That Gallagher Girl (2 page)

And neither the authorities nor her father seemed to give a shit.

Cat strolled across the pristine oatmeal carpet of the showhome's master bedroom to a big dormer window that looked out over the building site. How many houses like this might there be all over Ireland languishing unfinished, waiting for someone to occupy them? She reckoned she could have her pick of thousands. To the east, inland, ribbon developments straggled Dublin-ward along the sides of the roads. To the south, the landscape was dotted with un occupied holiday homes. To the west, an expanse of ocean glittered diamantine.

‘Look, Raoul!' she said, turning to him as he followed her through the door. ‘You can see the cemetery on Inishcaillín from here.'

Inishcaillín was where Cat's mother, Paloma, had been buried. The cemetry was on the summit of a drowned drumlin, and Cat would occasionally take a boat out to spend a day on the island, talking to her mother, undisturbed by anyone since the island was uninhabited now. Paloma's grave was surrounded by dozens of graves of victims of the Irish famine, all with their headstones facing west towards the Atlantic, that they might see in the setting sun the ghosts of all those loved ones who had fled Ireland for America a century and a half ago. It was a desolate place, whipped by raging gales that came in from the ocean, but it had been a place that Paloma had loved like no other, and that was why Cat had insisted she be buried there. When she was a little girl, she and her mother used to take picnics over to the island, and swim in the more sheltered of the easterly coves. They'd explored the abandoned village, too, making up stories about the people who used to live there, and had once even pitched a tent and stayed overnight in one of the roofless cottages.

‘Do you miss her still?' asked Raoul.

Cat turned to him. ‘Of course I do. But I hate her too, in a way, for leaving me alone with that bastard and his whore.' She saw Raoul raise an eyebrow. ‘What's up?' she demanded. ‘You know how I feel about them.'

‘Cat, Cat, you drama queen,' he chided. ‘Sometimes you talk like something out of Shakespeare.'

‘That bastard and his ho, then,' she returned, pettishly. ‘Let's open the other bottle. I feel like getting drunk.'

Cat had never been able to call her stepmother by her given name. Although Ophelia had been Mrs Gallagher for five years, Cat refused to acknowledge her and had gleefully shortened her name to ‘Oaf'. Stepmother and stepdaughter were barely civil to each other now.

Raoul took the second bottle of wine from his backpack, and started to strip away the foil from the neck. ‘You're seventeen now, Cat,' he pointed out. ‘Legally speaking, you could leave home, with our father's permission.'

‘Sure, he'd give it in a heartbeat.' Cat leaned against the wall, and slid down until she was sitting on the carpet.

‘Well, then?'

‘Don't think I haven't thought about it. But where would I go – and
don't
tell me I can move in with you because there's no way I'm gonna cramp your style with the ladies.' Raoul inserted the corkscrew and pulled the cork, and Cat smiled up at him. ‘I'll never forget how pissed off your girlfriends used to look every time I escaped from the boarding school of doom and landed on your doorstep.'

Raoul laughed. ‘It
was
a little bizarre. Remember the night you sleepwalked your way into bed with me and . . . what was her name? It was some hippy-dippy thing.'

‘Windsong. I could never keep my face straight when I talked to her. Windsong
hated
me.'

Raoul poured wine, then handed Cat a cup and sat down beside her. ‘So let's have a serious think about this. You can't move in with me, and you can't afford to rent anywhere.'

‘You're right. There's no way I could afford to live on my allowance. And I can't live without it. It's a catch-22. I may despise our dad, but he doles out the dosh.'

‘And he's not going to cut you off, kid. If you do move out, get him to lodge money in your bank account.'

‘I don't have a bank account'.

‘Not even a savings account?'

‘No, and I can't open a current account until I'm eighteen.'

‘Get him to send you postal orders.'

Cat gave him a sceptical look. ‘To where? Cat Gallagher, no fixed abode?'

‘It's dead simple. I used to do it all the time when I was travelling. You set up a poste restante in the local post office, and pick up your mail there.'

Cat made a face. ‘Maybe I should get a job.'

‘Maybe you should.'

‘Ha! Let's face it, Raoul – I'm unemployable.'

‘Don't be defeatist, sweetheart. And, hang on . . . I think . . . I
think
. . .'

‘Share. I hate enigmatic pauses.' Cat took a hit of her wine.

‘I think I might be having a very good idea.' Raoul gave her a speculative look. ‘How would you feel about living on a houseboat, Kitty Cat?'

‘A houseboat! Wicked! Tell me about it.'

‘I have a friend who has one in Coolnamara. He could do with someone to caretake it for him.'

‘Are you serious?'

