Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  Pearl came up at that moment and threw her arms around Veronica. ‘Veronica, you look lovely. So nice to see you again. Wasn’t the dinner last night just fabulous?’

  Marguerite blessed Pearl from the bottom of her heart. The dinner hadn’t been fabulous because her mother had sat there, tense and anxious, drinking slowly even though Marguerite’s father had tried to stop her. After a certain point she’d become what she’d described as ‘the life and soul of the party’, which everyone else thought was charming, but which Marguerite and Tony knew was very dangerous.

  ‘Why didn’t your brother come?’ said Jim, sitting beside his wife-to-be, nuzzling into her long, dark hair.

  ‘America’s a long way away and who knows, if he leaves he mightn’t get back in. You know the way things are getting with the immigration,’ Marguerite had said.

  It was funny how all the lies as a child meant she had an answer for everything.

  Mam is a bit high-spirited; she gets sad sometimes; she likes being by herself.

  All those lies to cover up. If only Mam could be a bit normal today.

  Marguerite had had no bridesmaid. Pearl had helped her to put the flowers in her hair and Pearl’s friends, Gloria and Annette, had assisted with crocheting a tiny little handbag and making a beautiful posy of ribbons and flowers for her wedding bouquet.

  ‘You’re like a queen,’ Annette had said, and Marguerite had beamed. If only she’d had a mum like these women.

  As Da walked her down the aisle, she told herself to stop looking at where her mother sat, to stop worrying, to focus instead on the new life in her belly and on Jim standing, tall and strong, at the top of the aisle. It was all going to be perfect. She’d got away from home. She hadn’t had a single drink since she found out she was pregnant. She could keep away from alcohol for her baby, even if it was impossible to keep away from it for herself alone. She was fine. Everything was going to be fine.

  In the small church hall, decorated to look festive and weddingy by Pearl and her friends, the DJ, Annette’s son, played all the songs of the time. With her long hair flying as she twirled, Marguerite danced with Jim. The DJ was playing ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac. Dreams could come true, Marguerite thought, held in her husband’s arms. She knew her mother had gone back to the B&B where her parents were staying, so there was no need to see her again. That part of the wedding was over. That part of her life was over. It could only get better.

  Cassie was such a sweet child. Even as a baby she was just happy and sunny. There were no problems with colic and not too many sleepless nights. She slept through the night once she was past two months old, which was incredible, according to the women in the mother and baby group in the church hall. Pearl had urged her to go.

  ‘It would be good for you to get out of the house,’ Pearl had said kindly. ‘You might get bored sitting here with just your mother-in-law looking at you.’

  They still hadn’t got a place of their own. It would take time, Jim said. Time before they found the perfect spot.

  Marguerite was impatient to have her own home. For all that she loved Pearl, it was difficult living with her because she could feel Pearl’s eyes on her all the time. Not judging exactly, just watching with a sort of pity, and Marguerite hated that.

  She hated that she’d begun drinking again. She hadn’t meant to; it had just happened. A sherry one day when she was no longer breastfeeding, and suddenly the hunger for alcohol was upon her again. She’d managed to escape the next day on the pretence of going for a walk on her own, leaving the baby with Pearl, while she bought some cheap gin.

  Oh, the relief when she drank it, like finding that safe haven again. She could handle this, she thought, watching Cassie asleep in her baby basket. It was just a little drink to tide her over.

  But one little drink quickly became more. Marguerite began to worry that Pearl would notice. She needed it, she felt. Taking care of a baby was hard work. Sometimes at night, when she couldn’t sleep and all the shameful memories were rolling around in her head of the crazy life she’d had before she met Jim, a drink or two helped calm her.

  Living with her mother-in-law meant it was difficult getting rid of the bottles, but Marguerite managed it. She smuggled them out in Cassie’s pram, and if sometimes Pearl looked up when she heard a rattle, she never said anything.

