by Cathy Kelly
‘You forget something, sir?’ the driver asked, looking at him curiously before he got back in his car.
‘No,’ said Red, and began following her.
Coco headed off towards the escalators up to arrivals and Red couldn’t help himself following her. She glanced at an old-fashioned watch on her slender wrist and sighed with impatience. She was running late, he thought. Late for whom? She was beautifully dressed, with a small elegant black handbag – the sort of thing she’d longed to sell in the shop but had never been able to afford in the early days.
Some instinct made her turn as she got off the escalator, and he turned too, bending his head as if he was looking back for someone on the ground floor.
Please let her not see me stalking her.
She didn’t. He got off after her and watched her walk, hips swaying in that utterly unconscious way of hers, over to the arrivals area.
Red, who had a boarding pass on his phone and no checked luggage, took the next escalator up and looked down at her. She was biting her full lower lip, the way she did when she was nervous and trying to find the right place to wait. Who was she waiting for that was making her nervous? A lover? A new fiancée?
Red was shocked by how jealous he felt of this unknown man.
Then she was out of sight and Red was joining the fast-track queue for the flight to New York. Maybe it was the previous late night, and the conversation he’d had with his friends, but Red had an overwhelming desire to turn around, race downstairs to where Coco stood, pick her up and never let her go.
Instead, he took off his belt and his shoes, laid his phone and laptop in the security trays and moved through. She didn’t want him in her life. She’d made that perfectly plain four years ago.
Thank heavens for Pearl, Coco thought as she hurried through the airport car park to reach arrivals, where Jo’s sister’s flight was due to land soon.
She arrived at the car park in front of the airport entrance proper to realise that, yet again, she’d mixed up the areas. She was at departures check-in, not arrivals. Muttering to herself, she took the escalator up to the right floor and she had the weirdest sensation of being watched. But when she looked around, there was nobody looking at her.
It was nerves, she thought. She’d felt nervous since she’d dropped Fiona off at Pearl’s, and was feeling incredibly anxious about meeting Attracta – the aunt that Fiona didn’t remember at all.
It was the emails that made her feel this. First, Attracta had sent emails to her sister, which was insane because Jo wasn’t able to type answers into her laptop, and this made her doubly frustrated. It was as if Attracta didn’t grasp the severity of the fact that her younger sister had had a stroke, or how huge an uphill battle her rehab could be if there wasn’t the much hoped-for spontaneous recovery.
Then Attracta had sent emails to Coco, too: update me emails where she wrote as if she was coolly enquiring if a pair of shoes had arrived in the shop.
Actually, Coco thought, she’d had far warmer and more interested emails from buyers contacting Twentieth Century about items of clothing. Ones where people wrote with emotion and feeling. Nothing Attracta wrote had an iota of emotion in it: My plane from London lands at half ten on Saturday morning. I will have slept: I use melatonin on long flights. I suppose we should go straight to the hospital?
‘I suppose we should go straight to the hospital,’ raged Coco to herself. How cold is that? If it was Cassie, I’d move heaven and earth to see her.
‘I don’t really remember her that well,’ Coco had confided in Pearl when she’d phoned to ask if her grandmother would take care of Fiona on Saturday morning when she went to the airport. ‘She was so much older than us. She was tough, she taught Jo to be tough—’
‘Which is good,’ Pearl reminded her, ‘because Jo needs to be tough now to get through this catastrophe.’
‘That’s it!’ said Coco. ‘I know it’s a catastrophe, you do, darling Fi knows it, and she’s only nine, but Attracta and Xavier – it’s like they don’t realise this, or if they do, they’ve distanced themselves from it. Xavier’s flying in tomorrow for one night. At least Attracta’s made a big effort to come from Australia, but he’s in Paris – it’s not half way around the world. I don’t understand them!’
