Literature / The Sopranos (Warner)

"Poverty goes without saying, Chastity comes despite ma best efforts and Obedience is forced onto yous, but by fuck am going for it the day."

— Orla Johnstone

A 1998 Coming of Age novel by Alan Warner about a group of Catholic schoolgirls from the Port, a small town somewhere in the north west of Scotland, as they run wild on a school trip to Edinburgh. It was adapted into a play by Lee Hall for the National Theatre of Scotland under the title Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour. It was also adapted into a film in 2019 under the title Our Ladies.

A sequel, The Stars in the Bright Sky was published in 2010 and was longlisted for that year’s Booker Prize.

The novel should definitely not be confused with the HBO series of the same name.

Provides examples of:

• Achievement Test of Destiny: It's alluded to in passing that the girls, along with the rest of the Fifth Year choirmembers, have just sat their Highers shortly before the school trip. The novel takes place in May, after exams have finished but before the schools break up for the summer holidays. These are the most important exams that Scottish secondary school pupils sit and determine their prospects for higher education. The fact that none of the five leads really discuss the exams or waiting for their results shows just how remote the prospect of going to university is for them.
• Adults Are Useless: None of the adults in the girls' lives seem to be on hand to offer any emotional support or guidance that might be of any use to them. Some parents are either completely absent (Chell's stepdad, Manda's mum), while others are largely invisible to the readers (Kylah and Fionnula's parents, Chell's mum). Manda's dad is physically present and putting food on the table as best he can but otherwise seems to have checked out, leaving Catriona to act as a Parental Substitute to Manda. Orla is an only child and seems to get along well with her parents, but it's implied that they weren't able to be by her side for a lot of her cancer treatment in Edinburgh, and that they're both too paralysed by the fear of losing her to talk to her about death or about her illness has affected her emotionally. Non-parental authority figures such as Sister Condron and Father Ardlui are only interested in using the girls for their own ends - Condron to win the cash prize in the choir competition and boost the school's image, Ardlui to find some willing stooges for his plan to turn the Port into a pilgrimage tourist trap by manufacturing a miraculous sighting of the Virgin Mary.
• An Aesop: In-Universe, Stephen jokes that lesson of McCaig going bankrupt after financing the construction of a monument to generate some work for local unemployed masons is that "charity is dangerous".
• All Psychology Is Freudian: Kay owns a Freudian dream dictionary.
• The Alleged Car: The Mud Bucket, the coach taking the choir down to Edinburgh, although it has apparently been cleaned up a bit for the occasion.
• Amazon Chaser: Kylah’s brother Calum might be one, since his idea of a hot date is an all-female ploughing contest.
• Ambiguous Ending: The book ends with the girls ditching school to spend another day together, with no clear answers given as to whether or not any of them will be expelled, if Orla's cancer really has come back and what direction Kay and Fionnula's relationship might take, if any.
• Ambiguous Syntax: When Kay mentions on the coach that she had been down to Edinburgh recently with her dad, Fionnula asks her "How come you were down?" which startles Kay because for split second she thinks that Fionnula is asking her why she's been in a low mood recently and not why she was in Edinburgh.
• Ambiguous Situation: Lampshaded when two female American tourists in their forties come into the bar where Kay and Fionnula are drinking a couple of Bloody Marys and the tourists ask "How much are they?". The text talks about how it'll never be certain if they meant the drinks or something more abstract about Kay and Fionnula themselves.
• Artistic License – Linguistics: The “Ceil Meile Failte” sign is presumably a misspelling of “Ceud Mìle Fàilte”, a Gaelic phrase which translates to “a hundred thousand welcomes”.
• Bait-and-Switch: Manda's backstory includes a mention of her, Catriona and their dad watchting Westerns together, only for the flashback to close out with a reveal that Manda has "never seen a black and white movie in her puff."
• Blatant Lies: When Fionnula asks Kay if she knows Catriona, Kay claims that she doesn't, despite having had a threesome with Kay and Iain Dickinson.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: The girls crack jokes about the new bouncer at the Mantrap only being able to tell the ages of sheep “[f]rom behind”.
• The Bet: Kylah had a bet with her wee brother that she could be in and out of the bathroom in 20 minutes. She lost, and had to swallow one of her contact lenses, which she does. If she’d won, her brother’s forfeit would have been to stick a Pepperami up his arse.
