Last Chance Saloon (8 page)

She hadn’t been keen on Thomas right from the very first night. Of course, she was delighted that Tara had met a new bloke – witnessing her pain after Alasdair had finally given her the slip had been excruciating. Not to mention that, with the best will in the world, sharing a flat with someone who’s recently had their heart broken becomes a small bit tedious after the first three months of hysteria and bizarre behaviour.

But some instinct had screamed at her that Thomas wasn’t Tara’s Mr Right, or even Mr Keep The Wolf From The Door.

‘Looks like she’s made a new friend,’ Fintan had murmured to Katherine, as Tara and Thomas ate the faces off each other in Dolly’s kitchen, oblivious to everyone around them.

‘Mmmmm,’ Katherine said noncommittally.

‘What is it?’ Fintan asked.

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s his brown jeans.’

‘Brown is the new black.’

‘But they’re horrible. And look! His shirt is brown too.’

‘Don’t be brownist,’ Fintan advised. ‘And he’s probably a dead nice person.’

But later on, when Thomas came home with Tara, Katherine and Liv, he wouldn’t contribute to the taxi-fare. ‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘If I weren’t here, you’d have to pay what you always pay. It’s daft if you profit from me being here. I speak as I find.’

Katherine burst out laughing. Maybe Thomas was OK, after all. ‘ “I speak as I find?” That’s a good one.’ In a poor Yorkshire
accent she’d continued, ‘ “Better wi’ nowt tekken out. Where there’s muck there’s brass. Tetley’s make teafolk make tea. I’m made up for our kid. You don’t get owt for nowt.” I love those Northern sayings. Any more?’

Suddenly she realized that Tara, Thomas and Liv had gone very still. At the exact moment that Tara hissed, ‘
Katherine
! Close your fat yap,’ Katherine realized that Thomas hadn’t been joking.

In grim silence Tara paid the taxi-man. And as Katherine watched Thomas swagger into the flat, and be led straight to Tara’s bedroom, she thought she’d explode with injustice.

‘I speak as I find,’ was Thomas’s favourite phrase. And what he found was rarely to his liking.

And then he spoke about it.

The day after Tara first met him, when they were all strewn about the living room, Katherine decided it was time to do some tidying, though she knew there would be objections.

‘I’ve something to get off my chest,’ she began.

‘You call that a chest,’ Thomas interrupted.

Tara screamed with laughter, so much so that even Thomas began to look alarmed. And when Katherine recovered from her shock and tried to object, he interrupted loudly, ‘But it’s TRUE, in’t it?’

‘That’s not the point,’ Katherine said coolly. ‘It’s very bad manners –’

‘BUT IT’S TRUE, IN’T IT?’ he said again, louder. ‘You haven’t got tits. It’s a fact and I’m not going to lie to you.’

‘No one asked you to say anything at all,’ Katherine said.

‘You can’t tek the truth, can you?’ He shrugged. ‘You’re too bludeh soft. I speak –’

‘– as you find,’ Katherine finished. ‘I know.’

In a matter of days, Thomas had managed to insult all of Tara’s friends. He called Liv a giantess, and as soon as she’d looked it up in the dictionary she was very upset. When he was formally introduced to Fintan, the way he hesitated about shaking hands, and the speed with which he wiped his palm on his jeans straight afterwards, made it abundantly clear that he didn’t approve of homosexuals.

However, when he turned his plain-speaking on Tara, in a subtle attempt to change the balance of power back in his favour, the others
really
took against him. But by then Tara was in too deep. Thomas had rescued her when she’d thought she was facing into forty-five years of spinsterdom. She’d become addicted to his devotion, and if he had any criticism of her, she’d do her best to address it.

She’d been going out with him about a month the first time she let slip that he was annoyed about her weight gain.

‘How dreadful,’ Liv said, in shock. ‘He is supposed to love you for
you
.’

‘But he’s only telling me because he cares about me,’ Tara insisted. ‘And he’s right. I have put on a few pounds. Which I’m going to lose.’

Liv clenched her hands in frustration. ‘After what Alasdair did you have the self-esteem of a gnu.’

‘You mean a gnat,’ Katherine interrupted, gently.

‘Thomas is merely a bully, don’t surrender to him,’ Liv urged.

‘Ah, now,’ Tara said softly, ‘I know you’re upset by what he said about your height. And, Katherine, I know you’re upset about what he said about your chest. But, in fairness, he was just being honest. Isn’t it refreshing to be around someone who lets you know exactly where you stand?’

Katherine had decided there and then that she was going to move out and buy her own place.

