Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  Weirdly, she thought she could smell it, which was ludicrous because she hadn’t sprayed it anywhere, and yet that scent, so evocative of her husband, seemed to linger in the air.

  Like her mother’s old scent had been evocative and held sway over her.

  Her blasted mother, Cassie thought bitterly. It all came back to that, to her leaving all those years ago.

  Cassie wondered if she was going entirely mad. Was it genetic? Who knew? She had no mother to compare herself with. Maybe that was what had happened with her mother and her dad, and Pearl just hadn’t wanted to explain when Cassie and Coco had been old enough to understand.

  How could you say to a seven-year-old child: ‘Your mum has gone crazy and she’s leaving because it’s safer that way’?

  Cassie wondered what it would be like to go mad, to feel yourself lose your grip on reality, because that’s what she felt like so much of the time now. She tried really hard at home to be normal, but what was normal anyway?

  The girls were devastated. Lily was quiet and tearful, casting sad glances at her mother, glances that said she blamed Cassie for everything. Not that she said as much. She barely said anything. Yes, no, thank you. She wasn’t eating much either, her little Lily who used to be able to consume the whole fridge and then come back and ask was there any Chunky Monkey ice cream in the freezer.

  Cassie was trying to watch Lily carefully to see if she was getting thinner, but winter was coming and Lily was responding to the increasing cold by wrapping herself in big jumpers. She had one of her father’s that she wore non-stop: a big, cream, soft Aran thing that Pearl had knitted for him once and which Shay had only worn when it was incredibly cold because it was so warm. It was far too big for slender Lily.

  ‘Why are you wearing that, darling?’ Cassie had asked once, and then wished she could take back the question because how stupid was that?

  ‘It’s Dad’s. I like wearing things of Dad’s,’ said Lily, and she’d run from the room, her sobs audible as she ran up the stairs.

  Beth had taken an entirely different approach: she was stroppy and angry.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on but I know you couldn’t have sorted it out like normal people. That’s what you’re always telling me, isn’t it? To be a grown-up, to be responsible, and to think before you do anything. Well, did you think before you threw Dad out? Not bloody likely. You didn’t think at all.

  ‘Don’t curse,’ said Cassie, hypocritically because she cursed the whole time in her head now; cursed Shay and Antoinette and her own bloody-mindedness.

  ‘I’ll curse if I want to. If you can act stupidly then so can I. Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ said Beth, glaring at her mother, daring her to reprimand her.

  ‘I said please don’t curse.’

  Once Cassie would have jumped on her elder daughter for using such language, but she’d long ago lost the high moral ground. Then she noticed Beth was wearing a leather jacket that Cassie had never seen before, and she was carrying her little rucksack, the cool Superdry one she used when she went out.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Cassie asked shrilly. ‘It’s eight o’clock at night. You should be finishing your homework and having a shower.’

  ‘I’m going out,’ said Beth, and her voice was antagonistic.

  ‘What do you mean “out”?’ demanded her mother.

  ‘Out out,’ said Beth. ‘If you can do mad things, then so can I. I’m going out, OK? I might go and see my father, wherever he is, or I might go out and drink too much and take drugs and do something crazy.’

  ‘Beth Reynolds, you will do no such thing,’ said her mother grimly.

  ‘Oh yeah, watch me,’ hissed Beth, and she was gone, another door slammed.

  Cassie ran after her but Beth had been faster. Cassie ran down the path and looked each way up the street but there was no sign of her daughter. Where had she gone? Into the lane where Cassie and Shay told Beth never to walk at night? She was only fifteen, after all.

  Oh Lord, who knew what she was going to do now.

  Think, Cassie, think.

  She ran inside, fumbled for her phone and rang Beth’s mobile. It went straight to voicemail, with a cheery Beth from what seemed like a long time ago happily saying: ‘Leave a message!’ Think, where else would she go?

  She dialled Mel, Beth’s closest friend, and that too went straight to voicemail. Beth liked to joke that Mel was on her phone so much that she hardly ever answered an actual call, she just had to return them.

