Last Chance Saloon Read Online Free PDF

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 Taramove 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 flickedup 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