‘Yippee!’ Fintan snatched off his Marilyn Monroe wig and twirled it like a lasso above his head. ‘I still can’t believe she did it. Can you believe it, Katherine?’
Katherine thought of Tara, who’d been crying solidly for the past forty-eight hours and murmured, ‘Mmmmm, I can, actually.’
‘Tell me what you’ve found out. Was he devastated?’
‘Quite upset, I believe.’
‘Oooohhhh.’ Fintan clenched his fists. ‘To have been a fly on the wall. Isn’t it a shame she didn’t video it? How is she?’
‘Broken-hearted, to be honest.’
‘Roy Orbison?’
‘No.’ Katherine smiled mysteriously. Roy Orbison was currently languishing in a shoe-box, beneath four photo-albums on the top of her wardrobe. It was one of the first things she’d done when Tara had arrived with her stuff, because there was no way she could cope with another two months of ‘It’s ooooooohhhhhh-ver!’
‘Is she going on about having to become a lesbian because she’ll never meet another man?’
‘Yes, just like old times.’
‘Evening classes?’
‘Talk of mosaic-making, learning Portuguese and banjo-playing so far. I’ll give you fair warning, she’s talking of roping you in.’
‘Holy God –
banjo-playing
! Isn’t it a stroke of luck that I’ve to go in for my next bout of chemo tomorrow and I’ll be too sick to even look at a banjo?’
‘There’s lucky.’
‘Listen, you don’t think she’ll get back with Thomas, do you?’
‘Well, he’s already rung to ask if they could still be friends.’
‘I see. He wanted a shag. And what happened?’
‘She said – actually it was great, Fintan. She said, “Still? How can we still be friends when we were never friends in the first place?” ’
‘Oh, lovely. She’ll get over this yet. But what we mustn’t do under any circumstances is suggest that she gets back on the horse. Look at what happened after Alasdair.’
‘Quite. What’s that box in the corner?’
‘My abdominizer. Don’t worry, it’s going back. So how are things with you?’
‘Very well.’ Katherine smiled like a Cheshire cat. ‘Very well, indeed.’
‘Still averaging three hours of sleep a night?’
‘If that.’
‘And look at you! Positively thriving. When can I meet him?’
‘When would you like?’
‘Best to wait till the chemo is out of the way. I don’t want to puke all over your new fella on our first encounter. It’d be very poor.’ The phone rang and Fintan asked, ‘Will you answer it? You’re nearer. Who could it be? Oh, the mad social whirl, my dear!’
‘Hello,’ Katherine said. ‘Oh, hello, Mrs O’Grady. Really? Are you sure? No, I knew nothing about it. No, really I didn’t. I swear to God I didn’t. I understand, ye – I underst – of course,
I understa – But wait a minute. Maybe you’d better find out if it’s true before you start threatening to kill people.’
Katherine handed the phone to Fintan. ‘It’s your mother. Do you know anything about Milo selling his farm and moving to London for good?’
Tara climbed out of bed and the first thing she did was tick the calendar that Katherine had given her. Ten. The tenth night in a row that she’d managed to stay away from Thomas. Ten never-ending, sleep-free nights, her circadian rhythms shot to hell by displacement, the large quantities of alcohol she was ingesting to anaesthetize the pain and fear of her yawningly empty future.
Her initial bravado when she’d marched out on Thomas had dissolved before she’d even arrived at Katherine’s. She’d almost turned the car around and driven back. But she knew that because of the extensive way she’d humiliated him, she’d burnt her bridges good and proper. Everyone told her that she’d get over him, but she knew her life was finished. She thought back to those heady, carefree days during her late twenties when she still had time. Of course, when Alasdair had dumped her, she’d thought it was all over for her. But this time, more than two years down the line, it really
was
all over.
She didn’t have the same bounce-back resilience that she used to have. She’d had her last chance and blown it.
The thought of going back to Thomas was dangerously seductive. Now that they were sundered, he didn’t seem so bad. His tetchiness didn’t look like a high price to pay for companionship. Though they’d had their squabbles, they knew each other very well. There was a huge comfort in that bickery intimacy. Better someone to disagree with than no one at all.
Also, when she could bear to be honest, she admitted that though she missed Thomas, she also missed the validation of being one half of a couple. Alone, she felt naked and failed.
Yet, despite her loneliness, she had flashes of a deep-down conviction that to go back to Thomas would be wrong. Not unless he’d changed fundamentally. And she was desperate to avoid a repeat of the way she’d humiliated herself with Alasdair.
Please
,
God
,
don’t let me ring Thomas
, she prayed, a thousand times a day.
Please
,
God
,
give me strength
.
Please
,
God
,
make him ring me
.
Make him tell me he’s a changed man
.
Katherine was in the kitchen making coffee for herself and Joe. ‘Hi,’ she twinkled. She’d been getting almost no sleep but was wide, wide awake. Super-alert, apart from the odd lapse into languid dreaminess.
