Last Chance Saloon

by Marian Keyes

  Afterwards he was full of wonder. ‘I never thought this would happen,’ he declared, looking down at her.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ she asked neutrally.

  ‘I was crazy about you for so long and I can’t actually believe…’

  In silence they lay in each other’s arms, until Katherine began to feel his hands moving over her again. Gently he snapped open her bra, unhooked her stockings, took off her suspender belt and panties then, leaving their clothing strewn all around the already shambolic living-room, they went to the bedroom where they made love for a second time.

  Afterwards Joe showed no sign of wanting to go to sleep, which suited Katherine.

  ‘Come on.’ She poked him.

  ‘Come on where?’

  ‘The bathroom, we’ll have a shower.’

  ‘Why? Do you have to go home to your wife?’

  ‘Come on.’

  Giggling, they tumbled into the bathroom, where they climbed into the bath and Katherine handed him a sponge and a tube of shower gel. ‘Wash me.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, eyeing her slender body, then the sponge. ‘But we’ll have to get you wet first.’

  He turned on the jet of hot water and pulled Katherine under it. The silent, speculative way he looked at her body, at the shower water sluicing down the curve of her breasts and over the peak of her nipples and the appraising way he squeezed the shower gel on to the sponge, was charged with eroticism.

  ‘You’re filthy,’ he said, sternly.

  ‘I know.’ She could hardly speak.

  Slowly, he began to apply the sponge to her shiny-wet body, to circle it over her stomach, her arms, her legs. Then her breasts, soaping them until her skin was slippery. ‘Particularly grubby here,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she gasped.

  He moved the sponge to between her legs and she squirmed with desire. ‘Stand still,’ he ordered.

  She tried, but the firm, relentless massage was irresistible. The warm water, his wet body, her slick skin became too much for them both.

  With her back against the cold wall tiles, her legs around his waist, Joe entered her again. For a few blissful moments they clung together, teeth gritted from desire, while he rhythmically stroked himself into her. Until he lost his footing on the wet bath and they both tumbled to the floor where, sprawled and tangled, still clinging to each other, they laughed their heads off.

  The morning after, Katherine woke early. She turned to the pillow next to her and there he was. Joe. Joe Roth. Joe Roth from work. Without his suits. In her bed. Asleep and beautiful, his eyelashes thick, the beginnings of stubble poking through his jaw, the room filled with the smell of his otherness.

  The thrill was like waking up on Christmas morning to find that Santa has been.

  I won’t mess this up, I won’t mess this up, I won’t… she repeated over and over again in her head.

  She knew this was the trickiest moment. Tara assured her it was difficult no matter who you were. But Katherine felt it was especially hard for someone like her, whose most alluring feature to men was her aloofness. Which disappeared as soon as she’d slept with them – it was kind of hard to have sex with someone and remain untouchable and icy. Not if you want to enjoy it, in any case. But, very often, men who’d chased Katherine for weeks and even months, maddened by her unattainability, found that after they’d screwed her, they lost interest. Her mystique dissolved and she was suddenly just an ordinary woman. Toppled from her pedestal and fighting for her man on the same terms as everyone else.

  Worse still, the contact would have rekindled old fires in Katherine. No doubt about it, it was a delicate time.

  Joe opened his eyes, his eyelids languid, his look meaningful. ‘Hi,’ he said, groggily.

  ‘Hi,’ she whispered.

  ‘What a lovely sight first thing in the morning.’ He reached out his hand and pulled her to him under the crumple of duvet. Her heart swelled as she felt the heat of his body. Chest against chest, the smooth skin of her leg rubbing against the hairs on his. She closed her eyes to savour the softness of his morning-langourous caresses and when they made love it was slower, more lazy and sensuous than it had been the previous night.

  Afterwards Joe went to the bathroom while Katherine frantically raked her hands through her hair, then swept her fingers under her eyes to remove any rogue bits of mascara. When Joe returned, he looked uncertain. Thoughtfully he rubbed his hand across his mouth, stretching and pulling his skin out of shape, then letting it spring back.

