Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  Eighteen months ago they’d been mother’s little helpers; now they were hormones on legs – happy one minute, gloomy the next, worrying about how they’d ever be rich and famous singers after that.

  ‘I need a bath before I finish my homework,’ announced Beth, who was tall like her father but with her mother’s dark and unmanageable curly hair. ‘I got a whack of the ball in netball today. There’s already a bruise. Honestly, Mum, do I have to do it? I’m never going to be any good at it …’ And then she was gone up the stairs, trailing her school tie and shoes after her, coat still on the floor.

  Beth was mercurial, definitely like Shay, but she could be funny and sparkly when she felt like it.

  Cassie looked at the coats on the floor, which would miraculously move themselves via Mother Power, which was a well-known family phenomenon. Like the laundry fairy and the answer to the ‘where are my trainers/black jeans/pink long-sleeved T-shirt?’ question. Mother Power could do it all and knew where every lost item was.

  Breathe, Cassie told herself as she shouldered her way through the door with the shopping. Breathe. Think of that mindfulness book she had on the floor by the bed and occasionally actually read. Be in the now, feel your feet touching the earth, rooting you …’

  ‘Mum, there’s a message on the phone. I listened and it’s Gran,’ roared Lily from the kitchen.

  The very notion of calm breathing and being rooted in the earth vanished to be replaced by the wild irritation she was accustomed to.

  It could not be good for the body, this irritation.

  In the kitchen. Lily’s skinny body was half in the fridge. Her appetite was mythic. Nobody could believe that somebody so small could consume so much and be so endlessly hungry. She could eat a trencherman’s dinner, and half an hour after, amble over to the cupboard, pull out the cereal and start gulping handfuls from the box. Where precisely it all went, Cassie didn’t know.

  Lily was slender and short, like her mother, but Cassie’s slenderness came from watching what she ate and occasionally, just occasionally, going for a walk with Coco where they talked about most things. Not everything, but most things.

  Lily appeared to do as little exercise as possible, despite the school system, and just ate.

  ‘Fast metabolism?’ Shay would say absently, when queried about this. ‘Great for sports, though. She likes tennis. Should she have tennis coaching?’

  ‘Who,’ Cassie wanted to screech, ‘would drive her to this extra tennis coaching? Not you, because you are never here anymore!’

  But she couldn’t say that because it was the unsayable. She would not count how many times he’d been at his mother’s lately. She would not.

  Breathe.

  She put the bags on the counter still messy with the morning’s breakfast dishes and pressed the answerphone button as she watched her younger daughter plundering the fridge.

  The frail-sounding voice of Antoinette, her mother-in-law, whispered through the kitchen.

  ‘Shay, pet, the hot water’s not working. I don’t know what to do and you know I’m scared of messing with the controls. Your father always did it. Could you come round?’

  If Lily hadn’t been there, Cassie might have sworn out loud, something long and filthy that would necessitate serious paper money in the swear jar, but as it was, she consoled herself with a silent curse. Somewhere deep inside, it made her feel marginally better.

  Then she opened the fridge and took out the half-full bottle of white wine chilling inside. She banished the thought that she’d only opened it the night before and that Shay hadn’t drunk any because he didn’t believe in drinking mid-week. She needed this, needed something to help cool and calm her down. What harm was there in a glass of wine?

  Shay’s mother, Antoinette, had always said she wasn’t good with the phone and could never remember which one to ring, so she had a system of leaving messages all over the place. She’d have left one on Shay’s phone and probably in his office too. Just in case. By now, Shay and the entire northern hemisphere would know he was needed in his mother’s house and he would have obediently gone there, to his former home on the other side of the city instead of to his current one.

  He wouldn’t be late for dinner with Cassie and the girls because he wouldn’t be eating with them at all. Antoinette would have ‘something small in the oven, pet, seeing as you’ve come all this way’.

