Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  They sat in the barrel-shaped cavern of a bustling restaurant near the office and, as a waitress cruised past with a martini and several glasses of wine on a tray, Cassie suddenly thought she knew what would fix her.

  ‘A martini, vodka,’ she said confidently to their waitress when she arrived.

  Belinda’s eyebrows raised the fraction they were capable of thanks to her three-monthly applications of Botox but she said nothing as she ordered tap water.

  ‘Hair of the dog,’ Cassie said when her drink arrived.

  ‘’Fess up – what’s wrong?’ said Belinda, studiously ignoring the bread. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drink alcohol at lunchtime. Now you’re hungover and ordering martinis. I was half expecting you to demand it shaken and not stirred … Is everything OK?’

  Cassie avoided answering the question by taking a deep drink of her martini: sharp, kick-ass and instantly hitting the spot. She’d hardly ever had one before. They were pre-marriage and pre-kids drinks, fun and frivolous, along with cosmopolitans and mojitos – silly expensive things for fun nights out with single girlfriends.

  ‘Of course, we don’t have to talk about it but I will have to use my mind-bending techniques on you,’ Belinda went on. ‘And the thing with the thumbscrews gets pretty messy …’

  ‘That’s not mind-bending.’ Cassie laughed for what felt like the first time that day.

  ‘Yes! A smile! Spill.’

  Cassie grabbed a fat bread roll, spread it liberally with butter – because what was the point of staying slim? – and explained.

  ‘And do not,’ she said at the end of her tale of Antoinette’s hostile takeover attempt, ‘take Shay’s side and say you can see how tough it is for him.’

  ‘As if.’

  A salad appeared in front of Belinda, and fish and chips in front of Cassie.

  ‘Never having been married, I have never had a serious mother-in-law problem,’ Belinda said thoughtfully, removing all the croutons from her salad. ‘Jake – remember him? Many years ago, casualty of a dreadful divorce and with a mother who thought he was a prophet in disguise? Now she was a nightmare. Straight out of a Stephen King novel. He was living with her and she felt it was her job to protect him from making any other relationship mistakes again. Any girl – royal descent, movie star, charity worker who gave all her money away to lame dog foundations, you name it – they weren’t good enough for her Jake. I’d say she had a hand in dismantling the previous marriage. We were together one Christmas and she bought me this perfume for a fiver; smelled like air freshener but not as nice. Plus she wore Guerlain perfume herself, so it wasn’t as if she didn’t understand how to buy nice perfume. I don’t mind if you can’t afford a present, but just buy a nice card instead. But she had money for sure and she was simply taunting me.’

  ‘Antoinette’s not like that,’ sighed Cassie. ‘She’s lovely to me, kind, all that stuff, but—’

  ‘But she wants her son to take over where her husband left off.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it in a nutshell.’

  ‘So Shay’s torn. He’s being the hero to his mother, while you, being Mrs Capable, are supposed to be able to keep the home fires burning. You should have been the fainting, useless type from the start.’ Belinda grinned. ‘You know, the women who can’t change light bulbs, take out the bins or phone the gas people to argue about the bill. Tough Scarlett O’Hara versus delicate Melanie Wilkes.’

  They both smiled at this, as they were both Gone With the Wind fans.

  ‘I was sensible from when I was seven,’ said Cassie.

  Belinda knew her mother had walked out, knew that Cassie had felt responsible for Coco as a child.

  ‘Even when I went through my “wild period” in my teenage years, I was still sensible. My Great-Aunt Edie thought I was out smoking pot and having sex with college kids, but I wasn’t. I was too sensible to do anything but fake being wild.’

  They both laughed at this and Cassie slurped some more of her martini.

  ‘What about Shay’s sisters?’ Belinda asked. ‘Can’t they help out with their mother?’

  ‘Miriam and Ruth?’ Cassie considered this while she looked at her cocktail glass and wondered if she could possibly have another martini because all the stress had gone with the drinking of this one, and she felt another one might make her perfectly calm, which would be lovely. ‘Now that does annoy me,’ she confessed. ‘Antoinette never asks them to do anything, and they don’t offer either.’

