Last Chance Saloon Read online

  ‘I don’t really want to go to a club tonight either,’ Liv consoled. ‘But at thirty-one and a half, I’ve come to terms with it.’

  ‘No!’ Tara was appalled. ‘Bad enough to not want to go, but to come to terms with it! I hate the ageing process, I really do.’

  ‘Next you’ll start feeling that you’d rather lie in bed and watch telly than do anything else.’ Katherine sparkled with wickedness. ‘You’ll find yourself making excuses not to go out. There’s even an official name for the syndrome – cocooning. You’ll get really fond of your remote control.

  ‘I love mine,’ she confided. ‘And you’ll stop buying Vogue and start buying Living Etc.’

  ‘That’s an interiors magazine?’

  Katherine nodded devilishly and Tara winced. ‘Eeee-oooh.’

  ‘Let’s go to someone’s flat.’ Fintan sought to get the festivities back on track. ‘We can pretend it’s a club.’

  ‘How about mine?’ Tara suggested, thinking of Thomas and hoping they said no. She was drunk, but not that drunk.

  ‘Or how about mine?’ Katherine suggested, also thinking of Thomas.

  ‘Katherine’s!’ Liv and Fintan said hastily, also thinking of Thomas.

  ‘Have you drink in?’ Tara asked.

  ‘Of course I have,’ Katherine said huffily.

  ‘Truly we are grown-up,’ Tara murmured thickly.

  Katherine flagged a taxi, to the annoyance of two men fifty yards up the road who’d been waiting longer.

  ‘Gospel Oak,’ she told the driver.

  ‘You could walk that,’ he grumbled.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Tara said brightly. ‘I’m pissed!

  ‘D’you remember,’ she reminisced, when the four of them had clambered in, ‘the way alcohol wouldn’t last candlelight when we lived together? Whenever we went to Ireland,’ she indicated Katherine and Fintan, ‘or you went to Sweden,’ she pointed at Liv, ‘and brought back freety-due, I mean duty-free, we’d have it drunk before it was barely in the door.’

  ‘It was our poority,’ Liv said.

  ‘Poverty,’ corrected Tara absently. ‘And it wasn’t just that. We were young, we had fire in our bellies!’

  ‘Now we’re old,’ Liv said mournfully.

  ‘Don’t!’ Katherine commanded. ‘It’s too early for you to slump. You still have about an hour to go.’

  3

  While Fintan and the girls had been in the restaurant, two minutes down the road there’d been a party in progress. Of course, there were several going on because it was London, it was Friday night and it was in the Camden area. But this particular party contained Lorcan Larkin.

  Lorcan Larkin was a man who had almost everything going for him. In fact, the only thing that didn’t really work was his name – rough work at the font. He was six foot two, with a broad-chested, flat-stomached, long-legged, narrow-hipped body which he maintained by eating, drinking and smoking copiously. He had a mane of shoulder-length, dark-red hair, narrow sherry-purple eyes and one of the most beautiful, sensuous mouths in the Camden catchment area around the close of the twentieth century.

  Thousands of women were thrown into great confusion when they met Lorcan and fell immediately in lust with him. ‘But I don’t find red-haired men attractive,’ was a common refrain. ‘This is so embarrassing!’

  Lorcan was a very special redhead. Not for Lorcan the cries of ‘Would you look at the ginger fuck!’ following him up the road. Entranced gazes were more likely in his wake.

  And in the rare cases when someone wavered on the brink of being mad about him, instead of diving straight in, he revealed his secret weapon. His Irish accent. This was no bogtrottery brogue that people imitated when they wished to pour scorn on the Irish, all ‘Dis’s and ‘Dese’s and ‘Yer honour’s. Lorcan’s soft-spoken voice was mellow, lyrical but, above all, educated. And he had no fear of dropping the odd quotation or line of poetry into the conversation, if he reckoned it was called for. Women were hypnotized by Lorcan’s voice. Because he made damn sure they were.

  At the exact moment that Tara ordered two desserts (‘Well, it is my birthday!’ she said, defiantly), Lorcan decided he was going to screw his hostess’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Kelly. She was obviously gagging for it, had been coming on to him all evening, giving him meaningful looks with her big doe eyes and brushing her high firm tits against his arm whenever she passed him. OK, so Angeline, her mother, might be pissed-off, but it wasn’t the first time a mother and daughter had come to blows over him and it wouldn’t be the last. He eyed Kelly, entertained by her glorious adolescent lushness. Her legs were long and slender, her bottom high and round. He could tell she was the type who’d put on weight quickly. In a couple of years she’d have gone to hell entirely, spare tyres, rolls of fat and all the rest. Wondering how everything had gone so wrong. But right now she was perfect.

