Last Chance Saloon

by Marian Keyes

  She’d been going out with him about a month the first time she let slip that he was annoyed about her weight gain.

  ‘How dreadful,’ Liv said, in shock. ‘He is supposed to love you for you.’

  ‘But he’s only telling me because he cares about me,’ Tara insisted. ‘And he’s right. I have put on a few pounds. Which I’m going to lose.’

  Liv clenched her hands in frustration. ‘After what Alasdair did you have the self-esteem of a gnu.’

  ‘You mean a gnat,’ Katherine interrupted, gently.

  ‘Thomas is merely a bully, don’t surrender to him,’ Liv urged.

  ‘Ah, now,’ Tara said softly, ‘I know you’re upset by what he said about your height. And, Katherine, I know you’re upset about what he said about your chest. But, in fairness, he was just being honest. Isn’t it refreshing to be around someone who lets you know exactly where you stand?’

  Katherine had decided there and then that she was going to move out and buy her own place.

  ‘I love his strong views,’ Tara admitted, dreamily. ‘I love the way he’ll take a stand and not back down. Don’t you think his confidence in himself and his own rightness is very sexy? Speaking of sexy, he’s like a madman in bed, day and night… Are you OK, Katherine? You’ve gone very red in the face.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Katherine muttered. If she had to listen again to how great Thomas was in bed, she’d scream.

  ‘Besides,’ Tara said, returning to the matter in hand, ‘if Thomas sometimes hurts people, it’s not his fault.’

  At their sceptical expressions, she launched into the story of his mother leaving him. ‘Maybe if our mothers had left us at such a formative age, we’d be going around speaking as we find too.’

  Though Fintan, and to a lesser extent Liv, tried to talk sense to her, they were wasting their time. Soft-hearted Tara was on a mission to love Thomas better. Even at his most hard-to-please – and he became progressively more hard-to-please as, over the months, he retrieved all the power he’d given to Tara in their early days – Tara couldn’t help but forgive him.

  She saw the abandoned boy in the adult Thomas. Was it any wonder if he occasionally lashed out after that ultimate betrayal?

  And there was a consolation prize. Loyalty was very important to Thomas. He demanded fidelity, but he also promised it.

  11

  When Tara got off the phone from Katherine and ventured back into the kitchen, Thomas was up. Staring into the faux-rustic bread-bin that he’d bought at King’s Crescent market for 99p.

  ‘This bread… but it was open last night.’

  Tara was clutched by the cold hand of fear and began pawing for her cigarettes. Why had she just put the bread into the bread-bin as it was? Why hadn’t she recreated the scene as she’d found it when she got up this morning?

  ‘Is this a new sliced pan?’ he hooted incredulously.

  ‘Yes,’ Tara said. She couldn’t manage the energy to lie or to say something funny.

  ‘And where’s the other one?’

  Tara thought she might say that it had gone off and she’d thrown it out but she was too depressed to bother. ‘I ate it.’

  He looked at her, goggle-eyed, open-mouthed. He was so shocked he could barely speak. ‘Nearly an entire loaf?’ he stuttered. ‘But why?’

  Tara felt a merciful bout of flippancy. ‘It was there, I was lonely,’ she quipped.

  ‘It’s nothing to laugh at, Tara,’ he exploded.

  ‘Ah, come on.’ Tara grinned. ‘I’m starting right now. Starvation for me. And I’ll do a step class after work tomorrow.’

  *

  All day a malaise lay on them. As if the damp grey morning mist had found its way into the flat, curling itself around them, lacing the air with doom. Dissatisfaction radiated so strongly from Thomas, Tara could almost see it. He was like a chimney belching grey clouds of negativity.

  The atmosphere in the front room – depressing at the best of times with Thomas’s brown sofa and brown carpet tiles – became more and more oppressive. Both of them were smoking more than usual and the cigarette fug further leadened the atmosphere. Tara was desperate to defuse the weirdness somehow, to say something light-hearted to put a smile on his face and make everything all right again. But she couldn’t think of a single thing. When she pointed something out in the paper he just grunted or plain ignored her.