  To add to this, Shay might not even text or phone to explain where he was and Cassie’s blood would boil all evening. ‘But sure, you knew I’d be with Ma, didn’t you?’ he’d say in bewilderment when he’d roll up at half ten or eleven, fed and happy after an evening with his mother. He wouldn’t have had to put away groceries, organise the next day’s dinner, put on washing, drag the recycling bin to the gate or do any of the normal jobs associated with family life.

  Nobody could castigate a man for taking care of his widowed mother. Cassie certainly wouldn’t have done so until over three years ago when her father-in-law had died.

  Arthur had been like Shay: a big man, fair-haired and freckled, larger than life, great fun and endlessly practical. Like his son, he worked in engineering and, consequently, both men knew their way around a tool kit and could put together flat pack furniture with good-humoured expertise.

  Then a massive heart attack had taken Arthur away and Antoinette’s life had changed. Shattered, Antoinette had not been able to cope and Cassie had felt enormous pity for her fragile mother-in-law.

  Despite her clothes being modern and fashionable, the internal Antoinette was like a woman from another time, one of the timorous gentle ladies from eighteenth century novels who had fits of the vapours at all aspects of painful modern life. It would be difficult for her to live on her own, Cassie thought, but at least Antoinette had two daughters as well as Shay. Three grown children to be there for her.

  Ruth was single, worked in television production and lived in an all-white apartment not too far from her mother, while Miriam was married with one teenage son, worked part-time and lived about four miles from Antoinette’s Clontarf home.

  Unfortunately, Miriam and Ruth weren’t on Antoinette’s emotional radar at all. Only Shay could fill his beloved father’s shoes. And Shay, to Cassie’s astonishment, was filling those shoes with vigour. Antoinette’s emergencies were twice-weekly events at least.

  ‘Doesn’t she ever phone Miriam or Ruth?’ Cassie had asked once, six months on from her father-in-law’s death, when Antoinette’s frantic phone calls were still coming fast and loose, and Shay appeared to be half living with his mother.

  ‘Ah, the girls are hopeless with house stuff, you know that, Cass,’ said Shay. ‘Miriam never answers her phone and Ruth’s so busy.’

  ‘Busy?’ Cassie heard the rage in her voice but was too angry to quell it. ‘And you’re not busy? You have a family and a job. Ruth only has one of those. It wouldn’t kill her to phone her mother once in a blue moon, and I don’t know why Miriam doesn’t answer her bloody phone. Push the button, say, “Hello, Mum, yes, I’ll come round.” It’s not rocket science. You are not your mother’s only child.’

  ‘Ma needs me right now,’ Shay said, managing to look a combination of irritated and hurt. ‘I don’t know how you can’t understand that, Cass. She’ll adjust. She’s lonely, that’s all. We live five minutes away from your grandmother, so it’s no big deal if you need to drop in. It’s only because Mum lives on the other side of the city that it seems like I’m gone for ages. I’m not. It’ll pass.’

  But over the past three years, Antoinette hadn’t become any less lonely.

  Other than the time aspect of it all, what hurt was the never coming first. Never. Shay had a list of important people in his head and after almost four years of his dropping everything to see to his mother’s emergencies, Cassie felt she was right at the bottom of it.

  In her darker moments, she decided that if she dr
ove off a bridge and Antoinette phoned simultaneously with a message about having pranged her car on the garden gate, Shay would throw Cassie a lifebuoy, roar, ‘I know you’ll be able to sort yourself out, love, you’re so capable,’ and he’d be gone. Gone to his mother who was too fragile for life.

  Cassie, who prized herself on her ability to cope with anything, was seen as strong enough to manage on her own.

  ‘What’s for dinner, Mum?’ asked Lily, looking at the shopping.

  ‘Fish pie,’ said Cassie, putting an arm around her younger daughter and hugging. Sometimes a person needed a hug and Beth had become very unhuggy these days. Something to do with her animal instincts making her pushed loved ones away before they pushed her away: defensive tactics in the evolution of a teenager. It still hurt like hell.

  Lily, in a moment of respite from the hormonal dark side, embraced her mother, snuggling in for a hug the way she used to.

