Her brother.
“The O’Callaghans say they didn’t notice any particular changes in her behaviour that weekend, although maybe a little more quiet than usual, on reflection.”
“Lily was always quiet,” Jo says. “She’s just like that.”
“That’s the impression we’re getting. In any case, her mother didn’t realize she was missing until around 8 a.m. on Monday morning, when Lily didn’t respond to numerous calls. Eventually Mrs O’Callaghan opened the bedroom door, and she was gone. She didn’t take anything with her. No clothes, no bag. She didn’t even change out of her pyjamas, by the looks of things.”
Jo and I are silent, both of us imagining Lily trudging down her suburban road in pyjamas. I find myself wondering, strangely, what kind of pyjamas Lily wears now.
“We’re looking for anyone who can give us information about Lily,” Griffin concludes. “And Maeve volunteered herself.”
“But, Maeve, Lily hasn’t been round here in ages. You two fell out last year, didn’t you?”
Griffin gives me that look again. That sharp, enquiring look that says, Well that’s interesting.
“Yes, but … we spoke again on Friday. I gave her a tarot reading. I didn’t want to, and neither did she, but the girls in school sort of … made it happen.”
“I’m sorry, tarot reading? Like, the cards?” Ward asks.
“Yeah,” I reply. “I’ve been giving tarot readings for everyone in our year. I found a deck in school and I learned the card meanings. It wasn’t a big deal. Or, I didn’t think it was. Anyway, I gave Lily a reading and she got upset. Then she didn’t come back to school.”
“What did you tell her in the reading? Did you say she was going to die, or something?”
“No, not at all. I would never. The cards don’t predict the future, they show your present.” I don’t know why I’m delivering my little rehearsed speech on tarot readings to a detective. As if she cares.
“What did Lily’s reading say?”
“It said she was very lonely. And heartbroken.”
“Lonely? For a boyfriend? Did she have an ex-boyfriend she was in contact with?”
“No.” I shake my head firmly. “Lily wasn’t like that. The reading was about me. I…”
I splutter again. Jo asks if I want some water, and I shake my head. I take another run at the sentence.
“I used to be Lily’s best friend. And then we stopped – I stopped – being friends with her.”
“Did you have a fight?”
I bury my face in my hands. No, we didn’t have a proper fight. I wish we had. A fight presumes that both parties are equally at fault.
The truth of the thing is that I froze Lily out, plain and simple. I started getting friendlier with some girls who were technically higher up the social pecking order, and, for a while, I thought Lily could climb with me. Me, Michelle, Niamh, and Lily would all sit around at lunch. I knew the girls didn’t like Lily as much as I did, but I thought that could change once they got to know her. They would see how funny she was, how utterly original.
But it didn’t work out like that.
“What are you staring at, Lily?” Niamh asked one day when she caught Lily staring at them taking selfies together. “You’re always looking at us.”
“I was just thinking, how cool would it be if you took all these selfies, and they aged and got all disgusting, but you stayed the same? And every time you opened your phone, you just saw this gnarled tree-stump face. Like in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But with phones.”
I laughed at that. I hadn’t read The Picture of Dorian Gray, but Lily had, and she had told me the plot. We acted it out. We were still into “acting things out”, even though we were definitely too old for games like that.
“You’re weird,” Niamh retorted. At first, she said it warmly, as if giving her the benefit of the doubt. But she kept saying it. The last straw came when we started hanging out with some boys from St Anthony’s at the old tennis courts after school, and Lily licked Keith Delaney.
“Maeve,” Niamh rang me that night. “We need to talk. It’s about Lily.”
“About the licking,” I countered, knowing already what this was about. “She was just doing this game we play sometimes.”
The Licking Game was a thing we had invented a few years earlier. It started when Roe told us that it was impossible to lick your own elbow, and we spent about two days trying. That spun into a years-long game of trying to lick things in difficult or risky places, even if it was just putting your tongue on it for a second. We would go into Waterstones on a Saturday and pretend to browse from across the store, keeping one eye on each other, and then slowly – so, so, slowly – put our tongue on whatever book we were pretending to read. Then we would leave the shop, holding each other and screaming with laughter.
It’s one of those “you had to be there” things, I suppose.
So when Lily, after hours and hours of patiently waiting for something fun to happen at the tennis courts, gently tapped her tongue on the back of Keith’s neck, it was her way of saying: Hey, can we just have some fun, already?
When I lamely tried to explain Licking to Niamh, she was silent for a time. “Look, Maeve,” she said, “we never asked to be friends with her, and we don’t want to hang around with her any more.”
And that was it. I started snubbing Lily at school, turning my back on her, refusing to meet her eye when she spoke to me. I told Joanne to tell her I was out when she phoned the house looking for me. Eventually, Lily got the hint. The Licking of Keith Delaney turned out to be her final act as my best friend.
I turn my face back to Griffin. “No, we didn’t have a fight. We just grew apart.”
“Can