‘Yes. His wife's in a wheelchair, and they can't live on a boat any more. Can't sell it, either. And he doesn't want it to rot away on the water.'

‘Where is it?'

‘It's on a stretch of canal near Lissamore, the one that goes from nowhere to nowhere.'

‘Nowhere to nowhere?'

‘It was one of those pointless famine relief projects, designed to give the starving locals the wherewithal to buy a few grains of Indian corn back in the 1840s. As far as I know, it was never used for anything. But my mate Aidan had his houseboat transported and plonked down in a safe berth. He hasn't visited it for over a year now, and he'd love it to be given some TLC. He couldn't pay you, but I'm pretty sure he'd let you live there rent-free.'

‘Oh, Raoul! I'd love to live on a houseboat!'

‘I'll see what I can do.' Raoul picked up the wine bottle. ‘Here. Have some more Château Whatever.'

Raoul was as good as his word. Straightaway, he put in a call to his mate Aidan, and sorted Cat out with her brand new home from the place she couldn't call home. And by the time they'd finished the bottle and left the house the way they'd come in and hit the main road, Cat was feeling buoyant and full of hope.

‘Bye, Raoul,' she said, as the twice-weekly bus to Galway appeared over the brow of the hill, and drew up by the turn-off to Hugo's house. ‘You are my fairy half-brother.'

‘Less of the fairy, thanks. I'll be in touch.'

Cat hugged Raoul the way she never hugged anybody else, and watched him board the bus.

‘Here,' he said, taking something from his backpack and tossing it to her. ‘You may need this.' He gave her a final salute, then the bus door slid shut and he was gone.

In her hand, Cat was clutching the screwdriver she'd used to gain access to the showhouse. She smiled, and turned towards the path that would take her to the house in the forest, the house that she hoped soon to leave. As she passed through the gate and rounded the first bend, a voice from behind her hissed: ‘Cat! Cat! Here, Kitty Cat!'

She swung round as they emerged from the trees. There were three of them. They were wearing stocking masks and stupid grins. One said, ‘A little bird told me it was your birthday, Kitty Cat. Come here to us now, like a good girl, and let us give you your birthday present.'

Without pausing for thought, Cat aimed the first kick.

Chapter One

Río Kinsella thought that she had never seen an uglier building. Constructed from precast concrete, it was veined with fissures and topped with a corrugated roof of some leprous-looking material. The grey steel shutters clamped over the doors and windows lent it a hostile expression. On the forecourt, dandelions clumped, and amorphous masses of machinery lay rusting. The place would make an ideal location for one of those murky Scandinavian thrillers.

Reaching into the pocket of her jacket, she extracted an email printout.

Oh, God. There was something so boyish, so affecting about all those exclamation marks!

Río folded the printout and slid it back into her pocket, then turned in the direction of the path that would take her from the packing shed to the cottage. It wasn't a cottage by definition, she knew – more a bog-standard bungalow. But hey – any single-storey dwelling on the west coast of Ireland called itself a cottage these days. The word ‘cottage' had cosier connotations than ‘bungalow', and stood a better chance of attracting the attention of potential buyers. The fact that this property came with an oyster farm attached, however, meant that offers were unlikely to be forthcoming. Who would be crazy enough to buy an oyster farm in the current economic climate? She wondered how much Adair had paid for it. She wondered if he had been suckered.

Adair Bolger was a shrewd businessman – there was no doubt about that. Or he had been. During the reign of the rampant Celtic Tiger he had bought and sold and prospered with the most pugnacious of Ireland's property barons. He had made headlines in the finance sections of the broad-sheets, and in the gossip columns of the glossies. But when it came to his personal affairs, Adair was purblind. He had spent millions building a holiday home for his (now ex-) wife Felicity during the boom years, but sold it for a bargain-basement price when the market imploded. He had acquired a pair of penthouses in Dublin's docklands as
pieds-à-terre
for himself and his daughter (plus a couple more as investments), but these castles in the air were now languishing unoccupied and unsellable. He had escaped to Dubai to regroup just as the tentacles of economic malaise had started to besmirch the gleaming canopy of the world's construction capital. Like hundreds of other Irish Icaruses, Adair Bolger had flown too high, had his wings scorched, and plummeted back down to earth. As he would put it himself, he was bollixed.

