Last Chance Saloon

1

At the chrome and glass Camden restaurant the skinny receptionist ran her purple nail down the book and muttered, ‘Casey, Casey, where’ve you got to? Here we are, table twelve. You’re the -‘

‘- first to arrive?’ Katherine finished for her. She couldn’t hide her disappointment because she’d forced herself, every fibre in her body resisting, to be five minutes late.

‘Are you a Virgo?’ Purple Nails swore by astrology.

At Katherine’s nod, she went on, ‘It’s your destiny to be pathologically punctual. Go with it.’

A waiter called Darius, with dreadlocks in a Hepbumesque topknot, pointed Katherine in the direction of her table, where she crossed her legs and shook her layered bob back off her face, hoping this made her look poised and unconcerned. Then she pretended to study the menu, wished she smoked and swore blind that the next time she’d try to be ten minutes late.

Maybe, as Tara regularly suggested, she should start going to Anal Retentives Anonymous.

Seconds later Tara arrived, uncharacteristically on time, clattering across the bleached beech floor, her wheat-coloured hair flying. She wore an asymmetrical dress that glowed with newness, sang money and – unfortunately – bulged slightly. Her shoes looked great, though. ‘Sorry I’m not late,’ she apologized. ‘I know you like to have the moral high ground, but the roads and the traffic conspired against me.’

‘It can’t be helped,’ Katherine said gravely. ‘Just don’t make a habit of it. Happy birthday.’

‘What’s happy about it?’ Tara asked, ruefully. ‘How happy were you on your thirty-first birthday?’

‘I booked ten sessions of non-surgical face-lifting,’ Katherine admitted. ‘But don’t worry, you don’t look a day over thirty. Well, maybe a day …’

Darius bounced across to take Katherine’s drink order. But when he saw Tara a look of alarm flickered across his face. Not her again, he thought, stoically preparing for it to be a late one.

‘Veen-ho?’ Tara asked Katherine. ‘Or the hard stuff?’

‘Gin and tonic.’

‘Make it two. Right.’ Tara rubbed her hands together with glee. ‘Where’s my colouring book and crayons?’

Tara and Katherine had been best friends since the age of four, and Tara had a healthy respect for tradition.

Katherine slid a colourful parcel across the table and Tara tore the paper off. ‘Aveda things!’ she exclaimed, delighted.

‘Aveda products are the thirty-something woman’s colouring book and crayons,’ Katherine pointed out.

‘Sometimes, though,’ Tara said, pensively, ‘I kind of miss the colouring book and crayons.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Katherine assured her. ‘My mother still buys them for you for every birthday.’

Tara looked up in hope.

‘In another dimension,’ Katherine said quickly.

‘You look fantastic.’ Tara lit a cigarette and wistfully checked out Katherine’ s claret Karen Millen trouser suit.

‘So do you.’

‘In my arse.’

‘You do. I love your dress:

‘My birthday present to myself. D’you know something?’ Tara’s face darkened. ‘I hate shops that use those slanty forward mirrors, so you think the dress makes you look slender and willowy. Like a poor fool I always reckon it’s because of the great cut, so it’s worth spending the debt of a small South American country on.’ She paused to take a monumental drag from her cigarette. ‘Next thing you know, you’re at home with a mirror that isn’t slanty forward and you look like a pig in a frock.’

‘You don’t look like a pig.’

‘I do. And they wouldn’t give me a refund unless it had something wrong with it. I said it had plenty wrong with it, it made me look like a pig in a frock. They said that didn’t count. It needed something like a broken zip. But I might as well wear it seeing as I went up to my Visa limit to buy it.’

‘But you were already up to your Visa limit.’

‘No, no,’ Tara explained earnestly. ‘I was only up to my official limit. My real limit is about two hundred quid above the one they set me. You know that!’

‘OK,’ Katherine said, faintly.

Tara picked up the menu. ‘Oh, look,’ she said in anguish. ‘It’s all so delicious here. Please, God, give me the strength to not order a starter. Although I’m so hungry I could eat a child’s arse through the bars of a cot!’

‘How’s the no-forbidden-foods diet going?’ Katherine asked, although she could have guessed the answer.

‘Gone,’ exhaled Tara, looking ashamed.

‘What harm,’ Katherine consoled.

‘Exactly.’ Tara was relieved. ‘What harm indeed. Thomas was raging, as you can imagine. But really! Imagine a diet that tells a glutton like me that nothing is forbidden. It’s a recipe for disaster.’

Katherine made murmury soothing noises, as she had every time over the past fifteen years when Tara had fallen off the food wagon. Katherine could eat exactly what she liked, precisely because she didn’t want to. From her glossy exterior she looked like the kind of woman who never had struggles with anything. The cool grey eyes that looked out from underneath her smooth dark fringe were assured and appraising. She knew this. She practised a lot when she was on her own.