  ‘I suppose I should be off,’ he said, questioningly.

  ‘I suppose you should,’ Katherine said, with an enigmatic smile. But she was bitterly disappointed. What about the croissants, the freshly squeezed orange juice and the white linen napkins on the gilt tray, like the ads promised? Shouldn’t she be wearing a pyjama top and Joe the bottoms? Shouldn’t she be sinking back into goose-down pillows, Joe bending over, feeding her spoonfuls of yoghurt? Then putting a blob of it on the tip of her nose, both of them laughing with crinkle-eyed joy?

  Then shouldn’t they go for a walk, holding hands, feeding the ducks, their lovers’ laughter ringing across the park? Shouldn’t Katherine dip her toe into the water, and wear a stupid hat which only stayed on by her holding her hand on the crown of her head?

  Joe left the bedroom and when he returned he was dressed. This made her feel horribly empty.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he promised.

  ‘Will you?’ Katherine smirked sagely. So that if he had no intention, she was letting him know, and thereby keeping her dignity intact. And if he genuinely meant to call her, then she was giving him some of the mysterious Katherine he was so keen on. Christ, it was exhausting!

  ‘And of course I’ll see you at work,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve no doubt you will,’ she agreed, lightly.

  ‘And thank you for a wonderful evening. And day,’ he added.

  She inclined her head graciously. ‘Don’t mention it.’

  The slamming of the door behind him was echoed by a thunderclap of bleakness deep within her. Was that it?

  But at least she’d kept the floodtide of need at bay. Better. Better than the last time. Maybe she’d finally grown out of it. If she had, she acknowledged ruefully, it had taken twelve long years.

  59

  First cut is the deepest. And Katherine’s was deeper than most. She’d been nineteen the first time her heart was broken – quite old; maybe that had been part of the trouble. Then, not even a full month later, she wrote to her father and found out he had died. Thus crystallizing her pain.

  So, the following week, when Tara said, ‘Fintan and I have enough money saved to leave Knockavoy. We think you should come with us,’ Katherine felt she’d been thrown a lifeline. On the one hand her life was over, so technically it didn’t matter where she eked out her days. But the idea of escape was a wildly inviting one.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she’d demanded.

  ‘To a faraway city,’ Tara had tempted.

  ‘Not Limerick?’ Katherine’s voice had quaked.

  ‘Jesus, no. Further afield.’

  ‘Dublin?’

  ‘Further afield again,’ Tara had swaggered.

  ‘Not… not New York?’ Katherine could hardly contain her excitement.

  ‘Er… no… not New York.’ Tara had been slightly shamefaced. ‘But how would London suit you?’

  Katherine would have preferred it if it was further. Like Los Angeles. Or Wellington. Or the moon. But London would do.

  Early on the morning of 3 October 1986 the three of them arrived at Euston station, bought an Evening Standard and landed a flat in Willesden Green.

  During the following week Tara got a job with a computer company, Fintan found employment on the shop-floor of an expensive menswear emporium, Katherine got a placement as a trainee accountant and their new life began.

  There were lots of men in London. Lots and lots of men. Tara and Fintan had rolled up their sleeves and set about w
orking their way through them, but Katherine had kept her distance. It was no hardship for her. But her lack of interest wasn’t always reciprocated. Though she wasn’t exactly fighting them off with sticks, she was occasionally asked out. Without it costing her a thought she always said no, as unpleasantly as she could. No one asked a second time.

  Until one Friday night, fourteen months after her arrival in London, Katherine went to the pub with Tara’s workmates. Among the people she was introduced to was a man called Simon Armstrong, the official office heart-throb. Confident, charming, well-built, good-looking and blond, he enjoyed great success with women. But Katherine barely noticed him. It was as if she had a blind spot. With his acute antennae, Simon picked up on her genuine lack of interest in him – you can’t fake these things. He could have had any of the women present, but contrarily he wanted Katherine, intrigued and maddened by her unavailability, his ego telling him he’d be the man to get behind her mask – that he had to be.

