Last Chance Saloon (42 page)
The first thing Frank Butler always said to Tara when he collected her from Shannon airport was ‘When are you going back?’ But in a momentous break with tradition, when he picked up Tara and Katherine on the Wednesday before Christmas, it was actually the second thing. The first thing was, ‘I believe Fintan O’Grady has Aids.’
‘No, Dad, he hasn’t. He has cancer.’
‘Heh! Cancer me foot. They must take us for a right crowd of goms. Come on, the car is this way.’ Weaving through the throngs of people in the arrivals concourse, he demanded, ‘Do they think we never pick up a newspaper or turn on the telly?’
‘No, really, Mr Butler,’ Katherine interjected, with just the right combination of meekness and authority. ‘He hasn’t got Aids.’
This threw Frank. Katherine Casey wouldn’t lie. She was a good girl. Although he’d half noticed a different air about her. In fact, if he didn’t think it was so unlikely,
brazen
would be the word he’d use.
‘When are you going back?’ he barked at Tara.
‘New Year’s day.’
‘I suppose you’ll want a lift.’
‘You suppose correctly.’
Then Frank thought of something and cheered up immediately. He was a lot more sure of his facts on this one. ‘Well,’
he blustered, ‘I hear Milo O’Grady’s as thick as thieves with some Swiss divorcee, who’s making him sell the farm.’
‘She’s not Swiss!’
‘And she’s not divorced, Mr Butler.’
‘And she’s not
making
him sell the farm. He’s doing it of his own free will.’
‘But they are as thick as thieves, Mr Butler, if that’s any consolation.’
Frank marched on in dejected silence. Gloomily he threw their cases into the boot of the Cortina, then looked appraisingly at Tara. ‘You’re terrible scrawny.’
‘Thanks, Dad!’
‘Mind you, you were a right platterpuss before. A face like a full moon in a fog, heh, heh, heh!’
Déjà vu
, Tara thought, in astonishment.
This is exactly the kind of conversation I used to have with Thomas. I must have been mad to put up with it
. And for the first time ever she knew this to be true: she’d rather be lonely for the rest of her life than live like that again.
Katherine and Tara were home for ten days. Because flights from London to Ireland were so oversubscribed at Christmas time, they’d booked theirs the previous March. At the time Katherine had congratulated herself for her in-like-Flynn behaviour. Now she was bitterly sorry. The idea of being away from Joe for ten days was awful.
Fintan had stayed in London because he was having another blast of chemo. He’d insisted that Tara and Katherine go to Ireland. ‘I’ll be swamped with people,’ he complained. ‘Sandro, Milo and Liv are staying in London. Harry, Didier, Neville, Geoff, Will, Andrew, Claude, Geraint and Stephanie have
insisted on coming over on Christmas Day. And JaneAnn and Ambrose are coming from Ireland.’
‘Yikes,’ Tara gurned. ‘JaneAnn and Liv! Has JaneAnn forgiven Liv for stealing Milo away from Knockavoy?’
‘Not really. But she’ll have to behave herself.’
‘Where’s Mam?’ Tara asked her father when they got home.
‘Here!’ Fidelma rushed in, beaming with delight. She was covered in feathers and wearing a ‘My neighbour went to London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’ T-shirt. ‘I can’t stay,’ she explained. ‘I only came up to say hello. I’m up to me oxters plucking turkeys below in the shed. There’s so many feathers floating around the place I can nearly fly!
‘Oh, Lord, you’ve turned into a right skinnymalinks,’ she noticed. ‘Is that because of the boyfriend?’
Tara nodded, her face trembling violently with the onset of tears. But it was fine to cry. She was with her mother.
‘And because of poor Fintan, too, I’m sure.’ Fidelma felt like bursting into tears herself, but now wasn’t the time. ‘Put all your worry behind you,’ she assured Tara, taking her in her arms. ‘We’ll mind you. You won’t know yourself going back.’
Tara snuggled into the squashy warmth of her mother, exhaling with relief at the healing power of maternal love. She could stop soldiering because her mammy was going to carry the burden for a while. For the first time in a very long time she felt safe.
Tara had a lovely Christmas. Delighted to be home and delighted to see her three younger brothers, Michael, Gerard and Kieran, who prided themselves on still behaving like surly adolescents even though they were variously twenty-three,
twenty-four and twenty-eight. Katherine, on the other hand, was counting the days until they returned to London. She spent hours and hours on the phone to Joe in Devon, both of them unable to ever hang up.
‘You go first.’
