Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  Pearl reckoned that the sugar flowers were left over from a long-ago baking party with Lily and Beth, so would be as hard as rocks by now. Time for a cupboard clear-out.

  ‘I’m not sure you can eat those, Fiona, because they’re a bit old, so remember to tell people the flowers are for decoration only, OK, darling?’ she said, and went back to her flowers.

  Coco and Fiona headed off with the cakes again and Pearl kept smiling at the thought of her darling granddaughter’s relationship with Fiona. If only Coco would see, really see, how glorious it would be to have her own children, then she might think more about settling down. There was no sign of Coco dating anyone, and the odd date she went on invariably turned into disaster.

  ‘All the good men are gone,’ Coco would say with an air of good humour, if asked about this.

  But Pearl wondered if the problem ran deeper. Was Coco so afraid of being abandoned that she ran away from relationships?

  No, Pearl decided. She’d been with Red for a long time. Two years, although it was nearly twice that since he’d left her.

  There had to be something else. Perhaps she simply wasn’t meeting the right ones.

  Or was it fear of being in a relationship and then, eventually, being a mother?

  That thought made Pearl feel weak with misery and guilt all at once.

  She’d talk to Jo about it later. Coco’s best friend had always had her head screwed on correctly. If anyone could make Coco see that love was a fundamental part of human happiness, it was Jo. No matter that Jo didn’t have the love of her life in the form of a man – she had it in her precious daughter. She’d want Coco to have that too. A husband, a child, some precious family of her very own.

  Seven

  ‘I am not ticking “bubbly”,’ said Coco fiercely, staring at the ForeverInLove.com website as Jo logged on to it. ‘That’s code for people like me: not too tall but could lose a few pounds – or more than a few pounds.’

  ‘You don’t need to lose any weight,’ said Jo automatically. ‘And there’s no box for bubbly. A lot of them work by psychometric testing. You answer a whole series of questions and they set you up with a group of guys. You don’t list your vital statistics. This whole dating thing has changed. It’s more scientific, less of the “GSOH, loves hamsters and old movies”. Although they do use photos.’

  Yeah, right, huge change there, Coco thought miserably, remembering how fat her calves had looked that morning when she’d put on her favourite swing skirt and had twirled to see it from behind. How had she not noticed this before? Thirty years of living and her ginormous calves had hidden themselves from her, hiding in plain sight. Another flaw.

  No, she and her flaws weren’t ready for this.

  Using a dating site was asking for trouble. Meeting friends of friends was less complicated – often tricky but not impossible – but strangers, total strangers, on websites looked at photos and read the information looking for clues. Looks were vital, no matter how many psychometric tests you did.

  And some sites did make space for ‘describe yourself’. ‘Petite’ was undoubtedly website code for a short, too-rounded piglet who lived entirely on chocolate and wore fifties clothes to hide this fact.

  How she regretted that five-minute dating conversation now. Jo had found her at a weak moment at Grammy’s birthday party, when everyone had been happy, and the house and green had been full of merry people, chatting, hugging and being lovely. Under those circumstances, it was easy to think the whole world was just as welcoming. She’d momentarily let her guard down and agreed with Jo that it might be nice to have a man in her life, and Jo had instantly said they had to go online to search for suitable men before Coco changed her mind.

  ‘It is different for me, kiddo,’ Jo had said. ‘I’ve got Fiona. I don’t think I could fit a man in my life, to be frank. Unless he was brilliant at cooking, because you know how useless I am. I mean, that might work … but really, I’d …’ Jo had paused. They were sitting on the green, enjoying the evening sun beside the fig tree and watching Fiona playing cards with Peter and Pearl, who were being taken to the cleaners.

  ‘I’d love you to experience motherhood, Coco. It’s incredible. I’ve never said that before because I didn’t want to do the whole you know nothing because you’re not a mother shtick. I hate women who do that. Also, I know how complex a subject parenting is for you because of … you know, your own mother. But it’s incredible.’ Jo’s eyes were misty as she stared at her daughter laughing riotously as she collected up all the Monopoly money she’d won at snap, and Coco had wanted to cry too.

