Just Between Us (38 page)

‘Fiona mentioned it to Joan, who said he’s just a guy from the same flat complex so, I thought I’d come over and talk to you,’ Vic continued. They’d reached the ticket desk.

‘Two please,’ said Vic, holding his credit card out to the teller.

‘There’s no need to buy my ticket,’ said Holly, who hadn’t really been paying attention and was now astonished at the notion of a man voluntarily buying her ticket.

‘You can get me a drink in the interval,’ said Vic, giving her a sloe-eyed grin.

‘Thanks,’ stammered Holly. He really was attractive. ‘You know,’ she added, looking at him curiously, ‘you don’t look a bit like Fiona.’

‘We’re all adopted,’ he replied.

‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean…’ She went pink again at this new faux pas, her arm jerked convulsively and a heap of leaflets advertising a series of comedy nights went flying onto the carpet. Both Vic and Holly bent to pick them up, their heads coming within an inch of banging.

‘Sorry,’ repeated Holly, thinking she should just get a tape recorder with her voice saying ‘sorry’ on it and she wouldn’t have to talk at all.

‘I don’t mind people noticing we look different, honestly,’ Vic chatted away as he briskly gathered up the scattered leaflets. ‘A lot of people notice because we genuinely look nothing like each other. Sandy, our other brother, has green eyes and white blond hair.’

‘That must make for great family group photos,’ Holly said admiringly.

‘You said it,’ said Vic easily. ‘Let me tell you about Fiona’s twenty-first birthday…’ And he was off. As Holly soon discovered, Vic was easy to talk to. A junior doctor in a busy city accident and emergency department, he was accustomed to talking to anyone and everyone and could get conversation out of a stone. He also hated silence and could keep up a stream of hilarious remarks for hours on end. All Holly had to do was listen and stop herself from laughing too much.

By the interval, neither Holly nor Vic had paid much attention to the band his brother was playing in.

‘We should watch a bit,’ suggested Holly guiltily, as they stood down the back of the Olympia, drinking gin and tonics
from plastic cups and talking loudly so they could hear each other above the thumping bass guitar.

Vic screwed his expressive face up in fake horror. ‘Holy shit, no. I’ve been listening to Sandy for years. The band practise in our garage when Mum and Dad are away and I could sing most of the songs myself. Besides, I’ve seen people half deaf from being too near to the amps. We’re much better down here where our ears are safe.’

Holly found that she was enjoying herself and the evening raced by. It was easy to talk to men when you weren’t interested in them. That was the secret, she realised. After all these years of feeling shy, she’d finally arrived at the truth. When a guy talked to her like a normal person, her shyness vanished. But the ones she liked made her tonguetied. Even Tom, her dear friend and a man she could have chatted to for years, had been affected by this horrible syndrome. Until she’d realised she was crazy about Tom, she could chat to him easily. Once the sisterly feelings went, so did the conversation.

She could see Tom towering over the heads of most of the concert-goers, his fair hair glinting in the lights from the stage. He looked around but obviously couldn’t see her because when she waved, his gaze went past her and he turned away without waving back. Holly’s heart gave a resigned little thump. She knew she had to get over Tom. He loved Caroline. There was no hope for stupid Holly. She might as well forget about him and get on with her life.

Vic, wildly indiscreet and onto the story of his previous night in A & E, was trying to make her laugh.

‘So this woman came in with abdominal pain and said she thought it was post-natal pains and that they could be dangerous, couldn’t they? So I said how long since she’d had the baby, and she said ‘five years’. He stopped suddenly. ‘I’m not boring you, am I?’ he asked.

Holly laughed out loud at the thought of anyone asking
her
that question.

‘That’s my line, normally,’ she teased.

‘You?’ Vic reached out and gently pulled one of her lustrous dark curls straight. When he let it go, it bounced back like a spring. ‘I can’t see you boring anybody, Holly. You are so not boring. You haven’t an ounce of boringness in your whole body. You are the least boringest person I have ever encountered in my entire boring life, and I know about boring because I personally…’

‘Stop it,’ laughed Holly. ‘I’m not going to buy you any more gin if you keep this up.’

Vic grinned broadly. ‘It’s not gin,’ he said indignantly. ‘It’s love.’

