Cass is in her final year of school and is about to take her Leaving Cert; she’s hoping to get the grades to go to Trinty college with her best friend, Elaine. Elaine is beautiful and popular, but she quickly becomes jealous when their glamorous substitute teacher takes a shine to Cass’s poetry. Elaine begins to distance herself, and even though Cass is becoming friends with the school “weirdo” she instead chooses to win Elaine back. She joins her at the local dive bar where they’re served alcohol and she eventually gets a boyfriend, Rowan, even though she’s indifferent to him. She does whatever she can to win Elaine’s affection, but her reliance on alcohol increases. Meanwhile, she tries as much as she can to avoid her home life: her parents are constantly fighting as her father, Dickie’s, garage fails to bring in the kind of money her mother Imelda is used to.
During all these arguments, her younger brother PJ is often ignored. He plays a lot of video games and even makes friends online – he doesn’t have many in real life. He begins talking to a boy called Ethan and soon relies on him for comfort. His real-life friend, Nev, is not comforting at all. In fact, he bullies PJ and says rude things about his family. In a bid to win Nev’s friendship, PJ shows him to the bunker where he knows Cass and her friends go to secretly drink. When Nev is unimpressed, PJ shows him a new housing estate in the woods, constructed by Big Mike, Elaine’s father. The houses are yet to be sold and should stand empty, but there’s a beautiful girl living in one of them, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Occasionally, another man, heavy with tattoos, shows up to sleep with her. Nev wants to watch but PJ makes them runaway.
Imelda is incredibly beautiful, and the village has always thought of her to be somewhat stuck up because of it. However, she comes from humble roots, despite how much of Dickie’s money she tries to spend now. Her father, a petty criminal, struggled to raise her after her mother died, so her Aunt Rose took her in. Her brothers stayed with their father, and went on to lead similar lives, but with Rose, Imelda had new opportunities. Rose was also well-known for being magical, people would come to her for palm readings and predictions, and some local women would come for abortions. When she was a teenager, Imelda met Frank, the star GAA player and village heartthrob. Despite coming from different backgrounds – him being middle class, his father owning the local garage, and his older brother Dickie off to study at Trinity – they fell in love.
Frank was charismatic and charming, but soon stardom got to his head. He trained less, drank more, and was kicked off the team. He tried selling weed as a side business, but that soon all went wrong. For a while, he thought he could get everything together, and he asked Imelda to marry him. She said yes, but when they told Rose, she predicted that she saw a haybale on fire, and a ghost at their wedding. True enough, Frank died in a car accident before they could marry, and in their grief, Dickie and Imelda began sleeping together. When she became pregnant, they decided to get married, much to everyone’s surprise. On the day of their wedding, Imelda was stung by a bee and her face became swollen, so she kept her veil on the whole time. When she caught sight of her reflection, she looked like the ghost that Rose had predicted.
Dickie inherited the garage business from his father after Frank died. His dad was very well respected, and due to all their financial worries and constant arguing, Dickie knows he will eventually need his help. When his father comes to town, he promises to sort the business out, so he hires Big Mike to step in as a consultant. They find a lot of company money has gone missing, and Dickie avoids telling them where it is. He never wanted to run the garage. At Trinty, he made friends with a guy called Willie, who introduced him to the queer scene in Dublin. Dickie didn’t have much sense of his own queer identity, but he and Willie soon fell in love. However, when Frank died, and Dickie got Imelda pregnant, he broke things off and married her. He justified his actions as an act of love.
At the garage, he had recently hired a young Polish man called Ryszard to work there. He was handsome, and after failing to reconnect with Willie, Dickie began having sex with him. However, he didn’t know that Ryzard was recording all their trysts and eventually he threatened to blackmail him. Dickie then began paying him off with money from the business, but Ryszard always wanted more – his girlfriend had become pregnant, and he needed to support her. Dickie is about to be found out, and slowly begins losing control. He becomes obsessed with building an end-of-days shelter with his friend Victor, which drives Imelda crazy. He avoids Big Mike and his father’s attempt to get in contact about where all the money has gone, but spends less and less time at the garage.
Meanwhile, Cass goes to university with Elaine and finds herself having a terrible time. She’s often depressed and tries not drinking for a while, worried she has a problem with it. She enjoys her classes and eventually gets a poem published. She gets on well with a German girl, and kisses her one night, but keeps it a secret, unsure of what it means about her sexuality. Eventually, she realises she and Elaine don’t have much in common and she’d rather hang out with other people, “weirdos” Elaine doesn’t think are cool. She tells this to Elaine at a party, which PJ then crashes. Cass is shocked to see him there and kicks him out, but later chases him down. PJ was trying to run away from home in a bid to get his parents back together, hoping their love of him will make them try harder. When he left Cass’s, he texted Ethan who lured him to an ally – but Ethan was actually a grown man, who tried to catch him, but PJ got away. Eventually Cass caught up with him, and they got the bus home together.
Imelda is trying and failing to keep her family together while Dickie sinks the family business. The women of the village have a gossip chat that she’s determined to keep them out of, but it’s where she also hears about Big Mike’s affair with the Brazilian housekeeper, Augustina. She doesn’t think much of him anyway, but when he buys her flowers and shows her attention, she contemplates an affair. She finds him easy to talk to, especially when Dickie is so distant. Meanwhile, Ryszard is posting videos online and Dickie decides to take drastic action and kill him. He realises that the girl from the empty housing estate is his pregnant girlfriend, Augustina, who had also a previous affair with Big Mike. He and Victor make a plan to shoot him one night, and Dickie gets his hands on a rifle.
On this same night, Cass and PJ get off the bus early and decide to cut through the estate, and the woods, to get home. It’s dark so they have to use their phones as torches. Meanwhile, Imelda is debating seeing Big Mike and sleeping with him, but then she hears rumours about the pregnant Augustina, and decides to call if off. She gets news from the care home that Rose is about to die, and after she does, Imelda has new resolve to make things work with Dickie. She races out into the night towards the shelter he’s making. Dickie raises his gun near the housing estate where he sees figures moving towards him, he thinks it’s Ryszard out to see Augustina. He knows his plan is crazy, but the truth cannot come out, and he thinks that what he’s doing is an act of love, to protect his family, but he mistakenly points the gun at Cass and PJ.