Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [147]
Another ten minutes of silence elapsed.
‘You look like you’re up the duff,’ he said.
‘You’re not exactly Kate fucking Moss yourself,’ Tara countered.
He looked up from correcting, his eyes stunned and childlike. ‘That was mean.’ He was surprised.
‘Now you know how I feel.’
‘But I say it for your own good.’
‘I’m saying it for your own good, too.’
Thomas looked at her and, in one of his quick, about-turn changes of mood, grinned suggestively. ‘It takes a big hammer to drive a big nail.’ His crotch was angled towards her, and the leer on his face said it all.
She looked at him, bewildered, her forehead furrowed like she was trying to read tiny writing. Why did he look like a gnome?
She didn’t want to sleep with him. That was the only thing she was certain of.
‘You laugh at the idea of us getting married then you expect me to go to bed with you. What’s wrong with this picture?’
Thomas looked genuinely confused. ‘Aw, Tara, come on,’ he whined. ‘You’ve got me all horny. Don’t be such a tease.’
‘Make your own arrangements.’ Then she stood up and walked from the room.
She wasn’t upset. She didn’t know what she was. Other than hungry.
But the thought of food made her queasy.
In the past when she’d been too hungry to sleep she took two Nytols to knock herself out. It worked for her then and it worked for her now. But her last thought before she descended into drugged sleep was not – unusually – I’d love a bacon sandwich. Instead it was, I wonder how Alasdair is?
54
On Friday Tara woke to foreboding, her jaw aching from grinding her teeth in her sleep.
She was humiliated by Thomas’s amusement. What was so funny about wanting to get married? They’d been together for two years. People sometimes got married, it wasn’t that bloody hilarious. She smarted with rejection, even if he hadn’t known that’s what his careless words had done.
Though she insisted unconvincingly that she wasn’t even sure she wanted to get married – after all, she’d spent her teenage years shouting about what a bourgeois institution marriage was – she wanted some indication that Thomas took their relationship seriously.
On the drive to work, she was tortured with anxiety about what was going to happen next. Surely things couldn’t just stay as they were? Or could they? She had a horrible feeling that she was obliged, for her own self-respect, to do something, make some stand. As she should have done a month before.
But she didn’t want to. She’d rather tiptoe through her life, as though through a condemned building. Afraid that the whole edifice could come toppling down if she put a foot wrong, stood on one rotten floorboard, leant against one shaky beam.
It used to be nice with Thomas, she thought. It used to be lovely. Perhaps she didn’t need to be worried, she bolstered herself in a burst of wild hope. The entire relationship hadn’t blown up in her face. Essentially nothing had changed and the structure still seemed sound.
Perhaps sound wasn’t quite the word, she admitted. But it looked the same as before. Whatever that was.
‘How’s the new lippy?’ Ravi yelled as soon as she walked into the office. ‘Kiss resistant?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Care to discover if it’s doughnut resistant?’ He waved a sugary ring in front of her. ‘Sorry,’ he said, when she winced and looked away. ‘How about a coffee?’
Ravi fetched her a cup of coffee, and Vinnie, Teddy, Evelyn, Slim Cheryl and Sleepy Steve couldn’t help downing tools in order to see what happened when Tara’s mouth came into contact with the side of her mug. She lifted the coffee to her lips, took a tiny sip, then held out the mug for all to see. Everyone exhaled a big ‘Oh’ of disappointment at the sight of a taupe, lip-shaped curve on the yellow enamel. ‘It said it was long-last,’ Ravi consoled. ‘It never said it was indelible.’
Tara sighed and said, ‘I think I’ll just give up. This is not something I’m going to win.’
After work she went for a couple of drinks with Ravi and some of the others, and didn’t mention Thomas or Fintan or anything