  She was like a little sprite in school uniform: dark hair growing out of a pixie cut, with knowing blue eyes that saw everything, a ready smile when the hormones weren’t torturing her, and a fondness for teenage fiction set in dystopian worlds.

  ‘Yum,’ she said now, blue eyes lighting up. ‘Is there any Chunky Monkey left for afters?’

  ‘Did you eat it all last night? If so, it’s just ordinary supermarket vanilla.’

  ‘Think I did,’ Lily said, sighing. ‘Can I melt Nutella on to the vanilla, then?’

  ‘Sure.’ Burying her head into the soft cloud of Lily’s hair and breathing in the scent of flowery girl perfume, Cassie closed her eyes and wished everything was as simple as what to have for dessert.

  Don’t grow up anymore, she wanted to beg Lily. Please go back to being my little girl for a bit longer. Let just one thing stay the same …

  Lily wriggled out of her mother’s embrace and skipped out the door.

  ‘Take your coat and put it in the cupboard,’ Cassie begged.

  ‘’K,’ said Lily.

  At least Lily still did what she was told. Telling Beth to do anything was akin to co-ordinating a rocket launch and hoping nothing exploded.

  Although Cassie firmly believed that people, even teenagers, had to clean up after themselves, it was sometimes easier to put Beth’s stuff away herself rather than wait for a missile strike from hormone central.

  It had been an exhausting day. She’d been drenched twice, had to deal with the whole Springfield Hotel crisis, and then being balled at on the phone by Loren, who’d shrieked – as if Cassie didn’t already know – that one messed-up conference would have a hugely negative impact on their reputation.

  ‘You are supposed to let that moron know that I will rip his guts out through his nostrils if he screws this up,’ had been Loren’s grim advice when Cassie had phoned in. In a chaotic world, one could always rely on her boss to be enraged about something.

  And it seemed as though one could always rely upon her husband to be at his mother’s house, Cassie thought.

  She glumly surveyed the shopping. She had picked the groceries off the shelves, put them into the trolley, loaded them on the conveyor belt, packed them into bags, hauled it all in a wonky trolley to the car, and now she had to put them all away again.

  At least dinner was ready to go. All it needed was reheating in the oven, which she switched on now. She clicked on the radio and found something with a pumping beat to keep her energy up so she could force herself to begin unpacking. As she listened to the music and drank her wine, she tried to keep the tears from her eyes. Crying and drinking: she was like a student in a flat, she reflected grimly. And then that thought shifted on to girls and tattoos.

  She might get a tattoo.

  Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

  She’d always loved W. B. Yeats. She’d get it somewhere secret so nobody would see it or need know what it meant, because she would. That was enough.

  By twenty to eleven, Cassie had all the washing done, some of it dried, and had ironed the girls’ school blouses for the next day. She’d taken out the next day’s dinner from the freezer but that was the last of her stash; tomorrow she’d have to cook up a few meals for the rest of the week. The wine was long gone and Cassie had, with great difficulty, stopped herself opening another bottle. She’d had too much already.

  Upstairs, Beth was in bed reading her history textbook and listening to music at the same time. Cassie had switched off Lily’s light twice already.

  ‘Just one more chapter! They’re about to get into the time reactor to try and switch everything back to the previous month before the invasion,’ wheedled Lily at ten, when Cassie crept upstairs with her ironing to find that Lily was reading again despite the 9.30 school night lights-out rule.

  ‘No,’ Cassie said firmly, but patted her daughter’s hand in case she sounded irritable. ‘You need your sleep, darling.’

  ‘Here are your shirts,’ Cassie said quietly, entering Beth’s domain.

  In bed, with the eye make-up off and in her fleecy pyjamas, Beth looked more like the fifteen-year-old she was and less like the seventeen-year-old she seemed desperate to turn into. She had her aunt Coco’s heart-shaped face and perfect eyebrows, and her father’s eyes with those unusual striations of amber in the centre. All in all, it made for a pretty amazing package and Cassie worried endlessly about her daughter’s effect on the male population and the tangles a young girl could get herself into.

