Cathy's Plagiarised Words

Cathy used to tell me secrets. She used to tell me them all the time. We would be walking home from school, scarves wrapped tightly around our necks in a vain attempt to hide from the wind that would cut at our faces like knives, hands cocooned in the lukewarm depths of our old and worn out jackets and still she would drone on and on about the most meaningless and trivial things. She would tell me how she had seen a really expensive looking pen sitting on Table 3 and how she had pocketed it with the greatest of ease without anyone noticing. She told me things like how she would get out of gym class by pretending she was dizzy, or how she would cheat on her maths test by Sellotaping the answers to the inside of her school jumper so that all she had to do was act as if she was just fiddling with the hem while thinking hard about the question. She told me that Amanda Gerald liked Frazer Decker but Frazer Decker liked Susannah Mills who was already going out with a boy from across town and had been for almost a week now.
         I hated Cathy for a very long time and would have probably told her if she had ever stopped to let me say just a few words. I only walked home with her because she was my next door neighbour and the two of us lived on the “chooch” side of the village: while all the other kids in our class turned right at the school gates and marched down towards the heart of the village, laughing and squealing like the little pigs they were, Cathy and I turned left and trudged our way along dirt paths that ran alongside small stone walls before breaking off from the suburban houses and snaking through thick dense woodland. But despite my loathing of the girl and her God-forsaken tongue, she was the only other kid in the whole school that lived anywhere remotely near me and so, every day at 3.30 I would wait in the cloakroom for her.
         The day I decided to kill Cathy started like any normal day. My father woke me up 6 for my early morning rounds of the animals. I pulled on my clothes that lay in a pile behind my door. My jumper was always caked in mud and on this particular day, my socks had gone rigid from the old, unwashed sweat. I went through to the bathroom to relieve my bladder, closing my eyes so that my brain could sleep for a few seconds longer. Clinging to the banister as I went down the stairs, I could hear my parents in the kitchen. They weren’t talking, so I knew there must have been an argument the night before. They never spoke to each other in the morning if they had rowed. It had probably been about Kelly, a friend my father had made on a trip to Aberdeen who he still kept in contact with. I could hear him talking to her on the phone while my mother was out at her aerobics class. Mother had every reason to argue with the bastard: I was young, but I already knew what infidelity was.
         It was while I was dragging the chicken feed round to the run that I saw Cathy sitting on the fence, her black pony pulling at the little tufts of grass growing at the foot of the posts. She grinned at me once she knew I’d seen her. Her hair, whose colour matched that of her pony’s, blew into her face, giving me the impression that she was a feral cat hissing at me.
         She leapt down off the fence and came over to me.
         “You’ll never guess what happened last night!” she said and before I knew it, she was off, telling me how her parents had let her watch the television because she had finished her homework (a rare treat for us choochs) and that there had been a programme on about Ireland. It had been a programme about a man who had gone on a trip around the coast, collecting little bits and pieces from each place he stopped at and taking the most amazing photographs so that now he had a huge collection depicting his travels and that he had decided to have an exhibition in London…
         I waited a few minutes to see if she would get straight to the point. That’s the thing with Cathy’s stories; for the most part, they start in a way that makes you want to know what’s next. But when she started talking about the man’s family and giving step by step accounts of the interviews given on the programme, I started to edge away from her in the direction of the chicken run. Of course, she followed me and so did her story. It was only when I was at the back door pulling off my boots that she finally said,
         “My mum says she’ll take me!” I looked up at her from my step. She was standing over me with her hands on her hips, grin still in tact, hair still swamping her face. “And it’s going to be amazing. I even get to take a couple of days off school but it’s alright, my mum’s gonna write a note which I just hafta show Miss Forsythe…”
         I suppose this must also be the day I realised how much I should have appreciated the original kaleidoscope of tales dear Cathy used to tell me. It was while the two of us were walking, this time on the way to school, that all I heard for the entire half hour journey was London, Ireland, photographs, days off school… she was, of course, rubbing it in my face. Several times she mentioned my parents and their low income and how this was due to their lack of any animal that was of value let alone not having a car. She must have heard all of this from her parents. I was (and am still) willing to bet she plagiarised every word, like her homework the previous month on Guy Fawkes. Not a single word of what she wrote, and now said about my parents, was her own.
         This was also the moment that I decided I must, somehow, come up with a way to shut that mouth of hers. Reaching the school’s playground with five or so minutes before the bell, Cathy ran over to Hailey and Sheila and the three of them spoke over each other, squawking like seagulls squabbling over a discarded sandwich. This was how it always was. I was merely there to fill in the gaps for her. While she had no one else to talk to, I would do. And it was starting to make me mad.
         The day’s weather deteriorated until eventually the heavens opened and granted us our fifth Inside Break that month. We were all willing snow of course, but Miss Forsythe just snapped, “Santa will bring snow if you’re good.” And that was the end of that.
         While my classmates wandered around the room, whispering behind cupped hands, sniggering at Lucy and how her bony hands were red raw with eczema (Cathy had, thank God, been awarded the glorious and highly prestigious job of looking after the P3s in the library during their weekly Quiet Time), I sat at my seat facing the grey December window, watching as the rain battered and crippled the view. My mind started to wander. First to the amount of time I would have to spend cleaning my shoes that night when I got home, as the dirt paths would surely be little streams of mud by now and it was barely even lunch time. Then I remembered Cathy and her painful story, the worst story she had ever felt the necessity to tell me. She had, like always, ended today’s instalment with her favourite tagline, “but don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret.”
         With a few minutes of break left to spare before Miss Forsythe would start heading back from the staff room clutching at a cup of coffee for support, I got up from my Heinemann 6 and went to the bookshelf. Past all the battered Homework Reading books like Supergran that had clearly been there since the school had opened, I picked up the Dictionary and, peering over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching, looked up the word secret.
         I smiled.
         Right on cue, Miss Forsythe stepped into the room just as I slid back into my seat in front of my abused scenery. She appeared to be quite disgruntled, the wrinkles on her face twitching at the corners of her mouth. “Quiet!” she barked and dropped her limp body into her chair.

I opened the front door and was greeted with the distant sound of raised voices. My parents were arguing in the kitchen again. My mother was screeching and banging the table while my father interjected with things such as, “This is absurd!” and “She is only a friend!”
         They didn’t even notice me as I slipped upstairs. They were never to know that I was having a shower without them having to tell me. They never found out that it was Cathy’s blood I was trying to scrape out my pores. The little bitch had screamed so loud I had ended up using far more force than I had originally planned just to shut her the hell up. As she lay, caked in mud, rain beating her face, she had managed to whisper,
         “Why are you doing this?”
I raised the rock above my head and replied,
         “It’s a secret.”