‘I said stop!’ Holly thought he was a howl. ‘I’ve always known that doctors were mad but you take the biscuit. My sister writes for
National Hospital
and the doctors in that all come across as deranged. Now I see the scriptwriters don’t know the half of it.’ Usually, mentioning Tara’s job enthralled listeners and they demanded details, wanting to know what the stars were
like
and how did they make all those mad story lines up? But Vic wasn’t even vaguely interested.

‘Junior doctors have to be deranged,’ he joked, ‘it’s part of the job. First the Hippocratic Oath, then the Deranged Oath. No, seriously, to get back to you, Holly, I am entranced by your non-boringness. Will you come out with me sometime? On a date?’

‘Vic,’ said Holly, ‘you are sweet.’

‘I don’t want to be sweet,’ he protested, ‘I want to be He-Man to your Shee-La Queen of the Jungle or whatever her name was. Go on, will you come on a date with me? I promise not to be deranged. It’ll be fun, although it’ll have to be on Friday because I’m on shift for the next four days.’

He looked so keen, and so interested in her. After yearning in vain for Tom, there was something infinitely comforting to Holly about a man who did like her. Even if she actually wasn’t interested in him. Vic was good-looking but he wasn’t her type. Still, it might be fun. She cast Tom resolutely out of her mind.

‘As friends,’ Holly said. ‘We’ll go out as friends.’

Vic growled and banged his chest like Tarzan. ‘Me He-Man, you Shee-La.’

‘Is he annoying you?’ asked Fiona, coming out of the bar with a tray of drinks.

‘No,’ said Holly, still laughing. ‘Not at all.’

For once, Joan didn’t have the energy to go clubbing. ‘Bed, I need my bed,’ she moaned as a slightly depleted crowd reconvened outside the Olympia after the gig to discuss further plans.

‘Me too,’ said Holly.

‘Three-in-a-bed!’ sighed Vic, rolling his eyes. ‘Will I be able for it?’

Everyone laughed, except Tom, who was noticeably stonyfaced.

‘No three-in-a-bed romps for you, my boy,’ said Holly sternly. ‘Go home and get some sleep yourself. We don’t want you killing anyone tomorrow due to lack of sleep.’

‘I’ll do my best, ma’am,’ said Vic, saluting. ‘Your wish is my command. But,’ he added in a stage whisper, ‘if the three-in-a-bed thing should come up, I can be at your place in fifteen minutes, twenty max. I’ll bring my stethoscope and my white coat, OK?’

Happily tanked up on beer, everyone roared with laughter again.

‘I’ll call you,’ promised Vic, blowing kisses in Holly’s direction.

Kenny hailed a taxi and shoved Joan in. Holly clambered in after her, still giggling over Vic’s antics, and Tom got in last, bending almost double to avoid knocking his head on the roof.

‘Vic’s a panic, isn’t he?’ said Joan, leaning against Kenny and closing her eyes. ‘Fiona says he’s totally brilliant and utterly mad, which is quite something coming from her because she’s the maddest of our whole year.’

‘Go to sleep, Joan,’ groaned Kenny, closing his eyes too. ‘I’m exhausted and I can’t believe I spent the evening listening
to those awful bands. What is it about straight men and crap music?’ he grumbled. ‘I mean, I have to be up at half six to be in the studio by seven thirty.’

Silence reigned. An uncomfortable silence, Holly thought in alarm. Both Joan and Kenny were snoozing, while Tom sat on the bucket seat and stared grimly out the window. The seat was far too small for his big frame and he looked like a giant on a child’s seat.

‘Did you’ve a nice time?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ said Tom, still looking out the window.

Holly nibbled a bit of fingernail. He must be missing Caroline. ‘I suppose you wish Caroline was here,’ she said kindly.

Tom dragged his gaze away from the fascinating spectacle of a traffic island with nobody standing on it.

‘She hates that sort of music,’ he said shortly.

‘Oh.’

He stared back at the traffic island. The lights changed and the taxi lurched off.

‘Well, she’ll be up from Cork soon, won’t she?’ Holly was doing her best to be chatty. ‘And when she gets the MG convertible thingy, she’ll be able to whizz up. It’ll eat up the miles.’

‘Coupé,’ said Tom.

‘Sorry, coupé,’ said Holly. ‘I know I’m stupid, you’d think I didn’t know the difference between a coupé and a convertible.’ It was her turn to look out the window. She hadn’t a clue about the difference between a coupé and a convertible. She’d thought they were the same. The roof came off, didn’t it? Obviously she was wrong about this, more proof of how Caroline was Ms Trendy, On-The-Ball person while she was Ms Gobshite, Never-Owned-A-Car and Never-Likely-To person. Shit, she didn’t care.

