Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [180]
‘You’ve been marvellous. And you’ll get over him all the quicker because of the lack of contact. Making the break slowly only prolongs the agony. It’s like pulling off a plaster. If you’re brutal, it’s more painful initially, but better in the long run.’
Katherine’s words both comforted and unnerved Tara. She wanted to get over Thomas, but in a mad, paradoxical way the thought of him being consigned to her past made her sad.
She trudged on through her life. Sometimes she’d catch a glimpse of herself. A thirty-something woman with a good job – even if she was as poor as a church mouse it wasn’t the fault of her job – who worked hard, went to the gym daily, bought nice clothes, hadn’t a hint of a man on the horizon, and who filled in the gaps with good friends and white wine. She felt like a cliché and a failure.
She yearned for the days when she was so porky she had to stop buying Vogue because looking at all the beautiful clothes she couldn’t fit into broke her heart – at least back then she’d had a boyfriend.
For Tara, Katherine, Milo and Liv, visiting Fintan was something that had become automatically built into their routine, as reflex as brushing their teeth in the morning. Daily visits were so much the norm that they felt odd if they didn’t see him.
The extremes of emotion they’d felt in the early days of his diagnosis had evened out. Despite living with terrible, ongoing anticipation where any twinge or ache of Fintan’s triggered wild anxiety, the horror wasn’t as accessible as it used to be. The acute shock had receded and the aberrant had been assimilated. There was no other way, Liv explained. ‘When you’re carrying a burden, you eventually get used to it. It’s still a drain and a strain, but the immediate shock of finding it weighing down your arms goes away.’
Nor did anyone have the same hope that they used to have – after four doses of chemo he’d made no visible progress.
Even Fintan’s rage, despair and hope didn’t reach the outer limits of the pendulum swing. In a way it all felt very ordinary.
Only now and then did the bizarre awfulness of the situation break through. Like the night that Katherine, Joe and Fintan went to a play, and Fintan couldn’t get a taxi home afterwards.
‘What a bummer I can’t give you a lift,’ Katherine lamented, as they stood on the street, taxi after taxi passing with their lights off. ‘That’s the problem with two-seater cars.’
‘I could sit on Joe’s lap,’ Fintan offered.
Laughing, Katherine began to berate him for his constant flirting with Joe, then saw he was serious. The shock deepened when she realized that it was possible. Fintan was shrunken and wasted enough.
She couldn’t speak as she drove them home, the once strong, healthy Fintan perched like a ventriloquist’s dummy on Joe’s knee, Joe’s arms cradling him protectively.
Milo put his farm up for sale and announced he was going to become a landscape gardener. ‘I love London, but I miss the land,’ he said. ‘I like the feel of earth between my fingers. We all have our own way of living.’
Liv looked like she was going to swoon from admiration.
‘Are you happy, Liv?’ Tara asked softly.
‘Happy?’ she said doubtfully. ‘I don’t really do happy. But I’m off my Prozac, St John’s wort, evening-primrose oil, vitamin B supplements and my light-box and I haven’t had a suicidal thought in ages.’
‘But are you happy with Milo?’
Liv lit up. ‘Oh, he’s wonderful. I can’t believe my luck. He’s changed the way I see the world. When it starts to rain instead of worrying that his hair might go frizzy, he doesn’t even notice it, or else he says things like “It’s a lovely, growthy rain, good for the crops.” Although,’ Liv added hurriedly: never let it be said that everything in her garden was rosy, ‘you must remember that we met because of Fintan’s illness. It’s made us closer in one way, but in another… It means we have worry and guilt. And, of course, JaneAnn is cross with me. Nothing is ever perfect.’
‘No, indeed it isn’t.’ Tara tried not to smile.