CHAPTER 1

Cancer 23 June-23 July

Protective, stubborn, moody, soft beneath a hard shell

The day started badly but that didn’t surprise her. Nessa’s horoscope for the whole week had been the sort she hated, full of warnings about people being unco-operative, minor mishaps and things not going to plan. It was one of those horoscopes that made her check the signs either side of Cancer just to see if things would have been better if she’d been born a month earlier or later. Gemini’s were in for an exciting week, it seemed. Leo’s would see some new events taking hold – good for Adam, at least. But the predictions for Cancerians were dull and vague. Not like last month when she’d read about an unexpected windfall and had won £500 on the Lottery the very next day. She’d scoured the pages of The Year Ahead for Cancerians for other potential money wins after that but hadn’t come up with anything even vaguely promising. The next few weeks looked incredibly boring as far as she could see, filled with advice to focus on her resources and take time before making important decisions. She’d checked a few magazine horoscopes too on the offchance that they’d throw a better light on things but they’d been equally vague. The only thing for it, Nessa decided, was to try and make the week more interesting herself.

Because things hadn’t started promisingly first thing (the alarm hadn’t gone off and there’d been a big rush to get both her unco-operative husband and her equally unco-operative daughter out of bed) she hoped that they’d improve by tonight. She really didn’t want minor mishaps and to upset the assorted family gathering she’d planned for this evening. I don’t know why I let myself in for things like this, she muttered, as she watched eight-year-old Jill eat breakfast by stuffing an entire warm croissant into her mouth. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

But it always gave her a warm glow to have the people she cared about around her and to bask in their appreciation of an enjoyable evening. Typically Cancerian, her mother Miriam would say fondly, and Nessa knew that she was right. But she couldn’t help herself. She liked filling her home with the people closest to her, and her parents’ visit to Dublin from their home in Galway was a good excuse to have everyone around for the first time in ages. Miriam and Louis had moved back to their home county when Louis had retired the previous year. Nessa still hadn’t got used to the fact that her mother was no longer a five minute drive away. It wasn’t, she knew, the fact that she needed to call on Miriam that often, but it had been nice to know that she was there in a crisis. Not that there were too many real crises in Nessa’s life. How could there be when Adam and Jill were part of it (even if they made it difficult in the mornings by refusing to get out of bed)?

And then she heard the crunch. She stood in the kitchen, coffee cup midway to her lips, while she processed the sound. She didn’t really need t process the sound, she knew exactly what it as, she’d heard it often enough before.

‘Oh, Mum!’ Jill’s blue eyes were wide with the knowledge too. ‘Dad’s pranged the car again, hasn’t he?’

‘Sounds like it.’ Nessa put her cup on the breakfast counter. ‘Let’s go and see.’

They walked together into the front room and looked out of the bay window.

Adam was getting out of the car, his face red and his eyes blazing with fury. Nessa could see clearly what had happened. In reversing the car out of the driveway Adam had managed to clip the front wing of another car which was parked at the kerb.

Shit, she thought, as she watched her husband stand and seethe. It was probably because he was eating the croissant as he drove. I should never have given it to him just to save time because he was late for a meeting. He can’t drive and do something else at the same time. I should know that by now. And I certainly should’ve anticipated what mishap would happen. I didn’t need a horoscope to tell me.

Of course, if he hadn’t been a terrible driver, if he hadn’t had trouble with – as he called it – spatial awareness, she might never have got to know him at all. They’d have passed each other by ten years ago instead of exchanging phone numbers in the less than romantic setting of the underground car park at Blackrock Shopping Centre. Parking was tight in the carpark at the best of times but, two days before Christmas, it was manic. Finding a space was difficult enough, parking in it wasn’t easy what with all the other impatient drivers around, and getting out of it was even more difficult because spaces that had been a tight fit on the way in suddenly seemed to shrink on the way out.

But parking in difficult spaces held no fears for Nessa. Louis, a tanker driver, had taught his three daughters to drive and had taught them well. Unlike most relatives as teachers, Louis was good at instructing, good at staying calm and good at instilling confidence. Nessa, Cate and Bree Driscoll had all passed their test at the first attempt.

But, easy as it was for Nessa, Adam Riley was having terrible trouble. He’d just spent the past two hours in the shopping centre at least half of which had been spent trying to find somewhere to park in the first place; he was tired and bad-tempered  and had spent much, much more than he’d meant to because he’d bought the first thing he saw for everyone and then, as he’d walked round a little more, had seen much more appropriate gifts and bought them too. He didn’t mind spending money – in fact he enjoyed it immensely – but both his credit cards were up to their limits and his current account was overdrawn. So he knew that as a result of today he’d be spending the next few weeks on some kind of drastic economy drive. And he hated economy drives.

He sat in his car and looked around him anxiously. The red car beside him was so close that only a couple of millimetres separated them. On the other side, a stone pillar seemed to be effectively blocking any attempts he could make at manoeuvering. And there was a queue of cars waiting to take the space which he should already have vacated.

Nessa was first in the queue. She was listening to her Queen tape and singing along happily to Bohemian Rhapsody when she realised that the asshole who was trying to reverse out of the space she was waiting for was making a complete mess of it. She watched as he moved backwards and forwards and backwards again without making any progress whatsoever. She was pleased that it was a bloke who was messing things up so badly but she knew that most of the people in the queue behind her would be thinking that some fool woman was making a tit of things.

Adam could feel his palms beginning to sweat. He knew that people were waiting. He knew that they were watching him. Most of the time he loved to have people watching him because he was a natural extrovert and enjoyed admiration but not here, not now.

He jumped as someone rapped on the driver’s window.

‘Let me.’

The girl was tiny – no more than five feet two. Her dark brown hair curled around her oval face and two grey eyes peered at him from beneath a shaggy fringe.

He wound down the window. ‘Pardon.’

‘We’ll be here until New Year if you keep on doing what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘And I want to get some shopping done. So, if you want to get out of that space, let me do it.’

He was going to say no but something in her eyes made him say yes.