Carolyn for Christmas Page 6

  Saoirse stared back at her, her face pulling into a frown.

  “What are you talking about? I never said I didn’t want to be friends anymore.”

  Carolyn sat up ramrod straight, the effects of the vodka already making her a little woozy.

  “No, you didn’t even have the nerve to say it. Sent your dickhead father to tell me instead.”

  Saoirse pulled herself up, too, so that she was sitting straight in her chair. She picked it up by the arms and turned it around to face Carolyn head on.

  “I never told my father to say anything like that to you.”

  * * * * *

  It’s started to rain again. Why can’t Ireland have snow more? Carolyn wonders. It always looks so pretty on American films, when everything is white and clean at Christmas.

  She presses her hand closed around the package behind her back. If the rain keeps falling, it’s going to soak through the wrapping paper on Saoirse’s present. Carolyn drew it herself. It took her a few days after school to finish, but it was worth it. She drew all of Saoirse’s favourite things on it—her favourite singers’ names, a big mug of hot chocolate, and some books. She even drew a horse because Saoirse likes them so much. The horse kind of looks like a dog—its face is too small and its belly too big—but she couldn’t fix it, or she’d make a mess of the whole thing.

  Carolyn dangles her legs over the wall and beats a rhythm against the hard stone. She’s really nervous. She saved her pocket money for weeks to buy Saoirse a present. She’s bought her a single from Pink, some fancy notepaper that has horses on it, and some earrings that Saoirse had said she liked when they’d gone shopping with Carolyn’s mam. They’re dangly and purple—Carolyn’s mammy had said they were very grown-up earrings.

  “I’m so happy we don’t have to go to school again for two whole weeks,” Saoirse says and Carolyn looks at her. “Why do we even have to go to school anyway?”

  Saoirse is really pretty. Like, really, really pretty. She’s probably the prettiest girl in their class. Carolyn didn’t used to notice how pretty she was, but lately she’s started to really like looking at her, especially when she laughs or sings a song.

  They’re only twelve now, but Carolyn’s mammy has said a lot that Saoirse will be a stunner when she’s older. Said she’d be beating off boys with a stick.

  Carolyn hates when June says that. She doesn’t want any boys to go near Saoirse. She wants to keep Saoirse all to herself.

  “What time did your dad say he was going to be here?”

  Saoirse checks her wrist. She has a nice gold watch on that she got for her birthday. When she got it, Carolyn was a little jealous, even though she knows you’re not supposed to be jealous of your friends. Saoirse has lots of nice things; Carolyn doesn’t have anything as nice as that watch.

  “He said he’d be here in ten more minutes. So we still have time to talk.” She frowns and shuffles on the wall, and pulls her wool hat down a little to cover her ears. “I’ll miss you. The only good thing about school is that I get to be with you every day. I don’t want to be stuck at home with my stupid brothers. Especially not Tom. He’s so mean.”

  Saoirse has often told Carolyn how much she hates Tom. He sounds horrible. Carolyn hasn’t ever met him—she never goes to Saoirse’s house; Saoirse only comes to Carolyn’s—but Carolyn thinks she would punch him in the nose if she met him. Nobody’s allowed to be mean to Saoirse when she’s around.

  “Mammy says you can come around here on Stephen’s Day or for New Year’s, if your mam and dad say it’s okay?”

  Carolyn holds her breath as she waits for Saoirse to answer. Her stomach feels weird—all fluttery and jumpy.

  Saoirse makes a strange face. She doesn’t look at Carolyn.

  “I don’t think I can, Carolyn. Because my mum needs me to help her.”

  All the breath Carolyn had been holding rushes out of her, and it feels like someone has hit her in the stomach. She knows Saoirse’s mother gets sad and that she has to cook a big Christmas dinner, but why would she need help for that much time? She doesn’t want to believe it, but maybe Saoirse is telling her a lie. She knows people in school wonder why Saoirse is friends with Carolyn, because Carolyn is rough and Saoirse is posh. Maybe Saoirse’s been wondering that, too.

  Carolyn can feel her eyes starting to fill with water and she scrunches them closed.