  Marguerite would have hated Pearl to find out. She desperately wanted Pearl and Bernie to approve of her. To think she was a good mother. And she was a good mother. She did everything for Cassie. She loved her and adored her.

  The mother and baby group didn’t really work out. Marguerite didn’t fit in. It was strange hanging around with a group of women who seemed to have come from ordinary, happy families. All smiling and talking about mothers coming round to help and sisters babysitting.

  ‘And what about you, Marguerite?’ they’d say.

  ‘Well, I’ve got Pearl and Bernie,’ she’d say, ‘and they’re so good to me.’

  ‘But your own family?’

  ‘They live down the country. They can’t get up: a farm, you know.’

  ‘Oh,’ everyone said, as if that explained everything.

  Life went on. She and Jim got their own home. Marguerite adored her daughter and tried so hard not to drink. She could go months without touching a drop, but then she’d give in and buy a bottle of gin, sink into its depths and forget who she was all over again. There would be rows with Jim, screaming, recriminations, and then her promises never to do it again.

  And then she fell pregnant again.

  ‘Please, darling,’ Jim said, holding her quivering body when she told him the news. ‘Let’s try again. Let’s make this work.’

  ‘I won’t hurt her, you know I won’t,’ vowed Marguerite.

  Coco was nearly a year old and Marguerite hadn’t had a single drink since she’d become pregnant. Everything in life was perfect: Cassie, baby Coco, her husband, everything. It had been so long since she’d had a drink, Marguerite had told herself she didn’t have a problem: that was in the past, she was better now. And then Niamh had phoned.

  Niamh, who’d been her closest friend in Dublin when they’d shared a flat on Capel Street, when Marguerite worked in a café. Niamh now worked in a club in town where the glamorous society people went to let their hair down.

  ‘Come on out,’ Niamh begged. ‘It’s boring without you, Marguerite. We need a bit of fun.’

  Tentatively, Marguerite went to Jim.

  ‘I don’t have to go,’ she said. ‘I won’t stay out long. I’ll be back to give Coco her last bottle.’

  She and her husband gazed into each other’s eyes. She was telling the truth and he believed her.

  She dressed up and brought her make-up in her handbag so she could apply it on the bus. Jim had never been one for make-up, even though he’d fallen for her when she’d been wearing plenty of it. But it was as if now that she was a mother, she was to be somehow different.

  They went to one of the clubs where some of Niamh’s friends worked.

  ‘We’ll get in here for nothing,’ she’d said, bringing them down dodgy steps into a place that was only just opening up. ‘We could eat here,’ she said thoughtfully, then she and Marguerite had looked at each other and laughed.

  ‘You’re right,’ agreed Niamh. ‘Why waste our money on food. The wine is brutal here but we’ll get it very cheap: I know the barman.’

  ‘I should be careful,’ said Marguerite. She had so much to lose, after all. She was different now. Mother to two beautiful girls. She would not risk it all on too much alcohol. She would control what she drank.

  And then had come that ripple of cool on her tongue, sliding inside her, the first taste of wine. All rational thought went out the window.

  The wine came, and then gin.

  Gin was the thing that brought Marguerite to that special place where she stopped c
aring, where the fear wasn’t there anymore. She looked hazily at the bar and the bottles ranged up behind the barman, and wondered what she’d have next. She wanted to be totally numb.

  ‘Come on up and dance,’ said Niamh as night turned to the wee small hours of the morning.

  ‘No, I have to go home now, it’s late, the baby and everything,’ mumbled Marguerite, who was very drunk. She hadn’t meant to have that much. How had this happened? She felt so dizzy, and where was her handbag?

  ‘You’re allowed one night out. You’re not glued to that house,’ said Niamh, and pulled her up to dance, so they danced. Danced and partied and drank with all sorts of men, and somehow Marguerite had ended up in a hotel room, waking up at six in the morning with no clothes on and a man she didn’t recognise naked and snoring beside her.