Pearl wished she could use the obvious example to explain this to her granddaughter, but she’d spent thirty years not discussing Coco’s mother with her, so she said instead: ‘Sometimes people with traumatic or dysfunctional families move away in every sense of the word. The Kinsellas are not normal, no doubt about it. They’ve driven their children away and it’s hard for Xavier and Attracta to come home. Home is linked with pain, hurt and never being good enough.’
Again, Pearl thought of Marguerite. Had she stayed away from her daughters because of that hurt and pain, of having been told she wasn’t a good enough mother? If so, Pearl had had a hand in it. It was a heavy burden to carry. But she’d been so scared for them, thinking what could go wrong because Marguerite’s behaviour had made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t able to take care of two children.
Pearl had changed her mind about telling her granddaughters the truth so many times. She would; she wouldn’t.
Not now, though. Not now.
‘I suppose that makes sense,’ reflected Coco. ‘If it were Cassie and I was on the moon, I’d come home as fast as I could.’
On the other end of the phone, Pearl smiled. Something she’d done right; those sisters adored each other.
Coco found a spot in arrivals where she could see the doors opening, disgorging passengers, and waited. The London flights processed people quickly. Twenty-five minutes after the arrivals board said the plane had arrived, a woman in her early forties arrived, pushing a trolley carrying one small suitcase and a carry-on. She was the right age and she had a look of Jo about her eyes, with the same dark eyebrows, but the resemblance ended there. Jo was tall, slim and loved colour, even ones like lemon yellows that Coco had to steer her away from. This woman was nowhere near as tall, didn’t have Jo’s enviable shape, and wore head-to-toe black, from her long, loose cardigan to her flat shoes, as if she was dressed for a funeral.
Was that her? Coco stared. The woman stared back and then pushed the trolley in Coco’s direction.
‘I’ve got photos on my wall of you with Josephine and Fiona,’ said Attracta, holding out a formal hand. ‘That’s how I recognised you. Hello Coco, it’s good of you to collect me.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing, the least I could do,’ babbled Coco, thinking that she’d barely recognised Attracta because it was years since she’d been home. Jo had only very old photos of her sister on her wall.
‘Attracta hates the camera,’ she’d said once.
It all came back to Coco now. Attracta had been told that being interested in your appearance was not thinking of God.
‘I told you my parents were nuts,’ Jo had said years ago when she’d explained this to Coco.
Nuts didn’t entirely explain it, Coco thought.
‘Welcome home, Attracta,’ she said now, trying to pull herself together. ‘I’m sorry it’s not under happier circumstances.’
‘I’m Tracey now,’ said Attracta briskly. ‘I hate Attracta.’
Coco missed a beat. The emails had been to a T. Kinsella but she hadn’t thought anything of it. People’s email addresses often bore no resemblance to their actual names. And yet, Attracta had never mentioned the name change in her emails … Weird.
‘Right. Tracey,’ she said evenly. She simply wasn’t going to even question this. ‘I’m on level two. Shall we walk?’
‘Sure. Are we going to the hospital then?’
‘Er, yes,’ said Coco, just stopping herself from saying: ‘No, we’ll take in a movie first.’
She must remember what Pearl had told her: this journey might be a very hard one for Attracta in so many ways
.
On the drive, Coco learned that Tracey – how hard was that going to be to remember and why hadn’t she mentioned it before? – lived in Sydney, worked in administration in insurance, lived alone in an apartment in Manley, and had slept for the leg of the flight from Hong Kong.
She didn’t ask about her sister and or say any of the expected things like how was her niece coping, or wasn’t Coco good to be there taking care of her.
Was it nerves or medication? Coco wondered, entirely on edge.
Tracey stared out of the car window at Dublin city and remarked occasionally how different it all looked now. It was only in the hospital that Coco finally realised that Attracta – sorry, Tracey – was wound up like a spring.
They walked into the ward together, where Jo was feeding herself lunch. Because of her inability to use her left arm properly, she wasn’t able to cut up her chicken, so was hacking away at it with a blunt knife and had clearly splashed food on to her pyjamas. The enormous fatigue she’d suffered since the stroke meant each forkful was an effort, and before Coco could smile and say that Jo had improved so much in the past two weeks, Tracey gasped and slapped a hand over her mouth. She took one look at her formerly vibrant sister reduced to someone feeble, unable to feed herself properly, and a torrent of tears emerged.
