Last Chance Saloon

by Marian Keyes

  ‘Some day.’ They’d sigh. ‘We’ll go there some day.’

  ‘What do they do?’ Frank Butler demanded angrily of Fidelma. ‘Just sitting there all that time. I drove past at half past five and they were there and when I was coming home again at ten o’clock they were still there, not a budge out of them.’

  Fidelma sighed. She knew how easy it was to spend four hours on a damp wall, unaware of time passing, building castles in the air, then moving into them. She remembered being young, certain that a wonderful future awaited you, like a flower ready to blossom. ‘Maybe they’re admiring the view,’ she suggested.

  Frank snorted, and with good reason. Tara, Katherine and Fintan never even noticed the vast expanse of sky and sea, except as something to escape over. The only view they were interested in was that of the crowds of boys who gravitated to the sea wall most evenings. There was a flourishing social scene with up to twenty there on any one night. Visitors from Limerick, Cork, Dublin, even Belfast.

  To Tara’s dismay, visiting girls also appeared, in their sophisticated, trendy city clothes. Even when they realized they were wasting their time with Fintan they still kept coming. But at least none of the locals tried to muscle in. Sometimes girls from school hovered on the edge, but when no one welcomed them into the privileged inner-circle, they drifted away again, disappointed.

  Nightly, the air was thick with adolescent longing. To facilitate which, fixed courting rituals were in place. You knew someone fancied you if they tried to trip you up or if they threw a jellyfish at you. People were forever up and down the steps to the sand, picking jellyfish up on to pieces of driftwood, then firing them at the object of their desire.

  Tara had more jellyfish thrown at her than anyone else. Katherine had a few pelted at her by a twelve-year-old boy, until he realized that Katherine was fourteen, then he was very apologetic. Fintan had none thrown at him.

  Until darkness fell, and then you’d have been surprised.

  If the person you threw the jellyfish at squealed, ‘Oooooh, you big meanie! I hate you!’ you knew they fancied you. But if they ran away and returned five minutes later with their father and pointed you out, saying, ‘That’s him, Dad. The one who tried to kill me,’ you realized you’d badly misjudged the situation.

  Another sure-fire method of announcing your amorous intentions was by holding up a piece of seaweed and saying, ‘Guess what this is? It’s your hair.’ Likewise if someone found an old, decrepit pair of knickers that had been washed in by the tide, and asked you, ‘Are these yours?’ you knew you had an admirer.

  Tara spent June and half of July with constant anticipation churning in her stomach. It was the most wonderful time of her life. She kept declaring, ‘I’m in love,’ and Katherine would say indulgently, ‘Again? Who is it this time?’

  Most nights, as the sun finally sank below the horizon, Tara repaired to the sand dunes for a courting session with her current squeeze. Katherine waited on the wall, talking shyly to the runners-up. She had no interest in going to the sand dunes to snog boys.

  And they weren’t terribly interested in her either. She was too skinny and plain, with no hint of the sleek, mysterious woman she’d eventually become. They said of her, ‘She has a nice personality,’ which was just adolescent-speak for ‘She has no diddies.’

  Tara spent most Friday nights in tearful goodbyes and promises to write, while Saturday afternoons were used to check out the new arrivals, the cars low in the ground as they rumbled into the caravan park, laden with people and roof racks. Life couldn’t have been better.

  But Fintan wanted more than just sea walls and sand dunes for the three of them. He had vision. Around mid-July, he shocked Tara and Katherine to the core by suggesting casually, ‘Let’s go to the disco.’ For the past three summers, there had been a disco for the over eighteens on Saturday nights in the community hall, with an extra one on Wednesday nights in August when the trickle of tourists became a slightly bigger trickle. The local clergy had given their reluctant approval to the disco in the hope that it might lure tourists away from the fleshpots of Kilkee and Lahinch, further along the coast. This, only after they’d tried and failed to raise money to buy bumper cars.

  The disco was an occasion of sin. Even though Father Neylon patrolled the slow sets with a big stick, the confession box was overrun with people afflicted with impure thoughts. It wasn’t good to encourage depravity. Except if money could be made from it.

  ‘The disco!’ Tara and Katherine swallowed. ‘But we’re too young.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Everyone,’ Katherine pointed out. ‘Our birth certs, for example.’

