Free OUT OF THE BLUE a gripping novel of love lost and found by Gretta Mulrooney Page B

You’d be given antihistamines now,’ she tells him.
    He takes a final suck of his cigarette and throws the stub into a bank of ferns. ‘That’s too clinical an explanation, too neat by a mile. I prefer the idea of hot blood. See you then, maybe.’
    ‘Thanks for the help with the tub and the tip about the ashes,’ she calls as he makes his way down the path.
    He raises his hat and waggles it without looking back. On the road at the foot of the glen is a bright blue car. Inside, she can just make out a dog, its nose poking through the open window. It leaps up as it sees him approach, paws pressed to the glass. She watches until he’s vanished from sight, remembering how one autumn, hives had come up on the soles of her feet and she’d walked barefoot on corn stalks after the harvest to find some relief. The sharp blades of the stubble had pierced the blisters and freed bright red ribbons of blood. Nanna had made her soak her feet in cold water in which she dissolved potassium permanganate crystals; her skin was stained a pale purple, the colour of ripe plums, for weeks afterwards.
    She turns back into the cottage. Fiery blood; what does she know of Owen? Something had happened in the family; that was all she could recall. She remembers that summer when her mother had lost the baby who would have been her brother or sister and she was left with her grandmother; Nanna sitting by the fire, legs akimbo, a lamp by her side, reading a letter, whispering that her tyke of a brother had the heart across her and would live to rue the day. ‘He’ll find he’s treading the sorrowful road after what he’s done.’ She had wanted to see the letter, curious to know who had written it and why Owen would find the road sorrowful but her grandmother had thrown it into the hissing fire and poked it sharply down until it was consumed to grey ash.
    In the evening, after she had gone to bed, Liv heard the door closing and watched from the window as her grandmother made her way down to the well in the dusk, her shawl gathered around her shoulders. Bats swung above her head in a criss-cross dance, vague shapes in the half-light and Liv felt anxious at being alone. She got up and quietly followed her grandmother, sensing the tension in her back. Peering from behind the bushes, she had seen Nanna circling the well, round and round in a clockwise direction, her rosary playing through her fingers, whispering her prayers. Suddenly, she missed her parents and darted back to the cottage, running up the stairs and pulling the bedclothes up around her head.
    Once, when she had been constructing a family tree for a school project, she’d asked her father to go through her grandmother’s side. He had counted off the names: Bridget, Dennis, Fergal, and Oona. She had written them in, then asked what about Owen, wasn’t he the youngest? Her father had pulled at his moustache, tested a wobbly chair, saying it needed mending. She had looked at him, puzzled, pen poised. She had asked again; wasn’t Owen the baby? Her father had nodded, saying he’d better see to that chair before someone took a tumble from it. So she had written in the name, Owen, thinking again of the sorrowful road, imagining it as a thorny country path like the boreen that ran from Nanna’s to the Moran’s farm. The boreen was bumpy, bordered with thistles, nettles and tall fat dandelions. When she walked it with her father he slashed the weeds and branches aside with a blackthorn stick, saying sternly, ‘down, down, false pride, discourses die,’ which was a line from a hymn they sometimes sang on Sundays. She pictured Owen becoming tangled in the brambles as night was falling, without a stick to beat them back, wishing that he hadn’t done the thing that made his road sorrowful.
    She decides to go to Crowley’s for supper. She lights a lamp and leaves it in the window to guide her back. Remembering Owen’s advice, she closes the damper on the fire. Taking a torch, she sets