Last Chance Saloon

by Marian Keyes

  Then Katherine said, ‘So, the usual, then?’

  ‘How about some extra garlic bread with cheese?’ Tara suggested.

  Katherine made the phone call, then all four of them settled down to watch The Ambassador.

  ‘This is great,’ Fintan observed, when the first lot of ads came on. ‘Good, clean, old-fashioned fun. Just like the old days.’

  ‘I really shouldn’t have ordered all that food,’ Tara interrupted, in a low voice, talking to herself. ‘I really shouldn’t.’ Her voice was getting louder. ‘I wish I hadn’t. Oh, God, I really wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘You don’t have to eat it,’ Katherine offered half-heartedly.

  ‘I have no choice,’ Tara hooted, hysteria putting in an appearance. ‘I have no bloody choice. Now that I’ve ordered it I won’t be able to stop myself from eating it. I haven’t an iota of willpower. But my entire future depends on it. Oh, my God.’ She choked. ‘What’s going to become of me?’

  With that she burst into face-in-hands, shoulder-shuddering tears.

  The pizza-delivery boy chose this moment to arrive, so while Tara was comforted by Katherine and Sandro, Fintan went down and dealt with pizzas and their payment. He couldn’t resist going to the gate to have one last quick look for his Viking. But Lorcan was long gone.

  As soon as it had started to rain, he’d hurried home. Lorcan was always reluctant to be out when it was drizzling because, despite the beauty and silkiness of his hair, it invariably puffed up into a big, frizzy ball within seconds of encountering precipitation. He was afraid of looking undignified by running, so by the time he reached his flat twenty minutes later, he could have doubled for Ronald McDonald. He had to wash his hair. As luck would have it, it was his night for doing a deep-conditioning treatment anyway. Even as Fintan was giving one last rueful look up and down the road, Lorcan was about to wrap a hot pink towel around his head. He rubbed the last of the conditioner into his ends. Because I’m worth it, he told himself smugly, smiling into the imaginary camera. Because I’m worth it.

  *

  Fintan went back in.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ Tara sobbed. ‘I’m just finding it a bit hard at the moment. What with Thomas and my birthday and being a fat cow and the awful day at the seaside and my indelible lipstick not being indelible! But everything will be OK when I’ve lost a bit of weight and knitted Thomas the jumper… I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ Fintan shushed her.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ Sandro comforted.

  ‘Not with us,’ Katherine assured her.

  ‘We’re your friends!’ they said in unison.

  14

  While Tara and Katherine had been best pals since their first week at school, Fintan was a relative newcomer to the friendship. They hadn’t bonded until they were both fourteen and he was fifteen. Of course, they knew him: it was a small town and you knew almost everything about your neighbours. Especially because Fintan had always been ‘different’ from the other boys. His kindness to his mother, his dreadful hand-to-eye co-ordination and his lack of enthusiasm for pulling the legs off frogs were testament to that.

  But it wasn’t until 1981 when he discovered the New Romantics that Fintan’s ‘specialness’ got out of hand altogether. (The New Romantic phase had arrived in the rest of the civilized world some time previously but Knockavoy was in a different time zone, about six to nine months behind.) Suddenly he was parading the two streets of Knockavoy draped in shiny yellow fabric. (Even then he was calling material ‘fabric’, a sure sign that a career in fashion awaited him.) He wore a silk headband around his asymmetrical bob, purple lipstick and earrings that he’d made himself by stealing feathers from his brother’s fishing kit, and dying them red and blue.

  ‘Fintan O’Grady’s had his ears pierced!’ The rumour spread from house to house like wildfire. There hadn’t been so much excitement since the last time Delia Casey had done something mad. There was great disappointment when it turned out the earrings were only clip-ons.

  Despite that, Fintan continued to intrigue the townsfolk. ‘Look at him,’ they muttered from the dim, low-ceilinged interiors of bars, shops and the sub-post office. ‘Strutting up and down like a paycock. And is that JaneAnn O’Grady’s good tablecloth he’s wearing? Jeremiah O’Grady must be twirling in his grave.’

