Last Chance Saloon Read online

  I’m nuts to keep doing this, Tara realized. Besides, he mightn’t even live here any more. Once people got married they had a tendency to move out of their stylish flats in central London, away from the good bars and restaurants, to a three-bedroomed semi with a garden on the far side of Heathrow.

  Her stomach twanged with displeasure. Tara loved Thomas, but she still had a strange proprietorial interest in Alasdair. It pained her to think of him making big life changes without her knowing about them. Alasdair had been the boyfriend before Thomas. And very different from Thomas. Generous, spontaneous, reckless, affectionate, convivial. Fond of meals out and he never once looked at the menu and said, ‘Ten quid, ten bludeh quid for a piece of chicken. I could buy that int’supermarket for twelve bob,’ the way Thomas did.

  Tara had met Alasdair after a chain of unserious boyfriends led her to the age of twenty-six. She was enchanted by his Scottish accent, his close-cropped black hair and his slightly mental eyes sparkling behind wire-rimmed glasses. She even found his name seductive. It hadn’t taken long for Tara to decide that he was the man she was going to marry. All the signs were auspicious.

  She reckoned she was the right age to get married. As he was two years older than her, so was he. They both had good jobs and came from similar rural backgrounds. But most importantly they wanted exactly the same things in life – lots of fun and meals out. Despite all the restaurants they went to, she was less overweight than might have been expected.

  They were the balsamic-vinegar generation – a handsome couple in their twenties, having dinner parties, getting great use out of Alasdair’s cappuccino machine, driving around London in his red MG, drinking champagne at least once a week, shopping on Saturdays at Paul Smith or Joseph. (Sometimes they even bought something. Like a pair of socks or a tie-pin.)

  When Tara went home to Ireland for a week one summer, Alasdair came with her. Suddenly she saw Knockavoy through his eyes. The magnificence of the crazed Atlantic, taking lumps out of the cliffs, the vast expanse of empty golden sand, the air so soft and clean you could almost see it. Up until then she’d hated her home town. A tiny rural backwater where nothing ever happened, except for a few months in the summer when the tourists came.

  Tara’s mother had loved Alasdair. Her father hadn’t, of course, but he disliked everything about Tara, why would Alasdair be any different? Next, Alasdair took Tara to meet his family in Skye, which Tara found immensely reassuring. She often feared that the people she met in London weren’t giving her the full picture. That to some degree they’d reinvented themselves. Simply because they could – almost no one was actually from London so they hadn’t any annoying family hanging around to give the lie to whatever fantasy they fed people. And even though it took her a week to recover from the excessive partying Alasdair’s family made her do, at least now she knew where and what he came from.

  Shortly after their return from Skye, it was their two-year anniversary and Tara thought it was about time things started to move in the direction of marriage. Or, at the very least, living together. She practically lived in Alasdair’s flat anyway, and she reckoned making it official was merely a formality.

  However, when she put it to him, he surprised her by looking terrified. ‘But…’ he said, his dancing eyes sitting this one out. ‘But we’re fine as we are, no need to rush things…’

  Badly shaken and denying how hurt she was, Tara backed off. ‘You’re right,’ she reassured him warmly. ‘Things are fine as they are, and there’s no need to rush things.’ Then she settled in for a war of attrition. All things come to those who wait. The only thing was, at twenty-eight, she knew time was a commodity she no longer had a surfeit of.

  She calmed her hysteria by telling herself he loved her. She was certain of it. She gripped on to this knowledge as if her life depended on it.

  Things continued for another six months or so, ostensibly the same. Except they weren’t. Alasdair had a faint hunted air about him that permeated everything, tainting it, dousing fun. And Tara had become watchful and anxious. Conscious that she was no longer in her mid-twenties, conscious that everyone she’d been to school with, with the exception of Katherine, was married and had children, conscious that there were fewer men around than there used to be, conscious that she was hurtling towards thirty. She’d invested a lot of time and hope in Alasdair – all her time and hope – and the idea that she’d backed a loser was unbearable to contemplate.

