Make Yourself at Home Read online

  MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

  Ciara Geraghty

  Copyright

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road

  Dublin 4, Ireland

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

  Copyright © Ciara Geraghty 2021

  Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

  Cover illustration © Andrew Davidson/The Artworks

  Ciara Geraghty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008320713

  Ebook Edition © February 2021 ISBN: 9780008320720

  Version: 2020-12-09

  Dedication

  For Grace, who makes this house a home every day

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Read on for a taste of Rita’s recipes, a Q&A with Ciara, and reading group questions.

  Rita’s Recipes

  Q&A with Ciara Geraghty

  Reading Group Questions

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  Also by Ciara Geraghty

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Optimistic people might say that the good thing about hitting rock bottom is that there is nowhere to go but up. Marianne Cross was not one of those people.

  Marianne, an accountant in both profession and nature, was a numbers person.

  You knew where you were with numbers.

  Take the number 435821, for instance. That was the number of the District Court case.

  Another number was 84: the number of times Marianne had shoplifted.

  Then there was the number of times Marianne had got caught shoplifting: 1. The age Marianne was when she began her shoplifting career: 13. A prime number. Then there was 35. A composite number and the age Marianne was when she married Brian.

  The number of years Marianne had managed to remain married: 4. The number of children Marianne wanted: 0. Which, incidentally, was the same number of children Brian had said he wanted, too.

  The number of children Brian was now expecting with his new partner, Helen: 2.

  These and other numbers scrolled through Marianne’s head that morning when she arrived back at her childhood home.

  The circulation figure of the national newspaper where Marianne’s crime had been reported in the ‘Court News’ column: 79,254. The times Marianne’s boss apologised during her ‘You’re fired’ speech: 8. The amount of euros by which Marianne was in arrears when the bank repossessed her home: 150,000.

  Marianne opened the passenger door and stepped out of her mother’s ancient Jeep. She straightened, looked at the house. Another number came to mind. This one was 15. Her age when she had left this place.

  She had resolved never to come back and yet here she was.

  That’s what rock bottom really meant.

  No place else to go.

  Chapter 2

  The house was called Ancaire, named for a granite rock on the beach below, with the curved top of an anchor.

  Marianne always thought it an appropriate name.

  Already she could feel the weight of it, bearing her down. She stamped her feet against the soggy earth to encourage some blood into her toes, wrapped her arms around her body in an attempt to ward off the worst of the bitter easterly wind that tore in from the sea, burdened with the salt water that went to work on her hair, transforming it from barely manageable to frizzy briars, dripping and dense.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’ Marianne opened her eyes. She had almost forgotten about her mother. Which was not something many people could be accused of. Rita’s dress sense alone prevented that.

  Marianne wondered, not for the first time, why her mother’s rig-outs – for there was no other word for them – never paid the slightest attention to the prevailing weather. Nothing about her headscarf – a bright snatch of orange silk arranged in a turban around her head – or the sleeveless pink summer dress underneath a blood-red bolero jacket suggested insulation or warmth. And the dullness of the day made her enormous sunglasses foolishly redundant. Rita launched herself in Marianne’s direction, stopping in front of her with barely an inch between them, reaching up to settle her hands on Marianne’s shoulders. Marianne could smell cigarettes and coffee and the herbal perfume Rita insisted on spraying not only on herself but also on innocent by-standers. She smelled like the sap of the dock leaves Marianne used to rub on Flo’s nettle stings when they were children.

  ‘Are you going to park?’ Marianne asked, stepping away so that Rita’s arms hung, suspended in the air for a moment. She lowered them, smoothing the material of her dress down the generous curve of her hips. She turned her head towards the Jeep, which had an abandoned look about it, strewn as it was across the grass, its ridged wheels sinking into the muck. It was an old army vehicle, the tarpaulin at the back torn and billowing in the wind like wings so that the leaking, rusting contraption looked as if it might take flight at any moment. Unlike the enormous rooster, now perched heavily on the roof.

  ‘I am parked,’ said Rita, setting the rooster on the ground. ‘I told you not to go up there, Declan,’ she told him. ‘You fell off last time, remember?’ The rooster scanned Rita with beady black eyes. ‘Go and find Gerard. That old goat will let anyone perch on him.’ Rita’s fingers tickled the bright comb of feathers sprouting from the rooster’s head. Marianne lifted her two suitcases out of the Jeep.

  ‘You’re travelling light,’ said Rita.

  For one horrible moment, Marianne thought she would cry. Cry in front of her mother like she was still
a baby who didn’t know any better. She set the suitcases down and pretended to cough instead. Rita whacked her on the back and Marianne stumbled forward. Her mother was stronger than she looked. She’d forgotten that.

