She hovered on the brink, trembling with desire and possibility. Then, with a rumbling in her ears, a tidal wave of adrenaline whooshed through her, carrying along everything in its path, and she was tearing open the packet with shaking fingers.
It was like a dogfight, the hand-to-mouth action a blur, as crumbs, chocolate chips, stray nuts and the torn wrapper went flying. She was transported, almost ecstatic, though she barely tasted anything she put in her mouth – it wasn’t there long enough for her taste-buds to get a grip on it. Strictly through-traffic only.
But, so quickly, it was all over. Sanity returned, and with it came shame. Although her acute anxiety and hunger had been sated, she felt wretched. She slunk to the checkout, horribly ashamed of the empty packaging in her trolley, mortified as the girl bipped it over the electronic reader. But if she’d tried to dispose of the evidence by hiding the wrappers, she might have been done for shoplifting. She was just the type who’d be caught.
What had she been thinking of? she wondered miserably. Had she gone mad? A whole day’s attempted starvation wiped out in a ten-minute frenzy. Look at the amount of saturated fat she’d just consumed. What about her diet? What about her good intentions? All her hard work? Hadn’t she nearly gone to a step class that day, and was all that effort to come to naught?
She found the young man staring at her again, and she no longer thought he fancied her. Then she remembered Thomas. And terror arrived.
She’d shouted at Thomas, and she’d broken her diet. She was not just fat, but a termagant as well. What had she done? Things were way too delicate to chance telling Thomas he looked like a goldfish. Shaking with fear and sugar-overload, Tara drove home. She had so many additives in her bloodstream that if she’d gone apeshit with a shotgun in a public place there wasn’t a jury in the land who’d have convicted her.
Thomas was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking heavily, Beryl crouching beside him in her basket. He looked up with anxiety as Tara came in. ‘Hello,’ he said, with a sweet, nervous little smile.
‘I’m sorry I shouted at you.’ She prostrated herself, so conditioned to him having all the power that when it fell into her hands she assumed it was a mistake and returned it immediately to its rightful owner, as if it was a wallet she’d found in the street. ‘If you’re furious with me I don’t blame you. I’m extremely sorry, and you have my word that I’m starting a very strict diet tomorrow.’
With each contrite word, Thomas’s subdued air evaporated and his swaggery arrogance returned. His chest visibly expanded, and his meek, hangdog face became just a distant memory. By the time Tara told him about Fintan’s kiwi-neck, Thomas was once more sure enough of himself to say, ‘With all his carry-on, he’s lucky it’s just his neck that’s giving him grief.’
22
Lorcan Larkin was an actor. It was what he purported to do for a living, as well as how he conducted his private life.
In his twenties and early thirties he’d been extremely successful in Ireland, the equivalent to a superstar. He’d set the stage ablaze in The Playboy of the Western World and Juno and the Paycock, eclipsing the rest of the cast. He’d been unpopular with other actors anyway, and after that they hated him.
For a few years he’d starred in an Irish soap, playing a philandering rake. Which was extremely handy because he was able to excuse his appalling behaviour off-screen by saying he was a method actor. Despite the capriciousness of his television character (which was only a watery imitation of the real thing) Lorcan was a huge sex-symbol. Fêted and drooled over. He met the Taoiseach and the President and it was a poor day that he didn’t receive a pair of knickers in the post. Even when the tabloids published a bitter tirade from the wife who’d supported him through the lean years and whom he’d abandoned as soon as the good times began to roll, adulation for him didn’t waver. But, for Lorcan, it wasn’t enough – nothing ever was. He felt uncomfortable about his success with the Irish. They hadn’t a clue, he suspected. OK, so they’re one of the most articulate and literate nations on earth, but he needed to be endorsed by people who really, you know, mattered.
So, about four years earlier, amid a media circus, he took his leave of Ireland. ‘I’m not getting any younger,’ he joked with the journalists. Although he didn’t mean a word of it – he thought he was immortal.
Then off he went to Hollywood to show them how it was done. He reckoned it would be only a matter of days before he was lounging beside his very own azure-blue swimming-pool, drowning under scripts, beating off directors with sticks.
