Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [85]
‘Er, no.’
‘We’re good customers,’ Tara insisted. ‘I get my wags lexed here.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I get my legs waxed here. How many times do you want me to say it?’
Poor Deedee had no choice. Reluctantly she led them into a little room that had six big pink plastic beds side by side. Tara and Liv were highly enchanted, in the way a sober person wouldn’t be. Ooohing and aaahing and saying, ‘So that’s what they look like,’ they hopped up on a bed each, still holding their brown paper bags. However once her ankles were strapped in, Liv declared, ‘I’m starving! How long is this going to take?’
Tara looked at her in astonishment. ‘But… but eat your nosh!’ she said. ‘Wasn’t that always the plan? That’s what I’m going to do.’
‘Oh, great,’ Liv said, delving into her bag. ‘Very hungry.’
‘I really don’t think…’ Deedee protested helplessly.
‘Have a chip,’ Liv offered her.
‘I’m switching the tables on now,’ Deedee said, in tight-lipped response.
‘Here we go,’ Tara said, as the end of the table lifted right up, taking her legs with it. ‘Wehay! This is the business.’
Up and down, up and down went Tara’s legs. In and out, in and out, scissored Liv’s, while they both lay flat on their backs, eating their chips and cheeseburgers.
‘This is wonderful,’ sighed Liv. ‘I feel so healthy.’
‘It’s very important to take care of our figures and our bodies,’ Tara said, cramming another handful of chips into her mouth. She said something else but it was muffled by the food.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I said, we’re worth taking care of. Awww, we’re stopping.’
Grimly, Deedee shooed them on to another table and off they went again.
‘Hey, my arms are going now!’ Tara declared. ‘Look, I’m waving at you.’
‘And I’m sitting up. No, sitting down again. No, just a moment, sitting up, and down again…’
When they got off, brushing stray chips and blobs of ketchup off their fronts, they examined each other and declared they could see a definite improvement in their silhouettes.
All smiles, they left, assuring a stony-faced Deedee that they’d be back to book a full course each in a day or so. Then they made a join-the-dots progress home, where they drank every drop of Thomas’s Newcastle Brown ale.
30
On Monday morning when Tara’s phone rang at work, she braced herself for it to be Thomas, possibly to tell her to pack her bags and move out. He’d been splutteringly angry the evening before and Tara had been so drunk she still wasn’t exactly sure why. Was it the theft of all his Newcastle Brown and his bottle of brandy? Or coming home to find Tara and Liv surrounded by pizza boxes? Or the burger wrappers he found in the bin? Or the way Tara and Liv screeched with laughter at him in his muddy knee-length nylon shorts? Or the way they’d neglected to feed Beryl?
Tara was sick with mortification. When she’d woken up that morning, Thomas had already left for work. With a mouth sticky and dry, she sat for ten minutes with her head in her hands, moaning. Then she rang Liv and whispered, ‘I can’t believe we did that. Say we didn’t, tell me we didn’t. Tell me I dreamt it, that we ate the burgers. Can you believe that we actually ate our burgers? On the toning tables? The shame, oh, the shame…’
‘We were horrible,’ Liv said, in a strangled voice.
‘I’ll have to find somewhere else to get my legs waxed,’ Tara forced herself to admit. ‘I can never go there again. I’ll even have to cross the road rather than pass in front of it.’
‘Guess what I did when I got home?’ Liv choked.
‘Oh, no. You didn’t…’
‘Ring Lars. Of course I did, I was drunk.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘The usual, I imagine. I can’t exactly remember, but I think I called him a bastard and threatened to tell his wife about us.’
‘Well, so long as you didn’t tell him you loved him.’
‘Oh, no,’ Liv gasped, as the dreadful, drunken memory was jogged by Tara’s words. ‘I did. I told him I loved him. Now, I’ll really have to ring and apologize. If he thinks I meant it, he’ll dump me.’
On Tara’s desk, her phone continued to ring. She was afraid to answer it, but as those around her gave frowning,