‘I thought you’d…’ she trailed off, looking around the village now and, as though realising where she was, she stood up straight, ran a hand across her hair to smooth it down, fixed her dress which was crumpled from the drive. She took small breaths and she visibly calmed before us. ‘You’re coming back to the house?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I frowned. ‘I told Mum where I was going.’

‘Yes, but your mother…’

‘My mother what?’ My voice hardened. If everything was so okay with my mother, then my telling her should have been fine.

Marcus’s hand was on my back, his thumb comfortingly circling the small of my back, reminding me of Mexico, of all the other places I could be.

‘You should go with her,’ Marcus said quietly. ‘I have to move on now, anyway.You can hold on to that.’ He nodded at the book I was hugging in my arms.

‘Thanks. See you again?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Of course, Goodwin. Now go.’

As I walked across the road and sat in the back of the Land Rover, I noticed the three male smokers standing outside the pub, staring. It’s not unusual to be stared at but it was the way they were staring. Arthur nodded at them. Rosaleen kept her head down, her eyes to the floor. The three men’s eyes followed us, and I stared back, hoping to figure out what exactly was their problem. Was it because I was new? But I knew it wasn’t, because they weren’t looking at me. All eyes were on Arthur and Rosaleen. In the car, nobody said a word the entire way home.

Inside the house, I went to check on Mum despite Rosaleen telling me not to. She was still sitting in the rocking chair, not rocking, and looking out at the garden. I sat with her a while and then left. I went downstairs to the living room, back to the armchair I’d been sitting in before Marcus called. I reached for the photo album but it was gone. Tidied away by Rosaleen again. I sighed and searched for it again on the bookshelf. It was gone. I went through every single book on that shelf, but it was nowhere to be found.

I heard a creak at the door and I spun round. Rosaleen was standing there.

‘Rosaleen!’ I said, hand flying to my heart. ‘You scared me.’

‘What were you doing?’ she asked, her fingers creasing and then smoothing the apron over her dress.

‘I was just looking for a photo album I saw earlier.’

‘Photo album?’ She cocked her head sideways, her forehead wrinkled, her face pinched in confusion.

‘Yes, I saw it earlier, before the library came by. I hope you don’t mind, I took it out to look at it but now it’s…’ I held my hands up in the air and laughed. ‘It has mysteriously vanished.’

She shook her head. ‘No, child.’ She looked behind her and then lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Now hush about it.’

Arthur entered then, with a newspaper in his hand and she went quiet. He glanced from me to her.

She looked at Arthur nervously. ‘I better see to the dinner. Rack of lamb tonight,’ she said quietly.

He nodded and watched her leave the room.

The way he watched her made me not want to ask Arthur about the album. The way he watched her made me think a lot of things about Arthur.

Later that evening, I heard them in their bedroom, muffled sounds that rose and fell. I wasn’t sure if it was an argument or not but it felt different from the way they usually talked. It was a conversation, instead of a series of comments thrown to one another. Whatever they were talking about, they were trying hard for me not to hear them. I had my ear up against the wall, wondering about their sudden silence, when my bedroom door opened and Arthur was there staring at me.

‘Arthur,’ I said, moving away from the wall, ‘you should knock. I need my privacy.’

Considering he’d just caught me with my ear to the wall he did well not to say anything.

‘Do you want me to bring you to Dublin in the morning?’ he grumbled.

‘What?’

‘To stay with a friend.’

I was so delighted, I punched the air and got straight on the phone to Zoey, either forgetting to pursue or not caring as to the sudden reason for my expulsion. And so that was the time I went to stay with Zoey. It had been only two nights in the gatehouse and already I felt different returning to Dublin. We went back to our usual patch on the beach beside my house. It looked different and I hated it. It felt different and I hated that too. By the entrance gate to my house a For Sale sign had been erected. I couldn’t look at it without my blood boiling, my heart rate rising and feeling an overwhelming desire to scream like a banshee, so I didn’t look. Zoey and Laura were already studying me as though I had landed from another planet, gutted their best friend and zipped on her outer layer of skin like a sleeping suit, and everything I said was being picked at, analysed, misconstrued.

Seeing the For Sale sign, my two friends, with the sensitivity of a ‘Geronimo’ became excited. Zoey chattered incessantly about breaking into the house and spending the afternoon there, as though at that exact time in my life that was the appropriate thing to say. Laura, a little more genteel, looked uncertainly at me while Zoey’s back was turned to face the gate and assess the situation, but when I didn’t object, she went along with the idea, swept out into sea like a freshly flushed shit.

I don’t know how I did it but I managed to kill the excitement for raiding my repossessed house in which my father had killed himself. Instead we got drunk and plotted against Arthur and Rosaleen and their evil country ways. I told them-no I didn’t just tell them, I revealed to them-about Marcus and the bus of books and they laughed, thinking him an absolute dork, thinking of the travelling library as the most ridiculously boring thing that they had ever heard of. It was bad enough to have a room full of books but to make books even more accessible, well, that was a downright dorkfest.

That hurt me so much but I couldn’t quite understand why. I tried to hide it, but the one source of excitement and escape I’d experienced in the month since Dad died was shredded in an instant. I think that’s when I started building a wall up between us. They knew it too. Zoey was looking at me with those squinted dissecting eyes that she gives anybody that’s in any way different, different being the worst possible offence in the world to her. They didn’t know why, they never thought that the emotional impact of what I’d just gone through was going to change not just me for a few weeks, but the very core of me for ever. They just thought living in the country was having a bad effect on me. But I’d been trampled on like a plant that has been crushed underfoot but not killed, and just like the plant I’d no choice but to grow in a different direction than I had before.

When Zoey grew bored, or scared, of discussing things she knew nothing of, she called Fiachrá Garóand the third muskateer, Colm, who I call Cabáte-which means ‘cabbage’ in Irish. I’d never ever spoken to him properly in my life. Zoey paired off with Garóid, Fiachrá was partnered with Laura, which Zoey had seemed to have got over, and Cabáiste and I just sat and watched the sea, while the other four rolled around in the sand making sloppy noises, and Cabáiste glugged occasionally on a nagin of vodka, and I expected to be groped at any moment. He covered the bottle with his mouth and knocked back another mouthful, and I waited for that wet, sloppy, vodka-tasting kiss that slightly stung and made me want to retch at the same time.

But he didn’t do that.

‘Sorry about your dad,’ he said quietly.

His comment took me by surprise and then suddenly I became so emotional I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t answer him, I couldn’t even look at him. I looked the other way and allowed the breeze to blow my hair across my face, hiding and sticking to the hot tears that rolled down my cheeks.

The fact I’d been trampled on was obvious. What I called into question time and time again was which direction I was now growing in.