‘Josephine, oh no, Josephine,’ she wailed, and threw herself at Jo, who glared at Coco over her sister’s head as if this outburst of emotion was all Coco’s fault.
Coco shrugged. She had learned that this was the best way to deal with Jo when she got stroppy. Reasoning didn’t work.
Your sister, she mouthed, and left the ward to wait outside.
After ten minutes, she grabbed one of the nurses she’d grown to know well.
‘Lesley, Jo’s sister’s just arrived from Australia to see her. Would you mind peering in to see how it’s going? I’m worried her sister might upset her. I don’t think she’s coping very well with Jo’s condition. I know you’re wildly busy but it’ll only take a few seconds.’
‘Sure,’ said Lesley, and walked into the ward.
She was back in a minute with Tracey in tow. Tracey was still crying; her face was swollen with tears and was blotchily red.
‘The café?’ suggested Lesley, with a meaningful look at Coco.
‘You are truly an angel,’ whispered Coco to Lesley as she escorted Tracey towards the lifts.
They’d just ordered coffees, and Tracey was brokenly muttering about how she never expected it to be this bad, when Coco realised that she’d just committed the cardinal sin with someone immobile in a hospital bed: leaving without telling them what was happening.
She paid, whisked their coffees off to a table, grabbed a few sugars, left them beside Tracey, and said: ‘I’m just popping up to see Jo. You sit here for a while. I’ll come back for you, right?’
Holding her coffee, she raced off.
Jo hated coffee now. She couldn’t drink anything very well except through a straw, and her love of strong Columbian coffee was gone. Coco never, simply never, brought a takeaway coffee cup into the ward in case it reminded Jo of her inability to drink properly, but right now she thought it was time to stop treating Jo like she was anyone different from the person she’d been before.
There would be no ‘does she take sugar?’ in their relationship.
Jo was still Jo, would need rehab and might never physically be quite the same again. But mentally she was the woman Coco had been friends with for twenty-six years, even if she’d gone through an emotional earthquake. Getting Jo back on her feet would take more than physical exercises.
‘What did you bring her in for?’ demanded Jo instantly. ‘You saw what she was like. That helps me how exactly?’
‘First, she flew thousands of miles to see you, and secondly, I am not a psychic,’ protested Coco. ‘I didn’t know she’d burst into floods on seeing you. She barely spoke about you in the car—’
‘Then she went on and on about our bloody parents and how we’re the most screwed-up family on the planet, and how she hates her life, and now this,’ interrupted Jo angrily. ‘Oh yes, and the clincher is, do I think my stroke is a judgement from God because none of us are religious—?’
‘Fiona’s doing well today, thank you for asking,’ said Coco acidly, doing some interrupting of her own.
Jo was silent.
‘I left her with Pearl. They’re going to bake something covered in sprinkles to bring into you later this afternoon. I was going to come with Tracey …’
‘I can’t believe she changed her name,’ said Jo, sounding totally like herself for a brief moment. ‘She’s always hated it, but changing it …’
‘You did OK. Josephine’s fine. Attracta’s such an Irish name, it might not travel as well as Jo,’ agreed Coco.
‘I wish my mother had been channelling something weird like yours and Cassie’s mother,’ Jo added. ‘Coraline and Cassiopeia – now they’re amazing names.’
‘Which she gave to us and then left,’ Coco emphasised. ‘What was that about saying you have the most screwed-up family ever?’
At that moment, Jo laughed – a sound Coco hadn’t heard since before her stroke.
‘You win that one. But nobody in your family ever tried to immerse you in the bath to wash away your sins. I win!’
‘Sounds lovely,’ said Coco, grinning. ‘A family spa day. You never told me that before.’
