It doesn’t feel like I have many options. I don’t want to take him to my mother’s house, and it seems a little selfish to insist we drive all the way back to London now; by the time we got there it would almost be time to come back.
“Okay,” I say, too tired to form a more elaborate response.
He switches on the seat warmers, turns on the radio and, hard as I try not to, I find my eyes closing for a little while.
I should have learned to be more careful where and when I fall asleep.
* * *
One of the last things that I remember clearly about my sixteenth birthday party was Jack taking a photo of the five of us. The rest of the night has always been a bit of a blur at best.
We drank a lot more after he left, I remember that much. Then we all did one another’s hair and makeup. Zoe had brought some of her latest fashion creations that she had made on her sewing machine for us to try on: skimpy dresses, low-cut tops, and skirts so short they looked more like belts.
Rachel went to work on Catherine Kelly’s face, as though it were a project in art class. She applied a thick layer of makeup, filled in Catherine’s bald eyebrows with a pencil, then stuck false black lashes to the blond ones around her eyes. Zoe lent her a dress, and Helen did her hair—squirting it with the water bottle my mum used for ironing, before blow-drying her whitish-blond curls straight. She said there wasn’t time to comb out all the knots, so cut them off instead. I remember random little clumps of hair discarded on the carpet.
The transformation was quite remarkable, and Catherine was almost unrecognizable when they were finished with her. Lives are like light bulbs; they’re not as hard to change as people think. Catherine looked beautiful, and she knew it too, beaming at her own reflection when the girls let her look in the mirror.
“Try to smile with your mouth closed. Nobody wants to see those ugly braces,” said Rachel. Catherine did as she was told. “Look at that pretty little mouth now. The boys are going to love you,” Rachel added, patting her on the head as though she were a pet.
Her new smile looked uncomfortable to wear.
I didn’t know what boys Rachel was talking about—we never hung around with any—but I think I must have looked jealous, because she offered to paint my nails for me then. She held my hands and wrote letters on my fingernails with red varnish, spelling the word GOOD on one hand, and GIRL on the other.
I’d already drunk far more alcohol than I was used to—the room had started to spin—but Rachel, Helen, and Zoe said they were going to the kitchen to find more, leaving Catherine and me alone in the living room.
“Are you glad you came?” I asked her.
She blinked at me, her new false eyelashes exaggerating the action, and once again I marveled at how different she looked. Then she told me something I had never known about her; I’m not sure anybody did. Perhaps because they never asked. She’d clearly had too much to drink too, and her sentences were interspersed with hiccups.
“I used to have an older sister, we did makeovers like this together, but she died. My dad had a little boat and we would go with him sometimes at weekends. That’s where it happened. But before then, sailing was fun and he taught us how to make lots of knots. Look, I’ll show you.” She pulled the laces out of her sneakers with a sudden and strange enthusiasm. “This is a square knot … this is a figure eight…” Her fingers were so fast, tying, twisting, and looping the laces together before holding them up each time. I watched with a sense of bewildered fascination. “This is a sliding knot—just like the one you’ve used in the friendship bracelets—and this is a bowline, which I like better because you can control how far the loop constricts … see?”
I stared at the final knot.
“How did she die? Your sister?”
I doubt I would have asked the question so bluntly if I hadn’t been so drunk. Catherine untied the laces and started to thread them back in her shoes.
“People always presume that she drowned because it happened when we were sailing, but an asthma attack killed my sister. She forgot her inhaler. My dad blamed himself and my parents have been really sad since she died, really sad. He lost his job, sold the boat, and our house isn’t a very nice place now. I think maybe that’s why nobody talks to me or invites me to anything anymore. Until you did. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I whispered.
“Can I hold her?” she asked.
I stared down at the gray kitten asleep on my lap. Kit Kat. I was so drunk I had forgotten she was there.