‘Less of an accusation and more of an implication.’ Joe inclined his head. ‘But, yes, I remember.’
He didn’t laugh or make a joke and she realized she’d been hoping he would. He looked grim and serious and suddenly she saw it from his point of view. People lost their jobs for less.
‘I’d like to apologize,’ she said, feeling for the first time genuinely ashamed of it. ‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t true, and I should never have said it.’
His face was expressionless. ‘Apology accepted.
‘And,’ he continued, his brown eyes cool, ‘I owe you an apology. I came on too strong. I should just have taken no for an answer.’
That was the last thing she wanted to hear! ‘No, no!’ she protested. At his question-mark face, she almost lost her nerve and bottled out. Her voice emerged as a squeak, and she rushed into saying, ‘If that offer to go for a drink is still on the cards, I’d be delighted to accept.’
She squirmed in mortification. I hate you, Fintan O’Grady.
Joe looked at her, assessing her ruddy little face. She stared back, trying to read what was going on in his hard eyes, utterly despising her vulnerability as she waited. She abhorred being at someone’s mercy. Particularly a man’s. Worse still, a man that she fancied.
Finally he spoke. He said, his watchful eyes never leaving her face, ‘I’ll think about it.’
She thought she was going to kill someone. Nodding, flushed, forcing a smile, she got up, her knees trembling. Clumsy with rage and shock, she stumbled en route to her own desk.
She had to go out. She walked around Hanover Square and up to Oxford Street, mimicking, over and over again in a namby-pamby voice, ‘I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it.’
As emotion invaded her like a virus, she swore that Fintan O’Grady would pay for this.
She went back to the office, picked up her tap-dancing gear, which hadn’t been used since Fintan got sick, and went to the gym. She never usually had any truck with the gym, but she felt the need to pound the stuffing out of a punch-bag, seeing as it was illegal to do it to Joe Roth. Or Fintan O’Grady, for that matter.
The instructor tried to tell her that she hadn’t got the right shoes, but her rage was somehow very persuasive. And when she began, her forearms were a blur, as she belted the punch-bag again and again and again. With a furiously red face, she stood in little flared shorts and patent dance-shoes with a big bow across the instep and pounded out her terrible anger at Joe and Fintan and Tara and the person who’d made her this way in the first place.
People, mostly men, came to look. Such a slight girl, with such great strength! ‘She could box for England,’ one huge, muscle-bound jock commented, in admiration. Katherine stopped for a moment. Normally a grade three (deep contempt cut with savage antagonism) or grade four (deeper contempt cut with even more savage antagonism, often delivered with a silent snarl) would suffice, but, hell, this was no ordinary day. So she flashed him one of her grade five looks (an entrail-freezing promise of actual bodily harm), and permitted herself a smirk as he stumbled back in dazed shock. Then she started up again, pummelling away her vulnerability, the hot flush of exposure. Shunted it out of her, in the hope that she might feel like herself again.
Abruptly she stopped boxing, to the disappointment of the small crowd who’d gathered. She’d suddenly realized what she had to do. She had to leave and find someone. Someone who’d make her feel better. Someone who would make everything all right. Someone who always made everything OK, one way or another. Tara.
49
When Tara opened the door, Katherine nearly keeled over at the dreadful stench, but couldn’t let herself be distracted from her main purpose.
‘I’m sorry,’ Katherine said quickly, before Tara could slam the door in her face. ‘I’m sorry for the fight. I’m sorry for the terrible things I said to you. I’m really, really sorry.’ She swallowed the aching lump in her throat. ‘I got you these.’ She thrust a bunch of twenty-four-hour-shop flowers at Tara. Tara’s face crumpled. ‘I’m sorry they’re so cheap and nasty,’ Katherine’s voice quaked, ‘but all the other flower shops were closed.’
‘They’re lovely.’ Tara’s eyes swam with tears. ‘I’m sorry too, for the things I said to you, Katherine. I had no right.’
‘You had every right,’ Katherine exclaimed.
In a floodtide of sentiment, they body-slammed each other and hugged tightly, both of them sobbing, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh, Tara, be nice to me!’ Katherine begged into Tara’s neck.
‘Of course I will. What’s wrong?’
