Last Chance Saloon

by Marian Keyes

‘I’ve a suggestion to make,’ Tara said, staring into the middle distance theatrically. ‘It’s a long shot, but it might just work. We could walk.’

  ‘Walk? How far is it?’

  ‘Only about fifty yards.’

  ‘OK. Shall we take a taxi?’ Liv deadpanned. ‘Oh! I did a joke! Did you hear me, Tara? I did a joke!’

  ‘Good girl yourself.’

  ‘It’s a French letter day when I do a joke.’

  ‘Red letter.’

  As they made their way to the Fox and Feather, Liv said, ‘I don’t do this often.’

  ‘What? Get buckled on a Sunday?’

  ‘No. Walk.’

  Three doors down from the pub was the Beauty Spot. It still had the big sign in the window saying, ‘TONING TABLES! FREE TRIAL!’ With a leap of hope, it crystallized for Tara that there were other ways to get slim, aside from exercise and starvation. Maybe she’d call in next Saturday and find out how much it cost.

  The pub was crowded and noisy, with people eating, drinking and playing darts. Good humour abounded.

  ‘What do you want to drink?’ she asked. ‘Wine? G and T?’

  ‘No,’ Liv said, firmly, ‘I want a pint of lager.’

  ‘Oooooh, that’s my girl.’ Tara clasped Liv’s shoulders, and shook them affectionately. ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’

  ‘Will we eat now or later?’ Liv asked.

  Tara was torn. Obviously food was always welcome, but alcohol had a strong effect on an empty stomach, and she really wanted to get twisted drunk…

  ‘Exactly!’ Liv agreed. ‘So when it’s safe and we’re very drunk, then we’ll eat.’

  Tara fought through the crowds at the bar, and came back with two brimming pints of lager. Then immediately went away again, but returned in moments bearing two more pints. ‘Might as well. We’re on a mission.’

  She set them down and produced a selection of savoury snacks from about her person. ‘Can’t drink pints without crisps to keep them company.’

  They clinked glasses, ‘That’ll put hair on your chest,’ Tara said. ‘No, no, not literally!’ she added, to Liv’s appalled face. Liv spoke better English than Tara, but her knowledge of colloquialisms sometimes let her down.

  As they caught up on their week, their conversation automatically and comfortably slipped into My Life’s More Of A Disaster Than Yours – a game for two or more players.

  ‘Here we are in Self-pity Corner, where I’m fatter than you,’ Tara said.

  ‘No, I’m fatter than you,’ Liv retorted.

  ‘Well, I’m poorer than you,’ Tara insisted.

  ‘No, I’m poorer than you,’ Liv replied.

  ‘Yes, but I owe more money than you,’ Tara elaborated.

  ‘No, I owe more money than you,’ Liv countered.

  ‘I smoke more than you.’

  ‘No, I smoke more than you.’

  ‘Liv, you don’t smoke.’

  ‘Yes, but if I did, I’d smoke more than you. I’m very self-destructive,’ she added proudly.

  ‘Point taken. Now where were we? Oh, yes. My flat is messier than yours.’ Tara was adamant.

  ‘No, my flat is messier than yours.’ Liv defended herself valiantly.

  ‘Well, my boyfriend is a bigger bastard than yours,’ Tara insisted.

  ‘No, my boy – Just a moment, you’re right, your boyfriend is a bigger bastard than mine,’ Liv agreed. ‘You win that round.’

  ‘Oh.’ Tara was upset. She’d only said it so that Liv would contradict her.

  ‘Was that a bad thing to say?’ Liv asked, in a little voice.

  ‘Oh, Liv.’ Tara sighed, taking a big swig of lager, then lighting a cigarette. ‘Something’s wrong with me and Thomas.’

  Tell me something I don’t know, Liv refrained from saying.

  Though she was frightened of talking about it, because it made it more real, Tara found herself blurting, ‘We had an… um… conversation last Saturday…’

  She paused and Liv remained silent and compassionate-looking.

  ‘… and he said that if I got pregnant he wouldn’t stand by me. Not that I’m planning to or anything, but it scared the life out of me. I’ve tried my best not to think about it and I know he loves me. But all week, under the surface, I’ve been expecting something terrible to happen.’ She took a shaky drag from her cigarette. ‘It’s not like we’ve had a particularly bad week – in fact, a couple of times he’s been lovely to me – but I just have this awful feeling hanging over me. And I’m so narky! I lost my temper with him on Monday night, and I wanted to again when I got home from the hairdresser’s yesterday. I can’t understand it.’

