‘This is number two,’ she said, ‘and Eric’s number three. He’s in there in the playpen. The two of them had to be separated because they were acting up.’ Dolores scrunched up her face and rubbed her nose against her daughter’s. ‘Isn’t that right?’ she asked, and her daughter rubbed her forehead vigorously against hers and threw her arms around her neck.

‘Madeleine’s the only one I know,’ Colette said. ‘She was in one of the plays we did at the Community Centre a few years back.’

‘That’s right,’ Dolores said. ‘She’s thirteen now. In first year at St Joseph’s.’

The child had gripped the chain that hung around Dolores’s neck. It read ‘Dolly’ in gold script. She began to stab at her mother’s throat with the pointed end of the y.

‘Stop that, Jessica,’ Dolores said, trying to pick the child’s fingers from the chain.

‘Look, Dolores, I won’t keep you, but I wanted to let you know that I’m interested in renting the cottage.’

‘Where are you stopping at the moment?’

‘I’ve been staying at a B and B for the past two weeks but that’s not much of an existence for anyone. I’d like to try and get a bit more settled.’

Why she couldn’t go home and settle with her husband was unknown to Dolores but she did know they’d been separated for some time.

‘Well, we’ve never rented it out during the winter. I’m not sure we’ve had the place properly cleaned since the last lot moved out in August. They might have left it a complete tip.’

‘But maybe I could go up and have a look at it, see if it would be suitable for me? Sure it might not be right at all. Does it have heat and electricity and—’

‘Oh, it has everything,’ she said. ‘Donal’s an electrician, he did the place up himself. You should have seen it when we first got our hands on it – it was falling down. We had to put on a new roof, new plumbing, new everything. It cost a fortune.’

‘Who owned it before you?’

‘Some fellow from the North who only used it one week of the year and wouldn’t sell it to us when we were building our own house. We would have tossed it and built on that site. It has an even better view of the beach than we have. We were five years in our own house before he finally agreed to sell.’

Dolores saw how keenly the woman was observing her. Her smile never wavered but her eyes were scanning every inch of her face.

‘And would it be OK to go up and have a look at it?’ Colette asked.

‘I can’t go heading up there now. Who’s going to look after these two? Anyway, it would be better to come back another time when Donal’s here. I couldn’t decide without asking him first. It might not be practical to be renting that place out this time of year.’ But she knew they might need the money. ‘And if you were still in it by next June, we’d have to charge you three times the price.’

‘I won’t be here by next June,’ Colette said. ‘Maybe you could give me the keys and I could go up and have a quick look now. I’ll be five minutes. At least that way I’d know whether or not I want it. You wouldn’t even have to bother Donal about it then.’

A scream came from the living room.

Dolores walked to the hallstand and pulled out a drawer. She threw her hand around inside and it rattled. She pulled out a bunch of keys with an anchor key ring and held them out to Colette. ‘The gold one is the one for the front door,’ she said. ‘It might be a bit stiff so pull it towards you when you’re opening it. It has its own driveway from the main road but you don’t need to go back up there. There’s a path up the hill at the bottom of the garden. It might be a bit damp, so mind yourself.’

She watched a smile spread across Colette’s face as she looked Dolores directly in the eye and withdrew the key from the end of her finger.

‘Thank you, Dolores,’ Colette said. ‘I’ll drop them back to you shortly.’

And with that she was out the door and right away Dolores wanted to call after her, to ask for the keys back, but the shout that rose from her stomach caught in her throat, and all that emerged was a small, tired sigh.

*  *  *

Colette began to make her way down through the Mullens’ front garden, the heels of her boots softly puncturing the earth. She thought about turning back and following the road up to the cottage, but plodded on. At the foot of the hill she looked around and saw Dolores still watching from the doorway, the child slung across her hip.

The hill up to the cottage was so steep she could see only the slate roof from the bottom. She could recall a time when the cottage had been thatched but she guessed the Mullens didn’t want to pay for the upkeep on that. There were footholds worn in the side of the hill and she took each one carefully, grabbing fistfuls of grass to steady herself as she climbed. At the top she passed through a gap in the dry-stone wall that divided the properties. Up close she could see where the whitewash was fading on the façade of the cottage and the old stone showed through. The blue paint on the door had almost entirely flaked away to reveal the grey undercoat. She held the little brass handle and pulled the door towards her as she turned the key. The cottage released a stale breath.

