Between Sisters (23 page)

Both girls held their breath. The shouting had been terrible. Dad was easy-going, everyone said so, but what if he went mental like Mum too? Mum had been really scary.

Their plates were slammed down on the table in time with the sound of the kitchen door slamming.

‘Thanks, Mum,’ said Lily, then whispered, ‘Why are you so angry with Dad?’

Beth kicked her under the table. ‘It’s Gran,’ she whispered. ‘Say nothing.’

‘Parents fight,’ said their mother icily.

She didn’t bother putting her own plate on the table. Instead she went to the cupboard, where she kept bottles of wine or gin for visitors, and picked up a fresh bottle of white. The fridge wine box was empty. This wine wasn’t cooled but, to be frank, she couldn’t care less. Perfect temperature wasn’t the point. Uncorking it, she poured a huge glass into one of Shay’s special red wine glasses. Lots of rubbish spoken about glasses, she thought grimly, taking a huge slug. She wouldn’t, on principle, drink his wine gift. Bought in the convenience store on the way home, she knew. She recognised that type of bouquet too. Not cheap, no, because of the ludicrous mark-up in the local shop, but not proper flower-shop flowers. An emergency present to try to smooth things over. Well, there would be no smoothing over with dreadful flowers and cheap wine. He had gone off to his mother’s house for the whole of Saturday, not lifted a finger at home, and hadn’t even thought that this might be a problem, even after what she’d said.

Although it was a family rule that they never had the TV on while they ate dinner, Cassie angrily flicked it on and found something innocuous about animals on the Discovery Channel. Then she sat at the table, picked at her meal, finished her glass and poured another. A tiny voice inside her head told her that this type of rage-induced drinking was not good. She was relying on alcohol to calm her, to soothe her. That was a mistake. And she was certainly going beyond the weekly allowance of fourteen units of alcohol in the past couple of weeks. Unhealthy too.

But, she reminded herself, as she filled up her glass: people with drinking problems had to race out and slam vodka into themselves first thing in the mornings. Their hands shook, they went out and got drunk at night, they messed up at work. She was nothing like that, so a few glasses of wine could hardly hurt. After all, wasn’t
wine o’clock
practically in the dictionary now?

By the time they heard Shay come downstairs, they were putting their dishes into the dishwasher, the girls helping silently, without their mother even having to ask. They could all hear the front door loudly slam shut.

‘Dad’s gone out?’ said Lily, sounding scared. This never happened. Dad always came into the kitchen for dinner, tousled her hair, tickled Beth, although she said she hated it, grabbed Mum and hugged her.

He never just went out – and without saying anything, either.

‘Must have forgotten something at your grandmother’s,’ said her mother, and slammed the dishwasher shut so fiercely that all the glasses rattled perilously.

The girls fled and Cassie retreated to the old kitchen couch with her bottle of wine and the TV remote. From a distance, Fluffikins stared at her.

‘I don’t think you can heal me tonight, honey, even if you are a healing cat, as Coco believes,’ Cassie told him grimly. ‘It’ll take more than a cat to sort this one out.’

She stared at the television and brooded.

Beth sat on her bed texting her best friend, Mel.

Wsh I woz at urs. Boring here. Mm n mood. Rlly bad md. Sumtin V V wrng. Plz fone n say uve emergncy???!!! Nthin on tv. Wish we’d Ntflix. ☺

After that, she had nothing else to do. Well, she could do her nails but her glue pen was in Mel’s house and she hated just painting her nails. Sticking art on: that was the fun bit.

What other fifteen-year-olds were in alone on Saturday nights? None, that’s who.

Dad was a useless cretin and Mum was being weird. She was drinking the wine again. Beth hated that. When she had wine, Mum changed. She never used to drink, but these days there was often a half-open bottle in the fridge and it was always gone next day. Always.

Mum used to lecture her on alcohol and how bad it was. It was all something to do with her and Coco’s mum drinking. Beth knew this because Coco had told her once, explained that Mum was too sad about it all to ever tell them, but that Coco and Mum’s mother had left them and she’d been some sort of addict.

Now Mum was drinking wine when she used to drink herbal tea, Dad had gone off without telling anyone, and it all felt horrible and scary.

Beth’s eyes were spiky with tears. Stupid tears. She didn’t know why she was crying. She wanted everything to be the way it was before, and it wasn’t. Were Mum and Dad going to get a divorce? It felt like that.

And Gran, stupid Gran, was somehow involved. Why couldn’t Gran be more like Pearl?

Pearl.