She looked different. Everyone noticed it. The other day at work, when a tight little bottom had wriggled past his glass office, Fred Franklin had nudged Myles and said, ‘Nice arse. If you can get it.’
Then Fred had frozen.
‘Whose
arse is it? Don’t tell me it’s Icequeen’s? Oh, bloody hell, it is! How could I be polite about
that?
’
Back in the kitchen Tara managed a tight smile at Katherine.
‘Tara,’ Katherine said, slowly.
‘What?’
‘This.’ Katherine put her finger inside Tara’s waistband and pulled. A big gap appeared.
‘Oh.’ Tara gazed down in amazement.
‘Are you eating
anything
!’
‘This always happens. You split up with your fella, you can’t eat a thing, you get lovely and skinny and you meet another man. It’s Mother Nature’s consolation prize.’ Tara smiled faintly.
‘But, Tara, you must eat.’
‘I couldn’t be bothered.’
‘Don’t give in to it,’ Katherine said stoutly. ‘He wasn’t worth it.’
‘He wasn’t all bad,’ Tara said. ‘He was nice
sometimes
.’
‘Give me one example.’
Tara thought for a second. ‘He always filled out my forms for me. Like my car insurance and tax. He knew how much I hated doing it.’
‘It was the least he could do, seeing as you drove him everywhere. Give me another.’
‘He was gentlemanly. Opened doors for me, pulled out chairs.’
‘Old-fashioned sexist.’
Tara sighed heavily. ‘OK, he’s great with his hands. When my silver chain got all tangled up he spent hours unknotting it without breaking it. I’d never have had the patience.’
Katherine harrumphed, not quite sure how to sneer at Thomas for his handymanism.
‘And we smoked together, we tried to give up together, we failed together.’ Tara sighed wistfully. ‘He used to light my cigarettes, I used to light his. It was very companionable, and I never ran out of fags because he had some when I didn’t.’
‘You mean he let you have them for free?’
‘Obviously
I had to pay.’ Tara attempted a wan smile. ‘But it still meant that I wasn’t ever deprived of them.’
‘Cheer up, you’re well shot of him. Let’s face it, it was hardly the world’s greatest love affair,’ Katherine scorned.
She was right, Tara considered. It was neither tragic nor romantic enough. But it had been
her
love affair. ‘Look,’ Tara bowed her head, ‘I
know
he was a bully and I
know
he was a meanie and I agree with you that I’m probably better off without
him. But when people get a gangrenous limb amputated, it still itches, you know.’
Katherine was pleased that Tara had compared Thomas to a gangrenous limb. Obviously it was a terrible slight on a gangrenous limb, but it was progress.
‘Thanks for last night, by the way,’ Tara muttered.
‘It’s OK. Er, sorry I ripped the jumper.’
‘You were right to. I was only fooling myself.’
The previous evening, to Katherine’s horror, Tara had taken out the jumper that she’d been knitting for Thomas and said, ‘I might as well finish it and give it to him. It’s a shame to waste it.’
‘No!’ Katherine had jumped up, grabbed the needles, yanked the half-knitted sleeve from them and torn frantically at the wool, unravelling line after line of stitches. ‘It’s only an excuse to see him. Like the money he owes you, and the shower curtain you left behind and the fact that you forgot to kick Beryl before you left. No, Tara, no!’
Tara’s face was luminous with amazement. ‘OK,’ she whispered.
Katherine stomped back to sit beside Joe and muttered, ‘Sorry you had to witness that.’
‘I’m scared!’ He quailed, and everyone laughed, dispersing the tension.
God, Tara thought, he was lovely! And so obliging. Tara suspected that the reason Katherine and Joe were spending so much time at Katherine’s instead of being holed up
à deux
in Joe’s flat was to keep an eye on Tara. Katherine had even moved the phone from the front room to the bedroom and confiscated Tara’s mobile. ‘I can’t stop you ringing him during the day,’ she’d said, ‘but at least you won’t be able to when you come home plastered.’
And Joe and Katherine had blocked Tara’s progress one night when she tried to leave for a drunken midnight drive. ‘I don’t want to call
in
to Thomas,’ Tara explained angrily. ‘I just want to drive
by
’
‘The only circumstance that I’ll let you drive by Thomas’s is if it’s a drive-by
shooting
,’ Katherine replied. ‘Now, back to bed!’
Tara dragged herself out of bed and ticked the calendar. Twenty days. Nearly three weeks. And after three weeks it would be almost a month.
So far she’d managed not to ring him. But it was a superhuman achievement, brought about by Herculean struggle. Every day seemed like a thousand-mile march, potholed with constant opportunities to pick up the phone. At times she literally sweated from the effort of not ringing him.
At weekends, without the distraction of work, the torment was magnified a hundredfold.