  They’d sat this way countless times, over countless Sundays, and it had always been comfortable. As far as Tara could see, nothing was different. There was no reason for this stomach-knotting… anticipation. Yes, that was the right word. Anticipation. But what was she waiting for?

  ‘I’d really like to go and see that play about Woodstock,’ Tara said, breaking an hour’s worth of silence. She actually didn’t give a damn about that play about Woodstock, but she couldn’t endure any more absence of sound. She felt she needed an excuse to talk to him and she wanted a promise of some kind of intimacy, a suggestion that he’d come to the play with her.

  Thomas looked at her over his paper. ‘Well, why don’t you go to that play about Woodstock, then?’ he barked, as if he’d never heard anything so stupid in all his life. Then gave his paper a paternal shake and redisappeared behind it, missing Tara’s stricken face.

  Beryl trotted into the room, gave Tara a disdainful, superior body-swerve – I saw you eating all that toast, you fat cow, she seemed to say – and hopped on to Thomas’s lap.

  ‘Have you come to see your daddy?’ Thomas crooned, all lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘Who’s a beautiful girl? Oh, who’s a beautiful girl?’

  Tara watched Thomas’s hand curving along Beryl’s back and tail, then saw Beryl staring smugly at her, snuggled on Thomas’s lap, and felt as if she was in a love triangle. She longed to be that bloody cat. To get a tenth of the affection that Thomas lavished on it. To have her tummy tickled. To be bought a scratch-pole. To be fed rabbit chunks in jelly.

  Beryl hung around for just as long as it suited her then, with the take-it-or-leave-it independence that Tara yearned to emulate, got down off Thomas and stalked out. Thomas’s gloom reappeared immediately.

  ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ Tara muttered, when the walls of the room began to move closer to her. The pounding water and the fresh, clean smell marginally uplifted her. But when she went back into the front room to Thomas, her anxiety greeted her at the door and reattached itself like a wraith. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked. And that seemed to annoy him even more. After a while she couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘Come on,’ she said, gaily, ‘let’s do something. Instead of sitting here like a pair of slugs, let’s do something.’

  ‘Like what?’ he sneered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she floundered, her confidence shaken by his hostility. ‘Go out. We live in London, for God’s sake. There’s millions of things we could do.’

  ‘Like what?’ he repeated.

  ‘Er…’ Frantically she searched her head, desperate to come up with something interesting. ‘We could go to an art gallery. The Tate! That’s a nice one.’

  ‘Bugger off,’ he said bluntly. And Tara had to admit she was relieved. Bad and all as it was trapped here in the living room, traipsing round a bloody art gallery would be immeasurably worse. Fighting through busloads of rowdy tourists and those terrible people who ‘understood’ art, then having to queue for an hour in the café for the obligatory slice of carrot cake didn’t appeal.

  ‘Shopping, maybe?’ she suggested. ‘It’s the new rock and roll.’

  He curled his lip derisively at that. ‘You’re overdrawn, you’re up to the limits on all your cards, and even though mine is one of the most important jobs anyone can do, I’ve no brass either.’

  ‘I know,’ she declared wildly. ‘We’ll go for a drive.’

  ‘A drive?’ Thomas had failed three driving tests, so he tried to make driving sound like a form of deviance. ‘A drive where?’

  Her mind went blank. ‘The seaside!’ she suggested, her enthusiasm lac
ed with desperation.

  But suddenly that seemed like a great idea to Tara. The brisk, bracing sea air would blow away the stagnation that cloaked them. A little spontaneity would do them no end of good.

  ‘The seaside? On the fourth of October?’ He looked at her as though she were mad.

  ‘Why not? We’ll wrap up warm.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ he conceded, grumpily.

  After the toast débâcle Tara was afraid to have any lunch before they left. Which meant that for the entire journey to the coast she smoked constantly and obsessed about food. Everything she drove past looked like something she could eat. Trees became heads of broccoli. Hay bales turned into giant Shredded Wheats or – even better – baklava, bursting with honey and sugar. When they passed a field full of sheep, her breathing quickened as she thought of a bursting bag of marsh-mallows. The cliff face of a chalk quarry reminded her of a lovely big slab of nougat. Her mouth began to water when they drove by a slick, muddy field. A two-acre chocolate fudge cake, she thought, smothered in chocolate icing. The other vehicles on the road tormented her more than anything. Not just because their tyres looked like liquorice wheels. But those cars with a shiny metallic finish put her in mind of chocolates, as if each car had been wrapped with coloured tinfoil, then a layer of Cellophane. Quality Street on wheels. A red car passed her going the other way. Strawberry Supreme, she thought. A purple car passed. Hazelnut in Caramel. A yellow car passed. Toffee Deluxe. A green car passed. Noisette Triangle. A brown car passed. Coffee Crème.

