Between Sisters (32 page)

Oh, the relief when she drank it, like finding that safe haven again. She could handle this, she thought, watching Cassie asleep in her baby basket. It was just a little drink to tide her over.

But one little drink quickly became more. Marguerite began to worry that Pearl would notice. She needed it, she felt. Taking care of a baby was hard work. Sometimes at night, when she couldn’t sleep and all the shameful memories were rolling around in her head of the crazy life she’d had before she met Jim, a drink or two helped calm her.

Living with her mother-in-law meant it was difficult getting rid of the bottles, but Marguerite managed it. She smuggled them out in Cassie’s pram, and if sometimes Pearl looked up when she heard a rattle, she never said anything.

Marguerite would have hated Pearl to find out. She desperately wanted Pearl and Bernie to approve of her. To think she was a good mother. And she
was
a good mother. She did everything for Cassie. She loved her and adored her.

The mother and baby group didn’t really work out. Marguerite didn’t fit in. It was strange hanging around with a group of women who seemed to have come from ordinary, happy families. All smiling and talking about mothers coming round to help and sisters babysitting.

‘And what about you, Marguerite?’ they’d say.

‘Well, I’ve got Pearl and Bernie,’ she’d say, ‘and they’re so good to me.’

‘But your own family?’

‘They live down the country. They can’t get up: a farm, you know.’

‘Oh,’ everyone said, as if that explained everything.

Life went on. She and Jim got their own home. Marguerite adored her daughter and tried so hard not to drink. She could go months without touching a drop, but then she’d give in and buy a bottle of gin, sink into its depths and forget who she was all over again. There would be rows with Jim, screaming, recriminations, and then her promises never to do it again.

And then she fell pregnant again.

‘Please, darling,’ Jim said, holding her quivering body when she told him the news. ‘Let’s try again. Let’s make this work.’

‘I won’t hurt her, you know I won’t,’ vowed Marguerite.

Coco was nearly a year old and Marguerite hadn’t had a single drink since she’d become pregnant. Everything in life was perfect: Cassie, baby Coco, her husband, everything. It had been so long since she’d had a drink, Marguerite had told herself she didn’t have a problem: that was in the past, she was better now. And then Niamh had phoned.

Niamh, who’d been her closest friend in Dublin when they’d shared a flat on Capel Street, when Marguerite worked in a café. Niamh now worked in a club in town where the glamorous society people went to let their hair down.

‘Come on out,’ Niamh begged. ‘It’s boring without you, Marguerite. We need a bit of fun.’

Tentatively, Marguerite went to Jim.

‘I don’t have to go,’ she said. ‘I won’t stay out long. I’ll be back to give Coco her last bottle.’

She and her husband gazed into each other’s eyes. She was telling the truth and he believed her.

She dressed up and brought her make-up in her handbag so she could apply it on the bus. Jim had never been one for make-up, even though he’d fallen for her when she’d been wearing plenty of it. But it was as if now that she was a mother, she was to be somehow different.

They went to one of the clubs where some of Niamh’s friends worked.

‘We’ll get in here for nothing,’ she’d said, bringing them down dodgy steps into a place that was only just opening up. ‘We could eat here,’ she said thoughtfully, then she and Marguerite had looked at each other and laughed.

‘You’re right,’ agreed Niamh. ‘Why waste our money on food. The wine is brutal here but we’ll get it very cheap: I know the barman.’

‘I should be careful,’ said Marguerite. She had so much to lose, after all. She was different now. Mother to two beautiful girls. She would not risk it all on too much alcohol. She would control what she drank.

And then had come that ripple of cool on her tongue, sliding inside her, the first taste of wine. All rational thought went out the window.

The wine came, and then gin.

Gin was the thing that brought Marguerite to that special place where she stopped caring, where the fear wasn’t there anymore. She looked hazily at the bar and the bottles ranged up behind the barman, and wondered what she’d have next. She wanted to be totally numb.

‘Come on up and dance,’ said Niamh as night turned to the wee small hours of the morning.

‘No, I have to go home now, it’s late, the baby and everything,’ mumbled Marguerite, who was very drunk. She hadn’t meant to have that much. How had this happened? She felt so dizzy, and where was her handbag?

‘You’re allowed one night out. You’re not glued to that house,’ said Niamh, and pulled her up to dance, so they danced. Danced and partied and drank with all sorts of men, and somehow Marguerite had ended up in a hotel room, waking up at six in the morning with no clothes on and a man she didn’t recognise naked and snoring beside her.

