Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  Within five minutes, Adriana had made herself tea, had ignored the duster Coco had left out on the counter for her, and was on the phone, whispering.

  ‘You too? I feel wonderful … What a start to the day … Sooo sexy …’

  Coco raged: she’d been right!

  She watched with irritation as her single staff member slipped past a customer to drift over to the stairs where she sighed and whispered some more sweet nothings into her phone. Adriana only worked part-time to help fund her college work, but she’d missed an hour and a half of her shift and yet would expect to be paid for it. When Adriana had been late before, Coco had paid her full wages without question, but this was now the fourth time in a few weeks that Adriana had been late.

  Plus – and Coco felt annoyed with herself over any irritation about this – it was clear that Adriana, for all her slacker lifestyle, had a healthy, wonderful sex life with her boyfriend, while the only things to keep Coco in bed late were either her phone alarm clock not going off or a vomiting virus.

  She hadn’t had a date since her last blind date, which had turned into a disaster of epic proportions and had made her decide, finally, that men were a waste of time.

  By half one, Coco was tired and looking out on to the street where the September sunshine shone down, and thought a quick walk down at the sea wall might blow the cobwebs away. She’d grab a sandwich on the way back and let Adriana take her lunch then.

  ‘Adriana,’ she began, as she got her purse, ‘I’m going for a walk and then—’

  ‘Oh, Coco,’ said Adriana, twirling a strand of bleached blonde hair. ‘Er, remember I said I had to go early today for, er, that essay I’m finishing for college? If I could go now, as I did ask …’

  Coco, who never lost her temper and who knew she was a complete pushover when it came to both staff and people haggling in the shop, suddenly lost it.

  ‘You want to leave at half one instead of half three, when you didn’t get here till eleven?’ she said furiously. ‘And you no doubt expect me to pay you for six hours when you’ll have worked two and a half? Am I correct?’

  ‘Well, it’s only fair. I got a flat,’ Adriana said, looking injured.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Coco.

  There, she’d said it.

  ‘This is your fourth time late since the last week in August. Do you want this job or not? Because I need someone I can rely on, not someone who waltzes in late and leaves early.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’

  ‘Adriana, it’s totally fair. I pay you to be here working, not spend hours on the phone to your boyfriend!’

  The burst dam inside Coco was pumping out a flood, but Adriana brought out the ultimate weapon: tears.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Coco. You’re so good to me, like a big sister, and I never had a sister, and I love you, you know that.’

  ‘Hush.’ Without almost knowing what she was doing, Coco instinctively put an arm around the sobbing Adriana.

  ‘It’s fine, you can go early now.’ Coco cringed inwardly, wondering if she could discuss not paying Adriana for the missed hours. No, she decided. Cassie would be able to do it. Cassie could take on anyone and did, but Coco wasn’t built that way.

  ‘Please don’t let it happen again. I need you, Adriana.’

  ‘Course, I understand,’ snuffled Adriana. ‘It won’t happen again. I promise.’

  It took five minutes and an emergency chocolate biscuit to get Adriana smiling and out of the shop, after which Coco began to wonder if she’d done the right thing.

  It was just hard to be tough with people you worked closely with … Yes, that was it. Adriana would buck up. Coco knew it.

  As for now, she’d have to shut the shop to grab a sandwich and she hated doing that. The success of the shop rested entirely on her shoulders and though the place was doing pretty well on the internet, a random person shopping on her lunch break and encountering a ‘closed’ sign on the door might assume Twentieth Century was always closed and never come this way again.

  Coco took off her heels, put on a pair of flats, grabbed the keys and her purse, stuck a ‘back in five minutes’ sign on the door and ran out into the September day, racing to the café where she could grab a ready-made sandwich.

  Maybe she should have done what Great-Aunt Edie wanted and done something boring in college, instead of Fine Arts, she thought, panting as she ran. But then she wouldn’t be her own boss. And Coco loved that more than anything.

  Life was too full of twists and turns, decisions taken out of your hands, people leaving and never coming back. Her mother and Red came to mind.