  Liv could think of millions of reasons to be furious with Thomas.

  ‘What should I do?’ Tara asked, desperately. ‘And please leave your personal feelings out of it.’

  Liv took a breath and decided to risk it, ‘I think you should leave him.’

  ‘HAHAHAHAHA,’ Tara roared, then quickly lit another cigarette.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Liv said. ‘What kind of future have you? If he says he won’t stay if you become pregnant, he’s not exactly offering a long-term relationship.’

  ‘I’ll just make sure I don’t get pregnant,’ Tara said grimly.

  ‘Don’t you want to have children. Eventually?’

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘But, in any case, that’s not the point. You want more of a commitment than he wants to give. Cut your losses.’

  Now, where had Tara heard that before?

  ‘How the hell can I leave him?’ she asked, suddenly tearful.

  ‘Easy, pack a bag, come and stay with me, or Katherine or Fin –’

  ‘I’m thirty-one.’ Tara’s voice was high and hysterical. ‘I can’t leave him, I’ll never meet anyone else. I haven’t any time left…’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘… I’m losing my looks, my flesh is drooping floorwards, my childbearing days are slipping through my fingers like mercury…’

  ‘You just said you don’t mind if you don’t have a baby –’

  ‘And there’s nowhere to meet men.’ Tara ignored her. ‘That awful party I went to last night was so depressing. And, worse again, I’ve kind of gone off going to clubs.’ She paused with dreadful realization. ‘It’s a disaster, Liv. I’m in the Last Chance Saloon… and I want them to turn the music down!’

  Liv despaired. Tara was so hard to help. ‘So, because you think you won’t find someone else, you will stay with a difficult, selfish man?’

  ‘It’s not his fault he’s like that,’ Tara insisted. ‘And, if you don’t mind, I prefer to think of him as damaged and sensitive.’

  Liv didn’t think she could bear another insightful lecture on Thomas’s childhood, so she said quickly, ‘So you’ll stay with a damaged, sensitive man?’ Adding under her breath, ‘Who behaves in difficult, selfish ways?’

  ‘Certainly, if the alternative is no man at all.’

  ‘We’re modern women, millennium women…’

  ‘Don’t even say it,’ Tara hissed, scrabbling once more for her cigarettes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That we don’t need a man. Need doesn’t come into it.’

  ‘But what about self-respect?’ Liv felt compelled to ask.

  ‘Self-respect doesn’t keep you warm at night.’

  ‘Self-respect doesn’t bring out the bins.’

  ‘Neither does Thomas.’

  ‘Actually, neither does Lars.’

  A silence ensued.

  ‘I’m in the Last Chance Saloon also,’ Liv had the decency to say.

  ‘No, you’re not. Lars has said that he’ll leave his wife for you.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ Liv admitted.

  ‘Well, yes, but at least he had the decency to say it. And maybe he’ll actually do it one day.’

  ‘A leper can’t change his spots,’ Liv said mournfully.

  ‘Why are relationships so difficult?’ Tara demanded.

  It was ac
tually a rhetorical question but, according to Liv, there were explanations for everything. ‘We must look to our childhoods,’ she said pompously. ‘As I’ve told you many times. For example, Katherine has no man because of the absence of a father-figure in her life when she was growing up.’

  ‘If Katherine was here, she’d make you cry for saying that,’ Tara felt she’d better point out.

  Liv ignored her. ‘We human beings have a design flaw in that we’re drawn to the familiar, even when it’s not pleasant. You’re with a bad-tempered man like Thomas because your father was… What’s the word? Narky?’

  ‘A narky pig,’ Tara supplied, helpfully. ‘So you keep telling me.’ She’d almost finished her second pint and, miraculously, felt slightly less despairing. ‘But knowing why I – allegedly – do it hasn’t stopped me from doing it,’ Tara said wryly. ‘If you want my opinion, psychotherapy is just a big cod.’

  Before Liv could start into her usual trip that self-realization is no good without acting on it, Tara said quickly, ‘And how about you? Explain to me why you’re having an affair with a married man.’

