Between Sisters (11 page)

‘The way that man looks at you …’ Pearl said happily. ‘He’s a keeper.’

It had been raining, needles of rain that had left the streets puddled with water.

Coco had avoided all Red’s phone calls since the night before.

She’d raced home after the horrible scene in the restaurant, grabbed a few things, and had driven off at high speed to stay with Jo, whom she’d ordered not to let Red in, even if he turned up.

He hadn’t.

He’d phoned. Nine times, nine messages, pleading in eight of them, until he’d ended with one cold message: ‘If you want to talk, I’ll see you tomorrow at one outside Bellamy’s. We can sort this out then. Bye, Coco.’

Not even an ‘I love you, Coco’ like in all the other messages.

Bellamy’s was the city centre restaurant where they’d met, even though they’d grown up only streets from each other.

Coco hadn’t opened the shop that morning because she’d kept crying and having to repair her make-up. But she got to the restaurant on time, wearing Jo’s raincoat, which was too big for her, and a pair of black trousers, also Jo’s, because she felt so fat and ugly, and she thought they might be slimming.

Red was sitting outside at one of the black cast-iron tables, menu ignored in front of him.

‘Why didn’t you wait for me or even listen to me?’ he said instantly, and Coco was astonished to see how angry he was.

He had the most amazing colouring: that dark red hair and the skin that tanned so easily, now darkened with anger.

‘I’m not waiting if that’s how you’re going to talk to me,’ said Coco shakily.

She didn’t move towards him so Red shoved the extra chairs out of his way to join her on the street, the screeching of cast-iron chairs alarming the two women sitting at the next table dithering over what to have for lunch.

‘You have to trust me, and if you can’t, Coco, what sort of future do we have?’ he said. ‘I can’t believe you’d rush off like that. As if I’d hurt you like that, as if I’d cheat on you …’ He stopped, as if he couldn’t manage to say anything else because the notion of his cheating was so incomprehensible.

But Coco had seen him with the other woman. That was her proof.

‘But I
saw
you! I saw you with her. She’s everything I’m not. How do I know she’s not what you want all along?’

The other woman had been tall, Bikram-yoga-lean, with well-behaved long blonde hair: the exact opposite of Coco. She surely was a model, even if Red had said she was someone he’d been asked to get a job for, and that night she’d looked like the sort of suited-and-spike-heel-booted woman who never needed to diet, never worried if her bum looked big in anything. The sort of woman who could take another woman’s man away from her.

‘I told you what happened,’ Red said fiercely. ‘I would never cheat on you, Coco. How can you not believe me?’

His hair was spiked up from his running his fingers through it and the rich mahogany red that had given him his nickname when he was a kid was darker now, the colour of beech leaves.

His voice was hard. ‘You either believe me, Coco, or you don’t.’

It had started to rain again then, a crazy monsoon-like autumn downpour, and still they had stood there, the rain making Coco’s borrowed coat cling to her and turning Red’s navy business suit to black.

‘I need you to believe me, Coco. Hell, we’re getting married in a month.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said in a whisper.

How could she? She’d seen what she had seen.

She tried to wriggle the antique ring off her finger. They’d bought it in Gray’s, the lovely family-run shop in Johnson’s Court off Grafton Street. It was an art deco-inspired square Ceylon sapphire of the palest blue in a princess cut surrounded by eight little diamonds. It felt tight so she had to pull, while Red watched her stone-faced.

‘
I
don’t want it,’ he said grimly.

Finally she wrenched the ring off and she reached out to hand it to him. He didn’t move.

‘I don’t want it,’ he said, his face harder than she thought it could ever be. ‘Don’t you hear anything I say? You don’t hear that I love you. You don’t hear that I’d never ever cheat on you.’

She dropped it at his feet, tears and rain combining as they ran down her face.

‘I don’t want it either. Give it to
her
.’

She turned and ran, blindly at first, because in her grief she wasn’t sure where she was anymore. When she reached the corner she looked back and he was standing there like a statue, as if he hadn’t moved or even picked up the ring.

Four years ago. Four years and she could still remember it as if it was yesterday. Coco rubbed away her tears with the sleeve of her beloved pink and moss-green Fair Isle cardigan and flicked the TV remote until she found the grisliest crime show she could bear.

That’s why she liked crime shows on TV: the bad people got caught and punished no matter what. In a crazy world, at least you could rely on that.