The room looked like it had been trashed. There were drink bottles everywhere, Niamh lay on a couch half in and half out of her clothes, her skin a mottled colour in the grey dawn.

Marguerite felt a shudder go through her, a shudder of shame and self-loathing. What had happened here? Oh God, Jim would be so worried. She had ruined everything. She moved, but the pain in her head was monstrous.

She ran to the bathroom and threw up violently. It wasn’t the first time she’d thrown up in there, she realised, as she looked at the vomit all around the loo. Somehow she gathered herself together, pulled on her clothes and went out into the world, looking ridiculous in her night-time black tights and dress with a flimsy little cardigan and the make-up sliding down her eyes.

She had only just stopped Jim throwing her out.

She’d stayed at Niamh’s, she told him. The wine had made her sick. It was only that.

Somehow he believed her, but the fear made her go back to the off-licence and buy gin the way she used to. The gin would help her cope with the fear of Jim finding out about that dreadful night where she’d blacked out with alcohol.

No longer living with Pearl, she had nobody to hide her drinking from during the day. She’d worked her way through that bottle, and then another. And then came that last day, that terrible day when she’d crashed the car with both her beloved children in it.

She’d picked Cassie up from school and little Coco was firmly in her carrycot, seat belt tightly around it. It was sheer fluke that Cassie was in the back of the car with her sister. If she’d been in the front, she could easily have been flung out through the windscreen on to the street. Marguerite was white with shock thinking of Cassie’s tiny body lying bloodless on the street, instead of sitting in the back seat, crying with fear and shock.

The man in the other car was angry because it was all Marguerite’s fault. He was angrier when he got closer to her and could smell the booze on her breath.

‘I’m calling the guards,’ he’d roared, so Marguerite clambered back into the car and drove off.

They were waiting for her when she got home: Pearl and Jim. Some neighbour had seen it all, seen Marguerite careening down the hill near Mill House Road, had waited for the accident.

‘She knew you were drunk, knew you were going to crash, and she couldn’t wait to tell us,’ Jim had hissed. ‘You had the kids in the car, Marguerite. What were you thinking?’

It was like an inquisition, then; her lovely, gentle Jim suddenly the grand inquisitor. She thought she’d concealed it from him these past months. But they had found the bottles and half-bottles of gin she thought she’d hidden cleverly around the house, and worse, Pearl took Coco from Marguerite’s arms and wouldn’t let her hold her.

‘You’re not able to take care of these babies,’ said Pearl with an anxiety Marguerite had never heard before. ‘You have to get help now. There are places you can go, Marguerite. We can help you.’

‘I’m not helping her,’ shouted Jim. ‘She’s not coming near my kids any more. She’s a drunk, and who knows what else.’

He didn’t sound like the Jim she knew: he sounded possessed with rage and disgust. It was all her fault, Marguerite thought, distraught. All hers. The shame rose up like bile in her throat and she knew she could never, ever make up for this.

‘Mama!’ said Coco, and they all turned to look at her, her little face pale with all the shouting.

Pearl shot a look at both Jim and Marguerite. ‘It’s all fine, baba,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you your snack.’ In a low voice, she whispered to the other adults: ‘We’ll deal with this tomorrow.’

Marguerite had hugged her small daughter, feeling as if she might break. They’d take her children off her now for sure. And at that moment, she craved a long, cool drink, pure alcohol to take away the fear.

The evening passed in a blur, and though she managed to be up for the children in the morning, she knew Jim was angry at her because he hadn’t come into her bed.

It was when Cassie was at school and Coco was down for a nap that Jim struck.

‘You’ve got to get out now, you crazy bitch,’ he said, his face harsh with loathing.

‘Jim,’ reproved Pearl.

‘You want her to kill the kids?’ Jim hissed.

‘No, but we can’t treat her like this … Marguerite, you need help—’

‘Help as far away from us as possible,’ Jim said. ‘I’ll pack your bag, get out now. And don’t come back, we don’t need you.’

‘
No!
’ sobbed Marguerite, trying to rush upstairs to grab Coco for a hug, but Jim held her back.

‘You touch them and I’ll call the police and tell them about yesterday. Your blood alcohol level must have been off the scale. You’ll rot in jail and will never see your daughters.’

‘Oh, Marguerite, you have to get help,’ Pearl said, distraught herself at this confrontation.

