Last Chance Saloon Read Online Free PDF Page B

lovely underwear,’ Tara suggested.
    ‘I’m fine without one.’
    ‘But so many lovely knickers,’ Tara said, ‘and no man to see them. I think it’s sad.’
    ‘I don’t think it’s sad,’ Katherine replied. ‘And they’re my knickers.’
    ‘But I do.’
    ‘Then you should get help for it.’
    ‘I don’t need help,’ Tara said, dizzy with gratitude. ‘I have a boyfriend.’
    ‘But what if it ended…?’ Katherine stirred, with quiet mischief.
    ‘Stop!’ Tara declared, in passionate horror. ‘What would I be like?’ She thought about it for a moment. ‘I’d become such a weirdo.’
    ‘Here we go again.’ Katherine sighed.
    Tara feared that boyfriendless women in their thirties became eccentric, more and more so as they continued further into their single state. Developing odder and odder habits, coiling ever more tightly in on themselves. And if the perfect man eventually came along, Tara reckoned they’d be too trapped in themselves to be able to reach out and accept the hand that was stretched in liberation.
    ‘I’d probably become one of those fruit-loops who collect rubbish,’ Tara said. ‘Who hoard everything from potato-peelings to decade-old newspapers.’
    ‘You’re nearly that way as it is,’ Katherine said.
    ‘I’d never open my door to the health visitors,’ Tara wenton, locked into her apocalyptic vision. ‘And you’d be able to smell my flat a hundred yards away. That’s what I’d become without a man.’
    ‘Just as well you have one, then,’ Katherine said.
    The bell rang, indicating Tara’s taxi had arrived.
    ‘Cripes, I’m sorry, Katherine, if I’ve offended you.’ Tara was suddenly mortified. ‘You’re my best friend and I love you and I wasn’t implying that
you’d
become a weirdo…’
    ‘No offence taken, now off you go. I’ve got a date with my remote control. But before that,’ Katherine added, ‘I’ve got to wash my hands fifty times and iron all my tights. Us single women! Martyrs to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.’

5
    Tara sat in the taxi, smoked, stared into the middle distance and felt guilty. Not only was she a despicable, needy-for-a-man wimp, but there was a chance – admittedly small – that she had upset Katherine. Katherine was so well balanced and independent that Tara sometimes forgot she had emotions at all.
    But when the taxi turned into Alasdair’s street, Tara forgot about Katherine. Instead she sat up and paid attention. She couldn’t help herself. Searching for a glimpse of him, she stared up at his windows. They were in darkness, and the taxi passed too quickly for her to establish whether it was because Alasdair and
his wife
were in bed or out on the tiles.
    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 bludehquid 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