Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

Why, wondered Marguerite? Why can we speak about a person with a heart attack and not talk about a person with the attack going on endlessly in their head?

  The crowd of teenagers all watched their classmate behind the bar. He’d be murdered if his father found out, they knew. Murdered for letting a gang of sixteen-year-olds into the family pub after hours; murdered for having a lock-in when it was illegal to open after closing time.

  But this was an adventure, this was Paudie’s sixteenth birthday, this was special.

  Paudie had worked in the bar unofficially since he’d been small and could fill a glass with spirits from the optics as fast as any adult barman.

  ‘Paddy and coke,’ ordered someone.

  ‘Pint of Guinness,’ said another.

  One by one they ordered until it came to Marguerite. Marguerite was shy and had never fitted in.

  ‘Wouldn’t say boo to a goose,’ Paudie’s pal said of her.

  But she didn’t look shy. She could smile at people, and she’d smiled at Paudie before because he was kind, didn’t treat her like a weirdo because she didn’t go to discos or parties like everyone else in their class. Her only pal was Eithne, who was wild over The Doors and had gone into mourning over Jim Morrison’s death.

  ‘Summer was over, life was over,’ according to Eithne, a view not shared by The Lake Cottage B&B where Eithne had a summer job chambermaiding and where she constantly stopped work to look moodily out of the window and think of poor Jim in his cold bed in Père Lachaise.

  Marguerite kept herself to herself, but tonight she’d come with them to Paudie’s birthday. He’d asked her when he met her down the town.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll come out, why not?’ she’d said, with a broad smile he so rarely saw in school.

  Now she looked at him and he felt as if he might drown in those brown eyes. They were the colour of beech trees, of the rich dark furniture in the church, polished and mysterious, gleaming with some hidden mystery. The summer sun had given her skin a light colour and she had freckles all over her nose. Her hair was long and rippling, and he wondered what it would feel like to touch it.

  ‘I don’t know, Paudie, what would I like?’ she asked now, replying to his question about what drink she wanted.

  Paudie knew that with Marguerite, it wasn’t a clever answer aimed at sounding smart or cool; it was unsure, like her.

  ‘Gin and orange,’ said Paudie decisively. ‘It’s sweet and hides the taste of the gin.’

  He was sweet on Marguerite, so a sweet drink made sense. He poured her a triple shot in a big glass. Lord knew how long they’d have in the bar before they’d have to get out. Might as well treat her well now that she’d come out. All these years he’d been admiring her and finally she was with the gang. His girl for the night, he hoped.

  Marguerite took a sip and, apart from the underlying bitterness, thought it wasn’t too bad. Plus all the rest of them were happy to be in the bar drinking illegally. She found she liked that wave of good-humouredness; being around happiness was infectious. She sipped some more. It was strong, she thought, but it was warming. She felt happy too.

  Peanuts were produced and she had some. A joke was told and Marguerite giggled. This morning she’d been in bed reading about people dying and understanding that pain; tonight she was laughing at a joke, eating peanuts, feeling a pleasurable warm feeling in her belly.

  Someone had found the radio the bar staff used to listen to big football and hurling matches and was trying to tune in Radio Caroline.

  ‘Turn it down!’ said Paudie, anxious. ‘It’s two in the morning. If my da hears, he’ll skin us all alive.’

  He was banking on his parents being so exhausted that they wouldn’t hear eleven teenagers sneaking around the bar, serving themselves shots. If it weren’t for the beer in his system, he might regret all of this, but he’d had two pints now and was feeling mellow.

  On a stool in front of him sat Marguerite, smiling now, those amazing eyes a little blurry. She mustn’t be used to drinking, he thought, but then how come she wasn’t? Her father liked the pub, but he wasn’t a heavy drinker.

  Paudie’s mother had an opinion about Marguerite’s mother; his mother had an opinion about everyone.

  ‘Strange, that’s what she is. I can see it in her eyes. There’s something wild there. Probably in the kids, too. Paudie, you stay away from that girl. There’s trouble there, I can see it.’

