Last Chance Saloon (5 page)

‘Hello,’ she said hurriedly, when he answered. ‘It’s me, I’m sorry, please don’t hang up, you wouldn’t believe how sorry I am, or how ashamed I am.’

Instead of slamming the phone down, he said, ‘It’s fine, I understand.’ Actually, Alasdair was quite relieved. He’d been
feeling guilty about his involvement with Caroline, but every slap that Tara had given him had changed the balance of sympathy in his favour. Now, instead of it being ‘Poor cuckolded Tara’, it would be ‘Poor beaten-up Alasdair’.

‘You know, you pack one hell of a punch,’ he added, with an attempt at a laugh.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Please forgive me.’

‘I forgive you,’ he said.

But all the same, when he rang her six weeks later to tell her he was getting married, he took the precaution of getting the locks changed first.

That was the night when Tara met Thomas.

They were at a party given by Fintan’s assistant, Dolly. Tara, dancing like a woman possessed, absentmindedly took Thomas’s cigarette from his mouth and stuck it in her own. Not in a deliberate attempt to be provocative – she didn’t even
see
Thomas. She was simply dying for a smoke and couldn’t find her own. Since she’d heard of Alasdair’s impending nuptials she’d been losing
everything
.

Despite the theft of his cigarette, Thomas was instantly besotted with Tara. He mistook her lunacy for vivacity and decided that her forwardness was an indication that she’d be uninhibited in bed. And he was most impressed with the slim figure she’d achieved by throwing all those cartons of yoghurt in the bin. For a few moments, he dithered, trying to decide what his chat-up line should be. But Thomas was a plain-spoken man, so he went for the obvious.

‘Can I have me fag back?’ Tara heard, and ceased her frantic dancing. She turned and saw a man standing four-square and smiling at her. Not bad-looking. Not good-looking, either, mind. Not compared to Alasdair.

But once she took a closer look she saw that he had shiny brown hair and a reassuring stockiness that made her yearn to lean against him.

He continued to smile, washing her with his warmth and admiration. ‘You’re a cracking bird,’ he told Tara, with an endearing combination of shyness and sureness. ‘Keep the fag.’

Under normal circumstances Tara would cross the road to avoid a man who called women ‘birds’ but she’d been through a lot. Thomas’s brown eyes held hers, and Tara was astonished to see devotion and respect in them. After what Alasdair had done, she’d thought she was as worthless as the Russian rouble. In amazement it hit her that maybe this man could redefine her, revalue her.

Though he wore a bit more brown than she considered ideal (any brown
at all
was more than she considered ideal), she felt strangely drawn to him. When she realized he was hers for the taking, the joy was like a heroin rush.

‘Come and dance with me,’ she invited cheekily, and took his hand. Even though Thomas’s dun-coloured clothing seemed to stay in the one place while the rest of him attempted to dance, Tara’s world instantly became a sparkling, magical place. An alternative future had opened up for her. Alasdair was going to marry someone else, but there were other men who liked her. Who cared more about her than she cared about them. Who might eventually marry her. Her pain had stopped and she’d thought it never would. Thomas was her saviour. ‘There’s a Chinese proverb,’ she murmured, ‘that says, if someone saves your life, they own you.’

Thomas nodded blankly, then nudged his mate Eddie and said, ‘She’s more pissed than I thought. I’m on a winner tonight.’

They spent from Friday night to Monday morning in Tara’s
flat, mostly in bed, but occasionally they got up to watch telly, Tara draped all over Thomas, snogging passionately, as Katherine and Liv tried to watch
Ballykissangel
and tune out the slurping noises.

‘They keep making the sound of a horse’s hoof being levered out of thick mud,’ Katherine said, when she rang Fintan to complain.

Liv grabbed the phone from her. ‘There’s a thing in the bathroom, that has suckers, and it sticks to the washbasin. It’s to keep soap on,’ she told Fintan. ‘When you pull the suckers off the basin,
that’s
the noise Tara and this man are doing. Can we come over to your flat?’

