That Gallagher Girl Read Free

holiday homes. To the west, an expanse of ocean glittered diamantine.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Cat, Cat, you drama queen,’ he chided. ‘Sometimes you talk like something out of Shakespeare.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Sure, he’d give it in a heartbeat.’ Cat leaned against the wall, and slid down until she was sitting on the carpet.
    â€˜Well, then?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜And he’s not going to cut you off, kid. If you do move out, get him to lodge money in your bank account.’
    â€˜I don’t have a bank account’.
    â€˜Not even a savings account?’
    â€˜No, and I can’t open a current account until I’m eighteen.’
    â€˜Get him to