said as much to my daughter who just gave me that look. The one you know where they think you don’t understand that it means dotty. Yeah, the child I spent hours looking after on little sleep and even less motivation, now thinks of me as her ‘dotty’ ma.

Anyways, the picture. I looked at it. Didn’t think much of it then as I found what I was looking for. But then, the other day, I saw it again. Well, it wasn’t the same picture, that would have been weird, wouldn’t it? I said this to my daughter, but she wasn’t listening, not really.

It wasn’t the same picture. The first one looked like a celebration of some kind. It was the same musician though, only this time he was at a funeral. Not his, some other famous person, whose name hasn’t found a place in my head. But he’s dead now, so no point worrying about it. I mean we’ll all be dead sooner or later. Sometimes, I look at my daughter and wonder which one she would prefer.

Anyways, in the picture, that’s where I saw her – the girl. The kind Ma used to warn us about. Funny thing that. Ma always warned us about girls. Not about the boys, or the men who came calling, always the girls. Like she wasn’t worried about me, Twin, Eldest or Baby. It was always Brother Dearest that her warnings were about. She wanted us to protect him from those girls.

Turns out we didn’t need to. One ex-fiancee, a series of boyfriends and now Matt, who we hope he sticks with, as he’s much too good for Brother Dearest.

I mentioned this to my daughter, not about Matt, who she adores as well, but about the girl in the picture. She said, ‘oh I know, that’s a ‘pick-me girl’. I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was on about. But I didn’t like to say, in case I got that look again. What’s a picking got to do with anything?

I called my twin. I told her where to look. I could remember that much. She agreed with me. It’s just like ma said. We thought it was just one of her back-home stories that da used to hate her talking about. Sometimes, we wondered why he had married her. Back then, he could have done a runner, and no one would have blinked at him. But he did the decent catholic thing. He made her miserable instead.

We called Eldest and asked her if she remembered what Ma used to say about ‘water maidens’.

“You mean a ‘mammy water”, she says. Eldest has always been like that. Correcting us even though she knows what we’re talking about.

“Anyways, I’ve found one”, I said to her. She looked at the pictures. We found more on the internet. The same girl, always at a wedding and then at a funeral. Sometimes, her hair was different, sometimes, it was her skin colour. But it was always the same girl.

So then Eldest came for the family meeting. Baby as usual ignored us, off doing her thing which we still have no idea what it is.

“You know what we have to do’, Eldest said. Twin looked at me as if to say, are we really doing this? I thought about all those years of Ma teaching us how to kill one and how we never got a chance to put it to practice. I thought to myself, why not.

Anyways, it’s probably like one of those songs, exposing it will probably do the job of killing it.