Between Sisters (3 page)

Mum never talked much to the other mums.

‘They’re boring,’ she’d whisper to Cassie, except Mum didn’t whisper quietly enough and people heard her.

Cassie knew she should feel bad at the stares people gave them, but Mum didn’t care. She shook her streaky dark hair and beamed back at everyone.

In the car, Cassie got to pick what music to play and they’d sing along loudly as they sped down the road, laughing and talking. Mum’s perfume was everywhere in the car: flowers, spices and something else Cassie didn’t recognise, something uniquely Mum.

She loved her mum more than anyone else in the world but sometimes, only sometimes, late at night, Mum got angry and shouted. Her voice sounded funny too, not like Mum at all. Cassie had heard her, heard Dad shouting back, heard Coco’s cry as she woke up.

Those nights gave her a pain in her tummy and she had it now when she saw Dad waiting for her at the school gates with all the mothers. He looked sick, sort of pale, like he might fall over if he wasn’t leaning on the gate pillar.

He took her hand in his and led her over to the car, with the big dent in it where Mum had banged it.

‘Only a teeny bang,’ Mum had said happily.

‘Teeny,’ Cassie had agreed, giggling.

‘We could cover over where the paint came off with nail varnish! Pink or red?’

Cassie had giggled some more. The car was pale blue. Pink bits would be so funny – a special car, for a special mum.

As she got into the car, Cassie didn’t ask Dad why he was there. Coco wasn’t in the back seat. She was at Grammy’s, Dad said. It was the only thing he said on the whole journey. His hands were really shaky the way Mum’s sometimes were – ‘Silly Mummy with her shaky hands!’ – and Cassie didn’t ask why they were driving to Grammy Pearl’s house with the pretty green and the old tree in front instead of to their home around the corner.

Grammy was at the door, reassuringly normal and calm, and she hugged Cassie and said she had made butterfly cakes. ‘Your favourite. I had to stop Basil and Sybil from nibbling them all,’ she added, as the pugs, both black and shiny with fat pink tongues, panted up to Cassie for kisses and licks.

On the ground, encircled by soft fur, squashy bellies and adoring dogs, Cassie felt a moment of safety. Grammy would tell her what was going on. Grammy had been the one who’d said Mum and Coco had to stay in hospital for a bit when Coco was a teeny baby and had been sick. Grammy was good at minding her when things went wrong.

But Grammy said nothing all day. Not when Cassie was doing her homework, not when they were watching
Scooby Doo
and Coco was asleep in her carrycot. Not that evening when Grammy brought Cassie up to the spare bedroom that was decorated in sunflower yellows and had all Cassie’s things magically in it – her teddies, her nightlight, her jammies with the rabbit on the front, and her books.

Cassie had to ask.

‘Where’s Mum?’ she said in her quietest voice, so Coco wouldn’t hear. She didn’t want Coco to get upset, even though she was a baby and everything. She might get upset and cry again. Coco was special because she’d been so sick and Mum called her ‘my little angel’. Cassie felt a powerful need inside her to take care of Coco. She was the big sister, after all.

Grammy muttered that the pillowcase looked unironed and went to find a new one. She didn’t look at Cassie as she changed it. ‘There, all nice and ironed now.’ She paused. ‘Your mum isn’t well, Cassie, and she had to go away to get better.’

‘Go away? Without me and Coco?’

The pain in her tummy had never felt this bad: it was like something ripping her tummy into two bits, carving a hole the way the people on the television had carved a pumpkin once for Hallowe’en to show how it was done.

Grammy Pearl sat heavily on the bed.

‘It’s the best thing, Cassie.’

‘No,’ wailed Cassie, not caring about the noise. ‘It’s not the best thing! I need her. Coco needs her. Somebody made her go! She was kidnapped! She wouldn’t go, she loves us!’

Grammy Pearl hauled Cassie on to her lap and held her like she was a baby.

‘Of course she loves you; that’s why she went. Because she’s not well and she wants to be a better mum to you both.’

‘She’s the best mum!’

‘I know, I know,’ crooned Pearl as Cassie sobbed. ‘It’s the best thing, really. I promise.’

A day had gone by and Mum hadn’t come home, hadn’t even phoned. Then another day. Then a week.

