Maeve, no.
I’m sorry, Roe, I’m sorry.
Michelle and Niamh are watching me, waiting for a response. There’s no use in saying they’re not bitches. They are. The only thing left to do is become one of them.
And in one fluid motion, I turn on the faucet.
Lily watches, her mouth gaping in shock. The contents of her entire school bag – her watercolour pencils, her books, her stripy little scarf and hat – are being slowly drenched in cold water. She doesn’t move a muscle.
Even I know I’ve gone too far. Further than it is possible to find your way back from. I have drenched a lifetime of committed friendship in a school sink.
“Sorry,” I say lamely, and push past her, linking arms with Niamh and Michelle as I move. She stays in the toilets, watching silently as the water spills over the rim of the sink and onto the floor.
Now, she can be your downfall, or she can be your start.
Ladies, meet the Housekeeper card.
Something changes then. Like a wave washing away a drawing in the sand, fifteen-year-old Lily slowly dissolves and Lily at sixteen comes to replace her. This is a more recent memory. Much, much more recent.
We are at St Bernadette’s again, a crowd of girls gathered around us. The tarot cards are spread in front of us. Lily’s eyes fill with tears as she stares forlornly at the Housekeeper.
Oh no oh no oh no…
Is this it? Is this the reading?
“Tell me, Maeve. I’m not too much of a baby to know.”
“I don’t know what it means.”
Fiona is next to me making soothing noises, trying to defuse the situation. But it’s useless. No one watching wants this moment to end. It’s the ultimate in mid-afternoon entertainment: two ex-best friends spitting venom at each other over a stupid card game.
“This is so like you. This is so Maeve.”
“Lily. Stop. I genuinely don’t know what it means, OK?”
“You’ll do anything for a bit of attention, won’t you, Maeve? But then, when all eyes are on you, you’ve got nothing to back it up.”
“I can’t believe we were ever friends,” Lily says. “You’re not a good friend, Maeve.”
Oh God. It’s coming. It’s coming. Roe. I’m sorry.
“I wish I had never been friends with you,” I reply, my teeth bared. “Lily, I wish you would just disappear.”
I feel for Roe in my head, searching for his presence.
Where are you? Talk to me. Please.
I open my eyes and I’m back in the hedge, my hair caked in dirt. I look around, groping for a hand to help me up.
But there’s none. Roe is gone.
I scramble out just in time to catch the back of him crossing the football pitch and eventually, he disappears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I CALL HIM AND CALL HIM, AND HE DOESN’T ANSWER. Eventually, he WhatsApps.
Stop calling, he writes.
I just want to explain what happened
A brief pause.
I saw what happened.
The familiar bubbles of typing and stopping, stopping and typing. After a while he gives up.
I’m sorry, I write.
You let me believe that Lily summoned the Housekeeper. But YOU did.
I am about to tap out my response, but his next message comes too quickly.
You WISHED she would just disappear? And you didn’t think that was relevant information?
I know I should think carefully about what I say next, but the panic is too strong. I type and type, sending long essay-length texts full of guilt and bargaining and misery. I stipulate over and over how we still don’t know what summons the Housekeeper, that it could have been both of us, or the concentrated energy of all the girls in the room. That these were all just theories, really, and we didn’t have any actual proof that the Housekeeper existed at all.
Another silence.
I just want to be alone right now.
I write and delete a million messages to him over the course of the evening. Do you still want to go out? And, Am I still invited to your gig on Saturday? And, most pathetically of all, Do you still like me?
Thankfully, I have enough self-preservation not to send them.
There’s something on the radio about global warming and gulf streams and fish migration patterns. A scientist is explaining to Alan Maguire about a warm current coming up from Brazil, and Alan Maguire is reading messages from listeners about how, in the good old days, everyone would go skating when the river froze over. Why hasn’t the river frozen over?
Joanne is in for the evening. She hasn’t been around much, lately. Her romance with Sarra is in full swing again, and she’s spending every other night at hers. I have a feeling she’s going to move out, and I’ll be alone with Mum and Dad again. Alone for, at the very least, another two years. Who am I kidding? It’s only two years if I go to a college in a different county, and at the moment it’s difficult to imagine me getting accepted into any college at all. I wince thinking about Mum getting me into the local university, or using her pull to get me a job in the bookshop.
“Hey, stranger,” Jo says as I descend the stairs. She’s baking again. A kind of oaty, honey biscuit that’s great dipped in tea. “Haven’t seen a lot of you lately.”
“Yeah,” I shrug. I can feel the three of them being cautiously optimistic about how much I’ve been out of the house lately. They still talk about me like they suspect I’m deaf. It’s good she’s keeping busy, etc., etc.
“A little birdy told me they saw you kissing someone.”
“What? When?”
“One of the girls asked if my sister had a boyfriend. I said not that I knew of…”
“Oh Jesus.”
“Well? What’s his name?”
I say nothing,
