Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [41]
However, Tara’s mother, Fidelma, was charmed by Fintan. When he arrived with Tara and Katherine after school, he’d sit on the settle-bed, girlishly tuck his legs up under him, smoke Woodbines through an ebony cigarette holder and discuss films with her. While Tara’s three younger brothers, Michael, Gerard and Kieran, stuck their heads into the room and sniggered at the strange, exotic creature, Fidelma and Fintan held forth on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and La Dolce Vita and other films that Fidelma had seen when she worked in Limerick, before she married Frank and moved home to Knockavoy.
Tara’s brain usually glazed over during the interminable reminiscences, but it was worth it to see her father wigging out. She loved it when he came into the room and hissed furiously at Fidelma, ‘Is that gombeen allowed to smoke? I’m sure JaneAnn O’Grady doesn’t let him.’
And she loved it even more when Fidelma replied equably, ‘I’d say there isn’t much that JaneAnn O’Grady doesn’t let him do.’
Frank Butler was a very bad-tempered man. He was an autocrat and a patriarch and everyone was afraid of him. Nothing made him happy. He and his brother had a tiny business where they worked cutting and selling turf. With the result that whenever there was a mild winter, and everyone else was thanking God for it, Frank Butler was railing against it in fury. ‘Lovely day,’ he mimicked, when he overheard his wife talking to someone about the unusually clement elements. ‘Lovely day. Well, you wouldn’t think it was so fecking lovely if you saw our order book.’
‘I still have the geese and the turkeys,’ Fidelma soothed him.
‘That’s your money,’ he pointed out, wildly. ‘That’s supposed to be your money. Have you any sewing jobs?’
‘A few,’ Fidelma said mildly.
‘What?’ Frank demanded. ‘Who? It’d be a godsend if you could get something big like a curtains job for the hotel.’
‘It would,’ Fidelma agreed. She didn’t want to tell him about Fintan arriving at the house, with a bolt of shiny magenta lining under his arm and a request that Fidelma sew him a kind of cloak-type effort, to a pattern he’d drawn up himself.
Despite his phenomenal unpleasantness, Katherine secretly idolized Frank Butler. With all his rules and intractability he was a man after her own heart. Frank Butler was particularly non-negotiable on the question of homework. One of Katherine’s biggest worries about losing Tara was that she wouldn’t be able to go to Butler’s every afternoon after school to bask in the atmosphere of tension.
She often lay awake at night, dreaming of a father shouting at her for not having done her exercise. Of a patriarch questioning her on her homework every evening: ‘How many yards to a mile?’, ‘What year was the proclamation of the Republic?’, ‘What’s the capital of Lima?’ Although she had been very embarrassed for Mr Butler when Tara had finally managed to get him to understand that Lima couldn’t have a capital because it was a capital.
Delia, Katherine’s mother, defiantly refused to check that Katherine had done her homework. ‘That’s no way to teach children,’ she said repeatedly. ‘Instilling fear and trepidation into them, getting them to parrot stuff by rote. If they’re interested in something they’ll learn it, and if they’re not interested, then there’s no point in forcing them.’
Katherine begged her to reconsider.
15
Something roused Lorcan Larkin from a deep sleep. Automatically, he did the first thing he did every morning as soon as he woke up – he grabbed his penis to make sure it was still attached.
It was, and he sank back with familiar relief.
The room was in darkness, and his body was telling him it was the middle of the night. What had woken him up?
There was no one he could ask because, unusually for Lorcan, he was in bed alone.
On Friday night, when he’d turned up at Amy’s birthday party so late that almost