That Gallagher Girl (24 page)

There was no cure for heartburn in the Bentley. There was no cure for heartache, either. And there was certainly no cure for terminal cancer.

Later that evening, when Río couldn't sleep, the notion of lying beside her dying husband staring into the darkness for yet another night filled her with horror. Instead, she slid out of bed, and made her way down the shore to the slipway. There she stripped off and lowered herself into the frigid, wine-dark sea.

Swimming always did it for Río. She could swim off fear and worry and stress and anger. The rhythmic strokes of her limbs as they levered her through the water, the regular in – two, three, four; out – two, three, four of her breath calmed her. It was as though her body was an engine working on autopilot, leaving her mind free to go problem-solving. But this time swimming didn't work. When she emerged from the sea, her mind was in turmoil still, and she could hear her father's voice reciting that line of Yeats over and over, the line from the poem called ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus':
I went out to a hazel wood because a fire was in my head
. . .
because a fire was in my head
. .
. because a fire was in my head
. . .

And then, as she was standing naked on the beach, towelling herself dry, Río heard another voice – a high light voice, like that of a child, singing in the darkness over by Coral Mansion, singing what might be a nursery rhyme: and no amount of vigorous rubbing with a towel could take the chill from Río's bones, or assuage the ache in her heart, or put out the fire that was in her head.

Chapter Nineteen

Cat was painting. She'd decided today that she liked the way the shiny new fire-engine red tractor belonging to Adair Bolger kind of blinged against the rust-coloured bladderwrack exposed at low tide. At this distance, Adair's Massey Ferguson looked like a toy tractor, the kind that ought to be driven by someone in
Postman Pat
. She'd decided to call her painting ‘Catgirl, Tractor and Bladderwrack'. She'd asked Finn to look up bladderwrack on the internet, and had so loved the other names it went by that she'd taken to chanting them like a mantra or a nursery rhyme: bladderwrack, black tang, rock rack, bladder fucus, dyers fucus, red fucus.

She was chanting this tongue twister now, as roving reporter Keeley Considine hove into view. Keeley was sporting flowery wellies today and a flowery pink frock: she looked like something off the cover of a glossy country lifestyle mag that Cat had seen in Eason's in Galway last week.

In Eason's, Cat had kept herself amused by looking at the covers of all the bestsellers on the bookshelves while Finn searched for the latest Super Mario game. She didn't think much of the jacket designs – why did so many women's books have cartoony type ‘cute' crap going on? Cat remembered how Oaf had once remarked upon the genius of Jeffrey Fulvimari – who had designed Madonna's book jackets – and how she and her father had looked at each other and then looked back at Oaf with stark incomprehension.

The bestseller chart had made Cat wonder when Oaf's book was going to be out, and what it might be about. She remembered what Raoul had said, about not needing imagination to write a book any more, just needing to be a celebrity instead, and she thought how awful it must be to be challenged in the imagination department! Not to be able to escape to jungles or deserts or coral reefs or the Planet Zog or the Greek islands, or put yourself in a lighthouse or a circus ring or travelling on a jaunty red tractor, the way Cat was travelling now, in her painting. She added the last stroke of Anthracite Black to her Catgirl's pointy ears and set down her paintbrush just as Keeley Considine drew abreast with her.

‘Hello, Cat,' said Keeley. ‘You never returned my calls.'

‘Well, there wasn't much point, was there? Elena disappeared before I could put the proposal to her. Fecking Shane jumped the gun by getting there first.'

Keeley looked bewildered for a moment, then laughed. ‘Oh! I see what you mean. You mean he got in with his proposal first!'

‘He sure did.'

Cat stepped back from her painting to give it a critical onceover. Hm. There was something missing, some im -balance there. A gull, perhaps, in the top left-hand corner? Or a cloud? A gull. Cat started rooting in her paintbox for a tube of Titanium White.

‘That's a beauty.'

Keeley was looking at the painting over Cat's shoulder. Cat wouldn't bother trying to sell it to her. She'd get more money if she pimped it via Elena to Johnny Depp or suchlike.

‘I love the juxtaposition of the starkly modern gasguzzling behemoth against the eternal vista of sky, sea and islands. You could call it “Time and Tide”.'

Not just ‘Catgirl, Tractor and Bladderwrack'?

‘There's something so ephemeral, isn't there, about . . .' droned Keeley.

Cat zoned out. Keeley was going to start spouting artspeak, the most boring language on the face of the planet. Cat had sat at numerous dinner tables where some gobshite had bored the assembled company to death by analysing her father's paintings and showing off how many big words he knew. She had coped with it by falling asleep like the dormouse in
Alice in Wonderland
, her father had coped with it by getting blind drunk, and her mother hadn't coped at all. She'd just ended up having to put both of them to bed and do the washing up by herself.

