Sisters ... No Way!

by Siobhán Parkinson

  I felt a bit foolish then, standing by Mum’s maturing, greening grave. I hadn’t brought anything, flowers or that. I felt as if I’d made a social faux pas, like someone forgetting to bring grapes to a person in hospital. The sky was leaden, and although it was only lunchtime it felt like dusk. I tried to say a prayer, but that didn’t work either. So in the end I just gave the wooden cross that is still on the grave a little pat, feeling very silly indeed but trying to show a bit of solidarity, and with an aching feeling in my throat, which is much worse than tears, I turned to go. As I went, a blackbird started singing from a chestnut tree. Most of the leaves had fallen from the tree, and it only took a minute or two to find the bird among the balding branches. I didn’t know blackbirds sang in October, and I certainly don’t know what he had to be so thrilled about on a cold grey afternoon like that, but there, that’s nature for you. So much for the pathetic fallacy.

  I arrived home as they were popping a champagne bottle in the drawing room. I don’t think it was the first, actually. They were all a bit pink looking, and I don’t think it was just the nip in the air. Still, I did my best not to look too ungracious, in spite of my jeans and woolly scarf, and I even drank half a glass, though I refused to clink glasses with Alva, who was over-excited because she’d never had a drink before. Instead I made a bit of a thing about holding Imelda’s glass for her, which was maybe a bit disabledist of me, but at least it gave me something elaborate to do, and that is just what you need when you are feeling as awkward as I was feeling.

  Fr Egan made a speech, which was really not at all the thing, in the circumstances, but I suppose the poor man was trying to make everything seem as normal as possible, which is daft – this is about as abnormal a situation as I can imagine. (OK, OK, if pressed I can imagine more abnormal situations, but not ones that are even remotely likely.) After that we all went around to the local trattoria for a plate of pasta. (We live in the sort of area where there is a trattoria around the corner. This is a far cry from Ballywhatsit and I hope that shower appreciate it.) Somebody must have tipped Luigi off (what are the odds on Fr Egan?) because he wheeled in a gigantic chocolate cake smothered in cream, to make it look more bridal, I suppose, with a plastic horseshoe on top and all lit up with birthday candles. It wasn’t anyone’s birthday, of course, but Luigi gets a bit over-enthusiastic. He isn’t really Italian at all, but he pretends to be. He even has those awful circular neon lights in his restaurant that you only get in Italy, and he has a garish crucifix on the wall above the door into the kitchen, which isn’t a door at all, but one of those ribbony curtains that you swish through.

  The best thing that can be said about the whole affair is that the food was mega. Old Luigi might be a bit of a poser in his own way, but he knows how to cook.

  Friday 24th October

  After the wedding, I went to stay at Imelda’s for a few days. That was my own idea. Tact, I suppose you could call it. Ashling and Alva went to stay somewhere too, leaving Dad and Margaret to get used to each other. At least, they’re obviously well used to each other, but I suppose I mean to get used to being married to each other. They didn’t go on a honeymoon. At least they spared us all that embarrassment. So there they are, having their little honeymoon in our house. They didn’t take any time off work, apart from the wedding day itself, but Dad said I needn’t go back to school until next week. It must be funny Margaret going off to school every day from our house instead of me. Not funny ha-ha, of course, just funny peculiar. (That is an expression of Imelda’s. I find it useful from time to time.) I wonder if people at school know yet. Some of the staff must know anyway. I can just imagine Gravyface going all wobbly in the neck at the idea, and as for Red Hugh, he’ll be like a beetroot for a week. Iron Knickers will be very disapproving, but of course she won’t be able to say so, which will kill her. I bet she’ll try to arrange some sort of a little blessing ceremony, though, when she hears it was a registry office wedding. She’ll find some tame Franciscan or something and create a liturgy, with candles and lots of movement and chanting from her little book of Taizé music. As long as she doesn’t try to get the class involved.

  I am going home tomorrow. Imelda said I could stay the weekend, but I think it would be better to go back there now and get acclimatised, so to speak, before school next week.

