Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [45]
Her windscreen wipers were broken so at every red light she had to jump out of the car and wipe the front window with a piece of scrunched-up newspaper, at the same time as fighting off aggressive youths armed with cloths and buckets of soapy water who were intent on cleaning her windscreen and extracting a pound for their trouble. The drive from the Holloway Road to Hammersmith was a long one and by the time she got to work she was soaked and exhausted, having shouted the word, ‘No!’ twenty-eight times en route and ‘Go away, I’ve no change,’ eleven times.
When she arrived at her small open-plan office only Ravi was there. As usual he was eating. ‘Morning, Tara,’ he brayed, in his cut-glass accent. ‘Care for some double-chocolate cheesecake? Twenty-seven grams of fat in every slice. Superb!’
‘How could you at this hour of the morning?’ Tara asked. She liked to pretend that she had an appetite like a normal person’s.
‘Up at five,’ he bellowed. ‘Rowed twenty miles. Bloody starving!’
Ravi did huge amounts of exercise. As well as belonging to a rowing team, he went to the gym at least four times a week and wouldn’t leave until he’d been told by the computerized machines that he’d burned off a thousand calories. His prodigious exercising was matched only by his prodigious eating. Not a morning passed that he didn’t arrive at the office weighed down with Marks and Spencer bags full of goodies. ‘Perhaps you’d like to keep the wrapper and lick it later?’ He waved a wedge-shaped piece of plastic, which she accepted. ‘How’s the new lipstick Fintan gave you? Do the trick?’
‘No, Ravi, another disappointment.’
‘Aw, boo. So the search continues.’
‘Certainly does.’
‘See Real TV on Friday night? Bloke goes up in a hot-air balloon, comes down through a skylight into a bathroom. Breaks his leg, nearly bloody drowns. Sooo-perb!’
‘Please stop. Have you updated the football-league stuff?’ Tara switched on her PC.
‘Absolutely.’ Ravi nodded, letting a thick lock of glossy black hair fall across his forehead. He looked like an Indian version of Elvis.
Ravi organized a football league for the employees of GK Software. At the start of the football season each person predicted where they thought all the teams in the Premiership were going to be placed. After each weekend, Ravi updated the results, so everyone could keep an eye on their interim progress. People had been overheard saying that it was the only thing that got them out of bed on a Monday morning.
People began to drift in. Evelyn and Teddy arrived. Evelyn and Teddy were married. They lived together, drove to work together, worked side by side, ate lunch together and went home together. ‘Morning,’ they said, simultaneously.
‘Have you…?’ Evelyn asked Ravi.
‘Of course.’ He smirked.
Evelyn and Teddy both keyed frantically until they found the updated table.
Vinnie, Tara’s boss, arrived, a nice man in his forties, with four young children and a receding hairline. He entertained dreams of being a dynamic businessman who barked things like, ‘I’ve put my cock on the block on this one, lads,’ but whenever he tried, everyone just laughed at him and patted his fast-disappearing hair. ‘Morning all,’ he called. ‘Good weekend?’
‘No,’ everyone replied automatically.
‘Have you updated the…?’ he anxiously asked Ravi, and when the answer was in the affirmative, raced to his terminal and switched it on.
Despite working in a computer company, Tara’s colleagues weren’t geeks. They were normal people whose conversation in the office mostly revolved around holidays and food. Just as it should.
Tara’s phone rang. It was Thomas. Her heart leapt, half with anxiety, half with joy. But he didn’t want to talk to her, he said, more brusquely than Tara considered necessary. He was simply reminding her to pay the cable-television bill. Don’t take it personally, she tried to soothe herself. It’s just his way.
On Monday lunchtimes, it was traditional for everyone from Tara’s section to go to the Italian greasy-spoon caff. It was a nod to the weekend, an assumption that everyone was nursing