  No, if you were your own boss, you were in charge and nothing happened if you didn’t like it. Because when random things happened, people got hurt and nobody recovered from the hurt. That was what Coco feared most of all.

  Coco always said she’d never minded not having a mother.

  ‘You don’t miss what you never had,’ she’d told her new girlfriends at college when they were on their second night out at the college bar and had moved on to sharing mother stories – the fabulous mother who was the kindest woman on the planet; the mother who behaved as though men were all raging sex maniacs and had sent her daughter to a convent lest one of the said maniacs got his paws on her; the mother who had a narcissistic streak and couldn’t hold a conversation for longer than two minutes without dragging it back to herself.

  The other three had been silent for a beat when Coco Keneally mentioned that she’d never known her mother.

  ‘She left home when I was one. I don’t even remember her,’ Coco said lightly, because it was easier to tell this story in such a manner rather than imply it had hurt in any way.

  ‘But a mother … You need a mother,’ said Janet with great sadness – Janet who was the youngest of the four new students and had been explaining how she had the kindest mother ever.

  Beers had been consumed and a level of honesty had been reached between the four women who’d been strangers until a month ago when they’d met on registration day for First Arts: four eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, anxious but hiding it, madly trying to appear cool.

  Even then, Coco’s love of vintage clothing had been obvious: she’d worn Grammy’s felted wool swing skirt with the kick pleat at the back, a red fake leather trench coat, and a black beret over her long, insanely curly dark hair.

  ‘Coco,’ Janet went on, ‘how can you bear it?’

  ‘Lots of people don’t have mothers. I had my older sister, Cassie,’ said Coco simply. ‘I had Dad when he was alive, and Grammy. Between them they made it not matter that my mother had left.’

  ‘I’ve just realised: you won’t have a mum to help you buy your wedding dress!’ hiccupped Lorraine from the convent, where it appeared that, despite reports to the contrary, convent girls were not wild and were certainly not able to hold their drink. On her second beer, Lorraine was already well beyond the tipsy stage. ‘That’s so sad.’

  ‘Look on the bright side: your mother will never want to upstage your wedding,’ added Carla (narcissistic mum) cheerfully. ‘At my brother’s twenty-first birthday party, my mother wore a leather mini skirt, a crop top that showed off her belly bar, and flirted with all my brother’s friends.’

  ‘Midlife crisis?’ said Janet hopefully.

  ‘Ah no, just my mother,’ shrugged Carla, with a glitter in her eyes.

  ‘That’s so sad—’ began Janet, tears at the ready.

  ‘Thirty’s a nice age to get married,’ Coco said, wanting to cut off Janet before she really started to cry at the thought of mothers unlike her own fabulous one and how had people coped?

  ‘Yeah, thirty,’ said Carla.

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ insisted Lorraine. ‘Still in your twenties; any older and you seem sad.’

  An argument started on the wisdom/sadness of getting married in you
r thirties and Coco never got around to saying that she knew she’d have her sister and her grandmother by her side when it was her turn. And who needed a mother they couldn’t remember, anyway? Little kids didn’t remember that far back.

  When she got married, she thought, allowing herself to imagine this event with all the talk of weddings, the pretty green in Delaney Gardens would be the venue. Cassie would plan it all like a military campaign: a hundred tea lights lit by 3 p.m., sir! Cassie could organise anything: her two tiny daughters, her husband, her job, even the newly purchased semi-detached house a mile from Delaney Gardens where the previous tenants had left it looking like a squat and had somehow removed all the grouting from the bathroom tiles.

  A small marquee would fit in the patch of glorious green in Delaney Gardens between the gnarled crab apple trees, the bluebells and the huge old fig tree. Grammy would source food from all her cooking pals, so no fortune would have to be spent on four courses or sorbets or any of that nonsense.

  Coco wanted the music of The Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller, with a hint of the seventies thrown in to get people up dancing.