She might talk to Pearl about it all. She’d understand even if nobody else did. Coco would be better but Coco was so busy with poor little Fi these days. Beth shuddered and snuggled closer into her bed and her soft pillows. It was scary how things could change in an instant. She’d always admired Jo: she was tough and cool even though she was old and everything. But now Mum said she couldn’t talk properly and couldn’t walk. How horrible was that?

Beth rubbed at a bit of something wet in one eye and tried to concentrate on how to do proper smoky eye. There were brilliant demos on YouTube but Mum had this thing about nobody using computers at night. Still, Mum was stuck into her wine, so she mightn’t notice. And Beth needed some comfort. She hauled the laptop from under her bed and fired it up. She’d go on to Facebook first, then YouTube, whatever she felt like.

She was breaking the rules. So what? Everyone else in the family was.

Saturday was one of the busiest days at the shop, and Coco wouldn’t get her head in the door that day what with Jo’s family coming to visit, so she had to content herself with phoning in.

‘You’re sure things are doing OK at the shop? And you’re keeping up with the Facebook page? That’s so important.’

Coco had a list of things in her head to talk to Adriana about Twentieth Century, but now that she’d grabbed a moment to make the phone call, it had all run out of her brain. Like what was the stock situation like? Had a delivery come from that auction in Belfast? Would Adriana drop any mail off at Coco’s?

Before she got a chance to ask these questions, Adriana assured her employer that the shop was a haven of customers, that it was clean and tidy, and did Coco want her to drop any mail off?

‘Yes,’ said Coco in blessed relief, and hung up feeling pleased at how hard Adriana was working.

It was so nice to have someone offer to do something for her like drop off the post, something practical. Friends of hers and Jo had phoned, all saying they were thinking of Jo, Coco and Fiona, and if there was anything they could do, to just ask. But Coco was so frantic with worry that thinking of what she needed most made her head ache.

Ludicrously, she knew, she wanted help without having to conjure up visions of what that help might entail. She really wanted someone with kids who might bring them over to play with Fiona, who didn’t want to go out at all. Now that would be a help.

She’d like a round-robin system so that someone else would phone all Jo’s teacher friends to pass on information about Jo’s progress instead of everyone phoning all the time, meaning Coco had to spend ages on the phone repeating herself when she got in at night.

‘No, she’s not in good form. Yes, do go in, but prepare yourself for her to be very tearful. No, there’s no miracle cure, I’m afraid. Time, hope for spontaneous recovery and rehabilitation are what it’s going to take. Fiona is here beside me,’ she’d add brightly when they asked, in low, sad voices, how Jo’s daughter was.

Some people didn’t take the hint and would keep saying how awful it was for a child, and Coco would have to say, even more loudly: ‘Fiona, who is
right beside me
, and I are having fun. We’re doing baking tonight! Purple and pink cakes, right, Fi?’

What would be especially lovely would be if someone else would cook dinner for her and Fi one night. They’d been to Cassie’s three times last week after being in the hospital, but Fiona needed some normality, and right now that was Coco’s flat.

And besides, there was something going on with Shay and Cassie, which was subtle, just under the surface, but there all the same. Normally Coco would insist on knowing what was wrong and would help out in some way. But now, burdened with a friend in hospital and a child to look after, she didn’t have any part of her left over for coping with anyone else’s problems; even her sister’s. Cassie would sort it out – Cassie could sort anything out.

Fiona had been due to go into school for the first time in a week since her mother had been rushed to hospital.

The school had been very helpful about Fiona having some time off to be with her mother in hospital under these difficult circumstances.

‘I’d like her to have some routine, and school is a great routine,’ the principal had said, ‘but if she really wants to go into the hospital first thing, you should do that. She could come in for a few hours in the afternoon, if possible, to see her friends, to get some normality into her life, and then start her back full-time on Friday,’ said the principal. ‘Then she’ll have the weekend to adjust.’

Fiona had got up quietly, put on her school uniform and even sat at the table with Coco, poking at her Pop-Tarts (desperation food as she wasn’t eating much), as if she might possibly have some, and then she’d whispered: ‘I can’t go to school without seeing Mum, Coco. I can’t.’

She’d cried then. Not loud, noisy tears like the ones Coco had seen many times before when Jo was well.
‘I need Chunky Monkey ice cream or I will explode!’ ‘Can we go to the cinema, pleeeeease …?’ ‘Can you write a note saying I don’t have to do my homework, Muuum …?’

These tears were different, silent grief pouring out, and Coco couldn’t bear them.