  Saturday 25th October

  Lisa’s mother had her baby last night. It came early, nearly two months early, I think, and it’s terribly tiny and in an incubator. Lisa rang me this morning, in a panic. She said they baptised it as soon as it was born. I said I was sure it would be all right, but she said she had been expecting a Sagittarian and now she’d got a Scorpio and she didn’t think she could adjust so quickly. It’s a girl, by the way, and they are going to call her Sandra. Well, I suppose they have already, if she’s been baptised.

  I was just coming in the hall door when the phone rang. Dad’s car was in the drive, and Margaret’s was parked at the kerb (Mum never had a car of her own), so I knew they were home, and I was steeling myself to say hello, but as soon as I put my key in the lock I could hear the phone bleating the way those new phones do. There is something very demanding about a ringing phone, so I tore into the house and picked it up at once, and it was Lisa with the news. She didn’t ask where I’d been all week. She knew about the wedding, of course, but I didn’t tell her the exact date. She probably doesn’t even know yet that it’s happened. I didn’t tell her on the phone.

  I found Dad and Margaret in the back garden. They obviously hadn’t heard the phone. (I keep telling Dad we should reinstall the old phone, which gave a proper tring-tring. You can’t hear the new one in the garden. But he likes new things, changes. I don’t.) Margaret was harvesting the apples from a neighbour’s old apple tree that overhangs our garden. I don’t know if you are legally entitled to apples that grow on somebody else’s tree even if they are technically in your garden, but anyway, the neighbours never pick even the ones on their side, so I suppose it’s better not to waste them. She had a basket, one of those old-fashioned shopping baskets, and was laying the fruit carefully in it, one by one, layer by layer, and talking to Dad, who was raking up fallen leaves and rotting windfalls from around her feet. They looked like the very picture of domesticity, her with her ripe reddening apples and her little bulge, him with his rake, like one of those Dutch pictures of peasants doing peasanty things. It had an unreal quality about it.

  Anyway I gave a little cough, because they evidently hadn’t heard me, and Margaret put her basket down and came towards me with her hand out, as if to shake mine, like a mayoress or somebody welcoming a visiting dignitary. Well, I didn’t feel like being welcomed to my own home, so I pretended I didn’t see the hand, but I managed a crooked sort of a smile, and I agreed to the coffee and barm (suck, swallow, sigh) brack she offered. Her hair looked worse than ever, all sort of flattened. I think it must be the kind of hair you need to use a ton of mousse on to give it shape. She didn’t look the type to steal somebody’s husband (OK, OK, widower). She looked extremely married, which of course she is, but it takes a lot of getting to used to that the person she is so extremely married to is my father. Sometimes I really hate him for this.

  We all sat silently, awkwardly, around the kitchen table, drinking our coffee and eating our brack, which was delicious but I really only noticed that afterwards. At the time, it might as well have been compressed cottonwool. There was a new tablecloth on the table. We always had just an old PVC one. The new one is nice, chequered, sort of French-bistro looking, cheap and cheerful. But there was nothing wrong with the old PVC one. After a while, I noticed vague shadowy markings on the tablecloth, like those transfers you use to do embroidery, and I realised the old tablecloth was still there, underneath, its pattern showing lightly through. I found that comforting.

  I told them about Lisa’s mother’s new baby. I was glad of something nice and neutral to talk about. Margaret was terribly interested, because of being pregnant I suppose. I even found m
yself telling her how Lisa was dismayed because the baby had the wrong birth sign, which made them both laugh. Dad laughed particularly loudly, gratefully, you might even think. I didn’t look him in the eye. I couldn’t.

  Ashling and Alva arrived while we were eating. Ashling had her double-bass with her. I thought for a minute it was a coffin, when I saw her propping it up in the porch. It’s twice as big as her. She had brought it on the bus. I wonder if she had to pay a fare for it? Their mum made a fresh pot of coffee. Alva was all excited about the brack – she’s a terrible baby for fourteen – and she announced she wanted the biggest slice because it looked as if it must have the ring in it. Ashling said getting the ring didn’t count unless it was actually Hallowe’en, which isn’t for another week, and then Alva started to sulk, and her mother said there wasn’t any ring in it, she’d come across it while she was cutting the brack and had damaged it so badly with the breadknife that she’d thrown it in the bin. Oh great, I thought, very auspicious, the first thing she does as ‘mother’ in this new family is throw a wedding ring in the bin. I know it’s only the cheapest sort of metal, but that’s not the point.