• Body Horror: Orla’s description of the sailor in the oncology ward who was being digested by his own stomach acid.
  • Orla's Old Dear also suffered a pretty horrific miscarriage before Orla was born.
• Bouncer: The girls' main obstacle to their night out is the new bouncer at the Mantrap.
• Book Ends: Starts and ends with the girls meeting up together at about six in the morning.
• Boring Religious Service: While Father Ardlui drones on at morning mass, Kylah tries to pass the time by counting the number of tiles in the chapel.
• Brown Note: A relatively harmless example. Michelle says that the noise from the mincing machine in the butcher's makes her baby kick. The exact note is identified in the play as F#.
• Buffy Speak: The novel is littered with these sorts of expressions, such as Orla noticing the “manness-that-was-not-dadness” of the sailor in the oncology ward.
• But Not Too Gay: In-Universe, Kylah tries to diffuse some of the tension after Fionnula and Kay kiss on the dancefloor by slagging Manda off for flirting with the grotty Bouncer and joking that she's sometimes contemplated snogging her own brother while drunk out of sheer boredom - her defence of Fionnula and Kay is that their kiss doesn't mean anything because it's between two girls.
• Call-Back: Chell's flashback mentions her playing with Barbies with some of her neighbours in the Complex. When the girls get to McDonalds she's pleased to see that they're doing Barbie Happy Meals.
  • The first chapter mentions the local statue of JL McAdam. Later, Fionnula offhandedly mentions him when his face turns up on a pound note.
  • As the bus winds back into the Port in the evening, it passes by the sign that Fionnula and Manda vandalised as Second Years.
  • On the trip down, Kylah brings her Cream cassette to play on the bus. When they arrive back at the Port that night, she asks Jerry the driver for the tape back.
  • At the Barrels, Kylah tells everyone else about the submariner who died who we saw Father Ardlui giving a funeral for in an earlier chapter.

• Chekhov's Gun: The coloured shoelaces mentioned at the start of the book come back when Orla asks Stephen’s to use hers to tie her to a tree while they have sex.
  • Orla’s retainer gets mentioned in the first chapter while the girls are waiting outside the school. Later, Stephen gets his tongue stud caught in it when he and Orla kiss at The Pillbox.
  • The book calls some attention to the artwork on various banknotes as Fionnula and Kay spend their cash throughout the day. Later, when they're lost, they're able to make their way back to the city centre by looking at a map of the capital featured on a note.
  • When Orla splits off from the rest of the group going to Velcro Suit's flat, she takes out her rosary beads and puts them in her purse. Later, she uses them as a sex toy when she has sex with Stephen.
• Christmas in July: When the choir starts singing Good King Wenceslas outside the school, a nearby resident opens their window to yell at them:
  "Christmas so soon? Fuckin shut it ya wicked wee Catholic heathens."
• Chippendales Dancers: The Mantrap once hosted what Chell considered to be a third-rate male strip show. Fionnula ended up getting hit in the face with a G-string, which resulted in her eye getting infected with pubic lice.
• Close-Knit Community: The Port has a population of a few thousand, and nothing stays secret there for long. As far the girls are concerned, though, this can have its upsides:
  Chell: Ah'll be glad to get back the Port away fro these townie nutters. Least you can get a decent snog, or something more anytime, offof someone ya reasonably known so he's no gonna knife ya or anything.
• Creator Provincialism: The Port is based on Oban (although it isn't explicitly identified as such in the book) , Alan Warner's hometown. The book contains several references to real-life locations and businesses such as McCaig's Folly and the Barcaldine Alginate works.
• Country Matters: There's little hesitation shown by any of the characters when it comes to deploying this word.
• Cultural Posturing: Lampshaded by Fionnula, who comments that Scots would claim to have invented Internet if they could get away with it.
• Disappeared Dad: Michelle’s baby was fathered by a sailor on shore leave, but she doesn’t have any intention of moving down to England to try and start a relationship with him or involve him in the kid’s life.
• Dirty Old Man: When Kylah and Chell go into a pub by themselves, they notice the guys in the bar leering at them.
  • Chell also catches the police officer at the station staring at her legs when she mentions that Danny had ran off with her knickers on his head.