  ‘Rules are made to be broken.’ Fintan smiled.

  ‘Have you been before?’ Tara asked.

  ‘Er, ah, yes, of course,’ Fintan said, airily. ‘Last year and the year before.’

  ‘Would we get in?’ Tara asked, feeling a rush of delicious, fearful excitement. She’d never even thought of going to the disco. She just assumed she’d have to be at least sixteen. But suddenly it seemed possible.

  ‘I’d say so,’ Fintan said, with confidence. ‘If you wear the right clothes and make-up. Leave it to me.’

  ‘My father is right,’ Tara said in admiration. ‘You are a bad influence.

  ‘Just as well. Let’s face it,’ she said fondly to Katherine, ‘if I was waiting for you to lead me astray, I’d be waiting till the Day of Judgement.’

  Preparations for the visit to the disco were frantic. Katherine took money out of her post-office account and lent it to Tara. Who hitched a lift with Fintan as far as Ennis, where she bought a pair of pink stretch Sasparillas, the most beautiful item of clothing she’d ever possessed. An order for a tube of hair-gel was placed in the Knockavoy chemist, who promised to pull strings to get it in by Saturday. A Day-Glo pink lipstick that had come free with Just 17 summer special was called into active service, and Fintan said it could be used as blusher and eye-shadow too.

  ‘I can’t get ready in my house,’ Tara said, fearfully. ‘If my father sees me all done up he’ll kill me.’

  ‘Get ready in my house,’ Katherine said.

  ‘But won’t Delia mind? Won’t she tell?’

  ‘For Cripe’s sake.’ Katherine sighed. ‘She’s been annoying me all summer to go to the disco. I’m only afraid she’ll want to come with us.’

  ‘Janey Mackers!’ Tara exclaimed. ‘You are so flipping lucky.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘What does your mother think?’ Tara turned to Fintan. ‘Will she be cross if she finds out?’

  ‘If my mother heard that I’d gone to a dance with two girls she’d burst with happiness,’ Fintan reminded them.

  On the big day Tara bought four lemons, as instructed by Just 17, squeezed the juice over her hair, then prepared to spend six hours sitting in the sun, waiting for her mousy hair to turn blonde. Unfortunately, the sky clouded over, then it began to rain, so that was the end of that. Fintan arrived just as Tara was about to start rinsing her hair with beer to make it shine. (Another Just 17 tip.)

  ‘What are you doing?’ Fintan sounded apoplectic. ‘Don’t tell me you’re rinsing your hair with beer?’

  ‘Is it bad for my hair?’ Tara asked anxiously.

  Fintan might have been camp, but he wasn’t that camp. ‘Who cares if it’s bad for your hair? It’s bad for your sobriety,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re wasting good Smithwick’s!’

  ‘But I want my hair to look nice for the disco,’ Tara said.

  ‘Believe me, your hair will look far nicer if you drink the beer,’ Fintan replied. ‘At least, it will look far nicer to you.’

  Tara arrived at Katherine’s with a plastic bag full of her clothes, her make-up, and two pint bottles of porter that she’d stolen from her father’s stash. Delia was out, working in the pub. Agnes, hunched, grey and lonely, looked up suspiciously from Delia’s copy of Spare Rib as Tara clinked past.

  Fintan swept Tara into Katherine’s bedroom. ‘I
need to be alone with my client,’ he said pompously, as he closed the door on Katherine. ‘Genius at work.’

  When Tara re-emerged some time later, Katherine was mesmerized with admiration. ‘You look…’ for once she was speechless ‘… so old.’ She paused, unable to express herself. ‘You look seventeen. Like the girl from Bananarama, or something.’

  Tara was dressed in the pink jeans, a white ruffly shirt, with a blue T-shirt underneath, crammed to capacity with her generous bosom. She had blue kohl around her eyes, Day-Glo pink lipstick on most of the rest of her face, and her hair was backcombed and gelled into sticking up in all the right places.

  ‘Right,’ said Fintan to Katherine. ‘Now you.’

  ‘But I’m ready.’

