Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [70]
Joe looked puzzled.
‘Radio rental – mental!’ Myles expounded. ‘Cockney rhyming slang.’
‘I know,’ Joe said. ‘But you’re not a Cockney.’
‘Nah. From Surrey. The poor bit, though. Now, listen, mate, you can’t apologize to her. That’s as good as admitting you’re guilty. Do you want the sack? You work hard, you’re ambitious. Leave it, mate!’
‘But I don’t think she meant it. I think she just wants me to shove off…’
‘Then do!’ Myles said, simply. ‘Now listen to Uncle Myles. What you need is to get up-close and personal with a totally pukka bird. That’ll sort you.’
‘No. It’s too soon.’
‘By the weekend?’
‘No.’
‘Sorry, mate. Forgot you’re going to the footie.’
‘No, I mean it would still be too soon.’
‘All you have to do is pretend it’s her.’
‘I can’t. I’d know. She wouldn’t be Katherine.’
‘Who looks at the mantelpiece when they’re poking the fire?’ Myles smirked triumphantly. He had an answer for everything.
‘Myles, you’re depressing me,’ Joe said wearily.
‘Cheer up, mate. You’ve been kicked into touch before, right?’
‘Well, I went out with Lindsay for three years, then she moved to New York –’
‘And you’re still up for it with other girls, right?’ Myles interrupted.
‘I suppose. I mean, it took a while, we’d kind of run out of steam anyway, but it wasn’t easy and though it was amicable it was still –’
‘Blinding,’ Myles cut in. ‘Very interesting. Not. What I’m trying to say here is that you win some, you lose some. You’ll get over it.’
Drunken hope filled Joe. Through the fuzz of alcohol, it seemed eminently possible to stop caring about Katherine. Even to meet another girl. He felt better already. ‘You’re right!’ he agreed. ‘Life’s too short.’
‘That’s it,’ Myles urged. ‘And who wants to go where you’re not wanted?’
‘Not me. I’d make a bad obsessive,’ Joe admitted.
‘Why’s that, mate?’
‘Dunno. I’m just not obsessive enough, I suppose.’
‘Yeh, ‘sa problem, innit? Right, so this Kathy –’
‘Her name’s Katherine,’ Joe interrupted. ‘She doesn’t answer to abbreviations of it.’
‘Ooooooooh, excuse me,’ Myles hooted, grabbing the handbag of the woman at the next table and thrusting it at Joe. ‘The award of the handbag!’
He looked angrily at Joe. ‘Don’t take it so serious, wouldja?’
‘Sorry,’ Joe said, slumping back into his pit of gloom. ‘It’s just that I just thought I was finally getting somewhere with her.’
‘Snog ya?’
Joe snorted. ‘No.’
‘Take my advice, mate, you weren’t getting nowhere if you haven’t even snogged her.’
Joe sighed. In his crude way, Myles was right.
‘Give the woman back her handbag,’ he said, wearily.
25
Tara staggered into the office, laden with carrier-bags, which she dumped on her desk. ‘I don’t know why they call it forbidden fruit,’ she complained. ‘Fruit is about the only thing that isn’t forbidden.’
Ravi, tearing open a Marks and Spencer’s ploughman’s roll, which boasted thirty-six grams of fat, watched with interest as she unloaded apples, satsumas, pears, nectarines, plums and grapes and arranged them like amulets around her desk. ‘Care for half my roll?’ he offered, in his public-school voice.
Tara made her two index fingers into a cross.
‘It’s got extra mayonnaise,’ he tempted.
‘Bad magic. Keep it away from me.’
‘You’re absolutely barking.’ Ravi jumped up, thrust his hands on Tara’s head and bellowed, ‘Out, out, demons, leave this poor child.’
‘That feels spectacular.’ Tara sighed, as Ravi massaged her skull. ‘I love it when you exorcize me.
‘Oh, don’t stop,’ she begged, as Ravi abandoned her, to cram eight hundred calories of sandwich into his mouth.
‘No choice,’ he mumbled through mouthfuls. ‘Nothing like a good exorcism for working up an appetite.’
A highly harassed Vinnie rushed in. A sleepless night with his three-month-old had had him pulling his hair out, and as soon as he saw Tara’s desk, he felt his hairline recede another inch or so. What kind of office was he running? ‘What’s going on here? It’s like Albert Square!’
‘Are you subcontracting?’ Teddy and Evelyn, the his ’n’ hers couple, had arrived.
‘Opening a fruit stall?’ Teddy inquired.
‘What a great