Next to arrive was Fintan, whose progress across the restaurant floor was observed by the staff and most of the clientele. Tall, big and handsome, with his dark hair swept back in a glossy quiff. His bright purple suit had buttonholes punched all over both sleeves, through which his lime-green shirt winked and twinkled. A plane could have landed on his lapels. Discreet murmuring of, ‘Who’s he . ..?’ ‘He must be an actor …?’ ‘Or a model …?’ rustled like autumn leaves, and the feel-good factor amongst the Friday-night diners experienced a marked surge. Truly, everyone thought, this is one stylish man. He spotted Tara and Katherine, who’d been watching him with indulgent amusement, and gave a huge smile. It was as if all the lights had been turned up.

‘Gorgeous whistle.’ Katherine nodded at his suit.

‘A noice, clarssy set of freds,’ replied Fintan, trying and completely failing to sound like a Cockney. There was no disguising his rounded County Clare accent.

Though it hadn’t always been that way. When he’d arrived in London, twelve years previously, fresh from small-town repression, he’d set about reinventing himself with gusto. The first port of call had been the way he spoke. Tara and Katherine had been forced to stand by, helplessly, as Fintan had peppered his conversations with camp ‘Oooohhh, you screaming Mary!’s and ‘Meee-yow!’s and wild talk of dancing with Boy George in Taboo.

But in the last couple of years, he’d gone back to his Irish accent. Except with some modifications. Accents were all fine and dandy in his line of work, the fashion industry. People found them charming – witness J.P. Gaultier’s, “Ow bar you, my leetle Breetish chums?’ But Fintan also realized the importance of being understood. So nowadays the brogue he spoke in was a kind of Clare Lite. Meanwhile, the twelve years had effected a mild-to-moderate urbanization of Tara and Kather­ ine’s accents.

‘Happy birthday,’ Fintan said to Tara. They didn’t kiss. Although Tara, Katherine and Fintan kissed almost everyone else they met on a social basis, they didn’t kiss each other. They’d grown up together in a town that didn’t go in much for physical affection -the Knockavoy version of foreplay was the man saying, ‘Brace yourself, Bridie.’ All the same, that hadn’t stopped Fintan trying to introduce the continental-style, two-cheeked kiss into their Willesden Green flat, in their early days of living in London. He even wanted them to do it to each other when they came home from work. But he’d met with strong resistance, which deeply disappointed him. All his new gay friends had indulgent fag-hags, why hadn’t he?

‘So how are you?’ Tara asked him. ‘You look like you’ve lost some weight, you lucky thing. How’s the beriberi?’

‘Playing up, taking it out of me, it’s in my neck now,’ sighed Fintan. ‘How’s your typhoid?’

‘I managed to shake it,’ said Tara. ‘Spent a couple of days in bed. I’d a mild bout of rabies yesterday, but I’m over it now.’

‘Making those kind of jokes is downright evil.’ Katherine tossed her head in disgust.

‘Can I help it if I always feel sick?’ Fintan was outraged.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said simply. ‘If you didn’t go out and get slaughtered every night of the week, you’d feel a whole lot better every morning.’

‘You’ll feel so guilty when it turns out I’ve got Aids,’ Fintan grumbled darkly.

Katherine went pale. Even Tara shuddered. ‘I wish you wouldn’t joke about it.’

Tm sorry,’ Fintan said humbly. ‘Blind terror is a divil for making you say stupid things. I met this old pal of Sandro’s last night and he looks like a Belsen victim. I hadn’t even known he was positive. The list just keeps on growing and it scares the living bejaysus out of me …’

‘Oh, God,’ Tara said quietly.

‘But you’ve nothing to be scared of,’ Katherine interjected briskly. ‘You practise safe sex and you’re in a stable relationship. How is the Italian pony, by the way?’

‘He’s a beeyoootiful, beeyoootiful boy!’ Fintan declared, in a boomy, theatrical way that had the other diners looking at him again and nodding in satisfaction that he was indeed a famous actor, as they’d first suspected.

‘Sandro’s grand,’ Fintan continued, in his normal voice. ‘Couldn’t be better. He sends his love, this card …’he handed it over ‘. ..and his apologies, but as we speak he’s wearing a jade taffeta ball gown and dancing to “Show Me The Way to Amarillo”. Maid-of-honour at Peter and Eric’s wedding, do you see.’

Fintan and Sandro had been going out with each other for years and years. Sandrowas Italian, but was too small to qualify for the description of ‘stallion’. ‘Pony’ just had to do. He was an architect and lived with Fintan in stylish splendour in Notting Hill.

