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something.’ Finbarr held out a four-leaf clover. I reached for it without sitting up and straight away the fourth leaf fluttered away. He’d been holding it there with his finger.
    ‘Fake luck.’ I flicked it away with a laugh, still delighted.
    Finbarr flopped down beside me. He never minded being contradicted, just like he never minded me winning game after game of tennis. He never minded anything.
    ‘I hope I don’t smell like fish,’ he said.
    I thought about lying and saying no. Instead I said, ‘Well, I smell of sheep and horse shite, so we’re a good match.’
    ‘I smell of those things too.’ He wove his fingers together, arched his arms over behind his head and made a pillow of his hands. ‘You like to read, do you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I could read that book when you’re done.’ He stared straight up at the sky, not at my book. ‘Then we can talk about it.’
    ‘Do you like to read?’
    ‘No. But I could start.’
    ‘This one’s mostly about a girl.’
    ‘I don’t mind reading about girls.’
    I turned my head and stared at him, and he tilted his head towards me. Long black eyelashes framed eyes of layered blue. Soon Uncle Jack would come up over the hill and he wouldn’t like to see us, lying side by side, even though we were a good two feet apart.
    ‘I think I’d like to be a writer,’ I said. It was nothing I’d ever thought of before. I liked to read but had never tried my hand at stories or poems.
    ‘You’d be a grand writer,’ Finbarr said. ‘You’d be grand at anything.’
    He put a strand of grass between his teeth and turned his eyes back to the sky. Legs crossed at the ankles. Alby tugged at his trouser legs, dissatisfied with a full day of running, or else eager to get home for the evening meal.
    ‘Nan O’Dea,’ my aunt called from the house. ‘You get up this minute, please, and wash for supper.’
    I knew the sternness in her voice was over me and Finbarr lying down together, not my need to wash. We jumped to ourfeet, both of us with mussed hair, sun from a day working outdoors rosying our cheeks.
    ‘Stay for supper, Finbarr?’ Aunt Rosie called, forgiving him, as no one could ever help but do.
    ‘I’d love to, Mrs O’Dea.’
    With as much energy as the younger of the two dogs, we raced each other to the house. Finbarr won. He jumped on the porch with both feet, raising his arms up in the air. Victory.

    Sometimes you fall in love with a place, dramatic and urgent as falling in love with any person. I started begging to return to Ireland almost the moment I arrived back in London. My sisters belonged to my mother and England, but Ireland was where I belonged. I had an ancestral memory of those green hills. The place lived in my bones so they ached when I was away from it. At that age, when I thought of Finbarr, it was as another part of the landscape.
    ‘I’ll only send you back if you promise never to stay,’ my mother said. ‘I don’t want any of my girls living far from home. Not even you, Colleen.’
    Those last words were spoken in a loving tone but Colleen didn’t answer. She sat sprawled at the kitchen table, her green eyes fixed on the pages of a book by Filson Young about the Titanic . Her wild blonde hair spilled onto the table, curtaining her face. The rest of us had brown hair and brown eyes like our father.
    Mum laughed and shook her head. ‘The roof could fall in around that one and she wouldn’t notice.’
    Louisa, the most practical of all of us, pushed her hand against Colleen’s shoulder. Colleen sat up, blinking, as if justwoken. ‘She’s already living off far from home,’ Louisa said, tapping the pages of the book.
    Oh, let me pause for a moment here. Colleen, seventeen years old, with her life ahead of her. All of us together and hopeful for the future, in the tiny, rundown kitchen that was the heart of our home. Our mother still able to believe her four girls would transition seamlessly from providing her a house full of children