by Marian Keyes
The Christmas-party season couldn’t have come at a better time for Tara. All the alcohol and high spirits kept her one step ahead of her demons. ‘Though I have to admit I’m a human Third World country from it all,’ Tara said. ‘I’m skint!’
‘You’re always skint,’ Katherine reminded her.
‘I’m worse than usual. Drink and taxis and… drink and taxis. And clothes, of course. I might have to cut my credit cards up again.’ Tara couldn’t stop buying clothes. Though it was cold comfort, she was able to fit into things that wouldn’t have gone near her six weeks previously. ‘A couple more weeks of this agony,’ she winced, then forced a smile, ‘and I’ll be able to wear jeans. Look at the lovely skirt I bought for our department lunch tomorrow.’
‘Fabulous,’ Katherine admired. ‘Where’s it being held? Somewhere nice?’
‘Actually, no.’
It had been decided to hold their department lunch in-house because it had been impossible to secure a booking at any of the local restaurants. Either they were already booked out or else word had reached them of the performance GK Software’s development department had put on last year, when the lunch had spilled over to the evening bookings and a hard-core of eight or nine rowdies had still refused to leave.
Even now, nearly a year later, one of the local Polish restaurateurs blessed himself and crossed the road rather than walk past the offices of GK Software and its savage staff.
This year’s lunch began sedately enough. Every woman left her desk at ten thirty to get ready even though kick-off wasn’t until one o’clock. No work was done all morning, on the pretext that everyone was so excited. Of course no one was excited, but they recognized a chance to swing the lead when they saw one.
‘What d’you think, Ravi?’ Tara asked, modelling her new skirt.
‘What am I looking at? Clothes or lipstick?’
‘Lipstick, shlipstick! I’m afraid that self-renewing one wasn’t exactly the final solution. Suckered once more.’
‘Oh, Tara, I’ve something for you.’ Ravi rummaged around in his desk drawer. ‘This could be the answer to all your problems. Here it is.’ He brandished something torn from a magazine. ‘Tattooing! On your lips. There’s a place in California that can colour your lips in permanently. Sounds bloody grim, but at least you’d never have to worry about your lipstick coming off again.’
‘Thanks, Ravi, but no.’ Tara was deeply touched. ‘It’s very sweet of you to bother, but what, for example, if I wanted to try a different colour –?’
‘Sorry. I just thought it was worth a try.’
‘Oh, but it was!’
At one o’clock, thirty people piled into the boardroom for sherry, reheated turkey and shoddy crackers. Everyone drank enthusiastically. As usual Tara and Ravi sat next to each other and batted funny comments back and forth.
‘Look at Vinnie.’ Tara laughed, her face flushed. ‘He’s twisted. Even his scalp has gone red.’
‘He doesn’t get out much so he’s lost the skill of drinking.’
‘Pour us another sweet sherry there, Ravi, good man.’
‘Just the one,’ he said in his mincing ‘lady’s’ voice and they clinked glasses coyly.
At some stage, responsible people like Vinnie went back to work, but several more stayed where they were, Ravi and Tara in the thick of them, spirits high.
However, at about half past four a combination of not having eaten for several weeks and having more alcohol than blood in her circulatory system meant things suddenly turned ropy for Tara. She started to cry about Fintan, then about Thomas, then about Fintan again. ‘’Sawful,’ she wept. ‘’Sunbearable. Whaf he dies? Doan say he woan cos he’s prolly goan to. ‘Slike a knife through my heart. Worse than losing Thoms, miles worse.’ Then she looked at Ravi beseechingly and said, ‘Ravi, ‘mgoing to puke.’
‘Gangway!’ Ravi bellowed, as he half dragged, half carried Tara to the ladies’. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, to the startled trio of girls from the payroll department who were preparing in front of the mirror for their department dinner. ‘It’s an emergency.’
‘We can see that,’ they said, jumping nimbly out of Tara’s way.
‘That’ll be us in a couple of hours,’ one of them said hopefully, watching Ravi as he held Tara’s hair back from her face while, into the sink, she parted company with her sherry.
‘C’ngo home, pliz, Ravi?’ Tara begged him when she’d finished. ‘Will you take me?’
‘Course. Stay here and I’ll order a taxi. Keep an eye on her,’ he told the payroll girls.
The moment Ravi was gone, one of the payroll girls whipped a tube of toothpaste from her bag and insisted that Tara rinse her mouth out with it. ‘Off!’ Tara flailed weakly with her hand.
‘He’s cute,’ the girl insisted.
‘’S not cute. ’S Ravi.’
But the mouth-washing was a pointless exercise because no sooner was it done than Tara threw up again. And again.
When the taxi arrived, Sleepy Steve knocked on the door of the ladies’ toilet.
‘Before we go, do you need to… again, you know…?’ Ravi asked discreetly. But no, Tara was all puked out, for the time being anyway. She was in floods of tears again, however.
The door opened and in swept Amy, willowy and gorgeous. ‘Tara,’ she gasped, ‘what’s wrong? Why are you crying?’
Though she hadn’t seen her in ages she hadn’t forgotten how nice Tara had been after she’d set the police on Lorcan.
‘M’ friend’s dyin’ an’ ‘sail over with m’ fella.’
