The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(9)

The clearing is small, just a circle of short grass ringed by tall cypresses. The air is instantly and utterly different, still and cool, with tiny eddies moving here and there. Sounds drop into it – a wood-dove’s lazy coo, the fizz of insects about their business somewhere – and disappear without leaving a ripple.

Selena says, only a little out of breath, ‘We come here.’

‘You never showed us this place before,’ Holly says. Selena and Becca glance at each other and shrug. For a second, Holly feels almost betrayed – Selena and Becca have been boarding for two years, but it never occurred to her that they would have separate stuff together – until she realises that now she’s part of it too.

‘Sometimes you feel like you’re going to go crazy if you don’t go somewhere private,’ Becca says. ‘We come here.’ She drops down on the grass in a spider-tangle of skinny legs and looks up anxiously at Holly and Julia. Her hands are cupped together tight, like she’s offering them the glade for their welcome present and isn’t sure it’s going to be good enough.

‘It’s great,’ Holly says. She smells cut grass, the rich earth in the shadows; a trace of something wild, like animals trot silently through here on their road from one nighttime place to another. ‘And nobody else ever comes?’

‘They’ve got their own places,’ Selena says. ‘We don’t go there.’

Julia turns, head tilted back to watch birds wheeling in the circle of blue, in and out of their V. ‘I like it,’ she says. ‘I like it a lot,’ and she drops down on the grass next to Becca. Becca grins and lets her breath out, and her hands loosen.

They stretch out, shift till the slipping sun is out of their eyes. The grass is dense and glossy, like some animal’s pelt, good to lie on. ‘God, McKenna’s speech,’ Julia says. ‘“Your daughters already have such a wonderful head start in life because you’re all so literate and health-conscious and cultured and just super-awesome all over, and we’re so totally thrilled to have the chance to continue your good work,” and pass the puke bag.’

‘It’s the same speech every year,’ Becca says. ‘Every single word.’

‘In first year my dad almost took me straight home because of that speech,’ Selena says. ‘He says it’s elitist.’ Selena’s dad lives on some commune place in Kilkenny and wears handwoven ponchos. Her mum picked Kilda’s.

‘My dad was thinking the same thing,’ Holly says. ‘I could see it. I was terrified he was going to say something smart-arsed when McKenna finished, but Mum stood on his foot.’

‘It totally was elitist,’ Julia says. ‘So? There’s nothing wrong with elitist. Some stuff is better than other stuff; pretending it’s not doesn’t make you open-minded, it just makes you a dick. What made me want to puke was the fawning. Like we’re these products our parents shat out, and McKenna’s patting all their heads and telling them what a good job they did, and they’re wagging their tails and licking her hand and just about peeing on the floor. How does she even know? What if my parents never read a book in their lives, and they feed me deep-fried Mars bars for every meal?’

‘She doesn’t care,’ Becca says. ‘She just wants to make them feel good about spending a load of money to get rid of us.’

There’s a snip of silence. Becca’s parents work in Dubai most of the time. They didn’t make it back for today; the housekeeper brought Becca in.

‘This is good,’ Selena says. ‘You being here.’

‘It doesn’t feel real yet,’ Holly says, which is only sort of true but is the best she can do. It feels real in flashes, between long grainy stretches of dizzy static, but those flashes are vivid enough that they throw every other kind of real out of her head and it feels like she’s never been anywhere else but here. Then they’re gone.

‘Does to me,’ Becca says. She’s smiling up at the sky. The bruise has faded out of her voice.

‘It will,’ says Selena. ‘It takes a while.’

They lie there, feeling their bodies sink deeper into the glade and change rhythm to blend with the things around them: the tink tink tink of a bird somewhere, the slow slide and blink of sunbeams through the thick cypresses. Holly realises she’s flipping through the day, the way she does every afternoon on the bus home, picking out bits for telling: a funny story with a bit of boldness in it for Dad, something to impress Mum or – if Holly’s pissed off with her, which it seems like she mostly is these days – something to shock her into letting a reaction slip out: Sweet Lord, Holly, why would anyone want to say such a . . . while Holly rolls her eyes to heaven. It hits her that there’s no point in doing that now. The picture each day leaves behind isn’t going to be given its shape by Dad’s grin and Mum’s lifting eyebrows, not any more.

Instead it’ll be shaped by the others. Holly looks at them and feels today shifting, fitting itself into the outlines she’ll remember in twenty years’ time, fifty: the day Julia came up with the Daleks, the day Selena and Becca brought her and Julia to the cypress glade.

‘We better go in soon,’ Becca says, without moving.

‘It’s early,’ Julia says. ‘You said we’re allowed to do whatever we want.’