As the initial agonizing wrench receded she’d come to see that it wasn’t just Thomas she missed, it was everything he’d represented: acceptance, endorsement, someone to consult on plans, a person to report to. She was deeply grateful for her friends, but without the unquestioned alliance of routine that existed between lovers, she ricocheted about like a free radical.
There had never been any great thrill in telling Thomas that she’d be home late. It was only now that there was no one to give a damn if she didn’t come home at all that it had taken on desirability. And even though she and Thomas had never really gone on a proper holiday, all she could hope for now was that some couple – perhaps Milo and Liv or Katherine and Joe – would take pity on her and let her tag along. Knowing
how unworthy such feelings were didn’t lessen them. She just ended up feeling guilty as well as lonely.
So nostalgic was she for her old life that she even missed the awful, brown, burrow-like flat. Despite it being in Thomas’s name, it had been her home. And now she was squashed like a refugee into a small bedroom in someone else’s flat, afraid of being a nuisance and unable to relax. Worrying about spending too much time in the bathroom, thinking she had no right to say what she wanted to watch on telly, feeling guilty for using too much electricity and edgily aware that any mess had to be cleared up immediately.
Constant fantasies of Thomas arriving and pleading passionately with her to return buffered her. But apart from the one phone call where he’d asked if they could still be friends there had been no contact from him. In her more honest moments, Tara knew there wouldn’t ever be. He had a macho closed-offness where it was shameful to admit to weakness or need. Even if he was dying without her, he wouldn’t act on it.
Parallel to the teeth-gritted endurance of a life without Thomas was life-sapping worry about Fintan. He’d had three bouts of chemo now and still hadn’t responded. His blood tests showed nothing had changed and you only had to look at him to see that his kiwi-neck was still as large as life.
The oncologists insisted that these things took time, that he had to get worse before he got better, but Tara remained on edge and retained an inordinate interest in
any
alternative remedy she heard about.
‘Twenty days today!’ Katherine and Joe burst into wild applause when Tara walked into the kitchen.
Tara flinched. ‘It’s Monday morning. How can you be so cheerful?’
‘Time for your morning whinge,’ Katherine glowed at her.
‘Thank you. Today’s grievance is that I hate having no one to go and see
The Horse Whisperer
with.’
‘But Thomas wouldn’t have gone with you, anyway.’
‘Permit me my rose-tinted view of my past, please,’ Tara asked, with dignity.
‘We don’t want to see
The Horse Whisperer
,’ Katherine said.
‘What night are we not going to see it on?’ Joe dazzled Katherine with an abundant smile.
There was a time lapse where they beamed goofily at each other, before she managed to reply, ‘Next Tuesday’
‘You don’t need to see it,’ Tara pointed out. ‘You’ve got enough romance in your lives. Right, I’m off to work.’
‘Enjoy your twenty-first Thomas-free day!’
‘I’ll be home late.’ She paused in the hope that someone might insist they wanted her to come home early but when they didn’t she continued, ‘I’m going to the gym, then I’m going out.’
‘Who with?’
‘Anyone I can find – Ravi, a
Big Issue
seller, whoever. Textbook, I know, all this pubbing and clubbing and drinking my head off.’
‘But at least you’ve broken with tradition by not having had at least one one-night stand,’ Katherine sympathized.
‘With a person you wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole if you hadn’t just broken up with someone,’ Joe added, with an I’ve-been-there smile.
‘Give it time. I haven’t sung yet.’
When Tara shut the front door behind her she was struck –
it happened a lot – by how wrong it all was. Why was she opening and closing someone else’s front door when she had a perfectly good front door of her own only a few miles away?
It was out there somewhere. She stood in the street, aware of all the houses and flats and shops and offices that stretched between her and her real home, her real life.
I want to go home
.
Well, you can’t, she told herself. Miserably, she girded her loins and trudged to her car.
‘Morning, Tara,’ Ravi brayed, when she walked into the office. ‘Great news. I read in
ES
there’s a new lipstick out by Max Factor. It doesn’t claim to be indelible, but it says it’s
self-renewing
, which – I don’t know about you but I think that’s as good as. I feel a trip to Boots coming on!’
‘Really?’ Tara was pleased. ‘Tell me what it said, Ravi.’
‘Apparently you put it on and whenever you’re worried that it’s faded or whatever the word is, you simply press your lips together…’ Ravi demonstrated by mashing his against each other ‘… and bosh! Fresh as the moment you put it on.’
Tara’s phone rang. It was Liv on the line. ‘What’s wrong?’ Tara demanded. ‘Is it JaneAnn?’
Liv sighed. ‘That woman is like a revenging angel. But it’s not her. Have you any drugs?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Hash.’
‘Not immediately to hand. What’s going on?’
‘It’s for Fintan. He still feels dreadful from the chemo two days ago and someone told him that hash takes away the nausea. But I’ve no idea how to get some – I work in interiors! Cocaine is the only narcotic I am ever offered.’