Grammy said Mum would come home but Dad hadn’t. Once, only once, he’d stared at Cassie with those sad eyes and had told her the worst thing in the whole world: ‘Your mother doesn’t want us anymore, Cass – that’s the truth of it. She’s not coming home. We can be happy without her, can’t we?’

He’d hugged her then and Cassie had been afraid to cry, afraid to say ‘Noooo’, afraid to do anything but hug her father back and pretend that everything was fine, like there wasn’t this hole in her life.

Eventually nobody even talked about Mum anymore. The photo of Mum and Dad on their wedding day disappeared but Cassie found it in Dad’s room, hidden on his dressing table behind a school one of her in her grey pinafore.

She began to worry about baby Coco. What if she went too? So Cassie decided that she would never allow that to happen. Coco was her sister and if they took her, they’d have to take Cassie too. Coco was hers to mind, whatever happened. Nobody would ever hurt her or take her away.

A skinny double-shot cappuccino in one hand, Cassie entered Larousse Events via the revolving door and made her way to the lifts, drinking some of her coffee, hoping it would work its magic. She’d been awake in the middle of the night due to thirteen-year-old Lily having a nightmare, and Cassie had ended up spending an hour in her younger daughter’s bed, hugging her until the night terror was over.

‘There are no monsters, honey,’ she’d said, holding Lily tightly until the shaking stopped. ‘Mummy’s here with you; you’re safe, Lily.’

The holding always worked. Like swaddling an infant, Cassie thought. It had taken a while to work out what seemed to calm Lily.

‘I used to put a cool cloth on your arms and legs and the cold gently took you out of it without really waking you up,’ Grammy Pearl had explained when Lily first started the nightmares.

Nightmares in children could be genetic but Cassie couldn’t remember having them until her mother had left. Maybe she was wrong. Her memory of those days was hazy now. She didn’t remember what from that time was the truth anymore.

But she knew one thing for certain: she couldn’t imagine what would ever make her leave her children.

There had to have been something wrong with her mother, hadn’t there? Not just the addiction. That’s what Pearl had finally, grudgingly, told her about when Cassie had begged to know – the drinking and the drunk driving. There had to be something more. Because any mother who really loved her kids would sober up and come home. No mother could leave her kids forever.

Except for Cassie and Coco’s mother, Marguerite Keneally, who’d had a family and a home and who’d packed her bags one day and had never returned.

There were no photos of her in the house in Delaney Gardens where Pearl lived alone with her darling pug; no memories whatsoever. It was as if Pearl, who talked and laughed about everything, had done her best to remove Marguerite from her granddaughters’ memories because she thought the memory of a long-lost mother would break them. It was enough that their father had died permanently mourning his wife. Pearl had decided that Marguerite could do less damage if she were forgotten.

In the office lift, Cassie tried to summon up her game face. Broken sleep seemed to be worse than no sleep at all. Shay and Beth had slept through it all. The double shot in her cappuccino might help and she hoped she’d get a few moments in the office to let her hair dry and let the caffeine sink in before the phone started.

Larousse Events – ‘We Make Your Imagination a Reality’ – had a quarter of a floor to themselves in an office block in the financial district. One half was executive offices and an imposing reception that had been designed to look like the lobby of an expensive boutique hotel and which was beloved of the company boss and owner, Loren Larousse.

‘First impressions are vital,’ she intoned as the staff worked out how much the original art on the walls cost and wondered how the cost of it had affected Loren’s decision to cut bonuses that year.

The rest of their part of the fifth floor was a warren of tiny offices and cubicles where the work actually went on.

Cassie, as a senior organiser, had her own office close to the huge meeting room which Cassie’s friend Belinda called ‘the place where ideas went to die’.

Loren Larousse – which had to be a made-up name for a girl from Dublin, but nobody had ever managed to get their eyes on her passport as ultimate proof – had set up Larousse Events twenty years ago and viewed the company not so much as her baby but as her own private fiefdom.

In the media, she was much vaunted as a female entrepreneur who loved to hire women. In private and within the tight-knit industry, she was an equal opportunities employer: capable of being a complete bitch to both men and women.

Whenever she sat at a meeting in the huge boardroom with its vast ceiling-to-floor windows, Cassie dreamed of pushing Loren out.

‘We all think you’re a witch, so let’s see if you can fly!’ she’d say gleefully.