However, it came as a very unpleasant shock to discover that Hollywood had reached its quota of sexy Irishmen. Three was reckoned to be enough. Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne did the trick nicely, thanks very much. Apparently Scottish actors had become the current flavour of the month, with Hollywood unable to get enough of them. Briefly, Lorcan considered changing his name to Ewan.
Undaunted, he accepted the part of a gay cyber-vampire biker in an art-house movie where the walls fell over every time someone closed a door. And for which he was never paid, as the money ran out less than half-way through shooting. Hot on the heels of that success he was offered a part – the starring role, actually – in an adult film when a director noticed in a men’s room that Lorcan had the right credentials for the job.
Then he was no longer undaunted. Then he was very daunted indeed. The only azure-blue swimming-pools he’d come within an ass’s roar of were the ones he ended up cleaning for a living.
The day finally came, during his fourteenth month of ‘resting’, when he was forced to admit that things hadn’t worked out – he just couldn’t bring himself to use the word ‘failed’. He was living in a roasting hot, airless, twelve by twelve room with a ‘window effect’ – no window but a closed plastic blind hanging on a square of the bare concrete wall – in Little Tijuana. Marshmallow Cheerios had been his breakfast, lunch and dinner for the past week. His car had been reclaimed, so that he had to ride the bus three hours across town to get to auditions. Not that there were many auditions – Lorcan was such an undesirable in Hollywood he probably wouldn’t have been able to get arrested.
Up until then, success had followed him, magnet-like. Realizing it had abandoned him caused excruciating agonies of terror and insecurity. His ego was so big yet so fragile that he always needed more than everyone else did just to tick over. More success, more acclaim, more money, more women. It was imperative to leave this place where he was a nobody.
He had just about enough money for his plane fare back to Europe. But there was no way he was going home to Ireland. Not after the way they’d lied to him, telling him he was a star when he clearly wasn’t. Instead he went to London, hoping to hide his humiliation in its vastness. He moved into a tiny, dingy room in Camden, where his flatmate was an affable, tubby man called Benjy who earned his living processing parking fines.
Then Lorcan desperately set about trying to recover lost ground and his sense of self by making disdainful noises about the trash being made in Hollywood. ‘The stage has always been my first love,’ he insisted in the Guardian. That was the Camden Guardian, the only paper interested in the fact that he was making a home in London. (And then only because he lived next door to their office.) ‘No, really, it has.’ Lorcan’s confidence had been badly dented in Hollywood, but he got an agent and began going to auditions in London. However, the world of acting is incredibly sensitive and can spot the merest whiff of loserism at a thousand paces. Astonishingly good-looking, almost threateningly sexy, there was nevertheless the faintest aura of the has-been about Lorcan. Some unkind people went even further and identified it as the scent of the never-was.
No one wants to be associated with that. It might be catching. So while the casting girls were perfectly happy to sleep with Lorcan, they weren’t so keen on giving him a part in their production. Pride kept him going. That, and the fact that he was equipped for nothing else. He had no choice but to pick himself up after every knockback
and try again.
So far, during the two years he’d been in London, he’d auditioned for Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello. After ten months of rejection, he finally got a part. In The Bill. Imaginatively cast as an IRA bomb-maker, and the only line he got to say was, ‘Jaysus, dey’re on to us. Run, Mickey!’
Much to his disappointment this tour de force didn’t open any further doors and beneath his smart-arse, arrogant exterior, he was in torment. He hated not being the most admired, the most sought-after, the most in-demand. Yet all wasn’t lost – he might have been without the roles or the money or the kudos but there was no doubt that he still got the girls. It was the only area of his life that still worked, a microcosm of how he wished everything else to be.
With women, Lorcan could wield his beloved power with a free hand. Of course it wasn’t much of a challenge making girlies cry but it was better than nothing. It was safe and he’d always be the winner. As the months passed without another part, it became very difficult to make ends meet. In fact, ends were barely on nodding terms with each other. Bitterly, resentfully, he got a job as a waiter. He, the great Lorcan Larkin, reduced to dishing up spaghetti carbonara to peasants. How are the mighty fallen. Luckily he was sacked within the week for having an attitude problem. (The manager just couldn’t get Lorcan to understand that if someone asked for a second cup of coffee, the correct response was ‘Certainly, sir, coming right up,’ and not ‘What did your last slave die of? Get it yourself.’)