‘I love his strong views,’ Tara admitted, dreamily. ‘I love the way he’ll take a stand and not back down. Don’t you think his confidence in himself and his own rightness is very sexy? Speaking of sexy, he’s like a madman in bed, day and night… Are you OK, Katherine? You’ve gone very red in the face.’

‘I’m fine,’ Katherine muttered. If she had to listen again to how great Thomas was in bed, she’d scream.

‘Besides,’ Tara said, returning to the matter in hand, ‘if Thomas sometimes hurts people, it’s not his fault.’

At their sceptical expressions, she launched into the story of his mother leaving him. ‘Maybe if our mothers had left us at such a formative age, we’d be going around speaking as we find
too
.’

Though Fintan, and to a lesser extent Liv, tried to talk sense to her, they were wasting their time. Soft-hearted Tara was on a mission to love Thomas better. Even at his most hard-to-please – and he became progressively more hard-to-please as, over the months, he retrieved all the power he’d given to Tara in their early days – Tara couldn’t help but forgive him.

She saw the abandoned boy in the adult Thomas. Was it any wonder if he occasionally lashed out after that ultimate betrayal?

And there was a consolation prize. Loyalty was very important to Thomas. He demanded fidelity, but he also promised it.

‘This bread… but it was open last night.’

Tara was clutched by the cold hand of fear and began pawing for her cigarettes. Why had she just put the bread into the bread-bin as it was? Why hadn’t she recreated the scene as she’d found it when she got up this morning?

‘Is this a new sliced pan?’ he hooted incredulously.

‘Yes,’ Tara said. She couldn’t manage the energy to lie or to say something funny.

‘And where’s the other one?’

Tara thought she might say that it had gone off and she’d thrown it out but she was too depressed to bother. ‘I ate it.’

He looked at her, goggle-eyed, open-mouthed. He was so shocked he could barely speak. ‘Nearly an entire loaf?’ he stuttered. ‘But why?’

Tara felt a merciful bout of flippancy. ‘It was there, I was lonely,’ she quipped.

‘It’s nothing to laugh at, Tara,’ he exploded.

‘Ah, come on.’ Tara grinned. ‘I’m starting right now. Starvation for me. And I’ll do a step class after work tomorrow.’

The atmosphere in the front room – depressing at the best of times with Thomas’s brown sofa and brown carpet tiles – became more and more oppressive. Both of them were smoking more than usual and the cigarette fug further leadened the atmosphere. Tara was desperate to defuse the weirdness somehow, to say something light-hearted to put a smile on his face and make everything all right again. But she couldn’t think of a single thing. When she pointed something out in the paper he just grunted or plain ignored her.

They’d sat this way countless times, over countless Sundays, and it had always been comfortable. As far as Tara could see, nothing was different. There was no reason for this stomach-knotting…
anticipation
. Yes, that was the right word. Anticipation. But what was she waiting for?

‘I’d really like to go and see that play about Woodstock,’ Tara said, breaking an hour’s worth of silence. She actually didn’t give a damn about that play about Woodstock, but she couldn’t endure any more absence of sound. She felt she needed an excuse to talk to him and she wanted a promise of some kind of intimacy, a suggestion that he’d come to the play with her.

Thomas looked at her over his paper. ‘Well, why don’t you
go
to that play about Woodstock, then?’ he barked, as if he’d never heard anything so stupid in all his life. Then gave his paper a paternal shake and redisappeared behind it, missing Tara’s stricken face.

Beryl trotted into the room, gave Tara a disdainful, superior body-swerve –
I saw you eating all that toast
,
you fat cow
, she seemed to say – and hopped on to Thomas’s lap.

‘Have you come to see your daddy?’ Thomas crooned, all lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘Who’s a beautiful girl? Oh, who’s a beautiful girl?’

Tara watched Thomas’s hand curving along Beryl’s back and tail, then saw Beryl staring smugly at her, snuggled on Thomas’s lap, and felt as if she was in a love triangle. She longed to be that bloody cat. To get a tenth of the affection that Thomas lavished on it. To have her tummy tickled. To be bought a scratch-pole. To be fed rabbit chunks in jelly.

Beryl hung around for just as long as it suited her then, with the take-it-or-leave-it independence that Tara yearned to emulate, got down off Thomas and stalked out. Thomas’s gloom reappeared immediately.

‘I’m going to have a shower,’ Tara muttered, when the walls of the room began to move closer to her. The pounding water and the fresh, clean smell marginally uplifted her. But when she went back into the front room to Thomas, her anxiety greeted her at the door and reattached itself like a wraith. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked. And that seemed to annoy him even more. After a while she couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘Come on,’ she said, gaily, ‘let’s do something. Instead of sitting here like a pair of slugs, let’s do something.’

