work in progress

Kim

"You're just rambling Cait," Kim said crossly. "Let's start at the beginning. Niamh and Maeve were friends and then they met you. Take it from there will you?"

What do I tell her? Cait wondered.

When she started in Scoil an Chroi Naofa, she was terrified and bored in about equal measures. Everyone else was so, well Irish. Of course Cait knew she was as Irish as everyone else, technically.She could speak Irish and she had an Irish passport. Unfortunately she also had a weird accent and after two hours in her new school she had already explained a million times that she had lived in the US for the last ten years and that yes it was great there. She did not want to talk to any of them. Except Maeve.

She had spotted Maeve the minute she had enteredd the classroom. Maeve did not look like a second year of only fourteen. Even though she wore the same hideous uniform as everyone else, she looked like she was wearing it as a costume. Her uniform was not her real clothes. She was tall and slim and beautiful. Long, long black hair and huge mysterious green eyes. She spoke to only one other girl and looked as if she was just biding her time till she got up, ripped off the dull brown uniform and burst into some kind of smokey, glamorous blues number.She stared into space as if somehow in her head some kind of sensuous music was playing. She swayed slightly in her seat from time to time when the rhythm moved her.

Cait knew she had some kind of stupid crush on Maeve, she had read about them in the boarding school stories she had devoured last year when her mother had announced she was sending her to boarding school. (Of course once her mother had discovered how much it cost she had changed her mind.) She did not care if it was a crush she just knew she had to talk to her.

Her chance came in German when Maeve sat by her and said "Hi I noticed your lovely eyes this morning. You look like you have a lot of secrets." Cait, thrilled beyond measure at being complimented by HER, desperately wished she did. Instead she smiled and said Well, I've had a weird life.

Within three days she had told Maeve her entire life story. Crazy hippy mother, wandering from town to town where her mother performed, her mother's many relationships and then the moment when Daryl came into their lives and her mother decided to go to Ireland and write. She also knew everything that could be known about Maeve. Her strict catholic parents, her eight brothers and sisters, their enormous shabby house. They had somehow become best friends. The only blight on the horizon was that Maeve was devoted to Niamh and Niamh really hated Cait.

Kim was plaesed with this revelation. "I had no idea you girls didn't get on" she said with great satisfaction. she took a pen out of her handbag, slowly took off the lid, put it on the back of the pen and began to write in a small leather-covered notebook. "You are not taking notes on that, are you?" Cait asked in alarm,"It's not relevant." Kim smiled again, still smugly," How do we know what's relevant?" she asked. "Continue".

They had been an uneasy threesome for almost two years. Niamh had tolerated Cait but they had never actually spoken to each other unless Maeve was present. Cait thought it was a fair price to pay to live in Maeve's world. Although there must have been lessons and exams and such, they were all a blur in Cait's memory. She remembered only visits to Maeve's house, expeditions to town where they just wandered around window shopping and nursing one cup opf coffee in gallagher's for hours, endlessly playing the same five or six LP's and singing along.

"You and Niamh, how did that go?" Kim interrupted. Cait shrugged. "Well, Maeve was great but she didn't always need us. So, in the end, we started to spend time together, by default really, and started to get on."

"Both rejected, you comforted each other?" Kim suggested." No "said Cait, "no, or at least it didn't feel like that." Kim smiled "Poor you." she said in her most condescending voice. She sounded like she knew far more about Cait and Niamh than they did. Cait stirred impatiently"It wasn't like that!" Kim nodded like she wasn't going to labour the point. "Ok," she said, "well, you became friends?" she said friends like it was a dirty word.