But Tara was thrilled with Thomas. ‘I’m mad about him,’ she announced to everyone.

‘Mad is right,’ Katherine muttered, scathingly eyeing Thomas in all his brown glory.

‘She is on the refund,’ Liv said, sagely.

‘Rebound,’ Katherine corrected. ‘And you’re right.’

He was in the living room, four empty Newcastle Brown cans and a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie tin on the floor beside the sofa. ‘About bludeh time,’ he grumbled good-naturedly.

‘Have you missed me?’ Tara asked, hopefully. She was so glad to see him.

‘Maybe I have.’ He gave a tantalizing, crinkle-eyed smile. ‘And maybe I haven’t. But I’ve had Beryl for company.’

Beryl was Thomas’s cat, upon whom he lavished attention, affection and admiration. Tara was wildly jealous of her and of the slinky, careless, ungrateful way Beryl received Thomas’s love, draping herself along him, then, on a whim, abandoning him as though it cost her nothing.

‘Good night?’ Thomas asked.

‘Yes.’ She didn’t say it was a pity he hadn’t come. Her friends and her boyfriend just didn’t get on, it was a common enough situation, only exacerbated when people tried to force it. ‘I
didn’t have a starter and wait till I show you my presents! Look at my lipstick, isn’t it magnificent?’

‘’S all right.’ He shrugged.

She noticed something on the coffee table. ‘Oh, Thomas, you’ve filled in my car insurance forms. Thanks. You know how much I hate doing it.’

‘Don’t say I never do owt for you.’ He grinned. ‘And while we’re on the subject I booked the flicks for tomorrow night.’

‘What film?’

‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
. About gangsters. Looks good.’

‘Oh.’ Her face fell. ‘I said I wanted to go to
The Horse Whisperer
.’

‘I’m not going to that bludeh girly weepy.’

‘But…’

Thomas looked hurt and before he did one of his quick about-turns of mood, Tara said quickly, ‘Well, never mind. I’m sure the other thing will be good.’

Thomas was terribly sensitive. It all went back to one Sunday morning when he was seven and he’d found his mother in the hall with a suitcase. When, in surprise, he’d asked where she was going, she’d laughed and said, ‘Don’t talk daft. You know.’ He’d protested that he didn’t, so she’d said bitterly, ‘We’re splitting up, me and your dad.’ It was the first Thomas had known about it and he told Tara that even now, twenty-five years later, it still pained him that his mother had been about to leave without saying goodbye to him.

‘Don’t come if you don’t want.’ Thomas looked wounded. ‘But seeing as I took trouble to book…?’

‘I want to come,’ she assured him. ‘Honestly, I do. Thanks for doing it. Who wants to see Robert Redford with his old
face hanging off him, anyway?’ She noticed the bag of peanuts that Thomas was practically lying on. ‘Yummy.’

‘Oi!’ He slapped her hand away.

‘Aw, it’s my birthday.’

‘I – am – your – conscience,’ he boomed. ‘You’ll thank me for this.’

‘I suppose I will,’ she said sadly.

‘Cheer up, Tara.’ He chided. ‘It’s for your own good.’

‘You’re right.’ She rummaged in her bag. ‘Oh, no, I’m out of fags. How did that happen? Have you any?’

There was an infinitesimal hesitation before he tossed her his packet of cigarettes. As he leant over with his lighter, he said, ‘We have to give up, Tara.’

‘We really must.’

‘They cost a bludeh fortune.’

‘They do.’

‘Three quid a day, Tara. Each.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s twenty-one quid a week. Each.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s eighty quid a month. Each.’

‘I know.’

That’s a thousand quid a year. Each. Think what we could buy with that, Tara
, Tara said in her head.

‘That’s a thousand quid a year. Each.’ Thomas said. ‘Think what we could buy with that, Tara.’
And it’s OK for you. You’re a computer analyst. You earn twice as much as me
.

