Catty Moore: Alice’s Rebellious Sister and Undying Shadow

Overview and Plot Role

Catty Moore is Alice Moore’s older sister, three years her senior, whose life is cut short in a car accident in Glasgow. She never appears as a living adult in the main timeline of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil — she exists entirely through Alice’s memories, flashbacks, and one haunting voice message. Yet Catty is not a passive ghost. Her personality, her anger, and above all her death shape Alice’s unravelling identity and the hunger that defines the novel’s undead world. Alice frames much of her own longing through Catty’s rebellion: the older sister who never could accept a new family, who ran away again and again, and who dreamed of living more than one life.

Catty’s core function is to be the gravitational center of Alice’s grief. The outline confirms that Catty’s death “haunts Alice’s undead existence and shapes her hunger for identity.” Alice’s transformation and her eventual choices are in many ways an attempt to answer the question Catty left behind — what if you could start again?

Personality and Defining Traits

Evidence from early chapters reveals a girl of fierce contradictions. Catty is magnetic and destructive, often in the same moment. When she first runs away from home after their stepmother-to-be Eloise makes a careless remark, nine-year-old Alice describes her as “so fast — so fast that Alice can’t catch up.” That speed is physical, but it’s also a metaphor for Catty’s emotional volatility and the widening distance between the sisters as adolescence intensifies their separate mournings.

Catty’s nickname itself is an identity she weaponises. She was called Catty because young Alice couldn’t pronounce the th in Catherine, but when a neighbour tutted that it wasn’t nice, Catty looked up its meaning — “mean, nasty, spiteful” — and “gleefully declared she’d answer to that and nothing else.” In a single childhood scene, the text establishes her defiant self-possession. She takes a slur and wears it as a badge, a habit she repeats when she claims a crumbling stone wall as her own because she finds a C carved into one of its stones.

Outwardly, Catty and Alice share fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, but the comparison is full of difference. Alice’s skin burns in summer, Catty’s is dusted with freckles. Alice’s hair is “a lifeless shade”; Catty’s is “the colour of melted butter.” Alice’s eyes carry grey and green uncertainty; Catty’s are “the cold, clear shade of winter mornings.” These details, drawn from a single passage, underscore Catty’s vividness — she is the more striking, the more certain, the one who takes up space. Alice, by contrast, shrinks.

Catty is also performative. She loves an audience, “striking a pose / Waiting to be noticed,” as Alice recalls when replaying the voice message. At a Halloween party, Catty saunters in with whiskers painted on her cheeks, a tail pinned to her jeans, and an arm hooked through Alice’s, pulling her sister into the thick of things. She nicks a bottle of gin from the pub, dances through the crowd, and seems effortlessly at home in chaos. Yet that same night she’s drawn to Derrick, an older boy who dismisses Alice — a small cruelty that shows Catty’s appetite for attention can lead her away from those who love her.

Chronological Arc and Key Moments

Catty’s arc, though glimpsed only in memories, follows a clear line from childhood grief to adolescent fury and finally to a tragic, isolated end.

• Childhood after their mother’s death: When Mum dies, Catty is seven; Alice is five. Catty remembers their mother, Alice doesn’t. The narrative notes that “the difference between missing and memory” cuts between the sisters. Catty’s grief is sharper, more embodied. A flashback from a later Halloween reveals that when a boy dared Catty to enter the graveyard where their mother is buried, she returned with red eyes and split his knuckles on his face. Alice never learned whether Catty was sad because she saw Mum’s spirit or because she didn’t.

• Eloise’s arrival and the first run: The night Dad’s new partner Eloise offhandedly says she and Dad were “meant to be,” Catty bolts. Alice chases her up a hill, terrified she will vanish. When Alice catches her, Catty is gripping a stone wall so hard her knuckles go white, then she wipes her cheeks and gives Alice the nickname “Bones.” They lie head-to-head on the wall as Catty plays a song on her phone — a haunting piece about getting lost in the woods — and she keeps restarting it before the word “home,” as if she can’t bear to hear it. The scene marks the beginning of Catty’s refusal to accept the remade family and her simultaneous role as a magnetic, untouchable figure for Alice.

