Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [65]
Nightly, the air was thick with adolescent longing. To facilitate which, fixed courting rituals were in place. You knew someone fancied you if they tried to trip you up or if they threw a jellyfish at you. People were forever up and down the steps to the sand, picking jellyfish up on to pieces of driftwood, then firing them at the object of their desire.
Tara had more jellyfish thrown at her than anyone else. Katherine had a few pelted at her by a twelve-year-old boy, until he realized that Katherine was fourteen, then he was very apologetic. Fintan had none thrown at him.
Until darkness fell, and then you’d have been surprised.
If the person you threw the jellyfish at squealed, ‘Oooooh, you big meanie! I hate you!’ you knew they fancied you. But if they ran away and returned five minutes later with their father and pointed you out, saying, ‘That’s him, Dad. The one who tried to kill me,’ you realized you’d badly misjudged the situation.
Another sure-fire method of announcing your amorous intentions was by holding up a piece of seaweed and saying, ‘Guess what this is? It’s your hair.’ Likewise if someone found an old, decrepit pair of knickers that had been washed in by the tide, and asked you, ‘Are these yours?’ you knew you had an admirer.
Tara spent June and half of July with constant anticipation churning in her stomach. It was the most wonderful time of her life. She kept declaring, ‘I’m in love,’ and Katherine would say indulgently, ‘Again? Who is it this time?’
Most nights, as the sun finally sank below the horizon, Tara repaired to the sand dunes for a courting session with her current squeeze. Katherine waited on the wall, talking shyly to the runners-up. She had no interest in going to the sand dunes to snog boys.
And they weren’t terribly interested in her either. She was too skinny and plain, with no hint of the sleek, mysterious woman she’d eventually become. They said of her, ‘She has a nice personality,’ which was just adolescent-speak for ‘She has no diddies.’
Tara spent most Friday nights in tearful goodbyes and promises to write, while Saturday afternoons were used to check out the new arrivals, the cars low in the ground as they rumbled into the caravan park, laden with people and roof racks. Life couldn’t have been better.
But Fintan wanted more than just sea walls and sand dunes for the three of them. He had vision. Around mid-July, he shocked Tara and Katherine to the core by suggesting casually, ‘Let’s go to the disco.’ For the past three summers, there had been a disco for the over eighteens on Saturday nights in the community hall, with an extra one on Wednesday nights in August when the trickle of tourists became a slightly bigger trickle. The local clergy had given their reluctant approval to the disco in the hope that it might lure tourists away from the fleshpots of Kilkee and Lahinch, further along the coast. This, only after they’d tried and failed to raise money to buy bumper cars.
The disco was an occasion of sin. Even though Father Neylon patrolled the slow sets with a big stick, the confession box was overrun with people afflicted with impure thoughts. It wasn’t good to encourage depravity. Except if money could be made from it.
‘The disco!’ Tara and Katherine swallowed. ‘But we’re too young.’
‘Says who?’
‘Everyone,’ Katherine pointed out. ‘Our birth certs, for example.’
‘Rules are made to be broken.’ Fintan smiled.
‘Have you been before?’ Tara asked.
‘Er, ah, yes, of course,’ Fintan said, airily. ‘Last year and the year before.’
‘Would we get in?’ Tara asked, feeling a rush of delicious, fearful excitement. She’d never even thought of going to the disco. She just assumed she’d have to be at least sixteen. But suddenly it seemed possible.
‘I’d say so,’ Fintan said, with confidence. ‘If you wear the right clothes and make-up. Leave it to me.’
‘My father is right,’ Tara said in admiration. ‘You are a bad influence.
‘Just as well. Let’s face it,’ she said fondly to Katherine, ‘if I was waiting for you