‘I can’t drive,’ she said recklessly. ‘I can’t afford to buy a car in the first place.’ She glared at Tom. Just because he was going out with perfect bloody Caroline, didn’t mean he had to get the hump with her.

Tom looked at her for a moment, then went back to the window.

Holly rooted around in her handbag and found her mints. She took one out and began crunching it crossly. Men. Pains in the backside, that’s all they were.

Tara’s ‘must do’ list was growing longer. First it was just:
buy binbags, dishwasher stuff, dandruff shampoo, FOOD, phone bank about standing order problem, get birthday present for Isadora, phone Dad to see how he is
. Then her credit card bill came and added another ‘must do’ to the list—a call-credit-card-people-and-complain job.

She opened the bill on the way to work when she was sitting in the car in a tailback at least a mile long with no sign of ever moving again. The new skincare range was going to be on the bill, she reflected. She should never have gone into the chemist when she was feeling grey-faced and old. Beauty counter experts had some sort of special radar for people experiencing hate-themselves days. The experts instantly spotted the said miserable person and convinced them that gorgeous pots of wildly expensive creams were the solution. Tara, despite knowing that it was going to be an expensive month because her car insurance was due, had succumbed to the power of the gorgeous pots. Now she wished she hadn’t. She scanned down the list of purchases. The skincare range was there in all its glory and she told herself firmly that shopping was not to be considered an acceptable form of therapy. They didn’t have the funds for luxuries.

Then, she noticed a huge debit that just had to be a mistake. Money taken from a cash machine. Well that was wrong for a start. Tara never used her credit card to take money from the hole in the wall—the interest knocked in
straight away and it would be cheaper to rip up a couple of tenners than borrow money that way. Honestly, first the bank messed up the mortgage payment which resulted in a snorter of a letter from the building society about how they were going to nail somebody’s kneecaps to the floor if the money wasn’t paid pronto. Now this.

Phone bank
went to the top of the
must do
list.

In work, there were messages from Stella, from Lenny in publicity about a reporter who wanted to spend the day on the set, and a please-call-someone-in-the-bank.

‘What’s up?’ asked Scott Irving, peering into Tara’s cubicle. He leaned his jean-clad hips against her desk and smiled at her over his cup of coffee. Scott’s smile was one of those slow-burn ones that made women pull their stomachs in. Tara tried to suppress the desire to check her reflection in her darkened computer screen.

‘Fine,’ she said. She
had
put lipstick on, hadn’t she?

‘Fancy lunch later?’

Tara smiled with genuine pleasure. ‘I’d love to,’ she said.

Scott treated her to another slow-burn smile that reached places most smiles couldn’t. ‘See you at one, then.’

Tara sat at her desk with her messages in her hand and tried to assimilate what had just happened. She’d said yes instinctively but was that a mistake?

‘Lunch?’ asked Isadora innocently on her way to her desk with a coffee in her hand.

‘I, er…well…’ said Tara, suddenly feeling embarrassed by the idea of telling Isadora that she was going out with Scott. It was only lunch after all, they worked together and had to discuss work and stuff, but people might read the wrong thing into it…

‘You’re a crap liar, Miller, you know that.’ Isadora gave a lascivious wink. ‘I heard you get asked out on a lunch date already. I was a step behind Mr Irving.’

‘It’s not a date,’ insisted Tara, going puce. ‘It’s work.’

‘If it’s about work, how come he’s never asked
me
out to lunch?’ countered Isadora.

‘That’s because you insist that men take you to fancy, expensive restaurants,’ Tara said, recovering quickly. ‘Us married women are cheap dates.’

‘So it’s a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich in the pub?’

‘Yes,’ Tara said. ‘Anyway, it’s work, I told you. I’m a happily married woman. I can’t refuse to go out with people I work with just because they’re good-looking, can I?’

Isadora didn’t have to reply: her expression said it all. Yeah right.

Tara decided to quickly run through her personal calls before she got down to work. Stella must have been sitting on the phone because she answered her private line on the first ring. She sounded uncharacteristically tense.

‘Hi, Tara, just thought I’d update you about Dad. He’s been leaving the answering machine on all the time, as you know, but I phoned Angela Devon first thing this morning and she said Dad was OK. She’s making him dinner tonight, although he says he’s not much company and he might not come. He and Alastair went out last night and Alastair said Dad cried in front of him.’