Amy seized on the worst piece of news. ‘Oh, no. That’s terrible. It’s all over with your boyfriend. Oh, you poor, poor thing.’ Then she had a wondrous, joyous idea. ‘I know! My boyfriend has a lovely friend. You’d be just right for each other. His name is Benjy, well all go out in a foursome in January.’
‘Sounds nice,’ Tara said, through her tears. ‘Does’t it, Ravi?’
‘Great.’
‘So long as you don’t fall in love with Lorcan.’ Amy giggled nervously.
‘’Slong’s I doan.’
Ravi assisted Tara, weeping and shambolic, through the reception area, where a cluster of smartly dressed men from the payroll department was about to depart for their dinner. They looked open-mouthed at the bleary-faced state of Tara.
‘Something she ate,’ Ravi said stoutly.
But as Ravi helped Tara down the short flight of stairs that led from the reception area to the exit, Tara began to heave again.
‘Just a minute…’ Ravi gasped, looking around in panic for something for Tara to vomit into. ‘Try not to –’
But it was too late, Tara was unable to stop herself from puking the last of her sherry on to the small metal handrail that ran beside the steps. ‘Sorry, Ravi,’ she said, thickly. ‘I’m ’sgusting.’
‘You’re OK, sweetheart,’ Ravi soothed, hoping to Christ that the taxi-driver wouldn’t refuse to take them. ‘Could someone clean that up, please,’ he called over his shoulder. But, of course, no one did. The staff from the payroll department had no intention of running the risk of splashing someone else’s puke on to their good going-out clothes. If anyone’s puke was going to be splashed on to them it would be their own.
Seconds later Alvin Honeycomb, the managing director of GK Software, rushed out of the lift and into the reception area. Tall, distinguished of temple (grey, in other words) and handsome, he swept through in a navy cashmere overcoat, carrying a clunky briefcase and an I’m-a-busy-and-important-man air. He, too, was on his way to a function. ‘Night all,’ he called, in his deep, mellifluous tones as he galloped towards the exit. He prided himself on being pleasant to his staff and waited to hear the chorus of ‘Goodnight, Mr Honeycomb.’ He always ran down the short flight of stairs to the exit, as though doing a dance. A flurry of perfect little steps executed in his soft, slip-on Italian shoes, that led him on to the street, invariably just in time to hail the empty taxi that would be approaching. But this night,
as he placed his hand on the railing to begin his little tap-dance into the street below, he connected with some of Tara’s recently regurgitated sherry. To Mr Honeycomb’s great alarm, his arm whooshed straight to the bottom of the rail, carried on a tide of vomit, the rest of him following rapidly, as though he’d just dived into a swimming-pool. His feet tried and failed to regain contact with the steps, and before he knew it he had tumbled down the entire seven steps and rolled into the street below, sustaining a bruised shoulder and a nasty crack to his chin. His briefcase skittered across the icy pavement, and for a few moments he remained sprawled, balanced on his chin, his arse in the air, too stunned to get up. A well-dressed couple en route to a work do sighed as they stepped over him and said, ‘Honestly, some people take this Christmas thing too far. They shouldn’t drink if they can’t handle it.’
The following morning when Tara woke up she didn’t feel too bad. There was a faint buzzing in her head and she couldn’t really feel her feet on the floor but she was able to get up, shower, get dressed and organize her new slinky black dress and black wedge sandals for that evening’s party.
Then she drove to work, strangely disconnected from what she was doing. When she got in, she passed Mr Honeycomb on the stairs. How did he get that big cut on his chin? she wondered vaguely. Probably out on the piss and fell flat on his face. A fine example to be setting his staff.
With shrugs and smiles she deflected the torrent of concerned inquiries from everyone in her section. ‘Thanks,’ she mouthed at Ravi, grateful that for some reason guilt and shame didn’t seem to be a problem. She was mercifully numb.
Until she found that someone – probably Vinnie – had booked her in for a ten o’clock appointment with two irate punters. In fact, they were already there, hanging around and looking indeed irate, as advertised. Just as well she’d managed to come in, instead of spending the day lying in bed roaring for a basin, as one might have expected.
But just as Tara was welcoming them into the meeting room, it suddenly dawned on her that she was still very, very drunk. Not only that but she was actually slurring her words. ‘Mishter Forde, Mishter Ransome, pleashe take a seat.’
Her tongue had swollen up to mammoth proportions and she could hardly unpeel it from the roof of her mouth. She began to sweat with fear. ‘Yesh, I quite undershtand your complaints about the servish we’ve been providing,’ she said desperately.
Was this a dream? she wondered.
She couldn’t defend herself. She couldn’t think of the right things to say. Her central nervous system was broken, the signals that normally zinged from one nerve-ending in her brain to another were bogged down in some treacle-like substance.
The little room was way too hot.
And then she smelt it. An odour that wasn’t ever appropriate in the meeting room, and certainly not at ten fifteen in the morning.
Alcohol. She could smell alcohol. Warm and rank. Exuding from her fear-enlarged pores.
Enough, she decided, there and then. That’s enough. She’d had her mandatory, post-split-up, drinking and partying, self-destructive spree. But now it was time to try to stop.
67
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!’