Don't You Forget About Me Read online

  Robin shakes his head.

  ‘Do you think I care more about Lou? Is that it? That she’s eclipsed you? That’s not how men see sex.’

  ‘Oh, God, Robin, you’re not listening: get lost …’

  ‘Men and women, we’re totally different about it.’

  ‘Please!’ Even though I shouldn’t be baited, I let myself be baited.

  ‘We just are! There’s these ants that scientists have been studying, right. They get possessed by a fungus. The brain is still the ant’s brain, but the fungus is in control of its cells. The brain is in the driving seat but the fungus has the wheel. A man’s libido is a lot like that. We may know it’s wrong, and have strong feelings for someone else entirely. But when it’s offered, we have sex. Nine times out of ten, we take it,’ Robin says. ‘The fungus has the wheel.’

  ‘You’re seriously saying a takeover by hostile brain fungus made you have sex with someone else? Are you practising material on me?’

  ‘No!’ Robin rakes at his hair theatrically and tries to put his hand on the worktop, but the toaster is in the way, ‘Having a penis, and a job where you meet willing women, is like being tied to the village idiot during a beer festival. It’s relentless.’

  ‘And, what, women don’t have the same urges, that they can choose to act on, or not?’

  ‘They do, but I think women are less overwhelmed by them. More capable of being sensible. I include Lou in that; she had no idea how you felt. She said she’d never have slept with me if she’d known.’

  ‘Oh God, how convenient. Women should’ve stopped you. This is Rav’s cookie jar.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, as anthropologically fascinating as this Men Are From Mars chat is, I don’t know why you’re telling me this. It’s irrelevant. I don’t know how many times I can tell you. We’re done.’

  ‘Listen. Maybe it didn’t come across enough but I am fairly fuckin’ crazy about you, Georgina Horspail.’

  Robin’s genuinely got my name wrong in this declaration. I work hard to keep my face straight, as there’s no way he’s finding out what he just did, and having it for his act. This priceless jewel is destined for my friends’ collection of treasured Robin mementoes.

  ‘I don’t care. Now, I need to go to sleep, so if you wouldn’t mind,’ I hustle Robin out of the door, ‘Cheerio and thanks for the nice thoughts.’

  As he starts to walk away, Robin turns, stagily, thoughtful finger to lips. Like Columbo trying to wrong-foot a suspect who thought the interrogation was over, and relaxed.

  Robin’s planned every part of this, I realise – from throwing stones, to the ant fungus speech, to this pretence of an impromptu parting shot. Which means he knew I’d probably turn him down.

  ‘Georgina, I know I was wrong, to do what I did with Lou, but I can’t help feel this has come along at the right time, to give you a reason to go. It’s finding an unlocked door when you were rattling the handles, looking for an exit anyway.’

  ‘Given what I walked in on, more like opening an air lock on a plane. So what?’

  ‘My point is. Before this happened. Were you actually in love with me, did you want serious commitment?’

  Oh so this was Robin’s whole game here. If I don’t feel enough to take him back then ergo he didn’t do anything wrong.

  I’m far too tired and disorientated – not only by being woken, but by everything: having spent six months with someone I can’t fathom, don’t like, and brutally, I am noticing, don’t remotely fancy, plus family, plus Lucas – to know whether concession is a wise idea, if it plays into Robin’s hands. I just want him to go away and stay gone away. And my pride won’t allow me to play him back and claim I did care. As he knows, that’s a green light for him to carry on pestering me.

  Ugh, the manipulation.

  I shrug.

  ‘No, not really. As it turns out.’

  ‘Then what I did didn’t matter, did it?’

  ‘Not now, it doesn’t.’

  I shut the door and lock it.

  17

  Your real problems are never the things you fret most about. This has an upside – sometimes you’ve fretted without cause.

  My first shift at the Wicker is uneventful, and almost entirely devoid of Lucas. Not that that stops me from flickering and crackling like a faulty radio signal the whole time I’m there. I’m so desperate to prove him wrong in his initial prejudice that I make myself a model employee: diligent, quiet, hardworking, has to be told to take a break. Devlin is clearly slightly disconcerted that The Game Girl At The Wake has disappeared and tries to jolly me out of it. Eventually I accept that Lucas isn’t judging me, he isn’t noticing me at all. I am performing for no audience at all, or certainly not the one intended.

  In what becomes a pattern during my next few shifts, he stays in the background while Devlin and I handle a steady trickle, soon a flood, of punters. The pub is in that tricky transition of shooing away the old undesirable clientele while letting the new ones know they’re not what they were. It’s got an Under New Management sign outside.

  Yet my good fortune couldn’t last forever. As you might expect from a calendar date celebrating the birth of Satan, I discover at the last minute I’ll be working Halloween alone with Lucas McCarthy, as fifty per cent of the management will be in another country. And not just any Halloween: it falls on a Friday night this year.

  ‘I know it’s inconvenient as hell but I’ve got to dash back to the motherland. Sick child,’ Devlin explains to me. ‘It’s not fair to leave my wife on mopping-up duty any longer.’

  ‘Your family isn’t in Sheffield with you?’

  ‘Hahaha no, God no. Mo wouldn’t wear it. We have a four-year-old lad and a four-month-old. Did I not say? No, Luc and I have several boozers over there, too. The plan eventually is for this to be up and running without us and we’ll oversee it from over there. Although I dunno what Lucas wants to do, what with everything that’s happened. And he’s not got any squeakers, like me.’

  I don’t ask what he means by ‘everything that’s happened’, though I am violently curious. I don’t want to pry. Or more accurately, I don’t want the image of someone who’d pry. Lucas can’t claim I’ve been gossiping about him.

