by Cathy Kelly
‘I know because I was like you; I am like you,’ said the woman.
‘How?’ sneered Elsa.
‘I’m an addict, an addict in recovery. Drink was my weapon of choice, the accelerant I added to the fire. And towards the end, I didn’t need very much accelerant.’ The woman looked off into the distance. ‘It’s funny, that,’ she said. ‘For a very long time you can drink everyone under the table and then you reach a point that you almost can’t drink at all. Alcohol makes you want to throw up and yet your system craves it. Every part of you craves it. I craved drugs too, but not in the same way. It was alcohol for me. And I hated myself. My husband had taken the children away from me. I was living on my own in a disgusting bedsit.’
Elsa stared at her in confusion.
She’d been living in a squat surrounded by other alkies and a couple of junkies, who were really quite harmless as long as they got their fixes. She thought she was going to die there and she wouldn’t have minded, really, until she’d somehow managed to pull herself out and find Solstice House after one person had left a flyer for it in the doorway.
‘I never thought my life was going to get any better and I never thought I could possibly like myself,’ said the woman, ‘but one day something happened and I still don’t know what it was. I suddenly realised that I didn’t have to be like this every day. That I could stop and I could stay stopped. That it wasn’t the second or the third or fourth drink that sent me off the rails – it was the first one. It was the first drag of the roll-up. It was the first drink. As long as I didn’t take them, I was fine. For that day alone, things would work out.’
Elsa stared at her with astonishment and grudging respect. ‘And how did you do that?’
‘I promised myself that I wouldn’t drink or drug for one day. Just one day. Tomorrow was a different story, but for one day I wouldn’t drink or drug, and I’d admit I was powerless over both those substances. You’ve got to do that. You can’t think you can control it, that you can be in charge of taking just one drink or just one drug, because you can’t. No drink, no drugs. End of. And I had to face me, which is the hardest bit.’ She stared deeply into Elsa’s eyes. ‘That’s why we’re here. So you can face all the inner stuff that you’ve been burying for all these years, smothering it with drink and drugs and self-hate. You’ll come out the other side and maybe one day you’ll be sitting in my place, helping another woman. You can choose. We’re here to help.’
Elsa thought of all her years of being clean and sober as she waited for the taxi to take her to the hospital. Twenty years. She’d never collected her twenty-year chip from AA, the symbol of her two decades of sobriety, but she’d gone out to dinner with some of her friends and they’d celebrated – celebrated that, along with someone else’s new grandchild, someone’s engagement: all the markers of life.
Celebrating the fact that they had been clean and sober was the thing that held it all together.
But right now Elsa didn’t feel like a proper member of her group of sober friends. She felt as if she deserved to suffer still. The people she was friends with, they’d all made amends with the people they’d hurt in the past, they’d made it up to families and friends, to children and husbands.
She’d made it up to nobody.
She thought of all those letters she’d written to Jim that he’d returned with the short sharp terse replies saying: We do not want you in our lives. The girls do not want you. Don’t contact us again.
She still kept those letters. She sent him more and more letters but he’d stopped even replying or sending hers back.
She sent cards on their birthdays until Coco was fifteen and Cassie was twenty-one, and finally she stopped. They had different lives now, they were grown-up. Cassie might be married with children, and why would they change their minds and suddenly want to see the mother who’d walked out on them when they were so little?
Still, today she’d written the letters to them to be opened if something went wrong, because she felt so deeply that something was going to go wrong this morning.
The doorbell rang. It was the taxi driver. Taking in Elsa’s white face and small bag, and the fact that she was going to the hospital, he reached forward and said, ‘I’ll take that for you, love.’
She sat in the back of the black cab and sent a long text to Mari.
Mari, sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want anyone coming into the hospital with me. Having a lumpectomy today. It is cancer and I’ve got to have chemo. I’m texting because I’ve given them your number as my next of kin. I have such a bad feeling about all of this. Like it’s my time. If anything goes wrong, will you take the letters I’ve written to my daughters and post them? They’re on my desk. I’ve tried to stay out of their lives but it’s impossible and I can’t do that anymore. I know they don’t want me but I needed to tell them I love them and I’m sorry.
I love you too and thank you for all our years of friendship. You, Anastasia and our friends, you have been my family. Thank you.
Love, Elsa
Twenty-Four
Mari was doing a high-speed, early-morning food shop when she got the text. She’d just dropped into the supermarket for a few things; one needed little when one lived alone. But, she thought, things are looking up with the new man on the scene.
Mari was wary of men. All those years she’d spent as a model, hanging around with rock stars and getting thrown out of hotel bedrooms, had left her with a sour taste in her mouth, broken teeth, a fractured thigh bone from that motorbike accident in Tahoe, and a few hidden and wildly tasteless tattoos on her body.
It had all seemed so much fun at the time, such a glamorous, exciting lifestyle: being beautiful and wanted, and having men dragging her into their suites and into their Jacuzzis, lacing her with cocaine and Southern Comfort … Not that she’d needed any help with taking drugs or drink. No, she’d done that herself. One could never blame other people for what one put in one’s mouth or inhaled or injected. An alcoholic and drug addict in recovery knew that.
