Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [84]
‘No, wait a minute,’ she started again, in a suddenly high-pitched tone. ‘You’ve always told me that your parents were the most happily married couple in Sweden! How could your mother have had an affair with a married man?’
‘She did,’ Liv insisted.
‘But happily married people don’t have affairs. Or, if they do, they have their happily married badges taken away.’
‘She did.’ Liv was adamant.
‘Weeelll, perhaps if it was only a brief fling at the start of their marriage.’ Tara was prepared to compromise. ‘How long did it go on for?’
‘Let’s see.’ Liv began to do arithmetic on her fingers and mutter to herself. ‘If they got married in nineteen sixty-one and it’s now nineteen ninety-nine, they have been together for thirty-eight years.’
Suddenly Tara understood. ‘Liv, I don’t think it counts as an affair with a married man,’ she pointed out, ‘if the married man is your husband.’
‘Awwww,’ Liv said gloomily. ‘I like when it all makes sense.’
‘More drinks,’ Tara ordered.
By the time they’d finished their third pints, even more of the edge had been taken off Tara’s anxiety.
‘No one’s relationship is perfect,’ she consoled herself, wrapped in a warm fuzz of self-justification and too much alcohol on an empty stomach. ‘It’s all about compromise. Myself and Thomas are grand and I’m perfectly normal. Do you know what it is if you kiss a frog and complain when he doesn’t turn into a prince? It’s immature, that’s what it is! If you’re grown-up you kiss a frog and you make yourself like it.’
‘Are you drunk yet?’ Liv asked.
‘In all bibaprolity, one more pint might do it.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I said, in all probability, one more pint might do it. Are you deaf?’
At about three o’clock, when they finally decided they were drunk enough, all the food in the pub was gone.
‘Oh, no.’ Tara put her hand to her mouth and giggled. ‘What’ll we do?’
‘I’m very, very, very hungry now,’ Liv warned.
‘OK, we could get a takeaway, there’s lots of places around here.’
‘Chips!’ Liv declared. ‘If we can’t have roast potatoes, we must have chips. We must have chips.’
She banged her empty pint glass on the table as she shouted, ‘Chips! Chips! Chips! Chips!’
About ten feet away was a man who was within a whisker of winning the darts match. He threw his final dart just as Liv started her chips chant and he was lucky to barely miss skewering someone’s ear to the wall.
In search of chips, Tara and Liv lurched out on to the Holloway Road, deeply surprised to find it was still daylight. Into the nearest fast-food joint, which was bursting at the seams with divorced fathers enjoying weekly visitation rights with their children. The noise was deafening.
‘Eat-in or take-away?’ Tara asked.
Liv looked around at the sea of children wearing cardboard hats. ‘Take-away,’ she replied. ‘Take-far-away. Take-very-faraway. Oh, Tara, I think I did another joke! Am I a gas woman?’
Armed with two very full brown bags, they made their way back out on to the street.
‘I’m so hungry I could eat a piebald pony between two bread vans,’ Tara warned. ‘Come on, hurry back to the flat.
‘It’s OK,’ she said to Liv’s aghast face. ‘Thomas won’t be back for hours and hours.’
But as they hurried past the Beauty Spot, it was open. Suddenly Tara thought how fantastic it would be to call in and give the toning tables a go, right there and then. And when she suggested it, Liv clutched her and yelled, ‘That’s a great idea. I’ve always wanted to go on them.’
They swung through the doors and Deedee, the beautician on duty, took one look at their red faces and manic eyes and felt a very strong urge to hide below the counter and pretend she wasn’t there. ‘We’re closed,’ she attempted.
‘You’re not.’ Tara gave a wolfish grin and drenched her with lager fumes. ‘We want to go on the toning tables.’
‘I really don’t think now is the right time.’
‘Is someone else on them?’ Tara asked.
‘No, but –’
‘Are you saying we’re drunk?’ Liv demanded, her eyes very blue in her