Steve nods away. ‘What kind of messed up?’
‘Ash said she used to be fine, back before we knew each other. But when Ash was almost ten, her dad walked out on them.’ Lucy should be relaxing, now that we’ve moved away from the murder and the hash and whatever she’s hiding, but her fingers are still rigid on her smoke and her feet are still braced on the paint-splattered floorboards like she might need to run any minute. ‘They never knew why, exactly. He didn’t say. Just . . . gone.’
‘And that wrecked Mrs Murray’s head.’
‘She never got over it. She just started going downhill and couldn’t stop. Ash said she was ashamed; she felt like it had to have been her fault.’ That twist to Lucy’s mouth again, through her cigarette, but this time the warmth isn’t there. ‘That generation, you know? Everything was the woman’s fault somehow, and if you didn’t get how, then you probably needed to pray harder. So Ash’s mum basically cut herself off. From everyone. She still went to the shops and to Mass, but that was it. So by the time we met, Ash had had two years where she spent most of her life stuck in the house, just her and her mum and the telly – she’s an only child. I never even wanted to go over there because her mum creeped me out so much – you’d hear her crying in her bedroom, or else you’d go into the kitchen and she’d just be standing there staring at a spoon while something went up in smoke on the cooker, and the curtains were always closed in case someone saw her through a window and, I don’t know, thought bad things about her . . . And Aislinn had to live there.’
Steve’s hit the Go button. Lucy’s talking faster; she’s not going to stop till we stop her, or till she crashes. ‘There was small stuff, too. Like, since her mum didn’t go out, and they didn’t have a lot of money, Ash’s clothes were always wrong – she never had whatever everyone else in school was wearing; it was always charity-shop crap that was two years out of date and didn’t suit her. I used to lend her stuff, but we were different sizes – that was another reason Aislinn was insecure: she was always, not fat, but a bit overweight – and my mum bought her stuff sometimes, but there’s four of us so there was a limit to what she could do, you know? It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’re twelve and everyone already knows that your dad’s left and your mum’s gone off the rails, the last thing you need is to look like some weirdo.’
This is the stuff Steve likes, and the stuff I’m wary of. He thinks it gives us an insight into the victim. Me, I think about those filters. I already know Lucy’s got at least one agenda that we haven’t pinned down. The Aislinn we’re getting here is totally in Lucy’s hands; she can do whatever she wants with her.
I say, ‘This is gonna sound blunt, Lucy, and I’m sorry about that. But I’m not getting why you two were friends. I’m trying to see it, but I can’t put my finger on a single thing yous had in common. What made it work?’
‘I guess you had to be there.’ Lucy half-smiles; not at me, at whatever she’s seeing. ‘We did have stuff in common. I wasn’t having that great a time in school either. I wasn’t an outcast or anything, but I was always into carpentry and electrics, so the boss mares gave me shite about that and called me a dyke, and the people who wanted to get in with them did it too, and it wasn’t some major torture thing but overall school mostly sucked. But Ash, right? She thought I was great – for the exact same things that everyone else was slagging me about. She thought I was totally amazing, like some kind of heroine, just because I told the other girls to fuck off and did what I wanted even though they didn’t like it. Ash thought that was the coolest thing ever.’
The smile spasms into something wretched. She takes a drag off her smoke to force it back under control. ‘And yeah, at first partly I was hanging out with her because I liked her thinking I was amazing, but after the first while it was because I liked her. People thought she was thick, but that was just because of what I told you, how she was unsure – it made her seem like she wasn’t keeping up. She wasn’t thick, at all. She was actually really perceptive.’
Steve is nodding along, all enthralled. I’m interested too, but not like that. Lucy wants us to know Aislinn, or at least her version of Aislinn; wants it badly. Sometimes we get that: the friends and family want to shove a holy innocent in our faces, so we won’t think this was all the vic’s fault. Usually they do it when they think it was at least partly the vic’s fault. Aislinn shagging a married man might be enough to do that for Lucy, or there might be more.
‘And she could make even shit things funny. Like I’d have some bitch-off with some cow in our class, and afterwards I’d be all pissed off and adrenaline-y, like “Who does that geebag think she is, I should’ve punched her face in . . .” And Ash would start giggling, and I’d be like, “What? It’s not funny!” all ready to go off on her; but she’d go, “You were brilliant, like this little furious cat chasing away a horrible dirty hyena” – and she’d do an imitation of me jumping up and down, trying to punch something way above my head. She’d be like, “I thought she was going to run for it, she’d be hiding in a corner screaming for help while you bit the ankles off her, everyone’d be crowding around chanting your name . . .” And all of a sudden I’d be laughing too, and the whole thing wouldn’t feel like a big deal any more. I wouldn’t feel like such a big deal.’
Lucy laughs, but there’s a stretched sound to it, like it’s straining against the solid weight of pain dragging downwards. ‘That was Ash. She made things better. Maybe because she’d had so much practice with her mum, trying to make their life even bearable for both of them; I don’t know. But even when she couldn’t make things better for herself, she made them better for other people.’
Please I don’t know where else to— That woman was still the twelve-year-old that Lucy’s describing: chubby, insecure, clothes that wouldn’t suit anyone and definitely didn’t suit her. The dead woman was a whole different story. I say, ‘Things got better for her, too, though. She grew into her looks, got a bit of style, bit of confidence. Yeah?’