  Sighing because she knew wine made her maudlin, Cassie put a few things in the laundry basket and then sat on the side of Beth’s bed, angling her head so she could see the title of the textbook: European History from 1000AD to the Glory of the Renaissance.

  ‘That’s a nice small area of research to get through,’ she joked.

  ‘I know, nightmare, right?’ said Beth. ‘It’s very brutal, too: everyone killing everyone else, or else they died from poverty or disease. Yeuch. And women were like objects, just things, almost not people at all. It was so horrible, I flicked ahead to the Inquisition.’ She shuddered. ‘That was way worse, the things they did to people.’

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  Knowing she could have her arm shrugged off but risking it anyway, Cassie leaned in and put an arm around her older daughter.

  ‘Honey, that’s probably not a good thing to read before bed. Some people can read about the most horrendous periods in history and it doesn’t affect them, but you and I – and darling Lily, as well – are not among them. When I read about how they treated witches, who were most likely just midwives or healing women, I couldn’t sleep for weeks. The thought of it all just stayed with me.’

  ‘Really, Mum?’ Beth looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Hard to imagine,’ joked Cassie, ‘but I was a bit sensitive when I was at school.’

  She still was, Cassie reflected ruefully, thinking of how upset Shay’s continued defection could make her. But kids seemed to function better when they saw their parents coping fabulously, so she tried not to let it show.

  She rapidly moved off that subject. ‘Your aunt Coco couldn’t read Anne Frank’s diary. She kept trying to but she’d sob so much that Grammy Pearl went into the school and said she didn’t care if it was on the course or not, Coco wasn’t going to read it.’

  ‘Go Pearl!’ laughed Beth.

  ‘Now, how about you pack up the history, flick through a magazine for five minutes to see what new band are in or out, and then try to sleep, because it’s really late, darling. I could bring you some hot chocolate?’

  Beth smiled at her mother. ‘Yeah, that would be nice.’

  Cassie almost bounced downstairs, so happy to have had a positive conversation with Beth.

  By half eleven, Cassie was in bed herself, not reading, just mindlessly flicking through the TV which was turned to low, trying to find something mind-numbing to send her off to sleep a
nd get her mind off the fact that Shay still wasn’t home.

  His 8 p.m. text –

  Gone to Ma’s, won’t be late

  – was plainly untrue and Cassie found herself simmering at the lack of any further texts.

  Blast Shay for having the sensitivity of a ten-tonne truck, she thought, and switched out the light forcefully.

  Cassie would kill him, Shay Reynolds thought as he sped through the darkened streets in his car, weariness overtaking him. He hadn’t noticed how late it had got. Once he’d sorted out the water heater problem, Mam had wanted to watch this old documentary on the TV about the building of Knock airport in the west of Ireland, and he’d said he’d sit with her for a bit of the programme. But she was so persuasive, and he’d made them another cup of tea – hers in the special china mug with the roses on it – and suddenly the show was over, it was after eleven and he’d been there for far longer than he’d meant to.

  All the same, he felt so sorry every time he left his mother alone in the house he and his sisters had grown up in. He swore her face got smaller and sadder each time when she stood at the door to kiss him goodbye.

  The routine was the same every time: Mam standing there wearing one of her soft woollen sweaters because she really suffered with the cold, and her wedding ring on a chain around her neck because her fingers were too misshapen from arthritis to wear it anymore. She hated that. His mother prized herself on looking youthful and pretty. She’d never been the sort of mother to slouch around the house and had always dressed up, wearing the pastel colours that suited her blonde-streaked hair.

  ‘Drive safely, love,’ she’d say at the door. ‘Give the girls my love, and Cassie. I hope she’s not working too hard. And you, love.’ At this, she’d reach up to hug him. Shay was six foot and his mother was almost a foot smaller. ‘You take care because nobody can replace my wonderful son.’