But that was bolshie Cassie speaking, the nineteen-year-old girl who’d been full of who’s-going-to-make-me attitude. Modern Cassie, who was tying herself in knots to be the perfect mother, perfect wife and perfect career woman, would never say such a thing.

It was now 8.15 and the Larousse Events staff were just getting in, hanging up coats, checking how many zillion emails had uploaded in the night, hoping for a few penile enlargement ones or lonely girls with unlikely names who wanted to be their best friends because they could happily be deleted.

Cassie’s head ached as she thought of the day ahead. Her workload today included the final stages of setting up a conference in a large hotel west of the city, where it transpired the spa was going to be out of order during the three-day conference the following week.

‘They’ll be too busy to be in the spa,’ blustered the hotel’s manager the day before, a new hire who made Cassie long for his predecessor, who’d made everything run smoothly.

‘Theoretically they might be too tired to use the mini-bar, but it will be stocked in every room, won’t it?’ Cassie had replied. ‘We need this sorted out or we’ll have to discuss pulling the conference,’ she added.

That was utterly last resort stuff. Everywhere would be booked. The company needed a big hotel and really big conference hotels in Dublin were short on the ground.

She was thinking how she’d call him first thing to see if he’d come up with a solution, and knew she’d have to drive out there to talk in person, when she spotted Belinda, her closest work colleague and possibly second-best friend on the planet, walking back from the ladies’ room, handbag in hand.

Belinda was ying to Cassie’s yang – a tall, cool blonde, keen on silk T-shirts, sharp skirts and
Vogue
-editor heels, as well as done-every-month highlights and blood-red manicures. Cassie was petite, had dark curly hair like her sister Coco, and taming it into work mode was easier when she could corral it back into a loose knot without actually doing much in the way of brushing it. Brushing caused lethal 220-volts frizz.

While Coco was the sister who wore vintage and lived in fifties cinched-in dresses, Cassie’s wardrobe veered towards the androgynous, with loose modern jackets and trousers. Never skirts. Never heels. Heels were girlie and Cassie was not. Being her sister’s protector from the age of seven meant Cassie had been the ultimate tomboy and she still was, she sometimes thought.

Instead, Coco was the girlie one with the bow-shaped lips and dimple on one side. Cassie had a strong chin, deep-set grave eyes and a serious problem with freckles: cute on kids, but not so cute on late-thirty-something career women.

Sometimes she wondered if she’d got those freckles from her mother because nobody else in the family had them except Beth, but because there were almost no photos of Marguerite, she’d never know. Her memories of her mother had faded to that memory of perfume in the car, something spicy she’d never been able to identify because it wasn’t there fully in her consciousness, just hidden beneath the surface.

When she closed her eyes, though, Cassie was sure she could smell it: something exotic, reminding her of a Moroccan souk with spices, heady oud and vanilla.

‘What do you think?’ Belinda asked in a murmur as they fell into step beside each other. ‘It’s a new foundation,’ she continued, gesturing to her perfect skin. ‘Said to last forever and make me young and dewy. Or something along those lines. I don’t know why I believe that crap, actually, but they sucker me in every time. Advertising works.’

Cassie smiled.

At forty-one, Belinda was three years older than Cassie, but had one older son who was unlikely to have woken her in the night since he was away at college. She actually did look pretty dewy but that was down to facials, IPL lasers and a new thing called jet flushing that cost as much as a week’s food shop, and apparently you needed six in a row to get any result at all. Cassie knew she would never be getting flushed unless her numbers on the lottery came up.

‘You look fabulous,’ she told her friend truthfully. ‘Are you still using that magic concealer pen to get rid of under-eye circles?’

‘Yup. Fakes eight hours’ sleep.’ Belinda was single and liked her own space, but not all the time. Gentlemen callers were welcome as long as they knew when to go home. Men messed up the towels.

Cassie used to wonder if Belinda was lonely. But then she realised that these days,
she
was sometimes lonely, and she was married with kids. Maybe those date-night people were onto something.

‘Can I borrow the magic concealer pen?’ Cassie asked.

‘Lily had a nightmare?’

‘Yes. Can’t you tell? I’m trying to eradicate it with caffeination before Loren sees me and rips me in two for appearing in the office looking less than perfect.’