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

laughs, eyes still tightly closed, seeing rushing stars and myriad lights, a pulsing galaxy of caramel freckles, that unforgettable tripping walk.
    * * *
    In the morning Liv wakes to bright sunlight and thinks of the well, smiling. She carries a mug of tea made with bottled water and the empty galvanized bucket along the little path made of stepping stones curving away to her right behind hawthorn bushes. The stones are worn and smooth with moss growing between the cracks. She follows them past the bushes and through a sea of swishing ferns, deep green and still licked with morning dew. She holds her hands out on either side and they tickle her palms, leaving traces like moist cobwebs on her skin.
    The path leads her past oak and elder trees, via a dense tunnel of fuchsia and blackberries, then turns through a narrow gap and down worn steps into a grove encircled with more blackberries, fat-leaved rhododendrons and tall lilies. In the centre of the grove is a well, surrounded by more interleaved stones, built up in a couple of layers around it. A tall hazel tree throws dappled shade. The sun sparks on the stones, catching the surface of the water, illuminating tiny flies dandering above it. The blackberries are ripe and she picks and eats a handful, tipping them into her mouth. They taste of earthy red wines.
    Kneeling on the ground, she lowers her face towards the water. It is deep and clear and fresh smelling, a natural spring. She plunges her hand in. It is earth cold, tingling. As a child she had imagined the fathomless source it came from and always it had filled her with a delicious fear. Kneeling by it, she would close her eyes and bend forward, thinking what it would be like to fall in and drift down through the chilled depths towards the earth’s raging core.
    Her grandmother had treasured the well as an almost sacred place; provider of pure water but also of protection and healing. She would sprinkle the water over her aching shoulders and rub it against Liv’s throat to protect her from recurring tonsillitis. When Liv’s mother had shingles, Nanna had sent her a bottle of the water to dab on her abdomen but she had poured it into a plant pot, saying she preferred the doctor’s medicine to Juju. Always, Nanna carried a small bottle in her pocket, in case she felt unwell or sensed ill will or danger. It was an ancient well, she explained to Liv; it had been there long before the house. The hazel tree signified its special qualities because there was a hazel by the well at the centre of the world. This tree had dropped its berries into the water and to eat a hazel berry meant that you gained wisdom. All wells were linked to the central one and this meant that magic could occur at any of them. That was why the fairies often stopped by wells and had their meetings in the trees and bushes around them. ‘The people these days are full of science and brain work but there’s more wisdom in that water than in all the books in the world,’ she’d advised, as Liv’s mother threw her eyes up to the ceiling.
    Liv scoops the well water into her mouth, shivering with the shock of its icy purity, then drinks and drinks with abandon until her mouth is numb, paralysed, and her face and hair drenched. She laughs, a loud, reckless note. A passer-by might mistake her for a fairy on the rampage, one of those her grandmother had often referred to. She’d had a wealth of verses and stories about them visiting wells and dairies; they were usually mischievous beings, out to hoodwink, irritate and tease, the delinquents of the spirit world. At night in the kitchen she would sing as she scraped leftovers into the pig bucket:
     
    With tip-toe step and a beating heart quite softly I drew nigh,
    There was mischief in his merry face
    And a twinkle in his eye,
    ‘Twas Tic Toc Tic his hammer went upon a weenie shoe,
    Oh I laughed to think of the purse of gold
    But the fairy was laughing too.
     
    Liv shakes her head back, sending a cloud