  That girl was staring up at the bottles behind the bar. She’d rarely been in a bar, and had never had a drink before. There was no alcohol in their house ever, except when Mother bought it and things went downhill.

  ‘Did you not take it off her?’ Da would yell when he came home. ‘She won’t take her medication if she drinks.’

  Sitting in Paudie’s father’s pub, a thought came to Marguerite: she wasn’t her mother’s keeper. It wasn’t up to her to keep drink away from her mother or to make her mother take the pills. None of that was her job.

  She felt a strange confidence with the warmth of the alcohol inside her. She didn’t feel shy the way she felt so much of the time, no need to keep her head down and hide her face behind the curtain of her hair. Suddenly she belonged.

  ‘Paudie,’ she said in a louder voice, ‘I’d like another of those orange yokes.’

  Paudie grinned.

  Marguerite found magic in a bottle. Any bottle. She learned to drink quickly, running to blackout every time she drank and ending up in the most crazy of situations.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Eithne had yelled at her one night at a dance when she discovered Marguerite in a corner with two men entwined around her. ‘You’re disgusting!’

  ‘Yes, I’m disgusting,’ Marguerite agreed sadly, and leaned her head on one of the men, who was kissing her neck.

  She left school with her final exams and got out of her home town at speed.

  ‘I won’t go back there,’ she told Rafe, who’d already gone to Dublin with a view to heading further afield.

  ‘Me neither,’ he said, taking a deep drag of his cigarette. He hugged her, which was unusual in itself because their family was not given to shows of affection. ‘Take care of yourself, sis. Watch the demons.’

  ‘What demons?’ she asked playfully, head to one side. She’d already had several gins before meeting him, knowing this was a goodbye, wanting to numb the pain.

  ‘The ones that make you want to block it all out,’ he said slowly. ‘We come from the same wound, Marguerite, and that makes us dangerous. To ourselves, and to other people. Take care.’

  The city was the perfect place to hide. Nobody knew who she was or that she’d once been an A-grade student in her home town school. Nobody knew she had a firm moral code or that she only meant to have one glass of wine. Nobody knew that once she started, she couldn’t stop.

  She met Jim at a party for college students, one she’d crashed with her friend, Niamh. Niamh had the hardness that Marguerite tried to adopt. With Marguerite, it was a veneer, sliver-thin.

  When she met Jim that night – tall, with those striking Spanish-Irish good looks and a gentle charm – Marguerite felt as if she had found the man who could save her.

  That night she’d drunk very little, enchanted by this lovely young man who talked to her about his hopes and dreams, and somehow extracted Marguerite’s long-forgotten hopes and dreams from her.

  They’d sat on the top step of the stairs while the party raged around them, talking about places they’d like to see, what they’d like to be.

  ‘I wanted to be a teacher when I was young,’ Marguerite said hesitantly, feeling Jim’s arm around her soft cotton blouse.

  ‘Why haven’t you?’ Jim asked.

  It was very simple, the way he saw it. He’d told her about his mother, Pearl, and father, Bernie, and somehow their home life sounded idyllic: as if a person could emerge from such a home to be an
ything they ever wanted to be.

  ‘You could be, if you wanted to,’ he went on.

  In the face of such belief in her, interest in her – something Marguerite hadn’t felt in many, many years – she felt herself fall in love with not just Jim, but with his family, his life, his hopes and dreams. With him, she could be a different woman: the woman she wanted to be and not this girl who became crazy as soon as she picked up the glass.

  Pearl had seen lots of girls come and go in her son Jim’s life. There had been the lovely nurse, a sweet girl from County Donegal with a beautiful accent and a kindness about her that made Pearl wish Jim would choose her.

  Of course, mothers had nothing to do with it when it came to sons choosing their brides, or even their girlfriends, come to that.

  The kind Donegal nurse had gone and Jim had moved on to a less suitable girl called Yvonne, who liked going out to discos, dancing and generally partying until the sun came up. She had permed blonde hair that kept getting stuck to her lip gloss, and appeared to wear nothing but hot pants or very tight jeans.

  ‘Life is for living,’ she told Pearl one evening when Pearl had invited her around for dinner.