• The wedding and the grave-dirt pendant: Years later, Dad marries Eloise in a church beside the graveyard. Catty, now fifteen, is barely holding her tongue until the private moment Eloise gifts the girls pendants containing soil from their mother’s grave. The text says, “Catty’s fist slams shut over the grave dirt, her face contorting with disdain.” She can’t bend the gift into anything but an insult; the soil is sacred, not a trinket. This moment epitomises Catty’s ferocious loyalty to their mother and her view that any new love is a betrayal.

• The voice message and her death: The pivotal piece of Catty’s arc arrives after she runs away for good. She leaves a voicemail — not a call, because a call would force Alice to answer. In it she says, “You ever think about how mad it is, that we only get one life? … Sometimes it breaks my heart, that I’m stuck with just this one.” She imagines a world where death is just a chance to “play again. New Alice. New Catty.” Then she quotes their mother’s saying about tired minds being “good soil for bad thoughts,” and promises she’ll feel brand new after sleep. The next day, she steps in front of a car in Glasgow. Alice learns the news through a call from a stranger; her world “just — stops.” The irony is devastating: Catty never made it to London, never escaped, and the new life she craved was snatched away.

These moments — running, claiming stones, refusing to accept the pendant, dreaming of multiple lives, and dying — form a tight character arc that ends in a final, irreversible separation.

Relationships and Impact on Alice

Catty’s most important relationship is with Alice, and it defines the younger sister’s entire arc. Catty is at once protector and abandoner. She calls Alice “Bones” with affection, links their arms, invites her to parties, and shares her music. But she also dashes ahead, leaving Alice scrambling to catch up. The phrase “Slow down! Come back!” is Alice’s refrain both literally and metaphorically. After Catty’s death, Alice replays the voicemail and feels an absence that becomes a kind of internal rhythm. In Chapter VIII, the outline tells us Alice walks through Boston, “bereft now that Catty and their mother are gone,” and turns the silence into a determination to survive on her own terms. Catty’s voice — that exhausted, foxed-edge voice — becomes the soil from which Alice’s new, harder self grows.

Catty’s relationship with their father and with Eloise is defined by resistance. She sees Eloise not as a new beginning but as a erasure. The first time Dad comes home from a date “looking almost happy,” Catty reads it as betrayal. The grave-dirt pendant cements that view. Even after Eloise has been around for years and has given birth to Finn, Catty cannot reconcile. Her pain and Dad’s happiness are “angled at each other, like pistols, or blades.” Dad himself, when Catty mocks the wedding, raises his hand as if he might strike her, then drops it — he is never that kind of man, but Catty’s provocations push the family to its limits.

Her bond with their late mother is the invisible foundation. Catty is the memory-keeper, the one who remembers Mum’s sayings, who visits the graveyard, who refuses to let the grave be filled in by a new marriage. This intense loyalty, however, also traps her. When Catty says she’s “tired” and that tired minds breed bad thoughts, it’s her mother’s voice she channels, but it cannot save her.

Key Decisions and Their Consequences

Catty makes a series of choices that each escalate her disconnection:

1. Running from home instead of staying. The first flight up the hill sets a pattern. She removes herself instead of fighting inside the house, which gives her a sense of control but also deepens the rift. Alice always tries to follow, but Catty’s speed keeps her isolated.
2. Refusing the olive branch at the wedding. By rejecting the pendant with such visible disdain, Catty not only wounds Eloise but also pushes away the one symbol that could have connected the sisters to their mother in a new ritual. Her anger forecloses any chance of accepting a blended family.
3. Leaving Hoxburn and never telling Alice the truth about her plans. The voice message reveals Catty got no further than Glasgow — an hour north of home. She had a crumpled tenner and a cheap pay-as-you-go phone. Whether she meant to step into the road or was simply exhausted and careless, the decision to run without a clear destination left her vulnerable. The driver claimed she “stepped right out in front of him.” The consequence is absolute: Alice’s whole world stops, and her undead existence later will be shaped by the hunger to fill that void.

Thematic and Symbolic Connections

Catty’s character resonates with several of the novel’s central themes.