‘Oh God,’ said Tara horrified. It was like imagining Superman in tears.

‘I know. I think that’s why he won’t talk to us: he’s afraid he’ll break down.’

‘This is terrible.’ Tara rested her forehead on one hand. ‘I wish there was something we could do.’

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Stella answered bleakly. ‘All Dad wants is for Mum to come home and she won’t. I said that myself and Amelia would visit her this weekend but she says no, she needs to be on her own.’

‘That’s not like Mum. She’d climb the Himalayas with one foot in plaster to spend five minutes with Amelia.’

‘She says maybe next weekend.’

‘What about Dad?’ asked Tara, doodling small, dark shapes on a bit of paper.

‘Well, as Holly told us, she’s definitely going down tomorrow night to spend the weekend with him. Originally,

he insisted that she get on with her life and not visit him, but she talked him into it.’

‘Good for Holly. She’s the only one of us who seems to be dealing with this.’

‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ Stella murmured.

Next on Tara’s list was the bank. The misery curdling inside her at what was happening to her family coalesced into pure bad temper. So the bank thought they could cancel the direct debit that paid the mortgage, did they? And their credit card division thought they could screw up her statement, adding in non-existent transactions willy-nilly and hoping she wouldn’t notice? Well, they couldn’t dare do such things and they were about to experience Tara Miller in full fury. She might be impotent about a lot of things in life but not with regards to the bank. She dialled the number, fingers stabbing the telephone buttons furiously.

Ten minutes later, she put the phone down and the only thing stabbing was the pain throbbing in her temples. A softly-spoken but firm assistant manager had taken the wind out of Tara’s sails. The mortgage hadn’t been paid because there weren’t enough funds in Tara and Finn’s joint account. The reasons for this were several withdrawals from the account by Mr Jefferson’s bank card. The assistant manager had understood that Tara was shocked by all of this. The couple’s tiny savings account hadn’t been touched but as they weren’t the sort of people who managed to save, there wasn’t much in there. The bank suggested a meeting to talk about what could be done.

Tara said she had to make one more phone call first. The credit card people confirmed her suspicions: the large withdrawal had been made one weekend at the bank machine nearest to the flat, the machine Finn and she used.

On the A-4 pad on her desk, Tara had scrawled the pitiable amounts left in the account. She added the credit card bill, made a rough guess at the electricity, phone, heating and grocery bills for the next month. Then, she added her salary and Finn’s. Like a straining waistband that wouldn’t
meet, the two figures were far apart. She and Finn never saved money and just scraped by each month. With the mortgage money blown, they were in trouble. If they didn’t eat for three months, sat in the dark and never turned on the water heater, there was a vague hope of paying the bills. Otherwise, they were up to their eyeballs in debt.

Tara could have coped with debt if it hadn’t been for how they’d fallen into it. Finn hadn’t bought anything with the money he’d siphoned out of their accounts. He didn’t have a spectacular new designer suit and he hadn’t splashed out on a better car. Tara knew what he’d done with the money: he’d drunk it. Generous to a fault, there was nobody keener to buy people drinks than Finn. And when he was happily drunk himself, he’d buy drinks for an entire pub. Their mortgage had been squandered at the bottom of a bottle.

She phoned Scott to cancel lunch: there was no way she could sit and talk companionably with anyone right now.

‘I’m sorry, Scott,’ she said, ‘I’m having family problems right now and I’d be very bad company.’

He was very understanding. ‘No problem, Tara,’ he said easily. ‘We can do it some other time.’ Then, he hesitated. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘Nah,’ she said, trying to sound light-hearted. ‘Other people’s family problems are boring, aren’t they?’

‘No,’ said Scott softly.

‘Well, bye.’ Tara hung up quickly. At this precise moment, she didn’t have time for idle office flirtation.

Her final call was to Finn’s mobile which was, as ever, switched to voicemail. As she waited to leave her message, she grimly wondered how he ever did business when he never answered his phone. ‘Finn, we need to talk about money. The mortgage hasn’t been paid because there isn’t enough in the account. Phone me back, it’s urgent.’

Despite Tara leaving two more messages, Finn never called. Tara’s ever-increasing rage meant she could barely work and at five on the nail, she left the office and went
home to wait for her husband. As she waited, she thought back over the past year. When they were first married, she’d genuinely thought they were so happy. Life held such promise. She adored Finn, she thought she still did, although it was buried deep inside her now.