  The room looked like it had been trashed. There were drink bottles everywhere, Niamh lay on a couch half in and half out of her clothes, her skin a mottled colour in the grey dawn.

  Marguerite felt a shudder go through her, a shudder of shame and self-loathing. What had happened here? Oh God, Jim would be so worried. She had ruined everything. She moved, but the pain in her head was monstrous.

  She ran to the bathroom and threw up violently. It wasn’t the first time she’d thrown up in there, she realised, as she looked at the vomit all around the loo. Somehow she gathered herself together, pulled on her clothes and went out into the world, looking ridiculous in her night-time black tights and dress with a flimsy little cardigan and the make-up sliding down her eyes.

  She had only just stopped Jim throwing her out.

  She’d stayed at Niamh’s, she told him. The wine had made her sick. It was only that.

  Somehow he believed her, but the fear made her go back to the off-licence and buy gin the way she used to. The gin would help her cope with the fear of Jim finding out about that dreadful night where she’d blacked out with alcohol.

  No longer living with Pearl, she had nobody to hide her drinking from during the day. She’d worked her way through that bottle, and then another. And then came that last day, that terrible day when she’d crashed the car with both her beloved children in it.

  She’d picked Cassie up from school and little Coco was firmly in her carrycot, seat belt tightly around it. It was sheer fluke that Cassie was in the back of the car with her sister. If she’d been in the front, she could easily have been flung out through the windscreen on to the street. Marguerite was white with shock thinking of Cassie’s tiny body lying bloodless on the street, instead of sitting in the back seat, crying with fear and shock.

  The man in the other car was angry because it was all Marguerite’s fault. He was angrier when he got closer to her and could smell the booze on her breath.

  ‘I’m calling the guards,’ he’d roared, so Marguerite clambered back into the car and drove off.

  They were waiting for her when she got home: Pearl and Jim. Some neighbour had seen it all, seen Marguerite careening down the hill near Mill House Road, had waited for the accident.

  ‘She knew you were drunk, knew you were going to crash, and she couldn’t wait to tell us,’ Jim had hissed. ‘You had the kids in the car, Marguerite. What were you thinking?’

  It was like an inquisition, then; her lovely, gentle Jim suddenly the grand inquisitor. She thought she’d concealed it from him these past months. But they had found the bottles and half-bottles of gin she thought she’d hidden cleverly around the house, and worse, Pearl took Coco from Marguerite’s arms and wouldn’t let her hold her.

  ‘You’re not able to take care of these babies,’ said Pearl with an anxiety Marguerite had never heard before. ‘You have to get help now. There are places you can go, Marguerite. We can help you.’

  ‘I’m not helping her,’ shouted Jim. ‘She’s not coming near my kids any more. She’s a drunk, and who knows what else.’

  He didn’t sound like the Jim she knew: he sounded possessed with rage and disgust. It was all her fault, Marguerite thought, distraught. All hers. The shame rose up like bile in her throat and she knew she could never, ever make up for this.

  ‘Mama!’ said Coco, and they all turned to look at her, her little face pale with all the shouting.

  Pearl shot a look at both Jim and Marguerite. ‘It’s all fine, baba,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you your snack.’ In a low voice, she whispered to the other adults: ‘We’ll deal with this tomorrow.’

  Marguerite had hugged her small daughter, feeling as if she might break. They’d take her children off her now for sure. And at that moment, she craved a long, cool drink, pure alcohol to take away the fear.

  The evening passed in a blur, and though she managed to be up for the children in the morning, she knew Jim was angry at her because he hadn’t come into her bed.

  It was when Cassie was at school and Coco was down for a nap that Jim struck.

  ‘You’ve got to get out now, you crazy bitch,’ he said, his face harsh with loathing.

  ‘Jim,’ reproved Pearl.

  ‘You want her to kill the kids?’ Jim hissed.

  ‘No, but we can’t treat her like this … Marguerite, you need help—’

  ‘Help as far away from us as possible,’ Jim said. ‘I’ll pack your bag, get out now. And don’t come back, we don’t need you.’

