Between Sisters (2 page)

One

DUBLIN

Dark hair plastered to her head with rain, Cassie Reynolds stood in the weary queue in Starbucks at five past eight in the morning and half-listened to the conversations going on around her.

‘The kids won’t get up for school. Do you think it’s easy for me, I asked them?’ demanded a forty-something woman laden down with laptop bag, handbag and light raincoat for the unseasonable downpour outside.

‘They won’t go to bed on time,’ agreed her friend, equally laden down.

Cassie, mother-of-two, and carrying just as much equipment in the way of laptop, overstuffed handbag and rain gear as the two women, understood their pain. Her daughters Lily and Beth, thirteen and fifteen respectively, seemed to think it was
her
fault that they had to get up for school in the morning.

‘It’s inhuman. Teenagers have rights too,’ Beth had taken to saying when 6.45 rolled around each morning and Cassie woke the household up.

Cassie wondered if she could go into the school Amnesty International group – which Beth had just joined – and point out that they were supposed to be explaining to the kids in class about basic human rights, and that this didn’t include moaning about their own first-world problems.

‘I’m sooo tired,’ Lily complained every day. ‘Can I have five more minutes, pleeease?’

‘I don’t want to get up either,’ Cassie wanted to say when she was poleaxed with exhaustion. ‘But we have to. You need to go to school or I’ll go to jail for keeping you out, and I need to earn money. Simples?’

She hadn’t said it so far – she knew she’d sound unhinged if she did. Unhinged was bad parenting, apparently. Or so it said in the women’s magazines she occasionally had the energy to skim through at night in bed.

Trying to get everyone to bed earlier didn’t work, nor did dire threats to remove electronic equipment for weeks. The only possible power she had left was turning off the Wi-Fi but she quite liked going on Pinterest herself in the evenings. She liked meandering in and out of photos of lovely holiday destinations and photos of adorable animals, pinning them on her wall of ‘Places I’d Like to Visit’ or ‘Cute!’ boards.

All of this activity was avoidance of setting up a ‘Why Are Teenagers So Tricky?’ or ‘Am I a Bad Mother?’ board, which would be far more to the point.

She pondered this as she stood in the queue. Was it the girls’ ages that made her feel so stressed lately?

Yes, that was it: being a parent of modern teenage daughters was the equivalent of running the Government or the health service. No matter what you did, you were always in trouble. Nobody apologised for yelling at you, nobody hugged you, and no matter what sort of fabulous meal you conjured out of thin air after a full day of work, nobody ever said thanks.

The years of being ‘fabulous Mummy’ had morphed into slamming doors to a chorus of ‘You’re horrible and I hate you!’

It broke Cassie’s heart.

She’d tried so hard to make her family into all the things she’d missed as a child: the perfect nuclear family with a cat, home-cooked food, camping holidays and Cassie doing her best to help with homework even though she worked full-time. And it had worked, until about two years ago when her daughters had hit hormone city one after the other and, suddenly, they weren’t a nuclear family – they’d just become nuclear.

Making scones or healthy oat and raisin cookies on Sundays for the girls’ lunches at school the following week didn’t cut any ice when someone was sulking up a storm over not being allowed to go to a party where Cassie knew the parents would think it perfectly fine to let teenagers bring their own beer.

Saturday night was no longer a cosy movie-and-take-away family night because the girls spent the whole evening ignoring the movie and texting, despite dire warnings about phone confiscation. Now Beth could officially watch 15 movies, she wanted to watch 18 ones.

‘I’m not a kid anymore so why do I have to watch kids’ movies?’ she’d say in outrage at the sign of any sort of family movie.

Beth now mooched around the house wearing low-slung pyjama-type joggers with her slim teenage belly visible. She had made hints about getting a belly ring, comments which made her father go green and made Cassie say ‘over my dead body’ in the manner of a Victorian parent.

She wore coal-black eyeliner, sky-blue nail varnish and had posters of shirtless young male singers with six-packs on display Blu-Tacked to her walls.

Lily, once a sweet little poppet prone to hugs and drawing kittens, had thrown out all her fluffy, fairy-style tutu skirts and insisted on jeans so skinny her mother worried about Lily’s circulation. Her once-beloved Lalaloopsy dolls were in a box under the bed and Lily kept rushing into her big sister’s room to watch things on YouTube. More reason to ban Wi-Fi for the next ten years.

