Which gave Maryanne stronger leverage to blackmail him to do what?
‘Right.’ Hazel O’Keefe stands up abruptly. ‘I better get home, I suppose, if I want the house still standing.’ She kisses Manda on both cheeks and they make promises to meet up properly in the New Year, promises they both know they won’t keep. ‘I hope you catch whoever did it,’ she says to me. ‘She could be a right cow sometimes, but sure, couldn’t we all at that age.’
‘Ah now, she wasn’t that bad, Hazel.’ Manda dabs at her eyes again, more for effect than necessity. ‘Don’t be speaking ill of the dead.’
Hazel picks up her phone. ‘It was just that she was snide, you know, that’s what I could never stomach. Me and Mands, and even Durkin Donut – that’s Colette Durkin – we fought and fell out and we slagged each other and all that, but Maryanne could be proper, proper snide. Putting you down in front of folk. Taking the piss without you realising.’
‘And always taking your stuff,’ chimes in Manda, clearly thinking ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ ‘Not stealing it, she was more wily than that. She’d just suddenly be your best pal, you know? All over you like a rash, flattering you, saying whatever she had her eye was soooooo gorgeous and she was so jealous, that sort of thing. Before you knew it, you’d given it to her – “here, it’d look better on you,” I’d end up saying. Sad thing is, it always did.’
‘Hey, I like your Tinkerbell,’ she said, touching the tiny pink pendant that hung around my neck – a Holy Communion gift from a distant Aunt who wasn’t big into Jesus. ‘Where’d you get it? It’s gorgeous! Look, it matches my belly-button ring, dead-on!’
1998
Saturday 6th June
‘Can I have a car hoover for Christmas?’
Mum looked at me with the annoyed face, thin-lipped and beady-eyed. She’d been looking at me with the annoyed face all morning. And all of yesterday. All week, really. She was cross that I’d lost my Tinkerbell pendant, a gift from Auntie Someone in America who doesn’t have the money to be wasting on spoilt little girls who don’t look after things properly.
She’d be even more cross if she knew I’d given it away.
‘Course you can, sweetheart,’ said Dad, fishing crisp and fag packets out of the side pockets of the car. ‘Or you could have it for your birthday, that comes first?’
Problem was, I wanted a leaf blower for my birthday. A great big red one with cruise control throttle like the one ‘Uncle’ Frank used for clearing his posh drive. And I couldn’t have a leaf blower AND a car hoover for my birthday because Jesus said we shouldn’t be greedy. I’d learned that in Holy Communion class too.
Mum stuck her head into the back seat, pulled out a banana skin. ‘This is disgusting. It’s only been two weeks and look at the state of the car.’
I jumped in beside her. ‘It hasn’t been two weeks, actually, it’s been twelve days.’ I counted them out on my fingers. ‘Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.’
‘All right, smart-arse, less cheek to your mum,’ said Dad, pulling a map of Ireland out of the glove compartment. ‘Here, Ellen, do you think your mam will use this?’
Mum gave Dad the annoyed face. ‘What would Mammy want with a map of Ireland, Mike? She hasn’t left the county since I-don’t-know-when. She hasn’t left Mulderrin for over a year.’
We hadn’t left Mulderrin in twelve days. I didn’t know why Dad needed a map of Ireland either.
And I didn’t know why Mum insisted on calling Gran, ‘Mammy’. It made her sound like a baby.
‘Mum,’ I said, stressing the word. ‘Can Gran come back with us? I think she might like London.’
Dad laughed, shouted over the top of the car hoover, ‘She might, she loves EastEnders!’
I thought it was a good point but Mum put her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Catrina, where would she sleep?’
But I was ready for this. I’d thought it all through. Gran could have my bed, I said, which meant they’d have to get me a new one and if they weren’t sure which are to get me, I’d seen one shaped like Buzz Lightyear in the Argos catalogue. Or, I suggested, Gran could have their bed because Mum often stayed at Auntie Carmel’s anyway and Dad was well used to kipping on the couch. Then, and this was my favourite idea, I said maybe Noel could move out and Gran could have his room (only after we’d opened the windows for a week though!). My last (and to be honest, least favourite) suggestion was that I give up my room and share with Jacqui again, like I ALWAYS had to do when one of our barmaids lived in.
Not that anyone had lived in since Alina – our Latvian barmaid – had moved out.
That last suggestion was definitely Mum and Dad’s least favourite too because they looked at each other funny and Mum popped the car boot open, saying something grumpy under her breath.
Dad turned off the car hoover, walked over to me and gave one of my curls a ping. ‘It’s a lovely idea, sweetheart, but the World Cup’s starting in a few days and it’d be much too noisy for Gran. And she’d never make it up the stairs. We’ve got a lot more stairs at the pub than Gran has here, haven’t we?’
We had. Fourteen up the fire escape to get to the front door. Another fourteen to get to the kitchen and the living room. And then ANOTHER fourteen to climb when it was time to go to bed.
Dad was right. Gran would never make it.
I was disappointed but at least Dad thought about things and made good points. He didn’t just stand there with a grumpy face or whisper grumpy things under his breath like Mum did.
But suddenly Mum didn’t have a grumpy face anymore.
‘Look, Cat,’ she said, pointing in the boot. I ran over to see what was making her less grumpy. ‘It’s amazing what you find when you actually look for things properly, isn’t it?’
I peered closer. Saw it glittering in between a wellie and one of those sealed brown boxes that Dad warned me I was never to touch.
My Tinkerbell.
But I’d given my Tinkerbell to Maryanne Doyle?
Maybe she’d heard that Mum was cross with me for losing it so she’d done a kind thing and snuck it back? Ever since she’d disappeared people had said mean things about her but if she’d done that, she definitely wasn’t all bad.
Stupid place to leave it, though. In the boot of Dad’s car.
23
‘So you’ve got a better sense of what she was like, you think she was pregnant when she left Ireland, and you remembered how to say “hot chocolate” in French, but that’s about it?’
It’s a fair summation. Steele’s not being snarky either, she just never has the patience for the nuances of the long version.
‘Yup. Report on the back of a fag packet OK for you?’
She raises her hand. ‘Er, quit with the negativity Kinsella. How sure are we she was pregnant?’
‘She had all the early symptoms, and it works as a theory – Irish girl comes to England for an abortion on the QT.’
Steele nods. ‘But obviously something changed her mind as we know she gave birth.’
‘Again, on the QT,’ says Renée, packing up for the day. ‘It’s not registered anywhere, it’s not in her medical records.’
‘Illegal surrogacy?’ I chip in. They both nod like they’ve been discussing it. ‘It’d explain the IVF desperation, anyway. Gina Hicks said that even when she first met “Alice” a few years ago, she was already strung out about the IVF not working, which seemed a bit odd as they hadn’t been trying that long.’
Renée sees where I’m going. ‘Yep, that’s definitely going to sting. Struggling to conceive a child when you already gave a perfectly good one away.’
‘It doesn’t explain why she’d put the brakes on the IVF though,’ says Steele.
It does to me – ‘Maryanne was fierce resourceful.’
‘They’d been through so many rounds already, I think she was giving Thomas Lapaine up as a lost cause, looking elsewhere.’