‘Joe Roth was horrible. I’m so humiliated! How can I ever go to work again?’
‘Oh, my God, you mean you did it… Oh, poor Katherine.’
Tara squeezed and rocked her in her arms until Katherine simply couldn’t bear any more.
‘Tara?’ she asked, in a little voice. ‘What’s the terrible smell?’
Tara sighed heavily, and her eyes were far away. ‘Come in and I’ll tell you all about it.’
Katherine followed her into the brown cavern.
‘I’ve done something that I shouldn’t have,’ Tara admitted. ‘But I was desperate.’
‘You haven’t…?’ Katherine was frightened. ‘You haven’t…?’
‘Haven’t what?’
‘You haven’t murdered Thomas?’
Tara laughed. ‘Not yet. No, it was my old trouble. Looking for a magic solution to my great girth.’
Katherine burned with shame. ‘I’m so, so sorry for what I said about you being… er… not thin.’
‘But it’s the truth,’ Tara admitted, ruefully.
She’d put on so much weight during the three weeks that Fintan was sick that on Friday morning, as Tara looked at herself in the mirror, the familiar panic took hold. She had to do something. She was constantly uncomfortable, everything was too tight, shirts stuck to her, jackets were so inhibiting she couldn’t lift her arms, waistbands cut into her so much that they hurt, she was always sweating. Clothes were her enemy.
Lots of people lost tons of weight, she consoled herself. Look at Oprah Winfrey. It can be done, but she needed it to be achieved quickly. After the toning-tables shambles, she’d been off snake-oil salesmen for a while. But desperate measures were called for. Again. ‘If there was such a thing as a back-street liposuctionist I’d have gone,’ she admitted.
Instead, she suddenly remembered a beautician’s near her work, which had a sandwich board outside, urging, ‘Perspire away those unwanted inches with a mud wrap.’ She almost wept with relief. She knew about mud wraps, and she liked what she’d heard. Being coated neck-to-toe in a warm, luxurious, chocolate-type substance, so that she became a human Bounty, all her fatness sweating away effortlessly, jumping ship from her lardy body into the thick, creamy mud sounded like heaven. Weight-loss and pampering all in one. What could be nicer?
She rang the beauty salon as soon as she got into work and they said they guaranteed a minimum loss of eight inches. Eight inches! Starry-eyed, thinking of losing four inches from her stomach and two from each of her thighs, she made an appointment for that lunchtime. And if it all worked out, she could go again on Monday and lose another eight inches and again the day after. And keep on going until she was as thin as her new friend Amy.
‘The old Chinese proverb springs to mind,’ Ravi said gravely, when she hung up the phone. ‘No pain, no gain.’
‘Mind your own business. This office is like a goldfish bowl.’
‘I was going to ask if you’d like to smell my Yorkie paper, but I won’t bother now. Have you got down on bended knee and proposed to Thomas yet?’
‘I was kind of hoping that if I de-larded myself enough he might propose to me.’ Then she laughed so Ravi wouldn’t think she was pathetic.
At twelve thirty, Tara bounded along to Poppy’s with a spring in her step. There she met a racehorse-thin white-coated beautician called Adrienne, who was so heavily made-up that if some
one had hit her on the back of her head, her foundation would have fallen off like a papier-mâché mask.
‘What do you work at?’ Adrienne asked, brusquely, when she’d marched Tara into a bare, chilly room.
‘Computer analyst,’ Tara answered.
‘You know, this isn’t my real job.’ Adrienne quivered with displacement. ‘I’m an actress, really. If there was any justice – but take it from me, there isn’t – I wouldn’t have to do this beautician stuff.’ At her bitterness, Tara’s mood dipped. It dipped even further when Adrienne ordered her to undress to her bra and knickers. The shame. ‘A bit like being strip-searched,’ Tara observed with a weak, nervous laugh, trying to deflect attention from her great wibbly-wobbly belly. Adrienne ignored her and pulled hard on both ends of her tape-measure, with barely suppressed resentment. Three years in RADA to end up doing this!
Then the measuring began.
‘Is this necessary?’ Tara asked anxiously. The disgrace of someone knowing her vital statistics.
‘How else will we know how many inches you’ve lost?’ Adrienne asked. Stupid!