Any comment on either sister’s clothes was followed by the refrain, ‘But everyone’s wearing these now, Mum!’

And, being infatuated with her cool, older sister, Lily now wanted to paint
her
nails blue and had begun shrugging off any type of hug.

The only thing Beth and Lily tried to hug with any regularity was the family cat, Fluffikins, who was not a touchy-feely animal and protested loudly at being picked up and dragged out of rooms after rows. Cassie thought the cat might possibly go deaf, what with all the slamming doors he was exposed to.

‘It’s a phase; the girls will grow out of it,’ Grammy Pearl said whenever they discussed it. ‘You did.’

‘Please tell me I wasn’t that bad or that hormonally difficult,’ Cassie begged her grandmother.

‘The times were different and you were different,’ Grammy said diplomatically. ‘You had a lot of hard things to deal with, Cassie. Teenage girls need to fight with their mothers and you didn’t have one. You only had me. I’m not easy to argue with – having your Great-Aunt Edie as a sister had taught me how to avoid arguments, because Edie could start one in an empty room.’

Grammy Pearl mentioning Cassie’s lack of a mother was the closest they ever came to discussing the great pain of the Keneally family – how Cassie and her younger sister Coco’s mother had left them when Cassie was seven years old and Coco had just turned one. How the pain had eventually killed their father ten years ago, destroyed by grief.

Jim Keneally had floated on the edges of the all-women household in Delaney Gardens, letting his mother sort out arguments and sign school letters. When Cassie thought of her father, she could see him bent with his head in a book, retreating from life because it hurt too much.

There had been happiness and love too – Pearl had made sure of that. But their family had never been the sort of normal family Cassie used to dream about – the ones in books or the ones her school friends had. Like a child peering in at a happy family at Christmastime, Cassie often felt that she’d spent much of her childhood peering through the glass windows at the homes of happy families she knew, watching as people made jokes and giggled, as mothers dropped kisses on father’s heads, as fathers were teased for hopeless anniversary bouquets for their wives.

Despite the happiness in hers and Coco’s childhood, they were different from their peers. Motherless.

That had made Cassie utterly determined to create the perfect family with Shay and her daughters, to make up for the one she’d never quite had. Her daughters would never be the ones with their faces pressed up against the glass windows, peeping in.

Except lately, it had all fallen apart.

‘One day they’ll come around and they’ll be hugging you, saying you’re the best mum ever,’ Grammy said. ‘Mark my words, it’ll happen.’

‘Any date in mind for this miraculous event?’ Cassie asked, laughing without mirth. ‘I want to mark it off in my diary and then see if I can get tranquillisers to keep me going until it happens.’

Worse was her marriage, because the most united thing she and Shay did now was to discuss their daughters and have rows about belly rings, clothes and unsuitable videos on YouTube, where male singers sang about sex and barely dressed girls who got called ‘hos’ danced around them.

She and Shay never scheduled the apparently vitally important ‘date nights’. Without date nights, your marriage was as dead as a dodo, and their version of a date night were nights when both she and Shay were too tired to cook – he really did his best to help, although he wasn’t a natural chef – and they got a takeaway with which the whole family slumped in front of the TV and hostilities were temporarily suspended.

Did that qualify as date night? Nobody fighting? Surely there was kudos for that?

Besides, if Cassie felt the spark had gone out of their marriage, then wasn’t that what happened to people with kids and busy lives, stuck on the mortgage hamster wheel, endlessly trying to make it all fit together? Shay worked in an engineering firm and these days – thankfully – he was as busy as she was.

Time was what they needed, and one day they’d get it. Well, they might if only Shay’s mother, Antoinette, let them.

Cassie, who had no real mother, had married a man who was joined at the hip to his. There were three people in their marriage, as the Princess of Wales had once said.

Three years ago, Shay’s father had died, and since then his mother had permanently attached herself to Shay like a barnacle to a whale. She rang constantly, asking Shay to come fix plugs, change light bulbs and open the jammed washing machine door.

