Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [33]
A long comfortable silence followed.
‘Do you think –’
‘– a shag-pile rug? I do. We could look –’
‘– next weekend. We will.’
Another blanket of hush.
Sandro folded up the Culture bit of the Independent and opened his mouth to ask Fintan to pass the Real Life section, but Fintan had beaten him to it and was already proffering it.
Fintan and Sandro had met six years previously when Fintan was sharing the flat in Kentish Town with Tara and Katherine. Sandro had literally been the boy next door.
The day Sandro had moved into the flat across the hall, Fintan took one look at his small, jaunty frame, his elfin face, his shaved head and round glasses, and fell in love. He was ripe for it. For about a year he’d been complaining, ‘I’m tired of playing the field. I’d like to settle down. I want a significant other.’
They knew from his mail that the new boy’s name was Sandro Cetti. He was always smiley and friendly if he met any of them in the hall, so one morning Tara brazenly questioned him and established that he was an architect, originally from Rome.
‘An Italian stallion.’ Fintan said later.
‘Hardly a stallion,’ Tara said. ‘An Italian pony is more like it.’
And the name stuck.
‘I just don’t know if he’s gay,’ Fintan agonized. ‘I’m not picking up any signals.’
‘But neither am I,’ Tara said. ‘I’m not sure he’s straight either.’
‘Maybe he’s an alien,’ came Katherine’s voice from the bathroom.
‘He’s going out, he’s going out,’ Tara yelped, and Fintan rushed to the window and discreetly watched Sandro walk buoyantly down the road, neat and dinky in his trendy little suit and shiny Doc Martens.
‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ Fintan sighed. ‘As cute as all get out?’
As the weeks passed, everything Sandro said and did simply served to increase Fintan’s devotion. One night there was a car crash outside their house and Sandro was full of dancing-eyed excitement by the front door the following morning.
‘I was lying in my sleep and BOOM!’ He lifted both hands as if conducting an orchestra. ‘I hear a big, big noise so I run to my window and I see glass in all the places!’
Later Fintan repeated every word that Sandro had said. ‘ “I see glass in all the places.” How could anyone resist that? “I was lying in my sleep.” The boy’s an angel.’ He sighed, love-sick. ‘This is getting worse.’
Time went on and Fintan continued with his high-octane life: pubs, partying, clubbing, always with one eye out just in case Sandro showed up in any of the gay clubs. But he didn’t and the vitality continued to drain out of Fintan, until he began to remark, ‘Life has lost its taste.’
The crunch came late one night when Fintan was on his way home, wearing his white Katherine Hamnett neo-bondage trousers. He hobbled off the night-bus, taking tiny little geisha-girl steps on account of the fact that his legs were strapped together, when he was set upon by a crowd of thugs, overburdened with prejudice and too much free time. Fintan tried his best to escape. Because he was unable to run, he began hopping frantically, like a person in a sack race, all the while trying to undo the straps. But it was too late and he was beaten into unconsciousness. It had happened before, but never as badly.
After three days in hospital he arrived home, and that was when Sandro came into the picture. He said he would call in on Fintan when the girls were at work during the day. Fintan looked like a train crash but was so weepy and depressed after being attacked that he couldn’t be bothered with vanity.
Sandro made Fintan tea and soup and in order not to disturb his dislocated jaw, helped him drink them through a straw. Then, because Fintan could barely see through his black, puffy eyes, Sandro offered to read to him.
‘Yes, please. If you could pick a magazine from that pile there.’
Fintan flailed his hand, and Sandro tentatively made his approach, wondering what kind of magazines they were. They were travel brochures.
Fintan’s depression lifted as he lay in delicious torment, within touching distance of the object of his desire, who poured sweet words into his ear. ‘… a