Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [196]
‘No, just one moment. Can we have a reality check here? Katherine, have you gone mental? You’re annoyed because he slept with someone before you got off with him? Did you expect him to be a virgin? Saving himself for you?’
‘No, but –’
‘You’ve slept with other people, Beaker from The Muppet Show, to take one example. You’ve no right to complain if Joe did too. Oh, come on! Show me a person who doesn’t have a past and I’ll show you a boring bastard.’
Katherine hitched and carelessly let fall her shoulders.
‘This isn’t anything to do with meeting Lorcan?’ Alarm mushroomed in Tara. ‘You’re not hoping to, um, start up with him again? Because that would be pure lunacy, Katherine.’
‘I know.’
‘It was twelve and a half years ago. A lifetime. He’s got a girlfriend, you’ve got Joe.’
‘If Joe rings,’ Katherine said, with cold finality, ‘I won’t speak to him, got that?’
‘Until when?’
‘I’ll decide when.’
‘But –’
‘It’s my flat.’
And that was the end of it.
Joe rang several times the following morning and left messages on the answering-machine. ‘Please talk to me, Katherine,’ he asked, his politeness not hiding his desperation.
Tara found it excruciating to listen to. ‘Come on,’ she said at two o’clock. ‘We’ve to go to Fintan’s.’
‘Go out?’ Katherine looked startled. ‘I’m not going out.’
‘But… Why not? Don’t you want to see his lumps? Or, rather, the lack of them?’
‘Not today.’
‘But, Katherine, we’ve been waiting six months for him to improve. It’s finally happened. Don’t you care?’
‘Yes, but I don’t want to go today. Sorry.
‘I am sorry,’ she added, with seeming sincerity.
‘Katherine, please let me help,’ Tara begged. ‘You’re being so weird. Just talk to me, would you?’
‘Go on your own. Give Fintan a kiss from me. I’ll see him soon.’
Her heart heavy with foreboding, Tara finally left, and Katherine exhaled with relief.
She was glad of the solitude. Though she knew she was behaving oddly, it was as if she was observing herself from afar and was powerless to intervene, like watching a wind-up doll which whirs about randomly, banging into doors and walls, mindless of its safety. She’d spent so long fantasizing about Lorcan that she couldn’t believe he’d been delivered into her lap. The shock was disconnecting. Though more than a decade had passed, she’d never really felt it was over. He was unfinished business and because the past had shaped the present, it was more important than the present.
Over the years she’d acted out many, many scenarios in her head. In most of them Lorcan prostrated himself with apologies, she made him suffer for a while, then forgave him. In the other version he cockily assumed he could take up where he left off and, with a selection of well-practised glares and pithy put-downs, she annihilated him.
She intended that when Lorcan came back – and she was convinced he would be back in the next day or so – she’d be the person in control. The ending would be rewritten, this time to suit her. Even if she wasn’t sure if it was the one where she rejected him scathingly or rode off into the sunset with him. Possibly both.
The one thing she was sure of was that the current ending wouldn’t do. Images of that last terrible scene with him assailed her and even now she winced at the very memory.
‘We have to get married.’ Katherine’s eyes were fixed on Lorcan’s face.
‘Why?’
She paused and flicked a glance around the pub. She’d thought a public place would be better to tell him her news in, but now she wasn’t so sure. ‘Because,’ she swallowed, and could hardly continue, ‘because I’m going to have a baby.’ Though she knew Lorcan wouldn’t do a runner on her, she couldn’t help being nervous because mythology held that men were likely to make for the hills around this delicate time. But she calmed herself with the thought that runners only happened to stupid, careless girls and no one was as careful as she. ‘Say something,’ she urged, anxiously. ‘Are you angry? If you are, you’ve no right to be, it takes two to tango…’
But he didn’t look angry, just weary. ‘I can’t marry you,’ he said, in pity and exasperation.