  The more she thought about this, the more annoyed she got. Ruth didn’t have a family to care for and she lived near her mother. Why didn’t Antoinette phone her as if she were the fire brigade?

  ‘There’s your answer,’ said Belinda with the firmness of one who liked straightforward solutions. ‘Talk to them. Say they need to pull their weight and help their mother through her grief. It means you don’t have to go into battle with Shay, and yes, I do feel sorry for him, poor love. He’s one of the good guys, Cassie, and you know it.’

  Cassie nodded and felt tears well up. She never cried in public. Never. She’d learned that lesson years ago when she was seven. This was ridiculous. What was happening to her?

  Suddenly she decided that she didn’t care what Belinda said or how shocked she looked: she was having another martini instead of dessert.

  Yes, Shay was a good man, she knew that, but it seemed as if Shay had made his choice – and he’d chosen his mother. Doing this had broken Cassie’s heart.

  He wasn’t the first person who’d chosen to leave her: her mother had too.

  A martini might not be the answer but, for today at least, when she felt in such emotional pain, it might help anaesthetise the hurt.

  Coco’s visitor was gone. She’d put Tracey into a cab for the airport just before twelve on Monday and had even hugged her goodbye, which was like hugging a board, as Tracey clearly didn’t do physical stuff.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m going home early but I can’t cope with any of it, being here or seeing poor Josephine,’ said Tracey, trying not to cry as she sat, all dressed in black, with her long-distance neck pillow – also black – sitting on the cab seat beside her.

  ‘I understand,’ said Coco, who didn’t but who was deeply relieved that her guest was leaving. She had no idea how Tracey had reorganised her flight details and, to be frank, didn’t care.

  Once Tracey was gone, Coco decided she had time to drop in unannounced to the shop and do some work, because she hadn’t been in for nearly a week and no matter how well Adriana said things were going, there would always be things only Coco could do.

  She swung into the coffee shop en route and picked up a takeaway for herself and one for Adriana. They could have a chat, look over the website and Facebook page, and then discuss plans. Coco was thinking about all of this as she walked down the road. When she reached Twentieth Century and found it shut with the shutters down, she did a double take.

  What?

  She looked at her watch. Half twelve. The shop was supposed to open at ten but there was no ‘back in five minutes’ sign hanging anywhere, no lights on, shutters still down. Adriana hadn’t opened up yet.

  Gritting her teeth, Coco put both coffees on the step, opened up the shutters and, standing back, cast a cold, hard eye over the front of the premises. The windows, which she often cleaned herself after bad weather despite the window cleaner coming once a week, were grimy. The shop displays were exactly the same as she’d left them, although Adriana had sworn blind that she’d redone them with one funky 1960s window and the other a window of models in pre-war suits. She’d emailed every single detail to Adriana, who’d replied perkily and said: No problem, consider it done.

  Consider it not done, thought Coco furiously.

  She opened up and went inside. The place smelled musty and of old sweat – a constant problem when you sold vintage clothes. If clothes weren’t
treated carefully when they came in, they would remain musty and sweaty, but Coco went to such effort to revitalise everything she sold. She kept the whole place freshly smelling at all times because nothing put customers off vintage more than to enter into a dusty, smelly place – like this, she realised, seeing nothing but dusty counters, dirty glass on the cabinets and cobwebs dangling from corners. It was like a grimy veil had been thrown over her beautiful jewel of a shop. She wanted to scream with fury at Adriana.

  Sipping her coffee, she threw the other one down the sink and found her cleaning clothes, where she kept them in a cupboard upstairs along with the mops, window-cleaning stuff, alcohol sprays for clothes, and essential oils for use on the floor in truly desperate times.

  She’d just changed when she thought of the girl Pearl had mentioned to her: someone who was studying fashion in Larkin College and was looking for part-time work.

  Texting Pearl, she asked for the girl’s details, and Pearl, who was a whizz with her phone because her poker friend Peter was a fan of technology and had shown her how to use it, texted Phoebe’s details straight back.