‘There was a wonderful exhibition at IMMA once – you may have seen it – in which half a dozen conceptual artists . . .'

Nooooooooooo!
Cat would have to shut Keeley up, otherwise she'd be in danger of having Titanium White or Anthracite Black accidentally squeezed all over her lovely flowery frock.

‘You know Oaf?' she said, interrupting Keeley's drone. ‘Ophelia Gallagher? When's her book out?'

‘Um, I think it's due out next month,' said Keeley. ‘There's a sneak preview in this month's
RSVP
magazine.'

‘There is? I must get Finn to buy a copy when he's next in town, so we can have a good laugh.'

Keeley looked puzzled. ‘Why would you want to have a laugh at Ophelia Gallagher's book?'

‘Oh, look! There's Finn over there!'

‘What? Where?'

‘Just getting on to that island, see, in the distance.' Cat pointed at a random drumlin. ‘He's gone off fishing. We'll be having lemon sea trout with capers tonight courtesy of Marco Pierre White. Why do they say “cut capers” when they mean dancing? You're a writer; you should know.'

‘Um. I think it comes from the Latin for “goat”. Goats tend to leap about a lot.'

‘I'm a Capricorn,' said Cat. ‘What are you?'

‘Virgo.'

Cat laughed.

The sound of the tractor starting up further down the beach made them turn. Adair waved at them from the driver's seat, the picture of the jolly farmer in his canary-yellow oilskin bib and braces.

‘Oh! Hello, Adair!' called Keeley, waving back. ‘I must go and have a word with him.'

‘Río had several words with him earlier,' said Cat, who had overheard the pair rowing that morning. ‘She was giving out about the fact that he was lugging sacks of oysters around by himself.'

‘I thought he had employed someone to help him?'

‘The lads have taken the day off. There's a big funeral in the village today. Río was on her way to it.'

After her spat with Adair earlier, Río had passed Cat by on her way along the beach. She had not done that rude thing of peering over Cat's shoulder at her easel, as Keeley had just done. Instead, she had smiled and said: ‘You're working, so I won't interrupt. But maybe you'd call round and have a glass of wine with me some time? Finn will tell you where to find me.'

And Cat had said: ‘I'd like that,' and watched as Río had kicked off her funeral footwear and continued on her way along the beach barefoot
,
pausing occasionally to pick up a shell or a pebble or some pretty scrap of flotsam.

‘I saw the cortege earlier,' said Keeley. ‘Looks like the whole village is on its way to that funeral. I wonder who died.'

‘Dick Head.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Richard Head. He was a local county councillor.'

It was true. For once, Cat wasn't winding Keeley up. Dick Head really was the name of the retired politico. A screech from above reminded her of her seagull. Squeezing a dollop of Titanium White on to her palette, she thought about adding a touch of Indian Yellow for the sunlight that was bouncing off its wings.

‘I'd better leave you to it,' said Keeley. ‘Enjoy your trout.'

‘What?'

‘The trout you're having for supper tonight.'

‘Oh yeah.'

Cat picked up her paintbrush, squinted at the canvas, and then all she felt was comforting oblivion as she lost herself in her landscape.

‘
Help! Help, Cat
– help! Over here!
'

What? Who was over where, and who needed help? Cat came to, emerging from her painterly trance back into real life. Keeley was standing over by Adair's tractor, and Adair appeared to be asleep on a bed of seaweed. Setting down her paintbrush, Cat shielded her eyes with her hand.

‘Do you have a phone?' Keeley was yelling.

Cat had no phone on her, and no idea where it was since she'd last spoken to Raoul about a week ago.

‘Can you phone for an ambulance, Cat?' shouted Keeley. ‘Quick!'

An ambulance! Something was wrong. Cat sprinted down the beach, to where a distressed Keeley was crouching by Adair, checking to see if he was breathing.

‘Is he dead?' asked Cat.

‘No. I think he's had a stroke. We have to get him to hospital right now. Have you a phone?'

‘No.'

‘Fuck,' said Keeley. ‘Neither have I. How stupid of me to leave it behind. Is there a landline at Coral Mansion?'

‘No. There's broadband. Could we Skype?'

Keeley shook her head. ‘No. That's no use, no use – too slow – the broadband connection's crap here. We'll have to try and do it ourselves.'

‘Get him to hospital?'

‘Yes.'

‘How?'

‘Have you a car?'

‘No. Yes. Well, it's Finn's. I can't drive.'

‘I can. Let's go.'

‘How will we get him to the house?'

‘We'll have to carry him somehow.'

‘No way! He's too heavy. Let's put him in that wheelbarrow.'

‘We can't do that!' protested Keeley. ‘It's . . . it's undignified!'

‘There's nothing dignified about dying on a beach. You take his feet. Come
on
!' commanded Cat.

