Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [103]
‘It’s right marvellous for him to have so many visitors. There’s not many people lucky enough to have eight young men sitting around their sick bed,’ JaneAnn said proudly. ‘And all of them so well turned out.’
‘Very well turned out,’ Milo agreed.
‘But terrible noisy,’ JaneAnn sighed. ‘My head was ruz. So did you think his lump looked like it had got a bit smaller?’
‘Now that you mention it, it did,’ Tara lied.
‘He certainly didn’t look like someone who was dying, now did he?’ JaneAnn asked, jovially.
‘Dying? Hardly!’ went the scornful response. ‘Would a dying person be so bad-humoured?’
Everything about Fintan – good, bad or indifferent – continued to be turned into something positive, to shore up their version of the cosmic plot, the one where he recovers.
But JaneAnn couldn’t sustain it. In the midst of the positive thinking, she burst into tears and blurted, ‘I wish it was me instead of him. To see him thrown in the bed, so sick and weak. He’s too young for that but I’ve one foot in the grave and another on a banana-skin.
‘You know what?’ she said, angrily. ‘It’s my fault. I should never have let him come over here to England. The other four lads stayed at home and none of them got cancer.’
As people rushed to comfort her, the pizzas arrived. And when JaneAnn discovered she was just supposed to eat it as it was, without potatoes or vegetables, she became even more upset. ‘Are you in earnest?’ she asked. ‘But that’s no dinner at all. Small wonder Fintan got sick if that’s all he’d eat of an evening. A mother’s home cooking could have prevented all this.’
Later on, JaneAnn turned businesslike. ‘Now, girls, I want to talk to you,’ she said. ‘You both have fine important jobs and I couldn’t have it on my conscience if you lost them because of all the time you’re spending looking after us. You don’t have to drive us everywhere, we can get that tube yoke.’
Tara and Katherine both protested enthusiastically. But never so energetically as when Timothy said, ‘Those lifts in the hospital are great, aren’t they?’
‘Um, yes,’ Katherine said, tentatively.
‘I was never in one until yesterday,’ Timothy elaborated.
‘Me either,’ JaneAnn said. ‘Great sport, wasn’t it?’
‘You could go up and down all day in it,’ Milo agreed. ‘It was like going on the merries in Kilkee.’
‘We can’t set them loose on the London Underground,’ Katherine hissed quietly to Tara. ‘Not without lessons. They’ll be going up the down escalators and breaking the ticket-machines and not minding the gap and getting stuck in the doors and whatnot. I can just see it! It’d probably get on the news.’
36
Somebody had slept with Angie.
Katherine hadn’t been in the office much all week – just running in between hospital visits to do a couple of hours here and there, and her mind wasn’t on the place when she was in – so it took her longer than it usually would to realize that a new nickname was doing the rounds. Gillette.
Despite all the horrors that were going on with Fintan, Katherine was surprised to find she still had emotion left over for Joe Roth. The few times she’d been to work that week she was highly sensitized around him and remained on full alert for any signs of sexual chemistry between him and Angie. She was very ashamed of this, but not ashamed enough to be able to stop. With her heart in her mouth, she listened anxiously to the men’s conversations to see just who ‘Gillette’ was and when her worst fear was realized and it became clear they were talking about Angie, she got a dull, heavy pain in her stomach, as if she’d eaten raw bread.
Gillette – why Gillette? What elaborate sexual tricks had Angie done that merited her being rechristened as a razor-blade? Katherine’s imagination went wild as she thought of the story she’d once heard from someone who’d been to a strip-show in Thailand and allegedly witnessed girls pulling strings of razor-blades out of their vaginas.