  I’ve just got Gloria on board and she says she’d love to meet her and, if all goes well, she could move in on Friday,

  Pearl added.

  Lovely girl. They’ll get on a like a house on fire and it will do Gloria the power of good.

  Hopefully she could do the shop the power of good too, Coco thought grimly.

  She printed up a sign:

  Shop closed for renovations

  Open Wednesday

  30% discounts!

  And then she stuck it on the front door, which she then locked.

  She sent a quick text to the girl, Phoebe, asking her if she still wanted part-time work and if so, could she do a trial in the shop as soon as college was over today. Then Coco began to clean up.

  Phoebe and Ian were sharing a coffee in the college canteen. Phoebe was wearing her newly renovated jacket from the vintage shop along with a skirt Ian had made for her: a draped grey jersey masterpiece he insisted he’d run up from some fabric he had lying around. It clung and pulled her in in all the right places, going wonderfully well with the fitted jacket and her biker boots.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she’d said with passionate gratefulness when he’d given it to her.

  ‘Wanted to drag you out of the misery pit,’ said Ian, pleased and then taken aback when Phoebe had hugged him fiercely in front of everyone.

  ‘Stop. People will think I’m straight,’ he’d hissed.

  By ‘people’ he meant a second-year graphic design student he fancied, who still had barely noticed that Ian existed.

  ‘There are so many gay guys around here, Mr Graphic Design hasn’t even spotted me yet,’ grumbled Ian, who was thinking of having a pink streak put in his hair so he could rise above the competition.

  Ian refused to hang out with the fashion fag hags who just wanted someone to go shopping with. ‘They have this TV show vision of gay men,’ he said mournfully. ‘They think it’s all squealing over Instagram and what Kim Kardashian is doing. None of them are into design at all or understand that I’m a serious artist with more ambition than hanging out in clubs and pretending to be a designer. There.’ He tweaked the skirt a bit on Phoebe. ‘Those are not the ideal boots, I should add. You need something flat and sedate with perhaps a hint of zebra, just a hint. But shoes are beyond me right now. Give me time. And cheer up, babes.’

  She’d been so miserable since coming back from Wicklow, and realising how impossible a task her mother was living with every day, that Ian had been racking his brains trying to cheer her up.

  It was proving difficult.

  ‘I’ll have to leave college,’ Phoebe said tearfully. ‘I can’t leave Mum to run the farm all by herself. It will kill her. She needs someone to look after Ethan and Mary-Kate too. Ethan will fall behind with his homework if he isn’t overseen, Mary-Kate is fragile since Dad died, and they need my money from the pub coming in or they’ll never survive.’

  ‘Please don’t say that,’ Ian begged. ‘You’re a brilliant designer – you have to stay.’

  ‘Not according to that bitch over there,’ said Phoebe, all the hurt coming up now.

  One of the fashion bitches had been particularly horrible about Phoebe’s latest design in pattern cutting, and had made subtle cow noises whenever Phoebe came near, to imply that Phoebe had better return to her farm.

  Ian, valiant in defending his friend, had sauntered over and said to the girl: ‘Tell me, how you do your hair to hide the horns, sweetie?’ in such a saccharine voice that the whole place had erupted into laughter and Ms Bitch had been the one to turn puce with embarrassment.

  ‘Ignore her,’ Ian said now. ‘She’s just jealous. Couldn’t design her way out of a paper bag. You, Ms McLoughlin, have talent, and don’t let anyone scare you away. There’s got to be a way to sort things out for your mum. We simply need to figure it out.’

  Pearl’s friend, Gloria, still hadn’t rung about meeting her, and Mrs Costello had been particularly poisonous when Phoebe had been leaving her bedsit this morning.

  ‘Are you sure you aren’t having men staying over?’ Mrs Costello had said, accosting Phoebe at the front door, eyes beadily looking Phoebe up and down as if she had ‘harlot’ painted on her somewhere.

  Ian had slept over one night, but he was like her brother. Still, no point saying that to Mrs Costello, who was probably homophobic to add to her other flaws.

  ‘There’s no room for men in my bedsit,’ she’d replied tartly. ‘No room for anyone.’