‘No, you go.’
‘No, you go.’
‘OK, we’ll count to three, then we’ll both hang up.’
‘OK.’
‘Right, one…’
‘… two…’
‘… three!’
‘Joe?’
‘Yes?’
‘You didn’t hang up.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. But neither did you.’
On Christmas morning, Agnes asked her, ‘Did he give you a Christmas present, this young man of yours?’
‘Yes, Granny,’ Katherine purred. ‘He gave me a star.’
‘What do you mean he gave you a star?’
‘He got a new star named after me. Somewhere up there,’ she tilted her head ceilingwards, ‘is a star called the Katherine Casey star. He said
I
was a star, do you see?’ she confided, shyly. ‘So having a star named after me seemed appropriate.’
‘In my day we were glad of a charm for our charm bracelet,’ Agnes muttered. Young Katherine was showing late but worrying signs of turning into another Delia.
Frank Butler and Agnes weren’t the only ones who’d noticed that Katherine had changed. ‘I don’t know what it is, but she’s gone very like her mother,’ they puzzled in the shops and pubs of Knockavoy.
‘Not that she’s wearing the oul’ tents or anything.’
‘No, indeed! She has some very handsome costumes. Look at her now!’
All the men gathered at the counter in Forman’s swivelled to look at Katherine, who was wearing a sleek black leather skirt and a short, tight cardigan.
‘Everyone in Alco’s Corner is looking at you,’ Tara muttered.
Katherine glanced up and saw a selection of bulbous-nosed faces checking her out. Tara waited for the glare to flash across the bar and scare the living daylights out of them. But Katherine smiled prettily and Tara sighed. She kept forgetting about the new, improved Katherine Casey.
Back at the bar, the men muttered in agreement. ‘It’s the twinkle in her eye that does it.’
‘… seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. HAPPY NEW YEAR!’
Tara looked at the half-smoked cigarette that she held in her hand. ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish,’ she murmured. Then amid great ceremony she crumbled and broke her last sixteen cigarettes into an ashtray in Forman’s.
‘Ouch.’ Timothy O’Grady winced. ‘I bet that hurt.’
‘No,’ Tara lied, airily. ‘My own personal Ramadan starts here. No eating, drinking and, most definitely, no smoking!’
Fourteen hours later, Katherine and Tara were sitting in the non-smoking part of Shannon airport, awaiting their flight back to Heathrow.
‘It’s fourteen hours since I had a cigarette,’ Tara announced proudly.
‘Fourteen
hours.’
‘You’ve been asleep for eleven of them,’ Katherine said drily.
‘Look at your man over there.’ Tara indicated a man in the
smoking section, sucking on a cigarette as though his life depended on it. ‘Isn’t it disgusting? How could he do that to himself? Putting that revolting gear into his body?’
Ten minutes later Tara broke open a packet of Nicorette. ‘This is the business,’ she said, chewing frantically. ‘Who needs fags?’ Twenty minutes later Tara was sitting in the smoking section, still chewing the piece of Nicorette and inhaling deeply on a cigarette she’d bummed from the man.
‘I’m a smoker,’ she sadly told him. ‘I suppose I’d better just come to terms with it.’
Tara started evening classes. Now that she wasn’t going on mad benders every night of the week – it was down to every second night and sometimes only every third night – she had to fill the time somehow and going to the gym and visiting Fintan weren’t adequate distraction. But the banjo lessons lasted only a night. ‘It was too hard,’ she complained, ‘and have you any
idea
how much a banjo costs? You’d be bankrupted.’
The mosaic-making didn’t fare much better. ‘Miles too fiddly. All those little tiles, they’d drive you mad.’
And as for the Portuguese lessons, ‘Full of weirdoes. But never mind,’ she said cheerfully, ‘they still have vacancies in meditation, batik-making and canoeing. One of them is bound to be nice.’
They weren’t.
‘Meditation. God, the tedium! And my nerves were in shreds from the silence, it was like a particularly awkward dinner party.’
After the batik-making she demanded, ‘Do I
look
like a hippie?’
She didn’t say much about the canoeing. Just limped in dejectedly, her hair streely and straggly.
‘How was it?’ Joe asked.
‘Not very nice. They turned me upside down into the water and I thought I was going to drown. I bumped my knee and my hair is ruined.’
She was very low that night and horribly aware of her single status. She craved comfort and affection, someone to put their arms around her and squeeze away the shock of being unexpectedly immersed in cold water, someone to kiss her poor bruised knee better.