  “You know, you don’t have to be my friend if you don’t want to,” she says quietly.

  Saoirse jumps off the wall and stands in front of Carolyn. She’s much taller than Carolyn. Even though she’s standing on the ground and Carolyn is high up on the wall, Saoirse reaches Carolyn’s chest.

  Saoirse puts a hand on her hip.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Saoirse sounds angry. Carolyn shakes her head. If she opens her mouth, she knows she’s going to start crying.

  Carolyn wants to gives her a hug, because she always feels better when she hugs Saoirse, but she might drop the present if she does, and then it’ll get all wet on the grass. She keeps her hands behind her back.

  But Saoirse shoves Carolyn hard in the leg and Carolyn drops the present anyway as she tries to keep herself from falling off the wall. She looks behind her on the grass. All the colours from the markers are blurring in together, a big smudge of ink bleeding from each picture she drew. Her wrapping paper is wrecked.

  Carolyn jumps down from the wall. She’s not so sad anymore; she’s cross, too. That took her so long to finish.

  “What did you do that for? Don’t push me.”

  Saoirse puts her other hand on her hip and shoves her chest out.

  “I can do what I want. You’re not the boss of me, Carolyn. And you can’t bully me around.”

  Carolyn’s chest is rising and falling quickly, her breath becoming hard to control. Her skin tickles like a thousand spiders are running up and down her back. No, this is all going wrong. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

  She wishes she hadn’t said anything to Saoirse. Now Saoirse’s mad and she’s Carolyn’s only friend. Why did she have to believe what some nasty girls had said about them being friends?

  “I’m…”

  She wants to say she’s sorry. This argument is silly. But the words won’t come out of her mouth; her breath won’t let them.

  Carolyn hears a car and she panics. It’s Saoirse’s dad’s big, green Jaguar, pulling up to the house. Carolyn wants to yell at him to go away, that she needs to talk to Saoirse before she goes away.

  But when Saoirse sees him, she turns on her heel and runs to the car, rain flying from her pink raincoat. She opens the door and jumps in, turning her face so that Carolyn can’t see her expression.

  Is she cross? Sad? Crying? Carolyn needs to know. She runs toward the car but the driver’s side door pushes open and Mr. Barrett gets out. He closes the door softly behind him and holds up a hand to stop Carolyn running. She stops in the middle of the road, unsure what to do. It’s starting to rain more heavily now and her socks are getting wet through her runners. She wriggles her toes in her damp socks.

  “Stop right there,” Mr. Barrett says in that big, scary voice that always frightens Carolyn. He steps forward and she looks up at him. He’s huge—at least twice the size of Carolyn, she thinks. His body is as wide as Carolyn’s fridge. His face is even redder than usual.

  “I think it’s about time we stopped all this nonsense, don’t you?”

  Carolyn doesn’t know what he means and he bends over to look her more directly in the face. The move frightens Carolyn.

  “Listen, Saoirse’s been very nice to you these past few years. That’s clear to see. I’m guessing that maybe she felt a little sorry for you—she’s just that kind of sweet-hearted girl. But she doesn’t want to be your friend now. And that’s all there is to it.”

  Carolyn shakes her head so hard it hurts her neck. If she can just run and grab the present, Saoirse would know that Carolyn was still her friend. She’d know that this was just
a silly argument.

  “No, Mr. Barrett. That’s not true. We just had a silly fight.”

  The words aren’t coming out how she wants them to. They don’t sound strong enough for him to understand exactly what she means. That she and Saoirse have a connection that other people don’t have. They’re meant to be together.

  “Fighting may be what people around here do”—he looks around the road, toward a neighbour’s garden that has a washing machine in the front, and Carolyn’s cheeks get hot—“but that’s not what my Saoirse does. She’s raised better than that.”

  Carolyn almost laughs. Saoirse pushed her, not the other way around. She’s about to tell Saoirse’s dad that when he says something that makes her want to lie down on the road and cry.

  “Saoirse says she doesn’t want to be your friend anymore. She says you’re a nasty, mean girl, but that she’s too afraid to tell you herself.”