  Bernie had been very quiet that evening, although it was hard to be anything but because Yvonne could talk enough for four people.

  ‘I didn’t know what to say,’ he’d confessed to Pearl later that night. ‘Lovely girl and all that, but … but sort of lively, almost too lively. Hard to get a word in edgeways.’

  Pearl had been very glad when Jim had moved on from Yvonne. He was seeing sense at last.

  After that, there was the student from college who was studying business, like Jim. Lavinia played tennis, her father was a solicitor who played golf, and they all lived in a mansion in Foxrock.

  Edie, who happened to be there when this paragon came to visit, was wildly impressed.

  ‘Lovely sort of gel,’ said Edie, whose accent reached pre-war British Empire standards in certain company.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pearl truthfully, because she thought Lavinia was a sweet girl, but it was clear that Lavinia was merely having fun dating the sort of people her parents would find unsuitable. Delaney Gardens, with its hodgepodge of one-time council houses and citizens who considered third-level education a thrilling notion, was wildly unsuitable for the likes of Lavinia.

  ‘She’ll marry a boy from her father’s firm who plays in the same golf club,’ Pearl said to Bernie, and indeed it wasn’t long before Lavinia dropped Jim and moved on to a Hugo, who was nearly a scratch golfer, ‘Whatever that is’.

  ‘What sort of girl do you think he’ll bring home next?’ asked Bernie, who thought it was all great gas.

  He didn’t mind what sort of woman their son turned up with as long as Jim was happy, and Pearl said she didn’t mind either – in theory. But in practice she found she worried greatly about the women who came through the door. At least that was one good thing: Jim brought his girlfriends home. He was tall and dark-haired like his father. ‘Black Irish’, as they used to say: descendants of the Spaniards from the Armada hundreds of years ago. He had the pale skin, the blue eyes, the raven hair and eyebrows of the Spaniards, and women seemed to find him irresistible.

  Then came Marguerite. She’d slipped into their lives quietly, without the fanfare the other girlfriends had merited. Jim was sort of vague about where he’d met her.

  ‘At a college party,’ he’d said, and Pearl had wanted to ask was Marguerite at college too or was she just at the party. There was a difference. Pearl was very proud of her son having gone to college. He was the first member of the family to have gone on to third level and it made her so happy.

  ‘Imagine, our son in university,’ she’d say to Bernie in the evenings when they’d sit out on the veranda he’d made from the old wooden packing boxes.

  Bernie would be out there, hammering in a nail that had come up or putting up a hanging basket for Pearl. He always wanted to be busy. Never sat down. The only time he really sat was late at night when he’d sit down for a few minutes with his pipe and smoke it. Sitting on the front step and looking out over Delaney Gardens, where the kids played in the gardens or raced up and down on their bicycles, was when he was happiest.

  ‘I know,’ he’d say to her. ‘Imagine that, our lad going to college. My mam would have been very proud to know that.’

  The first time Marguerite had come to their house for dinner, Pearl had sensed something in the young girl; it was something Pearl couldn’t quite put her finger on. There wasn’t a thing out of place in Marguerite’s behaviour. In fact, she behaved so perfectly, it was like she thought she was meeting the queen. She was full of pleases and thank yous, hopped up from the table every third minute to see if she could do something, never seemed to sit still, but not in the active way Bernie was always on the move. He liked to be doing things, while Marguerite moved because she seemed afraid that if she sat, someone might yell at her.

  That was it, thought Pearl, shocked when she realised what had been troubling her about Jim’s new girlfriend. Marguerite was anxious, like the Maguires’ dog across the road, who’d run away, and when she’d returned a week later, she’d been terrified of her own shadow. People had mistreated the dog while she’d been away, everyone decided, watching her quivering with fear.

  Though Marguerite had poise and politeness, she reminded Pearl of that poor, scared dog.

  She didn’t think Jim would stick with Marguerite, for all that she was so very beautiful: that oval face, those shaped eyebrows, the big brown eyes with the lustrous lashes, and the wild dark hair curling down her back, with paler brown tinges in it, sort of like a lioness’s mane, but darker. She was too exotic for Jim, anyway. She wore unusual clothes, the sort of stuff you might get in a second-hand shop or Dublin’s Dandelion Market. She was just too different for their family; too different for Jim and for Delaney Gardens.