  Cassie left a message. ‘Mel, please ring me back, it’s Cassie. I’m worried about Beth. She’s left the house and she won’t tell me where she’s going. Please ring me if she gets in, OK? It’s a school night. Just … please, thank you.’ She hung up.

  Next she rang Mel’s mother, who answered the phone on the third ring. In the background was the sound of television and the rattling of dishes being loaded into the dishwasher.

  ‘Deirdre, it’s Cassie. I’m just wondering, could you tell me if Beth turns up there?’ said Cassie, knowing how pathetic she sounded. ‘We had a row and she ran out.’ There was no time for false pride here.

  ‘Hi Cassie,’ said Deirdre. ‘I know things are tough round your place at the moment. I’ll ask Mel. Hold on.’

  Cassie waited on the phone, feeling the pain and anxiety of a woman forced to wait on the phone for a perfect mother to check if an imperfect woman’s daughter was there.

  Finally Deirdre returned. ‘Mel says Beth’s on her way over. I’ll get Ivan and Mel to go and meet her at the bottom of the road. Don’t worry, as soon as she comes in I’ll call you. If I can do anything …?’ Deirdre’s voice trailed off and Cassie felt the tears spring to her eyes.

  ‘There’s nothing anyone can do, but thank you. As long as you tell me when she comes in so I know she’s OK.’

  ‘If she wants to sleep over tonight will that be all right?’ said Deirdre.

  ‘Sleepover on a school night?’ said Cassie.

  ‘They’ve been planning it and I told both of them that they needed to run it by you. I figured with all the hassle you were having at the moment you’d be fine with it. I’m sorry, I should have thought to ring you. I … I just didn’t want to bother you in case you thought I was phoning looking for gossip.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think that of you,’ Cassie said honestly, although she knew plenty of other women at the girls’ school would be turning the handle of the gossip mill with the juicy news about the Reynolds’ break-up. Deirdre wasn’t one of them. ‘That’s fine, she can stay over. Thank you, Deirdre.’

  Ten minutes later, her phone rang and Cassie leapt to it.

  ‘She’s here. She looks a bit miserable but I’ve put some pizza on and we’ve got the blow-up bed in Mel’s room. They’ll be fine. I’ll keep an eye on them. There’ll be no sneaking out, don’t worry. I run a tight ship here,’ Deirdre said with a hint of pride in her voice.

  ‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ said Cassie gratefully before she hung up.

  She used to run a tight ship herself, but not anymore. Now she ran a sinking ship.

  ‘Mum?’

  Cassie looked up.

  Lily stood in her mother’s bedroom door carrying her pillow and a teddy she normally slept with in bed, but which rarely came out from under her bedclothes anymore. With her sad eyes, her hair fluffed up around her face and her downturned lips, she looked about ten instead of the self-confident teen she seemed to be most of the time now.

  ‘Can I sleep with you?’

  Coco and Fiona had got into a routine, the sort of routine that Coco remembered her sister talking about. She’d never really experienced it before. Even on those times when she’d babysat Lily and Beth when Shay and Cassie had gone away for a weekend, there’d been an air of fun about the whole thing, a sense of unreality about getting everyone up for school, putting out cereal and driving the
m to school. It had been exciting, play-acting. But there was nothing of the play-acting about her relationship with Fiona now, and yet it was still fun. Somehow Fiona had fitted perfectly into Coco’s apartment, despite her vast selection of cuddly toys, dolls, books and comic books, shoes, and clothes

  The morning routine was simple: Coco would wake early and would get up, make herself coffee and put on the radio to the bright sparkly music channel that Fiona liked. There was no more news and doom and gloom on the radio in the mornings. Fiona had enough doom and gloom in her life, and Coco was now operating to an entirely different set of standards. She’d go in and wake her goddaughter, normally by climbing into bed with her and tickling her and having Fiona moan, ‘No, stop, stop,’ until finally she woke up and could really get into tickling back, trying to wriggle down the bed so she could get to Coco’s feet, which were her tickliest bit ever.

  ‘OK, pax, pax,’ Coco would shriek, and they’d hug and get up, laughing.

  Fiona was a morning person. Full of energy and conversations and questions.

