Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [102]
Yasmin Al-Shari stared in horror at the two huge wild-haired men and the tiny grey-haired woman who were trying to gain admittance into her lovely shop. ‘Shoo!’ she shouted, waving her arm ineffectually.
‘God bless you,’ Milo, Timothy and JaneAnn called automatically.
Yasmin looked distastefully at them, and suddenly Milo saw himself, his brother and mother through Yasmin’s eyes. They weren’t wanted. An instant of depression, of diminishment. They didn’t belong in this city, but they needed to be here. ‘I think she thinks we’re undesirables.’ Milo took care to sound cheerful.
‘Us?’ JaneAnn was appalled. She was one of the most respectable people she knew!
‘We’re eccentric millionaires,’ Milo cupped his hands around his mouth and called through the glass. ‘But you’ve insulted us, so we’re taking our custom elsewhere.’ Forcing a wide grin, he turned to the others. ‘Off we go,’ he said. ‘Let’s go over here and look at the flowers in the flower shop and pretend we’re at home.’
Yasmin Al-Shari anxiously watched them shamble off. The old lady did look very like the grandmother in The Beverly Hillbillies. Had she just lost an enormous sale?
‘Could we take Fintan home?’ JaneAnn voiced what they were all thinking. ‘Back to Clare?’
Late afternoon, when Tara and Katherine reappeared at the hospital, Fintan was once more in disagreeable humour. Desperately, Tara launched into her anecdote about Amy being reunited with her gorgeous-looking boyfriend in the reception area of work. ‘It was beautiful,’ she exclaimed, one eye on Fintan to gauge whether or not he was enjoying it. ‘Like something out of a film.’
Katherine and Liv quickly weighed in with light-hearted stories of their own. They’d stored anything even remotely interesting or entertaining that had happened to them that day, in the event of Fintan being sour or depressed. But the only time Fintan perked up was when Sandro came in, waving a pile of holiday brochures. ‘Long-haul,’ Sandro announced. ‘Just out. Fourteen new destinations in Asia and the Caribbean.’
That evening, when they all had to leave the hospital to give Fintan some space for his posse of new visitors, they were reluctant to part so everyone went back to Katherine’s where they ordered pizzas and reassured themselves repeatedly, incessantly, that everything would be fine.
‘How did he seem to you today?’ JaneAnn inquired anxiously. ‘You see, if we could escape with him just having it in his lymph glands, we’d be on the pig’s back. I read that it’s easy to treat and there’s a great recovery rate. So how did you think he was?’
‘A bit tired,’ Sandro offered.
‘A bit tired? Yes, he seemed tired to me, but we all get tired. It doesn’t mean anything terrible. In fact, isn’t it great that he keeps falling asleep? Sleep is very healing.’
‘And he ate his lunch,’ Timothy chipped out.
‘And what harm that he didn’t eat his dinner?’ Milo said.
‘Don’t we all have days where we couldn’t be bothered eating our dinner?’ JaneAnn agreed.
‘Besides, he’d had a Smartie at about six o’clock,’ Liv valiantly offered.
‘Two,’ Sandro said triumphantly. ‘A blue one and an orange one.’
‘And he was in great form nearly all day,’ Tara said.
‘Apart from that time he was cross and told us to go away, using the F-word.’ JaneAnn looked sorrowful.
‘And he was cranky with that social worker,’ Timothy said. ‘Small wonder. She was asking highly inquisitive questions and she’d only just met him. How was he feeling? Was he angry? Was he frightened? If he hadn’t told her to be on her way, I would have.’
This was the longest speech Timothy had ever made.
‘It’s good for Fintan to be bad-tempered,’ Milo soothed. ‘Wouldn’t you worry if he was as sweet as sugar all the time? Sure, that isn’t normal.’
‘And maybe his other visitors will sweeten his humour.’ JaneAnn had been moved to tears, as Frederick, Geraint, Javier, Butch, Harry, Didier, Neville and Geoff had shown up in dribs and drabs around seven o’clock, bearing four pounds of grapes, three books, twelve magazines, two Barbie lollipops, two