  She turned and took in the house.

  It hadn’t changed. Still the same crumbling quality, the suggestion that it was only a matter of time before it succumbed to the lure of the cliff edge. The tall, grey façade was mostly covered now by the ivy that her late father, William, had occasionally tried to tame. At least the riotous greenery hid some of the decay of the ancient sash windows. Marianne could hear the panes of glass rattle in their tall frames in protest at the cutting wind that slashed across this exposed hilltop. And behind the house, the roar of the sea battering the coastline, dragging it away, piece by piece, year after year. One day, Marianne would arrive at this place and there would be nothing left.

  She shivered, tightened the coil of her arms around herself and squeezed her eyes shut. But even then, in the sudden darkness, she could see the house: the steep pitch of the roof, the bald patches where some of the slate tiles had come away, the precarious slant of the chimney pots. The heavy slab of the wood-panelled front door, its paint peeling and the brass of the lion’s-roar door knocker faded with the passing of the years and the gripping of hands.

  When Marianne opened her eyes. Rita was kneeling at the front door, her hand buried in the soil of a chipped terracotta planter out of which nothing but weeds grew.

  ‘Here it is,’ she said, drawing a large silver key out from beneath the clay. She banged it on the side of the planter to get the muck off it, then used it to open the door. Already, Marianne could smell the house. A damp smell, reaching for her like hands. Something of a greenhouse about it. Organic, like the house was alive in some way. Breathing.

  Rita held the door open. Marianne picked up the suitcases. The handles dug into the tender skin of her long, bony hands and she refused to think about the fact that everything she now owned could be accommodated within them. She negotiated her way inside, careful not to come into contact with either Rita or the door, like a child avoiding cracks on a pavement. Perhaps she thought that if she managed not to touch anything, she could somehow make it back home. Back to her house on Carling Road. It had been a new build in Drumcondra when she and Brian had bought it for an outrageous amount of money at the height of the boom. Still, even with the starkness of the repayments she entered into her household accounts spreadsheet, it had been worth it. The house paid homage to all the things that Marianne valued. Things like insulation. And security. Central heating that responded to the touch of a button instead of having to be coaxed and enticed and whacked betimes with one of Rita’s rolled up copies of Vanity Fair.

  Marianne walked down the hallway, concentrating on the black and white tiles on the floor, arranged in diamonds. The dado rail. The wallpaper, the pattern of which was long forgotten with the many coats of paint it had endured over the years.

  Rita followed her. Now, as well as the damp, Marianne could smell the fake tan on Rita’s legs, which did little to conceal the clumps of swollen blue veins that bulged at the back of her knees.

  The door into what her grandparents had called the drawing room, and where Marianne’s parents had once hosted their frequent and elaborate dinner parties, was closed.

  From behind the door, a cacophony of voices.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Marianne warily.

  ‘The Get-Well-Sooners,’ said Rita, smiling.

  The voices were chanting now.

  Get Well Soon.

  How?

  Don’t drink and sing this tune.

  When?

  Every day, starting today, you’ll

  Get. Well. Soon.

  ‘That seems fairly … straightforward,’ Marianne said.

  Rita did not rise to her dismissive tone. Instead, she said, ‘I left them here while I went to collect you.’

  ‘On their own?’

  ‘They’re fully grown adults, Marnie,’ said Rita.

  ‘My name is Marianne.’

  Get Well Soon™ was what Rita called her programme. She insisted on the ™ even though Marianne was pretty sure she had never actually registered it as a trademark. She had been running the programme since she got sober and realised that AA wasn’t a good fit for her, the acknowledgement of a ‘Higher Power’ not being within her gift. She also disliked the perpetual aspect of AA, the idea that alcoholism was a disease from which you could never recover. Her Get Well Soon™ philosophy was more upbeat, Rita felt, with its use of the word ‘soon’ and its presumption of recuperation.

  Membership was largely informal and word-of-mouth based. There was no hard-and-fast rule about how long you could stay. As long as it took, was Rita’s rule of thumb.

  ‘Besides,’ went on Rita, ‘Patrick was with them earlier. Teaching them how to whittle.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ said Marianne. ‘Putting out the fires in the Amazon, I suppose?’ Her tone was caustic. When she was within a certain circumference of Rita, she couldn’t seem to help reverting to a version of herself that was both childish and churlish.