  In the normal course of events Fintan could expect to be beaten to a pulp by the other young men of the town. Certainly there was bitter hostility. A couple of corner boys were moved to shout, ‘Ah, yuh maggot, yuh,’ at him, as he floated past in his saffron silkiness. One of them even went so far as to yell, ‘Yuh durthy bindher, yuh.’

  But when Fintan replied, ‘Oh, Owen Lyons, you weren’t saying that last Sunday up behind Cronin’s cowhouse. Or you, Michael Kenny,’ the crowd of lads abruptly ceased their accusations. Despite the flurry of panicky denials from Owen Lyons and Michael Kenny – ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about, the lying bindher’ – suspicion and fear of each other were cast into their midst.

  Fintan had a sharp and scathing tongue. He was tall and well-built. He had four older brothers who were also tall and well-built, and very protective of him. All in all, the lads of the town nervously decided, best to leave him be.

  Because he’d chosen the position of outsider, or had it thrust upon him, Fintan had no friends. Which tore lumps of anxiety out of Tara. ‘It’s desperate,’ she told Katherine, as they watched Fintan making his way up Main Street, assailed by daggers’ looks and an undercurrent of muttered insults. ‘He must feel awful lonesome.’

  A lightbulb sprang into life above Tara’s head. ‘I know! We’ll be his friends.’

  Katherine and Tara had recently emerged from the wilderness years of loathing and despising boys (traditionally between the ages of seven and twelve). At fourteen they were quite partial, at least Tara was and Katherine didn’t have any objection to them, though Fintan wasn’t a boy in Tara’s conventional interpretation of the concept – in other words, she needn’t hold out any hopes of getting off with him.

  ‘What do you want to be friends with him for?’ Katherine asked in a little voice, a cold lump of jealousy in her stomach. ‘Is it because he’s…’ she hesitated over the taboo word ‘… gay? Is it because the Limerick girls laughed at your sandals last summer?’

  Katherine yearned for Tara’s motives to be suspect. These were the days when a gay friend still carried kudos and novelty value. Having Fintan by one’s side was bound to impress visiting Limerick girls – possibly even Dublin girls. More so, even, than a sweatshirt with a pattern picked out in glitter and a pair of white tukka boots with fringes and beads.

  Tara was shocked by Katherine implying that Fintan was merely a fashion accessory. ‘No. It’s because he hasn’t any friends.’

  Katherine didn’t want to be convinced. ‘Anyway.’ There was a sour taste in her mouth. ‘He’s not gay at all. Sure, how could he be gay when there’s no one in Knockavoy for him to be gay with?’

  To her dismay this piece of astonishing information still didn’t put Tara off, and Katherine had to endure a couple of agonizing weeks while their alliance with Fintan was cemented. Mute with fear and misery Katherine was sure that the minute Fintan and Tara were officially pals they’d abandon her. With a rigid smile on her face, she yearned for reassurance from Tara, but didn’t know how to ask. ‘You and me will always be best friends,’ Tara had a murky inkling of Katherine’s distress, ‘but we can’t leave poor Fintan on his own.’

  ‘Poor Fintan, my foot,’ Katherine mouthed, with silent sarcasm. But to her surprise, she and Fintan hit it off like a house on fire. So well that Tara almost felt left out.

  Of course, both Katherine and Fintan had been brought up without a father – Fintan’s had died when he was six months old. And Fintan loved the way Katherine looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth yet could back-answer with the best. He had great plans to make her over as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
‘You’ve that small, neat Audrey Hepburn look about you,’ he told her. Tara tried to quell her envy.

  While Katherine was a bit doubtful at talk of wide-brimmed hats and Givenchy gowns, she was giddy with relief that Fintan approved of her. Now she had not just one friend but two!

  Although her friendship with Fintan didn’t go down so well with her granny. ‘Who were you out with?’ Agnes asked, one evening in early spring, when Katherine came in, her cheeks red with the cold.

  ‘Tara, and Fintan O’Grady,’ she said, unable to keep a hint of pride out of her voice.

  ‘Fintan O’Grady,’ said Agnes. ‘Tell me now, why does he dress up in JaneAnn’s dressing gown?’

  ‘Because he’s gay,’ Katherine explained.

  ‘Gay!’ Agnes objected angrily. ‘Well, how do you like that? Gay, no less.’