• Disposable Vagrant: Fionnula points out that one of the upsides of living somewhere like the Port compared to a big city is that there’s less chance of becoming one of these - she has an older cousin who is technically homeless but is at least able to sofa surf with family and friends when he's doing seasonal work in the Port.
• Dramatis Personae: The first chapter contains a list of all the girls in the choir organised in order of their inside leg measurements, giving some context for the members who are only mentioned in passing throughout the book.
• Dress Code: Before the choir heads off to Edinburgh, Sister Condron lectures the girls about uniform violations and other sartorial pet peeves of hers such as heavily tweezed eyebrows, multiple ear piercings and school shoes customised with coloured shoelaces.
• Drugs Are Bad: Played for Laughs when Stephen mentions that Scotland Against Drugs cards are great for skinning up a joint.
• Epigraph: Starts off with two:
  Lie Down./Cold Hand./Slow Heart./Breathe Deep./Close Eyes Now./Please Close Eyes Now
  —Superstar, Every Second Hurts
  They do live more in earnest, more in themselves and less in surface change, and frivolous external things. I could fancy a love for a life here almost possible...
  —Wuthering Heights
• Dying Town: The Port does seem to have a few active economic engines mentioned by the characters, such as the ice factory, the fish plant and the Alginate (whose real-life equivalent actually closed a few years prior to the publication of the novel), so it's not a straight-up dead town as such, but on the whole, there aren't many stable, well-paying jobs to be had, with a lot of work being low-paid, seasonal or insecure in other ways. There's so little going on that the Mantrap is usually empty enough that it's a good place for most of the ex-Merchant Navy men to catch a quiet pint before heading to their grim local for last orders.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Kylah knows that her bandmates all stare at her during their rehearsals if she wears anything more revealing than a pair of tracksuit trousers.
• Elephant in the Living Room: When Michelle shows up outside the school, nobody wants to ask her who the father of her baby is, even though it’s obvious that they want to know. Michelle does later reveal some details about him without being directly prompted.
• Empty Bedroom Grieving: Chell's stepdad's shaving things are still in the family bathroom, even though he's been Lost at Sea for several years.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The events of the novel place over the course of twenty-four hours.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: The local doctor, Dr Drumgarvie has a brother known only as "Argonaut" who does things like try to smuggle weed in his stomach only to shit it out after getting diarrhoea behind a bush in Paris. They both pretend they aren't related to each other.
• Foreign Queasine: Both Manda and Fionnula recount instances of people from the Port having traumatic incidents involving foreign seafood.
• Foreshadowing: Manda initially regards Kay as a "lightweight, university-bound virgin", but after spending time with Kay, Fionnula discovers that there’s a lot more to Kay than the image she projects.
  • One of the obscenities Lord Bolivia yells out during mass is "DANDOME POR DETRAS", which roughly translates to "Take me from behind." Orla has Stephen do the same to her when she asks him to tie her to a tree before they have sex.
  • There are some early hints that Fionnula is attracted to women when she mentions that she thinks that Laura Graham and the girl from Woolies who Kylah hangs about with are both really pretty. The rest of the group offhandedly joke about her "dark secrets". When she decides to go off for a walk by herself, Chell mentions that "[s]he's been queerer and queerer lately, the crazy chick."
  • Manda notices how exhausted Orla is just from trying on some shoes, an early sign that she hasn't actually recovered from her cancer. Later, they hug and Manda notices how cold she feels.
  • Manda claims that she feels as though Fionnula is drifting away from her and that she doesn't know her as well as she used to, in contrast to Catriona, who tells Manda everything about herself. Or so Manda thinks. As it happens, neither Fionnula nor Catriona have told Manda anything at this point about their respective orientations.
  • Velcro Suit does a handstand on the Velcro wall. He later does one naked when he brings the girls back to his flat.
  • When Kay tells Fionnula about looking for a student flat in Edinburgh, Fionnula jokes about Kay bringing boys back there only to follow it up with another question before Kay can reply, hinting that Fionnula might be feeling a bit of jealousy at the idea of Kay being with someone else.
  • Danny happily agrees to the request to help carry the bag containing the girls' uniforms, which he later steals from them once they get to Velcro Suit's flat.
