Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  Coco loved the internet and the conversations with her regulars – people who didn’t buy all the time but loved to talk about what was up or something glorious they’d seen. At the moment, someone was trying to track down a strapless DVF sheath dress with an African pattern and all Coco’s efforts had come to naught. And then there was a kooky Japanese girl named Asako – a regular customer who was studying in Ireland and loved the forties – who had found a cache of cashmere twinsets but they were seriously moth-injured.

  ‘Time for DEFCON 4,’ posted Coco. ‘Nothing you can do except get them out of your house now before they infect everything else.’

  There had been another email from Asako in her inbox the week before; somehow she had decided that Coco knew the answers to all the questions of the universe, including men.

  ‘He asked me to meet his parents,’ Asako wrote in her perfect English. ‘This is good, yes?’

  ‘Very good,’ emailed Coco. ‘Say in advance what you don’t eat, though, or else you might get a big Irish meat dinner and I know you don’t eat meat.’

  She knew Asako would email to tell her how it had all gone and Coco looked forward to that. Unlike Cassie, who was so busy she didn’t really have the time for the people who thought the Keneally sisters knew the answers to everything, Coco liked being needed.

  This morning, Coco listed her latest finds on her site and was just logging off when Jo, her oldest and closest friend, appeared at the door.

  ‘Ready for our coffee date?’

  Jo worked in the secondary school around the corner and if she had a few free periods and no marking to catch up on, she sometimes dropped into Twentieth Century for a speedy coffee date. She was a tall, slim, no-nonsense woman with short hair who looked like she might possibly teach games. Instead, she was the school’s French teacher.

  Coco winced. ‘Adriana got a flat tyre,’ she said, speaking of her part-time sales assistant who was finishing a Masters in film studies at night and working by day. ‘She’s due soon.’ Coco consulted her watch. It was already twenty past ten and Adriana, who’d been due at half nine, had phoned at twenty past to say she’d be a bit late. Coco pondered the fact that Adriana’s car/phone/house keys had had several mishaps during the past few months, making her very late for work, and hated herself for wondering if ill relatives would soon follow suit as excuses. It was all a bit ‘the dog ate my homework’ for Coco’s taste, but Coco was also not the sort of person who’d do anything about it.

  ‘Could we have coffee here?’ she asked Jo apologetically. ‘I can brew us up some but I can’t close the shop.’

  ‘No, I’ll rush out to the café. After fourth year French, I need something chocolatey with cream on top. Everyone has forgotten every single verb they knew before the summer holidays, nobody has settled back in yet, and there’s a lot of staring out the window and sighing. That’s just me. Do you have any decent biscuits?’

  ‘Gosh, don’t know. Go and look.’

  As Coco worked on the stockings, Jo went in behind the counter to the office, where organised chaos reigned and a faint scent of alcohol lingered in the air.

  ‘Jeez, it’s like a brewery in here and it’s only half ten in the morning.’

  ‘I just vodka-spritzed some dresses,’ Coco explained. ‘Theoretically gross and does make the place stink in a dirty-stop-out sort of way, but it can really get rid of old smells. You spray, then leave them to air. They’re upstairs in the hall, hopefully getting infused with rose potpourri sachets, but I keep the spritzer stuff in the office.’

  ‘Rose potpourri sounds better than vodka sachets. I can’t go back to school smelling like I’ve been spending my free period in the pub. Can we light a candle or spray some perfume?’

  ‘Candles are too dangerous,’ Coco said, ‘and perfume contains oils which ruin the clothes.’

  ‘Are there hidden dangers in takeaway coffee since you can’t leave the shop this morning?’ Jo said.

  ‘No hidden dangers and safer for you, actually. I drink coffee for the safety of my customers. Without coffee, I’m dangerous.’ Coco made a vampire face and bared her small, white teeth.

  Jo laughed. With that warm, engaging smile, Coco was the least vampiric person she knew. ‘As if I don’t already know, Ms Caffeine Addict. The usual? Skinny latte, two shots, one sugar, smallest cup?’

  ‘Yup.’

  When Jo had gone, Coco dusted the counter, and then turned to pricing and listing some new stock.