  ‘It’s love like nothing else, Coco,’ Jo had finished.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Coco mumbled, then managed to say something about getting more sandwiches because there were still some left in the fridge and the party would be winding up soon.

  As she ran towards the safety of Pearl’s home, she breathed deeply so she wouldn’t let herself down and cry in front of everyone.

  The subject of motherhood was like a flare with a short fuse in her mind. Mothers were not reliable. They never came home. Grammy Pearl had been an incredible substitute but she hadn’t been Coco’s real mother.

  She’d gone.

  Despite Jo’s interruption all those years ago, Coco could still hear the schoolroom taunts from Paula: ‘She’s a crybaby who made her ma leave.’

  Maybe she had. Maybe her mother had been incapable of being a mother and Coco’s birth had pushed her over the edge. Maybe Coco herself had been to blame. Maybe it was genetic. No matter what, Coco couldn’t bear to go down that route. She might be just like her mother and want to run as soon as she’d had her children. She would not subject a child to what she’d gone through.

  Cassie had got it out of her system by being a wild child when she was a teenager, but Coco had repressed all the pain until she’d been with Red.

  Then it had come out, and look what had happened.

  But Jo had kept the subject alive.

  ‘Let’s look at dating sites,’ she’d said cheerfully on Friday evening when Coco, Jo and Fiona were in Coco’s apartment after having a quick pasta supper, which was something they did every few weeks. Coco was a marvellous cook and Fiona loved going to her quirky apartment two streets away from Delaney Gardens, where the walls were covered with art deco gallery prints Coco had picked up over the years, and the faded amethyst couch was a vast velvet nest of embroidered cushions and squishiness. Fiona was sitting cross-legged on the fluffy violet rug, playing at the low coffee table, and inventing a new hat with an old sunhat and bits and bobs from Coco’s always replenished ‘things to be repaired’ box from the shop.

  After a while of registering on one site and looking at pictures of wildly attractive men that had Coco reconsider her point that ‘you can’t choose someone to love from their photo’, they were at the knotty part of agreeing what Coco was really looking for in a man.

  ‘Let’s see what we can agree on,’ said Jo, looking at the dating website. ‘We’ll think of your dream list and write it down so you can pick guys who fulfil those ideals. Handsome?’

  ‘Hell, yes. Definitely handsome,’ said Coco wearily, giving in. She might as well give it one last go. Couldn’t hurt – apart from how awful it would be if she and her calves were rejected. And she was lonely, not that she’d admit it to anyone.

  ‘No, that’s wrong to look for handsome,’ she said suddenly. Here she was worrying over fat calves and yet she was ready to pick a mate based entirely on looks.

  ‘OK, let’s not look for handsome. Taller than you, though?’

  Coco agreed. On the list of prospective male requirements, this one wasn’t hard to achieve. Most men were taller than her. The Seven Dwarfs were taller than her. Coco insisted she was five two, but had embroidered on that last inch. Red had been six foot exactly. He’d been able to lift her up effortlessly. Nobody would ever be
able to do that again.

  ‘You need to be looking for solvent,’ Jo went on. ‘You’ve got to be realistic.’

  Coco nodded grudgingly. She’d been out with a few non-solvents over the years when she had dated and it was always expensive. They had the best taste in wine, the most romantic ideas for weekends away, but funds ran out at the most inopportune moments and Coco always had to cough up. Paying for your own flowers/wine/birthday gifts did tend to pall. But, after Red, she hadn’t wanted a career man; she’d wanted someone entirely different from him. Unfortunately, this tended to mean men with no money and less ambition than sloths.

  ‘You need solvent, Coco. Even half a job,’ Jo said sternly. ‘Apart from Red, you’ve been going for broke men in bands or performance artists living with their mothers and getting rent allowance. You need a guy who doesn’t think jobs are for the little people. Now, you can figure them out pretty quickly on most of the sites – “searching for his passion in life” means he’s failed at ten things and is trying to figure out what number eleven is. Also means you will be footing every bill.’