  She feels a big blob of water run down her cheek and she hopes Mr. Barrett thinks it’s a raindrop. He straightens up and peers down his nose at her.

  “Just stop talking to her—you’ll only upset her if you do it. If you see her in school, don’t even look at her. Trust me, we’ll all be much better off if everyone sticks to their own.”

  He looks at her one more time and then over to Carolyn’s mother, who has just stepped onto the porch. He stands awkwardly a moment.

  “Happy Christmas,” he says, before he gets into the car and drives away.

  Carolyn doesn’t even look at the car as it moves away, just keeps her eyes trained on her soaked shoes.

  The paper is falling apart, the fancy notepaper ruined, too, by the time she reaches the garden to pick Saoirse’s present up.

  * * * * *

  Saoirse grabbed the bottle of vodka and matched Carolyn’s last three big gulps. She wanted to buy some time, or clear her head, or have the alcohol loosen her tongue before she continued.

  Her head was swimming, her stomach was in a knot, and a dozen different thoughts knocked against her skull.

  Her father said something to Carolyn? She’d seen him get out of the car to talk to Carolyn after their argument, of course, but she’d never imagined he’d said anything like that. Though she’d gone over the scene again and again in her mind, what her dad said to Carolyn had never registered as an important part of the memory.

  What had she assumed? That he’d wished Carolyn a Merry Christmas or that he’d told her to let Saoirse cool down a while? She knew what sort of person her dad was; why hadn’t she stopped to consider that he might have played a role in the events of that horrible day?

  In the deepest parts of her, she wanted it to be a lie, but already she knew it wasn’t. She’d wanted to see the best in him, she thought sadly. She’d always known he was an arsehole, but she’d never realised the depths to which he would lower himself to control her life.

  “What exactly did my dad say to you, Carolyn?”

  Carolyn sniffed.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said quietly.

  “Jesus, Carolyn, it matters to me,” Saoirse snapped.

  Carolyn’s eyes widened in surprise at the harshness of Saoirse’s tone.

  “Um, I can’t remember exactly.” She paused. “No, that’s a lie. I can.”

  She reached out her hand and Saoirse passed the bottle over to her. She supped from it a moment before she continued.

  “It was Christmas time when we were in sixth class, I think. I’d got it into my head that you didn’t really want to be my friend because some bitches from school had told me that was the case. And we had this stupid fight outside my house. You pushed me and I nearly fell off the wall, you cow. Dropped your Christmas present and all.”

  She supped from the bottle again and then passed it to Saoirse. “Anyway, your dad came to pick you up that day in his car and you got in without saying goodbye because you were mad at me. You were in the car for a minute and I remember thinking it was strange because you hadn’t driven away yet.

  “And then, your dad got out of the car, walked up to me on the road, and told me that you didn’t want to be my friend anymore. That you said I was nasty, rough, and just a mean girl. And I wasn’t to talk to you again. So I didn’t.”

  Tears welled up in Saoirse’s eyes. Must be the vodka, she thought. But she knew it wasn’t really. For all these years, she’d thought her best friend—the funny, interesting girl with the wild black hair and a love of yellow wellies, who drew her pictures to make her laugh—had just decided not to talk to her anymore when, in fact, her stupid father had been the cause of it all.

  “I’m so sorry, Carolyn,” she said, her words strangled by emotion. “You have to believe I never said that. I never told my dad to tell you that.”

  She put the bottle down on the floor with such force that it banged against the floor.

  “I’m sorry to say it, but my dad always thought you and June were common. He said you were dragged up and that your father was a sailor your mother met on the docks—that that’s why your dad wasn’t around.”

  She couldn’t bear to look at Carolyn to see what hurt her father’s opinion wreaked on her. She certainly wasn’t expecting a belly laugh, but that was what she heard.

  Actually, it started as a belly laugh and deepened until Carolyn was in a flood of giggles, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes.

  “What’s so funny?” Saoirse asked, baffled.

  “My dad wasn’t a sailor. His name is Jim Fitzgerald and he lives two towns over. I’ve seen him out and about with his wife and his kids in tow. He had two—a boy and a girl. Perfect little family if ever I saw one.”