  Jo was her oldest friend, the one in school who’d been there the first time she’d heard about her mother.

  ‘Your ma left you because you were a crybaby,’ said Paula Dunne, possessor of wild, curly hair and a streak of toothpaste on her uniform. Much taller than Coco, she was already at home in the class after just a week.

  Weird how you could forget vast parts of life and remember others with such clarity, Coco thought. But then, hearing that your mother had left you was the sort of thing a person remembered, no matter how small you were.

  Coco had been just four: young for junior infants. She knew she didn’t have a mother but that was fine because she had Dada, Grammy Pearl and Cassie. Cassie, who was eleven, was in the big kids’ part of the school, upstairs in the final class before heading to secondary school.

  ‘I’ll be here for you, Squirt, if you need me,’ Cassie had said when she waved goodbye to Coco each morning outside Miss Rosen’s class, where butterflies and flowers decorated the walls and picture books filled the shelves.

  But Cassie wasn’t there when Paula said those hateful words.

  Coco felt her bottom lip wobble. Don’t cry. Don’t be a crybaby. Mummy was sick, that was why she’d gone away, and one day, Grammy said, she might be better. In the comfort of home, in the small box bedroom with the Minnie Mouse bedside light, smells of Grammy cleaning her face with that lavender cream in the next bedroom, and Cassie’s Famous Five books beside her bed waiting for when Cassie came up to bed, all that was security and love enough for Coco.

  And now Paula was taking all that away. Coco couldn’t help it: the tears came.

  ‘Told you: crybaby,’ said Paula. ‘Coco’s a crybaby!’ she shouted. ‘That’s why her ma left her.’

  Coco cried even harder.

  Then Jo was beside her. Josephine, as she was called in those days, with a sister called Attracta and a brother named Xavier by overly religious parents. Josephine was the youngest and Attracta and Xavier were a lot older, and they’d shown her how to stand up for herself against the likes of Paula Dunne.

  ‘Go away, Paula!’ she shouted, hands planted on her hips the way Attracta did when she was cross.

  Josephine had the best hair in the class: long and fair, held in a single Valkyrie-like plait. Everyone admired it but even the roughest boys knew it would be a mistake to pull it. Standing there, tall and strong, she looked fierce. Josephine could thump just like a boy.

  Paula Dunne knew it too.

  ‘I was only sayin’,’ she muttered.

  ‘Say sorry, then,’ ordered Josephine, judge and jury.

  Paula’s face screwed up with anger.

  ‘Say it,’ said Josephine.

  Attracta had explained that some people needed to be told how to behave and the trick was to stare them down.

  ‘Sorry, Coco,’ muttered Paula with bad grace.

  She stomped off and Coco was left alone with Josephine, who’d never so much as looked at her until then.

  ‘Thank you,’ mumbled Coco with a still-trembling voice.

  ‘Would you like to come to my house to play sometime?’ Josephine asked. She might be only young but she knew they didn’t have people home to their house much: they had no telly, the radio was only on for the news and religious programmes, and there was never any sweet cake like you got in other people’s houses. But still, Coco wouldn’t mind.

  Coco l
ooked at her saviour with slavish admiration. She nodded, her dark curls bobbing. She wasn’t up to actual speaking just yet.

  Jo had been there, along with Coco’s beloved sister, Cassie, for the other big disaster in her life – the one with Red. But Coco tried not to think about Red too often. There was no point going over past dating disasters, her latest self-help book said. ‘Move on!’

  Coco was doing her best to move on, although it was tricky, even after four years.

  ‘Move on!’ She repeated her mantra.

  She’d certainly managed to move on with regards to her mother, she congratulated herself. She wasn’t ever coming back. People didn’t leave like that and never even so much as write a note afterwards if they were coming back.

  But Red … He came to Dublin often to see his mother, a woman who glared at Coco if she so much as spotted her, and he’d never come back to see her since. Which proved she’d been right about him. Red, like her mother, hadn’t planned to be around forever.

