Last Chance Saloon (17 page)

But fruit just never seemed to hit the spot, no matter how much she ingested. She ate an apple, a plum, a couple of satsumas, three nectarines, another satsuma, four more plums, a handful of grapes, one more satsuma and was still starving. So she started into a pear and nearly broke a tooth. She sighed.
She knew about pears. There was a one-and-a-half-minute period during which pears could be eaten. Until then they were as hard as concrete. Thereafter they were rotten mush. If you caught them during the short window, they were delicious, but the chances of that happening were slim.

They had a brainstorming session that morning as they formulated a game plan for the MenChel project they’d just been allocated.

Vinnie marched up and down in front of the office whiteboard, drawing grids and time scales and anxiously rubbing his thinning scalp.

‘I’ve put my cock on the block with this one, lads,’ Ravi muttered to Tara, as Vinnie did his spiel.

‘We’re talking a two-thousand-person-day project and we’ve got to do it right because we’ve got the ruddy quality auditors breathing down our necks,’ Vinnie urged.

‘What do you think that white stain on Vinnie’s sleeve is?’ Ravi whispered to Tara.

‘Baby puke.’

‘We’ve a very tight deadline,’ Vinnie galvanized, ‘no room for slippage, so we’ve got to really pull together as a team on this one and… and what on
earth’s
that funny, squelching noise?’

Ten people turned to look at Tara.

‘It’s Tara,’ Teddy said triumphantly.

‘That was hardly team-spirited.’ Tara was wounded. ‘Fingering me like that. Sorry, Vinnie, it’s my stomach. The different fruit acids mingling. I think they’re having a party in there.’

She longed for some carbohydrate to calm it all down. Something to fill up that liquid hollowness. She felt like her stomach was a great banqueting hall, with forty-foot-high ceilings.
Or an enormous conference centre that could hold three thousand delegates. Huge and echoey, cavernous and empty, empty, empty. But she was fired with willpower and wouldn’t give in. Not even when Sleepy Steve did a doughnut run to oil the wheels of the think-tank.

She rushed to the smoking room the minute the meeting was adjourned. ‘God bless these babies.’ Tara waved her pack of cigarettes at the small cluster of diehards in the tiny smoke-filled chamber. ‘Think of how huge I’d be if Nick O’Teen hadn’t kept a lid on the great hunger over the years. The fire brigade would have to cut me out of my house with a chainsaw.’

In the hour before lunch, whenever someone passed Tara’s desk, they broke off a couple of her grapes and popped them in their mouths.

‘What’s wrong?’ Ravi saw her distressed face.

‘My grapes,’ she complained. ‘Everyone thinks they’re fair game. But they’re not. They’re my lunch. I mean, I don’t go up to you and just help myself to one of your sandwiches.’

‘You do,’ he gently reminded her.

‘Well, maybe I do,’ she admitted. ‘But I’m different.
Normal
people don’t go around eating other people’s lunches uninvited.’

At one o’clock Ravi approached Tara. ‘How’s about you and me strolling up to Hammersmith? Doing some aimless wandering around the shops, maybe partaking of a scratch-card or two?’ he suggested suavely.

They often did this when Ravi didn’t go to the gym.

‘No, thanks.’ Tara whipped out her wool and needles. ‘I’m going to knit my hunger away!’

He stared in amazement. ‘What’s that?’

‘A jumper for Thomas.’

‘I hope he knows how lucky he is.’

‘Don’t worry. He will.’

Ravi lingered, reluctant to leave without her. ‘How about I fetch you some more fruit from the shops?’

‘Don’t bother, Ravi,’ she said. ‘The fruit is just making me hungrier. I suspect utter starvation is the only way, because if I eat a little bit the floodgates open and I want more and more.’

‘I don’t know why you do this to yourself,’ Ravi said.

Tara looked scornfully at him. ‘Blind, are you?’

‘I think you’re a top girl,’ Ravi said.

‘No you don’t. Now go away, I’ve to knit myself a happy relationship.’

‘Aw, please, Tara,’ he wheedled. ‘It’s no good going around the shops without you.’

She indicated her knitting.

‘We can stand in the newsagent’s and read the magazines,’ he tempted.

She shook her head.

‘They might have a new lipstick in Boots that really doesn’t come off,’ he said, wickedly. ‘It could be just in.’

‘Do your Elvis impersonation,’ she conceded, ‘and I’ll think about it.’

‘I’m taking requests.’

‘ “Hound Dog”.’