‘And it’s OK for me,’ she said, cheekily. ‘I’m a computer analyst. I earn twice as much as you.’

There was a moment’s edgy pause, then Thomas grinned ruefully.

In a sombre documentary voiceover, Tara intoned, ‘He was the meanest man I had ever met.’

‘Like I’ve any bludeh choice!’ Thomas declared hotly.

All his friends from college had landed fabulously well-paid jobs, where their quarterly bonuses were often more than Thomas’s annual salary. But as Thomas was too blunt to charm prospective employers in industry, he’d ended up becoming a geography teacher in a west London comprehensive. He worked very hard, got paid a pittance and his bitterness was legendary. But not as legendary as his stinginess. ‘I should get paid as much as a government minister because teaching kids is one of the most valuable jobs anyone can do,’ he often said. (‘Sorry, I’ve forgotten my wallet, you’ll have to pay,’ was another regular.) People spoke of him as having short arms and deep pockets, of him having a padlock on his wallet, of him being first out of the taxi and last to the bar, of him pinching a penny till it begged for mercy.

But he didn’t do himself any favours. Instead of at least pretending to be generous, he compounded his reputation as a tight-fisted leech by not letting his change rattle around in his trouser pockets like normal people did. Instead he kept it in a purse. A little brown plastic old-ladies’ purse that snapped closed at the top. Katherine had once wrestled it out of his hand and managed to open it before Thomas tore it back from her. She’d
insisted
that a moth had flown out.

‘I hate us being skint, Tara,’ Thomas whined. ‘You won’t stop spending and I’ve nowt to spend. The fags’ll have to go.’

‘The start of the month is always the best time to quit smoking,’ Tara humoured him.

‘Happen you’re right.’

‘And we’ve missed the start of October. So we’ll both give up on the first of November.’

‘You’re on!’

Then they both promptly forgot about it.

‘Time for bed.’ Thomas heaved himself out of the couch, where he was slumped surrounded by aluminium. ‘Come on, birthday girl, I’ve a present for you.’

Tara’s face lit up. Until Thomas glanced down at his crotch. Oh,
that
kind of present.

Wistfully she remembered her birthday two years ago. She’d been going out with Thomas less than a month and because it was her twenty-ninth birthday he’d given her twenty-nine presents. Granted some of them had been tiny – one had just been a box of multicoloured matches. And more of them had been crap – like the jar of pink sparkly nail varnish and the earrings that infected her ears. But the time and thought and effort he’d put into buying each thing and wrapping them individually had touched her to the heart.

She sighed. The first flush couldn’t last for ever. Everyone knew that. In the darkness she wrapped her arms around him and pressed herself against his snuggly warmth, a blissful hum in her veins. She was safe and loved, in bed with her man.

‘Hello,’ Delia’s breathless voice said.

Katherine felt the familiar surge of irritation. ‘Hello, Mam,’ she managed.

‘Katherine,’ Delia gasped. ‘As I live and breathe! I was talking about you not five minutes ago. Wasn’t I, Agnes?’

‘No,’ Katherine faintly heard her granny say. ‘Indeed’n you were not. Unless ‘twas to yourself you were talking, and if you were, it wouldn’t be the first time.’

‘I
was
talking about you,’ Delia stalwartly insisted to Katherine. ‘I knew the phone was going to ring and I knew it’d be you. I always know these things. I have the gift, the sight.’

‘You wish,’ Katherine scorned. ‘You know I always ring on Granny’s birthday.’

‘Don’t call her Granny, her name is Agnes. And haven’t I been telling you since the day you were born not to call me Mam. I’m Delia.’

Katherine’s family was an unusual one. At least, in Knockavoy
it was. It centred around Delia, Katherine’s mother, who’d been a wild and beautiful young woman in her time. She’d been very forward-thinking, and spent her teenage years in the sixties berating anyone who’d listen (precious few in Knockavoy) about the stranglehold the Catholic church had on Ireland. She had no fear.