  I’m too old to start again, she often thought, gripped with nauseating panic when she woke in the middle of the night. I haven’t got time. This one has got to work.

  Eventually, patience not being her strong point, she couldn’t help but ask him again what his long-term intentions towards her were. She knew she shouldn’t. That if it was good news, he’d have let her know. And that trying to force his hand would only bring things to a head, to the conclusion she didn’t want.

  She was right. Brusquely, because he was angry with her for ruining something good with her unreasonable demands, he told her that he didn’t want to marry her. He loved her but he just wanted to have fun, and wasn’t interested in the tedium of domesticity.

  Tara had to take a week off work with shock.

  ‘Cut your losses,’ everyone advised her, as she ricocheted around, crazed with disbelief and pain. ‘Leave now, don’t throw good time after bad.’ But she couldn’t. Just couldn’t say goodbye to two and a half years. Couldn’t admit that there was a possibility that she might have to consider a future without him.

  She kept trying to salvage it, first by pretending that the issue had never been raised, and that everything was as it had always been. And then, when living with the forced normality became too taxing, she once again tried to change Alasdair’s mind, by calling his bluff and threatening to end the relationship entirely. She’d heard of other cases like hers: when the man was faced with the reality of doing without the woman he suddenly saw that making a commitment was a wonderful idea. But nothing doing. Instead Alasdair said sadly, ‘Go, if you must. I don’t blame you, no one would.’

  ‘But don’t you love me?’ she demanded breathlessly, her voice high-pitched with horror, as she realized how badly she’d misjudged things. ‘Won’t you miss me?’

  ‘Yes, I love you,’ he replied, gently. ‘And of course I’ll miss you. But I’ve no right to hold you if you want to go.’

  Mortified, Tara quickly shut up with her dramatic, It’s-all-over talk. That ploy had backfired good and proper. A swift U-turn had her re-embracing the status quo, hoping no one had noticed. However, the relationship that had been wonderful a year before no longer seemed charmed and charming. It was a making-do, a half relationship, she thought bitterly. But it was better than nothing.

  Except it wasn’t. At least, not for Alasdair. ‘It’s no good any more,’ he told Tara, about a month later. She stared at him in terror, the much-derided, half-assed relationship suddenly flaring up into a highly desirable one, now that it was under threat.

  ‘But nothing’s changed,’ she stammered, confused because she was supposed to have the moral high ground. She was allowed to hold the threat of ending the whole thing over him, because he’d hurt her. Not the other way round. ‘I’m sorry I brought up the getting-married thing again, and I’m sorry I’ve been such a pain about it, but forget it, let’s just carry on as we were.’

  But he shook his head and said, ‘We can’t go back.’

  ‘We can,’ she insisted, hysteria in her voice, wondering why bad things insisted on happening when you were already beaten and broken.

  ‘We can’t,’ he repeated.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, knowing, but defiantly refusing to let herself find out.

  ‘It’s time to call it a day,’ he said quietly. And for a second Tara pretended he hadn’t said anything, refusing to move from life as it was to life as it is.

  ‘No,’ she said frantically. ‘There’s no need, things are fine as they are.’

  ‘They’re
not fine,’ he said. ‘You deserve someone else, someone who’ll give you what you want. Go on, there’s no good in staying with me, you’re wasting time.’

  ‘I don’t want anyone else,’ she promised desperately. ‘I’d rather have you the way things are than be married to someone else.’

  But no matter how much she tried to tell him she was happy as things stood, he wouldn’t have it, becoming more and more intractable as the conversation went on. Until she realized that there was no hope of convincing him, that, in fact, there never had been. His mind had been made up before she uttered a word.

  Tara nearly lost her reason. For weeks she was demented and hysterical. Her grief was so agonizing that she lay in bed and howled like an animal. So loudly that the upstairs neighbours called the police one night.

  She moved the CD player into her room and, roaring, crying, played Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over,’ incessantly. Every time the last bars of it faded she sobbed even harder and pressed the replay button. Liv and Katherine counted it twenty-nine times in a row one night. Sometimes she half howled, half sang along with it, getting particular relief from the part where it moved up an octave. ‘It’s ooooh-ohhhh-verrr.’ Up an octave. ‘IT’S OOOOH-OHHHH-VERRR!’ The upstairs neighbours talked about calling the police again.