No more evening classes, she decided. She’d loved the infusion of hope at the start of each class, the excitement as she waited for the activity to fix her. But it didn’t work. There was no point trying to escape her loneliness through a new interest.
Now her only hobby was Not Ringing Thomas, which was still a teeth-grittingly difficult exercise. Not a day passed that he wasn’t the first thing she thought of when she woke up. But Katherine made her remember how much more excruciating it had been in the beginning, ten weeks previously. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you barely slept and you never ate. I know you still feel horrendous but you’ve made progress. I haven’t had to stop you driving round to him late at night since before Christmas.’
‘I suppose,’ Tara said slowly, ‘I’ve done well not to ring him. Because I’m very weak, you know. I’ve the willpower of a gnat.’
‘You’ve been marvellous. And you’ll get over him all the quicker because of the lack of contact. Making the break slowly only prolongs the agony. It’s like pulling off a plaster. If you’re brutal, it’s more painful initially, but better in the long run.’
Katherine’s words both comforted and unnerved Tara. She wanted to get over Thomas, but in a mad, paradoxical way the thought of him being consigned to her past made her sad.
She trudged on through her life. Sometimes she’d catch a glimpse of herself. A thirty-something woman with a good job – even if she was as poor as a church mouse it wasn’t the fault of her job – who worked hard, went to the gym daily, bought
nice clothes, hadn’t a hint of a man on the horizon, and who filled in the gaps with good friends and white wine. She felt like a cliché and a failure.
She yearned for the days when she was so porky she had to stop buying
Vogue
because looking at all the beautiful clothes she couldn’t fit into broke her heart – at least back then she’d had a boyfriend.
For Tara, Katherine, Milo and Liv, visiting Fintan was something that had become automatically built into their routine, as reflex as brushing their teeth in the morning. Daily visits were so much the norm that they felt odd if they didn’t see him.
The extremes of emotion they’d felt in the early days of his diagnosis had evened out. Despite living with terrible, ongoing anticipation where any twinge or ache of Fintan’s triggered wild anxiety, the horror wasn’t as accessible as it used to be. The acute shock had receded and the aberrant had been assimilated. There was no other way, Liv explained. ‘When you’re carrying a burden, you eventually get used to it. It’s still a drain and a strain, but the immediate shock of finding it weighing down your arms goes away.’
Nor did anyone have the same
hope
that they used to have – after four doses of chemo he’d made no visible progress.
Even Fintan’s rage, despair and hope didn’t reach the outer limits of the pendulum swing. In a way it all felt very ordinary.
Only now and then did the bizarre awfulness of the situation break through. Like the night that Katherine, Joe and Fintan went to a play, and Fintan couldn’t get a taxi home afterwards.
‘What a bummer I can’t give you a lift,’ Katherine lamented, as they stood on the street, taxi after taxi passing with their lights off. ‘That’s the problem with two-seater cars.’
‘I could sit on Joe’s lap,’ Fintan offered.
Laughing, Katherine began to berate him for his constant flirting with Joe, then saw he was serious. The shock deepened when she realized that it was possible. Fintan was shrunken and wasted enough.
She couldn’t speak as she drove them home, the once strong, healthy Fintan perched like a ventriloquist’s dummy on Joe’s knee, Joe’s arms cradling him protectively.
Milo put his farm up for sale and announced he was going to become a landscape gardener. ‘I love London, but I miss the land,’ he said. ‘I like the feel of earth between my fingers. We all have our own way of living.’
Liv looked like she was going to swoon from admiration.
‘Are you happy, Liv?’ Tara asked softly.
‘Happy?’ she said doubtfully. ‘I don’t really do happy. But I’m off my Prozac, St John’s wort, evening-primrose oil, vitamin B supplements and my light-box and I haven’t had a suicidal thought in ages.’
‘But are you happy with
Milo?
’
Liv lit up. ‘Oh, he’s wonderful. I can’t believe my luck. He’s changed the way I see the world. When it starts to rain instead of worrying that his hair might go frizzy, he doesn’t even notice it, or else he says things like “It’s a lovely, growthy rain, good for the crops.” Although,’ Liv added hurriedly: never let it be said that everything in her garden was rosy, ‘you must remember that we met because of Fintan’s illness. It’s made us closer in one way, but in another… It means we have worry and guilt. And, of course, JaneAnn is cross with me. Nothing is ever perfect.’
‘No, indeed it isn’t.’ Tara tried not to smile.
‘But,’ Liv had the decency to admit, ‘I think this is as good as it gets.’