One day when she was seventeen she arrived in the kitchen, her hands dirty, her black hair more tousled than usual, an air of barely contained glee bringing a sparkle to her silvery eyes.

‘What were you doing?’ Agnes, her mother, feared the worst.

‘Pegging lumps of turf at the curate when he went past on his bicycle.’ Delia snorted with laughter.

Agnes rushed to the window and in the dip of the road she could see young Father Crimmond cycling away furiously, a clod of turf still attached to his big black coat.

‘Conduct yourself! You’ll get us all into terrible trouble,’ Agnes objected, alarmed yet shamefully exhilarated.

‘Trouble is what this place needs,’ Delia said darkly. ‘Trouble would do them no end of good.’

When news of the turf-throwing antics got out, the townsfolk were in uproar and two stout matrons purported to faint clean away. They’d never heard the like. Father Crimmond made oblique reference to the assault in his sermon and urged prayers for the poor deranged creature who’d attacked him. ‘More to be pitied than scorned,’ he concluded, which disappointed the congregation because they’d been looking forward to a good bit of scorning.

Delia became the most talked-about person for several parishes. People shook their heads when they saw her coming, saying, ‘That young girl of the Caseys has a bit of a lack,’ and, ‘That Casey child isn’t all there.’

Austin, Delia’s father, a dangerously mild man, suspected she was a changeling. Others with a bit more nous simply suspected that Agnes had strayed.

Delia continued to rebel. But no one else would join in, they were all too frightened. And as it isn’t much fun by oneself, Delia left Knockavoy in 1966 and went to London, where she found many other ways of railing against the establishment than throwing combustible fuel at mobile clergymen.

She channelled the bulk of her rebelling through the medium of sex and drugs, enjoying copious quantities of both. In case anyone doubted the sincerity of such rebelliousness, Delia put their minds at rest by getting pregnant. Better still, the man responsible was married and had no intention of leaving his wife.

But suddenly, to her great surprise, Delia became very frightened. She felt young, alone and scared. Rued the day she’d left Ireland. Sorry she’d ever heard of London. Cursed her contrary nature. Why couldn’t she have behaved herself like the girls she’d been at school with? A fifth of them had gone into the holy orders. Why hadn’t she been afraid of hellfire and damnation like everyone else?

Her poor father. He’d feel obliged to take his belt to her; it was the done thing. He’d hate having to do it because he was such a gentle soul, but rules were rules.

As it happened Austin was spared because a week after Delia realized she was pregnant he had a heart attack and died. (He’d been out getting turf for the fire. As Agnes said, turf brought nothing but sorrow to the Caseys.)

On the train home for the funeral, Delia practised her justification. ‘A new life in place of the old. Dada is gone, but a new person will be born in his stead.’ She was nervous. Being impregnated and ditched had knocked the stuffing out of her.
The free-spirited principles that had seemed so worthy and true in London became less and less convincing the closer she got to Knockavoy.

But she had to wait until the mourners and freeloaders had eaten all the ham sandwiches, drained the barrel of porter and finally left, before breaking the news. ‘Mama, I’m going to have a baby.’

‘I suppose you are,
alanna
,’ Agnes said. She had expected nothing less. She knew the high jinks they got up to in godless places like London and she was stoically prepared to accept the consequences. Her only regret was that she wasn’t able to spend some time in London herself. She hadn’t had any excitement in a long time. Not really since the civil war, once she thought about it.

The child was born in late August 1967. As it was the Summer of Love, Delia was keen to saddle her with a name like Raindrop or Moonbeam but Agnes intervened. ‘She’s the town bastard,’ she pointed out equably. ‘Would you not give her a decent name so that she won’t be the town laughing stock into the bargain?’

Everyone expected Delia to return to London, but she didn’t. She stayed in Knockavoy and no one could understand why, least of all herself. She knew it had something to do with the terror she’d felt when she found out she was pregnant. Fear wasn’t something she was familiar with and she wasn’t keen to renew the acquaintanceship. She lived with her mother, in the house she’d been brought up in, and reared her child. She got piecemeal jobs. Barmaiding during the summer months, driving the school bus – the regular driver was a martyr to the drink – and helping her mother with the hens, cows and crops on their smallholding.