  ‘Time to go, mate,’ Benjy reminded Lorcan, trying to keep the anxiety out of his voice. Lorcan had been due at his girlfriend Amy’s birthday party several hours ago.

  Lorcan waved Benjy away. ‘Not just yet.’

  ‘But…’ Benjy protested.

  ‘Get off my case,’ Lorcan bit.

  Benjy was Lorcan’s ex-flatmate and unofficial social secretary. He hung around with Lorcan in the hope that Lorcan’s tremendous success with women would rub off on him. In the event of that failing, he hoped to be on hand to help Lorcan’s cast-offs – and they were legion – pick up the pieces, preferably in bed.

  Lorcan stood up, unfolding himself from the sofa with easy grace. His face gleaming, he made his way over to Kelly, who dropped her eyes coyly, but not before Benjy had seen their spark of triumph. He couldn’t hear what Lorcan said to Kelly, but he could guess. Lorcan had once, out of the goodness of his heart, shared some of his chat-up lines with him.

  ‘Try murmuring very close to their ear, “You’re a terrible woman, tormenting me with those eyes of yours,” ’ he’d advised. ‘Or – and you’ve got to say this one in a stammering, halting way, like you’re dead nervous – “Sorry to interrupt, I just had to tell you that you’ve got the most beautiful mouth I’ve ever seen, sorry again to have bothered you, I’ll go away now.” That’ll increase your success rate by a hundred per cent,’ he promised Benjy.

  But a hundred per cent increase on nothing is still nothing. And the lines that were so successful for Lorcan earned Benjy either blank stares or scornful laughter. And, once, a belt across the face that gave him tinnitus in his right ear for three days.

  ‘What am I doing wrong?’ Benjy had demanded in despair, when his hearing was back to normal. It might have helped if he wasn’t five foot eight, tubby, with sandy, thinning hair, but Lorcan didn’t say that. He was enjoying playing benefactor.

  ‘OK,’ he’d grinned, ‘listen to the master. You find two girls, one a babe, the other not so hot, that’s often the way. You home in on the dog, right – all over her like a cheap suit and ignore the good-looking one. The dog is delighted to be picked over her babe mate. The babe is pissed-off at being ignored, tries to get you interested in her. You get your pick of the two!’

  Benjy was suffused with hope. Lorcan made it sound so reasonable. ‘Got any other tips?’

  Lorcan thought about it for a moment. ‘Every woman likes one thing about herself,’ he said. ‘Every woman has what she calls a “best feature”. All you have to do is find out what it is – and believe me, man, it’s always obvious – then compliment her on it.’

  Benjy nodded hopefully. ‘Anything else I should know?’

  ‘Yeah. Fat girls try harder.’

  Seconds after Lorcan and Kelly disappeared, Angeline, an attractive woman who worried about the size of her stomach, rushed up to Benjy. ‘Where’s Lorcan gone?’ she asked worriedly. ‘And where’s Kelly?’

  ‘Er, I don’t know,’ Benjy stammered. ‘But don’t worry, I’m sure they’ve not gone far,’ he added, wondering why he bothered.

  Indeed, they weren’t far, in Kelly’s pink and
fluffy bedroom, the view of the duvet almost obscured by the plethora of cuddly toys piled on to it. Kelly might look like a woman, but the rest of her hadn’t caught up yet.

  Things with Lorcan were going way too fast. She’d wanted him to kiss her so she could triumphantly say to her mother, ‘You see, you pregnant-looking old slapper, I told you I’m better-looking than you.’ She hadn’t yet decided whether to let him feel her tits – through her clothes, of course – but she thought probably not. So when Lorcan began unbuttoning his jeans it came as a big shock. When he pushed the jeans down to mid-thigh and stroked his large, angry-looking erection in Kelly’s face, it came as an even bigger shock.

  ‘Let’s go back to the party,’ she said, terrified.

  ‘Not yet,’ Lorcan said, with a dangerous smile, placing his hand firmly on the back of her silky-haired head.