  Katherine and Delia were astonished because Agnes was usually such an easygoing old woman.

  ‘I’ll give him gay where he’ll feel it,’ she threatened.

  Delia was appalled and already planning a Cake Sale Against Homophobia. ‘Mama… I mean Agnes, you’ve got to learn not to be so bigoted. Fintan’s entitled to express his sexual preferences…’

  ‘I’m not talking about his sexual preferences,’ Agnes exploded. ‘I couldn’t give a fiddler’s about his sexual preferences. For all I care he can do it with the hens and good luck to him! They might lay better. I’m talking about “gay”. It used to be such a lovely word.’ Her face took on a dreamy expression. ‘When people visited my mother, God be good to her, she’d be sitting there in the corner by the fire and they’d say to her, “Wisha, Maudie, but you’re right gay. As gay as the feather of a hearse.” Meaning she was looking well and happy, like. But you couldn’t say that now, of course, you’d be shot!’

  However, Tara’s mother, Fidelma, was charmed by Fintan. When he arrived with Tara and Katherine after school, he’d sit on the settle-bed, girlishly tuck his legs up under him, smoke Woodbines through an ebony cigarette holder and discuss films with her. While Tara’s three younger brothers, Michael, Gerard and Kieran, stuck their heads into the room and sniggered at the strange, exotic creature, Fidelma and Fintan held forth on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and La Dolce Vita and other films that Fidelma had seen when she worked in Limerick, before she married Frank and moved home to Knockavoy.

  Tara’s brain usually glazed over during the interminable reminiscences, but it was worth it to see her father wigging out. She loved it when he came into the room and hissed furiously at Fidelma, ‘Is that gombeen allowed to smoke? I’m sure JaneAnn O’Grady doesn’t let him.’

  And she loved it even more when Fidelma replied equably, ‘I’d say there isn’t much that JaneAnn O’Grady doesn’t let him do.’

  Frank Butler was a very bad-tempered man. He was an autocrat and a patriarch and everyone was afraid of him. Nothing made him happy. He and his brother had a tiny business where they worked cutting and selling turf. With the result that whenever there was a mild winter, and everyone else was thanking God for it, Frank Butler was railing against it in fury. ‘Lovely day,’ he mimicked, when he overheard his wife talking to someone about the unusually clement elements. ‘Lovely day. Well, you wouldn’t think it was so fecking lovely if you saw our order book.’

  ‘I still have the geese and the turkeys,’ Fidelma soothed him.

  ‘That’s your money,’ he pointed out, wildly. ‘That’s supposed to be your money. Have you any sewing jobs?’

  ‘A few,’ Fidelma said mildly.

  ‘What?’ Frank demanded. ‘Who? It’d be a godsend if you could get something big like a curtains job for the hotel.’

  ‘It would,’ Fidelma agreed. She didn’t want to tell him about Fintan arriving at the house, with a bolt of shiny magenta lining under his arm and a request that Fidelma sew him a kind of cloak-type effort, to a pattern he’d drawn up himself.

  Despite his phenomenal unpleasantness, Katherine secretly idolized Frank Butler. With all his rules and intractability he was a man after her own heart. Frank Butler was particularly non-negotiable on the question of homework. One of Katherine’s biggest worries about losing Tara was that she wouldn’t be able to go to Butler’s every afternoon after school to bask in the atmosphere of tension.

  She often lay awake at night, dreaming of a father shouting at her for not having done her exercise. Of a patriarch questioning her on her homework every evening: ‘How many yards to a mile?’, ‘What year was the proclamation of the Republic?’, ‘What’s the capital of Lima?’ Although she had been very embarrassed for Mr Butler when Tara had finally managed to get him to understand that Lima couldn’t have a capital because it was a capital.

  Delia, Katherine’s mother, defiantly refused to check that Katherine had done her homework. ‘That’s no way to teach children,’ she said repeatedly. ‘Instilling fear and trepidation into them, getting them to parrot stuff by rote. If they’re interested in something they’ll learn it, and if they’re not interested, then there’s no point in forcing them.’

  Katherine begged her to reconsider.