Mari generally went to AA meetings because the people in NA were often so much younger, and someone like her, who’d been clean for so long, was like an elderly lady.
Her best friends were in AA, like Elsa and Anastasia. Anastasia knew everything. She was so wise, incredible and loving.
And this new man had a sister who was in Narcotics Anonymous: that helped. He wasn’t turned off by dating the concept of an addict in recovery. Mari cheered up immensely, thinking how she might ring him and ask him round to dinner as she didn’t have any late piano lessons that evening. It had been years since she’d invited a man impromptu round to her house.
Her phone pinged again, reminding her for the second time that she had a text. She found her glasses, put them on and looked at it.
It was from Elsa. Quite a long text …
When she read it, she was so shocked she had to put the basket down.
Elsa had cancer and she hadn’t said anything about it. Mari was her next of kin – and Elsa felt something bad was going to happen.
Mari abandoned her basket, ran outside and rang Anastasia.
‘Anastasia, I’ve got to talk to you,’ she said. ‘There’s something really bad going on with Elsa and I need your help.’
Anastasia, stately, late sixties, and white-haired from tragedy in her life and a disabled husband she took care of lovingly after a horrible car accident, fretted.
‘I’m worried about this, Mari,’ she said. ‘It’s such a huge step to take. We don’t meddle in each other’s lives. We are there for help but not to push.’
‘Anastasia, Elsa doesn’t think she deserves the love of her daughters. She thinks she deserves nothing good because she was a bad mother then. That’s not sanity talking; that’s the inner voice of someone who is still paying for her crimes. That’s all I’m proposing: the chance for her to know her daughters a
nd –’ Mari shuddered at the thought – ‘if they really don’t want to know her, then I won’t tell her.’
‘She’s enough to deal with if she’s got cancer,’ Anastasia said. ‘Don’t play God, Mari. I’ve been around long enough to know that doesn’t work.’
‘I’m not playing God,’ insisted Mari. ‘I’m giving her a chance, that’s all, and if it doesn’t work out, she doesn’t know about it, but if something happened to Elsa and she never got to say goodbye to those girls …’ Her voice cracked. ‘I wouldn’t be much of a friend.’
‘Either he never loved me or he’s a coward,’ Cassie told Coco bitterly.
Coco was trying to play down her great happiness with Red, who’d come round to Cassie’s to hug her and the girls, but the couple’s joy was infectious and they couldn’t contain it.
‘I am so glad for you,’ Cassie said as they sat on the old kitchen couch together and watched Fluffikins consider if he wanted to sit on Red or not, while Fiona and Lily fleeced Red at Monopoly and Beth downloaded things on to his cool new ultra-light tablet.
‘I made a mistake four years ago, Cassie,’ said Coco. ‘Maybe you’ve done the same thing. Maybe we just think people automatically leave and that’s the problem.’
‘That might have been it with you and Red,’ said Cassie bitterly,’ but it was more with me and Shay. He chose someone else.’
‘Choosing his mother because she’s being tricky isn’t the same as him choosing another woman, not really,’ Coco said.
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ said Cassie wearily.
‘His mother,’ repeated Coco. ‘You are miserable, Cassie. The girls are miserable. I don’t know why you don’t go over to Antoinette’s and challenge her to a bitch fight.’
Somehow, it worked. Cassie actually laughed.
’You are too insane for words, Coco. Bitch fight indeed. Where do you think of these things?’
‘OK then.’ Coco’s eyes sparkled. ‘Go over and tell Antoinette you’ve had enough of this passive-aggressive stuff, that you married Shay and he gets to live with you.’
‘Except he doesn’t want to—’ began Cassie.
‘He did until you threw him out,’ Coco pointed out.
‘But why didn’t he come back, then? Tell me that? Red did.’
‘It took him four years,’ said Coco quietly. ‘Do you want to waste that much time?’
Mari wondered why she hadn’t tried being a detective before. It was so easy, thanks to the internet. Plus the girls’ names made it so much easier. Cassiopeia and Coraline Keneally were unusual names. Elsa had once said that Coraline was never called Coraline: she had always been Coco.
All it had taken was a few moments searching on Google and she’d come up with several references to Coco. Nothing for Cassiopeia or Cassie, but then perhaps she was married or lived off the grid.
It was hard to disappear totally, but not impossible – Elsa was proof of that. Elsa had changed her name by deed poll a long time ago, gone to college, earned her doctorate, and she looked so different from how she’d looked even when Mari had first met her.
Mari herself had come from a wealthy Gloucestershire family who’d long since disowned her, and the climb to being clean and sober had been a tough one. When it had been reported in the newspapers that she had a conviction for possession with intent to supply class-A drugs, she’d found that the name Barrington-Beaufoy was like a millstone around her neck. Newspapers had loved to write about the posh model who’d fallen from grace. It made great headlines to go with the photos of an exquisite but clearly out-of-it Mari with the rich and famous.