  ‘If you added up all the people in the world and put them in Ireland, would they fit?’ she might ask. ‘Or do dogs go to heaven when they die? Do rabbits go? Is there a different heaven for rabbits and dogs? Because dogs and rabbits don’t like each other and would the dogs chase the rabbits?’

  In the beginning, Coco had had no idea how to answer these questions.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ she’d say to Fiona, floundering. ‘I mean, I’ve never really thought about that.’ But now she made a stab at the questions. ‘All the people in the world on the island of Ireland – so that’s, let’s see, seven billion. Ah no,’ she said, ‘I don’t see that working at all; we’d all be terribly squashed. You’d have to have people getting piggybacks on top of other people, and what about all the babies? They’d have to be held up really high so they weren’t squished. And think of the lakes and rivers: people might get wet feet. No, that’s not going to work at all. Why?’

  Fiona would look at her with those deep, little girl eyes and say: ‘Dunno, just wondering.’

  The dog and the rabbit heaven one was a serious one because of the conversation about getting a dog. A conversation that Fiona had certainly not forgotten. Coco knew that once you made a promise to a child, you did not break it, so they were investigating pug puppies belonging to a friend of Pearl’s one evening that week.

  ‘I don’t know what colour I’d like,’ said Fiona, ‘but I s’pose it wouldn’t matter what colour we get because we’ll love it anyway. Mum’s talked about when you and Cassie were small and you had black pugs, and I thought they sounded so cute. I’ve seen pictures of black pugs but I’d be OK if it wasn’t a black pug because Daisy’s a lovely silvery, pearly colour and I love her, so it doesn’t really matter because it’s about how much you love them, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Coco, gravely trying to clear up the table because, despite her best efforts, the chocolate cereal would somehow have been spilled everywhere.

  It was a full-time job this cleaning up after a child and trying to make sure said child got enough vitamins and minerals in her food. She wondered if she should go into the chemist and get some sort of a child vitamin to be sure? Chocolate cereal was all well and good but was it the best thing? She wasn’t sure. Plus Jo really had been telling the truth when she said that Fiona was not a good person at eating her vegetables.

  Why didn’t they make cereal full of green, healthy things and disguise them with chocolate? Now that was a food innovation if ever there was one.

  Once breakfast was over, they both dressed, teeth were brushed and checked – Fiona was a great one for saying, ‘Of course I’ve brushed my teeth, Coco,’ when in fact she’d done nothing of the sort – and then out of the house, handbag and schoolbag in hands, ready to face the day.

  ‘It’s amazing what you’ve done with her,’ said Ms Ryan, the principal of the school where Fiona went. ‘Was it the counselling, do you think?’ she said. ‘They do wonderful things, counsellors. I’ve seen children who are just devastated and after a few sessions they come out and they’re miraculously able to be with us again. Children bury their feelings so deeply, don’t they?’

  ‘She hasn’t actually had any counselling at all,’ said Coco apologetically. ‘I had been planning it but somehow we seemed to get by without it, and her mother is improving a lot, which has helped hugely. Fiona and I are having a lot of fun in the middle of all this pain. I don’t know, I think love has fixed her. Does that sound awfully silly?’

  The principal smiled. ‘Love is a fabulous thing to have,’ she said. ‘Fiona is lucky to have you, and Jo is certainly lucky to have such a real friend. I’ve been in to see her and she seems in quite good form.’

  ‘You should have seen her ten days ago,’ said Coco, and immediately regretted it. ‘Of course, she’s very strong and courageous, you know. It’s been very difficult for her,’ she backtracked.

  ‘It’s OK, Coco, you’re not letting her down, don’t worry,’ said the principal kindly. ‘When serious illness strikes, it hits us all in different ways, but the Jo I saw was full of energy and determined to get back to normal. She’s made a remarkable recovery. She’s certainly one of the lucky ones.’

  ‘That she is,’ said Coco fervently. ‘I’m on my way into my shop now and then, after a couple of hours, I’ll be going into the hospital. Jo’s going to be getting out and going into a nursing home for a week tomorrow, so after that she should be coming home.’

