Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [7]
Liv looked surprised. Usually Tara was the first person to say what a tightwad Thomas was, beating everyone else to it, to show how much she didn’t mind.
‘He’s a meanie,’ Tara finished. ‘Come on, Liv, say it.’
‘Thomas is a meanie,’ Liv parroted. ‘Thank you, Tara.’
‘Anyway, you can see his point,’ Tara said. ‘They are all moneymaking rackets – Christmas, Valentine’s Day, birthdays, all that lark. I admire him for refusing to be manipulated. And it doesn’t mean he never buys me presents. A few weeks ago, unprompted, he bought me a lovely furry hot-water bottle for my period pains.’
‘Too stingy to buy you Solpadeine every month, more like,’ Fintan scorned.
‘Ah, don’t.’ Tara half laughed. ‘You don’t see what I see.’
‘So what do you see?’
‘I know he seems very gruff, but actually he can be very sweet. Sometimes,’ she looked slightly sheepish at this, ‘he tells me lovely bedtime stories about a bear called Ernest.’
‘Is that a euphemism for his willy?’ Fintan asked suspiciously. ‘Does Ernest do a lot of hiding in dark caves?’
‘I can see I’m wasting my time here.’ Tara giggled. ‘Have you any gossip? Come on, tell us a scurrilous story about someone famous.’
In Fintan’s job, as right-hand man to Carmella Garcia, a coke-fiend Spanish designer who’d been hailed simultaneously as a stunning genius and a mad bitch, he was privy to all sorts of startling information about the rich and famous.
‘OK, but first will we get another drink?’
‘Is the bear a Catholic?’
A long time and several French coffees later, Katherine became uncomfortably aware that Purple Nails wanted to cash up and go home. Or, at least, cash up and go out and take lots of drugs somewhere. ‘I suppose we’d better pay,’ she said, cutting into the drunken, raucous laughter.
‘I’ll get this,’ Fintan offered, with the magnanimity of the pissed person. ‘I… absolutely… insist.’
‘No way,’ said Katherine.
‘You’re offending me.’ Fintan slapped his credit card on the table. ‘You’re insulting me.’
‘How are you going to get your overdraft down to eight figures if you keep paying for other people’s dinners?’ Katherine admonished.
‘She’s right,’ Tara urged, emotionally. ‘You told me you’d be arrested if you put any more on your card. That the men in uniforms will arrive with their truncheons and handcuffs…’
‘Great!’ Fintan and Liv exclaimed, nudging each other and sniggering.
‘… and they’ll take you away and we’ll never see you again. “Stop me before I spend again,” you said.’ Tara skittered his card back across the table at him.
‘That’s good coming from you,’ Fintan complained.
‘Two wrongs don’t make a right.’
‘How come I’m so skint?’ Fintan demanded. ‘I earn a decent wedge.’
‘But that’s why,’ Tara consoled, with drunken logic. ‘The more I earn the poorer I become. If ever I get a rise, my spending expands to absorb the new money, except it expands at a far bigger rate. Dieting makes you fat? Forget that – pay rises make you poor!’
‘Why can’t we be more like you, Katherine?’ Fintan wondered.
Katherine had once confessed that when she got a pay rise, she set up a standing order to a savings account for the exact net amount of her monthly increase, working on the principle that because she’d never had it, she wouldn’t miss it. She looked up from dividing the bill. ‘But I need people like you so I can feel smug.’
Finally, they left.
Darius, the waiter, watched Katherine as she glided across the floor. She wasn’t his type, but there was something about her that intrigued him. He’d seen how much she’d had to drink, but she wasn’t stumbling across the floor, screeching and holding on to her friends, like the others were. And he was impressed by the way she’d behaved when she first arrived. He was an expert on women who nervously faked insouciance while they waited on their own, and he was fully certain that Katherine’s poised unconcern had been genuine. He searched his head for a label for her. (He wanted to be a DJ and words weren’t really his forte.) Enigmatic was the word he was searching for, had he but known it.
‘Where now?’ Tara