her but there was nothing but warmth emanating from her, from the two of them. They were exactly what she needed right then.
They walked five minutes to Frederick Street to a small Italian restaurant. Inside, a table of eight people awaited them and Sam insisted on dragging Kitty around and introducing her to all of their young, attractive and incredibly fashionable friends. Still wearing her clothes from the day before, Kitty felt like a hillbilly next to them all. She sat opposite Mary-Rose, perfect position for her interview, but she doubted that would happen with the lively banter at the table. They were an exuberant lot, friends from childhood with inside jokes that were funny to Kitty because of how they were delivered, despite her not actually understanding their meaning. They knew each other well, tirelessly teased one another, and Kitty couldn’t help but feel it was the best-scripted sitcom she had ever seen, with their flawless hair and clothes. And that was just the boys.
Kitty didn’t have friends like that. She grew up in County Carlow, in the south-east of Ireland. After school she left to go to University College Dublin and had lived in Dublin ever since, choosing to go home only on holidays or if somebody got married or died. She had two brothers, one who’d remained in Carlow and married, the other who’d moved to Cork to study in Cork University and was living very happily with a man named Alexander, whom she’d never met and had only learned about through Facebook. She couldn’t remember the last time they had all been together in the same room at the same time – probably a family member’s funeral – and she couldn’t remember the last time she phoned either of them for a conversation that wasn’t related to putting funds together for their parents’ dodgy immersion heater or their dysfunctional boiler. Her father managed the same bar in Tullow Street as he had done all through Kitty’s youth. Her parents were quiet, socially odd people, not quite knowing or learning the art of conversation and so they stayed away from most social events apart from close friends and family gatherings, where it appeared they mostly listened and did little talking, sat in a corner and didn’t leave for the entire event.
Kitty had grown up with two best friends, both named Mary: Mary Byrne and Mary Carroll, who were always called by their full names to avoid confusion. It had always been Katherine and the two Marys; nobody called her Kitty in Carlow. It was a name she had been proudly baptised with once she reached university and she was only too happy to embrace it, a new name for a new beginning. The two Marys had been irritated by the use of a name they hadn’t invented and refused to call her by it on the rare nights they came to join Kitty and her college friends on a night out in Dublin. Her Carlow friends and college friends had never mixed. The two Marys ended up rallying together in a staged intervention at the end of one particular night to drunkenly tell Kitty how much she’d changed since she’d moved to Dublin. Eventually Kitty couldn’t take the arguments over the same thing each time and the trips to Dublin were reduced to one a year, and then eventually stopped completely. As Kitty returned home less and less, their friendship had eventually whittled away to nothing. If a meeting on the street wasn’t cleverly avoided, the chats were increasingly difficult with nothing much to say. Mary Byrne had moved to Canada and Mary Carroll had lost two stone and was working in a clothes shop in Carlow, which Kitty now made a habit of avoiding after having the most awkward conversation of her life and having to buy two dresses Mary had recommended but which Kitty somehow couldn’t find in her heart to tell her she despised. Her politeness had cost her over one hundred euro.
Now, her solid never-changing friends were Steve and Sally. Apart from them, Kitty had never been able to keep friends, not because she was disloyal in any way, she just felt that she hadn’t connected with anyone deeply since her school friends and so it was easy to drift away as life moved on, as college finished and as she found new jobs and created new friendships that lasted as long as the jobs had. This – she looked around at Mary-Rose’s friends – this she did not have and had never had.
‘So you work for a magazine,’ Mary-Rose finally left the conversation at the other end of the table and turned her attention to Kitty. Kitty was momentarily disappointed about having to get back to work.
‘Yes. Etcetera. Do you know it?’
Mary-Rose thought about it. ‘Yes, I think so,’ she said unconvincingly.
‘My editor was Constance Dubois. Was she in touch with you, this year or last year?’ Kitty had long ago given up the hope that Constance had questioned any of these people.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Mary-Rose said again uncertainly.
‘She passed away a few weeks ago,’ Kitty explained. ‘But before she died she was working on a story. You were part of that story.’
Again, the same reaction as from Birdie, Eva and, to a certain extent, Archie. Surprise, confusion, embarrassment.
‘Do you know why she would have wanted to talk to you and write about you?’
Mary-Rose looked stunned. Kitty could see her eyes moving left and right as she searched both sides of her brain for the answer.
‘No,’ she responded, confused. ‘I’m the most boring person you could possibly meet.’
Kitty laughed. ‘I seriously doubt that. It has been fun so far.’
‘That’s Sam. Me? Honestly, I’m so boring. I’ve never done anything interesting, thought anything interesting, known or seen anything interesting.’
Kitty laughed further. ‘I find you very interesting.’ And she wasn’t lying. It was a pleasure to be in Mary-Rose’s company, to be invited into her world. ‘Well, how would you like to be part of the story I’m writing? Don’t you think that would be interesting?’
Again there was the same look that Kitty had seen from the others: shyness, embarrassment, flattery, but overall the feeling that they simply weren’t good enough for a story.
‘What’s the story about?’
‘About the people on a list.’
‘How many people are on the list?’
‘One hundred names in total.’
Mary-Rose’s eyes widened. ‘How big is your story?’
Kitty smiled. ‘How big is yours?’
Mary-Rose repeatedly pressed her finger against the crumbs on the table and released them again, while shyly answering Kitty’s questions.
‘I’m sure that these other people are very interesting, I’m sure they have exciting lives. I’m just a hairdresser. I work two days in a salon in Booterstown where I’ve lived all my life and the other two days I’m freelance. The rest of the time I’m at home with my mum.’
‘Where do you freelance? Magazines? Television?’
‘God, no. Debs’ nights and hen parties are about as exciting as I get, but mostly I’m in hospitals.’
‘Hospitals?’
‘Yeah, they call me whenever they need me. There’s no hair salons in the hospitals and often people who are sick really feel better when their hair’s done. Sometimes I do make-up for them too, but that’s less popular. It gives them a bit of dignity, at least it did for my mum.’
‘She spent time in hospital?’
‘She had a stroke. She was only young, forty-two. She’s forty-four now and still needs full-time care but getting her hair done always made her feel better. Not better
