Читать книгу That Gallagher Girl - Kate Thompson - Страница 8

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.

Río – finally found what I’ve been looking for! It’s a working oyster farm – OK, I know that hardly fits my boyhood dream of becoming a fisherman, but it’s the next best thing! Might you have a gander at it for me? It’s a mile or so along the beach from the Villa Felicity – or whatever the place is called now – you probably know it? The guy who sold it to me is from Kerry, and inherited it from his uncle. There’s a cottage with it – he said he’d leave the key in O’Toole’s so you could check it out. (I’ve a feeling it might be in need of your interior design skills!) I’m very excited by this – it’s come up at just the right time!

Your friend, Adair.

PS: Will be bringing you back a present from Dubai – can’t say I’ll be sorry to leave!

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.

She let out a low whistle. ‘Well. I didn’t know that Madser had talent in the art department.’ Taking a step forward, Río narrowed her eyes and gave the painting the once-over. In the bottom left-hand corner, a girl was depicted crouching by a rock pool, gazing intently at a red-spotted flatfish that lay half-buried in the sand. The girl was naked, striped all over like a brindled cat, and her lips were pulled back to show feral, pointed teeth. In the bottom right-hand corner was a tiny, barely recognisable signature. She made out just three letters: ‘C A T’.

‘No,’ she murmured. ‘Not Madser. Not a man. A woman was responsible for this.’

‘What are you on about, Río?’ asked Adair.

‘Someone’s left you a painting.’

‘A painting?’

‘Yeah. It’s not bad. In fact, I think I might be jealous.’ Río took another squint. ‘It’s better than any of the stuff I’ve done recently.’

‘Nonsense. Your paintings are wonderful,’ returned Adair, loyally.

‘I’ll take a picture of it, shall I? Send you the evidence.’ Río checked the battery level on her phone.

‘Is there a signature?’

‘Yeah. Banksy. Joke.’ Río leaned a little closer, wishing the light was better: the texture of the paint told her it was acrylic. ‘Talking of paintings, did I see that your Paul Henry seascape was up for sale?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘There was a description of a Paul Henry in the Irish Times auction preview a couple of weeks ago: it sounded a lot like yours.’

‘It is – was – mine.’

‘D’you mind me asking what you got for it?’ Río traced the raw edge of the canvas with a forefinger. It came away dust-free.

‘I got many thousand euros less than it was worth, Río a grá.’

‘Why did you sell it?’

‘Why do you think? I need a roof over my head more than I need a picture by a famous dead bloke.’

‘Did it cover the cost of your mobile home?’ she asked, taking a step backward, and putting her head on one side. How long had this painting been here?

‘No. The le Brocquy portrait did that. The Paul Henry went towards Izzy’s wedding fund.’

‘Izzy’s getting married?’ Río was astonished.

‘No, no. She’s no plans to get married. But she will one day, and I’m damned if my girl won’t get the most lavish wedding money can buy. The fact that her dad’s on his uppers isn’t going to get in the way of that. Oh – hang on a sec, Río – I just gotta sign something here . . .’

A deferential murmuring could be heard in the background. Río turned away from the painting and strolled across the room to where the minuscule dormer window afforded a peek of the butt-end of Inishclare island. She imagined Adair in Dubai surrounded by flunkeys, signing documents with a Montblanc pen. Hunkering down, she thought about what he had just said. On his uppers . . . How weird! Just a couple of years ago Río would never have dreamed that Adair Bolger would wind up broke. He’d been a ringmaster at the Celtic Tiger circus, a major beneficiary of the boom. Back in those days his weekend retreat, the Villa Felicity, had been an ostentatious pleasure palace for his gold-plated trophy wife, who had swanned about the joint as if it were her very own Petit Trianon. She remembered the guided tour Adair had given her of the swimming pool and the entertainment suite and the hideous yoga pavilion, and how she had curled her lip at the unseemly extravagance of it all. She remembered how he had hoped to indulge his daughter’s dreams of renaming the joint An Ghorm Mhór – The Big Blue – and turning it into a five-star PADI scuba-dive resort; how he had held on tight to that dream for Izzy’s sake, even when he could no longer afford to. But he hadn’t been able to hold on for long. Now this monument to the excesses of the Celtic Tiger era was lying empty a mile down the shoreline, waiting for its new owner to claim it. The new owner – whoever he or she might be – was clearly in no hurry. The shutters of the Villa Felicity had not been raised in over two years.

Río got to her feet and stretched. Then she reached into her backpack and rummaged for her cosmetics purse. Her nose had got sunburned yesterday and was peeling. Peering into the cracked mirror on the flap of the purse, she rubbed a little Vitamin E cream on her nose, and then on her lips. Her freckles were worse than ever this year – although you couldn’t really see them in the fractured glass. Maybe she should use this mirror more often? If she couldn’t see her freckles, that meant that she wouldn’t be able to see the fine lines around her eyes, the strands of silver creeping into her mass of tawny hair, the brows that needed shaping, the occasional blemish that needed concealing, the . . .

‘There, done and dusted,’ said Adair, back on the phone to her. ‘I’ve just signed away my condo in the Burj Khalifa.’

Something told Río that, despite the jocularity of his tone, he wasn’t being facetious. ‘Are you really on your uppers, Adair?’ she asked.