‘Stay out of this, Mother,’ Jim said. ‘I won’t have this drunk around my kids.’

He shoved Marguerite to the door and left her outside, the door shut.

A few minutes later, he opened it with a suitcase for her.

‘Take that. Get sober, don’t, whatever. I don’t care. The moment you nearly killed my children, you ceased to exist for me.’

Only the sips of gin she’d taken that morning gave her any warmth and allowed her to move down the pathway, out into Delaney Gardens and away.

Nineteen

DUBLIN

Cassie had never known that a house could feel so lonely, even though there were still three human beings in it; four living creatures, if you counted Fluffikins, which she couldn’t because Fluffikins was currently hiding on top of the wardrobe, as he did most of the time now, and refused to come down at all.

Clearly he’d loved Shay after all and was suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

We all are,
thought Cassie miserably.

Without Shay, the house felt so incredibly strange. The balance had shifted. They weren’t a family anymore; they were something fractured and broken.

When she was feeling angry and self-righteous, she told herself things like:
It’s his fault. He chose his mother over me, so what did he expect? Me to welcome him with open arms and say: ‘Yes, darling, of course we can move house to accommodate your mother. Pick your mother over me any time. I don’t mind.’

When she was feeling sad, which was far more often, she thought of what a huge mistake she’d made. This throwing Shay out had brought nothing but pain.

She must have been mad, she thought, which was exactly what Coco had said to her.

‘You did what?’ Coco had said the next day when Cassie had phoned her with the news. ‘You just threw Shay out? Cassie, haven’t we gone through enough mad behaviour in our lives without adding to it!’

‘I know,’ Cassie said tearfully.

‘Antoinette can’t help herself,’ went on Coco. ‘She’s one of those women who needs a man around, and since there’s nothing there for her romantically, she wanted Shay back. You should have handled her much more diplomatically and organised some family things so she saw you all as a family unit. Letting Shay go off to hers all the time made her think you didn’t want him. Shay was only trying to do the right thing …’

‘When did you get so wise, oh Great One?’ demanded Cassie bitterly.

‘Since I’ve had to cope with Jo’s stroke, taking care of Fiona, sorting out Jo’s benefits for her rehab, investigating grants for fixing up her place, and firing staff members,’ said Coco. ‘What does Pearl say?’

‘That’s the totally weird thing,’ Cassie said. ‘I rang her before I rang you and she kept saying she was so sorry, like it’s all her fault.’

‘Odd,’ remarked Coco. ‘Have you spoken to Shay today?’

‘No,’ said Cassie. ‘It’s up to him to talk to me first.’

‘What, are we in school now?’

‘You are no help,’ said Cassie.

‘On the contrary, I want you to see sense, Cass. You love Shay and he loves you. Don’t let Antoinette’s crisis get in the middle of that.’

Cassie and Shay’s bed, which she always thought was too small before because there wasn’t enough room for either of them to sprawl out and they always ended up spooned next to each other at night, had actually turned out to be too big to sleep in on her own.

Not that she slept. When she got into bed, Shay’s pillows seemed to look at her reproachfully, if pillows could look. Everything in the room seemed to be reproaching her for her behaviour, from the book Shay had been reading, left spine cracked open on his bedside table, to his aftershave in the bathroom. She’d remembered to fling his toothbrush into the carry-on bag but not his aftershave, and now she couldn’t touch it to shove it into a drawer, out of sight.

Weirdly, she thought she could smell it, which was ludicrous because she hadn’t sprayed it anywhere, and yet that scent, so evocative of her husband, seemed to linger in the air.

Like her mother’s old scent had been evocative and held sway over her.

Her blasted mother, Cassie thought bitterly. It all came back to that, to her leaving all those years ago.

Cassie wondered if she was going entirely mad. Was it genetic? Who knew? She had no mother to compare herself with. Maybe that
was
what had happened with her mother and her dad, and Pearl just hadn’t wanted to explain when Cassie and Coco had been old enough to understand.

How could you say to a seven-year-old child: ‘Your mum has gone crazy and she’s leaving because it’s safer that way’?

Cassie wondered what it would be like to go mad, to feel yourself lose your grip on reality, because that’s what she felt like so much of the time now. She tried really hard at home to be normal, but what was normal anyway?

The girls were devastated. Lily was quiet and tearful, casting sad glances at her mother, glances that said she blamed Cassie for everything. Not that she said as much. She barely said anything.
Yes, no, thank you
. She wasn’t eating much either, her little Lily who used to be able to consume the whole fridge and then come back and ask was there any Chunky Monkey ice cream in the freezer.

