Last Chance Saloon

by Marian Keyes

  He lounged ahead of her into the living-room, where Tara was waiting, her face hard.

  ‘Hi there,’ Tara said, coolly. ‘We weren’t expecting you.’

  ‘I think Katherine might have been.’ Lorcan’s meaningful, regretful smile intimated to Tara that if only he wasn’t saving himself for her flatmate, he’d be making a move on her.

  ‘Where did you get the phone number?’ Tara asked, unimpressed. Didn’t he know she didn’t stand for nonsense from men any more?

  ‘Oh, I didn’t ring,’ he explained, with another my-God-you’re-one-attractive-woman smile.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Tara, would you mind…?’ Katherine tried to be polite.

  Tara stomped from the room, surprised at how angry she felt. Lorcan was a tosspot, anyone could see that. For the first time ever Tara had an inkling of how frustrating it must have been for everyone around her when she persisted with unsuitable men.

  The living-room door slammed and Katherine and Lorcan sat looking at each other, he on the couch, she on a chair.

  ‘So,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, her lips trembling. Beneath her skull, it was lighter than air, unpleasantly insubstantial. She couldn’t take in that he was really sitting there opposite her.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked, with a tartness that required effort. In version one of the fantasies that had consoled her through the years, Lorcan would burst into passionate declarations along the lines of ‘I never forgot you, letting you go was the biggest mistake I ever made, let’s forget the last twelve and a half years, we’ve wasted too much time…’ Which would open up a lovely opportunity for her to tell him of all the ways he could stick it up his bum.

  But instead he just said, with confident ease, ‘Hey, it’s great to bump into you again. We can catch up on old times.’ Then he surprised himself by adding, ‘And I’d like to know…’ He faltered, and fixed his sherry-luminous eyes on hers. ‘I suppose I’d like to know what happened to the baby.’

  Like a slippery eel, her anger kept wriggling from her grasp. She should be furious that he’d waited so long to find out what had happened to his child, but instead she felt semi-comforted.

  ‘Tell me,’ he pressed. ‘Did you have it? Can I meet him?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Did you have the old Hoover job?’ he asked.

  She hesitated before saying, ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I had a miscarriage.’

  ‘But you’d contemplated the Hoover job?’

  Shamefaced, she nodded.

  So there was no child. Lorcan was relieved. He didn’t know what had prompted him to ask in the first place – he’d got slightly carried away at the thought that there was a fine son of his running about the place. But, let’s face it, who needed the responsibility?

  ‘So there we are.’ Lorcan was keen to move to the business in hand. This wasn’t going the way Katherine had imagined in any of her myriad scenarios. He was neither contrite nor cocky enough. She’d visualized throwing his apologies back in his face, like a handful of gravel. Or if he tried to get off with her, she’d practised so many malicious, rapier-sharp ripostes that she thought she’d be able to effortlessly shame and mortify him. (Everything from ‘Did I say you could touch me?’ to her old favourite ‘Sexual harassment is a crime.’) But now she felt she couldn’t riposte her way out of a paper bag. The shock of his presence was debilitating and she couldn’t shake the heavy unreality that accompanied every word she said to him, every glance he gave her.

  It was a big effort to regain control of herself.

  ‘I used to see you on telly in Briar’s Way when I went home to Ireland on holiday.’ She forced an arch smile. ‘You were just like yourself.’

  ‘Hahaha.’ Lorcan’s character in Briar’s Way had been a duplicitous womanizer. ‘Hey, we do what we can.’

  ‘You’re not in it any more, though?’

  ‘Nah, I outgrew it,’ Lorcan wondered nervously if she knew how deep into the doldrums his career had fallen in recent years.

  ‘You outgrow a lot of things.’ She gave a sarky smirk. ‘What happened to your wife?’

  ‘We went our separate ways.’ Around the time he’d started to earn decent money, but no need to mention that.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Hey. C’est la vie. You win some, you lose some.’

  ‘But why? Why did you go your separate ways?’

  Lorcan shuffled in his seat. He wished she’d shut up. Even after all this time he remembered how tenacious Katherine was. Once she got the bit between her teeth it was hard to wrest it from her. ‘We’d outgrown each other,’ he tried again.

