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‘No, not tonight.’

‘Nothing at all? Usually someone can scare something up.’

‘We could go to Bar Mundo?’ Katherine suggested.

Tara shook her head. ‘Because we go there on Wednesdays I associate it with work.’

‘The Blue Note?’

‘Too packed by now. We wouldn’t get a table.’

‘Happiness Stans?’

‘The music was crap the last time.’

‘Subterrania?’

‘Please!’

‘I’ll take that as a no.’ Katherine had almost exhausted their list of regular haunts.

‘How about the Torture Chamber,’ Fintan offered cheerfully. ‘Lots of lovely boys there, being led around on leads.’

‘No, don’t you remember?’ Katherine reminded him. ‘They wouldn’t let us in the last time because we’re girls.’

‘Is that why?’ Liv exclaimed. ‘I thought it was because our heads weren’t shaved.’

‘You know, I don’t think I could be bothered going to a club,’ Tara admitted. ‘I’m not really in the mood for mayhem. I’d like to chill, sit on a comfortable seat, not have to fight to get a drink, be able to hear our conversation… Oh, God!’ She clutched herself in horror. ‘It’s happening already. Thirty-one less than a day and I’m acting old. I’ll have to go clubbing just to prove I still want to.’

‘I don’t really want to go to a club tonight either,’ Liv consoled. ‘But at thirty-one and a half, I’ve come to terms with it.’

‘No!’ Tara was appalled. ‘Bad enough to not want to go, but to come to terms with it! I hate the ageing process, I really do.’

‘Next you’ll start feeling that you’d rather lie in bed and watch telly than do anything else.’ Katherine sparkled with wickedness. ‘You’ll find yourself making excuses not to go out. There’s even an official name for the syndrome – cocooning. You’ll get really fond of your remote control.

‘I love mine,’ she confided. ‘And you’ll stop buying Vogue and start buying Living Etc.’

‘That’s an interiors magazine?’

Katherine nodded devilishly and Tara winced. ‘Eeee-oooh.’

‘Let’s go to someone’s flat.’ Fintan sought to get the festivities back on track. ‘We can pretend it’s a club.’

‘How about mine?’ Tara suggested, thinking of Thomas and hoping they said no. She was drunk, but not that drunk.

‘Or how about mine?’ Katherine suggested, also thinking of Thomas.

‘Katherine’s!’ Liv and Fintan said hastily, also thinking of Thomas.

‘Have you drink in?’ Tara asked.

‘Of course I have,’ Katherine said huffily.

‘Truly we are grown-up,’ Tara murmured thickly.

Katherine flagged a taxi, to the annoyance of two men fifty yards up the road who’d been waiting longer.

‘Gospel Oak,’ she told the driver.

‘You could walk that,’ he grumbled.

‘I couldn’t,’ Tara said brightly. ‘I’m pissed!

‘D’you remember,’ she reminisced, when the four of them had clambered in, ‘the way alcohol wouldn’t last candlelight when we lived together? Whenever we went to Ireland,’ she indicated Katherine and Fintan, ‘or you went to Sweden,’ she pointed at Liv, ‘and brought back freety-due, I mean duty-free, we’d have it drunk before it was barely in the door.’

‘It was our poority,’ Liv said.

‘Poverty,’ corrected Tara absently. ‘And it wasn’t just that. We were young, we had fire in our bellies!’

‘Now we’re old,’ Liv said mournfully.

‘Don’t!’ Katherine commanded. ‘It’s too early for you to slump. You still have about an hour to go.’

3

While Fintan and the girls had been in the restaurant, two minutes down the road there’d been a party in progress. Of course, there were several going on because it was London, it was Friday night and it was in the Camden area. But this particular party contained Lorcan Larkin.

Lorcan Larkin was a man who had almost everything going for him. In fact, the only thing that didn’t really work was his name – rough work at the font. He was six foot two, with a broad-chested, flat-stomached, long-legged, narrow-hipped body which he maintained by eating, drinking and smoking copiously. He had a mane of shoulder-length, dark-red hair, narrow sherry-purple eyes and one of the most beautiful, sensuous mouths in the