  ‘Don’t get snappy with me, missy,’ snapped back Mrs Costello. ‘I can have you out in a flash, believe me.’

  So when two texts pinged in – one from Pearl asking her to meet her friend, Gloria, and one from Pearl’s granddaughter, Coco, asking her if she could come for a trial in the shop – Phoebe could barely believe it.

  ‘Look!’ she squealed, showing Ian. ‘A job and hopefully somewhere to stay!’

  ‘Well, paint me pink and mail me to Ballydehob,’ said Ian. ‘Guess you’re not going home after all, Dorothy!’

  Such was her desperation for the job that Phoebe texted Coco saying she’d be there by two, which meant cutting the colour appreciation class.

  ‘You know more about colour than old Murcheson,’ said Ian, naming the lecturer giving the class. ‘Go. I’ll get the notes for you. Just remember: blue and green should never be seen – unless you’re a designer, when the rules don’t apply and the wilder the better. Just ask Roberto Cavalli. Have fun.’

  Coco had moved at least a quarter of the stock upstairs – an exhausting job – and was about to start on the other side of the shop when the door opened.

  ‘Helloo!’ said a voice.

  Adriana.

  Coco looked at her watch, which said ten to two – almost four hours after Adriana was being paid to open up. Coco had gone online and found that keeping the shop clean and tidy, and redoing the window displays, weren’t the only areas where Adriana was failing in her duty. There had been no Facebook listings of new stock for at least five days, both Facebook and the shop’s email inbox was full of queries, and someone had emailed five times, increasingly angry emails at that, as she asked for the whereabouts of a skirt that she’d paid for in full ten days ago.

  Coco emerged from the office wearing her old white boiler suit and with her hair tied up in a scarf. She knew she had an uncharacteristically grim look on her face because Adriana’s pretty smile instantly disappeared.

  ‘Oh gosh, you caught me on the hop,’ said Adriana. ‘You see, I had this thing, and obviously I didn’t want to bother you—’

  ‘Stop right there,’ said Coco, hoping her face looked as glacial as she felt. ‘You’ve been telling me you’ve done all these wonderful things, like changing the window displays, and you haven’t done any of th
em. Why on earth would you lie, Adriana? If you couldn’t cope, why not tell me?’

  ‘You see,’ began Adriana, ‘I’ve had so many things go wrong …’

  Once, a few weeks ago, in fact, Coco would have listened to this litany of woes and, even if she hadn’t quite believed it all, she’d have caved totally once Adriana’s huge blue eyes filled with tears.

  But that was the old Coco. The new Coco, the one who was being a de facto mother, who was coping with a best friend suffering in hospital, who could see her sister being entirely miserable and simply couldn’t help – that Coco was a different employer altogether.

  ‘How many days have we been closed because of these issues?’ she asked coolly.

  ’Well, I closed early on Saturday,’ said Adriana slowly.

  ‘How early?’

  Adriana winced. ‘Three p.m.’

  Coco kept staring.

  ‘OK, half one. I had something to go to and there’s nobody to help me. If I need to run to the loo, I have to lock up, and I can’t get nice coffee or anything,’ she added sulkily.

  ‘Your tyre wasn’t flat that morning ages ago, was it?’ Coco asked. She had to know.

  Adriana looked sulkier than ever but said nothing.

  ‘The thing is, you want to be paid for working but you don’t want to actually work, Adriana. Worse, you lie to me about it. You lied to me on the phone the other day, telling me what you thought I wanted to hear. “Yes, I’ve redone the window displays; yes, the place is clean.” All lies. I can’t trust you, and if I can’t trust you, I can’t employ you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Coco, shrugging. ‘I need someone I can rely on. You’ll have to go.’

  Adriana burst into tears. ‘But Coco, we’ve been through so much together and I need this job, and—’

  ‘Keys,’ said Coco, holding out her hand.

  ‘You don’t mean this,’ sobbed Adriana.

  ‘I do,’ said Coco patiently, her hand still held out.

  Shocked that her tears hadn’t worked, Adriana handed over the keys, still sobbing. ‘But you need me!’ she said.