  Benjy looked up in a mixture of admiration and jealous hatred when Lorcan strutted back into the room, all but doing a lap of honour. ‘You jammy bastard,’ Benjy muttered.

  ‘I didn’t screw her.’ Lorcan’s eyes were limpid with his own goodness. ‘Her honour is still intact.’

  ‘Yeah, right! You didn’t lay a finger on her,’ Benjy scorned. ‘And what about Amy? It’s her birthday.’

  ‘I can’t help myself,’ Lorcan grinned, with a shrug that would have reduced several grown females to begging. ‘I love women.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Benjy said, in an undertone. ‘Seems to me like you hate them.’

  ‘Come on,’ Lorcan said. ‘Time to go. Move it, man, we’re late.’ And off he swept, all business, ignoring the weeping and humiliated Kelly, who sat hunched on the bottom step of the stairs.

  ‘Why do you always treat women like dirt?’ Benjy demanded, when they got outside into the chilly October night and stood, waiting for a taxi. ‘What did your mother do to you? Breastfeed you too long? Not breastfeed you enough?’

  ‘My mother was grand,’ Lorcan said, his soft, mellow voice contrasting with Benjy’s high-pitched rage. Why were people always looking for stupid Freudian reasons for his short attention span with women? It was really very simple. ‘It’s the old joke, Benjy, isn’t it?’

  ‘What old joke?’ Benjy shouted and, when Lorcan didn’t answer, followed his gaze and found him looking at three women and a man outside a nearby restaurant.

  ‘What old joke?’ Benjy again bellowed, his rage exacerbated by the sight of the four people clambering into the taxi he’d earmarked as his.

  ‘Why do dogs lick their balls?’ Lorcan replied.

  Benjy looked in sullen silence.

  ‘Because they can,’ Lorcan said, almost wearily. ‘Because they can.’

  4

  Liv, Tara, Fintan and Katherine drank gin and tonic, danced to Wham! and annoyed Roger, Katherine’s downstairs neighbour.

  ‘Isn’t this great?’ Tara demanded, her face aglow. ‘Do you remember dancing to this that summer we were fifteen? D’you remember, Fintan, d’you remember, Katherine?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fintan said awkwardly. ‘But don’t go on about it, you’re making Liv feel left out.’

  ‘No, no,’ Liv said, as jovially as she could. ‘It’s OK, I always feel left out.’

  ‘Except with people you know very well,’ Fintan reminded her gently.

  ‘No, especially them.’

  Eventually, at the appointed hour, Liv was overwhelmed by a wave of melancholy and decided she’d better go home.

  ‘Will you be OK?’ Katherine asked, as she saw Liv to the door.

  Liv nodded miserably. ‘I will eat twelve bags of crisps, sleep for eighteen hours, then I will feel better.’

  ‘God love her,’ Tara sympathized, when she’d gone. ‘I know I get the odd bout of depression, but you could set your watch by hers, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I think I’ll head home as well,’ Fintan said.

  ‘What? They’ll strip you of your title of Oldest Swinger in Town,’ Tara warned.

  ‘But I’m tired,’ he said, ‘and I’ve an awful pain in my neck and where my liver used to be.’

  The head of steam went out of things after that, to Roger’s acute relief. ‘I think I’ve danced myself sober,’ Tara said. Wham! were told to shut up, Tara’s taxi was summoned and Katherine got ready for bed.

  ‘You big girl’s blouse,’ Tara said, in jealous admiration, as she looked around Katherine’s neat, fragrant bedroom. The duvet cover crisp and spotless, plants emerald-green and flourishing, dust an infrequent caller. The many, many tubes of body lotion on her dressing table were full and new-looking. There were no old, grungy ones with half a millimetre left in the bottom that had been there for five years. And if you cared to look in her sparkling bathroom you would find that for every flavour body lotion on her dressing-table, there would be a matching soap or shower gel knocking around on the shelf in there.

  Katherine was a great girl for sets. She didn’t really enjoy things on their own. But the minute they came with something else she fell in love with them. So scarves had to have matching gloves; talcs had to be flanked by similarly scented soaps; a small ornamental bowl was scant comfort unless it had an even smaller, otherwise identical, ornamental bowl as its comrade. Indeed, Tara often joked that Katherine’s ideal man had to have good looks, a great body and an identical twin brother.