Eight

On Saturday morning, on a small hill farm in Wicklow, Phoebe McLoughlin surveyed the duck house and sighed. Giorgio, number one duck and the chattiest of the bunch, stood beside her.

‘It’s not your fault, Giorgio, I know,’ Phoebe told him. ‘Toilet training isn’t in your genetic code.’

Giorgio made his gentle murmur. He didn’t quack like the other ten ducks. He had an entire selection of noises and this one was his version of:
Sorry, nothing I can do about it, Phoebe
.

‘You know you can’t come in with me when I’m cleaning your house,’ Phoebe told him kindly.

Giorgio protested and gazed up at her.

‘No, really, you might be flattened. You know what I’m like when I’m going hell for leather. Go off, find Rocha and de-slug the garden. It rained so much last night, there must be a million slugs and snails in the lilies.’

She shoved the cap down on her head and bent enough to enter the duck house, a small stone-built shed with a galvanised roof. The ducks had low comfortable nests made of hay and the floor was scattered with fresh hay once a week. First, Phoebe had to clean it out, of course, which meant shovelling out the droppings, washing the whole place down and cleaning the nesting boxes. Her favourite part of the entire event was when it was over for another week.

Sighing, she began shovelling, doing her best to ignore the smell and send her mind off to where she liked to go when she had to clean out all the animal sheds: into the world of fashion.

Today’s daydream involved a phone call to her fabulous studio in … Phoebe’s shovel caught on the old sticking-up bit of stone floor. Caught her out every time.

In Paris, yes. Not that she’d
been
to Paris, but she’d read so much about it, had seen films about it, although she wasn’t sure that the Matt Damon one where he was an amnesiac assassin would be much help in that it showed a lot of the actual city but none of the glorious women with Gallic chic and amazing heels. Phoebe was no good with heels herself. It was the wellington boots, she thought grimly, shovelling more duck shit. Your average nineteen-year-old girl got to practise in heels but she spent much of her life in either the old clogs her mother used to wear or in wellies. Farm life in Dromolach, a small town in the Wicklow Hills, didn’t mean either the money or the opportunity for Manolo Blahniks.

But no point dwelling on the negatives. Paris …

Yes, Miss Gaga, Phoebe would be delighted to design a dress for you. She won’t work in meat, though. She’s a vegetarian. Her closest friends are cows, ducks and chickens, you know. Silk crêpe de Chine and Vionnet bias cut is more her style … She’s working on a series of designs inspired by Russian Orthodox iconography. You’d like that? Oh yes? Phoebe will start working on the gown straight away …

The duck shed took her forty-five minutes because she was doing a thorough job. She wouldn’t be home again for two weeks and Ma wouldn’t have time to do it. There was no way she and the kids were going to suffer because Phoebe was going to college in the city. If she had to get the bus home every weekend, then so be it. The city lights would have to burn brightly without Phoebe McLoughlin. The McLoughlin clan stuck together – had done ever since Dad had died.

A gentle and inquiring clucking at the door made Phoebe rub her eyes and look up.

‘Donna, pet, what’s wrong?’

If Giorgio was her favourite duck, Donna Karan was her most beloved hen. Half Silkie, half Rhode Island Red, she looked like a child’s auburn knitted pompom brought to life. Sweet, wildly bossed over by the other hens, and entirely Phoebe’s pet, Donna liked to follow Phoebe around as she did her chores.

‘Did you get thrown out of the henhouse?’

Donna clucked mournfully.

‘Honestly, girl, what are you going to do when you don’t have me to stand up for you?’ Phoebe said. She bent to stroke Donna, who cooed happily. ‘Things are going to be different and if you let the girls boss you, you’ll be miserable. I won’t be here, you know …’

Donna did a few more mournful clucks and began poking around on the floor for something edible. ‘You’ll be fine,’ Phoebe informed her firmly. ‘Everyone will be fine without me. I’ll be home in ten days and then every weekend. You won’t know I’m gone.’

‘You won’t know I’m gone,’ Phoebe said to her family as she stood, rucksack on one shoulder and her cross body messenger bag weighing her down in the kitchen the next day – leaving day. September wild flowers that her little sister, Mary-Kate, had collected for Phoebe’s special going-away dinner still sat on the scrubbed wooden table, and Prince, the sheepdog, lay under the table with his nose burrowed in his paws, canine senses registering off-the-scale human misery.