Beautiful, but with still too much of the basket case about her, no local man was interested in taking her and her daughter on. She remained outspoken and difficult, more of an outsider than ever. She practised radical politics from afar. She organized a mass rally against US intervention in Vietnam, to be held one Saturday at four o’clock outside Tully’s Hardware – she targeted Tully’s because Curly Tully had lived in Boston for eighteen months in the fifties. But the only people who turned up were herself and the two-year-old Katherine. (Agnes said she’d love to lend her support, but she was busy milking the cows.) At about five to five, just as Delia was getting ready to call it a day, she saw a crowd of six or seven people heading up the street towards her. Instead of throwing a snide remark and passing her by, as everyone else had done all afternoon, they stopped. Delia was ecstatic. Until it transpired the whole seven of them were there to help Padraig Cronin buy a ladder.

Next, Delia started a petition against apartheid, and nabbed people outside half-twelve Mass to make them sign. She managed seven signatures – her own, her mother’s, her daughter’s, Loony Tommy Forman’s, a Mr D. Duck, a Mr M. Mouse and a Mr J. F. Kennedy.

In the late seventies she became fixated with the Sandanistas, and held a sale of work to raise money for them. Which four people came to, generating takings of two pounds elevenpence.

She dreamt of having a drop-in centre. Sometimes she made noises about setting up a rape crisis centre in Knockavoy, even though no one had been raped for several decades.

She tried to teach yoga, except no one came. She tried to set up a craft-shop, but the crafts were crap.

She dressed in smocks, clogs and wooden jewellery and claimed to have psychic powers. She urged Katherine to call
her Delia, told her she didn’t have to go to school if she didn’t want and that she
certainly
didn’t have to go to Mass if she didn’t want. Katherine ended up knowing the ins and outs of the reproductive system before she’d mastered the ins and outs of tying her shoelaces.

Naturally Katherine rebelled. Which she did by being neat, tidy, quiet, respectful, diligent and devout. She was meek, questioned nothing, did exactly what the nuns told her, knew her catechism backwards (the best way), and told everyone that her first holy communion was the happiest day of her life.

Delia was devastated. ‘Wait’ll that child hits adolescence,’ she wept, hopefully. ‘Genes will out, she’s her mother’s daughter.’

But she was also her father’s daughter.

True to her libertarian principles, Delia never fed Katherine a pack of lies of how her daddy had been killed tragically in a war or car crash or bizarre ploughing accident (tick as preferred). From an early age, Katherine knew that her father was a snivelling, bourgeois coward called Geoff Melody, who had got Delia into bed by a mixture of drugs and empty promises that he’d leave his wife.

Although there was no contact – or love lost – between Delia and Geoff Melody, Delia repeatedly impressed upon Katherine that if she ever wanted to contact her father she’d do her best to facilitate it. But she wasn’t taken up on it until Katherine was nineteen. Of course Katherine’s fatherless state was cause for scorn in the school playground. At least, on the rare occasions when Tara wasn’t hovering protectively by her side. But Katherine responded with admirable aplomb whenever her classmates – one anxious eye out for Tara’s return – started up their chant of, ‘You’ve no dada, you’ve no dada.’

‘How can you miss something you’ve never had?’ she’d ask calmly. Then she’d give an enigmatic smile, while the others faltered in confusion, their chant dying away. Why wasn’t she crying like she was supposed to? Why did
they
feel like the stupid ones? And where did Tara Butler learn to do such a good Chinese burn?

When, finally – her heart having recently been broken for the first time – Katherine said she wanted to contact her father, Delia willingly supplied his last-known-at address. ‘Though it’s twenty years old, he’ll probably still be living there,’ she said. Adding spitefully, she couldn’t help it, ‘He was that type.’