  Katherine had on baggy black non-stretch jeans, a roomy white T-shirt and not a scrap of make-up. She only wanted to wear make-up if there was a chance that someone might tell her to take it off. She longed for a father to shout at her, ‘Wash that muck off your face! No daughter of mine is going around the town of Knockavoy like a painted whore,’ the way Frank would to Tara.

  ‘But we’ve got to look older, else we mightn’t get in,’ Fintan said anxiously. ‘Would you not even pad your bra?’

  ‘I have,’ Katherine said, in a little voice.

  As Tara emerged into the kitchen, Agnes was aghast. ‘Holy Mother of sweet divine suffering Jesus on the cross with six-inch nails through his hands and feet!’ she declared. ‘Comb your hair, child! How did you get so many knots in it?’

  ‘This is the way it’s supposed to be. It’s the fashion.’

  ‘But it looks like a furze bush.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Fintan and Tara smiled shyly at each other.

  ‘I’m with you now.’ Agnes began to understand. ‘Hair like that is all the go, is it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Well, would it be nice on me?’

  There was a nonplussed pause, until Fintan rallied. ‘Agnes, it’d be divine on you.’ And the career-guidance God smiled down and thought, This young man will go far in fashion.

  ‘I might have to cut it,’ Fintan warned.

  ‘Cut it all you like!’

  As Agnes unfurled her grey bun, she reached for the bottle of whiskey and said, ‘Ye’re welcome to drink Frank Butler’s porter, but I’m having a proper drink.’

  When Delia came home several hours later, she found her mother sitting in the chair where she’d left her, blind drunk, smeared in shocking pink lipstick and with a mass of sticky, backcombed, spiky grey hair.

  ‘Look at me,’ Agnes screeched. ‘I’m the height of style!’

  The corner boys were dubious about Tara’s transformation. ‘Don’t like the war-paint.’ Bobby Lyons watched her go past.

  ‘And her hair looks like a hay reek,’ Martin O’Driscoll complained.

  ‘A pile of silage,’ said Pauley Early.

  ‘But the pink pants are nice,’ Michael Kenny admitted.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ There was a chorus of agreement. ‘We like the pink pants.’

  Despite the porter, Tara, Katherine and Fintan were nervous wrecks at the community-hall door. ‘Remember,’ Fintan muttered, ‘you were both born in nineteen sixty-three.’

  But there was no need to be frightened. The only details that Father Evans was interested in checking was that they had the money to pay in.

  They’d been to the community hall hundreds of times, but this night the dusty wooden floor, the tiny little stage, the orange plastic chairs, the diagrams for the Order of Malta classes, the posters for Delia’s abortive yoga classes – the lotus, the Smirnoff – all looked magically different.

  Even though it was only half past seven and still bright outside, the atmosphere was charged. A strange machine put moving pictures of coloured bubbles on the walls. The bubbles expanded, then split into two, changed from blue to green to red. It reminded Katherine of biology at school, looking through the microscope as cells split and grew. They were the first people there. Nervously, they sat on the edge of the plastic chairs, tense with expectation, as they waited for people to come. And waited. And waited.

  ‘Should we dance?’ Katherine eventually asked. She had a keen sense of duty.

  ‘Wait a while,’ Fintan urged, looking anxiously at the door, willing someone, anyone, to come in. It became clear to Tara and Katherine that, for all his talk, this was Fintan’s first time too.

  They sat in silence, the dust motes spinning in the silvery evening light.

  ‘I think I’ll go to the toilet to see if my hair’s still OK,’ Tara said, after some time had elapsed.

  ‘It is,’ Katherine said.

  They sat in silence again.

  ‘I think I’ll go anyway.’

  At about half past nine as the songs were going around for the third time, one or two people arrived. Then as the sun finally set outside, more people came, then still more.

  Mute and nervous, Tara, Katherine and Fintan sat, amazed at how relaxed and confident everyone else seemed, how very comfortable they were in this wonderful place. Would they ever be that blasé?

  Katherine kept half an eye on the door. She knew that her mother was supposed to be at work, but she wouldn’t put it past her…

  24

  Joe Roth watched Katherine walk up to her desk and his heart lifted. There were at least twenty other women in the office, so what was it about this one that the mere sight of her had all his senses on full alert? Was it the face? The accent? The self-possession? The challenge…?