Nobody was to come to the bus station with Phoebe.

‘Tommy Joe will drive me,’ she’d said briskly, as if briskness would ward off any tears. ‘He’ll be glad of the business now the tourists are nearly gone.’

Phoebe wasn’t sure whose tears she was trying to ward off: hers or everyone else’s.

‘Mind yourself, Mary-Kate, and look after Donna for me, will you? Check her every day when you collect the eggs. She’s still getting pecked sometimes.’

Mary-Kate lifted the freckled chin that was so like her older sister’s and nodded. Her eyes, the same colour as the autumn beech leaves, were wet with tears.

‘I’ll install close circuit TV while you’re gone,’ she said with a hint of her usual sparkiness. ‘Hen TV. For those nights when there’s nothing else on the box.’

Phoebe bit her lip. ‘Brilliant idea. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it, MK,’ she said, wondering if she’d been as brave and funny at sixteen. ‘You could do that for the Young Scientist competition.’

‘Nah,’ said Ethan – fourteen, gangly and wearing the precious Man United football shirt that was too big for him. ‘She’s doing nuclear fusion. Or cooking, as she calls it.’

Mary-Kate managed a quick punch on the arm before Ethan bounced away, grinning.

‘Obviously no killing each other when I’m gone,’ Phoebe said. ‘Killing can only happen when I’m here to referee.’

Everyone held their breath. She wouldn’t be back for two weeks. Phoebe had never been away that long before, even when she’d gone to Dublin to show her portfolio to the fashion college. That had been two days and two nights and it had seemed to last forever.

Her being gone for two weeks didn’t seem right. The McLoughlin family were closer than a foursome of Siamese twins – everyone said so. They had been since the accident had taken Dan McLoughlin. The whole family never fought, always looking out for each other.

‘You’re in charge of the ducks, Ethan,’ Phoebe told her brother, moving on swiftly.

Ethan sniffed.

‘And Prince,’ Phoebe went on. ‘You’re in charge of dog food and his water bowl.’

None of this was entirely necessary because Ethan loved the sheepdog more than anyone else in the family and would have Prince sleeping in his bed, if possible. Phoebe and her mother had decided that Ethan needed to feel he was looking after someone else, and making it official that he was Prince-Minder-in-Chief was part of this plan.

‘Give him more than the ducks, Phoebs,’ Mum had said. ‘He doesn’t love the ducks the way you do. Let’s put him in charge of Prince.’

Phoebe had smiled. That was classic Mum; rearing three children single-handedly had taught her skills that would put Dr Phil to shame.

‘You’re guilty about leaving us and you shouldn’t be,’ Mum went on. ‘I lean on you too much. It’s my fault.’

Phoebe hugged her mother. She was taller now, even though Kate McLoughlin was a tall woman. Phoebe was nearly six feet in her socks and she prayed she stopped growing soon or she’d get into the
Guinness Book of Records
for something other than being the most successful fashion designer ever.

‘It’s not your fault. You don’t lean on me,’ lied Phoebe. ‘I wouldn’t be going if it wasn’t for you.’

She wouldn’t have applied to the design college if her mother hadn’t insisted.

‘You all need me,’ she’d argued. ‘Lots of people go into fashion without qualifications. I can do it over the internet and work on my pattern cutting here. I can do it—’

‘Not you, Phoebe,’ her mother said. ‘What would your dad think if he looked down now and saw me stopping you from fulfilling your potential? He’d think I’d failed, that’s what.’

Kate was flushed from playing her ace. Now she only talked about their dad on birthdays and at Christmas. Three and a half years ago, when he’d died after a tractor accident, she’d talked about him all the time.

‘Your dad would want us to get on and be happy,’ she’d say determinedly, not realising they could all see the tears about to leak down her face. Kate McLoughlin had worked hard to talk about her husband. Kids did better when they were able to face their grief, not hide it away from a distraught parent. No matter how much it hurt her, she made sure their father was still alive in their hearts even if he wasn’t there physically.

‘He’d never think you failed us, Mum,’ Phoebe said now, knowing she was beaten.

Tommy Joe’s taxi smelled strongly of car freshener in a scent that was allegedly pine. Having grown up with woods surrounding her home, the little green smelly Christmas tree hanging from the mirror smelled like nothing coniferous Phoebe had ever encountered.

