Chapter One Several Years Later

      ‘You’re like Baa, baa, Black Sheep, Ma.’

      ‘Baa, baa, Black Sheep?’

      ‘You’ve got three bags full by the kitchen door.’ Finn was leaning against the doorjamb of Río’s bedroom, watching her curiously. ‘What are you doing?’

      ‘I’m decluttering.’ Río looked up at her son from where she was sitting on the floor, surrounded by junk. ‘It’s my New Year’s resolution. I heard someone on the radio this morning say that every time you buy something new, you should discard at least two items of your old stuff, and I haven’t thrown anything out since the cat died.’

      ‘The cat dying hardly counts as throwing something out.’

      ‘No, but throwing out her bed and her kitty toys did. So now I’m making up for the fact that I haven’t trashed anything for ages by dumping loads of things. Like this.’ Río tossed a theatre programme over her shoulder. ‘And this.’ A desk diary went flying. ‘And these. Go, go, go!’ A bunch of Christmas cards fluttered after the desk diary. ‘Decluttering’s proving to be surprisingly therapeutic. How’s your hangover?’

      ‘Not too bad.’

      ‘Last night was fun, wasn’t it?’

      Río and Finn had rung in the New Year in O’Toole’s pub, where Río worked part time as a barmaid. But for once she hadn’t been pulling pints–she’d been singing and laughing and dancing into the small hours. She and Finn had swung home around three a.m., and then Skyped Finn’s dad and left a recording of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on his answering machine in LA.

      ‘Last night was a blast.’ Finn moved across to the pile of debris that Río had fecked into the middle of the floor, and pushed it about a bit with his bare foot. ‘Anything here I might want to keep?’

      ‘Nope.’

      ‘What about the bags in the kitchen?’

      ‘They’re full of crap too.’

      In the kitchen Río had bagged–amongst numerous other useless objects–a torn peg bag, half a dozen broken corkscrews, a copy of a GI diet book (never read), a cracked wine cooler and a yoghurt maker still in its box.

      Upstairs, she had decided to attack her bureau before attempting to cull her wardrobe. She suspected that if she opened the closet door, her clothes would start pleading with her not to discard them–especially those heart-stoppingly beautiful garments she’d earmarked for herself when she’d dealt in vintage clothing. The chiffon tea dresses, the cobwebby scarves, the silk peignoirs–all had their own stories to tell, and all had the power to bring her hurtling back to the past.

      As did the photographs. They were mostly of Finn. Finn aged seven, in a rowing boat with his father, both squinting with identical green eyes against the sun; Finn at thirteen, climbing a mast, black hair a-tangle with wind and sea salt; Finn at fifteen, kitted up in scuba gear, poised to perform a backward roll from a dive boat; Finn on his twentieth birthday, smiling to camera with a pint of Guinness in his hand…

      ‘Ha! Get a load of Dad’s ponytail!’

      ‘What? Show me!’

      ‘I could blackmail him with this if he had any money. Look.’ From out of the bureau Finn handed Río a yellowed newspaper cutting. Underneath a headline that read ‘Flawed Hamlet Fails to Engage’ was a picture of Shane gazing moodily at a skull. ‘What year was this taken?’

      Río frowned, thinking back. ‘It must have been’ eighty-seven, because I was pregnant with you during the run of that show. I remember climbing ladders to paint the backdrop, and trying desperately to hide my bump–I was scared they’d fire me for health and safety reasons if they found out. No wonder you’ve a head for heights’.

      ‘And depths. I was down at forty metres this morning.’

      ‘Finn! Don’t scare me!’

      ‘Pah! It’s a piece of piss, Ma. I could dive in my sleep now. I got gills.’ Finn started rummaging in the drawer again, and produced a carrier bag stuffed with mementoes. ‘Baby shoes!’ he said, pulling out a pair of teensy bootees. ‘Jeepers! Were my feet ever that small?’

      ‘Give me those!’ Río grabbed the bootees from him, and set them reverently aside in a box she’d labelled ‘Things to Keep’.

      ‘And here’s more newspaper stuff about Dad. Hey! Listen to this. “Shane Byrne glowers sexily as Macheath, but he should not also be required to sing.” Was Dad a really crap actor, Ma?’

      Río laughed. ‘No, he wasn’t. He just never got the breaks he deserved. Good-looking actors can be at a real disadvantage. Casting directors tend to want to bed them rather than hire them.’

      Finn gave her a cautious look. ‘Ahem. Casting directors are mostly women, yeah?’

      ‘Yip.’

      ‘Thank Jaysus for that. You want to keep this?’

      Río shook her head, and Finn screwed the newspaper cutting into a ball and batted it across the room. Next out of the carrier bag was a photograph mounted on pretty, marbled card.

      ‘Well, hello!’ said Finn. ‘Who are these foxy ladeez? Don’t tell me it’s you and Dervla, Ma? Take a look!’

      Río looked–and looking took her straight back to the spring of 1987, the year her mother had died. The picture showed a seventeen-year-old Río walking hand in hand with her sister through the garden of their childhood home. Both girls were wearing silk kimonos–one patterned with birds of paradise, the other with cherry blossom–and both were barefoot. Yellow-faced monkey flowers and blushing meadowsweet stippled the banks of the pond in which a lamenting willow trailed her arms, and a pair of lazy koi drifted. You could practically smell the damp earth.

      Río remembered that Shane had taken the photograph–from the sitting-room window, to gauge from the angle. And sure enough, when she turned the print over, there on the back were some lines he had adapted from a Yeats poem, written in his scrawly black script:

      The light of morning, Lissamore,

       Sash windows, open to the south,

       Two girls in silk kimonos, both

       Beautiful, one I adore.

      ‘You were beautiful, all right,’ observed Finn. ‘Both of you. Jaysus, if I’d been Dad, I’d have been hard-pressed to choose between the pair of you.’

      Río looked up from the photograph. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked uncertainly.

      ‘Well, he’d obviously already made his choice, hadn’t he? You were the adored one. Otherwise I would never have happened.’

      ‘Oh. Yes.’ Río’s eyes dropped back to the image on the photograph, of the two girls wandering through an Impressionist garden, waiting in anguish for their mother to die. She remembered how her older sister’s hand had felt in hers, the reassuring coolness of her palm, the comforting pressure of her fingers. They’d held hands again