Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [4]
After that night, they’d come to their current arrangement.
‘What did I give you?’ Fintan asked.
Tara ripped off the paper, and displayed a lipstick within. ‘But this is no ordinary lipstick,’ she said excitedly. ‘This one really is indelible. The girl in the shop said it’d survive a nuclear attack. I think my long search is finally over.’
‘About time,’ said Katherine. ‘How many fakes have you been persuaded to buy?’
‘Too many,’ Tara said. ‘With their promises of lip-staining and colour-fastness, and the next thing there they are all over the side of my glass or on my fork, just like an ordinary lipstick. It’d make you cry!’
Next to arrive was Liv, in an I-might-have-to-murder-you-for-it Agnès b coat. She was very label-conscious, as befitted someone who worked in the world of design, albeit as an interior decorator. Liv was Swedish. Tall, with strong limbs, dazzling teeth and waist-length, poker-straight, white-blonde hair. Men often thought they recognized her from a porn film.
She’d arrived in Tara and Katherine’s lives five years previously when Fintan left to move in with Sandro. They’d advertised for a new flatmate but weren’t having much luck in persuading someone to take the tiny bedroom. And didn’t hold out any hope that this Swedish woman would. She was just too large. But the moment Liv had realized they were Irish – better still that they were from rural Ireland – her blue eyes lit up, she reached into her bag and handed over the deposit.
‘But,’ Katherine said in surprise, ‘you haven’t even asked if we have a washing machine.’
‘Never mind that,’ Tara said, badly shaken. ‘You don’t even know how far away the off-licence is.’
‘No problem,’ Liv said, in her slight accent. ‘Such things are not important.’
‘If you’re sure…’ Tara was already wondering if Liv had any Swedish men friends living in London. Tanned, blond giants that she’d bring around and introduce.
But a few days after Liv moved in, the reason for her enthusiasm became clear. To the alarm and consternation of Tara and Katherine, she asked if she could accompany them to Mass, or join them for the evening rosary. It turned out that Liv was searching for some kind of meaning to her life. She’d temporarily run aground on the rocks of psychotherapy, was hanging all her hopes on spiritual enlightenment, and hoped that the girls’ Catholicism might rub off on her.
‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ Katherine gently explained, ‘but we’re lapsed Catholics.’
‘Lapsed!’ Tara exclaimed. ‘What are you talking about?’
Katherine looked surprised. She certainly hadn’t seen any signs of a recent renewal in Tara’s faith.
‘Lapsed isn’t a strong enough word!’ Tara finally elaborated. ‘Collapsed would be more like it.’
Liv eventually got over her disappointment. And although she spent a disproportionate amount of time discussing reincarnation with the Sikh newsagent, in most other ways she was perfectly normal. She had boyfriends, hangovers, threatening letters from her credit-card company, and a wardrobe full of clothes that she bought in the 70-per-cent-off sales, then never wore.
She shared the flat with Tara and Katherine for three and a half years until she decided to try and banish her existential ache by buying a place of her own. But she’d spent every evening of her first six months as a home-owner around at Tara’s and Katherine’s, crying and saying how lonely it was living by herself. And she’d still be at it, if Katherine and Tara hadn’t moved out of the flat and gone their separate ways.
2
‘So is it just the