  Coco paused. Where home was going to be exactly was the knotty question and she still had to work that one out. But she and Jo would work it out together; they were now working as a team.

  The shop was doing marvellously. Phoebe had it running like clockwork. She’d drafted in Alice, who used to work in her father’s pet shop up the road, to do extra hours.

  Alice was overjoyed to wear pretty clothes and get actual money for work.

  ‘Dad does his best but he can’t really employ us all,’ she said, ‘and I have been bitten by too many hamsters for my own good.’

  Phoebe loved the way Coco merchandised the clothes and used the internet to sell her goods far and wide, and she’d quickly taken over updating the Facebook page and keeping in touch with people who were on the lookout for something special.

  Phoebe had added a new feature: getting beautiful pieces and tweaking them with her seamstress skills to make them more modern and up to date. ‘You don’t mind?’ she’d said when she’d suggested this to Coco. ‘It’s just an idea I had after I tweaked a beautiful jacket I bought here from Adriana.’

  ‘Oh, don’t mention Adriana,’ said Coco, who still felt terribly guilty. ‘I worry about her, you know.’

  ‘Oh no, you mustn’t worry about her,’ said Phoebe sweetly. ‘Adriana will get on wonderfully well wherever she is. She’s an absolute survivor, couldn’t you tell? She’s working in a luxury boutique in town. I met her on my way to college one day.’

  ‘Is she?’ said Coco, in shock.

  ‘Yes,’ said Phoebe, ‘so worry not. She’s perfectly happy. It’s more of a full-time job and she has to turn up on time or she’ll get fired. It was good for her you letting her go. You did the right thing. Sometimes we have to be firm.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Coco, dizzy with relief at the thought that Adriana wasn’t out on the streets. ‘I’m no good at being firm.’

  ‘Yes, you are. Now, as I was saying … Because of that jacket I tweaked with darts to modernise it, I suddenly thought there were a few other pieces we had that I could tweak, so I’ve put them up online and it’s brought in a whole new community: the sewers who are interested in new projects and love the idea of being able to work on vintage clothes.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ said Coco, thrilled, ‘I knew it was a good idea to hire you.’

  Phoebe laughed. ‘I knew it was a good idea to co
me in here,’ she countered.

  ‘It’s all down to Pearl.’

  Thanks to Pearl, Phoebe was now living in a pretty turquoise and white bedroom overlooking the square in Gloria’s house, and even though she hadn’t got a penny of her deposit back from a pea-green Rita Costello, Phoebe and Gloria were getting on like a house on fire. Phoebe, who was a good cook, was making sure that Gloria ate properly, while Gloria made sure Phoebe had a wonderfully warm welcome home each night.

  The cloud in Phoebe’s life was worrying about her beloved mother, and even though she was now able to send money home, the downside of her new job meant she hadn’t actually been able to go home since the trip where she’d realised how exhausted her mother was.

  She’d told Coco a little bit about it, because she’d already told Ian and Gloria so much that she was terrified of boring them.

  ‘I love my mother so much and I know the farm means a lot to her, but here, when I’m not up there in the hills, I can see it’s all too much for her.’

  ‘You’re not boring me, you daft cow,’ Ian had said crossly. ‘You’re my friend. Let me put my brain in gear, all right?’

  Gloria had wondered how easy it would be to sell a farm in the hills, and Phoebe had explained that while many farmers would like a bit of extra land, part of the importance of the farm was the fact that the family could build houses on it for themselves if they ever had enough money.

  ‘That’s another thing that makes the land important for Mum,’ Phoebe explained. ‘The planning laws mean if the land is in your family, you can build on it, but not if you just buy it, so it’s not valuable as development land.’

  ‘Ah, right,’ said Gloria. ‘Goodness, it all sounds like an awful lot of work for your poor mother.’

  Being Coco, she never forgot another person’s problems, and checked in with Phoebe about how things were for Kate McLoughlin, Ethan and Mary-Kate.

  ‘Fine,’ fibbed Phoebe, seeing how stressed her boss was under all the relief about the shop. ‘Myself and Alice will keep the home fires burning here.’