  15

  Something roused Lorcan Larkin from a deep sleep. Automatically, he did the first thing he did every morning as soon as he woke up – he grabbed his penis to make sure it was still attached.

  It was, and he sank back with familiar relief.

  The room was in darkness, and his body was telling him it was the middle of the night. What had woken him up?

  There was no one he could ask because, unusually for Lorcan, he was in bed alone.

  On Friday night, when he’d turned up at Amy’s birthday party so late that almost everyone else had gone home, she’d been hysterical with fury. He’d grinned, given her his what-can-I-say? shrug, said, ‘I’m starving,’ and shoved one of the few remaining by now curling-at-the-edges sandwiches into his perfect mouth. To his surprise she’d had the temerity to screech at him to put it down, that he’d got all he’d ever be getting from her, that she’d never been so humiliated and that she never wanted to see him again.

  ‘And you,’ she shrieked, turning her attention to Benjy, who’d been sampling the remains of a tray of canapés, leave my food alone and get the fuck out!’ Benjy paused, a mini-quiche the size of a tenpence piece hovering three inches from his mouth. Should he risk it? Perhaps not, he thought, on reflection. Amy wasn’t in her right mind, there was no knowing what she might do.

  ‘Sure, if that’s what you want.’ Lorcan gave her a huge, white-toothed smile. He was very angry, but he was damned if he was going to show it.

  ‘Will we be off?’ he asked Benjy, making it sound as if he was choosing to leave. Benjy stared like a rabbit at Lorcan, not knowing the right answer. He tried a very tentative nod. Luckily that was the correct response.

  ‘Come on,’ said Lorcan, and marched through the room, grinding torn streamers into the carpet, kicking withered-looking balloons out of the way, Benjy scurrying behind him.

  Of course, a few hours later Amy had changed her mind and when Lorcan woke up on Saturday morning his answering-machine was full of ever-more-desperate messages from her.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Please call me.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Please, please call me!’

  ‘Listen to this,’ he said scornfully to Benjy, who’d slept on the couch. ‘Grovel, girl, grovel!’

  Benjy, who’d spent the night two feet from the phone and answering-machine, had already heard every one of Amy’s messages. ‘Are you going to call her?’ he asked, uncomfortable with the agony in Amy’s voice.

  Lorcan looked as disgusted as if Benjy had just asked him to eat his own spleen. ‘Ring her? After what she did to me?’

  ‘It was her birthday,’ Benjy pointed out, in a small voice. ‘You were very late.’

  ‘Whose goddamn side are you on?’ Lorcan asked coldly, and Benjy shut up.

  The messages continued over the next thirty-six hour
s and, on Sunday night, while Lorcan deep-conditioned his hair, Amy rang repeatedly. Sometimes she hung up and sometimes she left a message. ‘If you’re there, please pick up the phone,’ she begged, trying to tamp down her hysteria. ‘You must have got my messages by now. And if you haven’t, where are you?’

  Lorcan heard the terror in her voice and he nodded in grim satisfaction. That would teach her to shout at him in front of everyone. To attack him and tell him it was over. To upset him so much that he couldn’t let Benjy go home until Sunday afternoon.

  Over the weekend his anger had become even more defensive and his position as the wronged party got further and further entrenched. By the time he went to bed on Sunday night he felt like the most maligned person in the universe. Wrapped in a pink towel and a cocoon of sanctimonious self-righteousness, he slept deeply.

  But now he was awake.

  He looked at his alarm clock: it was ten past four. What had woken him? It certainly wasn’t the guilty whisperings of his conscience. Because he hadn’t got one.

  As he lay in the dark, holding on to his penis, he was surprised to hear his doorbell ring. It was then that he realized it had already rung a few minutes before. That was what had woken him up.

  Who could it be? Let’s see, he thought sarcastically, might it be Amy? Or on the other hand, of course, it might be Amy. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman had arrived in person in the middle of the night, deranged and demented from him refusing to take her calls. Well, she could wait, Lorcan decided. Why should he put her out of her misery? She’d told him she never wanted to see him again. She’d hurt him.

  But the doorbell rang again and Lorcan began to think about answering it. She was obviously sorry and maybe she’d suffered enough. When it rang once more he got up.