7

And of course, of bloody fucking course, Dina was waiting for me.

The first thing you notice about my little sister Dina is that she’s the kind of beautiful that makes people, men and women both, forget what they were talking about when she came in. She looks like one of those old pen-and-ink sketches of fairies: slight as a dancer, with skin that never tans, full pale lips and huge blue eyes. She walks like she’s skimming an inch above the ground. This artist she used to go out with once told her she was “pure pre-Raphaelite,” which would have been cuter if he hadn’t dumped her flat on her arse two weeks later. Not that this came as a surprise. The second thing that stands out about Dina is that she is crazy as a bag of cats. Various therapists and psychiatrists have diagnosed various things along the way, but what it comes down to is that Dina is no good at life. It takes a knack that she’s never quite got hold of. She can fake it for months at a stretch, sometimes even a year, but it takes concentration like she’s tightrope walking, and in the end she always wobbles and goes flying. Then she ditches her lousy McJob du jour, her lousy boyfriend du jour ditches her—men who like them vulnerable love Dina, right up until she shows them what vulnerable actually means—and she turns up on my doorstep or Geri’s, generally at some ungodly hour of the morning, making bugger-all sense.

That night, to avoid becoming predictable, she showed up at my work instead. We work out of Dublin Castle, and since it’s a tourist attraction—eight hundred years’ worth of the buildings that have defended this city, in one way or another—anyone can walk straight in off the street. Richie and I were heading across the cobblestones towards the HQ building at a fast stride, and I was arranging the facts in my head ready to lay out for O’Kelly, when a slip of darkness detached itself from the corner of shadow by a wall and flew towards us. Both of us jumped. “Mikey,” Dina said, in a fierce undertone, fingers taut as wires clamping around my wrist. “You have to come get me now. Everyone keeps pushing.”

Last time I had seen her, maybe a month before, she had had long rippling fair hair and some kind of floating flowery dress. Since then she had gone grunge: her hair was dyed glossy black and chopped off in a flapper-style bob—the fringe looked like she might have done it herself—and she was wearing a huge, ragged gray cardigan over a white slip, and biker boots. It’s always a bad sign when Dina changes her look. I could have kicked myself for going so long without checking.

I moved her away from Richie, who was trying to get his jaw off the cobblestones. He looked like he was seeing me in a whole new light. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. What’s up?”