‘I
wouldn’t ask him to fix those things,’ Cassie said in outrage to Coco.

‘She’s grieving,’ said her sister, always the peacemaker. ‘She’ll get it out of her system. Remember that sweet lady who used to come into the shop all the time when her husband died, in every second day, always with some little trinket? She could have brought it all in in one fell swoop to sell but she wanted the company. It’s like that. Then she got involved with the bingo crowd and now I never see her. She just needed to find her place in the world again.’

‘It’s not like that with Antoinette,’ said Cassie, sighing. ‘It’s like she wants a replacement husband.’

‘Don’t be freaky,’ said Coco, laughing.

Then Cassie had laughed and said she wasn’t being freaky, but honestly, Antoinette lived forty-five minutes away: it wasn’t as if she was around the corner. She had two daughters into the bargain, and ‘Could she not learn to change a plug herself?’

‘She will,’ soothed Coco. ‘She’ll adjust and find a new life.’

Except Antoinette hadn’t. Three years on and Shay still drove to his mother’s house like a good little boy whenever she phoned.

Cassie had explained to Shay that he was spending a lot of time in his mother’s house and might it not be a better plan to talk to his sisters, Miriam and Ruth, and say that they could all club together to afford handymen to help her do the odd jobs, and perhaps to share visiting her all the time?

‘Oh, Cass, she needs me now my father’s gone. Don’t you understand that?’ Shay had said crossly when she’d made this suggestion, so that Cassie had felt as if she was being selfish and horrible by wanting her husband to spend some time around their house at the weekend.

Worse, what Cassie couldn’t say to her sister – because it sounded stupid and melodramatic – was that she didn’t feel loved when Shay put his mother first every time. He kept choosing his mother over his wife.

Cassie had been too scarred by this happening when she was seven to want it to ever happen again. But how could she say this? It would sound ludicrous and childish.

Antoinette was older and alone; she needed Shay more.

Cassie tried so very hard to adjust to this and yet everything in her life was shifting. She’d relied on Shay to be the one constant in this teenage maelstrom but even he had shifted off course and was dedicating himself to his mother. Cassie was supposed to not be even vaguely upset by any of this. She was ‘good old Cassie’ who kept the home fires burning and required no love or affection at all.

Cassie could tell nobody, but this withdrawal of Shay’s presence – and, to Cassie’s mind, his love – was the most frightening thing of all.

The Starbucks queue shuffled forwards and Cassie let her attention wander to scan the customers, eyes paying particular attention to women in their late fifties and sixties. She’d been doing it for so many years that she didn’t notice she was doing it: always looking.

The woman she was looking for could be dead now for all Cassie knew. She might live somewhere else entirely; she might be living on a street dressed in blankets and begging for a few coins so she could buy something more to drink. Or would she have moved on to harder stuff? Heroin? Meth? Wasn’t that what happened to women like her mother?

Who knew?

Thirty years since she’d last seen her, yet Cassie couldn’t stop herself looking out for her mother. Despite the fact that she’d told everyone – Coco, their father, their grandmother, her husband, her friends – that she’d long since got used to the fact that her mother was a loser and had abandoned her without a second thought, Cassie still looked. And hoped.

She had no idea what she’d say to Marguerite – she would never call her mother or mum – but she was sure she’d know what to say if the chance ever came.

Why did you leave? Why did you never come back? Was it my fault? Was I not lovable enough?

The voice in her head when she spoke those words was never that of the always calm, mature Cassie Reynolds, née Keneally; it was the voice of a heartbroken seven-year-old who’d never forgotten the day she’d come home from school to hear that her mother had just left.

Her father had picked her up from school, not Grammy or Rita from next door, who did it when Mum couldn’t. Dad never picked her up. It was always Mum, except the day before they’d had the crash. Maybe Mum was upset about it, even though she’d laughed at the time and said it was all fine. Just a teeny little mistake.

Mum liked to do fun things when she came. She’d have Coco all bundled up in her car seat and she’d have a plan.

‘Let’s go to the cafe for tea and buns!’ she’d say, looking all shiny and pretty with her hair curled and her woolly coat – Mum said it was fake fur and she looked like a snuggly and glamorous bear, Cassie thought, with it wrapped around her.