Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [149]
Despite everything, Tara couldn’t help filling with excitement.
‘What should I wear on top?’ Katherine wondered.
Tara flicked through Katherine’s immaculate hangers. ‘You and your capsule wardrobe,’ she muttered, in a schoolmarm voice. ‘Buy in neutral colours, make sure the item fits in with the rest of your wardrobe, at the beginning of each season choose a few staple items – a grey trouser suit, a navy skirt suit, narrow-legged black pants and a black skirt – and build on them.’ She’d come to the end of the hangers. ‘Sorry, Katherine, I see no tops here that are sexy, and you can hardly wear a work blouse with those jeans.’ She put her hands on her hips in a wit’s-end way. ‘I don’t suppose you’d just go in your bra?’
Katherine surprised her by saying, uneasily, ‘Well, actually, I went shopping…’ she pulled a bag from under the bed ‘… and I bought this. But it’s not really me,’ she added apologetically. ‘It’s a boomerang.’
Tara looked perplexed.
‘I mean, it’s going back,’ Katherine explained.
‘Let me see.’ Tara pulled a raspberry-coloured little sweater from the bag. ‘On!’ she ordered. ‘This minute.’
‘But –’
‘On!’
Katherine stood awkwardly before Tara. She looked beautiful. The dark-pink colour made her face glow as if it had uplighters within it. The silky fabric clung to her arms and breasts and was just short enough to give a tantalizing glimpse of her concave stomach. Tara wished they’d thought in time of getting Katherine’s belly-button pierced – something she’d love to get done herself except she feared they’d need the equipment that excavated the Channel Tunnel to burrow through the fat to pierce the hole, then the ring would have to be the circumference of a dinner-plate.
‘You’ve got to wear it!’ Tara was passionate.
‘I can’t,’ Katherine protested. ‘I look so obvious. And it’s too young for me.’
‘Please,’ Tara begged. ‘You look sexy and waif-like. And he’s so used to seeing you all buttoned up in your bumlick suits that he won’t know what’s hit him.’
‘But it’s November. I’ll get a cold.’
‘Colds are caused by viruses. And you’ll have a coat. Which were you thinking of wearing?’
There was an unexpected pause and Katherine’s face was an agony of guilt. ‘Well, when I was shopping I saw this,’ she confessed, pulling another bag from under the bed. ‘But I shouldn’t have bought it. I’m going to bring it back on Monday. It’s just here for a little holiday in Gospel Oak. I don’t know what I was thinking of…’
Tara grabbed the bag from her and pulled out a three-quarter-length petrol-blue jacket, in liquid-soft leather, still in its tissue paper. ‘Jesus Christ! What else is under there?’ Tara hit the floor like a hostage in a bank raid.
‘Nothing,’ Katherine said, hastily. ‘Only a pair of boots. And some jewellery and make-up. Oh, and a few pieces of underwear. But they’re not me, at all, whatever about the other stuff, these were a big, big mistake.’
‘Baabaa ‘oots!’ Tara was under the bed, her voice muffled, but ecstatic.
Katherine took it to understand that Tara had found the Prada boots. ‘Please come out.’
Tara re-emerged. ‘So that’s why you didn’t get to Fintan’s until nine o’clock on Thursday night. You were shopping!’
Reverentially she began to unfold the jacket. ‘Oh, God, I don’t believe it,’ she exclaimed, when she saw the label. ‘Dolce and Gab –’
‘We won’t talk about it,’ Katherine interrupted smoothly. ‘The unbearable guilt, you understand.’
Tara felt relieved. Katherine had behaved wildly out of character by splurging on impractical, expensive clothes, but at least she had the decency to feel horribly guilty about it.
Finally Katherine was ready, wearing the new top, jacket, boots, choker, earrings, thong knickers, lacy bra, lipstick, eyeliner and a squirt of Boudoir on her neck, wrists and modest cleavage. She even let Tara put her hair in bunches.
‘You look about fourteen,’ Tara said. ‘Go forth in sin, my child.’
‘You can depend upon it.’
‘Not really? Not on a first date?’
‘Life is for living,’ Katherine quipped. ‘We could be dead tomorrow.’
She really seemed to believe that and Tara