Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [137]
Tara and Sandro exchanged an oh-yikes! look.
They arrived at the empty flat in Notting Hill to find that while they’d been out JaneAnn had gone on a Jif frenzy in honour of Fintan’s homecoming. Afternoon tea could have been taken on the rubber-tiled kitchen floor. JaneAnn had nearly worn holes in the Purves and Purves rugs with her enthusiastic Hoovering, and almost shone away the protective laminate from the polished concrete floors. The alabaster-framed mirrors were lucky not to have cracked from her energetic buffing.
A big, pink, crackly ‘Welcome Home’ sign looped across the top of the stainless-steel living-room door. Balloons and paper streamers were Sellotaped to original paintings, Japanese lamps and the industrial-style tallboy. Get well cards lined the Philippe Starck shelves. There were fresh flowers in every room.
Dazed, Fintan sat on the tan leather sofa they’d had specially made and imported from New York, while Sandro fussed around like an old woman, fiddling with the flowers, plumping leather cushions, straightening the original seventies Formica coffee table. He approached with a tartan rug, which he attempted to tuck in around Fintan’s knees. ‘I bought this specially. Your mother told me tartan rugs are good for sick people.’
‘Get it off me.’ Petulantly Fintan tore the rug from him and flung it away.
‘Oh. But JaneAnn said you would like it.’
‘I’m thirty-two. Not eighty-two. And never likely to be,’ he added bitterly.
‘Er, I will listen to the answering-machine.’ Sandro backed from the room.
‘Isn’t it great that you’re home?’ Tara asked nervously.
‘Is it? What goddamn difference does it make? And can we lose the bloody flowers? It feels like a hospital in here.’
‘Um, Katherine has some hot news for you.’ It was up to Katherine to tell Fintan about Joe Roth and the apology but Tara was desperate to lighten the atmosphere. ‘Yesterday, she apologized to the Joe Roth bloke!’
A dismissive pout.
Sandro returned and listed proudly, ‘You have had telephone calls from Ethan, Frederick, Claude, Didier, Neville, Julia and Stephanie. Everyone wants to come and visit, but I say, no, they must wait. Fintan will call when he is ready and good.’
‘No call from Carmella Garcia offering me my job back?’
Sandro looked stricken.
‘That’s the only phone call I’m interested in. Do you know what I want?’
‘What?’ Already Sandro had his feet on the starter’s blocks.
‘I want to get twisted drunk.’
‘You can’t do that!’ Tara was dumbfounded. ‘You’re sick. You need to get better.’
‘I’m not going to get better.’
‘Of course you are. You’ve got to think positive.’ Tara insisted. That was the message the nurses repeatedly pressed home. People with a good attitude stood a better chance of recovery.
‘Think positive?’ Fintan barked with joyless laughter. ‘I haven’t the energy.’
‘I have things for you to eat,’ Sandro tempted. ‘All your favourites. Strawberries? Pork pies? Petit Filous? Sugar Puffs? Toffee Pops?’
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘But, bambino, you have to eat.’
‘I don’t want anything,’ Fintan suddenly roared. ‘I keep telling you, everything tastes horrible. And you know I’m only supposed to eat raw, unprocessed food in any case!’
Letting a sob burst forth, Sandro rushed dramatically into the kitchen. Torn, Tara followed, and found him bent over the Icelandic lava-stone worktop, crying his eyes out next to an (unused) pale-green Alessi juicer.
‘Everything I do is wrong.’
‘He’s not well. He can’t help it. If you hadn’t done anything, that would annoy him too.’
‘He’s a different person, so angry and nasty. Not my Fintan.’
‘It’s so hard for him,’ Tara consoled.
‘But it’s hard for me too.’
‘Come on.’ Tara led him back to the front room, where they sat in uncomfortable silence waiting for Katherine to return from shopping with JaneAnn and Timothy.
‘I’m going to have a shower. I haven’t had one in weeks.’ Fintan announced.
‘But you can barely stand.’
‘I’ll manage.’ He glared.
Sandro and Tara sat with knots in their stomachs wondering how all the triumph of Fintan’s homecoming had