  She had to take another week off work and when she went back her colleagues wished she’d stayed away. Every program she was supposed to have tested was flawed, sending systems crashing all over London. Her department’s workload doubled for a couple of months, their manpower stretched to capacity cleaning up Tara’s messes. She only managed about three hours’ sleep a night and wandered the flat smoking cigarette after cigarette. She lost the ability to function normally. Forgetting to rinse conditioner out of her hair. Going to work on a Saturday and wondering why the building was all locked up. Driving to work, taking the tube home, then thinking her car had been stolen when she couldn’t find it outside her flat the following morning. Taking the lid off a carton of yoghurt, throwing the carton in the bin and staring at the lid, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong. In calmer moments, she talked, her knuckles clenched translucent, of evening classes. Pottery, Russian, cake-icing.

  Every week or so, when the pain got too much, she rang him and begged him to meet her. He always did and, naturally, they slept together. Frantic, tearful sex, scratching the clothes off each other, bruising each other with the relief of their familiarity.

  This happened so often she began to think that maybe there was a chance they’d get back together. It was obvious that he was as torn apart by the break-up as she was, that he still loved her.

  Until one night he wouldn’t let her come over.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked. He’d always been keen before.

  She heard him take a breath, and in the pico-second’s pause between the end of that breath and the start of him speaking, she got a very bad feeling. Before he even said it, she knew.

  ‘I’ve met someone else.’

  Tara calmly hung up the phone, got into her car, drove around to Alasdair’s, let herself in with the key she hadn’t yet returned, found him in the kitchen boiling the kettle and, with her forearm, hit him such a blow in the skull that his glasses fell off.

  Before he had a chance to recover, she slapped his head and face repeatedly with the palms of her hands. ‘Bastard,’ she gasped. ‘You bastarding bastard.’ But slapping him wasn’t expending the hatred or stopping her pain quickly enough so she punched him in the stomach, surprised by how weak her arm felt.

  Although it seemed to do the trick all right, she thought dispassionately, as she watched Alasdair choking and retching.

  ‘Ali?’ someone asked, and Tara turned to the kitchen door to see a plump blonde girl standing there.

  ‘What’s going on?’ the girl gasped in horror, as she took in the scene.

  Tara came out of her trance. Pausing only to give Alasdair a violent shove that sent him toppling into her usurper, she left.

  When she got home and told Katherine and Liv what had happened, they couldn’t hide their shock. Too late, they tried to make her feel better about it. ‘The bastard,’ they consoled. ‘Good on you. I hope you broke a couple of ribs.’

  ‘Stop,’ begged Tara. The red mist had evaporated, leaving her sickened and frantic with self-loathing. ‘I beat him up,’ she moaned, rocking backwards and forwards, her face in her hands. ‘Now I’ll never get him back.

  ‘I thought I couldn’t possibly feel worse than I have been for the past seven weeks, four days and…’ she paused to look at her watch ‘… sixteen and a half hours, but I was wrong.

  ‘I have to lie on my bed and howl like a dog,’ she said brokenly, and made for her bedroom. Katherine and Liv braced themselves for Roy Orbison. But to their surprise and relief instead they heard ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’. And then they heard it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

  Later that night Tara re-emerged. ‘I’m going to call him,’ she announced.

  ‘Don’t!’ Katherine commanded, diving on the phone and confiscating it. ‘You’ll only make things worse.’

  ‘Worse,’ Tara said miserably. ‘How could they be worse? Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah!’

  ‘A film called The Life of Brian,’ Katherine explained hurriedly to Liv’s perplexed face. ‘No, Tara, no calling him.’

  ‘Let me just apologize,’ Tara begged. ‘If you don’t let me, I’ll wait until you’ve gone to bed, and it’ll be far worse if I phone him in the middle of the night.’

  Eventually Katherine agreed. ‘But if you start shouting at him or making threats, then I cut you off.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Tara said miserably, and dialled Alasdair’s number.

