Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(2)

So what with Mum slapping Dad, Geri turning traitor and Noel stealing my hush money, May 31st 1998 hadn’t exactly been a great day for me. In fact, I wrote in my diary that it was the ‘Worst Day Ever in the Entire History of the Whole World Ever’. Even worse than the day I’d been sick on the escalators in Brent Cross and Noel told everyone I had AIDS.

It was so bad I hadn’t even noticed Maryanne was missing.

*

Maryanne was Jacqui’s friend, so Jacqui insisted anyway. I never saw them exchange anything other than the odd funny fag and back-handed compliment. If I had to sum it up, I’d say Maryanne was oblivious to Jacqui, who at just fourteen was three years her junior and still in her training bra.

I’d looked up the word ‘oblivious’ after Jacqui had stomped into Gran’s one night, raging about Maryanne and her mates going off with some ‘bog-boys,’ which meant she’d had to walk home in the dark.

‘I’m telling you, that Doyle one’s oblivious to anyone’s feelings,’ Mum said, stirring a pan of hot milk for Gran’s brandy-laced cocoa. ‘The mother was the same, though God forgive me, I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.’

I certainly wasn’t oblivious to Maryanne. From the second I clapped eyes on her, I’d been dogged in my pursuit of this glittering creature in her baby-doll smocks and hoops the size of Catherine Wheels – trailing behind her and her crew, mute with reverence and pained shyness, looking to get involved in literally anything they’d let me. Not that they ever did let me. In fact, she only ever deigned to acknowledge my existence once, at the Farmers’ Market that was held every Friday in the town square.

It was two days before she disappeared.

‘Hey, I like your Tinkerbell,’ she said, touching the tiny pink pendant that hung around my neck – a Holy Communion gift from an aunt who wasn’t big into Jesus. ‘Where’d you get it? It’s gorgeous! Look, it matches my belly-button ring, dead-on!’

She inched up her top and a group of tanked-up lads, wolfing chips out of cones, requested loudly that she get more than her belly-button out. Maryanne wasn’t ruffled though. She just flicked them the Vs and turned back to me.

But then Maryanne wasn’t exactly short of admirers. With her liquorice-black curls and blossom-pink pout, most boys turned into cartoon clichés around her – eyes out on stalks, steam billowing from ears, blood-red hearts pumping outside their puny adolescent chests.

And it wasn’t just the boys either.

It was the men.

The husbands.

The dads.

*

Dad told a lie that holiday. A big snarling monster of a lie. The kind that grown-ups always say you should never ever tell.

The kind that always comes back to haunt you.

There was only one person who knew it was a lie but eight-year-olds don’t count, do they? Eight-year-olds are too busy with their stickers and their sweets and their Pokemon and their Spice Girls to ever have a clue about what’s really going on.

Dad made lots of mistakes that holiday but his biggest was to equate being eight with being stupid.

Because I know he told a lie about Maryanne Doyle.

I know it truer than I know my own name.





1

Four p.m. Every Monday. For one hour. For the next eight weeks.

In roughly the same timeframe I could achieve something tangible, left to my own devices.

I could learn to code like every good little Millennial, or master the perfect soufflé.

But what I can’t do is change the past. I can’t redraft the god-awful ending or whitewash the dirt. These cosy, weekly, early-evening chats, well-intentioned as they are, can never obliterate the memory of tiny red footprints on cream kitchen tiles, nor wash crusty dried blood out of baby-fine hair. Nothing we discuss in this room can ever change what happened, and so it makes it all rather pointless in my book. Just a weekly invitation to my own private pity-party.

‘Why are you here, Catrina?’

Dr Dolores Allen, playing beautifully to type, glances furtively at the clock – the signature move of her profession. I follow her gaze and see I’ve got eight minutes left.

I keep it brief.

‘Because DCI Steele needs to tick a box so she’s outsourced the problem to you.’ The window’s open a crack and in the distance I can hear a group of toddlers chirping ‘Little Donkey’, out of tune and out of rhythm. The sound soothes me and then savages me with each jarring note. ‘Basically, she thinks I need my head sorted and, lucky old you, she thinks you’re the woman to do it.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘Little Donkey. Carry Mary, safely on her way .?.?.’

‘I think she might be right.’ I nod towards a wall peppered with achievements. ‘I mean, Masters from Queens, BPS, BACP. Very impressive. A BA in Textile Design, that’s me. Or a BA in Colouring In, as Steele calls it.’

She smirks. Or at least I think it’s a smirk. Dr Dolores Allen has one of those Mona Lisa mouths, the kind that makes you think that you’re not quite in on the joke. It’s an unfortunate mouth for a psychologist to have when you think about it. Wry smiles rarely win deep trust.

‘Catrina, I’m interested that you referred to yourself as a “problem” just now. Is that how you see yourself?’

I shift awkwardly in my chair and the scrunching of the leather fills the silence while I try to work out how to answer without digging myself in deeper. ‘Everyone defines themselves by their problems, don’t they?’