  Pricing done, Coco went to the iPod dock and switched on her current favourite music – her namesake, Coco Emerald. Forties-style, big band and almost burlesque with Miss Emerald’s sassy tones singing that she was coming back as a man, it suited Coco’s mood today and the shop.

  She wondered what Coco Emerald had been christened. Coco had been baptised as Coraline Patricia Keneally but nobody had ever called her Coraline.

  ‘Little Coco’ everyone had called her from the get-go and the name had stuck. Now people wondered if she’d changed her name because of a certain Gabrielle Chanel but Coco said that would be like changing your name midlife to Missoni because you liked the classic Italian design brand.

  ‘I was Coco from when I was little,’ she always said. Coraline was a bit of a mouthful. So too was Cassiopeia, which was Cassie’s true name.

  She’d asked Dad once why they had such unusual names. He’d prevaricated. ‘Must have been something from the TV,’ he’d said eventually, scratching what was left of his hair because he’d been bald from as long as Coco could remember.

  Coco hadn’t believed him. It was her mother, she knew it. Her mother had liked unusual names. But nobody talked about her mother. Asking her father used to result in his going into a dark place where he spoke to nobody for hours. It was simpler to let it go.

  She sniffed the air. Jo was right: there was a certain pub-after-hours smell to the place. Hastily she sprayed some room spray on the mat inside the front door and wedged it open with a little rubber wedge to let some air in.

  Jo returned a few minutes later carrying takeaway cups and a box containing two iced cupcakes.

  ‘We need the energy,’ said Jo.

  Coco eyed her one mournfully – a perfectly miniature carrot cake with a teeny iced carrot on top. Jo knew it was her favourite.

  ‘I was thinking of doing a juice diet,’ Coco said, thinking of how tight the belt felt on her classic swing skirt.

  ‘Think about it tomorrow,’ advised Jo. ‘People need pleasure in their lives.’

  Despite the fact that she regularly stroked soft marabou, sleek velvets and exquisite silks, the way her friend said the word ‘pleasure’ pierced Coco like a sneaky, minuscule arrow as she realised how little pleasure there was in her life. Pleasure made her think of Red and she was never thinking of him again. He meant nothing but pain and heartbreak and she’d had enough of that to last a lifetime.

  They were silent for a while as they ate and drank, then Jo talked about work and how she ought to be getting back.

  Coco loved chat from the school. School life was so crammed with incident and people: funny teachers; the handsome new geography guy who had half the staffroom and most of the girls staring at him in awe; how the transition years were working on some Machiavellian plan to have TY turned into a non-uniform year.

  ‘Anything new with you?’ Jo asked, after she’d binned her debris and washed her hands in the shop’s tiny loo.

  ‘Only the possibility that Adriana is taking the mickey out of me by never being on time. She said she had a flat tyre today and, you know what, I don’t believe her. Is that mean of me?’ Coco asked anxiously.

  Jo, not as soft as her friend and possibly a better judge of character, laughed.

  ‘Coco, you need to harden up, babe. Adriana has you totally figured out. She knows she can come in late and you won’t do a thing. You deserve better. Fire her.’

  ‘I couldn’t!’

  ‘Fine. Get Cassie to do it.’

  Coco didn’t reply and watched as Jo made a beeline for a fifties prom dress in polka dot chiffon yellow.

  Jo had absolutely no eye for colour; never had, never would. And she would never wear the prom dress, either.

  ‘Step away from the yellow,’ Coco said in a mock-stern voice, relieved to be able to change the subject. ‘You wearing yellow will frighten the heck out of your next class. Yellow is for people with warm complexions, ideally exquisite Indian girls with silken, mocha skin. Or people from the Caribbean. You and I with our milk-bottle-blue skin look like we’re about to die of consumption when we wear it.’

  Coco grinned at her best friend to lessen the blow.

  ‘And you are successful at selling clothes how, exactly?’ demanded Jo, moving down the rail.