  ‘No!’ sobbed Marguerite, trying to rush upstairs to grab Coco for a hug, but Jim held her back.

  ‘You touch them and I’ll call the police and tell them about yesterday. Your blood alcohol level must have been off the scale. You’ll rot in jail and will never see your daughters.’

  ‘Oh, Marguerite, you have to get help,’ Pearl said, distraught herself at this confrontation.

  ‘Stay out of this, Mother,’ Jim said. ‘I won’t have this drunk around my kids.’

  He shoved Marguerite to the door and left her outside, the door shut.

  A few minutes later, he opened it with a suitcase for her.

  ‘Take that. Get sober, don’t, whatever. I don’t care. The moment you nearly killed my children, you ceased to exist for me.’

  Only the sips of gin she’d taken that morning gave her any warmth and allowed her to move down the pathway, out into Delaney Gardens and away.

  Nineteen

  DUBLIN

  Cassie had never known that a house could feel so lonely, even though there were still three human beings in it; four living creatures, if you counted Fluffikins, which she couldn’t because Fluffikins was currently hiding on top of the wardrobe, as he did most of the time now, and refused to come down at all.

  Clearly he’d loved Shay after all and was suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

  We all are, thought Cassie miserably.

  Without Shay, the house felt so incredibly strange. The balance had shifted. They weren’t a family anymore; they were something fractured and broken.

  When she was feeling angry and self-righteous, she told herself things like: It’s his fault. He chose his mother over me, so what did he expect? Me to welcome him with open arms and say: ‘Yes, darling, of course we can move house to accommodate your mother. Pick your mother over me any time. I don’t mind.’

  When she was feeling sad, which was far more often, she thought of what a huge mistake she’d made. This throwing Shay out had brought nothing but pain.

  She must have been mad, she thought, which was exactly what Coco had said to her.

  ‘You did what?’ Coco had said the next day when Cassie had phoned her with the news. ‘You just threw Shay out? Cassie, haven’t we gone through enough mad behaviour in our lives without adding to it!’

  ‘I know,’ Cassie said tearfully.

  ‘Antoinette can’t help herself,’ went on Coco. ‘She’s one of those women who needs a man around, and since there’s nothing there for her romantically, she wanted Shay back. You should have handled her much more
diplomatically and organised some family things so she saw you all as a family unit. Letting Shay go off to hers all the time made her think you didn’t want him. Shay was only trying to do the right thing …’

  ‘When did you get so wise, oh Great One?’ demanded Cassie bitterly.

  ‘Since I’ve had to cope with Jo’s stroke, taking care of Fiona, sorting out Jo’s benefits for her rehab, investigating grants for fixing up her place, and firing staff members,’ said Coco. ‘What does Pearl say?’

  ‘That’s the totally weird thing,’ Cassie said. ‘I rang her before I rang you and she kept saying she was so sorry, like it’s all her fault.’

  ‘Odd,’ remarked Coco. ‘Have you spoken to Shay today?’

  ‘No,’ said Cassie. ‘It’s up to him to talk to me first.’

  ‘What, are we in school now?’

  ‘You are no help,’ said Cassie.

  ‘On the contrary, I want you to see sense, Cass. You love Shay and he loves you. Don’t let Antoinette’s crisis get in the middle of that.’

  Cassie and Shay’s bed, which she always thought was too small before because there wasn’t enough room for either of them to sprawl out and they always ended up spooned next to each other at night, had actually turned out to be too big to sleep in on her own.

  Not that she slept. When she got into bed, Shay’s pillows seemed to look at her reproachfully, if pillows could look. Everything in the room seemed to be reproaching her for her behaviour, from the book Shay had been reading, left spine cracked open on his bedside table, to his aftershave in the bathroom. She’d remembered to fling his toothbrush into the carry-on bag but not his aftershave, and now she couldn’t touch it to shove it into a drawer, out of sight.