  ‘You’ll need disco music,’ said Cassie, shocked, when Coco had explained how she and the girls from college had been talking about weddings. ‘You can’t get married without Abba, at least.’

  And the sisters had giggled at the thought of this lovely imaginary event to plan, and had discussed how it was handy Coco was waiting for several years, because right now, Beth would be a very bad flower girl as she was going through a stomping phase in nursery school.

  Had she really been that naïve? Coco thought now. Thinking thirty was the right age to get married – as if it were something you had the slightest control over.

  Coco had grown more and more accustomed to the concept that life rippled along in its own way no matter what you did to intercept it, but she was still shocked by how powerless she was about it all.

  She was thirty-one now, and her last serious relationship had been with Red, four years ago. Since then she’d had a couple of dates and then, for a whole year, nothing. Nada. Zip. Until last month and the disastrous blind date at a friend’s dinner party with a recently separated guy who’d muttered endlessly about his ex-wife and her new man, and then grabbed Coco as she tried to leave and slobbered drunkenly on her in a manner he clearly thought was kissing. Nice.

  ‘Sorry,’ said her friend who’d set it up. ‘I thought he was over it. I shouldn’t have made Brandy Alexanders …’

  ‘No,’ said Coco, and she’d nearly said, It’s me. I am catnip to the wrong men and the right men run from me.

  Red had run from me, the man I wanted to marry, was what she’d thought, but she never told people things like that.

  Instead, she’d said, ‘He was drunk. Hardly your fault. You didn’t pour it down his throat. But no more blind dates and dinner parties, please? They make me feel hopeless and pitied. Trips to the cinema and things like that, lovely. But dinner parties with other couples just make it worse.’

  In the years since Cassie and Coco had planned the perfect wedding, Cassie and Shay had long since renovated their house on the cheap and Coco’s nieces were now thirteen and fifteen. Beth had gone back into a stomping phase, Cassie pointed out miserably.

  And still no need to set up any type of marquee in Delaney Gardens for Coco.

  Was there something wrong with her? Was nobody in her family telling her the truth because they loved her? Would therapy help? No, cross that off the list, Coco thought gloomily. She couldn’t afford therapy. The electricity bill from the shop alone made her wince every two months. Who knew what professional therapists charged for their services?

  No, perhaps she was simply one of those women who were destined to be alone.

  Three

  That afternoon, Pearl Keneally stood in her red and white themed kitchen with Ritchie Valens singing in the background and toyed with the idea of putting the salted peanuts out in her small, hot-pink and blue dishes from Ios, but then thought better of it.

  Liam’s blood pressure was high enough: he didn’t need the salt. Plus Gloria was back in diet club for a winter wedding and would stab Pearl if she saw needless temptation. Pearl snagged a handful of peanuts for herself, then put them in the back of the treat cupboard. Daisy, an oyster pug who needed to be on a diet herself, sat at Pearl’s feet, smiling and watching with delight. For Daisy, her mistress’s weekly events meant treats.

  Snacks and drinks was what they’d agreed when they set up the Thursday night club all those years ago. The group, who all lived in Delaney Gardens, had between them seen children grow up, grandchildren grow up, had experienced death, illness: you name it, they’d seen it. And still they came together once a week, rain, hail or shine. The rules hadn’t changed: no proper dinners or cheese squashed into shapes on crackers, or it would soon become a huge effort when all they wanted were a few card games and the company.

  Now that over forty years had passed, people’s varying ill health meant the snacks had to be wildly healthy, not dangerous for anyone on anti-stroke medication and suitable for Annette, who was diabetic. Pearl found the low-cal, low-salt, low-taste nibbles and put them out with some trail mix, along with diabetic chocolate near the seat where Annette usually sat.

  Some members of the club were gone to wherever it was people went. There were six of them now instead of the initial nine: Loretta and Dai were dead, Louis in the mysterious and painful land of dementia.

  Annette’s husband, Dai, had had a heart attack when he was sixty and, years later, Annette insisted that she’d never have survived without her Thursday nights.