And now Adair wanted Río to help him realise his dream of downshifting, and living off the fat of the land or – to be more accurate – the fruits of the sea. An oyster farm, for feck's sake! Did he have a clue what oyster farming involved? Did he know that it was backbreaking, knucklegrazing work, work that had to be carried out in all seasons and in all weather conditions – mostly inclement because of the ‘R' in the month thing? Did he know that demand for oysters had plummeted since recession had struck? Or that oyster farms on the coasts of all four provinces of Ireland were foreclosing, their owners emigrating? Río pictured the lucky Kerryman who'd sold Adair the property chortling up his sleeve like a pantomime villain, and rubbing his hands with glee as he cashed Adair's cheque.

The cottage and its outbuildings were hidden away in a quiet estuary of Coolnamara Bay. The man who had owned the farm had been a loner known as Madser, who had stockpiled junk and bred fighting dogs. On the rare occasions he sallied forth into Lissamore village, it was astride the ancient Massey Ferguson that he used to tow his shellfish to his packing shed, exhaust fumes spewing into the clean Coolnamara air and settling on the produce heaped on the trailer behind him. Locals used to joke that Madser's were the only diesel-smoked oysters in the world.

Today was the first time that Río had ventured beyond the sign that read ‘Trespasers Prosecuted' since the days when, as a child, she had routinely flouted Madser's misspelt warning. In those days, the local kids scored points for bravado every time they crawled under the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the property, daring one another to venture further and further up the lane until the barking of Madser's dogs became so frenzied that even the bravest of them had turned tail and fled. The dogs – or the descendants of those dogs – had been put down, Río had learned, when their master died.

Their legacy lived on in the form of the denuded meat bones that strewed the backyard of the house. Sweet Jesus, this was a cheerless place! Surely Adair had seen photographs of it online and read the implausible sales blurb? No amount of Photoshopping could disguise its intrinsic ugliness, no estate agent's spiel convince that this property didn't come with a big ‘BUYER BEWARE!' sticker on it. Río wondered for the umpteenth time what had possessed him to buy it.

Skirting a pile of rusty bicycle parts, she negotiated the mud track that led to the back door, glad that she was wearing her wellies. She didn't need the key, she realised, as she went to insert it in the lock: the door was ajar. Oh, God. This was the bit in the horror film, the bit where you peek through your fingers and tell the stupid girl not to go in there, the bit where you get ready to jump.

Río nudged the door with her foot. It swung open with a spooky sound-effect creak.

But once she stepped through the porch into the living space, she breathed easy. There were no
Silence of the Lambs
sewing machines lined up to greet her, no Texas chainsaws caked in gore. Instead, she found herself in a room with a view.

Adair had told her once that, in his fantasy life as a fisherman, he didn't care where he lived as long as the house in question had a view. Beyond the grimy picture window that stretched the length of the ground floor, this place had a vista to die for. The sea was just yards away from the front doorstep: all that separated the house from the wavelets lapping against the shingle was a swatch of overgrown lawn. Beyond the grassy incline, a jetty projected into the estuary, a red and blue rowing boat hitched to one of its stone bollards. As Río watched, a gull perched on the furthermost bollard lifted itself into the air and wheeled away towards Inishclare island, over which the vestiges of a double rainbow glimmered. Squalling seagulls and turbulence in the water to the west spoke of mackerel activity; a trail of bubbles told her an otter was on its way. Presiding over all, like a beneficent deity enthroned upon the horizon, a purple mountain slumbered, swathed in a shawl of cobwebby cloud.

Río drew her phone from the pocket of her jacket and accessed her list of contacts.
Looks like you got yourself a crib with a view – but not a lot else, mr bolger
, she texted, then paused as, from somewhere further along the estuary, came the aggrieved squawk of a heron. She turned and saw it flap past the east-facing window on the far side of the room – a bog-standard timber-framed casement. The glass was broken, Río noticed as she moved towards it, and the sill littered with dead bluebottles. Brushing them to the floor with the corner of a filthy net half-curtain, she leaned her elbows on the ledge. No wonder this window had been obscured with net, she thought, as she surveyed the dismal aspect. If the view were a drawing and she had an eraser handy, she'd have rubbed it out, for Madser's junkyard was emphatically not the stuff of picture postcards – unless you were a Britart aficionado.

Turning back towards the main room, Rio decided that the junkyard inside the house was nearly as bad. The floor was littered with detritus: bottles, cans, cigarette butts, plastic bags, cardboard cartons, old newspapers. The headline of a yellowed
National Enquirer
screamed up at her, and she remembered with a smile how she had once made it into the pages of the
Enquirer
, whose gushing prose had described her as a ‘flame-haired Irish colleen and erstwhile lover of Hollywood heart-throb Shane Byrne'. Her relationship with Shane had been bigged up as a ‘tempestuous affair'; their son, Finn, had become a ‘love child', and it was hinted that the only reason Shane had never married was because he was still ‘smitten' with the ‘first and only true love of his life.'

