Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [80]
Cronyless, she had to endure three hours in the pub, drinking diet Coke, lasciviously eyeing the peanuts, and yearning for the day when they invented reduced-fat lager. Then they all went back to Eddie’s flat in Clapham for the party. Which, as Tara realized, surveying it in disappointment, wasn’t much of a party. There were only about twenty guests and every single one of them had been invited. There would have been a bigger turnout, except after the pub multitudes had to leave early to relieve their babysitters.
The music was on too low for anyone to want to dance. People stood and sat in little clusters, discussing the wonders of MDF, door-handles in the Conran Shop, good sofa-shops – and some of these were straight men!
Tara listened in on a conversation between Stephanie and Marcy who, from the sound of things, were trying to get pregnant. Lots of talk of folic acid and how very acceptable it was to have your first child at thirty-seven.
‘Is your partner supportive?’ Stephanie asked Marcy.
‘What partner?’
‘Er, the man, the father…?’
‘Oh.’ Marcy laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t met him.’
‘But I thought you said you were trying to get… pregnant?’
‘Sperm bank.’
Tara hastily made her excuses and went over to Mira, Paul’s girlfriend, who wore a short black rubber skirt – no fear she’d be talking about sofas and folic acid.
‘It’s only small,’ she sighed, blissfully, ‘but I love it.’
What was she talking about? Tara wondered. Her tattoo? A nose-ring? Paul’s penis?
‘It’s a real sun trap,’ she enthused. ‘In the summer the rhododendrons along the back wall are glorious. They thrive like wildfire…’
Jesus! Gardening. Tara was disgusted. I mean, gardening.
Aimlessly, she wandered into the kitchen, where Thomas and his circle of pals stood, necking lager and trading insults. Turning their mouths upwards to show how ‘good-natured’ it all was. Eddie laughingly belittled Thomas’s badly paid job, while Thomas retaliated by calling Eddie ‘a flash bastard’. Thomas scorned Paul for supporting a third-division football team and Paul swaggered that at least he had loyalty. Paul doubled over with mirth when he heard that Michael’s girlfriend had dumped him. Michael nearly had to be hospitalized when he heard that Eddie had totalled his car during the week.
While they clutched their beer cans and howled with hilarity, Tara retained a polite smile. Making sure Thomas wasn’t looking, she flicked a quick look at her watch. One thirty. Hopefully they could go home soon. What a let-down of a Saturday night. She’d nearly have been better off going to the pictures with Katherine.
The merriment continued. Roaring with laughter, Eddie said that Thomas’s flat was a dreadful investment and that he was bound to be in negative equity for the rest of his life. In high spirits, Thomas told everyone that Paul’s ex-girlfriend said that Paul could do with a course of Viagra. With a great display of amusement Paul grinned at Thomas: ‘At least my mother didn’t run off and abandon me.’
Tara anxiously realized that things were about to break through the maintenance-level hostility when, luckily, someone put ‘One Step Beyond’ on the tape deck. Suddenly the living-room carpet was aswarm with thirty-something men dancing for the one and only time that evening.
29
During the week, she’d gleaned a certain pleasure from feeling light and empty, enjoying the sensation of control and moral superiority. But it had started to wear thin. So when Sunday rolled around, Tara had that Friday feeling and was ripe for a major blow-out. She was keenly aware of the danger of her metabolic rate dropping through lack of food. And, of course, she’d endured five days of fruit and deprivation. She deserved a reward. She