Between Sisters (4 page)

‘Yeah, well, we can’t all have a professional blow-dry every morning and get dressed from a wardrobe set up by a personal shopper,’ Belinda replied.

She briefly gazed at her friend’s pale face, the bruised smudges beneath her brown eyes and the wet hair. With amazing sleight of hand, Belinda took Cassie’s coat and laptop bag, handed over her own handbag, and muttered: ‘Go. Let the under-eye thing do its magic. Use the highlighter/sculptor thing too. Charlotte Tilbury. Ludicrous price but worth it. Does actually make you look like you’ve been on holiday and have cheekbones like a supermodel. We should have gone into the beauty products business years ago, honey. That’s where the money is today. Then we wouldn’t have to be prostituting ourselves working for the Wicked Witch of the West.’

‘Isn’t it the Witch of East?’ said Cassie.

‘She was the good one, wasn’t she? Nah, West. Loren had all the good sucked out of her on her last liposuction procedure.’

Cassie had her first laugh of the day and, juggling her coffee and Belinda’s handbag, headed for the loo.

The ladies was large and full of chatter as women from the various companies on the floor talked while they brushed their hair and slicked on lipstick. Usually a hotbed of rumours, the current one was about the US event company, Prestige, taking over Larousse Events.

Cassie still hadn’t found out if it was true or not but that didn’t stop the gossip. From what she could ascertain, Prestige was a much leaner affair than their own company. Friendly takeovers were just like hostile ones but with more smiles: many people would still lose their jobs. The thought sent a little shiver through Cassie. More change, and she hated change. She hoped that rumour was just a rumour.

She went to work with Belinda’s magic products, dried her hair with some paper towels and listened.

The other gossip was that Denise, from the small accountancy firm on their floor, had left her husband after an affair with one of the personal trainer guys in the gym on floor ten. As Cassie applied Belinda’s brilliant concealing pen to the dark shadows under her eyes, she heard how Denise had been sick of her workaholic husband and how he had no time for her.

‘Nothing in the bedroom department,’ the girl with all the news informed her avid listeners.

‘Do you think yer woman with the Rolling Stones fella was right about how to keep a man?’ someone said. ‘Cook in the kitchen and hooker in the bedroom?’

Everyone was silent as they thought about this. At least half of the women on the fifth floor had kids and really needed a wife to keep the show on the road. Bedroom antics were way down the list.

‘I wouldn’t be into yer man from the Stones,’ said Gladys, senior supervisor from the insurance company, as if Mick Jagger was waiting outside for her command to have him washed and sent to her tent. ‘The mouth on him.’ She shuddered. ‘Now, that nice Michael Bublé, if he was around … Well, you wouldn’t kick him out of bed for getting crumbs on the sheets, would you?’

Everyone laughed, breaking the tension.

But Cassie didn’t laugh. Instead, she thought of how long it was since she and Shay had made love. True, she was perpetually too tired for sex. Arguing with the girls gave her tension headaches too, but it was months now and Shay hadn’t made a single move to make love to her. She tried to remember the dates but couldn’t, yet she realised that it was a long time since Shay had reached out in the bed towards the wall of her back, stroking, telling her he wanted her.

She put down the magic concealer pen, no longer really caring about how she looked. Was her husband going off her?
Had
he gone off her? The ripple of anxiety over abandonment she’d never truly been able to shake began to hit earthquake status.

‘Cassie.’ A voice interrupted this terrible thought. ‘Do you have a moment?’

It was Karen, a junior in Cassie’s department: a sweet girl in her twenties who was going out with the boyfriend from hell.

Desperate to talk, Karen just blurted it out: ‘I told him what I was thinking and he walked out. Just walked out, Cassie. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I thought we’d talk about our relationship but he didn’t. He got his stuff, said I was too high-maintenance with my talk about our plans for the future, and then he went. My brother’s wedding is next weekend and we were going together, but now I’ll be there on my own.’ Karen’s crying sounding like howling. ‘Cassie, what do I do?’

Cassie managed to put an arm around Karen and let her howl.

As ever, it was a supreme irony that Karen had come to her for help. People had been coming to Cassie for help and support all her life. People told her things. She didn’t know why.

‘You have an open face; we have open faces,’ Coco had said years before. ‘We look like we can keep secrets and that we don’t judge.’

Coco had been born looking as if she was interested in everyone, with sparkling brown eyes that could turn almost black with emotion and feeling, and made the person talking to her feel as if nobody else on the planet existed but them and their problems. She exuded warmth, caring and kindness. And she didn’t mind.

Cassie had been born looking as if she was the woman who could sort out every problem, starting with the Middle East. And she did mind.