  Katherine wasn’t as sleek and beautiful as the women he usually dated but, somehow, that made it even more important to win her. He found himself going after her, blocking her way, and grinning. ‘Resistance is futile.’

  The other girls there looked on in disbelief, scorning Katherine’s neat hair and her ordered, unremarkable appearance. ‘Maybe she reminds him of his mother,’ they concluded.

  Simon got her work number from Tara and rang and asked her out. She said no. So he rang again. Again she said no. He told her he didn’t take no for an answer.

  Katherine was initially alarmed by his attention. And then she was flattered. And then she was excited. The bombardment of Simon’s attentions managed to break through her protective walls and old, buried desires came bobbing to the surface. She wanted to be loved. And if she could make things work with this Simon Armstrong, her life would get back on the right track. All’s well that ends well.

  So she went on a date with him. Then another. Then another. After three weeks she slept with him. As she left his bed he said he’d call her that evening, but he didn’t. So she called him early – too early – the following day. And, trying to keep the tremor from her voice, suggested that they go out that night. When Simon gave an evasive answer, she begged, her eyes clenched shut, ‘Please don’t do this to me.’ Which, of course, had Simon running for the hills.

  He’d lost interest, anyway. She was too young and inexperienced, not tough enough, and he’d hung on merely for the notch-on-the-bedpost bonk. All he’d really liked about her was her unavailability and once he’d slept with her that had disappeared immediately. Though slim and pretty, she was no stunna and Simon Armstrong liked stunnas. Not to mention that he was picking up very needy signals from her, which made him itchy and uncomfortable.

  He knew an obsessive when he facilitated one.

  In the weeks and months that followed, Katherine was like a shell-shock victim. She couldn’t believe she’d been dumped again. It seemed that her ability to handle men had worsened, if anything, and she felt more out of control than ever.

  That was the last time she’d ever go out with a man, she swore to herself. She’d really learnt her lesson this time.

  Over the next couple of years her life came together for her. She worked hard, passed accountancy exams, lived with Fintan and Tara, watched their romantic exploits with a wry smile, but steered well clear of any liaisons herself. Not that you’d know she’d opted out of love: she still bought trendy – though not too trendy – clothes, spent a lot of money on her hair, talked to men in a light-hearted, distant way and went partying every time her flatmates did. The only difference was that she always went home alone.

  Until she met Alex Hoist.

  It was almost four years since she’d moved to London. Fintan had just started work for Carmella Garcia, and Alex was one of the models. He had a stubbly jaw, perfectly capped teeth, raven’s-wing hair, and a dancing, mischievous smile. But to his alarm, when he was introduced to Katherine, her eyes didn’t light up with a lascivious gleam. She was polite but not really present, and this completely unnerved him. His ravenous ego needed her adoration.

  He was incredibly insecure, having spent his childhood as an overweight blimp. Via the twin tools of weightlifting and bulimia he was now lean and beautiful, but he hadn’t made the emotional shift. In his own head, he was still a mountain of lard, ostracized and ridiculed. As Katherine moved away from him, the chant of, ‘You’re nothing but a fat bastard,’ started internally.

  He was gentler than Simon had been, but just as persistent. He kept up a steady flow of phone calls, sent her flowers at work and wrote her a poem, telling her that she was the most interesting and intriguing woman he’d ever met.

  And Katherine resisted a lot harder than she had with Simon. When Alex told her that he never usually pursued women so relentlessly, she sneered, ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

  When he swore to her that he wasn’t a womanizer, she laughed nastily and said, ‘You must take me for a fool.’

  When he decided to surprise her one night by waiting outside her office, she told him coldly that stalking was a criminal offence.

  But he didn’t give up and she began to soften. She couldn’t help herself. His attention was so seductive and she started to believe his protestations of devotion. Because she so desperately wanted to. Then one night he told her about the shame of his tubby past, and the last of her barriers was washed away in a tide of compassion.