How funny to think that people reading it may have imagined some
uber
-romantic
Wuthering Heights
scenario with the pair of them pining in perpetuity for each other, when in reality Shane and Río Skyped at least once a week, swapped photographs of Finn on a regular basis, and were forever sending each other links to daft stuff on YouTube.

She was on her way across the room towards the staircase when her phone sounded. Adair.

‘Hey, Río!' came his cheerful voice through her earpiece. ‘What do you think?'

‘I think you're mad,' said Río. ‘It's like something out of
Slumdog Millionaire
, except you're not even a millionaire any more. Are you seriously thinking of living here?'

‘I'm not thinking, Río. It's a done deal.'

‘Jesus, Adair. The place is a mess.'

‘What do I care? I've got my view, I've got my oyster beds.'

‘You've got rats.' In her peripheral vision, Río registered a furry something scurrying along the skirting board.

‘I'll get a cat.'

‘You've got birds, too,' she said, looking up. ‘There's a swallows' nest in the stairwell. That's meant to be lucky.'

‘Then I won't get a cat.'

‘You'll have to get used to living with bird shit, so.'

‘Beats living with bullshit. There's been too much of that in my life lately.'

As Río laid a hand on the white-spattered banister, a feather spiralled from the ceiling. She guessed the birds had found a way in under the eaves. Gaping eaves, broken windows, unlocked doors – the place might as well have been flying a welcome banner for a come-all-ye. ‘Shall I give you a guided tour, Mr Bolger?' she asked.

‘You're there now?'

‘Yes.'

‘Thanks, Río. It's good of you to check the joint out for me.'

‘I'm curious. This was the bogeyman's house when I was a kid. I've never been down this way before.'

‘You might send me some pictures. I'm not sure the ones on the internet do it justice. What's that noise?'

‘A cider can. I just kicked it out of the way.'

Río felt another flash of unease as the can clattered down the staircase. Who might have been here before her? Might she have company, apart from Ratty and his feathered friends? She was glad that Adair had phoned, glad his voice was in her ear. She tightened her grip on her Nokia as she climbed up to the first floor, avoiding any dodgy-looking steps. She didn't want to end up stuck here on her own with a broken ankle.

‘I'm upstairs, now,' she told him, looking around. Above her, a mouldering raffia lampshade dangled from an empty Bakelite socket, to her right a beaded curtain obscured the entrance to what she guessed was the bathroom. Across the landing, a door hung off its hinges. She passed through into a long, low-ceilinged room that smelled of damp. ‘I suppose this is the master bedroom.'

‘It's the only bedroom.'

‘The only one, Adair? What'll you do when Izzy comes to stay?'

‘I'll put her in the mobile home.'

‘What mobile home?'

‘I'm not hanging around waiting for the boys in the planning department to sneer at any ideas I might come up with for a refurbishment project, Río. I'm not going to give them the satisfaction of binning my applications, or giving me the runaround. I don't need planning permission for a mobile, so I'm going to put one out back, and live there while I work on the place.'

‘You're going to do the graft yourself?'

‘I am. Didn't I start my career as a builder? A bloody crack one, too. I'm the only person I could trust to get the job done properly.'

Río guessed he was right. She had no problem picturing Adair getting his hands dirty, navvying by day and dossing down in a mobile home by night. But the notion of Princess Isabella – his beloved only child – slumming it in a caravan made her want to laugh out loud.

‘Won't you feel claustrophobic, Adair, cooped up in a mobile home after all those years living in villas and penthouses and hotel suites and what-have-yous?'

‘Sure, it'll only be for a short time. Tell us, what's the view from the bedroom window like?'

‘Um. There isn't one.'

‘What do you mean? The blurb said there was a view from upstairs, too.'

‘The roof slopes down too far. There's no space for a picture window to the front.'

‘There's no window at all?'

‘Well, yeah. There's a kind of dwarf-sized dormer . . .'

‘And that's
it?
' Adair sounded incandescent with indignation.

‘Well, no. There's a bigger one in the gable end wall. Hang on a sec.'

Río moved to the other side of the room. Like its counterpart downstairs, this casement would overlook the junkyard: the view would be crap. Unless, that is, her eyes were deceiving her . . .

Instead of a junkyard, what she saw was a marine-blue inlet all a-glimmer in the low-slung sun. Fringed by a stretch of footprint-free sand, this was Coolnamara Bay
au naturel
, before man had left his mark on the shoreline. But it wasn't real. The view that lay before her was an imaginary one. It had been painted by a visionary's hand directly on to a canvas nailed to the window frame.