Immortality and Hunger: Catty’s voicemail directly voices the fantasy of multiple lives — “If we could play until we lose, and then just start again.” This longing feeds directly into Alice’s encounter with Lottie and Sabine, where a literal form of second life is offered at a terrible cost. Catty’s desire for a “new” self becomes the fuel for Alice’s own transformation. The song “When I was a child / I got lost in the woods,” which Catty looped endlessly, speaks to a hunger for an ending where the lost soul finally finds home. By never letting the final word play, Catty kept herself suspended between escape and arrival, a state that mirrors Alice’s later liminal undead existence.

Identity and Transformation: Catty was, in Alice’s eyes, the blueprint for becoming someone else. When Alice later smudges her eyeliner at a college party and sees a different version of herself in the mirror, she thinks, “If Catty were here she would make it a game.” New Alice is born from the memory of Catty’s bravado. The theme of identity and transformation threads through this borrowed courage; Alice often dresses, speaks, or acts like the girl she imagines Catty would be.

Toxic Love and Control: Catty’s love for Alice is fierce but also careless. She drags Alice to parties, shares her music, and physically pulls her away from walls, but she also abandons her for Derrick, runs off without warning, and ultimately leaves Alice alone forever. This dynamic mirrors the toxic love and control that Sabine later exerts: a magnetism that consumes.

Sacrifice and What Survival Costs: Catty’s death is not a sacrifice by choice, but it becomes one in Alice’s psyche. Alice’s hunger to survive, to feed, and to keep walking “on her own terms” as Chapter VIII shows, is a direct response to the sacrifice Catty couldn’t avoid. The link to sacrifice and survival costs is implicit: Alice pays for her second life with the grief that Catty’s first life ended.

Memory and the Passage of Time: Because Alice has so few memories of her mother, Catty becomes the vessel for all that is lost. The song, the grave dirt, the nickname, the voice message — these are the artifacts that Alice clings to. The theme of memory and the passage of time is embodied in Catty’s recorded voice, a ghost of a life that cannot be rewound.

Frequently Asked Questions about Catty Moore

1. What is the significance of Catty’s nickname?

When Alice was little she couldn’t pronounce the th in Catherine, so “Catty” stuck. Later, after a neighbour said the name wasn’t nice, Catty looked up its meaning — “mean, nasty, spiteful” — and proudly announced she would answer only to that. The name encapsulates her tendency to reclaim what others intend as an insult and twist it into a defiant identity.

2. Why did Catty run away on the night Eloise made her comment?

Eloise, during a dinner with visiting friends, said that she and Dad were “meant to be,” which Catty interpreted as meaning their mother was not. For Catty, any language that seemed to erase Mum was an attack. Running away was her immediate, physical response to a pain she couldn’t articulate, and it set a pattern of fleeing whenever the new family threatened her sense of loyalty.

3. What does Catty’s voice message to Alice reveal about her inner life?

The message shows Catty was exhausted, longing for multiple lives, and deeply ambivalent about the one she had. She muses, “Maybe that’s what death is, and we just don’t know it. A chance to play again.” She also quotes their mother’s saying about tired minds being good soil for bad thoughts. The message is both a confession of despair and a plea for understanding — yet she didn’t make a live call, suggesting she already felt unreachable.

4. How does Catty’s reaction to the grave-dirt pendant reflect her relationship with her mother?

When Eloise gives the sisters pendants filled with grave dirt from their mother’s burial, Catty slams her fist shut over the soil, her face twisting with disdain. To her, the dirt is a sacred relic, not a gift to be prettied up in a locket. Her violent refusal shows how fiercely she guards the memory of their mother and how incapable she is of blending that memory into a new family narrative.

5. What role does the song “When I was a child I got lost in the woods” play in Alice’s memories of Catty?

Catty played the song over and over on the hillside wall, always restarting it before the final word “home.” For Alice, the loop becomes a symbol of Catty’s refusal to find rest or acceptance. The song later reappears in Alice’s mind during moments of transformation, tying Catty’s lostness to Alice’s own search for identity. It is the soundtrack of their shared and broken childhood.