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
