◢ walks like rain ◣

Anyone who knows Tallaght, Dublin, is lucky to be breathing. A rough suburb of Dublin, this is where Caoimhín grew up. As Disney so politely put it, like Aladdin, Finn was considered to the snobs of the city nothing more than a street rat. It didn’t help that his parent’s bread like them too. He was in the middle of six and was one of the quiet siblings, focusing more on his goal to escape his surroundings. A feat that wasn’t easy, particularly when his mother fell victim to the drugs that came to the area. His Father spent most of his time away working, which left Finn’s mother raising the six children all on her own, waiting on pay checks in the post to feed them. The woman couldn’t take the pressure and fell for the charms of a local dealer, who in turn made her addicted to his product.

School was the only place that Finn felt safe. He was the first kid there and the last to leave, joining every club that would have him. He would spend more time at friends’ houses before daring to go home, running from the reality that lingered over their small home like a dark cloud. The guilt would eat away at him, which resulted in a compulsion with exercise in his teenage years, anything to feel in control. To the outside world, he was perfect guy – athletic, smart, funny – they didn’t know it was years of avoidance and masking to escape the hell at home.

Despite the adversity, his determination to escape Tallaght paid off. Finn was offered a place at University in England, the first in his family ever reach University, not that they cared. He would have swum there if he had to, eager to leave the last eighteen years behind him. A fresh start where no one could define him by his family name or where he came from… or so he thought. Although being Irish in England in the noughties was a far more pleasant experience than former years. Finn thrived there and finally felt like he belonged. The morning runs remained but he began to relax into this new life and even fell in love. His first love and it happened to be with a girl from the city of love itself, he couldn’t believe his luck.

Finn was like puppy dog and even followed her back home to Paris when they both graduated. He didn’t speak a word of French but if life had taught him one thing, he could overcome any hurdle in his way. That’s what he believed then until the one hurdle he hadn’t expected came his way – the love of his life, Louise, told him she had cancer. The news broke him, but he was by her side through it all, despite how much it hurt him to see her in pain. Finn was only twenty-two and watching the woman he wanted to spend his life with die and all he could do was hold her hand.

Alexander Nielsen is the second eldest of three boys, born in the beautiful hills and valleys of California part of a winery dynasty. His parents were madly in love and people often said it was too intense a love but his parents laughed those people off, said they were jealous.

The signs of his Mother’s mental illness began just after his birth and they were small at first, put down to postnatal depression. However, just two years after his baby brother was born, the problem escalated. Alex woke to screams from his older brother and he remembers his Father’s arms wrapped around his Mother, hugging, or that’s what baby Alex recalls. His innocent mind and sleeping form had not seen that his own Mother was standing over him with a pillow in hand with a sinister look in her eyes, mumbling prayers to herself convinced that what she was doing was God’s will.

That night often flashed across Alex’s mind, especially whenever he had nothing to distract himself with. As he grew older, he suspected what happened that night wasn’t as he recalled it, but talking about it was off-limits. He always questioned why after that night they moved home and he never saw his Mother again.

Alex now middle-aged, as much as he likes to deny it, is living in California running one of the family’s newly acquired vineyards. The business has boomed and his Father bought property and land for all of his sons in different corners of the country to expand the brand. It was the first time that Alex was going at it alone, and it was the first time in a long time he was being left alone to his thoughts and he wasn’t sure he liked it.

A few years have passed and he has settled into the way of things, finding distractions in different pockets of the state; girls, drink, parties, hangovers. His Father would always be breathing down his neck about figures, profits, production, but one day that all stopped. Alex woke blinded by the sun that peeked through his window as the the buzzing of his phone on the bedside table deafened him. Groggy, he answered and was not prepared for the message on the other end. He was gone.

Currently, Alex is struggling to cope with the loss of his Father and can’t believe it to be true. The business is in turmoil and his life has been flipped upside down as it has been decided he will be the new CEO, something that has bred resentment in his older brother. He is coasting along in shock and the world spins around him and to make everything worse, the Mother he has not seen in over thirty years is back and those questions that often plagued him have bubbled to the surface once more and he wants answers. Can he trust her?

All of this and more is to come his way. How will he cope when he learns the truth that on a fateful night his beloved Mother tried to kill him? A Mother whom he has glorified in his mind due to the brutal way she was torn away from him. Thirty plus years of longing and heartbreak creating a bitterness in him towards the very people who had done everything to protect him.