With great care, she leaned the pane against the exterior wall before setting her palms on the sill and hoisting herself up.
‘Wait!’ said Raoul. ‘Take your boots off. You don’t want to leave footprints.’
Cat undid the laces on her boots, pulled them off and dropped them on the muddy ground below the window. Then she twisted around, slid her legs through the empty frame, and eeled herself into the house.
‘How easy was that!’ she crowed, and her words came back to her, bouncing off the smooth plaster walls of the house that would never be sold, never be lived in. ‘Come and have a look, Raoul.’
He followed her through.
Both utility room and kitchen were equipped with state-of-the-art white goods. The kitchen floor was marble, the work surfaces polished granite. The adjacent sitting room boasted a gas fire and a panelled alcove in which to house a plasma screen. Beyond the sitting room, beyond doorways that accessed study, den and conservatory, carpeted stairs led from the light-filled lobby to bedrooms and bathrooms above. Upstairs, the walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom was nearly as big as Cat’s room in Hugo’s house.
She wondered what it must be like to live in a house like this. Would you live a life here, or a lifestyle? Would you curl your feet up on a suede upholstered sofa while aiming a remote at your entertainment suite? Would you microwave a ready meal from a top end outlet while uncorking a chilled bottle of Sauvignon Blanc? Would you cuff an infant lovingly when he or she trotted mud onto your marble tiles before reaching for your eco-friendly floor wipes?
Hugo’s house was so very different. Hugo’s house stood all alone in the middle of a forest, and was like something out of a Grimm’s fairytale. It was dark and tumbledown with a cruck frame and exposed beams and a roof that slumped in the middle. Having settled comfortably into its foundations over the course of three hundred years, Hugo’s house listed to starboard, and had crooked windows and wonky stairs and worn flagstones. Hugo had refused to compromise the character of his house by introducing twenty-first century fixtures and fittings: his fridge was clad in elm planks, he cooked (when he could be bothered to) on an ancient Rayburn. There was no television, no broadband and no power shower. People described Hugo’s house as ‘quaint’. But they didn’t have to live there. Cat had never been able to call Hugo’s house home.
She had returned there when she was fourteen, after her mother – Hugo’s second wife – had died of uterine cancer. Paloma had left Hugo and the Crooked House some years previously, taking Cat with her to Dublin, where they had lived until Paloma’s untimely death. Back on the west coast, the teenage Cat, bereaved and isolated, had found it impossible to make friends. Her accent singled her out as being different – that and the fact that her eccentric father was now living with his third wife.
Cat hated school. Hugo had tried the boarding option, but she just kept absconding, and running away to Raoul’s bedsit in Galway. When she was expelled from boarding school, she mitched from the local secondary so often that Hugo made a pledge to the authorities to home-school his daughter. But Cat shrugged off his half-hearted attempts. How could you have faith in a teacher who sloshed brandy into his morning coffee and smoked roll-ups while he recited Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney in maudlin tones? The answer was – in Cat’s case – you didn’t. You gave him the finger, and went off in search of boats to sail, or cloudscapes to paint, or – the very activity she was presently engaged in – houses to break into.
And neither the authorities nor her father seemed to give a shit.
Cat strolled across the pristine oatmeal carpet of the showhome’s master bedroom to a big dormer window that looked out over the building site. How many houses like this might there be all over Ireland languishing unfinished, waiting for someone to occupy them? She reckoned she could have her pick of thousands. To the east, inland, ribbon developments straggled Dublin-ward along the sides of the roads. To the south, the landscape was dotted with un occupied holiday homes. To the west, an expanse of ocean glittered diamantine.
‘Look, Raoul!’ she said, turning to him as he followed her through the door. ‘You can see the cemetery on Inishcaillín from here.’
Inishcaillín was where Cat’s mother, Paloma, had been buried. The cemetry was on the summit of a drowned drumlin, and Cat would occasionally take a boat out to spend a day on the island, talking to her mother, undisturbed by anyone since the island was uninhabited now. Paloma’s grave was surrounded by dozens of graves of victims of the Irish famine, all with their headstones facing west towards the Atlantic, that they might see in the setting sun the ghosts of all those loved ones who had fled Ireland for America a century and a half ago. It was a desolate place, whipped by raging gales that came in from the ocean, but it had been a place that Paloma had loved like no other, and that was why Cat had insisted she be buried there. When she was a little girl, she and her mother used to take picnics over to the island, and swim in the more sheltered of the easterly coves. They’d explored the abandoned village, too, making up stories about the people who used to live there, and had once even pitched a tent and stayed overnight in one of the roofless cottages.
‘Do you miss her still?’ asked Raoul.
Cat turned to him. ‘Of course I do. But I hate her too, in a way, for leaving me alone with that bastard and his whore.’ She saw Raoul raise an eyebrow. ‘What’s up?’ she demanded. ‘You know how I feel about them.’
‘Cat, Cat, you drama queen,’ he chided. ‘Sometimes you talk like something out of Shakespeare.’
‘That bastard and his ho, then,’ she returned, pettishly. ‘Let’s open the other bottle. I feel like getting drunk.’
Cat had never been able to call her stepmother by her given name. Although Ophelia had been Mrs Gallagher for five years, Cat refused to acknowledge her and had gleefully shortened her name to ‘Oaf’. Stepmother and stepdaughter were barely civil to each other now.
Raoul took the second bottle of wine from his backpack, and started to strip away the foil from the neck. ‘You’re seventeen now, Cat,’ he pointed out. ‘Legally speaking, you could leave home, with our father’s permission.’
‘Sure, he’d give it in a heartbeat.’ Cat leaned against the wall, and slid down until she was sitting on the carpet.
‘Well, then?’
‘Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But where would I go – and don’t tell me I can move in with you because there’s no way I’m gonna cramp your style with the ladies.’ Raoul inserted the corkscrew and pulled the cork, and Cat smiled up at him. ‘I’ll never forget how pissed off your girlfriends used to look every time I escaped from the boarding school of doom and landed on your doorstep.’
Raoul laughed. ‘It was a little bizarre. Remember the night you sleepwalked your way into bed with me and . . . what was her name? It was some hippy-dippy thing.’
‘Windsong. I could never keep my face straight when I talked to her. Windsong hated me.’
Raoul poured wine, then handed Cat a cup and sat down beside her. ‘So let’s have a serious think about this. You can’t move in with me, and you can’t afford to rent anywhere.’
‘You’re right. There’s no way I could afford to live on my allowance. And I can’t live without it. It’s a catch-22. I may despise our dad, but he doles out the dosh.’
‘And he’s not going to cut you off, kid. If you do move out, get him to lodge money in your bank account.’
‘I don’t have a bank account’.
‘Not even a savings account?’
‘No, and I can’t open a current account until I’m eighteen.’
‘Get him to send you postal orders.’
Cat gave him a sceptical look. ‘To where? Cat Gallagher, no fixed abode?’
‘It’s