Now Mari had chopped off the Beaufoy – far too grand for a humble piano teacher – and went by Mari Barrington. People often looked at her if she strayed to the upper echelons of Knightsbridge, because with her long blonde hair and the straight aristocratic nose, she was definitely recognisable. But Mari always walked on by previous pals because none of them had stood by her when she’d been sent to prison for eighteen months. When she’d come out, still an addict due to the availability of drugs within the system, the old pals had melted away. The ones who wanted to be her friends when she was dating rock stars and modelling, with access to vast quantities of booze, coke and every drug imaginable had long since vanished.
In the rooms of Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, she’d found friends – real friends. They were the people she could phone up in the middle of the night in those early days and say she craved a hit, craved it like she craved breathing. They were the ones who talked her through the pain, who brought her to meetings because she had no money for even the bus.
They helped her get well. And chief among those friends was Elsa.
Online, Mari looked at The Twentieth Century Boutique website for pictures of its owner, Coco Keneally. The name was so unusual – it had to be her. When she saw a photo, she’d know.
There were lovely pictures of clothes, lively updates of what had come into the shop and its provenance, plus merry tales of a new dog named Apricot who had to be kept away from vintage shoes and anything with a fluffy collar. And then finally she found it: an old photo of someone who clearly didn’t like the camera that much. She was obviously small, with a mass of dark curls, huge dark eyes that sparkled at the camera, and perfectly shaped eyebrows that were hers by genetics. She was curvier than Elsa, who was slimmer and taller, even now, but there was no doubt in Mari’s mind: Coco Keneally was Elsa’s younger daughter.
Mari bit her lip because she thought she might cry.
She couldn’t believe these girls wouldn’t want to see their mother, no matter how much their father had poisoned them against her. They deserved one last chance to be reunited. If it went wrong, so be it, but Mari refused to let her friend go through her cancer battle without thinking she had some hope of redemption. Because that was all any of them were looking for: redemption and peace.
Coco was sitting at her kitchen table looking at the finances and trying to work out how she, Fiona and Jo would cope together in Jo’s house, but she was being distracted by texts from Red.
Stop,
she texted back, adding a few kisses.
Am working.
Nobody knew how long it would take for Jo’s rehabilitation to be complete. The doctors talked about there being possible further improvement over at least eighteen months, so she could improve over that period of time. But how could Coco best take care of her friend and darling Fiona? She could rent out her own apartment, though she hated the idea. But needs must.
Red was insisting that he was there now and could help out, but Coco knew Jo would hate that. The idea of being dependent on Red’s money would be anathema to her. Coco had to come up with a solution that pleased everyone. The shop was doing marvellously at the moment, which was another boon. Now with Phoebe there part-time and also Alice, that lovely girl from the family pet shop down the road, things were doing well. With Fiona in school, Coco was able to be there a lot more now, but what would happen when Jo came out of the rehab? Who knew when she’d work again? Her medical insurance could cover only so much.
She was writing figures down on a piece of paper when the phone rang. It was Alice from the shop.
‘Hi Alice,’ said Coco. ‘Anything wrong? I’m going to be in in half an hour anyway.’
‘Well,’ said Alice, ‘something weird happened. It’s this woman – she rang from London. Very posh-sounding, actually, and I thought maybe she had something to sell or had seen something on the internet and wanted to buy it, but she was looking for you. She was really adamant about that, said …’ Alice paused. ‘She said she was a friend of your mum’s, but I thought your mum was dead?’
Coco dropped the pencil she’d been holding. She looked at it blankly: it was one of Fiona’s pencils with a furry purple bird on top where the rubber should have been. The house was full of colouring pencils and
little adorable rubbers shaped like strawberries and other fruits, and smelling like them too.
‘She said she was a friend of my mother’s?’
‘Yes,’ said Alice, ‘and she wanted your number, but I wouldn’t give it out, obviously. She wanted to know if you had a sister called Cassie and, I’m really sorry, I know I shouldn’t have done this from a security point of view but I’m sorry, I did; I said yes you had a sister called Cassie. I just thought she might be some relative or something. Did I do the wrong thing?’
‘No,’ said Coco, ‘you didn’t do the wrong thing. What was her name? Did she leave a number?’
‘Her name is Mari, M-A-R-I,’ said Alice, ‘and she did leave a number. It’s her mobile.’
She read the number out twice on Coco’s request to make sure she had it down correctly.
‘OK, thanks, sweetie,’ said Coco, trying to sound a bit normal. ‘I’ll see you in a little while.’
She hung up and wondered should she ring Cassie first. A friend of their mother’s …
She almost didn’t know what to do, what to think. She was thirty-one years old and she hadn’t seen her mother since she was one, just a baby. Truthfully, she could say she hadn’t seen her mother at all because whose memory went back to when they were a year old? Cassie, on the other hand, could remember their mother. No, she needed to call Cassie first. It wouldn’t be fair to phone Red first and tell him this incredible news.
Cassie was at home. She’d taken the day off, something she’d done a couple of times since Shay had left. It was his mother’s birthday – Cassie had it marked on the calendar. Not a word from Shay, either. He picked up the girls every weekend for a few hours but never came near the house, instead sitting in the car outside and phoning them to come out.