Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [15]
Every week or so, when the pain got too much, she rang him and begged him to meet her. He always did and, naturally, they slept together. Frantic, tearful sex, scratching the clothes off each other, bruising each other with the relief of their familiarity.
This happened so often she began to think that maybe there was a chance they’d get back together. It was obvious that he was as torn apart by the break-up as she was, that he still loved her.
Until one night he wouldn’t let her come over.
‘Why not?’ she asked. He’d always been keen before.
She heard him take a breath, and in the pico-second’s pause between the end of that breath and the start of him speaking, she got a very bad feeling. Before he even said it, she knew.
‘I’ve met someone else.’
Tara calmly hung up the phone, got into her car, drove around to Alasdair’s, let herself in with the key she hadn’t yet returned, found him in the kitchen boiling the kettle and, with her forearm, hit him such a blow in the skull that his glasses fell off.
Before he had a chance to recover, she slapped his head and face repeatedly with the palms of her hands. ‘Bastard,’ she gasped. ‘You bastarding bastard.’ But slapping him wasn’t expending the hatred or stopping her pain quickly enough so she punched him in the stomach, surprised by how weak her arm felt.
Although it seemed to do the trick all right, she thought dispassionately, as she watched Alasdair choking and retching.
‘Ali?’ someone asked, and Tara turned to the kitchen door to see a plump blonde girl standing there.
‘What’s going on?’ the girl gasped in horror, as she took in the scene.
Tara came out of her trance. Pausing only to give Alasdair a violent shove that sent him toppling into her usurper, she left.
When she got home and told Katherine and Liv what had happened, they couldn’t hide their shock. Too late, they tried to make her feel better about it. ‘The bastard,’ they consoled. ‘Good on you. I hope you broke a couple of ribs.’
‘Stop,’ begged Tara. The red mist had evaporated, leaving her sickened and frantic with self-loathing. ‘I beat him up,’ she moaned, rocking backwards and forwards, her face in her hands. ‘Now I’ll never get him back.
‘I thought I couldn’t possibly feel worse than I have been for the past seven weeks, four days and…’ she paused to look at her watch ‘… sixteen and a half hours, but I was wrong.
‘I have to lie on my bed and howl like a dog,’ she said brokenly, and made for her bedroom. Katherine and Liv braced themselves for Roy Orbison. But to their surprise and relief instead they heard ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’. And then they heard it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
Later that night Tara re-emerged. ‘I’m going to call him,’ she announced.
‘Don’t!’ Katherine commanded, diving on the phone and confiscating it. ‘You’ll only make things worse.’
‘Worse,’ Tara said miserably. ‘How could they be worse? Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah!’
‘A film called The Life of Brian,’ Katherine explained hurriedly to Liv’s perplexed face. ‘No, Tara, no calling him.’
‘Let me just apologize,’ Tara begged. ‘If you don’t let me, I’ll wait until you’ve gone to bed, and it’ll be far worse if I phone him in the middle of the night.’
Eventually Katherine