She shoved her chair away, threw her arms around Fiona and held her tightly.

‘You don’t have to,’ said Coco wildly, knowing she was saying the wrong thing, but desperate to say anything to help. ‘Mum is going to be OK, darling. It may take time, but she will, and you have me with you. I’ll never let you down. I am here for you always. I’ll keep you safe, Fi, darling.’

Somehow they ended up on the floor in a sodden heap, with Coco rocking Fiona like she was a baby, and Fiona making little mouse-like noises that Coco somehow knew weren’t bad noises. It was like she was finally letting go of the fear and pain she’d been holding inside her small body. The pain of seeing her beloved mum in hospital, the pain of Jo not being able to walk or even hold her properly or talk. The pain of loss, and the fear that that loss might come again, bigger or worse.

Coco, who’d never known her mother, understood those fears. One loss made you frightened that there would be many more. It made you wear a cloak of armour in case you got hurt again, and that never worked, not in the real world.

‘It’s all right, darling, I’m here now Fi. Mum will get better, I promise you, and I am going to be here for both of you.’

Fourteen

‘I can’t believe you’re off again.’ Myra O’Neill’s current expression was what her loving husband might have described as ‘a face that would stop a clock’.

‘Business,’ said Red blandly, sitting in his parents’ kitchen for a quick cup of tea before heading to the airport.

Saying ‘business’ covered a multitude of excuses. Nobody could argue with a man like himself when he said he had to leave because of business.

‘But you only just got here,’ wailed his mother.

‘Ah, leave the man alone,’ said his father. ‘If he needs to be in New York, he needs to be in New York.’

Red didn’t need to be in New York. He just knew that he didn’t want to be in Dublin anymore. The dinner party the night before had unsettled him so much. Michael and Barbara had said the sort of things he didn’t want to hear, reminding him about Coco and telling him he should see her.

Why would he want to do that? Why put himself through the pain?

The driver dropped him off at terminal two departures.

‘Thanks,’ said Red, getting out of the car.

Just ahead of him was a woman with long black hair curling down her back. She was muttering to herself.

‘I always get these floors mixed up,’ she said, even though she was alone and there was nobody else to hear her.

Red recognised that voice; he’d have recognised it anywhere, under any conditions.

‘Impossible to know if you’re in arrivals or departures,’ the woman muttered.

Dressed in a long pink circle-skirted dress with a nipped-in waist that showed off her Venus curves and slender ankles was Coco Keneally. She used to worry they were fat – they weren’t.

‘You forget something, sir?’ the driver asked, looking at him curiously before he got back in his car.

‘No,’ said Red, and began following her.

Coco headed off towards the escalators up to arrivals and Red couldn’t help himself following her. She glanced at an old-fashioned watch on her slender wrist and sighed with impatience. She was running late, he thought. Late for whom? She was beautifully dressed, with a small elegant black handbag – the sort of thing she’d longed to sell in the shop but had never been able to afford in the early days.

Some instinct made her turn as she got off the escalator, and he turned too, bending his head as if he was looking back for someone on the ground floor.

Please let her not see me stalking her.

She didn’t. He got off after her and watched her walk, hips swaying in that utterly unconscious way of hers, over to the arrivals area.

Red, who had a boarding pass on his phone and no checked luggage, took the next escalator up and looked down at her. She was biting her full lower lip, the way she did when she was nervous and trying to find the right place to wait. Who was she waiting for that was making her nervous? A lover? A new fiancée?

Red was shocked by how jealous he felt of this unknown man.

Then she was out of sight and Red was joining the fast-track queue for the flight to New York. Maybe it was the previous late night, and the conversation he’d had with his friends, but Red had an overwhelming desire to turn around, race downstairs to where Coco stood, pick her up and never let her go.

Instead, he took off his belt and his shoes, laid his phone and laptop in the security trays and moved through. She didn’t want him in her life. She’d made that perfectly plain four years ago.

Thank heavens for Pearl, Coco thought as she hurried through the airport car park to reach arrivals, where Jo’s sister’s flight was due to land soon.

She arrived at the car park in front of the airport entrance proper to realise that, yet again, she’d mixed up the areas. She was at departures check-in, not arrivals. Muttering to herself, she took the escalator up to the right floor and she had the weirdest sensation of being watched. But when she looked around, there was nobody looking at her.

It was nerves, she thought. She’d felt nervous since she’d dropped Fiona off at Pearl’s, and was feeling incredibly anxious about meeting Attracta – the aunt that Fiona didn’t remember at all.