  ‘Hello,’ she said hurriedly, when he answered. ‘It’s me, I’m sorry, please don’t hang up, you wouldn’t believe how sorry I am, or how ashamed I am.’

  Instead of slamming the phone down, he said, ‘It’s fine, I understand.’ Actually, Alasdair was quite relieved. He’d been feeling guilty about his involvement with Caroline, but every slap that Tara had given him had changed the balance of sympathy in his favour. Now, instead of it being ‘Poor cuckolded Tara’, it would be ‘Poor beaten-up Alasdair’.

  ‘You know, you pack one hell of a punch,’ he added, with an attempt at a laugh.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘Please forgive me.’

  ‘I forgive you,’ he said.

  But all the same, when he rang her six weeks later to tell her he was getting married, he took the precaution of getting the locks changed first.

  That was the night when Tara met Thomas.

  They were at a party given by Fintan’s assistant, Dolly. Tara, dancing like a woman possessed, absentmindedly took Thomas’s cigarette from his mouth and stuck it in her own. Not in a deliberate attempt to be provocative – she didn’t even see Thomas. She was simply dying for a smoke and couldn’t find her own. Since she’d heard of Alasdair’s impending nuptials she’d been losing everything.

  Despite the theft of his cigarette, Thomas was instantly besotted with Tara. He mistook her lunacy for vivacity and decided that her forwardness was an indication that she’d be uninhibited in bed. And he was most impressed with the slim figure she’d achieved by throwing all those cartons of yoghurt in the bin. For a few moments, he dithered, trying to decide what his chat-up line should be. But Thomas was a plain-spoken man, so he went for the obvious.

  ‘Can I have me fag back?’ Tara heard, and ceased her frantic dancing. She turned and saw a man standing four-square and smiling at her. Not bad-looking. Not good-looking, either, mind. Not compared to Alasdair.

  But once she took a closer look she saw that he had shiny brown hair and a reassuring stockiness that made her yearn to lean against him.

  He continued to smile, washing her with his warmth and admiration. ‘You’re a cracking bird,’ he told Tara, with an endearing combination of shyness and sureness. ‘Keep the fag.’

  Under normal circumst
ances Tara would cross the road to avoid a man who called women ‘birds’ but she’d been through a lot. Thomas’s brown eyes held hers, and Tara was astonished to see devotion and respect in them. After what Alasdair had done, she’d thought she was as worthless as the Russian rouble. In amazement it hit her that maybe this man could redefine her, revalue her.

  Though he wore a bit more brown than she considered ideal (any brown at all was more than she considered ideal), she felt strangely drawn to him. When she realized he was hers for the taking, the joy was like a heroin rush.

  ‘Come and dance with me,’ she invited cheekily, and took his hand. Even though Thomas’s dun-coloured clothing seemed to stay in the one place while the rest of him attempted to dance, Tara’s world instantly became a sparkling, magical place. An alternative future had opened up for her. Alasdair was going to marry someone else, but there were other men who liked her. Who cared more about her than she cared about them. Who might eventually marry her. Her pain had stopped and she’d thought it never would. Thomas was her saviour. ‘There’s a Chinese proverb,’ she murmured, ‘that says, if someone saves your life, they own you.’

  Thomas nodded blankly, then nudged his mate Eddie and said, ‘She’s more pissed than I thought. I’m on a winner tonight.’

  They spent from Friday night to Monday morning in Tara’s flat, mostly in bed, but occasionally they got up to watch telly, Tara draped all over Thomas, snogging passionately, as Katherine and Liv tried to watch Ballykissangel and tune out the slurping noises.

  ‘They keep making the sound of a horse’s hoof being levered out of thick mud,’ Katherine said, when she rang Fintan to complain.

  Liv grabbed the phone from her. ‘There’s a thing in the bathroom, that has suckers, and it sticks to the washbasin. It’s to keep soap on,’ she told Fintan. ‘When you pull the suckers off the basin, that’s the noise Tara and this man are doing. Can we come over to your flat?’