  ‘My mother had a very long love affair with a married man,’ Liv explained.

  ‘Did she really?’ Tara was amazed and admiring. ‘You Swedes. Such goers. I can’t imagine my mother doing anything like that. In fact, I still don’t believe she ever had sex at all –’ Tara stopped abruptly.

  ‘No, wait a minute,’ she started again, in a suddenly high-pitched tone. ‘You’ve always told me that your parents were the most happily married couple in Sweden! How could your mother have had an affair with a married man?’

  ‘She did,’ Liv insisted.

  ‘But happily married people don’t have affairs. Or, if they do, they have their happily married badges taken away.’

  ‘She did.’ Liv was adamant.

  ‘Weeelll, perhaps if it was only a brief fling at the start of their marriage.’ Tara was prepared to compromise. ‘How long did it go on for?’

  ‘Let’s see.’ Liv began to do arithmetic on her fingers and mutter to herself. ‘If they got married in nineteen sixty-one and it’s now nineteen ninety-nine, they have been together for thirty-eight years.’

  Suddenly Tara understood. ‘Liv, I don’t think it counts as an affair with a married man,’ she pointed out, ‘if the married man is your husband.’

  ‘Awwww,’ Liv said gloomily. ‘I like when it all makes sense.’

  ‘More drinks,’ Tara ordered.

  By the time they’d finished their third pints, even more of the edge had been taken off Tara’s anxiety.

  ‘No one’s relationship is perfect,’ she consoled herself, wrapped in a warm fuzz of self-justification and too much alcohol on an empty stomach. ‘It’s all about compromise. Myself and Thomas are grand and I’m perfectly normal. Do you know what it is if you kiss a frog and complain when he doesn’t turn into a prince? It’s immature, that’s what it is! If you’re grown-up you kiss a frog and you make yourself like it.’

  ‘Are you drunk yet?’ Liv asked.

  ‘In all bibaprolity, one more pint might do it.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said, in all probability, one more pint might do it. Are you deaf?’

  At about three o’clock, when they finally decided they were drunk enough, all the food in the pub was gone.

  ‘Oh, no.’ Tara put her hand to her mouth and giggled. ‘What’ll we do?’

  ‘I’m very, very, very hungry now,’ Liv warned.

  ‘OK, we could get a takeaway, there’s lots of places around here.’

  ‘Chips!’ Liv declared. ‘If we can’t have roast potatoes, we must have chips. We must have chips.’

  She banged her empty pint glass on the table as she shouted, ‘Chips! Chips! Chips! Chips!’

  About ten feet away was a man who was within a whisker of winning the darts match. He threw his final dart just as Liv started her chips chant and he was lucky to barely miss skewering someone’s ear to the wall.

  In search of chips, Tara and Liv lurched out on to the Holloway Road, deeply surprised to find it was still daylight. Into the nearest fast-food joint, which was bursting at the seams with divorced fathers enjoying weekly visitation rights with their children. The noise was deafening.

  ‘Eat-in or take-away?’ Tara asked.

  Liv looked around at the sea of children wearing cardboard hats. ‘Take-away,’ she replied. ‘Take-far-away. Take-very-faraway. Oh, Tara, I think I did another joke! Am I a gas woman?’

  Armed with two very full brown bags, they made their way back out on to the street.

  ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a piebald pony between two bread vans,’ Tara warned. ‘Come on, hurry back to the flat.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said to Liv’s aghast face. ‘Thomas won’t be back for hours and hours.’

  But as they hurried past the Beauty Spot, it was open. Suddenly Tara thought how fantastic it would be to call in and give the toning tables a go, right there and then. And when she suggested it, Liv clutched her and yelled, ‘That’s a great idea. I’ve always wanted to go on them.’

  They swung through the doors and Deedee, the beautician on duty, took one look at their red faces and manic eyes and felt a very strong urge to hide below the counter and pretend she wasn’t there. ‘We’re closed,’ she attempted.

  ‘You’re not.’ Tara gave a wolfish grin and drenched her with lager fumes. ‘We want to go on the toning tables.’

  ‘I really don’t think now is the right time.’

  ‘Is someone else on them?’ Tara asked.

  ‘No, but –’

  ‘Are you saying we’re drunk?’ Liv demanded, her eyes very blue in her puce face.

  ‘Er, no.’