  After the limited success of the lunch the previous day, he was working himself up to asking her out for dinner. And this time he’d do it without the help of Fred Franklin or the pretext of discussing work. Subterfuge and manipulation weren’t Joe’s usual methods. Though the lunch had been partly work-related, he was ashamed he’d brought pressure to bear on her. But he just hadn’t been able to stop himself.

  As he watched her carefully hang her jacket on the back of her chair, he was trying to decide where to take her. Somewhere so new the paint was still drying? Or somewhere old, mellow and out of town? Which would she prefer?

  Katherine sat down, switched on her computer and opened a file. Then closed it and opened another. Then closed it again. She couldn’t decide where to start. Momentarily, she didn’t care. Then, as she watched Joe walk over to her desk, she realized she’d been waiting for him. He looked extremely good today. That made four days in a row. He wore a beautiful navy suit, with a turquoise weave, and the pale, pale green of his shirt made his dark eyes and hair look even darker. The clothes maketh the man, she told herself, firmly. It was the cut of the suit that made him look so elegant and graceful. It was the soft texture of his jacket that made her want to touch his arm.

  He stood in front of her. She looked at a button midway down his shirt and, to her surprise, thought, I could just open that and slide my hand in. In the split second that she imagined the touch of his skin – taut, silky beneath his chest hair – she had a hot flare of sensation. He sat on the edge of her desk, and she found she was watching the way the front of his trousers bunched and gathered. What would happen if she inched down his zip and slipped her hand in…? Once more her nerve endings prickled with heat. Mesmerized, she forced her eyes from his flies to his face. She felt frightened. Then angry. He smiled at her as he’d done every morning, but today it was different. All the intensity had moved from his mouth to his eyes. Less sweetness, more tension. Less sunniness, more breath-holding anticipation.

  ‘Morning, Katherine.’

  ‘Morning,’ she said, shortly.

  He paused and managed to make eye-contact before saying, ‘Thank you for coming to work today. You’ve made an old man very happy.’

  Katherine coldly quirked an eyebrow. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes, it is. As a very wise man once said.’ Joe paused, rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said, ‘What was it exactly? Oh, right! “You are the sunshine of my life.” ’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Ka
therine replied slowly, ‘because another very wise man – he’s a judge, actually – once said, “Sexual harassment in the workplace is a crime.” ’

  There was a split second of stillness, then Joe twitched as if she’d hit him. As his face flooded with colour, he was already moving off her desk, sickened by shock and sudden self-loathing.

  Sexual harassment! She said he was sexually harassing her. Him! Joe Roth. He’d always thought that sexual harassment was done by older men, who held a position of power and abused it for sexual favours. Like Fred Franklin. It had never occurred to Joe that his enthusiastic wooing of Katherine might be viewed in such a light. He’d just thought he’d been flirting with her. He felt dirty and disgusting – and rejected.

  ‘Sorry,’ Joe said, his face aghast as he backed away. ‘I didn’t mean to… it wasn’t my intention to… I’m terribly sorry.’

  Savouring her sour triumph, Katherine turned her attention to the figures on her desk. To be fair, she thought, it wasn’t exactly harassment, as such. He hadn’t ever accidentally-on-purpose grazed her nipples under the guise of passing her an expenses claim. Or suggested she sleep with him if she wanted a pay rise. Or while she was photocopying in the eight-foot-wide corridor, he hadn’t rubbed up behind her, making sure she felt the full benefit of his erection, saying, ‘Whoops, excuse me, just trying to squeeze past you. Tight fit, this eight-foot-wide corridor,’ the way Fred Franklin did to some of the other girls.

  But he had bullied her into going to lunch with him. Even if it was work-related. And he had smiled at her a lot, an awful lot, and that wasn’t work-related. Not to mention all that irritating stuff about wise men saying things. It’d get on your nerves!

  She stuffed down the unpleasant feeling that true victims of sexual harassment wouldn’t have been one bit impressed with her accusations. But at least she’d managed to get rid of him. Right, then. Opening balances!

  *

  Joe went back to his desk and Myles, who’d been watching the exchange – him and most of the Breen Helmsford payroll – murmured sympathetically, ‘Kicked you to the kerb?’