Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [136]
As soon as she returned to work, people began sniffing in alarm.
‘What’s that awful stink?’ Ravi demanded.
Tara sat very still at her desk, trying not to move, because she was shedding dried muck with every gesture.
‘Someone must have trod in dog do,’ Vinnie announced. ‘Everybody check your shoes.’
There was a flurry of people pushing themselves from their desks and examining the soles of their shoes.
‘You too, Tara.’ Ravi frowned.
Cautiously, slowly, Tara lifted her foot, but it wasn’t cautious or slow enough because a cloud of dust rose, obscuring everyone’s view of her.
‘What’s going on?’ Ravi demanded. ‘Have you just been exhumed?’ He came and stood beside her. ‘Eeee-oooo,’ he declared, dramatically pinching his nose. ‘Call off the search, everyone,’ he announced. ‘It’s Tara’s liposuction thingy.’
‘It wasn’t liposuction!’ Tara sat up and defended herself angrily, causing more dried muck to billow forth. ‘It was only a mud wrap. For my skin!’
God forbid that people would know to what desperate measures she’d gone to to lose weight.
Ravi made a big show of moving his desk. ‘I have to. I can’t concentrate due to the pong,’ he claimed.
In the end, by popular demand, Tara left work early, a trail of brown dust following her, as if she was rotting. ‘Don’t come back until you’ve had a good scrub,’ Vinnie ordered, wearily. It was bad enough to have four children of his own…
Tara went home. She should have gone to Katherine’s to pick up the O’Gradys and take them to the hospital. But she was too depressed – not to mention smelly. Alone and honking she sat in Thomas’s gloomy flat and tried to read Louise L. Hay’s You Can Heal Your Body, one of the many books on alternative healing they’d bought. But she couldn’t concentrate on it. Instead of visualizing Fintan’s cancer cells fading away to nothing, she found herself visualizing leaving Thomas. Too many thoughts had been planted by too many people for her to be able to continue completely immersing her head in the sand.
She loved Fintan. She really did. Now he was sick, possibly dying, and he wanted her to leave Thomas.
Reluctantly Tara admitted she could see how it looked to him. Compared to the time she’d spent with Alasdair, her relationship with Thomas might seem a bit of an emotional route march. At least to the outsider.
She looked around the front room, imagining packing up her pictures and books and (four) CDs, pulling the front door behind her for the last time and going out alone into the big, bad world. It made her flinch and the fear welled up again. There was no way she could do it. Clutching at straws she remembered that Thomas might marry her. All she had to do was ask. But not just yet…
She longed for Katherine. She missed her and, for some reason, the anger she had felt for her had gone. Then the doorbell rang, and, as if her thoughts had conjured her up, there was Katherine, holding a tatty bunch of flowers and looking more distraught than Tara had seen her in a long time.
50
On Saturday afternoon Tara and Sandro brought Fintan home. He had spent nearly three weeks in hospital.
He looked atrocious and was so weak he had to lean on a male nurse and Sandro to get to the car park. Strictly speaking, at five foot four, Sandro was more of a hindrance than a help, but he insisted on supporting. And emotions were running too high to deny that kind of request.
Seeing Fintan framed by the outside world staggered Tara. She realized that you can get away with looking like you’re dying in a hospital bed: you kind of blend in. But it’s a different kettle of fish outside where people are, for the most part, healthy.
Tara noticed one good thing. Fintan was wearing the pistachio-green sheepskin coat he’d ‘borrowed’ from the stockroom at work. ‘Don’t suppose this’ll be going back now.’ Tara twinkled.
‘My redundancy