‘Off to the big smoke,’ said Tommy Joe congenially, as he rattled the old Cortina at breakneck speed down the mountain lanes. ‘You’re back at the weekends, though, your mother says. Ah sure, they’ll be lost without you.’

‘They’ll be grand,’ said Phoebe, determined to stop her lip quivering. ‘They won’t know I’m gone.’

‘Well, if the snow comes, you won’t be able to get through the Sally Gap and you’ll have to stay in town,’ Tommy Joe went on. ‘It’s great living on the mountain until the bad weather comes in. Remember when that Sky television team got stuck up the mountain with their big jeep and they had to be rescued? When it snows up here, Phoebe, nothing gets through. A tractor, now …’ Tommy Joe added thoughtfully. ‘That would be your only man, but you might lose it in a ditch and then where would you be?’

Phoebe turned up the radio, tuned as ever to something country. A man with a soulful voice was singing about how his heart was broken and it would never be fixed again.

‘Now that’s a man who can sing,’ said Tommy Joe with satisfaction and all conversation stopped. It never occurred to him that his passenger’s father had died in a tractor accident.

Phoebe kept staring out the window but she wasn’t seeing anything anymore. If she reached into her bag for a tissue, Tommy Joe might notice. They had enough time for the journey to the train station for the tears to have dried on her face.

‘You don’t have much stuff, do you?’

The landlady, a stout woman in a housecoat who said her name was Mrs Costello, stared suspiciously at Phoebe’s rucksack and the cross body messenger bag. ‘I hope you won’t be skipping out without paying the rent?’

‘No,’ said Phoebe, trying to be upbeat with only a chocolate bar, a muffin and a strong coffee inside her. Her tears from earlier were gone. Here, in a small, dingy house in Delaney Gardens, was her new home, and just because Mrs Costello had clearly had bad experiences before with students didn’t mean that they should get off to a bad start.

Mrs Costello’s son, a fellow student, had shown Phoebe around the bedsit the first time in June when she’d snapped it up – despite the general air of decrepitude and the loud gurgling of the water heater in the corner.

‘Bedsits are going like flies,’ he’d informed her.

And Phoebe, who read the papers and knew that September was like the first day of the sales when it came to rented accommodation for students, had put a deposit down even though bedsit number four was hardly a palace. The clincher for her was the location: Delaney Gardens was about ten minutes’ walk from Larkin College of Art and Design, and the square itself was like a little oasis of country flowers in the middle of the city, which had made Phoebe sigh with pleasure.

The square was made up of small two-storey workers’ houses dating from the 1930s, she reckoned, with long front and back gardens and all manner of fascinating plants and shrubs. Across from this house there was a home painted an almost peppermint green with the crimson of Virginia Creeper clustering around its walls; another with cerulean windowpanes and what looked like a Venus de Milo dressed languidly in moss staring out at the central garden area, where shrubs and plants were abundant. Phoebe was sure that was a fig tree in the centre of the handkerchief-sized green. She’d never had fresh figs, never seen them grown, and couldn’t imagine they would in Ireland. Surely they were for tropical countries? But her father could have grown them: her father had had green fingers.

She dragged her gaze from the window to listen to her new landlady, who was explaining the rules, of which there were many. No men friends over. Nobody staying over at night. No parties.

Phoebe looked at the small room, where there was just enough space for a tiny old two-seater couch, a defiantly single bed, a kitchenette and an afterthought of a shower room with a toilet, all of which was jammed into a corner and cobbled together with cheap wood. The bathroom was the other bonus for her: privacy.

‘No parties, right,’ she said gravely to Mrs Costello.

It was a squeeze with the two of them in there. Phoebe was sure that if more than three people were gathered in the room, the fire brigade would have to cut one of them out.

Perhaps she might meet a troupe of acrobats and have parties with them draped in odd positions on the curtain rails. Otherwise, she was destined to sit here alone.

‘Hmm,’ said Mrs Costello, giving Phoebe the sort of look practised by suspicious customs officials scenting blocks of cocaine in people’s suitcases. ‘See you do understand,’ she said. ‘There’s no house phone,’ she went on. ‘You all have those mobiles now. Used to cost me a fortune in the old days and the phone in the hall never stopped. Nurses …’ Mrs Costello’s face went red. ‘Nurses were the worst. Always organising parties.’