  As with Simon, Alex became an opportunity to fix where she’d gone wrong. And in the end, begging herself, steeling herself, gritting her teeth and swearing to God that she wouldn’t act needy in any way, she went out with Alex.

  It lasted slightly longer than the Simon encounter, but sooner rather than later, she sensed a slipping away of his interest. When she questioned him on it, he denied that he was any less ardent than he’d been all along, but she didn’t believe him. She watched herself mutate from a breezy, self-contained young woman to a desperate, paranoid, insecure obsessive. And she could do nothing to stop herself. She accused Alex of looking at other girls and of not really caring about her. He protested, not very convincingly, that he did care about her, but then he didn’t ring for three days. And when he finally did, it was to tell her that he was seeing someone else.

  All her old wounds were torn open. The mortifying feeling that she wasn’t good enough and the huge gaping ache of loss reappeared. Back she went into the pit of self-hatred. The pain was unbearable. She felt like a fool and a terrible failure.

  Eventually, she righted herself. And though she swore she’d never, ever again, for as long as she lived, have anything to do with a man, she wasn’t convinced. She’d sabotaged herself twice now. She lived in terror of doing it again.

  When she was between men, her life was nice and ordered. She became a fully qualified accountant, she bought her beloved car; eventually she bought her own flat. As she became more confident in her professional life she transformed herself from fresh-faced girl to sleek child-woman.

  But the desire for love was relentless. It kept coming back at her like a boomerang. Reappearing every so often, usually when she was being wooed by a good-looking man.

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t go out with such hunks,’ Tara had suggested gently. ‘Usually they’re so in love with themselves they’ve none left over for anyone else.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Katherine snapped.

  ‘I know.’ Tara sighed.

  Katherine couldn’t go out with ordinary blokes. She just couldn’t. They held no interest for her.

  She had slept with six men before Joe. The longest ‘romance’ lasted seven weeks, and all six of the men dumped her. Not once did she get what she so desired – the upper hand.

  In the end the fear of being left made her desperate to pre-empt it. She couldn’t bear waiting for the man to gradually go off her as soon as he realized she was just an ordinary woman and not the mysterious enigma he’d expected. So she precipitated
it. Began behaving like a psycho bitch from hell. All the better to hasten the inevitable. She lurched through life, long tracts of celibacy intercut with short-lived romance, followed by lengthy periods of wound-licking. Every time a man lost interest in her, and implied that she wasn’t good enough, it triggered an avalanche of old pain.

  In saner moments she knew she was stuck in the past and that she wasn’t normal. It had taken her until four years ago, aged twenty-seven, to wonder if perhaps it was the discovery of her father’s death so soon after her first heartbreak that had knocked her so far off course. After all, everyone gets ditched at some stage. Only the truly weird don’t get over it. But the double wound had the effect of bricking her in, of keeping her stuck. Somehow twelve years had passed, and when she thought about it, she really couldn’t figure out where the time had gone.

  Then came that day, two months ago, when she’d been introduced to the new account director, Joe Roth, and he’d begun to rain attention down on top of her in a way that was frighteningly familiar.

  60

  But this time I behaved myself, Katherine thought, with pride, looking around at her rumpled bed. The emptiness left by Joe’s departure had evaporated and she was skittish and overexcited after her night with him.

  She picked up a pillow, pressed it to her face, and caught a faint whiff of him. A thrill of memory charged her and she wriggled with glee. She was dying to talk about it. It was nearly midday – too early to ring Tara?

  Oh, Jesus – Tara! Whatever had happened to her yesterday? Katherine grabbed the phone, but just got Tara’s answering-machine. So she tried her mobile and got her voicemail. Next she rang Liv and got her answering-machine. She left a message and then rang Fintan.

  ‘Hello,’ he barked.

  ‘It’s me. Will I come over?’

  ‘Not now. This evening.’

  ‘Oh. OK. I’ll have my mobile if you change your mind.’