  • Chell cracks a joke about The Divorcee drowning himself in the toilet. Manda cheers up a little upon hearing this because she knew how hard Chell took her Daddy Patrick's death. Manda thinks for a moment about him being lost somewhere in the ocean in a pile of algae. Later that night when they're round the back of the Mantrap, Chell thinks for a moment that she sees his face in a pile of seaweed.
• Fowl-Mouthed Parrot: Lord Bolivia, a parrot brought back from Venezuela by Sister Fagan, was taught a number of Spanish swear words by some air conditioning technicians who came to fit out the convent in Ciudad Bolivar where he lived and yells them out during mass in the chapel at Our Lady’s.
• Freestate Amsterdam: Fionnula tells the group an anecdote about Iain Dickinson and some of his friends going to Amsterdam and trying to smuggle some hash back with them. Manda is sceptical of the city's reputation:
  "Aye, ah bet there's no a decent disco in the whole place, just rave shite and guys with fucking dreadlocks and camouflaged trousers..."
• Freudian Slip: Spimmy commits one when he first talks to Kylah that suggests he was far more interested in recruiting Kylah to the band for her looks than any musical talent she might have.
• From Bad to Worse: Orla knew when the nurses wouldn’t let her walk from her ward to her radiotherapy appointments that she was going to reach a point where she wouldn’t be able to walk.
• Gag Penis: Kay tells Fionnula an anecdote she heard from her dad about a medical student who cut off the penis from a cadaver he was working on, tied it to a piece of string and threaded it down his inside trouser leg so that it would peek out at his ankle.
• Gilligan Cut: Not long after Kylah says in a flashback portion of the book that she doesn't want anyone to hear her singing in the band, the action cuts back to the coach and Kay complimenting her on how amazing the band sounded on their cassette.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: Danny's poorly-worded note that he leaves when he steals four of the girls' uniforms includes the question, "HOW ABOUT SOME LESBO STACK ACTION THEN WEE PIERCED WHOORS?".
  • The boy Manda had been dancing with at the Mantrap watches a little awkwardly while Manda bats at Kylah's shirt to get some of the dust off her chest. When Fionnula and Kay kiss, he loses interest in Manda altogether.
• Harmful to Hitchhikers: Averted. Spimmy once hitchhiked home from a bar while drunk without being harmed.
• High-School Dance. The school had one prior to the events of the novel that ended up being interrupted by a police raid.
• Hope Spot: Orla starts to feel better when she stops doing radiotherapy, but she quickly realises that that doesn’t mean she’s been cured.
• Horny Sailors: The girls are hoping to encounter these in the Mantrap after the competition. This results in the girls going off on a tangent at the start of the book about how semen behaves in a pressurised submarine.
• Improvisational Ingenuity:
  • The school has a wall with iron stubs from where the bars that had been there in the past were removed to be used as raw materials for the war effort in the 1940s.
  • Sister Fagan applies her HRT patches to her poinsettias to encourage their growth.
  • While on holiday in Spain, Catriona put her bikinis and underwear in the fridge and alternated between the two to keep cool.
  • Buzz stores bees in vacuum cleaner bags and packs them in beside a storage heater to keep them warm.
  • Orla uses her kilt pin as a retainer cleaner. When doing her makeup she softens her eyeliner pencil by letting it melt a little under the light of the bathroom mirror.
  • When Kay and Fionnula get lost in a housing estate, several of the flats have milk cartons sitting out on windowsills, since the flats don't most likely don't have any fridges to keep them cool.
  • Kay extracts the cash from her handbag full of vomit by using a spare condom from Michelle as a glove.
• In Da Club: Subverted. After all the buildup throughout the day, once the girls actually make it to the Mantrap it proves to be thoroughly underwhelming.
• Indirect Kiss: Manda notices Fionnula offering Kay a cigarette and lighting it for her without the two of them saying anything to one another.
• Inherently Funny Words: Cocklawburn, where Fionnula went on a caravanning holiday with her parents.
• Ironic Nickname: Owing to the high rate of Teen Pregnancies, the school has been nicknamed “The Virgin Megastore” by some of the pupils.
• Lampshaded Double Entendre: When Fionnula gives some advice on how to drink flaming Sambucas:
  Fionnula: Don't hold it the too long in your mouth.
  Chell: As the Bishops says to the actress.