  When there hadn’t been any mention of Marguerite for quite a while, Pearl decided that her son must have split with the girl and she felt sorry for her. Marguerite wasn’t at college, as it turned out. She’d a job as a waitress in a café in town and she worked long, hard hours. Home was some place in the country and she’d never been forthcoming about it, even though Pearl had politely asked about Marguerite’s people at the meet-and-greet dinner.

  ‘She doesn’t talk about her family.’ Jim had shrugged. ‘Not everyone wants to talk about where they’ve come from, Ma.’

  Yes, Pearl had felt sorry for Marguerite, left out of the lovely charmed world they lived in in Delaney Gardens. They might not have much but they had happiness and love and good neighbours who’d look after them.

  Jim was still going out to parties and seeing friends and seeing films. But there was no mention of Marguerite. Pearl decided she’d be the sort of mother who wouldn’t pry. One of those modern ones.

  ‘You’re mad,’ said her sister Edie, who liked poking her nose in where it didn’t belong. ‘I’d want to know everything he was getting up to. Young people today, you don’t know what they’re doing. The world is full of young pups and they need an eye kept on them. I’m not saying your Jim is a pup, because he’s not, but you don’t know who he’s hanging around with every night. I’d want to know all the details. I’d want to know every night where he was, who he was with—’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ said Pearl.

  Edie annoyed the heck out of her sometimes. For a woman with no children, Edie had very firm opinions on how to raise them.

  ‘He’ll tell me about who he’s going out with soon. It’s not that Marguerite one, anyway.’

  ‘Good,’ said Edie. ‘Didn’t like the sound of her.’

  ‘She was nice,’ Pearl said. ‘Just anxious. Like she was scared.’

  So they were all surprised when Jim came home his face alight, and told them he was going to marry Marguerite.

  ‘Get married?�
� said Pearl, having to sit down on the couch in shock. ‘But why, love?’

  ‘She’s going to have a baby, Ma – my baby.’

  Marguerite knew that without the pregnancy hormones surging through her blood, she’d have been scared stiff of the wedding. But she wasn’t. She had Jim beside her and his mother, Pearl. Marguerite was almost as in love with Pearl as she was with Jim. She’d moved into Pearl and Bernie’s house in Delaney Gardens and she loved it there.

  ‘It’s just for the moment, Mum,’ Jim had said, ‘until we get settled with a place ourselves.’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ said Bernie firmly. ‘We want you, Marguerite and the baby to be safe and happy.’

  Marguerite knew that Bernie and Pearl weren’t delirious that their only child was getting married because his girlfriend was pregnant, but she was determined to do the right thing, to be the most wonderful mother, the best wife and the most incredible daughter-in-law.

  She knew what happy families were like. She’d seen them before, from a distance. She’d seen her school friend Eithne’s family, so she knew how it was done. She could be a part of that, and her darling child could be a part of that too. This was a new start.

  Her parents arrived for the wedding. Pearl had thought it a little strange that Marguerite didn’t want the wedding in her home town, but Marguerite, who’d found she was remarkably good at lying over the years, because she’d had to do it so much when she was a kid, said her mother was a bit of an invalid and had never got involved in the local community. Marguerite had implied that Veronica Donnelly’s invalidity was more along the lines of the physical rather than the mental. God forbid that Marguerite hinted at the reality.

  Marguerite didn’t have Eithne there. It was almost the first thing her mother said when she turned up at the church.

  ‘Where’s Eithne? I want to see Eithne,’ she’d said plaintively. ‘She’s a lovely girl; I don’t know why you’re not more like her.’

  Marguerite, dressed in the long, flowing white dress that she’d loved picking, felt her heart sink. Da said he’d made sure Mum had had her meds, but Marguerite wondered if he hadn’t gone a touch too far. There was such a fine line between making sure Veronica wasn’t manic and keeping her calm, because there was an anxiety in her that even drugs couldn’t quench, and sometimes she became fixated on certain things. Today it was Eithne.