Cahal by the way.’
‘Ca-hal,’ she said, trying out the unfamiliar name. ‘Sarah. How did you learn to play like that?’
He shrugged as if his talent was nothing. ‘I’ve tickets for a Chieftains concert next week. Will you come with me?’
She did not hesitate. ‘Yes.’
‘So says Miss Celibate.’ Becky grinned to take the sting out of her comment.
‘That’s not fair. I did have a sex life once,’ said Sarah.
‘And you will do again,’ said Becky confidently.
Sarah smiled doubtfully. ‘Seriously, you should think about what I said.’ She spied Lewis’ hat on the ground, picked it up and shook the sand off it. ‘What happened with that promotion at work? Weren’t you to hear this week?’
Becky sighed. ‘I didn’t get it.’
Sarah’s heart sank. It was the third promotion Becky had been knocked back for. She worked as an admin assistant at Queen’s University Belfast, a job she’d taken straight after leaving school with three good A levels. Sarah had tried to encourage her to go to uni but Becky, under the influence of a no-good boyfriend at the time, had refused.
‘They recruited externally,’ Becky went on. ‘You know, I’m really cross about it. I wouldn’t have minded, but you should see the nerd who got the job. He can barely switch on the computer. Has to ask me every little thing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sarah and glanced furtively at Becky. The nose piercing was a recent one and it still looked raw and sore. ‘Did you get any feedback on why you didn’t get it?’
Becky shook her head. ‘Just vague feedback about not being right for the job. My boss said I should’ve got it, but it was up to the interview panel, not her. And I didn’t know any of them.’
They walked on, arms linked. Up ahead, Molly veered left, onto the seaweed-strewn pebbles at the top of the beach, and Lewis trailed in her wake. ‘Have you thought that how you present yourself might have something to do with not getting the job?’
Becky sighed crossly. ‘I’m an admin assistant, not a model. Surely what I do is more important than what I look like?’
‘It ought to be. But the thing is,’ said Sarah tentatively, ‘first impressions are ever so important. Everyone who knows you thinks you’re lovely but to someone meeting you for the first time, well, they might not think so.’
‘Why not?’ snapped Becky, shaking off Sarah’s arm.
‘The piercings and the tattoos and the dyed hair. They give out a message, Becky. Quite an aggressive one. Why don’t you let your hair go back to being brown? It’s the most gorgeous chestnut colour.’
Becky lifted her chin and her eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not going to change the way I look just to fit into other people’s idea of what’s acceptable. And I wish you would stop trying to change me into a clone of you. Just because you have it all – the house, the kids, the high-flying career. And the figure and looks.’
Sarah gasped in surprise. ‘How can you possibly say that? I’m a single mother struggling to run a home and hold down a full-time job. I’d hardly call that having it all.’
Becky blushed. ‘Well, you did have it all until you got divorced.’ There was an awkward pause and she sighed. ‘I just wish you would stop telling me how I should dress and what I should do.’
Sarah looked away, chastened. ‘I don’t mean to boss you around. I just want things to work out for you. In and out of work.’
Becky sighed and patted Sarah’s arm. ‘I’m okay, Sarah, really. I’m happy the way I am. You don’t have to be so protective. You’ve been mothering me ever since Mum died.’
Sarah swallowed, the mere mention of their mother bringing a lump to her throat.
The rain had stopped. A shard of sunlight broke through a chink in the pale grey, skitting cloud – and just as quickly vanished again. In the blank canvas of the sky, Sarah saw the stark grey-whiteness of the hospital ward where her mother had died.
She perched on the edge of her mother’s bed, the metal bedframe digging into her thigh. Crisp white sheets crunched between her fingers. The low hum of equipment, like a beating heart, filled her ears. The room was hot and smelt of floor polish and the fragrant sweetpeas that Dad had picked from the garden two days ago and which now sat, wilting, on the bedside table. Fear, terrible fear, ballooned in her chest.
‘Sarah.’
She leaned over her mother’s body, already still, like a corpse. She held her ear close to her mother’s lips, her heart tight and cold in her breast, and waited.
‘Take care of Becky.’ Her mother’s breath was a caress, like a summer’s breeze. ‘You’re sister and mother to her now.’
The last words her mother had said to her.
Becky’s quiet voice cracked through the memories. ‘It wasn’t right of Mum to ask you to take care of me,’ she said, harbinger of a message that Sarah stubbornly refused to own. ‘You were little more than a child yourself.’ Becky paused. ‘You must know that.’
Sarah looked away, her heart heavy with old, well-worn guilt. There was logic and truth in what Becky said. But her mother had asked. And she had promised. She’d spent the rest of her life trying to fulfil that promise. Such a contract, so solemnly made, could not be broken, despite Becky’s plausible arguments to the contrary. She blinked to clear her vision. ‘But if I don’t look out for you, who will?’
‘I’m thirty years old, Sarah,’ smiled Becky, ‘I think I can look after myself.’
Sarah returned the smile but knew in her heart that this wasn’t true. Becky was always borrowing money off her, though to be fair she did pay it back – eventually. She’d been thrown out of accommodation twice in her early twenties for not paying her rent and she was still living in a rented flat with no prospect of buying somewhere of her own.
Becky bent down, picked up a couple of glassy, grey, sharp-edged stones and stood up again, holding them in her mittened palm for Sarah to see. ‘Do you know they found evidence of Neolithic people living in this bay? They made tools from this flint. It’s over two hundred million years old.’ She turned the stone in her hand and gazed dreamily along the beach. ‘It’s amazing to think that we’re walking in the footsteps of Stone Age humans who lived over six thousand years ago. They reckon they lived in caves up there on the hill.’ She pointed at the green plateau that rose high above sea level. ‘And came down to the seashore to forage for shellfish.’
‘How do you know that?’
Becky slipped the flintstones into her pocket. ‘I quite often go to the library at lunchtime. I like the idea of learning about our ancestors by the evidence they left behind.’
‘Well,’ said Sarah, pulling the collar of her coat tighter. ‘I wouldn’t have fancied running about in nothing but animal furs, trying to kill your dinner with a bit of stone tied to the end of a stick. It must’ve been a bleak existence.’
Becky
