Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [179]
‘Everyone in Alco’s Corner is looking at you,’ Tara muttered.
Katherine glanced up and saw a selection of bulbous-nosed faces checking her out. Tara waited for the glare to flash across the bar and scare the living daylights out of them. But Katherine smiled prettily and Tara sighed. She kept forgetting about the new, improved Katherine Casey.
Back at the bar, the men muttered in agreement. ‘It’s the twinkle in her eye that does it.’
‘… seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. HAPPY NEW YEAR!’
Tara looked at the half-smoked cigarette that she held in her hand. ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish,’ she murmured. Then amid great ceremony she crumbled and broke her last sixteen cigarettes into an ashtray in Forman’s.
‘Ouch.’ Timothy O’Grady winced. ‘I bet that hurt.’
‘No,’ Tara lied, airily. ‘My own personal Ramadan starts here. No eating, drinking and, most definitely, no smoking!’
Fourteen hours later, Katherine and Tara were sitting in the non-smoking part of Shannon airport, awaiting their flight back to Heathrow.
‘It’s fourteen hours since I had a cigarette,’ Tara announced proudly. ‘Fourteen hours.’
‘You’ve been asleep for eleven of them,’ Katherine said drily.
‘Look at your man over there.’ Tara indicated a man in the smoking section, sucking on a cigarette as though his life depended on it. ‘Isn’t it disgusting? How could he do that to himself? Putting that revolting gear into his body?’
Ten minutes later Tara broke open a packet of Nicorette. ‘This is the business,’ she said, chewing frantically. ‘Who needs fags?’ Twenty minutes later Tara was sitting in the smoking section, still chewing the piece of Nicorette and inhaling deeply on a cigarette she’d bummed from the man.
‘I’m a smoker,’ she sadly told him. ‘I suppose I’d better just come to terms with it.’
68
Tara started evening classes. Now that she wasn’t going on mad benders every night of the week – it was down to every second night and sometimes only every third night – she had to fill the time somehow and going to the gym and visiting Fintan weren’t adequate distraction. But the banjo lessons lasted only a night. ‘It was too hard,’ she complained, ‘and have you any idea how much a banjo costs? You’d be bankrupted.’
The mosaic-making didn’t fare much better. ‘Miles too fiddly. All those little tiles, they’d drive you mad.’
And as for the Portuguese lessons, ‘Full of weirdoes. But never mind,’ she said cheerfully, ‘they still have vacancies in meditation, batik-making and canoeing. One of them is bound to be nice.’
They weren’t.
‘Meditation. God, the tedium! And my nerves were in shreds from the silence, it was like a particularly awkward dinner party.’
After the batik-making she demanded, ‘Do I look like a hippie?’
She didn’t say much about the canoeing. Just limped in dejectedly, her hair streely and straggly.
‘How was it?’ Joe asked.
‘Not very nice. They turned me upside down into the water and I thought I was going to drown. I bumped my knee and my hair is ruined.’
She was very low that night and horribly aware of her single status. She craved comfort and affection, someone to put their arms around her and squeeze away the shock of being unexpectedly immersed in cold water, someone to kiss her poor bruised knee better.
No more evening classes, she decided. She’d loved the infusion of hope at the start of each class, the excitement as she waited for the activity to fix her. But it didn’t work. There was no point trying to escape her loneliness through a new interest.
Now her only hobby was Not Ringing Thomas, which was still a teeth-grittingly difficult exercise. Not a day passed that he wasn’t the first thing she thought of when she woke up. But Katherine made her remember how much more excruciating it had been in the beginning, ten weeks previously. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you barely slept and you never ate. I know you still feel horrendous but you’ve made progress. I haven’t had to stop you driving round to him late at night since before Christmas.’
‘I suppose,’ Tara said slowly, ‘I’ve done well