here were twelve minutes of a comfortable and not-for-one-second awkward conversation with Marcus, before reaching the town. Only ‘the town’ wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Even with my expectations lowered to an all-time low, it was so much worse. It was a one-horse town, with not even a horse in sight. A church. A graveyard. Two pubs. A chipper. A petrol station with a newsagent. A hardware store. Full stop.

I must have whimpered because Marcus looked at me, worried.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘What’s wrong?’ My eyes widened as I turned to him. ‘What’s wrong? I have a Barbie Village from when I was like, five, bigger than this at home.’

He tried not to but he laughed. ‘It’s not that bad. Another twenty minutes and you’re in Dunshauglin; that’s a proper town.’

‘Another twenty minutes? I can’t even get here, to this shit hole on my own.’ I felt my eyes heat up with frustration, my nose started to itch, my eyes began to fill. I felt like kicking the bus down and screaming. I grunted instead. ‘What the hell am I going to do around here on my own, buy a shovel in there, and dig up the dead over there? And have a bag of chips and a pint while I’m doing it?’

Marcus snorted, and had to look away to compose himself. ‘Tamara, it’s really not that bad.’

‘Yes it is. I want a fucking skinny gingerbread latte and a cinnamon roll, now,’ I said very calmly, aware that I was beginning to sound like Violet Beauregarde from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. ‘And while I’m there I want to use my laptop and avail myself of their Wi-Fi service, go online and check my Facebook page. I want to go to Topshop. I want to Twitter. And then I want to go to the beach with my friends and look at the sea and drink a bottle of white wine and I want to get so drunk, I fall over and vomit. You know, like normal things that normal people do. That is what I want.’

‘Do you always get what you want?’ Marcus looked at me.

I couldn’t answer. A giant lump of oh-my-god-I’m-in-love-kind-of-feeling had gathered in my throat. And so I just nodded.

‘Okay,’ he said, perking up, and I swallowed, my Marcus crush sent flying down my oesophagus into my stomach. ‘Let’s look on the bright side.’

‘There is no bright side.’

‘There’s always a bright side.’ He looked left and then he looked right, he held his hands up and his eyes lit up. ‘There’s no library.’

‘Oh my god…’ I head-butted myself off the dashboard.

‘Right,’ he laughed and turned the engine off, ‘let’s go somewhere else.’

‘Don’t you need the engine on to go somewhere else?’ I asked.

‘We’re not driving,’ he said, and climbed over the top of the driver’s seat and into the bus. ‘So, let’s see…where should we go?’ He moved his finger along the spines of the books in the travel section and walked alongside them reading aloud, ‘Paris, Chile, Rome, Argentina, Mexico…’

‘Mexico,’ I said straightaway, kneeling up on the seat to watch him.

‘Mexico,’ he nodded. ‘Good choice.’ He lifted the book from the shelf and looked at me. ‘Well? Are you coming? Flight’s about to leave.’

I smiled and climbed over the back of the seat. We sat on the floor, side by side, in the back of the bus and that day, we went to Mexico.

I don’t know if he knows how important that moment was to me. How much he actually saved me from myself, from absolute despair. Maybe he does know and that’s exactly what he was doing. But he was like an angel who came into my life with his bus of books at exactly the right time, and who whisked me away from a terrible place to a faraway land.

We didn’t stay in Mexico for as long as we’d hoped. We checked into our hotel, double bed, dumped our bags, and headed straight for the beach. I bought a bikini from a man selling them on the beach, Marcus had ordered a cocktail and was going to go on a jetski alone—I was refusing to get into a wet suit—when the knock came on the bus and an elderly woman who eyed me suspiciously stepped on to find something for her to pass her time in. We got to our feet then and I browsed the shelves while Marcus played host. I came across a book about grief; about learning how to deal with personal grief or a loved one suffering from grief. I hovered by that book for a while, my heart pounding as though I’d found a magic vaccination for all worldly diseases. But I couldn’t bring myself to lift it from the shelf—I don’t know why. I didn’t want Marcus to see, I didn’t want him to ask me about it, I didn’t want to have to tell him about Dad dying. Then that would mean I’d be exactly who I was. I was a girl whose dad had just killed himself. If I didn’t tell him, then I didn’t have to be that girl. Not to him, anyway. I would just be her on the inside. I’d let her rage inside me, bubble under my skin, but I’d go to Mexico and leave her behind in the gatehouse.