  Tara continued to survey the bedroom. ‘You make me feel so inadequate,’ she said, wistfully, ‘having your bed made when you didn’t even know you’d be having visitors.’

  She’d forgotten how much of a homemaker Katherine was because it was a year since they’d finally stopped sharing a flat. Katherine had bought her own place and Thomas had let Tara move in with him. And, while she was at it, pay half his mortgage.

  Unable to help herself Tara looked in the drawers. Everything within looked organized, fragrant, pressed, pristine, tended. Katherine was that rare creature: the woman who had regular clean-outs when all her grey, saggy underwear got thrown in the bin.

  ‘Do I have double vision from all the drink?’ Tara wanted to know. ‘Or do you really have two of every pair of knickers?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Katherine confirmed. ‘Two pairs to every bra.’

  Tara just didn’t get it. She didn’t care about underwear. She only cared about what went on on the outside, what people could see. Of course, Thomas got to see her antediluvian pants and bras, but they’d been going out with each other for two years. Sustaining mystique for longer than three months was too exhausting. Besides, he was no great shakes in the underpants department himself, she reminded herself, and waited for the guilt to abate.

  Tara opened another drawer and found a selection of little outfits specially for bed. Although they were sweet, rather than sexy. Not for Katherine a see-through black polyester baby-doll nightdress with matching crotchless panties.

  ‘You’re so cool,’ Tara said, ‘spending so much time and money in Knickerbox.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  ‘Maybe. But no one else I know buys things for herself.’

  Tara lay on the bed and enviously watched Katherine’s legs – taut and muscled from tap-dancing classes – as they climbed into a cute pair of blue and white polka-dotted jersey shorts. Then came a matching little vest. She’d put the vest on back to front and inside out, so that the washing instructions flicked up and down under her chin, but otherwise you’d never have known how drunk she was.

  ‘It’s about time you got a fella so that he’d get the benefit of your lovely underwear,’ Tara suggested.

  ‘I’m fine without one.’

  ‘But so many lovely knickers,’ Tara said, ‘and no man to see them. I think it’s sad.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s sad,’ Katherine replied. ‘And they’re my knickers.’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘Then you should get help for it.’

  ‘I don’t need help,’ Tara said, dizzy with gratitude. ‘I have a boyfriend.’

  ‘But what if it ended…?’ Katherine stirre
d, with quiet mischief.

  ‘Stop!’ Tara declared, in passionate horror. ‘What would I be like?’ She thought about it for a moment. ‘I’d become such a weirdo.’

  ‘Here we go again.’ Katherine sighed.

  Tara feared that boyfriendless women in their thirties became eccentric, more and more so as they continued further into their single state. Developing odder and odder habits, coiling ever more tightly in on themselves. And if the perfect man eventually came along, Tara reckoned they’d be too trapped in themselves to be able to reach out and accept the hand that was stretched in liberation.

  ‘I’d probably become one of those fruit-loops who collect rubbish,’ Tara said. ‘Who hoard everything from potato-peelings to decade-old newspapers.’

  ‘You’re nearly that way as it is,’ Katherine said.

  ‘I’d never open my door to the health visitors,’ Tara went on, locked into her apocalyptic vision. ‘And you’d be able to smell my flat a hundred yards away. That’s what I’d become without a man.’

  ‘Just as well you have one, then,’ Katherine said.

  The bell rang, indicating Tara’s taxi had arrived.

  ‘Cripes, I’m sorry, Katherine, if I’ve offended you.’ Tara was suddenly mortified. ‘You’re my best friend and I love you and I wasn’t implying that you’d become a weirdo…’

  ‘No offence taken, now off you go. I’ve got a date with my remote control. But before that,’ Katherine added, ‘I’ve got to wash my hands fifty times and iron all my tights. Us single women! Martyrs to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.’

  5

  Tara sat in the taxi, smoked, stared into the middle distance and felt guilty. Not only was she a despicable, needy-for-a-man wimp, but there was a chance – admittedly small – that she had upset Katherine. Katherine was so well balanced and independent that Tara sometimes forgot she had emotions at all.

  But when the taxi turned into Alasdair’s street, Tara forgot about Katherine. Instead she sat up and paid attention. She couldn’t help herself. Searching for a glimpse of him, she stared up at his windows. They were in darkness, and the taxi passed too quickly for her to establish whether it was because Alasdair and his wife were in bed or out on the tiles.