‘Will you tell me something?’ Tara asked carefully. ‘Do you and the pony ever have rows?’

‘Rows!’ Fintan was aghast. ‘Do we ever have rows? What a thing to ask. We’re in love.’

‘Sorry,’ Tara murmured.

‘We never stop,’ Fintan continued. ‘At each other’s throats morning, noon and night.’

‘So you’re cracked about each other,’ Tara said wist­ fully.

‘Put it this way,’ Fintan replied, ‘the man who made Sandro did the best day’s work he’ll ever do. Why are you asking about rows, anyway?’

‘No reason.’ Tara handed him a tiny parcel. ‘This is your present to me. You owe me twenty quid.’

Fintan accepted the parcel, admired the wrapping, then handed it back to Tara. ‘Happy birthday, doll. What credit cards do you take?’

Tara and Katherine had an arrangement with Fintan where they bought their own birthday and Christmas presents. This came about after Fintan’s twenty-first birthday party when they’d nearly bankrupted themselves buying him the boxed set of Oscar Wilde’s work. He’d accepted his present with fulsome thanks, yet a peculiarly expressionless face. And some hours later, when the partying was more advanced, he’d been found sobbing, curled in a foetal ball on the kitchen floor, amongst the ground-in crisps and empty cans. ‘Books,’ he’d wept, ‘fucking books. I’m sorry to be ungrateful, but I thought you were going to get me a rubber T-shirt from John Galliano!’

After that night, they’d come to their current arrangement.

‘What did I give you?’ Fintan asked.

Tara ripped off the paper, and displayed a lipstick within.

‘But this is no ordinary lipstick,’ she said excitedly. ‘This one really is indelible. The girl in the shop said it’d survive a nuclear attack. I think my long search is finally over.’

‘About time,’ said Katherine. ‘How many fakes have you been persuaded to buy?’

‘Too many,’ Tara said. ‘With their promises of lip-staining and colour-fastness, and the next thing there they are all over the side of my glass or on my fork, just like an ordinary lipstick. It’d make you cry!’

Next to arrive was Liv, in an I-might-have-to-murder-you­ for-it Agnès b coat. She was very label-conscious, as befitted someone who worked in the world of design, albeit as an interior decorator. Liv was Swedish. Tall, with strong limbs, dazzling teeth and waist-length, poker-straight, white-blonde hair. Men often thought they recognized her from a porn film.

She’d arrived in Tara and Katherine’s lives five years previously when Fintan left to move in with Sandro. They’d advertised for a new flatmate but weren’t having much luck in persuading someone to take the tiny bedroom. And didn’t hold out any hope that this Swedish woman would. She was just too large. But the moment Liv had realized they were Irish -better still that they were from rural Ireland – her blue eyes lit up, she reached into her bag and handed over the deposit.

‘But,’ Katherine said in surprise, ‘you haven’t even asked if we have a washing machine.’

‘Never mind that,’ Tara said, badly shaken. ‘You don’t even know how far away the off-licence is.’

‘No problem,’ Liv said, in her slight accent. ‘Such things are not important.’

‘If you’re sure …’ Tara was already wondering if Liv had any Swedish men friends living in London. Tanned, blond giants that she’d bring around and introduce.

But a few days after Liv moved in, the reason for her enthusiasm became clear. To the alarm and consternation of Tara and Katherine, she asked if she could accompany them to Mass, or join them for the evening rosary. It turned out that Liv was searching for some kind of meaning to her life. She’d temporarily run aground on the rocks of psychotherapy, was hanging all her hopes on spiritual enlightenment, and hoped that the girls’ Catholicism might rub off on her.

‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ Katherine gently explained, ‘but we’re lapsed Catholics.’

‘Lapsed!’ Tara exclaimed. ‘What are you talking about?’

Katherine looked surprised. She certainly hadn’t seen any signs of a recent renewal in Tara’s faith.

‘Lapsed isn’t a strong enough word!’ Tara finally elaborated. ‘Collapsed would be more like it.’

Liv eventually got over her disappointment. And although she spent a disproportionate amount oftime discussing reincarnation with the Sikh newsagent, in most other ways she was perfectly normal. She had boyfriends, hangovers, threatening letters from her credit-card company, and a wardrobe full of clothes that she bought in the 70-per-cent-off sales, then never wore.

She shared the flat with Tara and Katherine for three and a half years until she decided to try and banish her existential ache by buying a place of her own. But she’d spent every evening of her first six months as a home-owner around at Tara’s and Katherine’s, crying and saying how lonely it was living by herself. And she’d still be at it, if Katherine and Tara hadn’t moved out of the flat and gone their separate ways.