He had no choice but to look for an alternative form of income.
He could have gone the gigolo route. There were enough rich older women in London who would keep Lorcan in a style to which he could quickly become accustomed. While he, in return, would provide sexual services. But he just couldn’t stomach it.
He had no objection to sleeping with them, but only on his terms. However, six months ago came a week where three good things happened for him. First, he got a job doing voice-overs for the Irish tourist board, which wasn’t exactly ‘smell-of-the-greasepaint-roar-of-the-crowd’ territory but it put beer in the fridge. The following day, he managed to get a housing-association flat in Chalk Farm – his own place. (Benjy was heartbroken.)
And then he met Amy.
He and Benjy were at a party when they first saw her.
Benjy took one look at her long, willowy limbs, her pure, radiant face, her tendrils of red-blonde hair, and thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. ‘Look,’ he gasped, and elbowed Lorcan.
‘I thought you were a tit-man.’ Lorcan sounded unimpressed.
‘Not really. I’m an anything-man,’ Benjy said mournfully. ‘An anything-I-can-get man.’
‘Well, may the force be with you. And remember what I’ve told you. Act shy. Be bashful.’
‘I can’t possibly go and speak to her.’ Benjy was horrified.
‘Why not? You fancy her.’
‘That’s exactly why.’
‘Go on, my son,’ Lorcan urged, giving Benjy a little push in the back.
So, with quaking legs, Benjy crossed the room and made his pitch. Lorcan leant against the wall and watched the girl through almost-closed eyes. What’s sauce for the goose was sauce for the… other goose.
All too soon, Benjy was back, red with mortification. Acting shy only worked when the man was extraordinarily handsome. Otherwise he just seemed like a geek.
‘How did you get on?’ Lorcan patronized him by asking.
‘She patted me on the head and told me I was a pet.’
‘I think we’ll both agree that that wasn’t the desired response,’ Lorcan said. ‘OK, now watch how it should be done. Look and learn. Because I’m a woman whisperer.’
‘What the hell’s that?’ Benjy demanded angrily, terrified that Lorcan was going to snatch Amy effortlessly from under his snub nose.
‘Like the horse whisperer, except instead of getting messed-up horses eating out of my hand, it’s messed-up women.’
‘She’s not messed-up,’ Benjy said hotly.
‘Oh, but she is. That sweet face, all that niceness, she’s just a bit too eager to please,’ Lorcan said thoughtfully.
‘Not to me, she isn’t,’ Benjy retorted bitterly.
Timing was everything. So Lorcan waited until every other man in the room had made his move. He knew she’d seen him. He was so tall it was hard to miss him, and he’d caught her glancing at him once or twice.
He didn’t march straight up to her and demand attention – a good-looking man who’s arrogant often scares the girls away. But a good-looking man who’s vulnerable is on the home stretch. So the contact he made with her was seemingly accidental, under the guise of helping the host collect glasses and empty cans. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but do you know if this is an empty?’ Lorcan asked, his purple eyes intense with contrived vulnerability.
When she nodded, he said haltingly, ‘You know… I mean, you’ve probably heard it before… No, no, nothing, sorry. Forget I said anything.’ And he made to move away but by then he had her interest.
‘No, please, say what you were going to say,’ she said.
‘Ah, no.’ He shuffled in a triumph of gawky body language. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘You can’t just start saying something then stop.’ Her blue eyes pleaded up at him.
Lorcan looked away, swallowed, then blurted out, ‘OK. You’re probably sick hearing it, but can I just say that you’ve the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen.’ He had the handy gift of being able to blush on cue.
‘Thank you,’ Amy said, also blushing.
‘I’d better…’ he made an awkward gesture with the empty glasses, followed by a shy smile ‘… you know, put these in the kitchen.’
