Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [75]
Finally Katherine got home but her elation was short-lived. Her clean, sparkling flat seemed sad and sterile. Too clean. Neurotically clean. She thought vaguely about eating, except she couldn’t be bothered. She switched on the box, but couldn’t find anything she wanted to watch. Her life, which she usually found so satisfactory, was unaccountably lacking. Everything in it, from her job to her flat, seemed dull, inadequate and only half alive. She popped a few blisters of bubble-wrap, but even that had lost its charm.
Apart from the one enormous worry hanging over her – and that was so big she sometimes didn’t even see it – she’d been perfectly content with her lot even a couple of days before.
She hated Joe for doing this to her. She’d made the mistake of starting to see herself through his eyes, and she’d liked the view. Now that he’d withdrawn his admiration she had to go back to seeing herself through less rose-coloured eyes – her own. The adjustment was always painful.
She couldn’t ring Tara, Fintan or Liv to spill her guts and seek comfort. It just wasn’t what she did. She’d always coped on her own. And she knew it’d upset the others if she dissolved into a gooey mush. Everyone thought that she was capable and emotionless.
Eventually she decided she’d better eat something but, as usual, she had nothing in. Listlessly she traipsed to the corner shop and uninterestedly picked up some things. But as she went to pay she was drawn to look at the paltry items languishing in the bottom of her basket. A frozen lasagne. Serves one. A single apple. The smallest carton of milk in existence. How pathetic. What a massive advertisement that she was alone. How the checkout man would pity her.
Angrily, she heaved up a two-kilo bag of mucky potatoes and threw it in the basket, nearly dislocating her shoulder and stretching her arm to twice its length. There! That’d teach people to think she didn’t have a bloke. No single person would buy a two-kilo sack of potatoes. Especially ones still covered in earth. They were the preserve of mothers – standing at the sink, their knuckles chapped, scrubbing the dirt off with a nailbrush, before boiling a huge big pot of them for their demanding family.
High colour on her cheeks, Katherine smiled challengingly at the assistant. See. I’m a real person. But he didn’t even make eye-contact with her. Then she lugged the spuds home, wondering what on earth she was going to do with them.
She ate her lasagne, her apple, and had a cup of tea, but the evening was long and she was agitated by its emptiness.
She ran herself a Philosophy bath, choosing the ‘I know’ bottle because the label promised ‘self-worth, confidence, empowerment and a sense of achievement’. Then she went to bed and, for the first time in ages, she noticed she was alone.
Never mind, she thought. I’ve always got my television. She picked up her beloved remote control, determined to find something to lull her to sleep. Who needs a man when you’ve got Sky Movies?
But she found herself wondering what Joe would be like in bed. What he would look like naked. What it would feel like to circle her hands over his pearly-beautiful skin, to feel the muscles in his back. Despite all his boyish friendliness, he was sexy, Katherine conceded miserably. When he had been actively pursuing her, she wouldn’t let herself think about how attractive he was. Only now