  ‘What a shame you couldn’t have outgrown each other when you got me pregnant,’ she said snippily.

  ‘So it goes. But listen,’ he said hastily, ‘can I just tell you that you’ve really blossomed? You were always cute, but you’ve turned out gorgeous.’

  She was just about to ask about his girlfriend when he stretched over and put his hand on her face. The touch of his fingertips on her skin was like a bolt of electricity. Every nerve end in her body began humming and singing, and rational thought was shunted way off course.

  ‘You’ve grown up into a beautiful woman,’ he said huskily. He moved his palm along her cheek and up into her hairline while she sat like a statue, her eyes closed. She knew she was passing up a perfectly good opportunity of acting out version two of her fantasies where she gave him a sharp elbow in the chops for his presumption. But she couldn’t move, overwhelmed by the intensity of travelling back through time.

  ‘Sit next to me. He thumped the couch beside him.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Go on.’ He smiled wolfishly. His back was hurting from leaning over to her. In fact, his back had been giving him gyp lately, he must get it looked at…

  He hadn’t known how much resistance he’d get from Katherine. On Saturday night she’d have run away with him there and then, he felt. But, in the meantime, she’d remembered her anger, so it was time to send in the heavy guns. ‘Do you know something, Katherine with a K?’ he said, looking straight into her soul. ‘I never, ever forgot you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  She shook her head again.

  ‘I swear to God it’s true,’ he repeated. ‘You were very special to me and if I hadn’t been married…’ The sincerity in his gaze began to trickle light and healing into her heart. ‘Would you ever come on over here beside me?’ he urged softly.

  And she just couldn’t help herself. Like an automaton, she jerkily left her seat and sat next to him. She didn’t know what was motivating her. Her mind was a snarled mess where desire for revenge was wound tightly around other emotions – the sexual attraction she’d felt when she was nineteen and the need to correct the course of her personal history.

  As soon as she sat down, Lorcan clasped her little face in his big, confident hands, as if he was about to kiss her. She knew she should dig him in the kidneys or swipe him across the face, but all of her pre-planned scenarios were strewn on the cutting-room floor. Her anger and desire for vengeance were fatally blunted. Instead the thought that he still wanted her laid balm on her old wound.

  But there was something she wanted to know… What was it?

  Then she remembered. ‘What about your girlfriend?’

  ‘Don’t mind her.’ Lorcan chuckled, giving his you’re-the-most-special-woman-in-the-world look. ‘It’s over with her.’ Then he prepared to administer a Lorcan Larkin extravaganza. The kind of kiss that destroys women: gentle yet sure, sweet yet macho, firm yet teasing, erotic yet comforting.

  Paralysed, Katherine watched in wonder as he moved so close that his face blurred. Just before he prepared for the final descent he added casually, ‘She was nobody special.’

  She was nobody special.

  She was nobody special.

  The words echoed in Katherine’s head. With
a sudden, unwanted clarity, she knew that that’s what Lorcan would once have said about her, if his wife had found out. ‘Hey, that Katherine girl? Don’t worry about her, it meant nothing to me, she was nobody special.’

  Out of nowhere she thought of Joe. He wouldn’t do that to her. He wouldn’t do that to anyone.

  Lorcan loomed ever closer and finally his lips touched Katherine’s. Desperate for breath, she found herself ducking out from under his embrace. ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ she gasped.

  To her surprise he didn’t complain. Until she saw the indulgent look on his face and realized he thought she wanted to brush her teeth before the clinch.

  With a watery looseness about her knees, she made it to the door. As soon as she’d closed it behind her, Tara hurtled down the hall, and hustled them both into the bathroom. ‘What are you doing in there?’ Tara demanded, in an hysterical whisper.

  Panic swam to the surface of Katherine’s face. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Let me remind you that he couldn’t even remember your name on Saturday night. And he still doesn’t remember your surname because if he did he could have got your phone number from directory inquiries. And why is he calling around so late? Where was he before now? Don’t tell me he was working because Amy told me he’s not.’ Tara had spent the previous twenty minutes agonizing, and all her worries tumbled out. ‘And speaking of Amy…’

  ‘It’s all over with them,’ Katherine mumbled. ‘He told me.’

