‘Should we be in here?’ asked Lou tentatively, standing at the green gate as if waiting to be given a ticket for admittance.
‘We’re not here to steal anything,’ replied her sister in exasperation. ‘Margo said we could come up here—’
‘But it’s not her house,’ protested Lou. ‘Who knows if there’s anyone here or not. There might be someone inside phoning the police as we speak!’
‘There isn’t,’ said a voice from behind Lou.
It was the girl they’d seen on the bicycle. Slim from all the cycling, early twenties with the small brown fluffy dog at her heels. Delighted to see new people, he ran into the garden with his topknot bouncing, yapped a bit at Lou and then leaned against her legs to be petted.
‘Hello little doggie,’ she said, leaning down to stroke his fur, then stood up anxiously as she remembered that they were trespassers. ‘We’re just here to see the house. We were looking for Angelo Mulraney—’
‘It’s grand,’ said the girl, waving a long, dismissive hand accessorised with a jewelled, hippie-ish bracelet. ‘They’re not due back for months. Mrs Mulraney likes the Canaries in the winter. She comes back the colour of mahogany from hours on a sun lounger and makes everyone jealous of her tan.’
‘Sounds like a good plan,’ said Toni, because even though they were in the shelter of the walled garden, there was quite a breeze blowing in from the ocean. This place would be Baltic in the real winter and the thought of the Canaries was beguiling.
‘Mrs Mulraney ... is she Angelo’s wife?’ asked Lou tentatively.
The girl considered this. ‘No. I think Angelo’s the uncle. I don’t know him. He lives abroad.’
‘Sicily,’ supplied Toni.
‘I’m going to Greece when I’ve done my finals,’ said the girl, perking up at this new bit of information. ‘I wonder is there a ferry linking them? My mother keeps an eye on the place for Mrs Mulraney and I could go and kip on Uncle Angelo’s floor so we could have a look at Sicily. There’s only going to be three of us. He wouldn’t mind, would he?’
‘How could he?’ said Toni easily, as if she knew Angelo intimately instead of only having heard of his existence the night before. ‘How many Irish people have travelled the world sleeping nowhere but on distant strangers’ floors?’
The girl nodded enthusiastically. She liked this plan.
‘Listen,’ went on Toni, ‘do you have Mrs Mulraney’s phone number?’
Toni was on home ground here. Searching out phone numbers and contacts for people was one of the many things she was good at.
‘I could ask my mother, but she’s off with her walking group for a week. Never looks at the phone. We’re having a party every night!’ The girl laughed and Lou could see her sister beginning to look annoyed.
‘We’ll track him down another way,’ Toni said grimly and began to scroll.
‘Good luck with that,’ said the girl cheerfully, and Lou, left to her own devices, looked around. Now that someone who knew the family had given the imprimatur for Lou and Toni to be at the house, Lou felt some of the tension leave her. Not that she or Toni could possibly resemble the sort of people who’d rampage through the house and steal things, but it was better to have someone know they were there. How was it that Toni didn’t have a shred of anxiety about being in a stranger’s garden when she was riddled with fear at being caught there? How could they be so different – was that Angelo’s doing? His genes?
Lou gave the little dog one last pet and left the garden to walk around the house. It was clear why the walled garden was a necessity: at the back of the house, the wind from the ocean had nothing to stop its progress. There were no trees and only a few bushes in its path. The view must have looked the same, Lou thought, as it had a hundred years ago. Nothing could have changed, except that perhaps erosion had made the sea closer.
Lou realised there were ruins just metres away at the bottom of the land on which the house sat. The ruins were probably the remains of the original Mulraney homeplace. The same white-painted stones were placed around its front door but there was only a shadow of a cottage left. One gable wall was gone entirely, and ivy and moss clung ferociously to the remains of the house. Despite its destruction, there was peace surrounding the mossy ruins.
Without knowing why, Lou took out her phone and began to take photos. She and Mim had always believed that places could contain memories. It was why they’d loved all their tatty jewellery talismans and stories about ancient Celtic sites. They’d gone to the Hill of Tara and Newgrange, as well as many holy wells and the Druid’s Altar, the stone circle in Drumbeg. They’d felt something in each place. The memory of the past, a distant echo of other lives lived.
Lou now felt something here, although she could not have put words upon it. If Angelo was her father, then his family had lived here, and they were her family too. Had her ancestors farmed this rock-strewn land? Had they looked out onto the sea every day, trying to make a living, wondering why they yearned for the heat and thinking they’d never reach the stunning Spanish land from where their relatives had come?
Lou ran a gentle finger over the ruins.Am I from here?she wondered.
‘Lou, there’s a dark cloud coming and my app here says it’s going to rain for sure. Time to go. Come on.’
They made it just beyond Skreen before the rain truly came down and soon, the windscreen wipers couldn’t keep pace with the furious torrent.
‘We have to stop,’ Toni said, but it was ages before they came upon a suitable place where the car would not be flattened. The stopping place was on the outskirts of Ballysadare, a gleaming mobile Winnebago of the type that had done huge business in the pandemic and boasted signs all over that said it sold coffee and stunning ice cream. A little further along was an actual café, with Wi-Fi, and as soon as they sat down Toni began googling for mentions of the Mulraney family and of Angelo. Then, when she could find nothing, she began looking up articles about people discovering they were not genetically related to some of their family members.
‘This is amazing,’ she said to Lou. ‘Look, this woman thought it was a laugh to do his and hers DNA tests with her boyfriend and they hoped he had Viking blood because he was blue-eyed, tall and very blonde. In fact, he was 4 per cent Viking and she found that the person she’d thought was her sister was in fact her mother! Her nephew was her half-brother. I can’t believe I haven’t interviewed anyone about this before.’
Lou shot Toni a jaundiced look.
‘This is not a research trip,’ she said. ‘This is my life, Toni.’