  Sunday 26th October

  Ashling and Alva are miffed because they have to share a room (them and the double-bass). They had their own rooms in their old house, except when somebody came to stay. Now they have the spare room. Very appropriate, I have to say. It’s a lot smaller than my room, which is a source of satisfaction. At least nobody had the gall to ask me to move out of my bedroom. They have the spare room – I think I shall go on calling it that – all dickied out with ribbons and lace already. They both have mosquito nets over their beds. I told them we don’t have mosquitoes in this part of Dublin, but they said they have them because they are ‘pretty’. I was right about the Boyzone posters. They have one each, identical ones, stuck up over their beds, which I can’t see the point of, but I suppose if they had separate rooms before it may have made more sense.

  When Margaret sells her house there will be some extra cash, and they are going to use it to do ‘improvements’ to this house. It doesn’t need improving. It’s perfectly all right. It’s a very fine house. I hope Dad doesn’t let Margaret redecorate it. I don’t think I could live with the flowery things she is bound to want to put everywhere. I draw the line at primroses creeping up the dining room wall and sprigs of sweet pea dotted about the hall. The main plan is to open up the attic and put a new room up there for the girls, and then the baby can have the spare room. Alva is dead excited about it and sits around reading Velux brochures all the time, very childish. I hope they put another bathroom up there too, for their exclusive use. They are both for ever in the bathroom. You nearly have to make an appointment to go to the loo, never mind take a shower. It’s going to be murder in the mornings, trying to get out to school on time.

  Monday 27th October

  I knew there’d be trouble over the bathroom this morning. A queue formed outside the bathroom door at about seven-thirty. It was like being in a youth hostel. I don’t know which was worse, waiting in the queue or being inside the bathroom, knowing there was a queue outside. In future I am going to have my shower at night, and then all I’ll have to do in the morning is beat the rush and use the loo. I can brush my teeth at the kitchen sink. I have already ensconced my toothbrush there, next to the cutlery drainer.

  Margaret gave me a lift to school. I hadn’t thought about that, but of course it doesn’t make any sense my taking the bus while she drives. It was the first time we’d been alone since this whole business started. In fact, it was the first time since that day of the counselling session. She gave me a cloth and asked me to clean the inside of the back window and to give the wing mirrors a wipe, as it was one of those fugged-up October mornings. Then I climbed into the front passenger seat and folded the cloth away in the glove compartment. At this point she was concentrating on pulling out into the traffic. It wasn’t until we got to the first set of traffic lights that she had a minute to make conversation. I sat there, staring out of the front windscreen and hoping the lights would change quickly, so that there wouldn’t be an opportunity to talk – Margaret is the sort of driver who needs all her concentration to drive – but those lights are very slow to change, as they are at a junction where a very insignificant road meets a major one with fast-flowing traffic, so of course they stayed red for ages, and, just as I feared, Margaret started to talk. It’s funny, though, about cars. Sometimes it’s easier to talk in a car, as you don’t have to look the other person in the face. She put on her counselling voice, which is very low and concerned, and she said she knew the situation must be very awkward for me, and that she didn’t for one moment think she could take the place of my (inhale, swallow, exhale) mother for me. I nearly choked. It hadn’t even vaguely occurred to me that she might. I felt like snapping this at her. I knew she was trying to say the right thing, but sometimes the mere effort of someone trying to say the right thing is the very thing that makes what they say the wrong thing, the last thing you want to hear. With a major effort at self-control I said that I didn’t want to talk about it if she didn’t mind, that it had all happened now and we all just had to make the best of it. She flushed at that, but she didn’t say any more, but that may have been because the lights had changed and she needed to think about what she was doing. We didn’t exchange another word till we got to the school gates, and then she said she would wait for me at four o’clock unless I had any extra-curricular activities. I’m in transition year, which means that everything is more or less extra-curricular for us, but I let that pass and I said I would meet her at the car at five past, thank you. I had thought fleetingly of making some excuse, so people wouldn’t see me getting into her car, but I could see that they were all going to have to find out some time, so what was the point.

