Between Sisters (26 page)

She swung into the coffee shop en route and picked up a takeaway for herself and one for Adriana. They could have a chat, look over the website and Facebook page, and then discuss plans. Coco was thinking about all of this as she walked down the road. When she reached Twentieth Century and found it shut with the shutters down, she did a double take.

What?

She looked at her watch. Half twelve. The shop was supposed to open at ten but there was no ‘back in five minutes’ sign hanging anywhere, no lights on, shutters still down. Adriana hadn’t opened up yet.

Gritting her teeth, Coco put both coffees on the step, opened up the shutters and, standing back, cast a cold, hard eye over the front of the premises. The windows, which she often cleaned herself after bad weather despite the window cleaner coming once a week, were grimy. The shop displays were exactly the same as she’d left them, although Adriana had sworn blind that she’d redone them with one funky 1960s window and the other a window of models in pre-war suits. She’d emailed every single detail to Adriana, who’d replied perkily and said:
No problem, consider it done.

Consider it not done,
thought Coco furiously.

She opened up and went inside. The place smelled musty and of old sweat – a constant problem when you sold vintage clothes. If clothes weren’t treated carefully when they came in, they would remain musty and sweaty, but Coco went to such effort to revitalise everything she sold. She kept the whole place freshly smelling at all times because nothing put customers off vintage more than to enter into a dusty, smelly place – like this, she realised, seeing nothing but dusty counters, dirty glass on the cabinets and cobwebs dangling from corners. It was like a grimy veil had been thrown over her beautiful jewel of a shop. She wanted to scream with fury at Adriana.

Sipping her coffee, she threw the other one down the sink and found her cleaning clothes, where she kept them in a cupboard upstairs along with the mops, window-cleaning stuff, alcohol sprays for clothes, and essential oils for use on the floor in truly desperate times.

She’d just changed when she thought of the girl Pearl had mentioned to her: someone who was studying fashion in Larkin College and was looking for part-time work.

Texting Pearl, she asked for the girl’s details, and Pearl, who was a whizz with her phone because her poker friend Peter was a fan of technology and had shown her how to use it, texted Phoebe’s details straight back.

I’ve just got Gloria on board and she says she’d love to meet her and, if all goes well, she could move in on Friday,

Pearl added.

Lovely girl. They’ll get on a like a house on fire and it will do Gloria the power of good.

Hopefully she could do the shop the power of good too, Coco thought grimly.

She printed up a sign:

Shop closed for renovations
Open Wednesday
30% discounts!

And then she stuck it on the front door, which she then locked.

She sent a quick text to the girl, Phoebe, asking her if she still wanted part-time work and if so, could she do a trial in the shop as soon as college was over today. Then Coco began to clean up.

Phoebe and Ian were sharing a coffee in the college canteen. Phoebe was wearing her newly renovated jacket from the vintage shop along with a skirt Ian had made for her: a draped grey jersey masterpiece he insisted he’d run up from some fabric he had lying around. It clung and pulled her in in all the right places, going wonderfully well with the fitted jacket and her biker boots.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ she’d said with passionate gratefulness when he’d given it to her.

‘Wanted to drag you out of the misery pit,’ said Ian, pleased and then taken aback when Phoebe had hugged him fiercely in front of everyone.

‘Stop. People will think I’m straight,’ he’d hissed.

By ‘people’ he meant a second-year graphic design student he fancied, who still had barely noticed that Ian existed.

‘There are so many gay guys around here, Mr Graphic Design hasn’t even spotted me yet,’ grumbled Ian, who was thinking of having a pink streak put in his hair so he could rise above the competition.

Ian refused to hang out with the fashion fag hags who just wanted someone to go shopping with. ‘They have this TV show vision of gay men,’ he said mournfully. ‘They think it’s all squealing over Instagram and what Kim Kardashian is doing. None of them are into design at all or understand that I’m a serious artist with more ambition than hanging out in clubs and pretending to be a designer. There.’ He tweaked the skirt a bit on Phoebe. ‘Those are not the ideal boots, I should add. You need something flat and sedate with perhaps a hint of zebra, just a hint. But shoes are beyond me right now. Give me time. And cheer up, babes.’

She’d been so miserable since coming back from Wicklow, and realising how impossible a task her mother was living with every day, that Ian had been racking his brains trying to cheer her up.

