Anybody Out There - Marian Keyes by Anybody Out There Read Free Book Online Page B

worst of the lot
--at least, until mine. Several years ago, while she'd first been living in New York, she'd
developed a fondness for the devil's dandruff (cocaine). Things got very messy, and after a
dramatic suicide attempt, she landed in an expensive Irish rehab.
Very expensive. Mum still goes on about how she and Dad could have gone on the Orient
Express to Venice and stayed in a suite at the Cipriani for a month for the same money, then she
always adds quickly, but not entirely convincingly, that you can't put a price on your children's
happiness.

But it's fair to say that Rachel is also probably the Walsh family's biggest success story. A year or
so after rehab, she went to college, got a degree in psychology, then an MA in addiction studies,
and she now works in a rehab place in New York.

After the years she'd spent coked out of her head, it was very important for Rachel to be "real"; a
laudable ambition. The only downside was that she could be a bit earnest. She often talked--
approvingly--about people having "done work" on themselves. And when she was with her
"recovery" friends, they sometimes joked about people who'd never been to therapy: "What?
You mean, she still has the personality her parents gave her?" That was a joke, see. But if you
scratch away at Rachel's earnestness, you don't have to try too hard before you've uncovered a
version of the old person, who is lots of fun.

Next in line is me--I'm three and a half years younger than Rachel.

Then, bringing up the rear, is Helen and she's a law unto herself. People love her and fear her.
She's a true original--fearless, undiplomatic, and willfully contrary. For example, when she set
up her agency (Lucky Star Investigations) she could have had her office in a lovely suite on
Dawson Street, with a concierge and a shared receptionist, but instead she situated herself in an
estate of graffiti-covered flats, where all the shops had their shutters down permanently, and
dodgy-looking youths in hoodies whizzed around on bikes, delivering screwed-up bits of white
paper.

It's unspeakably bleak and depressing but Helen loves it.

Even though I don't understand her, Helen is like my twin, my dark twin. She's the shameless,
courageous version of me. And even though she's always made fun of me (nothing personal, she
does it to everyone), she's loyal to the point of fisticuffs.

In fact all my sisters are loyal to the point of fisticuffs--while it's okay for them to slag each
other, they'd kill anyone else who tried it.

And yes, okay, they used to say that I was away with the fairies and "Earth calling, Anna" and
that sort of thing, but to be fair, there were reasons: it was obvious I wasn't too keen on reality.
Why would anyone be, I used to wonder, it never seemed that pleasant a place. Any opportunity
for escape I was given, I took--reading, sleeping, falling in love, designing houses in my head,
where I had my own bedroom and didn't have to share with Helen--and I was not the most
practical person you could meet.

And then, of course, there were the fringey skirts.
It's mortifying to admit, but from my late teens onward I owned several long, hippie-type fringey
skirts, some even with--oh God!--bits of mirrors on them. Why, why? I was young, I was
foolish, but really. I know we all have our youthful fashion shame, the badly dressed skeletons in
our closets, but my time in the fashion wilderness lasted the best part of a decade.

And I gave up going to the hairdressers when I was fifteen after they sent me out with a Cyndi
Lauper. (The eighties, I can't blame them, they knew no better.) But the fringey mirrored skirts
and messy hair were mere bagatelles compared to the shock waves of the compliment-slip
story...

The compliment-slip story

I f you haven't heard it already, and you probably have, because the world and his granny
seems to know about it, here it is. After I left school, Dad swung me a job in a construction office
--someone had owed him a favor and the