Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [2]
‘Sometimes, though,’ Tara said, pensively, ‘I kind of miss the colouring book and crayons.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Katherine assured her. ‘My mother still buys them for you for every birthday.’
Tara looked up in hope.
‘In another dimension,’ Katherine said quickly.
‘You look fantastic.’ Tara lit a cigarette and wistfully checked out Katherine’s claret Karen Millen trouser suit.
‘So do you.’
‘In my arse.’
‘You do. I love your dress.’
‘My birthday present to myself. D’you know something?’ Tara’s face darkened. ‘I hate shops that use those slanty forward mirrors, so you think the dress makes you look slender and willowy. Like a poor fool I always reckon it’s because of the great cut, so it’s worth spending the debt of a small South American country on.’ She paused to take a monumental drag from her cigarette. ‘Next thing you know, you’re at home with a mirror that isn’t slanty forward and you look like a pig in a frock.’
‘You don’t look like a pig.’
‘I do. And they wouldn’t give me a refund unless it had something wrong with it. I said it had plenty wrong with it, it made me look like a pig in a frock. They said that didn’t count. It needed something like a broken zip. But I might as well wear it seeing as I went up to my Visa limit to buy it.’
‘But you were already up to your Visa limit.’
‘No, no,’ Tara explained earnestly. ‘I was only up to my official limit. My real limit is about two hundred quid above the one they set me. You know that!’
‘OK,’ Katherine said, faintly.
Tara picked up the menu. ‘Oh, look,’ she said in anguish. ‘It’s all so delicious here. Please, God, give me the strength to not order a starter. Although I’m so hungry I could eat a child’s arse through the bars of a cot!’
‘How’s the no-forbidden-foods diet going?’ Katherine asked, although she could have guessed the answer.
‘Gone,’ exhaled Tara, looking ashamed.
‘What harm,’ Katherine consoled.
‘Exactly.’ Tara was relieved. ‘What harm indeed. Thomas was raging, as you can imagine. But really! Imagine a diet that tells a glutton like me that nothing is forbidden. It’s a recipe for disaster.’
Katherine made murmury soothing noises, as she had every time over the past fifteen years when Tara had fallen off the food wagon. Katherine could eat exactly what she liked, precisely because she didn’t want to. From her glossy exterior she looked like the kind of woman who never had struggles with anything. The cool grey eyes that looked out from underneath her smooth dark fringe were assured and appraising. She knew this. She practised a lot when she was on her own.
Next to arrive was Fintan, whose progress across the restaurant floor was observed by the staff and most of the clientele. Tall, big and handsome, with his dark hair swept back in a glossy quiff. His bright purple suit had buttonholes punched all over both sleeves, through which his lime-green shirt winked and twinkled. A plane could have landed on his lapels. Discreet murmuring of, ‘Who’s he…?’ ‘He must be an actor…?’ ‘Or a model…?’ rustled like autumn leaves, and the feel-good factor amongst the Friday-night diners experienced a marked surge. Truly, everyone thought, this is one stylish man. He spotted Tara and Katherine, who’d been watching him with indulgent amusement, and gave a huge smile. It was as if all the lights had been turned up.
‘Gorgeous whistle.’ Katherine nodded at his suit.
‘A noice, clarssy set of freds,’ replied Fintan, trying and completely failing to sound like a Cockney. There was no disguising his rounded County Clare accent.
Though it hadn’t always been that way. When he’d arrived in London, twelve years previously, fresh from small-town repression, he’d set about reinventing himself with gusto. The first port of call had been the way he spoke. Tara and Katherine had been forced to stand by, helplessly, as Fintan had peppered his conversations with camp ‘Oooohhh, you screaming Mary!’s and ‘Meee-yow!’s and wild talk of dancing with Boy George in Taboo.
But in the last couple