It was proving difficult.

‘I’ll have to leave college,’ Phoebe said tearfully. ‘I can’t leave Mum to run the farm all by herself. It will kill her. She needs someone to look after Ethan and Mary-Kate too. Ethan will fall behind with his homework if he isn’t overseen, Mary-Kate is fragile since Dad died, and they need my money from the pub coming in or they’ll never survive.’

‘Please don’t say that,’ Ian begged. ‘You’re a brilliant designer – you have to stay.’

‘Not according to that bitch over there,’ said Phoebe, all the hurt coming up now.

One of the fashion bitches had been particularly horrible about Phoebe’s latest design in pattern cutting, and had made subtle cow noises whenever Phoebe came near, to imply that Phoebe had better return to her farm.

Ian, valiant in defending his friend, had sauntered over and said to the girl: ‘Tell me, how you do your hair to hide the horns, sweetie?’ in such a saccharine voice that the whole place had erupted into laughter and Ms Bitch had been the one to turn puce with embarrassment.

‘Ignore her,’ Ian said now. ‘She’s just jealous. Couldn’t design her way out of a paper bag. You, Ms McLoughlin, have talent, and don’t let anyone scare you away. There’s got to be a way to sort things out for your mum. We simply need to figure it out.’

Pearl’s friend, Gloria, still hadn’t rung about meeting her, and Mrs Costello had been particularly poisonous when Phoebe had been leaving her bedsit this morning.

‘Are you sure you aren’t having men staying over?’ Mrs Costello had said, accosting Phoebe at the front door, eyes beadily looking Phoebe up and down as if she had ‘harlot’ painted on her somewhere.

Ian had slept over one night, but he was like her brother. Still, no point saying that to Mrs Costello, who was probably homophobic to add to her other flaws.

‘There’s no room for men in my bedsit,’ she’d replied tartly. ‘No room for anyone.’

‘Don’t get snappy with me, missy,’ snapped back Mrs Costello. ‘I can have you out in a flash, believe me.’

So when two texts pinged in – one from Pearl asking her to meet her friend, Gloria, and one from Pearl’s granddaughter, Coco, asking her if she could come for a trial in the shop – Phoebe could barely believe it.

‘Look!’ she squealed, showing Ian. ‘A job and hopefully somewhere to stay!’

‘Well, paint me pink and mail me to Ballydehob,’ said Ian. ‘Guess you’re not going home after all, Dorothy!’

Such was her desperation for the job that Phoebe texted Coco saying she’d be there by two, which meant cutting the colour appreciation class.

‘You know more about colour than old Murcheson,’ said Ian, naming the lecturer giving the class. ‘Go. I’ll get the notes for you. Just remember: blue and green should never be seen – unless you’re a designer, when the rules don’t apply and the wilder the better. Just ask Roberto Cavalli. Have fun.’

Coco had moved at least a quarter of the stock upstairs – an exhausting job – and was about to start on the other side of the shop when the door opened.

‘Helloo!’ said a voice.

Adriana.

Coco looked at her watch, which said ten to two – almost four hours after Adriana was being paid to open up. Coco had gone online and found that keeping the shop clean and tidy, and redoing the window displays, weren’t the only areas where Adriana was failing in her duty. There had been no Facebook listings of new stock for at least five days, both Facebook and the shop’s email inbox was full of queries, and someone had emailed five times, increasingly angry emails at that, as she asked for the whereabouts of a skirt that she’d paid for in full ten days ago.

Coco emerged from the office wearing her old white boiler suit and with her hair tied up in a scarf. She knew she had an uncharacteristically grim look on her face because Adriana’s pretty smile instantly disappeared.

‘Oh gosh, you caught me on the hop,’ said Adriana. ‘You see, I had this thing, and obviously I didn’t want to bother you—’

‘Stop right there,’ said Coco, hoping her face looked as glacial as she felt. ‘You’ve been telling me you’ve done all these wonderful things, like changing the window displays, and you haven’t done any of them. Why on earth would you lie, Adriana? If you couldn’t cope, why not tell me?’

‘You see,’ began Adriana, ‘I’ve had so many things go wrong …’

Once, a few weeks ago, in fact, Coco would have listened to this litany of woes and, even if she hadn’t quite believed it all, she’d have caved totally once Adriana’s huge blue eyes filled with tears.