It was the emails that made her feel this. First, Attracta had sent emails to her sister, which was insane because Jo wasn’t able to type answers into her laptop, and this made her doubly frustrated. It was as if Attracta didn’t grasp the severity of the fact that her younger sister had had a stroke, or how huge an uphill battle her rehab could be if there wasn’t the much hoped-for spontaneous recovery.

Then Attracta had sent emails to Coco, too:
update me
emails where she wrote as if she was coolly enquiring if a pair of shoes had arrived in the shop.

Actually, Coco thought, she’d had far warmer and more interested emails from buyers contacting Twentieth Century about items of clothing. Ones where people wrote with emotion and feeling. Nothing Attracta wrote had an iota of emotion in it:
My plane from London lands at half ten on Saturday morning. I will have slept: I use melatonin on long flights. I suppose we should go straight to the hospital?

‘I suppose we should go straight to the hospital,’
raged Coco to herself.
How cold is that? If it was Cassie, I’d move heaven and earth to see her.

‘I don’t really remember her that well,’ Coco had confided in Pearl when she’d phoned to ask if her grandmother would take care of Fiona on Saturday morning when she went to the airport. ‘She was so much older than us. She was tough, she taught Jo to be tough—’

‘Which is good,’ Pearl reminded her, ‘because Jo needs to be tough now to get through this catastrophe.’

‘That’s it!’ said Coco. ‘I know it’s a catastrophe, you do, darling Fi knows it, and she’s only nine, but Attracta and Xavier – it’s like they don’t realise this, or if they do, they’ve distanced themselves from it. Xavier’s flying in tomorrow for
one
night. At least Attracta’s made a big effort to come from Australia, but he’s in Paris – it’s not half way around the world. I don’t understand them!’

Pearl wished she could use the obvious example to explain this to her granddaughter, but she’d spent thirty years not discussing Coco’s mother with her, so she said instead: ‘Sometimes people with traumatic or dysfunctional families move away in every sense of the word. The Kinsellas are not normal, no doubt about it. They’ve driven their children away and it’s hard for Xavier and Attracta to come home. Home is linked with pain, hurt and never being good enough.’

Again, Pearl thought of Marguerite. Had she stayed away from her daughters because of that hurt and pain, of having been told she wasn’t a good enough mother? If so, Pearl had had a hand in it. It was a heavy burden to carry. But she’d been so scared for them, thinking what could go wrong because Marguerite’s behaviour had made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t able to take care of two children.

Pearl had changed her mind about telling her granddaughters the truth so many times. She would; she wouldn’t.

Not now, though. Not now.

‘I suppose that makes sense,’ reflected Coco. ‘If it were Cassie and I was on the moon, I’d come home as fast as I could.’

On the other end of the phone, Pearl smiled. Something she’d done right; those sisters adored each other.

Coco found a spot in arrivals where she could see the doors opening, disgorging passengers, and waited. The London flights processed people quickly. Twenty-five minutes after the arrivals board said the plane had arrived, a woman in her early forties arrived, pushing a trolley carrying one small suitcase and a carry-on. She was the right age and she had a look of Jo about her eyes, with the same dark eyebrows, but the resemblance ended there. Jo was tall, slim and loved colour, even ones like lemon yellows that Coco had to steer her away from. This woman was nowhere near as tall, didn’t have Jo’s enviable shape, and wore head-to-toe black, from her long, loose cardigan to her flat shoes, as if she was dressed for a funeral.

Was that her? Coco stared. The woman stared back and then pushed the trolley in Coco’s direction.

‘I’ve got photos on my wall of you with Josephine and Fiona,’ said Attracta, holding out a formal hand. ‘That’s how I recognised you. Hello Coco, it’s good of you to collect me.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing, the least I could do,’ babbled Coco, thinking that she’d barely recognised Attracta because it was years since she’d been home. Jo had only very old photos of her sister on her wall.

‘Attracta hates the camera,’ she’d said once.

It all came back to Coco now. Attracta had been told that being interested in your appearance was not thinking of God.

‘I told you my parents were nuts,’ Jo had said years ago when she’d explained this to Coco.

Nuts didn’t entirely explain it,
Coco thought.

‘Welcome home, Attracta,’ she said now, trying to pull herself together. ‘I’m sorry it’s not under happier circumstances.’

‘I’m Tracey now,’ said Attracta briskly. ‘I hate Attracta.’

