Free Between Sisters by Cathy Kelly Page B

which time it had started raining again and Cassie’s hair and clothes were wet through. Shivering, she sat in the car with the heater jacked up and thought of how nice it might be to text someone she loved. The girls were in school with their phones, hopefully turned to silent. Coco was always busy during shop opening hours and her speciality was returning texts three hours later by saying:
    Sorry! Busy! Didn’t see phone!
    And she and Shay rarely rang each other at work anymore. So she sent Coco a text instead:
    Hi, honey. Come to lunch at the weekend? C xxxx

Four

    Her grandmother really had been an amazing woman, Cassie thought as she unlocked the front door, weak with pure exhaustion, and Lily and Beth hurried into the house ahead of her. Grammy Pearl had raised two kids who weren’t even her own and Cassie wondered if she and Coco had been as annoyingly teenager-ish as her own daughters were.
    From the moment she’d picked them up from school, there had been squabbling, a heated debate over why they had less pocket money than anyone else in their year (Beth), and a mutinous murmur over how her phone was totally crappy and why didn’t she have a really cool phone like everyone else (Lily).
    Inside their painstakingly renovated house, the girls dumped their rucksacks full of books and their coats on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, shrugging off the detritus of school. Nobody moved to help their mother with the shopping she’d raced around the supermarket to purchase before she’d collected them.
    Eighteen months ago they’d been mother’s little helpers; now they were hormones on legs – happy one minute, gloomy the next, worrying about how they’d ever be rich and famous singers after that.
    ‘I need a bath before I finish my homework,’ announced Beth, who was tall like her father but with her mother’s dark and unmanageable curly hair. ‘I got a whack of the ball in netball today. There’s already a bruise. Honestly, Mum, do I have to do it? I’m never going to be any good at it …’ And then she was gone up the stairs, trailing her school tie and shoes after her, coat still on the floor.
    Beth was mercurial, definitely like Shay, but she could be funny and sparkly when she felt like it.
    Cassie looked at the coats on the floor, which would miraculously move themselves via Mother Power, which was a well-known family phenomenon. Like the laundry fairy and the answer to the ‘where are my trainers/black jeans/pink long-sleeved T-shirt?’ question. Mother Power could do it all and knew where every lost item was.
    Breathe , Cassie told herself as she shouldered her way through the door with the shopping. Breathe . Think of that mindfulness book she had on the floor by the bed and occasionally actually read. Be in the now, feel your feet touching the earth, rooting you …’
    ‘Mum, there’s a message on the phone. I listened and it’s Gran,’ roared Lily from the kitchen.
    The very notion of calm breathing and being rooted in the earth vanished to be replaced by the wild irritation she was accustomed to.
    It could not be good for the body, this irritation.
    In the kitchen. Lily’s skinny body was half in the fridge. Her appetite was mythic. Nobody could believe that somebody so small could consume so much and be so endlessly hungry. She could eat a trencherman’s dinner, and half an hour after, amble over to the cupboard, pull out the cereal and start gulping handfuls from the box. Where precisely it all went, Cassie didn’t know.
    Lily was slender and short, like her mother, but Cassie’s slenderness came from watching what she ate and occasionally, just occasionally, going for a walk with Coco where they talked about most things. Not everything, but most things.
    Lily appeared to do as little exercise as possible, despite the school system, and just ate.
    ‘Fast metabolism?’ Shay would say absently, when queried about this. ‘Great for sports, though. She likes tennis. Should she