Cassie was trying to watch Lily carefully to see if she was getting thinner, but winter was coming and Lily was responding to the increasing cold by wrapping herself in big jumpers. She had one of her father’s that she wore non-stop: a big, cream, soft Aran thing that Pearl had knitted for him once and which Shay had only worn when it was incredibly cold because it was so warm. It was far too big for slender Lily.

‘Why are you wearing that, darling?’ Cassie had asked once, and then wished she could take back the question because how stupid was that?

‘It’s Dad’s. I like wearing things of Dad’s,’ said Lily, and she’d run from the room, her sobs audible as she ran up the stairs.

Beth had taken an entirely different approach: she was stroppy and angry.

‘I don’t know what’s going on but I know you couldn’t have sorted it out like normal people. That’s what you’re always telling me, isn’t it? To be a grown-up, to be responsible, and to think before you do anything. Well, did you think before you threw Dad out? Not bloody likely. You didn’t think at all.

‘Don’t curse,’ said Cassie, hypocritically because she cursed the whole time in her head now; cursed Shay and Antoinette and her own bloody-mindedness.

‘I’ll curse if I want to. If you can act stupidly then so can I. Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ said Beth, glaring at her mother, daring her to reprimand her.

‘I said please don’t curse.’

Once Cassie would have jumped on her elder daughter for using such language, but she’d long ago lost the high moral ground. Then she noticed Beth was wearing a leather jacket that Cassie had never seen before, and she was carrying her little rucksack, the cool Superdry one she used when she went out.

‘Where are you going?’ Cassie asked shrilly. ‘It’s eight o’clock at night. You should be finishing your homework and having a shower.’

‘I’m going out,’ said Beth, and her voice was antagonistic.

‘What do you mean “out”?’ demanded her mother.

‘
Out
out,’ said Beth. ‘If you can do mad things, then so can I. I’m going out, OK? I might go and see my father, wherever he is, or I might go out and drink too much and take drugs and do something crazy.’

‘Beth Reynolds, you will do no such thing,’ said her mother grimly.

‘Oh yeah, watch me,’ hissed Beth, and she was gone, another door slammed.

Cassie ran after her but Beth had been faster. Cassie ran down the path and looked each way up the street but there was no sign of her daughter. Where had she gone? Into the lane where Cassie and Shay told Beth never to walk at night? She was only fifteen, after all.

Oh Lord, who knew what she was going to do now.

Think, Cassie, think.

She ran inside, fumbled for her phone and rang Beth’s mobile. It went straight to voicemail, with a cheery Beth from what seemed like a long time ago happily saying: ‘Leave a message!’
Think
, where else would she go?

She dialled Mel, Beth’s closest friend, and that too went straight to voicemail. Beth liked to joke that Mel was on her phone so much that she hardly ever answered an actual call, she just had to return them.

Cassie left a message. ‘Mel, please ring me back, it’s Cassie. I’m worried about Beth. She’s left the house and she won’t tell me where she’s going. Please ring me if she gets in, OK? It’s a school night. Just … please, thank you.’ She hung up.

Next she rang Mel’s mother, who answered the phone on the third ring. In the background was the sound of television and the rattling of dishes being loaded into the dishwasher.

‘Deirdre, it’s Cassie. I’m just wondering, could you tell me if Beth turns up there?’ said Cassie, knowing how pathetic she sounded. ‘We had a row and she ran out.’ There was no time for false pride here.

‘Hi Cassie,’ said Deirdre. ‘I know things are tough round your place at the moment. I’ll ask Mel. Hold on.’

Cassie waited on the phone, feeling the pain and anxiety of a woman forced to wait on the phone for a perfect mother to check if an imperfect woman’s daughter was there.

Finally Deirdre returned. ‘Mel says Beth’s on her way over. I’ll get Ivan and Mel to go and meet her at the bottom of the road. Don’t worry, as soon as she comes in I’ll call you. If I can do anything …?’ Deirdre’s voice trailed off and Cassie felt the tears spring to her eyes.

‘There’s nothing anyone can do, but thank you. As long as you tell me when she comes in so I know she’s OK.’

‘If she wants to sleep over tonight will that be all right?’ said Deirdre.

‘Sleepover on a school night?’ said Cassie.