Coco missed a beat. The emails had been to a T. Kinsella but she hadn’t thought anything of it. People’s email addresses often bore no resemblance to their actual names. And yet, Attracta had never mentioned the name change in her emails … Weird.

‘Right. Tracey,’ she said evenly. She simply wasn’t going to even question this. ‘I’m on level two. Shall we walk?’

‘Sure. Are we going to the hospital then?’

‘Er, yes,’ said Coco, just stopping herself from saying: ‘No, we’ll take in a movie first.’

She must remember what Pearl had told her: this journey might be a very hard one for Attracta in so many ways.

On the drive, Coco learned that Tracey – how hard was
that
going to be to remember and why hadn’t she mentioned it before? – lived in Sydney, worked in administration in insurance, lived alone in an apartment in Manley, and had slept for the leg of the flight from Hong Kong.

She didn’t ask about her sister and or say any of the expected things like how was her niece coping, or wasn’t Coco good to be there taking care of her.

Was it nerves or medication? Coco wondered, entirely on edge.

Tracey stared out of the car window at Dublin city and remarked occasionally how different it all looked now. It was only in the hospital that Coco finally realised that Attracta – sorry, Tracey – was wound up like a spring.

They walked into the ward together, where Jo was feeding herself lunch. Because of her inability to use her left arm properly, she wasn’t able to cut up her chicken, so was hacking away at it with a blunt knife and had clearly splashed food on to her pyjamas. The enormous fatigue she’d suffered since the stroke meant each forkful was an effort, and before Coco could smile and say that Jo had improved so much in the past two weeks, Tracey gasped and slapped a hand over her mouth. She took one look at her formerly vibrant sister reduced to someone feeble, unable to feed herself properly, and a torrent of tears emerged.

‘Josephine, oh no, Josephine,’ she wailed, and threw herself at Jo, who glared at Coco over her sister’s head as if this outburst of emotion was all Coco’s fault.

Coco shrugged. She had learned that this was the best way to deal with Jo when she got stroppy. Reasoning didn’t work.

Your sister
, she mouthed, and left the ward to wait outside.

After ten minutes, she grabbed one of the nurses she’d grown to know well.

‘Lesley, Jo’s sister’s just arrived from Australia to see her. Would you mind peering in to see how it’s going? I’m worried her sister might upset her. I don’t think she’s coping very well with Jo’s condition. I know you’re wildly busy but it’ll only take a few seconds.’

‘Sure,’ said Lesley, and walked into the ward.

She was back in a minute with Tracey in tow. Tracey was still crying; her face was swollen with tears and was blotchily red.

‘The café?’ suggested Lesley, with a meaningful look at Coco.

‘You are truly an angel,’ whispered Coco to Lesley as she escorted Tracey towards the lifts.

They’d just ordered coffees, and Tracey was brokenly muttering about how she never expected it to be this bad, when Coco realised that she’d just committed the cardinal sin with someone immobile in a hospital bed: leaving without telling them what was happening.

She paid, whisked their coffees off to a table, grabbed a few sugars, left them beside Tracey, and said: ‘I’m just popping up to see Jo. You sit here for a while. I’ll come back for you, right?’

Holding her coffee, she raced off.

Jo hated coffee now. She couldn’t drink anything very well except through a straw, and her love of strong Columbian coffee was gone. Coco never, simply never, brought a takeaway coffee cup into the ward in case it reminded Jo of her inability to drink properly, but right now she thought it was time to stop treating Jo like she was anyone different from the person she’d been before.

There would be no ‘does she take sugar?’ in their relationship.

Jo was still Jo, would need rehab and might never physically be quite the same again. But mentally she was the woman Coco had been friends with for twenty-six years, even if she’d gone through an emotional earthquake. Getting Jo back on her feet would take more than physical exercises.

‘What did you bring her in for?’ demanded Jo instantly. ‘You saw what she was like. That helps me
how
exactly?’

‘First, she flew thousands of miles to see you, and secondly, I am not a psychic,’ protested Coco. ‘I didn’t know she’d burst into floods on seeing you. She barely spoke about you in the car—’

‘Then she went on and on about our bloody parents and how we’re the most screwed-up family on the planet, and how she hates her life, and now this,’ interrupted Jo angrily. ‘Oh yes, and the clincher is, do I think my stroke is a judgement from God because none of us are religious—?’

‘Fiona’s doing well today, thank you for asking,’ said Coco acidly, doing some interrupting of her own.

Jo was silent.

‘I left her with Pearl. They’re going to bake something covered in sprinkles to bring into you later this afternoon. I was going to come with Tracey …’