Ravi shook a lock of hair over his forehead, curled his lip, held up his arms and did some serious hip action. ‘ “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” ’ he began.

‘You see!’ Tara yelled. ‘I knew you didn’t fancy me.’

‘Thalidomide?’ Ravi said in alarm.

‘Biomide,’ she corrected him.

Next they went into the newsagent’s where Ravi flicked through
Top Gear
and Tara read
Slimming
. For a grand finale they bought a scratch-card each. Ravi passed her a twopence piece and they flaked away aluminium ink in companionable silence. Neither of them won anything.

‘How long have we been gone?’ Tara asked.

‘Forty-five minutes.’

‘S’pose we’d better go back,’ Tara said.

‘S’pose.’

After lunch, back in the office, as conversations drifted over to her, everyone seemed to be talking about food.

Vinnie described the new project to Evelyn as ‘a Marathon task’, and Tara instantly thought of peanuts, caramel and thick milk chocolate.

‘Don’t be chicken,’ Evelyn gently teased, and Tara almost fainted at the idea of a big bucket of KFC.

Ravi was on the phone to Danielle, his girlfriend. ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it,’ he advised. What kind of cake, Tara wondered dreamily. Moist, sticky banana cake? Dark, rich chocolate fudge cake? Sweet, delicious carrot cake? Dense and heavy Dundee cake?

‘Join the club,’ Ravi laughed affectionately into the mouthpiece, as Tara visualized tearing off the yellow wrapper and the gold foil and biting through the thick chocolate and the biscuit underneath. God, this was torture.

‘… cast your bread upon the waters…’ drifted over to Tara, from yet another conversation. What kind of bread? Ciabatta? Focaccia? Baguette? Batch loaf? But did anyone other than Bible-bashers talk about casting bread upon the waters? Was she hearing things? Hallucinating from hunger?

Just then a dark, elegant woman appeared at the office door. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Pearl from Technical Support. I heard I could buy an orange here.’

Everyone turned and looked at Tara.

‘You heard wrong,’ she said bluntly.

‘Sorry,’ said Pearl from Technical Support, edging back to the door. She suspected she’d put her foot in it.

‘Oranges put up too much of a fight,’ Tara explained. ‘Juice everywhere except in the orange. I can do you a satsuma, though. Far more convenient.’

After work Tara did a step class, and was delighted when she almost fainted. She had to sit on the bench for fifteen minutes before she could stand up without her knees buckling. When she got home, Thomas smacked her on the bum and said, affectionately, ‘You’re not bad, for a fat lass.’

That night, she went to bed trembling with hunger and overexertion. All in all, it had been a very good day.

At work the following morning, she was mildly curious. Joe would have had time to recover from her accusation, so would he revert to being charming and familiar? Would the morning chats continue? Would the desk-sitting continue? Would the flirting and persuading continue?

Would her cruelty continue?

To her surprise, she was inclined finally to give him a break. He’d been so persistent, it was only fair. Perhaps she’d go for a drink with him – acting as though he had a gun to her head, of course.

She kept watching the door, not exactly anxious yet not quite at peace. But he didn’t appear. She turned her attention to a trial balance but by lunchtime realized there was a part of her that had been on the alert all morning for him.

Finally, at three o’clock, he arrived, Myles in tow, carrying a bottle of Lucozade. Both men looked pale and sheepish.

‘Gentlemen! Glad you could join us today,’ Fred Franklin said, sarcastically.

Joe muttered something about having been on a shoot for an ad.

‘So they shot it in your bedroom, did they?’ Fred scorned.

‘No,’ Joe said defensively. ‘In the bathroom, actually,’ he added, with a rueful, hangdog smile, and moved across the office.

Instantly, Katherine assumed her smooth, enigmatic expression. Here we go!

Joe came towards her, right up to her desk – and kept going. To the coffee-machine. Seconds later, on his return, Katherine once more poised herself. But he bypassed her completely. In fact, he didn’t even look in her direction as he went to his own desk.

Katherine gave him a few minutes to check his calls and e-mails, and expected him to come over then. But he didn’t. She waited a bit longer while he dealt with any urgent work, and still her desk remained unsat on. Perhaps he had too much catching up to do after his twenty-six-hour lunch. She watched him covertly. He didn’t
look
like a man snowed under with work.

After an hour passed, Katherine had to acknowledge that Joe wouldn’t be visiting her today. That it seemed he’d given up on her. Relief clashed with disappointment. He’s a wimp, she thought. What’s an accusation of sexual harassment to a real man?