  This happened to her a lot. When Liv wore her green-coloured contact lenses, Tara could never look at her without instantly being put in mind of lime Jelly-tots. When Tara went to Italy and was flying over whitish mountains covered with brown scrub, all she could think about was tiramisu. She’d once visited a friend’s flat and from across the room saw a bowl of sweets. Wine gums, she’d deduced, and promptly asked if she could have one. But they weren’t wine gums. They were crystals, and Tara had had to spend the next half an hour pretending to admire them.

  ‘I suffer from a food analogy,’ she muttered at Thomas, but he was too busy smoking in the passenger seat and staring out of the window away from her. She hadn’t wanted him to hear her anyway.

  After they’d been driving for over an hour Thomas stabbed a finger and said, ‘Look!’ in the general direction of a Little Chef. Tara’s heart leapt with hope. Maybe she’d be allowed to eat something. But, as it turned out, Thomas was pointing at the first sighting of the sea. They went to Whitstable in Kent, and had the pebbled beach entirely to themselves. The day was as damp and misty as it had been early that morning. The unmoving sea was a sludgy colour between brown and grey, and the sky looked as if it had been concreted over. The emptiness and greyness depressed Tara further. Coming here had been a mistake. The two hours they’d spent trapped in the car with each other, smoking their heads off, had been even more electric with tension than their morning in the front room. Despite the uninviting weather she insisted that they get out and walk, hoping that the fresh air would perform miracles. Heads down, they trudged along the gravel and, when they got to a breakwater, stopped. They sat on the damp gravel and stared out at the stagnant sea. As beneficial as looking at a switched-off television. No birds sang.

  After fifteen silent minutes they slogged back to the car and returned home. On the drive back to London it started to rain.

  12

  Fintan and Sandro were having a far nicer day than Tara and Thomas. They’d had a lively, chattery lunch with a crowd of friends at Circus, and now they were at home reading the Sunday papers. Fintan was stretched full-length on their so-hip-it-hurts tan leather sofa, his feet in Sandro’s lap.

  Perfectly in tune with each other, they barely needed to speak to communicate.

  ‘Did you read –’

  ‘– Michael Bywater?’

  ‘Mmmmm. Funny.’

  ‘Mmmmm.’

  A long comfortable silence followed.

  ‘Do you think –’

  ‘– a shag-pile rug? I do. We could look –’

  ‘– next weekend. We will.’

  Another blanket of hush.

  Sandro folded up the Culture bit of the Independent and opened his mouth to ask Fintan to pass the Real Life section, but Fintan had beaten him to it and was already proffering it.

  Fintan and Sandro had met six years previously when Fintan was sharing the flat in Kentish Town with Tara and Katherine. Sandro had literally been the boy next door.

  The day Sandro had moved into the flat across the hall, Fintan took one look at his small, jaunty frame, his elfin face, his shaved head and round glasses, and fell in love. He was ripe for it. For about a year he’d been complaining, ‘I’m tired of playing the field. I’d like to settle down. I want a significant other.’

  They knew from his mail that the new boy’s name was Sandro Cetti. He was always smiley and friendly if he met any of them in the hall, so one morning Tara brazenly questioned him and established that he was an architect, originally from Rome.

  ‘An Italian stallion.’ Fintan said later.

  ‘Hardly a stallion,’ Tara said. ‘An Italian pony is more like it.’

  And the name stuck.

  ‘I just don’t know if he’s gay,’ Fintan agonized. ‘I’m not picking up any signals.’

  ‘But neither am I,’ Tara said. ‘I’m not sure he’s straight either.’

  ‘Maybe he’s an alien,’ came Katherine’s voice from the bathroom.