Tell me and I will fix it
was the unspoken message on her face, and although Cassie had spent hours looking at herself in the mirror trying to figure out why people felt this about her, she was at a loss. She only saw a woman with dark eyes, winged brows, those darn freckles and a too-wide mouth that possibly smiled too much because smiling was safer, she’d learned over the years. Smiling stopped people asking ‘are you all right?’

Since she’d been seven, though, she’d understood pain. Was that the secret? Did people see pain in her eyes and think
she’ll understand
?

Either way, Cassie fervently wished she hadn’t been born with this look on her face. She knew the secrets of half the people in her office, many of the mothers in the girls’ school and, when Coco was busy, her friends turned to Cassie for advice. It was exhausting.

Grammy Pearl had the same gift. People loved to talk to Grammy and total strangers flung themselves at her at parties, telling her their life stories while searching for tissues in their pockets or handbags.

Weird how genetics worked. They’d got this unasked-for gift from Pearl.

It could hardly have come from Marguerite.

Still, Cassie summoned up the strength she’d been summoning up since she was seven, closed off her own problems deep inside her, and began to calm Karen down.

She might text Coco later and see if she could come round for supper that evening. Coco always cheered her up. And Coco never, ever let her down.

Two

Coco Keneally liked to think that her vintage shop, The Twentieth Century Boutique, was a bit of a mysterious jewel: bijou-looking on the outside, a slightly shabby Tardis on the inside because it hadn’t been painted in a few years, and yet filled with sparkle. Set on the main shopping street in Silver Bay, a once down-at-heel but now up-and-coming part of Dublin Bay’s outer reaches, it stood out among a trail of shops that included two competing hairdressing salons, a small jewellers there since the year dot, a convenience store and a new coffee shop that had made the local pubs up their game in terms of morning coffee and cakes. There was a sprawling pet shop, a small strange establishment that never seemed to be open but had clocks, toasters, screwdrivers and the odd power tool in the dusty window, and a glamorous chemist where a quick trip for tissues could result in a haul of nail varnish, things for removing hard skin from feet and an essential oil known to cure all ailments if rubbed on every day.

Coco had been running her shop for five years and the premises covered two shop fronts and a large upstairs, where the more expensively labelled clothes and accessories were: the rare and valuable Diors, Chanels, original Halstons, the tiny YSL Le Smoking nobody could fit into but which Coco found herself loath to sell via the internet on the grounds that, one day, the right person would come into the shop and Coco would
know
it.

She couldn’t get so much as a leg into the suit – not without major amputation of a limb. Le Smoking suits had been made with svelte, tiny-boned women in mind and Coco was more of a pocket-sized Gina Lollobrigida: big hips, a DD bra to keep her breasts firmly in place, and the ability to put on weight by so much as looking at a bar of chocolate. So she went for a fifties look herself – sleek dark eyebrows
à la
Elizabeth Taylor, dark eyes emphasised with a cat flick, ruby red lipstick that suited her full mouth with its finely arched upper lip – and idly waited for the day when a woman walked into her store to befit the exquisite YSL suit.

Vintage store was perhaps the wrong description for the place, Coco often thought. It was a treasure trove of the past, mysteries bound up in clothes, handbags and costume jewellery, memories of other lives.

Coco loved the past. ‘Who knew what sort of life this nightgown has seen?’ she might say, holding up a crêpe de Chine garment when she was in Grammy Pearl’s house around the corner going through a cache of clothes, searching for special pieces.

If Great-Aunt Edie, Grammy’s younger sister, was visiting at the same time, she’d sniff disparagingly and say something about how she couldn’t understand people buying second-hand clothes.

‘If faded old nighties from the thirties are vintage, then I’m from the moon,’ Edie would add. ‘Vintage is just other people’s old stuff, smelly and stained …’

Edie disapproved of people working in shops that sold other people’s old clothes. She’d wanted Coco to go to college to study law or something … well,
suitable.

‘I’m the oldest vintage here, Edie, and calm down,’ Pearl would say warningly. Nobody was allowed to criticise Coco or Cassie when Pearl was around. ‘Play nice or no cakes with the tea. I’ve got almond Danishes.’

Grammy Pearl had encouraged Coco every step of the way with her shop but, strangely, she didn’t seem as keen on the past history of garments in the way Coco was. Grammy Pearl didn’t even like talking about the past. She was more of a looking-forward person; astonishing for someone of seventy-eight, Coco thought.