• Land Down Under: Fionnula mentions that she's curious about what Australia's like, but that she doesn't see the point in travelling around the world to a place where everyone still speaks English.
• Last Stand: Knowing that they will most likely be expelled in the morning, the girls decide to party the rest of the night away rather than trying to save any face with the Sisters.
• Lonely Funeral: Rather than being buried at sea, the dead submariner is given a funeral at the cathedral in the Port which is effectively only attended by the undertaker, the organist and parish nun, Sister McTavish
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: The choir see a couple having sex outdoors from the window of their rehearsal room at the concert hall.
• Malaproper: The girls often make these sorts of conversational slip-ups,with Fionnula usually being the one to correct them.
• Mamet Speak: Conversations involving more than two characters typically result in a lot of overlap.
• Mixtape of Love: The guys in the band bring Kylah a selection of CDs to their rehearsals every weekend in an attempt to charm her.
• My Local: Quite a few pop up throughout the book:
  • The Mantrap seems to act as multi-purpose Local Hangout, doubling as a bar and nightclub.
  • There's also the Barrels Bar, where Orla meets up with the rest of the Sopranos before her trip to Lourdes.
  • The Gluepot is Orla's dad's regular boozer.
  • The Barn is the pub where Kay hits it off with Iain Dickinson.
  • Kylah occasionally drinks in the bar at the Silvermines hotel.
  • There's a mention of Dirty Dick's a Real Life pub in Edinburgh's city centre. Manda and Orla stop for a drink at the Auld Hundred, another city centre pub.
  • On the estate near the hospital, Kay and Fionnula come across a very rough pub call The Broadsword.
  • The Politician is the only pub where teenage boys can drink after [swimming up the Lynn.
• Narcissist: The singer who Kylah replaced in the band was allegedly vain enough to check his hair in the cymbals of the drumkit in between numbers.
• Nepotism: At the hospital, all the taxis are driven by the ward sisters' boyfriends and husbands, meaning the sisters can stop anyone who gives them any grief from getting a lift.
• No Accounting for Taste: After they get to Velcro Suit's flat, Chell and Manda discuss amongst themselves who they want to get off with, suggesting a certain level of indifference about the attractiveness of the men in question.
  • Chell later comments at the Mantrap that there isn't really anyone there that she wants to dance with
• No Communities Were Harmed: The Port is never explicitly identified in the book, but in the play it is confirmed to be Oban.
• No Periods, Period: Averted. No one gets their period on the trip, but menstruation is discussed frankly.
• Norse by Norsewest: No one seems to know exactly where in Scandinavia the sailor with pancreatic cancer is from.
• Not Staying for Breakfast: Fionnula doesn’t stick around in the morning after sleeping with Kay.
• One-Night-Stand Pregnancy: This seems to be the only way anyone in the Port gets pregnant.
• Only Known by Their Nickname:
  • Kylah only refers to the drummer in Lemonfinger as "Drummer". She initially only refers to Spimmy as "Guitar".
  • Buzz has a friend who is only known as "Snorkel".
• Opposing Choir: Downplayed. There's a brief mention of the "Hoors of the Sacred Heart", another school choir from The Fort who've taken part in the choir competition in the past. They're implied to be much more up themselves than Our Lady of Perpetual Succour despite such pretensions not being borne out by the pupils' actual conduct:
  Fionnula: Know what the Hoor's school motto is? It's 'Noses up...knickers DOWN!'
• Porn Stash: Fionnula and Catriona both own some porn magazines.
• Precious Puppy: Selwyn, Chell's Irish setter. She's had him since she was in primary school, so he is now quite an elderly pooch.
• Public Service Announcement: Chell and Kylah notice that when they go to the police station in Edinburgh, it has different posters from the ones they're used to seeing outside the station in the Port, which warn people about finding ordnance on the beaches or offer some Scare 'Em Straight gore shots of a savaged lamb to make sure they keep their dogs on the lead.
• Pun: Catriona is a hairdresser at "The Best Little Hairhouse in Town". It was previously known as Kurl Up and Dye.
• Quest for Sex: The girls’ plan to sabotage the choir competition is all in service of a chance of a shag from the submariners docked in the Port.
• Romance Novel: The night sister on the oncology ward reads these during her shift.