Together they hoisted Adair up and into the wheelbarrow. He was surprisingly light for a big man, but it still took Keeley and Cat many long minutes to get him as far as the porte-cochere of the house where Finn's Renault was parked, and into the back seat. Cat ran into the kitchen, praying that the car keys would be where Finn usually left them, in the fruit bowl. They were.

‘You stay with him in the back seat,' said Keeley, when Cat emerged from the house.

‘What'll I do?' asked Cat, crawling in beside Adair while Keeley strapped herself into the driver's seat.

‘Just hold his hand, and talk to him.'

So Cat did. She talked to Adair about Kylemore Abbey, the boarding school she'd been to, and the wild mountain goat that had followed the girls home one day, and slept on the backdoor mat for the best part of a week before a ranger from Coolnamara National Park had come to reclaim it. She talked about how she'd used to go climbing the mountains that were part of the school's grounds, and swimming in the lake there. And she talked too of the lake by the Crooked House, and how she'd swum there as a child, and sailed her little boat called
The Catkin
that she had painted pea-green like the one in ‘The Owl and the Pussycat'. And she talked about the treehouse called the Heron's Nest that her mother had built for her, and how she and her mother had used to lie there at night, and how her mother would tell her stories.

‘Would you like to hear one?' she asked Adair. ‘I remember them all.'

And when she thought she saw Adair manage a nod and a kind of weird lopsided smile, Cat launched into one of the stories with which her mother had regaled her as a child, not just at bedtime or in the treehouse, but also during the time when Cat had had to spend many, many nights on and off for a year in a hospital bed with bandaged eyes after an accident with nitric acid. Her mother had often slept beside her, on a low camp bed, and Cat would lie with her hand dangling limply over the side of the mattress so that her mother could hold it while she told her the tale of the little Catgirl who lived in a fabulous palace called Sans Souci which was built by the King of Prussia to be his pleasure dome.

In Sans Souci – which was French, her mother had told her, for ‘no worries' – Catgirl roamed from chamber to fabulous chamber through colonnaded galleries, accompanied by naughty cherubs who had flown down from the dome of the palace to befriend her. Outside, she explored the parklands: the richly decorated gazebos and temples and pavilions, the labyrinthine mazes, the greenhouses in which exotic fruits grew. Catgirl ate her fill of melons and peaches and figs and bananas, she kicked up sprays of water with the cupids in the fountains, and she swooped low over the terraced gardens with brightly coloured parrots and macaws, spitting cherry stones down on the heads of the courtiers as they ponced around below, paying obsequies to the king.

Her mother had painted such a vivid word picture of the palace that Cat felt as if she was actually living there, not lying blind and bandaged in a hospital called Sans Souci that smelt of disinfectant and boiled cabbage. It was the stories that had got her through that dark, dark time; the stories that she listened to still on the ancient Sony Walkman her mother had given her, stories she knew by heart.

She was in the middle of the story of Catgirl and the Monkey when Keeley pulled up at the main entrance to Galway University Hospital.

‘I'll go get help,' Keely said. ‘You stay here.'

Cat nodded, watching as Keeley sprinted into the foyer.

‘Of course, Adair,' she resumed, ‘Catgirl was very angry with the ape who had stolen her bananas. And she swore she'd get her revenge. And that night she waited until the king and his courtiers had gone to bed, and then she crept into the secret, cedar-lined library, and took a big, leather-bound book of magic from one of its cedar shelves, and leafed through it until she found the very spell she was looking for, the How to Be Revenged on Monkeys spell . . .'

And Cat carried on telling her story as she waited for the paramedics to come and take Adair away to perform CPR, and she knew even as they took him from the car and laid him on the gurney that there was no point in performing CPR, because just as she had been about to embark upon the spell that told you How to Be Revenged on Monkeys, Adair Bolger had laid his head on Cat's shoulder and died.

The place where they went to wait for news of Adair was horrible. The walls were snot-green, the plastic chairs grubby. The hospital smells made Cat feel sick, and brought back painful memories of bandages and needles and inedible food. She tried zoning out, but there was so much going on around them that escaping to a jungle or a lighthouse or a Greek island was out of the question. Keeley got coffee from a vending machine that was so disgusting it made Cat feel even sicker.

She hadn't told Keeley that she knew Adair was already dead. She felt that that was the kind of news that should be delivered by a healthcare professional. When did people stop calling hospital workers doctors and nurses and start calling them healthcare professionals instead, she wondered? And when did nurses stop wearing neat uniforms and start dressing in drab overalls? Some of the nurses were obese, she noticed. In fact, lots of the people sitting around the waiting area were obese. One child who was stuffing his face with Coke and crisps was clearly suffering from ADHD. He was lying on his back on the floor kicking his legs and embarrassing his mother. He was probably Special Needs, like her. Except Cat had never made a show of her mother when she'd been in hospital.