  ‘I couldn’t fall in love with anyone else,’ she said. ‘Dai was the love of my life. Thursday nights saved me. I had somewhere to go.’

  Gloria’s husband, Louis, was in a nursing home with advanced dementia. He no longer recognised Gloria or any of his family, and sat whispering fearfully about ‘going home’, by which he meant his birth home.

  Gloria had stayed away from the Thursday night club for a year when Louis had first gone into the nursing home.

  ‘The guilt kills me,’ she’d told Pearl the night Pearl had gone over to Gloria’s to beg her to come back to the poker club. ‘I should be taking care of him, not someone else, someone who doesn’t know what he likes!’

  ‘And what would you do if he got run over by a car when he escaped from the house again, looking for the way back to his mother’s house, Gloria? You’d feel twice as guilty then,’ Pearl had said, knowing she had to be cruel to be kind. ‘What Louis needs now is something you can’t physically give him. He needs people who are rested and expert, people who aren’t so worn out with emotion that they want to cry when he won’t eat and sob with exhaustion as they try to change his clothes. You can’t do that, Gloria.’

  ‘I know.’ Gloria sat with her face in her hands. ‘But I feel guilty.’

  ‘You will if you sit at home and brood. You need a few hours every week where you forget it all, where you can laugh and know nobody’s judging you and that we love you. We all miss Louis, he was a part of our lives too, but he wouldn’t want you killing yourself with pain because he has this bloody disease.’

  ‘He was a great poker player, wasn’t he?’ Gloria remembered proudly.

  ‘Better than the rest of us put together,’ Pearl agreed. ‘He loved the tradition of it all, the fun. I’m not just saying what I think you need to hear, Gloria,’ Pearl went on, ‘but I knew the real Louis. He was good and kind and loved you with all his heart. He would hate to see you in this much pain.’

  Gloria let the tears flow. ‘I am so lonely, Pearl.’ She almost breathed the words out, she spoke so slowly. ‘We had fifty years and now it’s all over, gone. How can it be gone when he’s still actually here? It would feel like cheating on him to have fun when he isn’t.’

  ‘If you were in the home, if places were reve
rsed, what would you want for Louis? Endless pain and guilt, or a life with friends who helped you?’ Pearl delivered the final bit of her argument.

  That was a year ago, and Louis was going steadily downhill, getting thinner and having more and more chest infections he couldn’t shake, but Gloria was somehow coping. Joining the diet club was a huge step, Pearl knew. The Gloria of a year ago was so numb that she didn’t care if she was five stone or fifty.

  Ritchie Valens was singing ‘Bluebirds Over the Mountains’. Whisking around the living room with Daisy panting at her heels, Pearl admired her house and thought how pretty it all looked now: one person – her younger sister, Edie, who’d been born with a bitter taste in her mouth – had said it was ludicrous having a Mediterranean-themed house in a northern European city, but Pearl pointed out that when there wasn’t always enough sun outside, you had to generate it somewhere. Plus, the house was very near the sea after all. The sea wall of Silver Bay was only half a mile away, so a maritime theme worked. And people needed vitamin D.

  Her walls were primrose yellow, her couch was a faded turquoise with rainbow crochet cushions, she had a heated fish tank for a sense of the ocean, a jungle of stretching, gleaming cacti plants on the low windowsill, and the pictures on the walls were of Santorini, Thessaloniki and Crete.

  All the people whom Pearl loved, loved her home. Coco, Cassie, Shay, Lily and Beth adored it. The Thursday night club loved it. Edie could go hang, with her beige carpet, beige velvet couch and OCD-inspired overuse of hand sanitiser.

  ‘Pearl, it’s like being on holidays,’ Lily liked to say, lying on the couch and looking up at the Greek pictures.

  When she was little, Beth hadn’t been able to say Great-Grammy but had liked saying ‘Grammy Pearl’ in her breathy, little girl’s voice, and so Grammy Pearl it had remained for both of Pearl’s great-granddaughters.