‘It’s not the sort of thing you can discuss when you’re eleven, but it was a very fundamental phase they were going through …’ And Jo laughed again.
What a lovely sound, thought Coco.
‘What am I going to do with Attracta?’ Coco asked Pearl in a manic whisper when she went to pick up Fiona.
Attracta/Tracey had said she’d wait in the car as she didn’t like meeting new people.
Coco wanted to say she didn’t like new, wildly unsociable, slightly unhinged people staying in her flat, but controlled herself.
‘She completely freaked out when she saw Jo. I was going to bring Fiona in this afternoon but I certainly don’t think I can bring Attracta – sorry, Tracey – in. It’ll make Jo crazy and upset Fiona.’
‘Fiona’s the one you have to think about,’ said her grandmother wisely. ‘Not Tracey. And not Jo. Jo is an adult and you can only do so much for her. She has to learn to cope with this on her own, but you’re taking care of her daughter. Her nine-year-old daughter. That’s your job now.’
Coco thought about it. Pearl was right. Taking care of Fiona was the main thing, and the longer that they spent together, the more she realised how much went into mothering. It was more than the fun things she, Jo and Fiona had done over the years, like going out to restaurants or to the cinema or to the park. Even holidays they’d taken together. No, this was totally different. Being a parent meant – and she supposed she was Fiona’s parent for the moment – so much more. It meant being responsible for the fears that went on in Fiona’s little head.
‘You’re right,’ Coco said decisively, agreeing with her grandmother. ‘Fiona is my main priority. I’ll tell Tracy to stay at home or to go out for a walk, or to do whatever the bloody hell she wants, and I’ll bring Fiona in to see her mum. Then maybe we’ll go somewhere out for dinner?’
‘Only do what’s right for you and your family,’ said Pearl. ‘That’s what you have to do when you’re taking care of children.’
It all sounded very sensible to Coco.
When her granddaughter had left, Pearl was thinking of exactly how true her advice really was. She thought of the earth-shattering decisions she’d made when she was trying to protect Coco and Cassie all those years ago. Protect your family no matter what else. But she hadn’t protected everyone. She hadn’t protected Marguerite, and that was one of the things she regretted most. Marguerite had had nobody to take care of her, and Pearl had been thinking only of t
he children.
Tracey didn’t want to go out to dinner and was being so moody and miserable that Fiona went silent and sat in her room among her teddies. So Coco ordered in Chinese takeaway, but even that didn’t lift the gloom. After eating most of the prawn crackers, a vast quantity of the fried rice and at least half of Fiona’s leftover sweet and sour chicken, Tracey sat down in the best armchair after dinner.
Ignoring the fact that the television was on with a DVD of Frozen, because it was Fiona’s favourite movie and Coco was trying to take her mind off her deeply stressed aunt, Tracey then proceeded to talk loudly in a sad monologue about how stressful things had been and how strange she felt being back in Ireland, how confined and suffocated.
‘Well, that’s great,’ said Coco sharply in a tone she barely recognised as her own. She never normally spoke like that, but somehow taking care of Fiona had turned her into an alpha mum with a hint of lioness added in for fun. ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ she’d growled, giving Tracey a very meaningful glare and then staring at Fiona. ‘Something less upsetting.’
It was a command and, finally, Tracey copped on.
‘Er, of course,’ she said.
Luckily, jetlag, despite the melatonin, hit Tracey like a lead balloon and she had to go to bed early. So Coco and Fiona left her to the couch and snuggled up on Coco’s bed, watching the rest of the film on the TV in her bedroom. Coco wished they had her grandmother’s pug, Daisy, sprawled on top of them.
She should get a dog, she thought. A dog would be fabulous for Fiona. Children told things to dogs, told them their deepest, darkest secrets.
She had.
She’d sat in Basil and Sybil’s bed when she found out her mother had left, and she’d whispered the secrets that she couldn’t speak to anyone else, and the dogs had understood. They’d consoled her with loving pug licks that made Coco feel somebody understood how upset she was.