With an effort she switched her focus back to work, but her concentration was patchy. To the outside world she looked like a woman immersed in amortization calculations, but her head was full of exclamation marks. I can’t believe he’s just given up on me! Just like that! He was cracked about me yesterday! I was the sunshine of his life, he said!

She kept flicking glances, checking on him. In case he’d changed his mind. She happened to be watching when, across the office, Joe took off his jacket, tugged his tie loose and rolled
up his sleeves. Though she didn’t want to, Katherine stared hard. At the hair on his forearms, the skin silky underneath, the muscles bunching and lengthening every time he picked up the phone or clicked his mouse. His chrome watch sat heavy on his wrist. There was nothing wimpy about his arms.

That really irritated her. He presented himself as Mr Safe, Mr Too-Thin-to-Be-Macho. But, lean though he was, he had strength. Those arms were the arms of a sexy man… Oh, no! Back in your box, she admonished her recalcitrant feelings, back behind bars.

As she finished for the evening, Joe and his team were making noises about going to the pub. Hair of the dog, and all that.

Joe called, ‘Hey,’ and Katherine looked up. At long bloody last, she thought. And prepared to play hard to get. No point giving anything away too easily. But Joe’s eyes skimmed over her and moved further along the office. ‘Hey, Angie,’ he called again. ‘Coming for a drink?’

Katherine’s stomach contracted. Angie was a copywriter. She was dainty, dark-haired, pretty and so new she hadn’t yet been rechristened with regard to her sexual propensities.

‘Why not?’ Angie smiled.

Katherine waited for Joe to suggest that she come too, but the air resonated with his silence.

She shoved in a disk to back up her day’s work and deliberately, with cold pleasure, hardened her heart. Joe Roth was an asshole. To think she’d felt sorry for turning him down! It hadn’t taken him long to get over her. Clearly, small and skinny was his type, and he’d moved on to the office’s
new
small and skinny woman.

He’d just been playing games with Katherine, and the minute she’d become interested, he’d have run off and left her with
reopened wounds. He only wanted her because she was unavailable. Men were such children, their grass was always greener.

She’d had a lucky escape.

She finished backing up and threw the disk into her drawer with force. When she got to the lift, they were all there, Joe laughing at something Angie had said, his head close to hers. Katherine wanted to turn back, but that would have been even more excruciating. Stiff-faced, she went down with the merrymakers, all of whom kept saying that they could murder a pint.

‘Why don’t you come with us?’ Myles suggested to Katherine, in the hope of cheering Joe up. Then he immediately regretted it. What if she accused
him
of sexual harassment?

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she murmured, and waited for Joe to weigh in and try to persuade her. But he said nothing and she brimmed over with rage. Shallow swine. As she got out of the lift, she threw, ‘Have fun,’ over her shoulder and wondered how it hadn’t choked her.

On Wednesday evenings, Katherine usually went tap-dancing. Losing herself, clattering along to ‘Happy Feet’ with six other women with flared shorts and fantasies of a happy childhood, while everyone else en route to the normal aerobics classes looked into the studio and sniggered.

Then after the class she often went out with Tara, Liv and, sometimes, Fintan and Sandro. But today she just wanted to go straight home. Too distressed to feel guilty, she flung herself into the tide of office workers making for Oxford Circus tube. And she couldn’t bear that either. So she flagged a taxi and prayed for the driver not to be loquacious. The odds were stacked against her. Sure enough, she had to endure a forty-minute rant from a xenophobic Fascist called Wayne, who kept
a photo of his three fat, ugly children on the dash, and said, of every nation on earth, ‘Fing is, lav, they’re filfy, in’t they?’ The French, Bosnian, Jamaican, Algerian, Greek, Pakistani and, of course, the Irish, were all, according to Wayne, filthy. As she rang the others from her mobile, and left messages to say she wouldn’t be going out, she could barely hear herself think.

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 that he was probably no longer available was it safe to.

At four in the morning she bumped awake and found herself cuddling the remote. Foreboding hung over her and it took a few seconds to identify exactly what it was. Then she remembered. Joe going out. Angie going too. In a flash she realized that he could be in bed with her right now.
Right now
. Somewhere across town, Joe Roth could be in bed, his arm around a naked woman. Katherine had fallen into the trap of thinking that she should be that woman. That his ardour belonged solely to her.

Flat on her back, she looked anxiously at the ceiling. It was a long time since she’d had interrupted sleep, and she didn’t like what it meant. Old, old feelings were upon her, twisting and tormenting her.