I’m just finishing my second plate of food and my fourth game of Mario Kart when Fiona taps me on the arm. “C’mon,” she says. “Follow me through the kitchen.”
We glide back through the kitchen, where a karaoke machine has been set up and two of Fiona’s aunts are singing “Vogue”. Fiona walks into the room, claps and sings along, and then seamlessly wraps her hands around a bottle of red wine and hides it under a dishcloth. She winks at me, and I follow her up the stairs and into her room.
“Slick,” I say, impressed.
“Like cat shit on a linoleum floor,” she replies with a grin.
She tips the wine into two plastic cups.
“Thanks, Fifi.”
“Shut your damn mouth.”
“Your family are very cool.”
“Oh God, don’t. If you say that around my mother, she’ll get her sax out.”
“Her saxophone?”
“Drink your stupid wine.”
The wine tastes like dirt and blackberries, bitter and stinging on my palate. I cough.
“You don’t drink wine?”
“No, I do. Just usually … white.”
Lie. One the rare occasions that I drink, it’s usually some vile vodka mix sipped out of a Coke bottle. I take another gulp, and it goes down easier this time.
“Mmm. Earthy.”
I peer over my cup to see that Fiona is also grimacing slightly, and that she doesn’t really drink wine either. I catch her eye and we both burst out laughing, delighted that we were both willing to put on a show for the other.
Fiona opens her laptop. “So I looked up Children of Brigid, and there’s not that much out there. Just the closed Facebook group that weird girl mentioned. I mean, who even uses Facebook any more?”
“See-Oh-Bee. CoB! Children of Brigid. OK, sorry, I just got it.”
“Thank you, Miss Chambers, for joining the rest of the class.”
“Shut up. I got there eventually. Did you request to join?”
“Are you joking? Imagine if people saw – they’re a fundamentalist protest group.”
I suddenly think of Jo, and the day she left college early because there was a protest of some queer exhibition. It seems likely that these are the same crowd, and that they’re after more than just cool shops.
“Well, we could make up some fake profiles, and ask to join as them.”
So we drink wine, and we create fake Facebook profiles. We steal photos from obscure Tumblr pages and call ourselves Mary-Ellen Jones and Amy Gold. We spend a long time trying to make our profiles look like ordinary, real girls and it becomes a sort of game. We try to out-normal each other, turning the traits of other people into jokes about the kind of girls we will never be. We’re being a little cruel, but I can tell that these jokes are as much a balm to her as they are to me.
“OK, OK,” Fiona says, giggling while typing. “I’m going to put, ‘Love my besties for ever’.”
“How about that Marilyn Monroe quote people always use? What is it? ‘If you can’t handle me at my worst’ – or some crap?”
“’If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best’,” she says. “Oh yes, that’s gold. I’m putting that.”
Suddenly, we hear a thick pop of brass travelling up the stairs and I jump.
Fiona’s mum has brought her sax out.
I phone Mum, who says she’ll collect me at eleven. I brush my teeth with my finger in Fiona’s upstairs bathroom before she arrives to try to disguise the smell of alcohol, and say goodbye to her family.
Marie hugs me tight. “You know you can stay for a sleepover if you like? You can call your mother, if she hasn’t left already?”
“That’s OK,” I reply, beaming at her. “But I’ll be back! If you’ll have me.”
“Anyone who eats is allowed to come back. It’s why those actresses haven’t got a second invitation.”
“Mum!” Fiona scolds.
“Fifi, it’s true.”
Luckily, Mum doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve had half a bottle of red wine, or if she has, she’s decided to forgive me for it. She looks at me a little suspiciously on the ride home, her brow furrowed as I talk animatedly about Fiona’s family, telling her that we should have more family parties. I keep reminding myself to slow down, to not slur my words, to hide as best I can that I’m on the slightly-wrong-side of tipsy. She stays silent.
“You know,” I say, slightly huffy with her, “I thought you’d be glad that I was out on Saturday night. With parental supervision.”
Mum continues to say nothing. We are pulling into the driveway of our house.
“They’re such a nice family,” I continue. “And Fiona’s mum Marie plays the saxophone!”
“Maeve,” Mum finally says, turning off the ignition. “There’s been some news.”
In an instant, my sloppy wine buzz turns into pure nausea.
“Good news? Bad news?”
“Neither, really. Just news. It seems someone saw Lily on the night she went missing.”
We sit in the car, and Mum tells me everything Lily’s mum told her. At around 5 a.m. on the morning Lily went missing, a milkman was doing his rounds near the Beg when he spotted a very tall girl with dark-blonde hair wearing a coat over her pyjamas. She was not alone. Walking with the girl was a woman with black hair. The milkman, who was used to bumping into all sorts of unusual characters at that hour of the morning, waved hello to the pair. The woman turned away, hiding her face, but the girl looked straight at him. The girl looked like she had been crying.
“The milkman apparently assumed that they were mother and daughter, and that they were fleeing some sort of domestic violence,” Mum explains. “Which is why he remembered them. They stuck in his head, and apparently he was worried about them for quite a few days afterwards. He felt very guilty for not offering to