  Coco still hadn’t exhaled after the mention of Red’s name. She hated people even mentioning him. He was handsome, solvent, all the things on every woman’s top-ten list on every dating website, but he’d left her. It had all been his fault.

  Besides, it had been a lucky escape, when she thought about it – as she had, endlessly. He’d been too Type A and demanding.

  So there would be no more go-getters, no more high-achievers for Coco. They could deliver a killer heart blow in a way that dreamy non-solvents never could.

  ‘I like artists and musicians,’ Coco began, nose in the air.

  Jo gave her a harsh look. ‘That’s playing the romantic card, as if you’re a terrible romantic who’s still looking for Mr Darcy, and we both know he does not exist.’

  Jo used to be a romantic until she became pregnant with Fiona, whereupon romance was knocked clean out of her mind with the knotty problem of a boyfriend who had decided this baby lark wasn’t for him as soon as the pregnancy test showed the two blue lines. Fiona’s father apparently now lived in the Philippines with a wife and young family, and had never met his daughter. Coco was listed as Fiona’s guardian because Jo’s family situation was complex.

  ‘Jane Austen has a lot to answer for,’ Jo remarked, as she had many times before. ‘How many handsome, rich, single men are there out there who own an estate like Pemberley, know how to apologise for a messed-up proposal and save your sister from disaster – tell me that?’

  Coco and Jo laughed. ‘If one does exist, he doesn’t need to be on ForeverInLurve dot com,’ Coco said. ‘He’s probably beating women off with a stick.’

  The TV was tuned to a children’s channel but both Jo and Coco knew Fi was listening breathlessly to the conversation.

  ‘A dog,’ said Fiona. ‘He needs a dog. Can you say Coco wants a man with a dog, Mum?’

  ‘You’re probably right, Fi,’ said Coco humbly. ‘Men who like animals are nice. Do you think that nice vet on Bondi Beach is available?’

  ‘Sadly, I doubt it,’ Jo said, with genuine regret. ‘Another man who looks as if he needs a stick to keep the women away. Should we say you like opera? Do you think you’d get a more interesting type of guy if he likes opera as well as playing air guitar?’

  The women gazed at each other.

  ‘I like listening to opera,’ conceded Coco. ‘Madame Butterfly makes me cry. But I don’t know if I could sit through a whole one. And I like guys who adore rock music.’

  She typed some more.

  ‘No opera,’ she muttered. ‘Honesty is the best policy.’

  ‘We have said I’m five two,’ Coco pointed out.

  ‘We should make you taller. You can wear heels. There’s probably a subsection of men who only like short women. You know, like there are men who only go for bigger girls or women with huge …’ She glanced meaningfully down at Coco’s large breasts.

  ‘I’ve met all of them,’ Coco said. ‘Those guys only see 38DD.’

  ‘What’s 38DD?’ asked Fi, on cue.

  ‘The bus from Blackrock into the city,’ said her mother.

  Fiona, nine and a quarter, possessor of the steely mind of a German chancellor, pondered this for a moment. ‘That’s a fib,’ she said.

  ‘Fiona McGowan, are you accusing me of telling fibs?’ demanded her mother with fake shock.

  Fiona giggled. ‘She tells them all the time, Coco. You don’t get sick if you don’t eat green things every day: Louise in school told me. All mums say that and it’s not true. Chocolate cereal is good for you too, and you say it’s not a proper breakfast.’

  ‘I always feel that the milk’s the healthiest bit,’ agreed Coco, who was secretly very fond of chocolate cereal herself.

  ‘Milk is really good for you,’ Fiona said, as if that made the whole thing all right. ‘Chocolate milk is a food group, Mum, isn’t it?’

  ‘We have work to do on our food issues,’ Jo sighed. ‘Tomato ketchup is not a vegetable, by the way, Fi.’

  Fiona’s eyes twinkled as she went back to her hat-making. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But chips are.’

  Jo and Coco controlled their laughter and looked at the website again.