  ‘And you believed him? God, he must have really gone to town on the apologies.’

  Katherine hesitated just a shaving of a second, but it was enough.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Tara breathed. ‘You mean he hasn’t apologized? Hell – o!’

  Katherine was snow white. ‘I mean… I thought…’ But no matter which way she looked at it, she couldn’t justify it. Tara was right.

  Lorcan hadn’t apologized; she’d been about to let him kiss her and she’d made no protest. How the hell had it happened? She was meant to be in control, not him. But she was as powerless and humiliated as the moment he’d left that pub more than twelve years ago. With his good looks and smooth lines, he’d fudged her emotions so much she couldn’t think straight – just like old times.

  ‘I’m sorry to be so cruel, Katherine, but you’d do the same for me. You have done the same for me, all those nights you stopped me from driving over to Thomas.’

  ‘This is different,’ Katherine tried unconvincingly. Away from Lorcan’s physical presence her head continued to clear, leaving her demeaned and cheapened at how easily she’d almost capitulated.

  ‘Lorcan Larkin is a bad bastard,’ Tara insisted. ‘You only have to look at how he treats his girlfriend. And, Katherine, think, please, I beg of you, just think what he did to you. And he’d do it again. He was the biggest mistake you ever made.’

  ‘But he was my favourite one.’

  ‘He’s a prick. I can’t understand how you even let him in the house. I admit he’s very good-looking and that you probably still fancy him, but after what he did to you!’

  ‘I thought if I saw him again I’d be able to fix the past.’ Katherine was finding it harder and harder to defend her actions. ‘My life’s a disaster and it can all be traced back to him. I thought that if he was nice to me or if I was horrible to him I’d finally feel OK.’

  ‘Your life isn’t a disaster!’ Tara said, hotly. ‘The past is fixed, you just can’t see it. In your head nothing has changed since Lorcan legged it, but see yourself through my eyes. You’ve a good job, you’ve got a lovely car, you’ve got great friends, but most importantly you have a relationship that works. Joe and you work! You’ve been going out with him for five months. He’s mad about you. You’re mad about him. It’s working. It’s a success.’

  ‘Sooner or later he’ll go off me,’ she said sadly. ‘They always do.’

  ‘He won’t. You’ve gone past that stage with him. He knows you.’

  ‘Why is this one different?’

  Tara frantically sought a reason. ‘It might be because of Fintan,’ she tried wildly. ‘You’ve been so worried about him you haven’t had time to be neurotic.’

  A stab in the dark, but to her great surprise, Katherine nodded slowly. ‘Jesus, maybe you’re right.’ She lowered herself and balanced on the side of the bath. ‘God, I think you’re right.’

  ‘And if you don’t cop on to yourself really quickly and stop this malarkey with Lorcan, you’ll lose Joe.’

  ‘I’ll lose Joe,’ Katherine repeated, and the thought of being without him rocked her off balance. She couldn’t bear it.

  A film reel of memories unspooled themselves. The night she and Joe had attempted to cook a dinner from scratch and nearly set Joe’s kitchen on fire, all the hours Joe uncomplainingly gave to Fintan, the arm-wrestling matches that he let her win, videoing Ally McBeal without having to be asked, buying her a Mac lipstick in almost the right colour, his insistence on trying to fix her car when it broke down for the umpteenth time, his unconditional acceptance when she’d managed to tell him about her father. The togetherness of it. And it was mutual. She thought of the compassion with which she’d consoled Joe after Arsenal lost five-nil to Chelsea, the new Wallace and Gromit socks she’d bought because his old ones had holes, the cashew-nut butter she’d tracked down and kept in her kitchen cupboard because he’d once mentioned he liked it, the time and effort she’d put into learning how the Premier league worked for no other reason than she hoped it would please him, the way she didn’t mind when Joe hadn’t been able to do a thing with her car and it still had to go to Lionel the mechanic, who said that Joe had made things worse.