But then, helping to raise your granddaughters kept a person young, as Grammy Pearl often said. She looked quite like Great-Aunt Edie in many respects: same strong chin, good bones, high forehead. But where Edie was all angles and wrinkles around her mouth from pursing it up in near-constant disapproval, Pearl’s face had the softness of the finest silk, Coco thought. Edie dyed her hair a rich and unlikely shade of brown, while Pearl’s was white as snow and clustered around her face the way it did in photos going way back. Pearl’s eyes gleamed with fun and enthusiasm, and she used face powder, lipstick and a hint of mascara every day.

Pearl was proud of everything Coco did, even if she didn’t wear vintage herself. But Coco loved to watch the expressions on her grandmother’s face on those times she visited the shop, fingering everything from recent, pre-loved things to garments that had last graced skin when the Second World War was raging through Europe.

The stocking pile was top of Coco’s agenda when she opened up that September morning. Silk stockings from that era didn’t last in any meaningful way but there were places where you could order honey silk stockings with the all-important seam up the back.

A lollipop-pink-haired fashion stylist on a mission had ransacked the stocking display the previous evening and after Coco had run an eye over her empire, she did some quick spritzing of some of the new stock to make sure it all smelled OK, then took the lock off the door to proclaim that they were open, and settled down to reorganise her stockings.

Normally she went online first thing, to Facebook and her blog, to pin up photos of her latest finds, but she needed Adriana doing front of house when she was in the back office on her laptop, and Adriana was late.

The internet was what made The Twentieth Century Boutique a success. Neither the suburban village that was Silver Bay, nor the city of Dublin itself, were big enough markets for a shop like Coco’s with its wildly diverse and often high-end stock, but with one click of a mouse, a buyer in Melbourne, Memphis or Mysore could pick up an alligator handbag, an original Biba coat or a highly sought-after Rifat Özbek bone-decorated jacket.

Coco loved the internet and the conversations with her regulars – people who didn’t buy all the time but loved to talk about what was up or something glorious they’d seen. At the moment, someone was trying to track down a strapless DVF sheath dress with an African pattern and all Coco’s efforts had come to naught. And then there was a kooky Japanese girl named Asako – a regular customer who was studying in Ireland and loved the forties – who had found a cache of cashmere twinsets but they were seriously moth-injured.

‘Time for DEFCON 4,’ posted Coco. ‘Nothing you can do except get them out of your house now before they infect everything else.’

There had been another email from Asako in her inbox the week before; somehow she had decided that Coco knew the answers to all the questions of the universe, including men.

‘He asked me to meet his parents,’ Asako wrote in her perfect English. ‘This is good, yes?’

‘Very good,’ emailed Coco. ‘Say in advance what you don’t eat, though, or else you might get a big Irish meat dinner and I know you don’t eat meat.’

She knew Asako would email to tell her how it had all gone and Coco looked forward to that. Unlike Cassie, who was so busy she didn’t really have the time for the people who thought the Keneally sisters knew the answers to everything, Coco liked being needed.

This morning, Coco listed her latest finds on her site and was just logging off when Jo, her oldest and closest friend, appeared at the door.

‘Ready for our coffee date?’

Jo worked in the secondary school around the corner and if she had a few free periods and no marking to catch up on, she sometimes dropped into Twentieth Century for a speedy coffee date. She was a tall, slim, no-nonsense woman with short hair who looked like she might possibly teach games. Instead, she was the school’s French teacher.

Coco winced. ‘Adriana got a flat tyre,’ she said, speaking of her part-time sales assistant who was finishing a Masters in film studies at night and working by day. ‘She’s due soon.’ Coco consulted her watch. It was already twenty past ten and Adriana, who’d been due at half nine, had phoned at twenty past to say she’d be a bit late. Coco pondered the fact that Adriana’s car/phone/house keys had had several mishaps during the past few months, making her very late for work, and hated herself for wondering if ill relatives would soon follow suit as excuses. It was all a bit ‘the dog ate my homework’ for Coco’s taste, but Coco was also not the sort of person who’d do anything about it.

‘Could we have coffee here?’ she asked Jo apologetically. ‘I can brew us up some but I can’t close the shop.’

‘No, I’ll rush out to the café. After fourth year French, I need something chocolatey with cream on top. Everyone has forgotten every single verb they knew before the summer holidays, nobody has settled back in yet, and there’s a lot of staring out the window and sighing. That’s just me. Do you have any decent biscuits?’

‘Gosh, don’t know. Go and look.’

As Coco worked on the stockings, Jo went in behind the counter to the office, where organised chaos reigned and a faint scent of alcohol lingered in the air.

‘Jeez, it’s like a brewery in here and it’s only half ten in the morning.’

‘I just vodka-spritzed some dresses,’ Coco explained. ‘Theoretically gross and does make the place stink in a dirty-stop-out sort of way, but it can really get rid of old smells. You spray, then leave them to air. They’re upstairs in the hall, hopefully getting infused with rose potpourri sachets, but I keep the spritzer stuff in the office.’

