Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [14]
She kept trying to salvage it, first by pretending that the issue had never been raised, and that everything was as it had always been. And then, when living with the forced normality became too taxing, she once again tried to change Alasdair’s mind, by calling his bluff and threatening to end the relationship entirely. She’d heard of other cases like hers: when the man was faced with the reality of doing without the woman he suddenly saw that making a commitment was a wonderful idea. But nothing doing. Instead Alasdair said sadly, ‘Go, if you must. I don’t blame you, no one would.’
‘But don’t you love me?’ she demanded breathlessly, her voice high-pitched with horror, as she realized how badly she’d misjudged things. ‘Won’t you miss me?’
‘Yes, I love you,’ he replied, gently. ‘And of course I’ll miss you. But I’ve no right to hold you if you want to go.’
Mortified, Tara quickly shut up with her dramatic, It’s-all-over talk. That ploy had backfired good and proper. A swift U-turn had her re-embracing the status quo, hoping no one had noticed. However, the relationship that had been wonderful a year before no longer seemed charmed and charming. It was a making-do, a half relationship, she thought bitterly. But it was better than nothing.
Except it wasn’t. At least, not for Alasdair. ‘It’s no good any more,’ he told Tara, about a month later. She stared at him in terror, the much-derided, half-assed relationship suddenly flaring up into a highly desirable one, now that it was under threat.
‘But nothing’s changed,’ she stammered, confused because she was supposed to have the moral high ground. She was allowed to hold the threat of ending the whole thing over him, because he’d hurt her. Not the other way round. ‘I’m sorry I brought up the getting-married thing again, and I’m sorry I’ve been such a pain about it, but forget it, let’s just carry on as we were.’
But he shook his head and said, ‘We can’t go back.’
‘We can,’ she insisted, hysteria in her voice, wondering why bad things insisted on happening when you were already beaten and broken.
‘We can’t,’ he repeated.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, knowing, but defiantly refusing to let herself find out.
‘It’s time to call it a day,’ he said quietly. And for a second Tara pretended he hadn’t said anything, refusing to move from life as it was to life as it is.
‘No,’ she said frantically. ‘There’s no need, things are fine as they are.’
‘They’re not fine,’ he said. ‘You deserve someone else, someone who’ll give you what you want. Go on, there’s no good in staying with me, you’re wasting time.’
‘I don’t want anyone else,’ she promised desperately. ‘I’d rather have you the way things are than be married to someone else.’
But no matter how much she tried to tell him she was happy as things stood, he wouldn’t have it, becoming more and more intractable as the conversation went on. Until she realized that there was no hope of convincing him, that, in fact, there never had been. His mind had been made up before she uttered a word.
Tara nearly lost her reason. For weeks she was demented and hysterical. Her grief was so agonizing that she lay in bed and howled like an animal. So loudly that the upstairs neighbours called the police one night.
She moved the CD player into her room and, roaring, crying, played Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over,’ incessantly. Every time the last bars of it faded she sobbed even harder and pressed the replay button. Liv and Katherine counted it twenty-nine times in a row one night. Sometimes she half howled, half sang along with it, getting particular relief from the part where it moved up an octave. ‘It’s ooooh-ohhhh-verrr.’ Up an octave. ‘IT’S OOOOH-OHHHH-VERRR!’ The upstairs neighbours talked about calling the police again.
She had to take another week off work and when she went back her colleagues wished she’d stayed away. Every program she was supposed to have tested was flawed,