‘Pretty well,’ he acknowledged, cheerfully. ‘You don’t sound too put out about it.’

‘You know me, Río. As long as my girl’s happy, I’m happy. And she’s doing OK.’

‘What’s Izzy up to?’

‘She’s got herself a grand job in marketing. How’s Finn?’

‘His father got him work as a stunt double on his latest blockbuster.’

‘Cool.’

‘I guess. But LA doesn’t suit him. He’s making noises about going travelling again.’

Travelling solo, Río supposed, since – as far as she knew – her son had not had a significant other in his life since he and Adair’s daughter had gone their separate ways. When Finn and Izzy had first become an item, their Facebook albums had featured the kind of pictures that had made Río smile every time she browsed through them. Most of them showed the dynamic duo at work and at play as they backpacked around the world: Finn at the helm of a RIB, Izzy hosing down scuba gear; Finn signing logbooks, Izzy poring over dive plans. The pair of them together, swimming with manta rays, dancing on beaches, perched on barstools and swinging off bungee cords. The loveliest one of all (Río had printed it out) showed them lounging in a hammock, wrapped in each other’s arms.

And then, once Izzy had made the decision to embark upon a real-life career, her Facebook albums had reflected this U-turn. The backgrounds of sand, sea and sky had been replaced by vistas of gleaming steel and glass edifices in front of which a well-heeled Izzy posed with the élan of Condoleezza Rice, briefcase in one hand, iPhone in the other. Finn’s pictures, by contrast, continued to show him coasting in his own groove – surfing the shallows, skimming the reefs and diving the depths off islands from Bali to Bora Bora.

There was a silence, during which, Río knew, Adair did not want to talk about Izzy and Finn any more than she did. It was like a bittersweet romcom, she guessed, or an Alan Ayckbourn play. It was – well . . . complicated.

‘How’s my old gaff doing?’ Adair asked, finally. ‘Is there anyone living there?’

‘No.’

‘Still no idea who bought it?’

‘Not a clue. If somebody doesn’t lay claim to it soon it’ll go feral, like this place. It’s already overgrown with creeper.’

‘You once told me that if you trained creeper up the walls of a house it gave it a loved look.’

‘There’s a difference between cultivating creeper and allowing weed to grow rampant, Adair.’

Adair sighed, then gave an unexpected, robust laugh. ‘What a fucking colossal waste of money that house was! It’s funny to think that I’ll be living just a mile down the shore from that great white elephant, Río, isn’t it? That stupid feckin’ albatross of a Taj Mahal that—’ A blip came over the line, and, before Río could remark on his mixed metaphors: ‘Shite and onions!’ he growled. ‘Incoming call, Río, from a man I have to see about a dog. Thanks for the recce.’

‘I’ll send pictures. I hope they put you off.’

‘Nothing’s going to put me off, Ms Kinsella. Bring on that wheelbarrow.’

‘Wheelbarrow?’

‘For my cockles and mussels, alive alive-o.’

‘Slán, Adair.’

Río looked thoughtful as she ended the call. Adair was making a huge mistake – sure, didn’t the dogs in the street know that? But there was no talking to him because he simply wouldn’t listen. She had quizzed Seamus Moynihan, a local boatman, about the pros and cons of oyster farming, and asked him to put his thoughts in an email to her so that she could pass them on to Adair. The bulk of the email outlined the cons. As far as Seamus was concerned there were fuck all pros: in his opinion the phrase ‘the world’s your oyster’ was more of a curse than a compliment. Upon forwarding the email, Río had received a typically sanguine response. Adair was like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, she decided, fixated on his Bubba Gump Shrimp Company . . . except farming oysters on the wild West coast of Ireland had to be a hell of a lot more challenging than shrimp fishing in the southern United States.

What the hell. Mr Bolger was a grown man – he could do as he pleased and suffer the consequences. Río stuffed her phone back in her pocket, and resumed her inspection of the canvas nailed over the window.

It was a naughty little siren of a painting. It had a naïve, dreamlike quality that reminded her of one of Rousseau’s jungle fantasies – especially when the eye wandered to that small, unexpected feral creature in the bottom left-hand corner. A ray of sun filtering through the glass set it aglow suddenly, lending it the jewel-like appearance of a mosaic. Río wanted it. Picking up a shard of slate from the floor, she used it to prise away the nails fixing the painting to the window frame. Then she rolled up the canvas and tucked it inside her jacket. She wasn’t stealing, she told herself. She was safeguarding the painting for Adair. If she left it where it was, it would soon be destroyed by the damp sea air that seeped in through the bockety casement.

The damp was infiltrating her bones, now – she wanted to get back outside to where the sun was pushing its way through raggedy cloud, dispersing rainbows. She made a last, quick tour of the house upstairs and down, snapping a dozen or so photographs that she could attach to an email and send to Adair as evidence of his idiocy. In the kitchen, she even took a couple of shots of the empty whiskey bottles littering the room – proof of how old Madser had been driven to drink, and a premonition of the fate that might befall the new owner. But as she went to leave by the back door, she looked over her shoulder at the picture window beyond which the light bounced straight off the sea into the living space, and she knew that Adair Bolger – whose glass was always half-full – would somehow find a way to be happy in this house.