Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [31]
The atmosphere in the front room – depressing at the best of times with Thomas’s brown sofa and brown carpet tiles – became more and more oppressive. Both of them were smoking more than usual and the cigarette fug further leadened the atmosphere. Tara was desperate to defuse the weirdness somehow, to say something light-hearted to put a smile on his face and make everything all right again. But she couldn’t think of a single thing. When she pointed something out in the paper he just grunted or plain ignored her.
They’d sat this way countless times, over countless Sundays, and it had always been comfortable. As far as Tara could see, nothing was different. There was no reason for this stomach-knotting… anticipation. Yes, that was the right word. Anticipation. But what was she waiting for?
‘I’d really like to go and see that play about Woodstock,’ Tara said, breaking an hour’s worth of silence. She actually didn’t give a damn about that play about Woodstock, but she couldn’t endure any more absence of sound. She felt she needed an excuse to talk to him and she wanted a promise of some kind of intimacy, a suggestion that he’d come to the play with her.
Thomas looked at her over his paper. ‘Well, why don’t you go to that play about Woodstock, then?’ he barked, as if he’d never heard anything so stupid in all his life. Then gave his paper a paternal shake and redisappeared behind it, missing Tara’s stricken face.
Beryl trotted into the room, gave Tara a disdainful, superior body-swerve – I saw you eating all that toast, you fat cow, she seemed to say – and hopped on to Thomas’s lap.
‘Have you come to see your daddy?’ Thomas crooned, all lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘Who’s a beautiful girl? Oh, who’s a beautiful girl?’
Tara watched Thomas’s hand curving along Beryl’s back and tail, then saw Beryl staring smugly at her, snuggled on Thomas’s lap, and felt as if she was in a love triangle. She longed to be that bloody cat. To get a tenth of the affection that Thomas lavished on it. To have her tummy tickled. To be bought a scratch-pole. To be fed rabbit chunks in jelly.
Beryl hung around for just as long as it suited her then, with the take-it-or-leave-it independence that Tara yearned to emulate, got down off Thomas and stalked out. Thomas’s gloom reappeared immediately.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ Tara muttered, when the walls of the room began to move closer to her. The pounding water and the fresh, clean smell marginally uplifted her. But when she went back into the front room to Thomas, her anxiety greeted her at the door and reattached itself like a wraith. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked. And that seemed to annoy him even more. After a while she couldn’t bear it any longer. ‘Come on,’ she said, gaily, ‘let’s do something. Instead of sitting here like a pair of slugs, let’s do something.’
‘Like what?’ he sneered.
‘I don’t know,’ she floundered, her confidence shaken by his hostility. ‘Go out. We live in London, for God’s sake. There’s millions of things we could do.’
‘Like what?’ he repeated.
‘Er…’ Frantically she searched her head, desperate to come up with something interesting. ‘We could go to an art gallery. The Tate! That’s a nice one.’
‘Bugger off,’ he said bluntly. And Tara had to admit she was relieved. Bad and all as it was trapped here in the living room, traipsing round a bloody art gallery would be immeasurably worse. Fighting through busloads of rowdy tourists and those terrible people who ‘understood’ art, then having to queue for an hour in the café for the obligatory slice of carrot cake didn’t appeal.
‘Shopping, maybe?’ she suggested. ‘It’s the new rock and roll.’
He curled his lip derisively at that. ‘You’re overdrawn, you’re up to the limits on all your cards, and even though mine is one of the most important jobs anyone can do, I’ve no brass either.’
‘I know,’ she declared wildly. ‘We’ll go for a drive.’
‘A drive?’ Thomas had failed three driving tests, so he tried to make driving sound like a form of deviance. ‘A drive where?’
Her mind went blank. ‘The seaside!’ she