But that was the old Coco. The new Coco, the one who was being a de facto mother, who was coping with a best friend suffering in hospital, who could see her sister being entirely miserable and simply couldn’t help –
that
Coco was a different employer altogether.

‘How many days have we been closed because of these issues?’ she asked coolly.

’Well, I closed early on Saturday,’ said Adriana slowly.

‘How early?’

Adriana winced. ‘Three p.m.’

Coco kept staring.

‘OK, half one. I had something to go to and there’s nobody to help me. If I need to run to the loo, I have to lock up, and I can’t get nice coffee or anything,’ she added sulkily.

‘Your tyre wasn’t flat that morning ages ago, was it?’ Coco asked. She had to know.

Adriana looked sulkier than ever but said nothing.

‘The thing is, you want to be paid for working but you don’t want to actually work, Adriana. Worse, you lie to me about it. You lied to me on the phone the other day, telling me what you thought I wanted to hear. “Yes, I’ve redone the window displays; yes, the place is clean.” All lies. I can’t trust you, and if I can’t trust you, I can’t employ you.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry,’ said Coco, shrugging. ‘I need someone I can rely on. You’ll have to go.’

Adriana burst into tears. ‘But Coco, we’ve been through so much together and I need this job, and—’

‘Keys,’ said Coco, holding out her hand.

‘You don’t mean this,’ sobbed Adriana.

‘I do,’ said Coco patiently, her hand still held out.

Shocked that her tears hadn’t worked, Adriana handed over the keys, still sobbing. ‘But you need me!’ she said.

‘I need someone who doesn’t lie to me …’

‘I only closed early a few times, and I was going to change the window displays …’

Phoebe pushed the door open and took stock of the situation. ‘I’m Phoebe McLoughlin,’ she said to Coco. ‘Should I come back later?’

Coco drew herself up to her full five foot one. ‘No,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Welcome, Phoebe. Come on in. Adriana, I’ll send your wages on, and I’ll be examining the till carefully and the stock for any discrepancies.’

Adriana snorted. ‘I would never steal.’

Coco held the front door open. ‘By taking wages and not working, you already have,’ she said sweetly. ‘But more fool me for not getting rid of you ages ago. I guess I’ll have to chalk this one down to experience.’

Adriana marched past, Coco shut and locked the door, and then leaned against it.

‘I’ve never done that before,’ she said, thinking she might cry herself.

Phoebe grinned. ‘First time for everything,’ she said. ‘Now, I’m not dressed for cleaning but I guess that’s what we’re doing today. I like your overalls. Any in my size?’

Pearl was changing her duvet and struggling with it when the doorbell rang.
Goody,
she thought. It might be someone who could help. Daisy, who kept having to be stopped rolling in the bits of the duvet on the floor and escaping into the cavern of snowy white cover to play hide and seek, was of no assistance at all.

‘Coming,’ yelled Pearl as she went carefully down the stairs.

She was beginning to see the allure of those stairlift yokes. It was so easy to slip, and while she wasn’t like Edie – terrified to put a foot under her in case she fell when she was on stairs – Pearl was getting more anxious about the thought of a fall. Falls were the bogeymen of old age, she knew. Hips and pelvises shattered like glass when you got older, and hospital stays merged into nursing home stays, and before people knew it, they were stuck there forever. She wanted to remain in her own lovely home with her things, and with darling Daisy to snuggle into her bed at night, and darling Peter around the corner. She wasn’t ready to let go of all that.

Mind you,
she reminded herself,
look at poor Josephine and what she was going through, and her only thirty-one, the same age as Coco. Tragedy can strike at any age.

And that dear Fiona, such a glorious little imp with the most gorgeous smile, and Coco said she’d been so upset when Josephine’s sister had been over from Australia.

Pearl was thinking sadly on the unfairness of life as she opened her door, and was surprised and delighted to see her older great-granddaughter standing there in her school uniform, rucksack slung across one shoulder.

‘Beth, my love, come in!’

‘You sure I’m not interrupting?’ said Beth in a tremulous voice that wasn’t like hers at all.

Pearl could recognise those signs as well as she could read the day’s weather from the morning sky. She’d raised three teenagers after all: her son and, later, his daughters too.