  How right I was! The head nun announced the marriage at assembly, congratulating Mrs Ellis, as she called her. I nearly passed out. That’s Mum’s name. Lisa gave me a dig with her elbow and whispered: Jeez, Cindy, you never told me.

  I hadn’t seen her since the wedding, and I’d been too upset beforehand. A buzz was building up in the assembly hall. Everyone was saying that they’d been right she was pregnant, but god, Cindy Ellis’s father! Some of them started to giggle, and I could feel the eyes of the whole school on me. It was dreadful. Then Margaret stood up, bright pink, and thanked everyone but she said she would prefer to go on being called Miss Magee. We always called her that, even though she should have been Mrs, I suppose. Maybe she didn’t want people knowing she was married before. I can’t see it being for feminist reasons. I felt better when she said that, though. I’m the only Ellis in this school, and I’d prefer if it stays that way. I’m glad Margaret doesn’t want our name as well as everything else.

  After assembly, everyone was fluttering around me, wanting to know about the wedding and everything. I said very quietly and firmly that I hadn’t been at the wedding, and most people got the message, I think, but one girl, Emma O’Mara in fifth year, who loves to gossip, persisted in asking her horrible, prurient, salacious questions – what did Milly-Molly-Mandy look like at breakfast, was she a good cook, what TV programmes does she watch, why had they not gone on honeymoon, did she sleep in my mother’s bed? At that last question I let fly at her. I caught her by her horrible frizzy, wiry hair, a clump of it in each hand, and pulled like anything. She screamed and screamed, and Lisa hit me hard on the wrists to make me let go, and when I did Emma fell in a heap on the floor, weeping and clutching her head. Mr Gravy came along just then, and wanted to know what had happened. Everyone started to gabble at once, hysterically, but Lisa grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him aside and explained it all to him in a low voice. As soon as he heard what O’Mara had said, he took charge of the situation. He shooed all the others away, threatening them with detention if they were late for class, then he pulled her up off the floor and told her to stop snivelling and get to class at once. She went off, still moaning, lurching along by
the wall, with her two hands to her head.

  It has just occurred to me that the baby will be called Ellis too.

  Monday 3rd November

  Lisa’s mother is out of hospital, but the baby is still in an incubator. She’s doing really well, putting on weight and all, and she is out of intensive care, but she will be kept in hospital for a while yet. Lisa was telling me all this on Saturday. We went to Dunkin’ Donuts, because we needed a treat, and we hadn’t had a proper chat for ages. Lisa is worried about her mother. She said it is really time she stopped having babies and maybe it is time she thought about throwing her dad out. Lisa! I screeched. I mean, it’s all very well to give out about your parents, it’s normal, but suggesting that your mum should throw your dad out, for no reason at all, that’s going a bit far.

  I was really shocked. But Lisa was adamant. She said they were always fighting, and she thought her mum just went on having babies to stop him from leaving, but that was a very bad reason to have babies. (Babies are a bad reason to get married, and keeping a marriage together is a bad reason for having babies – funny how babies and marriage are so mixed up.) She said that really they’d all be much better off without him. I couldn’t believe my ears. I pointed out to her that they were the perfect family, all those lovely children, all those games of charades. Lisa stared. Charades? she said. We never play charades. Monopoly? I asked, Cluedo? Lisa said they never played anything, except when she played Happy Families with the little ones to keep them quiet on a Saturday afternoon while her father watched his football and drank himself silly (her expression) and her mother went to Crazy Prices. I said what about the division of labour between herself and her dad and taking it in turns to babysit on a Saturday? Huh! she sneered. He’s the one that needs babysitting. All that going to parent–teacher meetings and coaching the school football team is just so much camouflage, she says.