One Hundred Names (Special Edition)

time Kitty had heard it. Kitty believed it wasn’t about the money, it had been to come and face old ghosts, but those old ghosts had won yet again on a day when Birdie had imagined victory.
    ‘What have you got there?’ Birdie asked, looking at the bunch of wild flowers Kitty had gathered before coming over to meet her.
    ‘Ah. Yes. The young O’Hara came to see me,’ she said. ‘He wanted me to tell you something.’
    In the foothills of the Boggeragh Mountains, a light mist falling all around them, Birdie finally stopped searching the gravestones and settled next to one, her search over. Next to the church, the small school and schoolhouse she had grown up in, she laid flowers on the grave of her first true love, Jamie O’Hara, who she’d loved but hadn’t been allowed to love as she wished, who she’d had to leave behind to move to Dublin to escape her father’s clutches and a small town’s prejudices. She’d made a promise and she’d made a bet, and she had finally come home. For both, unfortunately, it was too late.
    Kitty joined the group outside and picked at her battered fish and chips with mushy peas and tartare sauce, and wondered how on earth she could recover the mood of the group. How on earth she could recover her own? Conversations were light and quiet but lacked the jovial joyfulness from the bus.
    ‘It’s not your fault,’ Steve said quietly, breaking her silence.
    She looked at him uncertainly. ‘I feel embarrassed.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘For bringing everyone here, for—’
    ‘It’s not your fault, Kitty,’ he simply repeated, and gave her a glass of wine. ‘Now get this into you so you can be more fun. ‘You’d better not snore tonight or I’ll suffocate you with a pillow.’
    ‘I don’t snore.’
    ‘Yes, you do. When you’ve had a drink, you snore as loudly as my dad.’
    ‘I do not. You don’t know that.’
    He fixed her with that look again, that froze her outsides but turned her insides to mush. ‘I know that at least on one occasion you did.’
    She swallowed. ‘No one’s ever told me that before,’ she said quietly.
    ‘Maybe they were never awake when you were asleep.’
    It was a simple comment but it went straight to her heart again, and all she could think of was lying in that student accommodation beside him, sleeping on his chest while Steve, with those long black eyelashes and messy mop of hair, watched her. Suddenly there was a tinkling sound as Sam stood and tapped his spoon against the glass.
    ‘Oh, no, Sam,’ Mary-Rose said, her face meaning business without an ounce of a smile this time.
    ‘Esmerelda,’ he said in a warning tone.
    ‘Esmerelda?’ Jedrek said, confused. ‘I have been calling you Mary-Rose,’ he leaned over the table and shouted down to her.
    ‘Just ignore him,’ Mary-Rose said, covering her face with her hands. ‘Sam, I mean it, stop it.’
    But Sam wasn’t picking up on her cooler-than-usual mood, or he was misreading it as something he could fix with a proposal, when it was clear at least to Kitty that he couldn’t. She had witnessed two proposals already; she considered herself an expert.
    ‘Okay, fine,’ Sam appeased the confused diners. ‘Esmerelda is like a term of endearment,’ he explained. ‘Isn’t it, darling?’
    ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘It is not.’
    ‘Okay. Mary-Rose Godfrey,’ he said dramatically, smiling. ‘My best friend in the whole world.’
    ‘Stop, Sam.’
    ‘No, I can’t, I can’t stop how I feel for you. I can’t stop thinking about you. I can’t pretend that we are only friends. Every day when we are together, I feel it inside and I can’t tell you.’
    Kitty suddenly stiffened beside Steve, feeling uncomfortable with his words. If this was how she was feeling, she couldn’t imagine how Mary-Rose was feeling.
    ‘We have known each other since we were six years old. When you walked into our class on the first day of school with your shoes on your wrong feet I knew that you were someone I had to talk to.’
    Suddenly Mary-Rose started laughing. ‘That’s true,’ she said in surprise.
    So Sam wasn’t reading from his script that evening, but did he mean it?
    ‘And then we started talking, and when we had a fight over whose turn it was to play with the yellow Lego, and you pinched me and got in trouble with the teacher and had to stand in the corner, I thought to myself, that girl has balls. I want to be friends with that girl. Not that I’m into girls with balls or