  “What?” Saoirse asked. “You know where your dad is? When did you find out?”

  Carolyn nodded.

  “About five years ago. My mother was afraid I’d bump into one of them or start up a relationship with some cousin or other, so she told me where he was. He’d just moved back from Germany—had run off there when my mother got pregnant and met a woman there. Only came back when his dad died as there was a rumour of an inheritance. Lovely man, really.”

  “Oh,” Saoirse said. “Oh Carolyn, I’m sorry. That’s awful.”

  Carolyn shrugged and burst open the bag of crisps.

  “It is what it is. I try not to worry about it.” She shoved a crisp in her mouth and chewed loudly. “There was only ever one parent I really cared about.”

  Saoirse stood up and kneeled in front of Carolyn. She put her hands on Carolyn’s two knees and looked up at her.

  “You have to believe, too, I’m really sorry about June. I always loved your mother. And the time I spent with you. That’s why I convinced Damien to switch the concert charity to the Leinster Cancer Support. Someone told me they’d been great to your mother.”

  Carolyn stared down at Saoirse’s hands on her knees and then back to Saoirse’s face.

  “That was you?” Her brown eyes bore into Saoirse’s soul and Saoirse was surprised when those brown eyes filled with tears.

  “She’s not good, Saoirse,” she said, and the tears starting to stream fast and thick. “She’s going to die soon.”

  Saoirse hadn’t realised. She’d known June was sick, but not that sick. Her heart ached with the news.

  She stood up and pressed her arms around Carolyn, and Carolyn’s arms were stiff at first. But the more she cried, the softer her body got, and she reached up and pressed Saoirse hard to her.

  “I am so, so sorry,” Saoirse said, and she wasn’t sure which part she was saying sorry for—for Carolyn’s mother, for Saoirse’s father, or just for the stupid amount of time wasted between the two of them, time that could have made them both so much happier.

  Carolyn pulled her head back from the hug and looked at Saoirse full in the eyes again, rubbing the sides of Saoirse’s face with her hands.

  And before Saoirse knew it, Carolyn was kissing her, long and hard and searchingly. Her lips were as sweet and soft as Saoirse had imagined and, after a second or two of shock, she
pushed into the kiss, too. All the anxiety she carried around with her daily fell away; for the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt whole.

  Chapter Three

  The cleaning lady was surprised to see the two of them wrapped together on a chair in the staff room. Carolyn was just as surprised to see her.

  “Um, good morning,” she said, jumping up and smoothing down her shirt front as a little woman with a grey perm gawped at them both open-mouthed.

  “We got locked in here last night,” Saoirse said behind her quickly. “After choir practice. We couldn’t get out.”

  The woman said nothing, but stared at Carolyn’s chest. Her front buttons were open, she realised in horror, as she looked down to where the woman’s gaze had landed. She buttoned them hastily.

  “We had no phones to call anyone,” Saoirse continued and Carolyn turned to look at her. Saoirse shoved the empty vodka bottle into the crisp packet. “We’ll reimburse whoever owns these.”

  The woman started to laugh.

  “Sure, the crowd in here will never notice a bottle gone. They’ve enough to keep them going.” She winked at Carolyn. “You want me to let ye out?”

  Carolyn nodded vigorously, a laugh falling from her own mouth, joining with the cleaning woman’s laughter.

  “I bet we look a sight,” Saoirse said as she tamped down her hair.

  “You could say that,” the cleaning lady said. “Come on and I’ll walk you out.”

  They grabbed their shoes and bags and hurried down the stairs behind the cleaning woman, Saoirse looking like she wanted the ground to open up and swallow her.

  “It’s kind of funny,” Carolyn whispered.

  “It’s not funny,” Saoirse hissed. “I’m mortified.”

  Her flustered expression brought on more giggles in Carolyn and she had to stop to catch her breath. Saoirse scowled at her at first, but as the seconds passed, her face softened until she was doubled over in giggles, too. They had to run to catch up with the cleaning woman at the door, their stockinged feet slapping heavily against the floor.