  ‘By being truthful and not allowing either customers or best friends to buy things they will never wear,’ Coco said. ‘You know I put all my efforts into you and for that reason, I can’t let you buy yellow, lovie. You’ll never wear it and it will stare at you reproachfully from your wardrobe. Do you know we wear only twenty per cent of our wardrobes—’

  ‘Yeah, eighty per cent of the time,’ finished Jo with a sigh. ‘That’s people like me, boring worker ants of thirty-one. People like my daughter wear one hundred per cent of their clothes over the course of one weekend. She changed four times on Sunday. Fairy at breakfast, princess in the park, a fish – don’t ask, something to do with a science project – all afternoon and then, when it was time for bed, she went into serious dress-up mode and wanted a fashion show wearing my shoes, which are pretty boring, it has to be said. She wanted to know why I didn’t have cool shoes like you.’

  Coco glanced down at her red patent Mary Janes fondly. She was afraid they gave her fat ankles but she loved them so much.

  ‘Her energy levels rise just before bed. Why?’ asked Jo. ‘Nobody can tell me. Unless it’s competitive parenting, every other nine-year-old I know is apparently asleep by eight. Whereas Fi’s gearing up for fun. She’s just like you were about clothes.’

  Coco laughed at the thought of her beloved goddaughter tearing through her wardrobe, flinging what she didn’t want on the bed until she found the perfect outfit.

  Unlike her mother, nine-year-old Fi had an innate sense of personal style and the determination to carry it off. Fi was petite by comparison with her mother’s tallness, with skinny legs, a mischievous smile and hair as dark as Coco’s. All a debt owed to her father, who’d been handsome and dark-haired as well as cavalier with other people’s lives.

  Looking at how happy Jo and Fiona were, Fiona didn’t seen damaged by not having a father in her life.

  But then, Coco worried – as did Jo – that one day, Fiona would demand to see her long-gone father and insist that his absence had destroyed her. It was the great fear of Jo’s life because how could you tell a child that a man simply hadn’t had it in him to stay around to be a dad?

  Coco hoped Fiona wouldn’t go through what she and Cassie had. After all, Fiona’s father had simply never been there at all, while Marguerite had – and had then abandoned them.

  Coco loved having Fiona as a goddaughter: it was almost like having her own child but without any of the responsibility that went with it. Coco was never having children herself.

  Never.

  To distract herself from having landed on this horrible thought, she asked, �
�Have you thought of asking Mr Geography out for coffee?’

  Jo snorted. She’d been put off romance for life when Fiona’s father had run a mile as soon as she got pregnant.

  ‘I’m saving myself for someone perfect,’ she said sarcastically.

  ‘Oh, me too,’ joked Coco. ‘Let’s say that next time we get asked why two such lovely girls are on our own.’

  ‘The people who ask that are always married and want everyone else to be paired up too,’ Jo said. ‘Dating and bringing up a small child on your own are mutually exclusive.’

  ‘At least you have an excuse,’ Coco said. ‘I think I’ll start saying I’m gay.’

  ‘People will simply start introducing you to their lovely female next-door neighbours and workmates instead of the male ones,’ Jo pointed out. ‘No, celibacy is the only way. That and a diet of sexy novels where men are men and women are never too tired or hormonal.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose,’ murmured Coco thoughtfully.

  Two customers came in and Jo waved goodbye, making an I’ll phone you gesture as she left.

  It was a wonderfully busy morning in the shop. Coco sold a small frame handbag with a tortoiseshell clasp, a set of diamanté drop earrings and a matching brooch to a bride-to-be, and a 1930s astrakhan and velvet coat in Chinese lacquer red to a tall, dramatically dark-haired woman who slipped it on, looked at herself in the mirror and then beamed. ‘I’m not taking this one off.’

  Coco was thrilled.

  Adriana made it in by eleven, dressed in a flowing floral dress she’d got with her staff discount, and not looking as if she’d been frantically wrestling with the car jack as she changed her tyre. Instead, she looked soothed and happy, with the relaxed face of a woman who’d just spent the morning in bed with her boyfriend. Coco didn’t have a shred of evidence except there was no stress on Adriana’s face from the trauma of the flat tyre, plus Adriana’s blonde hair looked so very bed-head, and Coco knew for a fact that Adriana possessed very fine hair that flopped no matter what products Adriana used. In that case, there was a pretty good chance that bed-head hair meant actual bed-head hair.