Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [67]
‘Thank you.’ Fintan and Tara smiled shyly at each other.
‘I’m with you now.’ Agnes began to understand. ‘Hair like that is all the go, is it?’
‘It is.’
‘Well, would it be nice on me?’
There was a nonplussed pause, until Fintan rallied. ‘Agnes, it’d be divine on you.’ And the career-guidance God smiled down and thought, This young man will go far in fashion.
‘I might have to cut it,’ Fintan warned.
‘Cut it all you like!’
As Agnes unfurled her grey bun, she reached for the bottle of whiskey and said, ‘Ye’re welcome to drink Frank Butler’s porter, but I’m having a proper drink.’
When Delia came home several hours later, she found her mother sitting in the chair where she’d left her, blind drunk, smeared in shocking pink lipstick and with a mass of sticky, backcombed, spiky grey hair.
‘Look at me,’ Agnes screeched. ‘I’m the height of style!’
The corner boys were dubious about Tara’s transformation. ‘Don’t like the war-paint.’ Bobby Lyons watched her go past.
‘And her hair looks like a hay reek,’ Martin O’Driscoll complained.
‘A pile of silage,’ said Pauley Early.
‘But the pink pants are nice,’ Michael Kenny admitted.
‘Oh, yes.’ There was a chorus of agreement. ‘We like the pink pants.’
Despite the porter, Tara, Katherine and Fintan were nervous wrecks at the community-hall door. ‘Remember,’ Fintan muttered, ‘you were both born in nineteen sixty-three.’
But there was no need to be frightened. The only details that Father Evans was interested in checking was that they had the money to pay in.
They’d been to the community hall hundreds of times, but this night the dusty wooden floor, the tiny little stage, the orange plastic chairs, the diagrams for the Order of Malta classes, the posters for Delia’s abortive yoga classes – the lotus, the Smirnoff – all looked magically different.
Even though it was only half past seven and still bright outside, the atmosphere was charged. A strange machine put moving pictures of coloured bubbles on the walls. The bubbles expanded, then split into two, changed from blue to green to red. It reminded Katherine of biology at school, looking through the microscope as cells split and grew. They were the first people there. Nervously, they sat on the edge of the plastic chairs, tense with expectation, as they waited for people to come. And waited. And waited.
‘Should we dance?’ Katherine eventually asked. She had a keen sense of duty.
‘Wait a while,’ Fintan urged, looking anxiously at the door, willing someone, anyone, to come in. It became clear to Tara and Katherine that, for all his talk, this was Fintan’s first time too.
They sat in silence, the dust motes spinning in the silvery evening light.
‘I think I’ll go to the toilet to see if my hair’s still OK,’ Tara said, after some time had elapsed.
‘It is,’ Katherine said.
They sat in silence again.
‘I think I’ll go anyway.’
At about half past nine as the songs were going around for the third time, one or two people arrived. Then as the sun finally set outside, more people came, then still more.
Mute and nervous, Tara, Katherine and Fintan sat, amazed at how relaxed and confident everyone else seemed, how very comfortable they were in this wonderful place. Would they ever be that blasé?
Katherine kept half an eye on the door. She knew that her mother was supposed to be at work, but she wouldn’t put it past her…
24
Joe Roth watched Katherine walk up to her desk and his heart lifted. There were at least twenty other women in the office, so what was it about this one that the mere sight of her had all his senses on full alert? Was it the face? The accent? The self-possession? The challenge…?
After the limited success of the lunch the previous day, he was working himself up to asking her out for dinner. And this time he’d do it without the help of Fred Franklin or the pretext of discussing work. Subterfuge and manipulation weren’t Joe’s usual methods. Though the lunch had been partly work-related, he was ashamed he’d brought pressure to bear on her. But he just hadn’t been able to stop himself.
As he watched her carefully