  ‘We’re good customers,’ Tara insisted. ‘I get my wags lexed here.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I get my legs waxed here. How many times do you want me to say it?’

  Poor Deedee had no choice. Reluctantly she led them into a little room that had six big pink plastic beds side by side. Tara and Liv were highly enchanted, in the way a sober person wouldn’t be. Ooohing and aaahing and saying, ‘So that’s what they look like,’ they hopped up on a bed each, still holding their brown paper bags. However once her ankles were strapped in, Liv declared, ‘I’m starving! How long is this going to take?’

  Tara looked at her in astonishment. ‘But… but eat your nosh!’ she said. ‘Wasn’t that always the plan? That’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ Liv said, delving into her bag. ‘Very hungry.’

  ‘I really don’t think…’ Deedee protested helplessly.

  ‘Have a chip,’ Liv offered her.

  ‘I’m switching the tables on now,’ Deedee said, in tight-lipped response.

  ‘Here we go,’ Tara said, as the end of the table lifted right up, taking her legs with it. ‘Wehay! This is the business.’

  Up and down, up and down went Tara’s legs. In and out, in and out, scissored Liv’s, while they both lay flat on their backs, eating their chips and cheeseburgers.

  ‘This is wonderful,’ sighed Liv. ‘I feel so healthy.’

  ‘It’s very important to take care of our figures and our bodies,’ Tara said, cramming another handful of chips into her mouth. She said something else but it was muffled by the food.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said, we’re worth taking care of. Awww, we’re stopping.’

  Grimly, Deedee shooed them on to another table and off they went again.

  ‘Hey, my arms are going now!’ Tara declared. ‘Look, I’m waving at you.’

  ‘And I’m sitting up. No, sitting down again. No, just a moment, sitting up, and down again…’

  When they got off, brushing stray chips and blobs of ketchup off their fronts, they examined each other and declared they could see a definite improvement in their silhouettes.

  All smiles, they left, assuring a stony-faced Deedee that they’d be back to book a full c
ourse each in a day or so. Then they made a join-the-dots progress home, where they drank every drop of Thomas’s Newcastle Brown ale.

  30

  On Monday morning when Tara’s phone rang at work, she braced herself for it to be Thomas, possibly to tell her to pack her bags and move out. He’d been splutteringly angry the evening before and Tara had been so drunk she still wasn’t exactly sure why. Was it the theft of all his Newcastle Brown and his bottle of brandy? Or coming home to find Tara and Liv surrounded by pizza boxes? Or the burger wrappers he found in the bin? Or the way Tara and Liv screeched with laughter at him in his muddy knee-length nylon shorts? Or the way they’d neglected to feed Beryl?

  Tara was sick with mortification. When she’d woken up that morning, Thomas had already left for work. With a mouth sticky and dry, she sat for ten minutes with her head in her hands, moaning. Then she rang Liv and whispered, ‘I can’t believe we did that. Say we didn’t, tell me we didn’t. Tell me I dreamt it, that we ate the burgers. Can you believe that we actually ate our burgers? On the toning tables? The shame, oh, the shame…’

  ‘We were horrible,’ Liv said, in a strangled voice.

  ‘I’ll have to find somewhere else to get my legs waxed,’ Tara forced herself to admit. ‘I can never go there again. I’ll even have to cross the road rather than pass in front of it.’

  ‘Guess what I did when I got home?’ Liv choked.

  ‘Oh, no. You didn’t…’

  ‘Ring Lars. Of course I did, I was drunk.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘The usual, I imagine. I can’t exactly remember, but I think I called him a bastard and threatened to tell his wife about us.’

  ‘Well, so long as you didn’t tell him you loved him.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Liv gasped, as the dreadful, drunken memory was jogged by Tara’s words. ‘I did. I told him I loved him. Now, I’ll really have to ring and apologize. If he thinks I meant it, he’ll dump me.’

  On Tara’s desk, her phone continued to ring. She was afraid to answer it, but as those around her gave frowning, inquiring looks, she was forced to.

  ‘Hello,’ she managed, in a trembling voice, hoping against hope it would be an irate punter.

  ‘Tara?’ It wasn’t Thomas, it was Sandro.

  ‘Hi!’ Tara greeted, delighted to hear from him. ‘Where’ve you and your fella been all weekend? We thought you must have been kidnapped by aliens.’