  Before she’d met Joe her life had been a cold, sterile white page, now it was awash with mesmerizing, swirling colours. She couldn’t go back, it would kill her. Astonished by the crystal-clear overview of her before-and-after life, she acknowledged how far she’d come, how much she’d changed, how full and rich her present really was.

  And to think that she had been prepared to throw it all away for a man who would happily and effortlessly destroy her.

  It was like waking up from a dream. A dream where the craziest of things had made perfect sense. But which, with the benefit of wakefulness, were clearly illogical and ridiculous.

  ‘Do you know something, Tara?’ Her eyes were full of wonder. ‘I think you’re right. It’s real with Joe, isn’t it? I’m not imagining it, am I? It works? He cares about me? Tara, I’ve got to ring him!’

  ‘Ahem.’ Tara nodded politely in the direction of the living-room. ‘There’s the small matter of a red-haired man expecting to be serviced.’

  ‘What’ll I do with him? You wouldn’t take him off my hands?’

  ‘I wouldn’t get up on him to get over a hedge. Just tell him to leave.’

  ‘As simple as that? Considering he got me pregnant, then dumped me?’ Exhilarated with liberation, Katherine demanded, ‘Could I not upset him. Just a little bit?’

  Tara considered, reluctantly. ‘Well, OK, but be very careful. Close contact with that fella would addle the head. If you’re not out in five minutes I’m going in to get you.’

  Katherine didn’t even have to think about what she was going to say. She’d already had nine million mythical practice runs. She slinky-hipped back into the living-room.

  ‘Now, where were we?’ she purred at Lorcan.

  ‘Just about here.’ He smoothed his big warm palm along her hair and drew her face to his.

  He placed his mouth on hers, but just before the kiss got into its stride, she disengaged herself.

  ‘No.’ She pulled away from him.

  ‘No?’ he hooted.

  ‘Sorry.’ She sighed regretfully. ‘I just don’t fancy you.’

  ‘Wha–’

  ‘You’re not the man you used to be. And do you know something?’ She looked and saw that it was actually true. ‘You’re losing your hair.’

  He went chalk white. ‘This is to do with your dykey friend, isn�
��t it?’ he said angrily. ‘You were all on for it before you went to the bathroom.’

  ‘I wasn’t, and it’s nothing to do with anything except your lack of sex appeal.’ She smiled prettily at him. ‘Sorr-ee!’

  ‘You’re a lying bitch.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that.’ She was suddenly icy. ‘How dare you?’

  She flashed him a grade three look and he recoiled in unexpected shock. She was like an animal!

  ‘How dare you treat me the way you did all those years ago?’ A grade four was dispatched in his direction, and his breath deserted him. She was like a mad animal. Crazed. Rabid!

  ‘And how dare you come back here and behave as if you hadn’t done anything wrong? How dare you?’

  She took a deep breath and hoped she could pull it off – she’d been out of practice for a while. She clenched her jaw and with monumental effort flung him the Medusa look. From the satisfyingly terrified expression on his face she knew she’d hit home.

  He was astonished with fear. She was evil. Evil.

  ‘I’m off,’ he said.

  ‘I thought something smelt funny.’

  ‘Bitch,’ he muttered.

  He passed Tara who was sitting in the hall like a guard-dog. ‘Bitch,’ he muttered, again.

  ‘Prick,’ she said, cheerfully.

  Roger in the flat below nearly had a heart-attack from the slam Lorcan gave the door.

  Tara and Katherine looked at each other. It could have gone either way with Katherine, until Tara started to laugh heartily, then so did she.

  ‘I’m so glad,’ Katherine convulsed, ‘that I got to use the Medusa look, seeing as I always practised it with him in mind.’

  ‘Very good. Now, are you going to ring Joe or call over?’

  ‘You think I should forget about the Angie thing?’

  ‘Katherine!’

  ‘OK, OK, it’s forgotten.’

  79

  Lorcan strode up the cold, dark road, energized by furious self-righteousness. The outrageous cheek of the woman. How dare she? He’d only came on to her to get one over on pretty-boy Joe Roth and because he’d been bored. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been seen dead with her.