Ten minutes later, when Amy put a cigarette into her mouth, Lorcan belted through the crowds in a great display of clumsy haste. He fumbled for his special lighter, and clicked it under her nose. When – as planned – the lighter didn’t work, he allowed a brief spasm of horror to cross his face. Then, holding Amy’s gaze, burst out laughing. Ruefully, he lied, ‘It was working five minutes ago.’ It hadn’t worked for two years.
‘Isn’t it true,’ he sighed, ‘these things always let you down when you’re trying hardest to make an impression?’ Then he shrugged, ‘Sorry,’ and moved away, leaving Amy staring longingly after him. A short time later, as expected, she came after him. He was home and dry. Elation tingled through him. God, he loved this! No one could touch him. He was the master, truly the master!
The following day Amy called an Extraordinary General Meeting of all her friends. ‘I felt terribly embarrassed for him,’ she exclaimed. ‘The look on his face! He actually blushed. It meant ever so much to him to light my cigarette. And he’s so drop-dead gorgeous it hurts, when you see him, you simply won’t believe what a babe he is. How about it? A good-looking man who’s also thoughtful and vulnerable. I know it’s very soon and perhaps I’m ever so slightly jumping the gun, but I honestly think he might be…’ she paused and exhaled shakily ‘… The One.’
A few days later when Benjy realized that Amy was to be Lorcan’s girlfriend he went into a decline. ‘I thought it was just a case-study,’ he said, reeling from shock and jealousy. ‘I thought you only slept with her to show me how it’s done.’
‘Really, Benjy.’ Lorcan tutted in disapproval. ‘What a thing to say. That’s no way to treat people!’
23
The first summer that Fintan, Tara and Katherine were pals was a magic time – though Frank Butler declared Fintan O’Grady was a very bad influence. He declared it long and loud to anyone who’d listen in O’Connell’s snug. Not that he drummed up much support for his cause.
‘Sure, what harm is he doing?’ Tadhg Brennan asked, visualizing Fintan in batwing sleeves and harem pants. ‘He livens the place up. Anyway, ‘tis only a phrase he’s going through.’
‘And when he’s finished going through his phrase, phase, he’ll have my daughter well and truly corrupted.’
Frank’
s buddies fell silent. It wasn’t fair to blame Fintan O’Grady. Tara Butler would have been corrupted sooner or later. Even aged fourteen she had that look about her.
She was highly popular with the local gurriers, who made a full-time job of wearing flares and leaning against the corner of Main Street and Small Street – professional corner boys, who could probably put it on their CVs.
‘Here’s my chest, the rest is coming.’ They’d nudge each other, when they saw Tara approaching.
‘You’re a fine hoult of a woman,’ they’d shout, as she swept past, curvy and sexy, her nose in the air. ‘I wouldn’t mind having you in my herd. Will we go away and find a gable end?’
‘Romance Knockavoy style.’ Katherine laughed.
No one suggested that straight-up-and-down Katherine was a fine hoult of a woman. In fact the corner boys sometimes shouted after her, ‘G’wan, yuh dhroopy dhrawers. I’d sooner coort a shtick.’
Tara was worried about her. ‘Do you mind…?’
‘Do I mind what?’
‘That they don’t say…’ Tara faltered ‘that they’d like you in their herd.’
The look Katherine gave her redefined the concept of scornful.
‘No? Good,’ Tara murmured nervously.
As a fourteen-year-old Tara was very interested in lads, though she’d have nothing to do with the locals. She lived for the summer months, when the famine became, if not quite a feast, then certainly a square meal, with a fresh batch of boys arriving at the caravan park every week. Tara and – to a lesser extent – Fintan had their work cut out to get around to everyone.
‘No one goes home disappointed!’ Fintan was fond of saying.
During the evenings that went on for ever, Tara, Katherine and Fintan sat for hours on the sea wall in the pinkish light, until the sun finally got around to setting far out to sea.
‘Over there’s America,’ they were fond of saying. ‘Next stop New York.’ Then they’d strain their eyes, in case, shimmering on the horizon, they could see the top of the Statue of Liberty.