  ‘He’s putting solar panels in the roof,’ Rita said. ‘The power of the sun is an amazing thing. And free to all. Patrick says—’

  ‘What room should I put my cases in?’ Marianne cut in. Couldn’t her mother wait until she took her anorak off before she started waxing lyrical about bloody Patrick? She supposed he could be described as … what? Her foster brother, maybe? He was eleven when he came to live with Rita that winter. Marianne was fifteen and had persuaded her mother to let her leave the local day school and enrol in a boarding school on the other side of the country. William left that summer, too, shortly after Rita stopped drinking. Those two events were not unrelated.

  Patrick was one of a long line of children Rita began fostering after she got sober and William left and Marianne left. Most of the foster kids stayed for a matter of days or weeks, but Patrick never left. On his eighteenth birthday, Rita had given him a half-acre at the north-eastern edge of Ancaire on which he had built a carpentry workshop with an apartment above it, and cultivated a kitchen garden that was, of course, rude with abundant growth, no matter what the season. He insisted on paying a mortgage on the property but Rita just squirrelled the money away for him. She had given Marianne the details of the account, for safekeeping. ‘You’re good with money,’ she had said.

  That had been true once.

  Patrick was as much a fixture at Ancaire as Rita and Aunt Pearl, who was not really Marianne’s aunt but Rita’s father’s cousin. When Rita inherited Ancaire from her parents, she had also inherited Aunt Pearl.

  ‘Put the suitcases in your bedroom, of course,’ said Rita. She glanced at the clock. ‘The Get-Well-Sooners are finishing up now,’ she said, beaming. ‘They’re dying to meet you.’

  ‘I don’t want to meet them.’

  ‘Of course you do. They’re darlings.’

  Rita opened the door and strode into the drawing room, clapping her hands for attention. ‘Everybody, this is Marnie. Marnie, everybody.’

  Marianne stood at the door, the outsider looking in. It was a familiar condition but no less awkward for that. The room seemed crammed although there were only four people inside. Two women, two men. One was a young woman, maybe twenty-five, who studied Marianne with long, navy eyes like she was a foreign film with no subtitles. In the weak January sun struggling through the windows, the rings in the woman’s nose, chin and along her ears glinted, as did the silver studs across the shoulders of her black leather jacket. It was difficult to tell what colour her hair was, since her head was shaved clean. Her maroon leather skirt struggled to cover the gusset of her tights, the legs of which ended in a pair of white wedge-heel trainers, with laces the same shade of red as her lipstick.

  ‘You don’t look like a Marnie,’ the young woman said. She had a hoarse voice and her tone was one of deep suspicion.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Marian
ne. ‘I’m a … Marianne.’ Everyone smiled as if Marianne had said something amusing.

  ‘Well, I’m a Shirley,’ she said, snapping a wad of chewing gum around her mouth. ‘I’m getting evicted too.’

  ‘I wasn’t evic—’

  ‘Eviction, repossession, same shit, different class,’ said Shirley, shrugging.

  ‘How do you do?’ The other woman, a diminutive elderly lady, buried beneath layers of cardigans, shuffled towards Marianne in an enormous pair of woollen slipper-boots. She stretched out an ancient, arthritic hand and slipped it into Marianne’s. It felt like a small bundle of twigs. Marianne held it rather than shook it.

  ‘Ethel Abelforth,’ the woman said. ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance.’ She smiled a sweet, little old lady smile. She looked a most unlikely addict with her blue rinse, freshly set in stiff curls. Rita would not approve of such thinking, insisting that addiction was an equal opportunities condition.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about your young man,’ Ethel went on, her brown eyes enormous behind thick spectacles and concern plaguing her features.

  Marianne withdrew her hand and glared at Rita. ‘Is there anything you haven’t told them?’ she snapped.

  One of the men stepped forward and examined Marianne’s face. ‘She failed to impress upon us how beautiful you are.’ He splayed a set of short, fat fingers across his cheeks. ‘Why, in this light, you’re like a young Katharine Hepburn.’

  ‘Hashtag, objectification,’ piped up Shirley.

  ‘Hashtag, can’t a man compliment a woman anymore?’ he said. He was immaculately turned out in a three-piece suit, the buttons of his waistcoat straining against his stomach, across which a thick gold watch chain stretched. His hair was dyed black and was slick with gel at the sides, while the top was arranged in a buoyant quiff. He lifted one of Marianne’s hands and bowed his head. ‘Bartholomew Sebastian Doyle the third, recovering alcoholic, at your service,’ the man said. Then, without warning, he pulled her into an all-encompassing hug that left her stinking of Paco Rabanne. Marianne coughed and extricated herself from his embrace.

  ‘You might be an alcoholic but, as I have said repeatedly, I only occasionally drink problematically.’ This came from the other man, a twitchy specimen, wearing a limp brown corduroy jacket with leather patches at the elbows.