‘Rose potpourri sounds better than vodka sachets. I can’t go back to school smelling like I’ve been spending my free period in the pub. Can we light a candle or spray some perfume?’

‘Candles are too dangerous,’ Coco said, ‘and perfume contains oils which ruin the clothes.’

‘Are there hidden dangers in takeaway coffee since you can’t leave the shop this morning?’ Jo said.

‘No hidden dangers and safer for you, actually. I drink coffee for the safety of my customers. Without coffee, I’m dangerous.’ Coco made a vampire face and bared her small, white teeth.

Jo laughed. With that warm, engaging smile, Coco was the least vampiric person she knew. ‘As if I don’t already know, Ms Caffeine Addict. The usual? Skinny latte, two shots, one sugar, smallest cup?’

‘Yup.’

When Jo had gone, Coco dusted the counter, and then turned to pricing and listing some new stock.

Jo was her oldest friend, the one in school who’d been there the first time she’d heard about her mother.

‘Your ma left you because you were a crybaby,’ said Paula Dunne, possessor of wild, curly hair and a streak of toothpaste on her uniform. Much taller than Coco, she was already at home in the class after just a week.

Weird how you could forget vast parts of life and remember others with such clarity, Coco thought. But then, hearing that your mother had left you was the sort of thing a person remembered, no matter how small you were.

Coco had been just four: young for junior infants. She knew she didn’t have a mother but that was fine because she had Dada, Grammy Pearl and Cassie. Cassie, who was eleven, was in the big kids’ part of the school, upstairs in the final class before heading to secondary school.

‘I’ll be here for you, Squirt, if you need me,’ Cassie had said when she waved goodbye to Coco each morning outside Miss Rosen’s class, where butterflies and flowers decorated the walls and picture books filled the shelves.

But Cassie wasn’t there when Paula said those hateful words.

Coco felt her bottom lip wobble.
Don’t cry. Don’t be a crybaby.
Mummy was sick, that was why she’d gone away, and one day, Grammy said, she might be better. In the comfort of home, in the small box bedroom with the Minnie Mouse bedside light, smells of Grammy cleaning her face with that lavender cream in the next bedroom, and Cassie’s
Famous Five
books beside her bed waiting for when Cassie came up to bed, all that was security and love enough for Coco.

And now Paula was taking all that away. Coco couldn’t help it: the tears came.

‘Told you: crybaby,’ said Paula. ‘Coco’s a crybaby!’ she shouted. ‘That’s why her ma left her.’

Coco cried even harder.

Then Jo was beside her. Josephine, as she was called in those days, with a sister called Attracta and a brother named Xavier by overly religious parents. Josephine was the youngest and Attracta and Xavier were a lot older, and they’d shown her how to stand up for herself against the likes of Paula Dunne.

‘Go away, Paula!’ she shouted, hands planted on her hips the way Attracta did when she was cross.

Josephine had the best hair in the class: long and fair, held in a single Valkyrie-like plait. Everyone admired it but even the roughest boys knew it would be a mistake to pull it. Standing there, tall and strong, she looked fierce. Josephine could thump just like a boy.

Paula Dunne knew it too.

‘I was only sayin’,’ she muttered.

‘Say sorry, then,’ ordered Josephine, judge and jury.

Paula’s face screwed up with anger.

‘Say it,’ said Josephine.

Attracta had explained that some people needed to be told how to behave and the trick was to stare them down.

‘Sorry, Coco,’ muttered Paula with bad grace.

She stomped off and Coco was left alone with Josephine, who’d never so much as looked at her until then.

‘Thank you,’ mumbled Coco with a still-trembling voice.

‘Would you like to come to my house to play sometime?’ Josephine asked. She might be only young but she knew they didn’t have people home to their house much: they had no telly, the radio was only on for the news and religious programmes, and there was never any sweet cake like you got in other people’s houses. But still, Coco wouldn’t mind.

Coco looked at her saviour with slavish admiration. She nodded, her dark curls bobbing. She wasn’t up to actual speaking just yet.

Jo had been there, along with Coco’s beloved sister, Cassie, for the other big disaster in her life – the one with Red. But Coco tried not to think about Red too often. There was no point going over past dating disasters, her latest self-help book said. ‘Move on!’

Coco was doing her best to move on, although it was tricky, even after four years.

‘Move on!’ She repeated her mantra.

She’d certainly managed to move on with regards to her mother, she congratulated herself.
She
wasn’t ever coming back. People didn’t leave like that and never even so much as write a note afterwards if they were coming back.