‘OK, but don’t tell me how many inches my bum is. Or my stomach,’ Tara said, frantically. ‘Or my thighs. Or the tops of my arms. Or my –’
‘I won’t tell you anything,’ Adrienne cut in, wondering if the tape-measure would be long enough to do Tara’s hips. What was wrong with these fat girls? All they needed was a little willpower. A week’s starvation never hurt anyone.
In uncomfortable silence Tara was measured about forty different times – each arm alone was done no less than four times. With creeping dread she realized that if she lost a fifth of an inch from each measuring place, the promised eight inches wouldn’t be too hard to accumulate, but wouldn’t make much difference to her overall appearance. Oh dear.
When all the measurements were written down – this took some time – Adrienne approached Tara with a plastic bottle, the type that people like Katherine sprayed plants with, and squirted her with water. Tara jumped and yelped. She continued to wobble long after she’d stopped moving.
‘The hot water’s broken,’ Adrienne said, with bad grace, watching Tara shiver. My God, she thought in disgust, even when a goose-pimple popped on to the surface of this woman’s skin, it caused her flesh to sway like Stevie Wonder’s head!
‘Now for the mud.’
In every fantasy she’d ever had about mud wraps, Tara thought she’d be smothered in an unctuous, glistening cream and left to wallow in it like a happy hippo. Instead, as she stood shivering, Adrienne approached her with a mixing-bowl and a wooden spoon.
‘Making a cake?’ Tara joked.
Adrienne gave her a look of contemptuous pity, and scooped some warm, foul-smelling mix out of the bowl, then splatted it on to Tara’s thigh and used the wooden spoon to even it out. Daubing randomly, a stripe of smelly muck here, a stripe of smelly muck there, she emptied the bowl.
Tara looked down at herself, her white body criss-crossed with occasional brown stripes. I look like I’m on a dirty protest, she thought.
‘Now for the wrap,’ Adrienne said.
‘But I’m not all covered with the mud,’ Tara squeaked.
‘You don’t need to be.’
The ‘wrap’ turned out to be six tatty old salmon-pink bandages, the type that Tara’s mother used to practise her Order of Malta routine with. They were wound around Tara’s midriff, thighs and arms, then each one was secured with a big nappy-pin. Tara couldn’t bear to visualize what she looked like.
‘Next,’ Adrienne declared, ‘we put you into the special rubber suit, which heats up the mud, increasing toxin loss.’ Tara’s heart leapt with a fierce hope because this sounded scientific and viable. A lot more so than plastic plant-spraying bottles and Order of Malta bandages. But, to her great disappointment, the special rubber suit wasn’t a special rubber suit at all. It was just a cheap plastic tracksuit that a twelve-year-old girl might wear on a shoplifting expedition into town. She could have wept.
According to Adrienne, the de-larding process took about an hour to kick in. She left, leaving Tara lying on a table in the bleak little room, listening through the cardboard walls to the rhythmic rip of other people having their legs waxed, without even a copy of OK to take her mind off her ignominy. At one stage she dozed off, only to wake herself up with her own terrible stench.
Things got worse. After a while the bandages cooled and felt damp and cold under the tracksuit. The horrible feeling of soaked, clammy underclothes reminded her of days at school as a four-year-old when she’d wet her knickers and woollen tights but was carrying on as if everything was normal.
After an hour Adrienne came back, reclaimed the tracksuit, unpeeled the bandages and measured Tara again, this time pulling the tape-measure tourniquet-tight. ‘Oh, yes,’ she kept saying, as she squeezed Tara’s circulation to a standstill. ‘Much smaller.’ After she’d added it all up, she announced, ‘Eleven inches, you’ve lost eleven inches.’
‘Sure,’ Tara whispered. She might be fat, but she wasn’t stupid. ‘Where are the showers?’
‘No shower,’ Adrienne said quickly.
‘But I’m filthy!’ The gloopy mixture had dried and hardened on her skin and was flaking away with every movement.
‘Er… the mud will continue to detoxify you for another twenty-four hours,’ Adrienne insisted.
Oh, yeah? Tara’s face said. And this has nothing to do with the hot water being broken?
But after paying forty quid for the experience, she wanted to get every possible benefit from it. So the mud stayed on and she got dressed. Naturally she left a hefty tip, due to feeling inferior for being so much fatter than Adrienne. Then she left, her morale and hopes at rock bottom.