‘Like what?’ he sneered.

‘I don’t know,’ she floundered, her confidence shaken by his hostility. ‘Go out. We live in London, for God’s sake. There’s millions of things we could do.’

‘Like what?’ he repeated.

‘Er…’ Frantically she searched her head, desperate to come
up with something interesting. ‘We could go to an art gallery. The Tate! That’s a nice one.’

‘Bugger off,’ he said bluntly. And Tara had to admit she was relieved. Bad and all as it was trapped here in the living room, traipsing round a bloody art gallery would be immeasurably worse. Fighting through busloads of rowdy tourists and those terrible people who ‘understood’ art, then having to queue for an hour in the café for the obligatory slice of carrot cake didn’t appeal.

‘Shopping, maybe?’ she suggested. ‘It’s the new rock and roll.’

He curled his lip derisively at that. ‘You’re overdrawn, you’re up to the limits on all your cards, and even though mine is one of the most important jobs anyone can do, I’ve no brass either.’

‘I know,’ she declared wildly. ‘We’ll go for a drive.’

‘A drive?’ Thomas had failed three driving tests, so he tried to make driving sound like a form of deviance. ‘A drive where?’

Her mind went blank. ‘The seaside!’ she suggested, her enthusiasm laced with desperation.

But suddenly that seemed like a great idea to Tara. The brisk, bracing sea air would blow away the stagnation that cloaked them. A little spontaneity would do them no end of good.

‘The seaside? On the fourth of October?’ He looked at her as though she were mad.

‘Why not? We’ll wrap up warm.’

‘Go on, then,’ he conceded, grumpily.

After the toast débâcle Tara was afraid to have any lunch before they left. Which meant that for the entire journey to the coast she smoked constantly and obsessed about food. Everything she drove past looked like something she could eat. Trees became heads of broccoli. Hay bales turned into giant
Shredded Wheats or – even better – baklava, bursting with honey and sugar. When they passed a field full of sheep, her breathing quickened as she thought of a bursting bag of marsh-mallows. The cliff face of a chalk quarry reminded her of a lovely big slab of nougat. Her mouth began to water when they drove by a slick, muddy field. A two-acre chocolate fudge cake, she thought, smothered in chocolate icing. The other vehicles on the road tormented her more than anything. Not just because their tyres looked like liquorice wheels. But those cars with a shiny metallic finish put her in mind of chocolates, as if each car had been wrapped with coloured tinfoil, then a layer of Cellophane. Quality Street on wheels. A red car passed her going the other way. Strawberry Supreme, she thought. A purple car passed. Hazelnut in Caramel. A yellow car passed. Toffee Deluxe. A green car passed. Noisette Triangle. A brown car passed. Coffee Crème.

This happened to her a lot. When Liv wore her green-coloured contact lenses, Tara could never look at her without instantly being put in mind of lime Jelly-tots. When Tara went to Italy and was flying over whitish mountains covered with brown scrub, all she could think about was tiramisu. She’d once visited a friend’s flat and from across the room saw a bowl of sweets. Wine gums, she’d deduced, and promptly asked if she could have one. But they weren’t wine gums. They were crystals, and Tara had had to spend the next half an hour pretending to admire them.

‘I suffer from a food analogy,’ she muttered at Thomas, but he was too busy smoking in the passenger seat and staring out of the window away from her. She hadn’t wanted him to hear her anyway.

After they’d been driving for over an hour Thomas stabbed
a finger and said, ‘Look!’ in the general direction of a Little Chef. Tara’s heart leapt with hope. Maybe she’d be allowed to eat something. But, as it turned out, Thomas was pointing at the first sighting of the sea. They went to Whitstable in Kent, and had the pebbled beach entirely to themselves. The day was as damp and misty as it had been early that morning. The unmoving sea was a sludgy colour between brown and grey, and the sky looked as if it had been concreted over. The emptiness and greyness depressed Tara further. Coming here had been a mistake. The two hours they’d spent trapped in the car with each other, smoking their heads off, had been even more electric with tension than their morning in the front room. Despite the uninviting weather she insisted that they get out and walk, hoping that the fresh air would perform miracles. Heads down, they trudged along the gravel and, when they got to a breakwater, stopped. They sat on the damp gravel and stared out at the stagnant sea. As beneficial as looking at a switched-off television. No birds sang.

After fifteen silent minutes they slogged back to the car and returned home. On the drive back to London it started to rain.