  ‘He’s going out, he’s going out,’ Tara yelped, and Fintan rushed to the window and discreetly watched Sandro walk buoyantly down the road, neat and dinky in his trendy little suit and shiny Doc Martens.

  ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ Fintan sighed. ‘As cute as all get out?’

  As the weeks passed, everything Sandro said and did simply served to increase Fintan’s devotion. One night there was a car crash outside their house and Sandro was full of dancing-eyed excitement by the front door the following morning.

  ‘I was lying in my sleep and BOOM!’ He lifted both hands as if conducting an orchestra. ‘I hear a big, big noise so I run to my window and I see glass in all the places!’

  Later Fintan repeated every word that Sandro had said. ‘ “I see glass in all the places.” How could anyone resist that? “I was lying in my sleep.” The boy’s an angel.’ He sighed, love-sick. ‘This is getting worse.’

  Time went on and Fintan continued with his high-octane life: pubs, partying, clubbing, always with one eye out just in case Sandro showed up in any of the gay clubs. But he didn’t and the vitality continued to drain out of Fintan, until he began to remark, ‘Life has lost its taste.’

  The crunch came late one night when Fintan was on his way home, wearing his white Katherine Hamnett neo-bondage trousers. He hobbled off the night-bus, taking tiny little geisha-girl steps on account of the fact that his legs were strapped together, when he was set upon by a crowd of thugs, overburdened with prejudice and too much free time. Fintan tried his best to escape. Because he was unable to run, he began hopping frantically, like a person in a sack race, all the while trying to undo the straps. But it was too late and he was beaten into unconsciousness. It had happened before, but never as badly.

  After three days in hospital he arrived home, and that was when Sandro came into the picture. He said he would call in on Fintan when the girls were at work during the day. Fintan looked like a train crash but was so weepy and depressed after being attacked that he couldn’t be bothered with vanity.

  Sandro made Fintan tea and soup and in order not to disturb his dislocated jaw, helped him drink them through a straw. Then, because Fintan could barely see through his black, puffy eyes, Sandro offered to read to him.

  ‘Yes, please. If you could pick a magazine from that pile there.’

  Fintan flailed his hand, and Sandro tentatively made his approach, wondering what kind of magazines they were. They were travel brochures.

  Fintan’s depre
ssion lifted as he lay in delicious torment, within touching distance of the object of his desire, who poured sweet words into his ear. ‘… a swim-up bar, landscaped gardens, air-conditioning, tea and coffee facilities and a supervised play area.’

  ‘Half board?’

  ‘Room only. But it say there is three restaurants. “The casual beachside grill, the child-friendly Harvey’s and the more formal Cochon Gros.” ’

  ‘Not that I’ll ever get to go to any of these places,’ Fintan murmured. ‘But it’s nice to dream. What’s the average temperature this time of year?’

  Sandro consulted the chart at the back of the brochure, then suddenly flung it on the floor. ‘I am so angry with these peoples, these animals, that do this to you,’ he said fiercely.

  ‘Are you… really?’ Fintan choked.

  ‘I am angry that they do it to the gay man and I am angry that they do it to you!’

  But what did that mean? Fintan wondered. Was Sandro just a bleeding-heart liberal? A straight bleeding-heart liberal?

  Luckily, no. Sandro was as gay as the next man. (Fintan.) When pressed it all came out, and Sandro admitted that two years previously his boyfriend had died of ‘the virus’.

  ‘And I feel I can never again care for anyone. But I see you coming in and out of your flat,’ Sandro ducked his head in embarrassment – not that it made any difference because Fintan was still, to all intents and purposes, blind, ‘and I think, he’s… he’s good-looking. Then you bring me my letters and the leaflet about pizzas and window-cleaning and I think you’re very kind.’

  Very gently, taking care not to dislocate Fintan’s jaw any further, they had their first kiss and Fintan experienced such a surfeit of happiness that he thought his heart would split open – just like his lip had. From that day forth, Sandro and Fintan were an item and it was a match made in Heaven.

  They were mad about each other. Sandro was overwhelmed with happiness at falling in love again and Fintan had met his long-awaited Mr Right.