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

If 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 consensus was that it must have been a pretty large favor.

But anyway, there I am, working away, doing my best, being nice to the builders who come in for petty cash, and one day Mr. Sheridan, the big boss, throws a check on the desk and says, “Send that to Bill Prescott, stick a compliment slip in the envelope.”

In my defense, I was nineteen, I knew nothing of the language of administration, and luckily the check was intercepted before it went out in the post with my accompanying note: Dear Mr. Prescott, although I have never met you, I believe you are a very nice man. All the builders speak highly of you.

How was I to know that sending a compliment slip did not actually involve complimenting anyone? No one had told me and I wasn’t psychic (although I wished I was). It was the kind of mistake any uninitiated person could make, but it became a watershed event: it took pride of place in the family folklore and crystallized everyone’s opinion of me: I was the token flake.

They didn’t mean it unkindly, of course, but it wasn’t easy.

However, everything changed when I met Shane, my soul mate. (It was a long time ago, so long that it was permissible to say that sort of thing without getting sneered at.) Shane and I were delighted with each other because we thought exactly the same way. We were aware of the futures that awaited us—stuck in one place, shackled to dull, stressful jobs because we had to pay the mortgage on some horrible house—and we decided to try to live differently.

So we went traveling, which went down oh-so-badly. Maggie said about us, “They’d say that they were going up the road to buy a Kit Kat and the next time you’d hear from them, they’d be working in a tannery in Istanbul.” (That never happened. I think she must be thinking of the time we went to buy a can of 7-Up and decided on a whim to skipper a boat around the Greek Islands.)

Walsh family mythology made it sound like Shane and I were a pair of work-shy layabouts, but working in a canning factory in Munich was backbreaking work. And running a bar in Greece meant long hours and—worse still—having to be nice to people, which, as everyone knows, is the toughest job in the world.

Whenever we came home to Ireland, it was all a bit “Ho, ho, ho, here they are, the pair of smelly hippies, coming on the scrounge, lock up your confectionery.”

But it never really got to me—I had Shane and we were cocooned in our own little world and I expected it would stay that way forever.

Then Shane broke up with me.

Apart from the sadness, loneliness, woundedness, and humiliation that traditionally accompanies a broken heart, I felt betrayed: Shane had got his hair cut into something approaching respectability and had gone into business. Admittedly it was a groovy kind of business, something to do with digital music and CDs, but after he’d scorned the system for as long as I’d known him, the speed with which he’d embraced it left me reeling.