  ‘Right, do you want to do this or not?’ asked Jo.

  ‘Sign me up,’ Coco said with an air of resignation.

  When Jo and Fiona had gone home, Coco double-locked the apartment front door and tidied up the kitchen. Then she sat down on the couch again and flicked through the evening TV schedules to see if there was anything to amuse her for another hour before bed. She used to be keen on social media and had kept up with all her old pals from college, but since Red and the broken engagement she’d stopped and rarely went back on again.

  All those months of chatting with people who’d seen her changed status: Engaged! To the most wonderful man in the world!

  These giddy words of love were followed by photos of herself and Red doing things that were ultra-ordinary but were gilded with excitement because it was the two of them together, in their glorious bubble of love. They’d walked the pier in Dun Laoghaire, with Red taking pictures of them waltzing around the Victorian bandstand, eating ice creams in the park, hiking up to Mahon Falls on a blissful summer weekend in Waterford, marvelling at the sheer scale of the Giant’s Causeway and how the smooth basalt rocks looked as if a giant had indeed placed them there.

  And her favourite photo of all, one she’d never put on Facebook, was of them together in her bed, just a close-up of their faces against the creamy pillows, blissfully happy with love, a sheen on their skin from lovemaking, smiling as Coco held the phone up to capture the sheer power of their happiness.

  She’d loved that photo; used to look at it when Red was out of the country on business, phoning from airports and conferences, muttering softly about how much he missed her and what he’d do to her when he got back. When she forgot herself and let the photo get into her head, Coco could still feel her body cuddled up to Red’s long, strong one, his heat against her. He was the only man who’d ever made her feel fragile and pretty; the only man who’d never made her worry about her little pot belly or how curvy her legs were instead of the long slim ones she’d prayed for since she was a teenager.

  They’d probably looked ludicrous together, she told herself when it was over: her short, verging on the pocket siren, and him tall and with a broad chest like the heroes in the books her girlfriends used to read in school. Big hands and long, mobile fingers that could do things to her body that made her laugh and gasp all at the same time …

  On her couch, TV remote in hand, Coco felt the familiar misery well up in her. She’d never told anyone how it had really ended, not even Cassie, and they were as close as it was possible to be. Some things you couldn’t tell anyone.

  She could still see the anger in his f
ace that last day. Red was never angry with her. He cherished her, Pearl used to say, like she was a precious jewel.

  ‘The way that man looks at you …’ Pearl said happily. ‘He’s a keeper.’

  It had been raining, needles of rain that had left the streets puddled with water.

  Coco had avoided all Red’s phone calls since the night before.

  She’d raced home after the horrible scene in the restaurant, grabbed a few things, and had driven off at high speed to stay with Jo, whom she’d ordered not to let Red in, even if he turned up.

  He hadn’t.

  He’d phoned. Nine times, nine messages, pleading in eight of them, until he’d ended with one cold message: ‘If you want to talk, I’ll see you tomorrow at one outside Bellamy’s. We can sort this out then. Bye, Coco.’

  Not even an ‘I love you, Coco’ like in all the other messages.

  Bellamy’s was the city centre restaurant where they’d met, even though they’d grown up only streets from each other.

  Coco hadn’t opened the shop that morning because she’d kept crying and having to repair her make-up. But she got to the restaurant on time, wearing Jo’s raincoat, which was too big for her, and a pair of black trousers, also Jo’s, because she felt so fat and ugly, and she thought they might be slimming.

  Red was sitting outside at one of the black cast-iron tables, menu ignored in front of him.

  ‘Why didn’t you wait for me or even listen to me?’ he said instantly, and Coco was astonished to see how angry he was.

  He had the most amazing colouring: that dark red hair and the skin that tanned so easily, now darkened with anger.

  ‘I’m not waiting if that’s how you’re going to talk to me,’ said Coco shakily.

  She didn’t move towards him so Red shoved the extra chairs out of his way to join her on the street, the screeching of cast-iron chairs alarming the two women sitting at the next table dithering over what to have for lunch.