‘They’ve been planning it and I told both of them that they needed to run it by you. I figured with all the hassle you were having at the moment you’d be fine with it. I’m sorry, I should have thought to ring you. I … I just didn’t want to bother you in case you thought I was phoning looking for gossip.’

‘I wouldn’t think that of you,’ Cassie said honestly, although she knew plenty of other women at the girls’ school would be turning the handle of the gossip mill with the juicy news about the Reynolds’ break-up. Deirdre wasn’t one of them. ‘That’s fine, she can stay over. Thank you, Deirdre.’

Ten minutes later, her phone rang and Cassie leapt to it.

‘She’s here. She looks a bit miserable but I’ve put some pizza on and we’ve got the blow-up bed in Mel’s room. They’ll be fine. I’ll keep an eye on them. There’ll be no sneaking out, don’t worry. I run a tight ship here,’ Deirdre said with a hint of pride in her voice.

‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ said Cassie gratefully before she hung up.

She used to run a tight ship herself, but not anymore. Now she ran a sinking ship.

‘Mum?’

Cassie looked up.

Lily stood in her mother’s bedroom door carrying her pillow and a teddy she normally slept with in bed, but which rarely came out from under her bedclothes anymore. With her sad eyes, her hair fluffed up around her face and her downturned lips, she looked about ten instead of the self-confident teen she seemed to be most of the time now.

‘Can I sleep with you?’

Coco and Fiona had got into a routine, the sort of routine that Coco remembered her sister talking about. She’d never really experienced it before. Even on those times when she’d babysat Lily and Beth when Shay and Cassie had gone away for a weekend, there’d been an air of fun about the whole thing, a sense of unreality about getting everyone up for school, putting out cereal and driving them to school. It had been exciting, play-acting. But there was nothing of the play-acting about her relationship with Fiona now, and yet it was still fun. Somehow Fiona had fitted perfectly into Coco’s apartment, despite her vast selection of cuddly toys, dolls, books and comic books, shoes, and clothes

The morning routine was simple: Coco would wake early and would get up, make herself coffee and put on the radio to the bright sparkly music channel that Fiona liked. There was no more news and doom and gloom on the radio in the mornings. Fiona had enough doom and gloom in her life, and Coco was now operating to an entirely different set of standards. She’d go in and wake her goddaughter, normally by climbing into bed with her and tickling her and having Fiona moan, ‘No, stop, stop,’ until finally she woke up and could really get into tickling back, trying to wriggle down the bed so she could get to Coco’s feet, which were her tickliest bit ever.

‘OK, pax, pax,’ Coco would shriek, and they’d hug and get up, laughing.

Fiona was a morning person. Full of energy and conversations and questions.

‘If you added up all the people in the world and put them in Ireland, would they fit?’ she might ask. ‘Or do dogs go to heaven when they die? Do rabbits go? Is there a different heaven for rabbits and dogs? Because dogs and rabbits don’t like each other and would the dogs chase the rabbits?’

In the beginning, Coco had had no idea how to answer these questions.

‘I don’t really know,’ she’d say to Fiona, floundering. ‘I mean, I’ve never really thought about that.’ But now she made a stab at the questions. ‘All the people in the world on the island of Ireland – so that’s, let’s see, seven billion. Ah no,’ she said, ‘I don’t see that working at all; we’d all be terribly squashed. You’d have to have people getting piggybacks on top of other people, and what about all the babies? They’d have to be held up really high so they weren’t squished. And think of the lakes and rivers: people might get wet feet. No, that’s not going to work at all. Why?’

Fiona would look at her with those deep, little girl eyes and say: ‘Dunno, just wondering.’

The dog and the rabbit heaven one was a serious one because of the conversation about getting a dog. A conversation that Fiona had certainly not forgotten. Coco knew that once you made a promise to a child, you did not break it, so they were investigating pug puppies belonging to a friend of Pearl’s one evening that week.

‘I don’t know what colour I’d like,’ said Fiona, ‘but I s’pose it wouldn’t matter what colour we get because we’ll love it anyway. Mum’s talked about when you and Cassie were small and you had black pugs, and I thought they sounded so cute. I’ve seen pictures of black pugs but I’d be OK if it wasn’t a black pug because Daisy’s a lovely silvery, pearly colour and I love her, so it doesn’t really matter because it’s about how much you love them, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Coco, gravely trying to clear up the table because, despite her best efforts, the chocolate cereal would somehow have been spilled everywhere.