As soon as she returned to work, people began sniffing in alarm.
‘What’s that awful stink?’ Ravi demanded.
Tara sat very still at her desk, trying not to move, because she was shedding dried muck with every gesture.
‘Someone must have trod in dog do,’ Vinnie announced. ‘Everybody check your shoes.’
There was a flurry of people pushing themselves from their desks and examining the soles of their shoes.
‘You too, Tara.’ Ravi frowned.
Cautiously, slowly, Tara lifted her foot, but it wasn’t cautious or slow enough because a cloud of dust rose, obscuring everyone’s view of her.
‘What’s going on?’ Ravi demanded. ‘Have you just been exhumed?’ He came and stood beside her. ‘Eeee-oooo,’ he declared, dramatically pinching his nose. ‘Call off the search, everyone,’ he announced. ‘It’s Tara’s liposuction thingy.’
‘It wasn’t liposuction!’ Tara sat up and defended herself angrily, causing more dried muck to billow forth. ‘It was only a mud wrap. For my skin!’
God forbid that people would know to what desperate measures she’d gone to to lose weight.
Ravi made a big show of moving his desk. ‘I have to. I can’t concentrate due to the pong,’ he claimed.
In the end, by popular demand, Tara left work early, a trail of brown dust following her, as if she was rotting. ‘Don’t come back until you’ve had a good scrub,’ Vinnie ordered, wearily. It was bad enough to have four children of his own…
Tara went home. She should have gone to Katherine’s to pick up the O’Gradys and take them to the hospital. But she was too depressed – not to mention smelly. Alone and honking she sat in Thomas’s gloomy flat and tried to read Louise L. Hay’s You Can Heal Your Body, one of the many books on alternative healing they’d bought. But she couldn’t concentrate on it. Instead of visualizing Fintan’s cancer cells fading away to nothing, she found herself visualizing leaving Thomas. Too many thoughts had been planted by too many people for her to be able to continue completely immersing her head in the sand.
She loved Fintan. She really did. Now he was sick, possibly dying, and he wanted her to leave Thomas.
Reluctantly Tara admitted she could see how it looked to him. Compar
ed to the time she’d spent with Alasdair, her relationship with Thomas might seem a bit of an emotional route march. At least to the outsider.
She looked around the front room, imagining packing up her pictures and books and (four) CDs, pulling the front door behind her for the last time and going out alone into the big, bad world. It made her flinch and the fear welled up again. There was no way she could do it. Clutching at straws she remembered that Thomas might marry her. All she had to do was ask. But not just yet…
She longed for Katherine. She missed her and, for some reason, the anger she had felt for her had gone. Then the doorbell rang, and, as if her thoughts had conjured her up, there was Katherine, holding a tatty bunch of flowers and looking more distraught than Tara had seen her in a long time.
50
On Saturday afternoon Tara and Sandro brought Fintan home. He had spent nearly three weeks in hospital.
He looked atrocious and was so weak he had to lean on a male nurse and Sandro to get to the car park. Strictly speaking, at five foot four, Sandro was more of a hindrance than a help, but he insisted on supporting. And emotions were running too high to deny that kind of request.
Seeing Fintan framed by the outside world staggered Tara. She realized that you can get away with looking like you’re dying in a hospital bed: you kind of blend in. But it’s a different kettle of fish outside where people are, for the most part, healthy.
Tara noticed one good thing. Fintan was wearing the pistachio-green sheepskin coat he’d ‘borrowed’ from the stockroom at work. ‘Don’t suppose this’ll be going back now.’ Tara twinkled.
‘My redundancy package,’ he said, grimly.
Tara and Sandro exchanged an oh-yikes! look.
They arrived at the empty flat in Notting Hill to find that while they’d been out JaneAnn had gone on a Jif frenzy in honour of Fintan’s homecoming. Afternoon tea could have been taken on the rubber-tiled kitchen floor. JaneAnn had nearly worn holes in the Purves and Purves rugs with her enthusiastic Hoovering, and almost shone away the protective laminate from the polished concrete floors. The alabaster-framed mirrors were lucky not to have cracked from her energetic buffing.