Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [124]
As Katherine reached her desk, she was shaking. What if this didn’t work? What if the only thing he’d really liked about her was her inaccessibility? She’d be completely wasting her time by becoming sweet and approachable.
She hated having to do this but she’d no choice because she always had to do everything. She bristled with self-righteousness. No one else could be depended upon. She always had to pay the bills, lend people money, remember birthdays, drive when everyone else was drinking their heads off. Now she had to save Fintan’s life. No point expecting that irresponsible, selfish coward Tara Butler to lift a finger to help.
At the thought of Tara, Katherine buzzed with high-voltage guilt: she’d broken the worst taboo and told Tara she was fat. Although she was only stating a fact, she bolstered herself. All that she’d said was true. God, she thought, I’m turning into Thomas. Speaking as I find. It was four days since Katherine and Tara had had their terrible row and, though they’d both mended their fences with Liv, they hadn’t made it up with each other. But they were coldly civil for the sake of the O’Gradys.
Though Katherine knew it was patently ridiculous to suggest that how she lived her life could affect or arrest the progress of someone else’s cancer, throw enough mud and it sticks. She was haunted by the idea that the O’Gradys, Sandro and Liv were looking at her accusingly. With each passing day her paranoia got worse, as she suspected the nurses were eyeing her with contempt, then the other patients, then their visitors, then strangers in the street…
What made it all so messy was that she was also squeezed with overpowering love for Fintan. She’d find herself remembering the way he was before he got sick – healthy and robust as an animal, with glowing skin, thick lustrous hair, shiny eyes. Then she’d look at the shrunken, dead-eyed, listless creature in the bed, with his patchy hair and swollen neck and be unable to avoid the realization that he might never recover. At those times of intestine-clenching terror and unbearable sorrow, she’d have done anything for him. Anything.
On other – rarer – occasions, she got the six-months-to-live feeling, when her vision of life was channelled through Fintan’s and she genuinely agreed that it was imperative to make the most of every single day. She’d be swept along on a sparkling love of life, where it all seemed so beautifully, joyously simple. Of course she’d try her best with Joe Roth!
But then the moment would pass and Katherine always returned with a thud to mundanity. Lumbered with an impossibly burdensome task that five minutes earlier had seemed like the easiest thing in the world.
Until her mood would change again and she’d see Fintan’s request from yet another angle. Fintan loved her. He’d want the best for her, so surely she should trust him.
Surely?
For short periods of time she managed to, then the conviction trickled away again.
All the voices in Katherine’s head gathered steam and clamoured louder and louder. Everyone – including, at times, herself – was pushing her towards Joe Roth and she realized she’d get no peace until she’d, at least, tried.
Naturally, being a cautious kind of a girl, she spent days agonizing before she finally made her decision, her conviction morphing from out-of-the-question to manageable to downright desirable, then back to out-of-the-question again.
In the end it seemed easier for her to try than not to try, with so much guilt and pressure and fear and conscientiousness washing around. And there was one final factor. Buried under all the other feelings was one she wouldn’t have admitted to under torture: she wanted Joe Roth. In an invisible, shameful way, Fintan’s request was merely an excuse.
On Thursday morning, feeling like she was going into battle, she plucked up all her daring and forced herself to wear a short black Lycra ‘pulling’ – though Katherine