She flicked the switch by the door and an exposed bulb cast a cold light over the room. The furniture was a mixture of cheap-looking, self-assembled pieces and older items that looked like they’d been salvaged from some estate sale. And it was pokey, the room, with a low ceiling that made everything look like a miniature version of itself or too oversized and bulky for the space. But there were homely touches too; you could see that some effort had been made. There was a polished flagstone floor and the fireplace was a neat little square cut from the wall. There was a pine dresser with bits of old crockery displayed on each shelf. Green-and-pink tieback curtains framed the window that looked out onto the beach. In the bathroom she slid back the plastic door on the shower cubicle and tried to imagine how she would ever fit herself inside. The only bedroom was almost as big as the living room, so it was like the house had been divided in two by one wall, probably the only structural change that had been made in however many hundred years. The bedroom had a chest of drawers, a wrought iron bedstead, and a few wire hangers dangling from a rope hung between two walls. And tucked at the foot of the bed was a child’s cot with sides of slim white railings, just big enough to sleep the smallest of infants.

The cot would have to be gotten rid of. And wire hangers could be thrown away, light bulbs replaced, she thought, as she walked slowly back to the little banquette that had been built into the wall beneath the window, with cushions upholstered in the same pink-and-green fabric as the curtains. She took a seat there and looked out at the beach. She had walked the length of it every single day since her return. She had looked up at this cottage and wondered who owned it and made enquiries around the town. People from the North owned most of the holiday homes, but when she’d learned that the Mullens had bought the house a few years ago and done it up to rent out, she’d begun to imagine herself into it. She could wake each morning to the sound of the sea dissolving in her ears, and watch the weather change over the bay as she sat at this window, writing. She could bide her time there.

She looked around her again and ‘cosy’ was the kindest word she could think to describe the room, ‘quaint’ at a stretch, and while it was not quite the traditional Irish cottage she’d envisaged, it would do well enough. Turning back to the window, her eye settled on a little pine chest resting on the floor beside her. She lifted the lid. It was filled with bed linens. She ran her hand over the rough, starched sheet that lay on top and her finger brushed against something smooth. She pulled back the sheet and there was a magazine. On the cover a woman with an enormous perm, wearing nothing but white stockings, high heels, and a lace choker, leaned forward with her breasts squeezed between her arms. Her face was frozen in a look of mock horror, mouth hanging open, like some invisible assailant had surprised her and the camera had caught her mid exclamation. Colette smiled as she looked through the magazine. It was readers’ wives stuff: women who were either slightly overweight or bone-thin decked out like Christmas baubles in cheap, colourful lingerie. They wore knickers with an open crotch that exposed lengths of untrimmed pubic hair, pointed at the camera with their fingers peeling back their labia. There were no men to be seen anywhere, and in the back of the magazine, pages and pages of adverts for chat lines and escorts.

Was this why Dolores had looked so frightened when she’d mentioned going up to the cottage – was she worried she would find this flimsy rag? But the woman had looked tense from the moment she’d arrived, brittle and fearful. Then Dolores had taken her daughter in her arms and Colette had watched all the tension leave her body. But so thin, so cold-looking. Her hands, Colette had noticed, red-raw like she’d just pulled them from a bucket of water. Those gleaming tiled floors, slick as an ice rink. Was that what she did all day, scrubbed floors until her husband came home and gave her permission to do something else? She’d never met the man but she knew him to see, and when she’d spotted him in that picture in their hallway, she’d been reminded of his handsomeness. He was hard to miss – it was the only family photo on the wall. Dolores looked drawn, smiling wearily, the child on her lap festooned in a white lace christening dress and pointed awkwardly at the camera. Front and centre sat Donal, composed but absent, not a hair on his dark head out of place.

She stared down at the magazine in her hands. It could be Donal’s or have been left behind by some man staying in the cottage and hidden away at the last minute – or a teenager, Colette thought. She wondered if her own teenager, Barry, was at that stage now, procuring magazines and keeping them under his mattress and getting into a panic when Sheila, who had worked for them since he was a baby, came upstairs to clean his room. Even if he would speak to her, it was not something they would ever discuss, her angry son who had been butting his head against the world since the day he was born. Ronan was in his first year in Trinity now and had never had an angry phase, and Carl was still too young. But Barry, he blamed her for everything.

The last time she’d phoned the house he’d answered, and she’d asked him how he was. She could hear how foolish she sounded, the forced joviality in her voice because she feared so much her son’s response. ‘Fuck off,’ he’d said. ‘Just, fuck off,’ and he’d hung up the phone. She realised later that she should have kept phoning back until Shaun answered so they could discuss how to deal with their son’s behaviour. But when Barry had said this, it had stopped up the breath in her. The receiver was frozen in her hand, the dial tone ringing off. She was sitting in the hallway of the B&B, staring at the little wooden box where she’d just placed the 20p for the phone call. To have been dismissed by her son so violently, and for that to simply be the shape of things – she felt more foolish for being surprised. And she had tried to collect this incident in her head, to carry these thoughts back up to her room, moving slowly and carefully, like the ideas might spill out of her. And she’d sat down at the little fold-out table and written as plainly as she could of the hurt her son’s words had delivered to her. Like colliding with a glass wall, it was – the shock and pain and embarrassment of it – to see your life on the other side and not be able to touch it. And when she’d written the lines, when she thought she had said exactly enough, she left them. The flourishes, if the poem called for them, could come later. What was required in this first stage was accuracy, and honesty.

