Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [66]
Preparations for the visit to the disco were frantic. Katherine took money out of her post-office account and lent it to Tara. Who hitched a lift with Fintan as far as Ennis, where she bought a pair of pink stretch Sasparillas, the most beautiful item of clothing she’d ever possessed. An order for a tube of hair-gel was placed in the Knockavoy chemist, who promised to pull strings to get it in by Saturday. A Day-Glo pink lipstick that had come free with Just 17 summer special was called into active service, and Fintan said it could be used as blusher and eye-shadow too.
‘I can’t get ready in my house,’ Tara said, fearfully. ‘If my father sees me all done up he’ll kill me.’
‘Get ready in my house,’ Katherine said.
‘But won’t Delia mind? Won’t she tell?’
‘For Cripe’s sake.’ Katherine sighed. ‘She’s been annoying me all summer to go to the disco. I’m only afraid she’ll want to come with us.’
‘Janey Mackers!’ Tara exclaimed. ‘You are so flipping lucky.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘What does your mother think?’ Tara turned to Fintan. ‘Will she be cross if she finds out?’
‘If my mother heard that I’d gone to a dance with two girls she’d burst with happiness,’ Fintan reminded them.
On the big day Tara bought four lemons, as instructed by Just 17, squeezed the juice over her hair, then prepared to spend six hours sitting in the sun, waiting for her mousy hair to turn blonde. Unfortunately, the sky clouded over, then it began to rain, so that was the end of that. Fintan arrived just as Tara was about to start rinsing her hair with beer to make it shine. (Another Just 17 tip.)
‘What are you doing?’ Fintan sounded apoplectic. ‘Don’t tell me you’re rinsing your hair with beer?’
‘Is it bad for my hair?’ Tara asked anxiously.
Fintan might have been camp, but he wasn’t that camp. ‘Who cares if it’s bad for your hair? It’s bad for your sobriety,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re wasting good Smithwick’s!’
‘But I want my hair to look nice for the disco,’ Tara said.
‘Believe me, your hair will look far nicer if you drink the beer,’ Fintan replied. ‘At least, it will look far nicer to you.’
Tara arrived at Katherine’s with a plastic bag full of her clothes, her make-up, and two pint bottles of porter that she’d stolen from her father’s stash. Delia was out, working in the pub. Agnes, hunched, grey and lonely, looked up suspiciously from Delia’s copy of Spare Rib as Tara clinked past.
Fintan swept Tara into Katherine’s bedroom. ‘I need to be alone with my client,’ he said pompously, as he closed the door on Katherine. ‘Genius at work.’
When Tara re-emerged some time later, Katherine was mesmerized with admiration. ‘You look…’ for once she was speechless ‘… so old.’ She paused, unable to express herself. ‘You look seventeen. Like the girl from Bananarama, or something.’
Tara was dressed in the pink jeans, a white ruffly shirt, with a blue T-shirt underneath, crammed to capacity with her generous bosom. She had blue kohl around her eyes, Day-Glo pink lipstick on most of the rest of her face, and her hair was backcombed and gelled into sticking up in all the right places.
‘Right,’ said Fintan to Katherine. ‘Now you.’
‘But I’m ready.’
Katherine had on baggy black non-stretch jeans, a roomy white T-shirt and not a scrap of make-up. She only wanted to wear make-up if there was a chance that someone might tell her to take it off. She longed for a father to shout at her, ‘Wash that muck off your face! No daughter of mine is going around the town of Knockavoy like a painted whore,’ the way Frank would to Tara.
‘But we’ve got to look older, else we mightn’t get in,’ Fintan said anxiously. ‘Would you not even pad your bra?’
‘I have,’ Katherine said, in a little voice.
As Tara emerged into the kitchen, Agnes was aghast. ‘Holy Mother of sweet divine suffering Jesus on the cross with six-inch nails through his hands and feet!’ she declared. ‘Comb your hair, child! How did you get so many knots in it?’
‘This is the way it’s supposed to be. It’s the fashion.’
‘But it looks like a furze bush.