Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [172]
‘No!’ Katherine had jumped up, grabbed the needles, yanked the half-knitted sleeve from them and torn frantically at the wool, unravelling line after line of stitches. ‘It’s only an excuse to see him. Like the money he owes you, and the shower curtain you left behind and the fact that you forgot to kick Beryl before you left. No, Tara, no!’
Tara’s face was luminous with amazement. ‘OK,’ she whispered.
Katherine stomped back to sit beside Joe and muttered, ‘Sorry you had to witness that.’
‘I’m scared!’ He quailed, and everyone laughed, dispersing the tension.
God, Tara thought, he was lovely! And so obliging. Tara suspected that the reason Katherine and Joe were spending so much time at Katherine’s instead of being holed up à deux in Joe’s flat was to keep an eye on Tara. Katherine had even moved the phone from the front room to the bedroom and confiscated Tara’s mobile. ‘I can’t stop you ringing him during the day,’ she’d said, ‘but at least you won’t be able to when you come home plastered.’
And Joe and Katherine had blocked Tara’s progress one night when she tried to leave for a drunken midnight drive. ‘I don’t want to call in to Thomas,’ Tara explained angrily. ‘I just want to drive by’
‘The only circumstance that I’ll let you drive by Thomas’s is if it’s a drive-by shooting,’ Katherine replied. ‘Now, back to bed!’
Tara dragged herself out of bed and ticked the calendar. Twenty days. Nearly three weeks. And after three weeks it would be almost a month.
So far she’d managed not to ring him. But it was a superhuman achievement, brought about by Herculean struggle. Every day seemed like a thousand-mile march, potholed with constant opportunities to pick up the phone. At times she literally sweated from the effort of not ringing him.
At weekends, without the distraction of work, the torment was magnified a hundredfold.
As the initial agonizing wrench receded she’d come to see that it wasn’t just Thomas she missed, it was everything he’d represented: acceptance, endorsement, someone to consult on plans, a person to report to. She was deeply grateful for her friends, but without the unquestioned alliance of routine that existed between lovers, she ricocheted about like a free radical.
There had never been any great thrill in telling Thomas that she’d be home late. It was only now that there was no one to give a damn if she didn’t come home at all that it had taken on desirability. And even though she and Thomas had never really gone on a proper holiday, all she could hope for now was that some couple – perhaps Milo and Liv or Katherine and Joe – would take pity on her and let her tag along. Knowing how unworthy such feelings were didn’t lessen them. She just ended up feeling guilty as well as lonely.
So nostalgic was she for her old life that she even missed the awful, brown, burrow-like flat. Despite it being in Thomas’s name, it had been her home. And now she was squashed like a refugee into a small bedroom in someone else’s flat, afraid of being a nuisance and unable to relax. Worrying about spending too much time in the bathroom, thinking she had no right to say what she wanted to watch on telly, feeling guilty for using too much electricity and edgily aware that any mess had to be cleared up immediately.
Constant fantasies of Thomas arriving and pleading passionately with her to return buffered her. But apart from the one phone call where he’d asked if they could still be friends there had been no contact from him. In her more honest moments, Tara knew there wouldn’t ever be. He had a macho closed-offness where it was shameful to admit to weakness or need. Even if he was dying without her, he wouldn’t act on it.
Parallel to the teeth-gritted endurance of a life without Thomas was life-sapping worry about Fintan. He’d had three bouts of chemo now and still hadn’t responded. His blood tests showed nothing had changed and you only