What is required is honesty – and as she thought this a wind rolled in off the bay, and it was like the eaves of the cottage heaved in air and the entire structure expanded just a little and settled back on itself again. Her sons would never visit her in this house – that was the truth of it. Ronan would come but he would be mortified for her and she wouldn’t be able to stand it. Barry would not deign to spend a single second here, nor should he or Carl be asked to. They had a home, a fortress that their parents had built for them where they’d all been happy together for the most part, and why should they be made to visit a two-room cottage where the roof lifted when the wind blew and the windows rattled in their frames?

She slipped the magazine back beneath the sheet and closed the lid of the chest. No, this would have to be her sanctuary, and hers alone. She could make a home of it, she was sure of that. And she would not hide away; she would simply retreat. There was work to be done.

Chapter 3

Niall could not find his school uniform. His mother had washed it for him the day before and he’d checked in the utility room. He couldn’t ask his father because he was doing a radio interview on the telephone in the hallway, and anyway, his father always got cross with him for losing things. Niall always seemed to be losing something. He knew that his father had to go to Dublin that morning and was dropping him off at school on his way, and he could already imagine his father shouting at him for making him late.

‘There’s a reason why Donegal is called the “forgotten county”,’ his father blared into the phone. Niall crept past him down the hallway to the spare room. He pushed open the door and smelled the warm fug of sleep; saw the rustling pile of her beneath the quilt. His mother always slept here when she’d had a fight with his father, and when things were this way between them, she usually didn’t get out of bed in the mornings. She became like this a few times a year – sometimes it was after they’d had a row and sometimes it just happened. When he got home from school, she’d have managed to get herself to the sofa in the living room. She’d be wrapped in a blanket with the applause of an afternoon chat show washing over her. He’d try to give her a hug or ask if she was OK and she’d butt into him gently, the way a cat turns its head against the back of a hand. She’d never really say what was wrong, and when she spoke, her voice would have this phlegmy rasp to it like it didn’t really belong to her. When things were normal, he looked forward to getting home from school to joke and laugh with his mother about what had happened that day, because really his mother was the funniest person he knew. But often, there’d be someone else there with her and this made him mad because he wanted his mother to himself. Sometimes it was her friend Margaret Brennan. His mother said that Margaret had time to be sitting around chatting all day because she was separated from her husband. But lately Father Brian’s car would be parked at the house and they’d be in the kitchen smoking and laughing and drinking tea.

He leaned over her in the bed and whispered in her ear, ‘Mammy, do you know where my school uniform is?’

She stirred but did not open her eyes. ‘In the hot press,’ she said, in a voice soft and sticky with sleep. Her dry lips sort of peeled apart each time she opened her mouth.

He retreated quietly back down the hallway.

‘There has been zero investment in infrastructure for the past twenty years and that situation has to be rectified,’ his father shouted into the receiver.

In the kitchen, Niall reached for the door of the hot press to open it slowly because the door was made of heavy wood and if it banged shut it made a loud noise. Opening the door, he saw the black hairy arse of a rat bounce back up through the hole in the wall where the pipes went out.

His father appeared in the doorway. ‘What the fuck are you screaming about?’ But then a worried look came over him. ‘Niall?’ he asked. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I saw a rat in the hot press.’

His father stared at the wooden door. ‘Shite,’ he said. His shoulders dropped. ‘Well, listen, don’t worry.’

‘But I can’t get my school uniform out because it’s in there.’

‘That rat’ll be more scared of you than you are of him.’ But his father didn’t seem convinced of that as he edged open the door and tugged on Niall’s school tie so that his jumper and shirt and trousers fell into a pile on the floor.

He gave Niall a brief hug. ‘Calm down – go upstairs and put your uniform on. We need to be on the road in the next ten minutes.’

Niall tied his tie in the car, his hands still shaking. All he could think about was the way his father had looked at him when he’d screamed, like he suspected Niall of having done something.

At school, Mrs Mallon tacked a map of Ireland to the wall. She pointed to areas on the map and they had to name the county, first in English and then in Irish. Then she pointed to rivers, lakes, and mountains, and they shouted the names in unison. She moved around the map clockwise, and then counterclockwise, and then she just swatted the long wooden pointer against the map at random and they had to think of the name as quickly as they could. She moved faster and faster until they were roused into a collective giddiness, and they were rocking back and forth in their seats and laughing.