How had she not noticed what he was like? She cast her mind back, wondering was there some specific time when everything had changed.

Before they’d got married, Finn didn’t appear to drink any more than anyone else but he was drunker, faster. She remembered that weekends revolved around a visit to the pub. There was no day where wine wasn’t opened. All the signs had been there but she hadn’t noticed them. Maybe it was because her husband was a far cry from the archetypal abusive drunk. He was still the same Finn: charming, funny, loving. Just slightly changed, slightly out of it when he drank. Finn was never aggressive or even raised his voice. But the drunk Finn was different from the sober version. The drunk Finn was anaesthetised to become a robot, a creature who smiled and talked but was a million miles away. Tara hated this interloper.

When eleven came and there was still no sign of Finn, she gave up and went to bed to spend a restless night. The next morning, she showered and dressed quickly, wanting to be dressed before she checked if Finn was crashed out in the spare bedroom. There was a dull ache in the base of her neck, from hours of tossing and turning in hot sheets. When she was ready, she made herself a quick cup of coffee and then opened the spare room door. He was awake, his eyes wary despite the welcoming smile on his face.

‘I got in late, I thought I’d sleep here so I wouldn’t wake you,’ he said, as if he was bestowing some great favour.

Tara just stared back at him. How could he lie there and act so nonchalantly?

‘Why didn’t you come home last night?’

‘I told you yesterday,’ he said, ‘a work thing with clients. We’ve nearly netted that big cleaning company contract. It’s
a huge franchise and they’re going to buy a lot of computers for their outlets all over the country.’

Seeing Tara’s lip curl, he added: ‘You’ve got to network to stay ahead of the game. Going out and buttering people up over dinner is part of my job.’

That was Finn’s standard response to any comments about his socialising. Tara had thought of getting the phrase chiselled into one of the apartment’s walls.

‘Hey, some of the lads were talking about a trip to Cork at the weekend.’ Finn looked over at Tara hopefully. ‘You know, a gang of us could go and stay in some really nice place. Nice dinners, a bit of clubbing. It’d be a blast. You’d love it.’

The tension in her neck spilled over into migraine alert. Tara reached up to massage her neck before the pain made its inevitable journey up to behind her eyes.

‘We can’t afford a weekend away,’ she said. ‘We’re broke, Finn. The mortgage hasn’t been paid.’

‘Never mind,’ said Finn good-humouredly. ‘The lads will have to do without us in Cork.’ He got out of bed, stretching his arms up to the ceiling and yawning.

Tara flipped.

‘Don’t you realise what I just said, Finn?’ she shrieked. ‘We’re broke and the mortgage hasn’t been paid because you’ve been cleaning out our account. You even took money from my credit card.’

‘I was going to tell you about that,’ he said guiltily. ‘It’s just that I needed some cash and I had none, but don’t worry about the mortgage,’ he added. ‘I’m due my bonus any day now, it’s going to cover everything.’ He was smiling now, like a child. ‘We could go to Cork for the weekend, in fact. You just need to be cool about the money because it’s coming, and we can have a fantastic time. The bonus will be in the account in a few days and that’ll clear all the bills. You know I’d never mess up our mortgage payments or anything, Tara. I just miscalculated, that’s all.’

He reached out tentatively and touched her arm. ‘Don’t
be angry with me, love, please. I’ll buy you a top-notch present when the money comes in, I promise.’

Tara jerked her arm away from him. He just didn’t get it, did he?

‘It’s not about the money, Finn,’ she said, ‘and a present won’t solve things. The problem is that you took money from our account without mentioning it to me, and I bet you anything I know what you needed the money for. Booze. You
promised
me you’d stop, you promised you’d cut down but you haven’t, have you?’

‘Course I’ve cut down,’ Finn said sharply. ‘I don’t have a drink problem, if that’s what you’re implying. I have to socialise for work. You’re just uptight because of your parents splitting up.’

‘That’s not it and you know it!’ she shouted back at him.

‘Yes it is,’ Finn said wearily. ‘You can’t cope with the fact that everything in the Miller garden isn’t rosy. Well, face up to it, Tara. Family life isn’t all fun and games and picnics. We didn’t all have an idyllic childhood, you know. You’ve got to get on with life and forget about the past.’