• Slut-Shaming: Fionnula points out that even with their antics in the Capital, the Sisters probably want to expel the girls because of their unapologetic approach to sex.
• Scotireland: Surprisingly so for a work created by someone from one of the countries in question. Alan Warner was based in Dublin at the time he wrote the novel. Much as the setting of the novel is based on his own Scottish hometown, there are occasional expressions here and there in the text (e.g. "cowboy dinner", "bogger" and "debs night") that come across as more Irish than Scottish.
  • There is apparently a branch of the Gaelic League in the Port. While there is one in Glasgow in Real Life, they are unsurprisingly much more common in Ireland.
  • The names of the characters also stand out in this respect. A Catholic secondary school in 1990s Scotland may well have had its share of Shannons, Sineads and Siobhans, but not so many of the more old-fashioned Irish Names that pop up such as Fionnula, Clodagh, Shuna and Assumpta.
• Sexual Extortion: Averted. When Kay tells Fionnula about the threesome, Fionnula is concerned that Kay was coerced into it, but Kay tells her that she was the one who instigated it.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Many of the conversations between the characters involve digressions into pop culture or anecdotes about other people living in the Port.

• Serious Business: Changing out of their school uniform is one of the few moments where there's no room for levity:
  "No girl smiled as she dressed - a ritual they treated wi more reverence than ingestion of any transubstantial host; cause the vestiary metamorphosis was going bring about an immediate transformation that the body and blood of God's son never could."
• Sex for Services: The Bouncer says that he'll let them all into the Mantrap next Saturday, but that he needs some "encouragement". Manda agrees.
• Skewed Priorities: Fionnula is sceptical of Moira Grierson's claim that Iain got her pregnant because "it's aye better if folk think it was a good-looking guy."
• Slobs vs. Snobs: Most of the girls at the school come from working-class families, with Kay and Ana-Bessie being the odd ones out, which is the source of some friction at the outset:
  "Kay and Ana-Bessie were aye willing to admit bursary girls like Fionnula had ‘colourful character’. Inwardly, the two middle-class girls consoled themselves: Fionnula’s legs were 'actually' too thin and there was always the fact Fionnula’s parents only had a bought council house from up the Complex."
• The Stool Pigeon: Tina MacIntyre grassed Michelle up to their boss at the Superstore about her being pregnant, which is how Michelle lost her job there.
• Strip Poker: The girls pass the time at the back of the bus on the drive down to Edinburgh by playing an extremely slow-moving game of strip poker, e.g. forfeits being one button on a school shirt.
• Suicide is Shameful:
  • The group doesn't really buy into the concept of sin as proscribed by the Church, except when it comes to suicide.
  • Fionnula’s seventeenth birthday party apparently included a drunken game of Strip Twister.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: Played for Laughs. The school has a statue of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour on its roof. On their first day, First Years often shout at her not to jump.
• Tragic Dream: Fionnula mentions how the girls had been planning and saving up for a holiday together, but that they've always known on some level that it was never going to happen, at least not with all five of them.
• Troubled Sympathetic Bigot / Skewed Priorities: Orla’s Old Dear insisted on putting on some nice shoes and a bit of jewellery before going to hospital when she’s in the middle of a miscarriage because she doesn’t want to be seen "looking like a tinker".
• Two-Teacher School: Averted. Although Sister Condron and Sister Fagan are the only teachers who the girls interact with over the course of the novel, the headmistress, Mother Superior, and others such as The Cyclops and Mr Eldon, are mentioned occasionally. The Stars in the Bright Sky also includes a mention of a careers teacher known as "Leary Neary".
• The 'Verse: The Port is also home to Morvern Callar. There are also some passing mentions of other characters from that book such as Tequila Sheila and Creeping Jesus.
• Wham Line: When Fionnula and Kay stop for a moment to rest on a bench as they try to make their way back to the concert hall:
  Kay: I've got the fat belly.
  Fionnula: What?
  Kay: I'm pregnant.
• Where Everybody Knows Your Flame: Fionnula goes off for a walk on her own without telling anyone else where she plans to go. She ends up outside a gay bar called Tarantula, but is too nervous to go in.
• World of Only Children: Averted. Although Catriona is the only sibling of the main five who affects the story, others are mentioned in passing even if Chell's sister Shirley is the only one who's named. Orla and Kay are only children.

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