My eye fell upon a large leather-bound book in non-fiction. It was brown, thick, no author’s name or title along the spine. I pulled it out. It was heavy. The pages were jagged along the edges as though they’d been ripped. ‘So you’re like a Robin Hood of the book world,’ I said, as soon as the old woman had left with a racy romance under her arm, ‘bringing books to those who have none?’

‘Something like that. What have you got there?’

‘Don’t know, there’s no title on the front.’

‘Try the spine.’

‘Not there, either.’

He picked up a folder from beside him and licked his finger before flicking through some pages. ‘What’s the author’s name?’

‘There’s no author’s name.’

He frowned and looked up. ‘Not possible. Open it up and see what’s on the first page.’

‘I can’t,’ I laughed. ‘It’s locked.’

‘Oh, come on,’ he smiled, ‘you’re taking the piss, Goodwin.’

‘I’m not,’ I laughed, moving towards him. ‘Honestly, look.’

I passed it to him and our fingers brushed, causing a tingle of seismic proportions to rush through every single erogenous zone that existed in my body.

The pages of the book were closed with a gold clasp and attached to that was a small gold padlock.

‘What the hell…’ he said, trying to pull at the lock, making a series of grimaces that had me smiling. ‘Trust you to choose the only book in here that doesn’t have an author or title and is padlocked.’

We both started laughing. He gave up on the padlock and our eyes locked.

This was the bit where I was supposed to say, ‘I’m only sixteen.’ But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I told you, I felt older. Everybody always thought I looked older. I wanted to be older. It wasn’t like we were going to have sex on the floor, he wasn’t going to be in prison for staring at me. But still. I should have said it then. If we were in some old Gone with the Wind-style southern early nineteenth-century book, back in the good old days where women were men’s property and weren’t protected at all, then it wouldn’t have mattered, we could have rolled around in the hay in a barn somewhere and done whatever we wanted and nobody would have been accused of anything. I felt like hunting down that book from the shelves, opening it and jumping into the pages with him. But we weren’t. It was the twenty-first century. I was sixteen, very nearly seventeen, and he was twenty-two. I’d seen it on his ID card. I had experience in knowing that a guy’s horn didn’t last until my seventeen birthday. It was rare they felt like coming back in July.

‘Don’t look so sad,’ he said, and reached out and lifted my chin with his finger. I hadn’t realised he’d come so close to me and there he was, right before me. Toe to toe.

‘It’s only…a book.’

I realised I was hugging it close to me, both my arms wrapped around it tightly.

‘But I like the book,’ I smiled.

‘I like the book too, very much. It’s a cheeky very pretty book, but it’s obvious we can’t read it right now.’

My eyes narrowed, wondering if we were talking about the same thing.

‘So, that means we’ll both just have to sit and look at it, until we find the key.’

I smiled, and I felt my cheeks pink.

‘Tamara!’ I heard my name being called. A screeching, desperate call. We stopped gazing at one another and I rushed to the door of the bus. It was Rosaleen. She was running across the road toward me her face scrunched up, her eyes wild and dangerous. Arthur was standing on the pavement beside his car, looking calm. I relaxed a little then. What had Rosaleen all riled up?

‘Tamara,’ she said, breathless. She looked from Marcus to me, appearing like a meerkat again, on high alert. ‘Come back to us, child. Come back,’ she said, her voice shaky.

‘I am coming back,’ I frowned. ‘I’ve only been gone an hour.’

She looked a little confused then, looked at Marcus as if he was going to explain everything.

‘What’s wrong Rosaleen? Is Mum okay?’

She was silent. Her mouth opened and closed as if she was trying to find words.

‘Is she okay?’ I asked again, panic building.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course she’s fine.’ She still looked confused, but beginning to calm.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘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.