  I’d feared that Lucas would scrutinise my work in this first shift of just the two of us and hang over me, given he’d never wanted me here in the first place. Again, the opposite turns out to be true.

  Lucas has barely laid eyes on me, giving me a wide berth. It’s like we have separate dance spaces, he keeps rigid control, never stepping into mine.

  It might be a little more difficult to avoid me all evening, though.

  ‘Are we doing anything special for Halloween?’ I ask Lucas as we set up the back of the bar.

  ‘No, nothing special, the usual. Cotton wool across the bar taps, spiders in the plant pots, fancy dress, “Thriller” on the speakers. I’m doing a few bowls of punch with gummy worms in, and so on. Keith’s going to wear devil horns.’

  He gestures at Keith in his basket. (As Official Pub Dog, he is already a colossal hit. ‘And getting steadily fatter on contraband peanuts; the vet is going to flay me,’ Lucas says.)

  My mouth falls open. Fancy dress?

  ‘What are you here as?’ He looks my black-jeans-black-t-shirt up and down, leaving me feeling seen and yet wanting. ‘I’ve got a Beetlejuice suit going spare. You could hairspray your hair up.’ Lucas studies it. ‘Bit of talc.’

  I hate antics. And with him? I’m going to feel the very dickhead.

  ‘I do ask you stay in character throughout the evening. Can you do a Beetlejuice voice?’

  A smile flickers onto his face and I finally twig he’s winding me up. I wouldn’t have been so slow, but I’m on hyper alert around him. My appalled expression softens.

  ‘Oh, you SWINE.’ I get my first ever Lucas grin in return. I didn’t know his face could still do that. It radically alters it.

  ‘Heh.’

  ‘I believe
d you for a moment!’

  ‘Nah, nothing, not even a carved pumpkin. To be honest, theme or no theme, it’s early days so it’s hard to call if we’re going to be rammed or not.’

  For the first hour or two, it seems ‘not’, and then things gather pace. Lucas has been letting me serve alone and leaving me to myself, but we’re sufficiently full by 8 p.m. that this is no longer an option. Apart from the occasional muttered ‘Excuse me’ ‘No after you’ when we’re reaching for the same bottle, there’s not much chat.

  There is the excruciating moment when I bend down and my backside collides with something solid, and when I straighten I see it was Lucas. There’s more padding on me than when we dated and I feel like a panto dame. He moves away from the scene of the collision with a humiliating speed.

  Then there’s a lull, and we’re forced to find some conversation. This is the real problem with working for the McCarthys – I have no blank slate (or, it might be blank for him, it’s full of scrawl for me). It makes moments that should be easy or neutral, a minor agony.

  ‘Lot of effort for Devlin to go back and forward to Ireland,’ I say. ‘I didn’t realise his kids were over there, that must be tough.’

  ‘It’s only an easyJet flight away, not too arduous,’ Lucas says. ‘He lives in central Dublin, so it’s not much of a hike on the other side.’

  ‘Still, when your child’s sick, you want to be with them as soon as.’

  ‘And he is with them.’

  ‘Ehm, OK. Was only expressing sympathy,’ I say, no longer able to hide my irritation.

  I see Lucas see this and take a breath and rearrange his attitude a little. ‘I don’t mean to snipe at you. It’s a sibling thing. Dev’s the impetuous one who acts on instinct and I’m the one who generally gets invited to clear up afterwards. I didn’t think it was the right time to be expanding the mini empire to South Yorkshire, with his family commitments. He convinced me it’d be a breeze, us knowing the city from when we were kids. He said we needed a change of scene. Dublin’s great but it’s small when you’ve been there as long as we have.’

  This sounds just slightly ominous to me. Angry creditors? Scorned women?

  ‘But Dev’s done the “whoops would you mind” dropping a custard pie on my feet a few too many times to me lately. Things are a bit strained.’

  He means me! I strained things. I am a custard pie. I even have custard-coloured hair.

  ‘Oh, I see. I didn’t know.’

  ‘No, well. Why would you.’

  I get the impression Lucas meant this to be conciliatory statement of fact, but it doesn’t land as completely without rancour.

  I shuffle uneasily, arranging and rearranging the paper straws in their holders on the bar. The end of this shift can’t come fast enough.

  ‘I don’t mean I mind him being with Oscar, I should add. I’m just not the right person to muse on Poor Dev at the moment.’

  I nod.

  ‘He has two kids, he said?’

  ‘Oscar and Niamh.’

  We’re drawn away from a discussion that’s bringing pleasure to neither of us, to witness the sight of a dozen girls pouring through the door. They’re in angel wings, football skirts and Aertex t-shirts saying BEC’S HEN, and commandeer a large booth in the window, throwing down their paraphernalia and accessories with the entitlement of a gang walking onto their own yacht.

  ‘What’s our policy on stags and hens?’ I mutter.

  One of the women screeches with delight at the sight of wobbling penis deely boppers hauled out from a bag and handed around like Academy Award statuettes. The phalluses are glittery and protrude from gobbets of cerise fluff. Humans are strange, really.

  ‘We don’t have one. I have a feeling we will do, by the end of the night.’

  ‘I’m surprised they’d come to a place like this for a hen?’ I say.

  Lucas gives me a grim look.

  ‘You know why, don’t you?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Cos they’ve probably been told no everywhere else?’

  It’s a rule of restaurants that your spunkiest spenders are the most trouble. I guess there’s some justice in that, effort versus reward, only if you’re not the proprietor, you’re not seeing any of the latter.

  And let me tell you this, as immutable law: the bigger the table, the smaller the tip. Something to do with diffusion of responsibility, Rav reckons.

  So BEC’S HEN are pouring profits into The Wicker with their unslakeable prosecco thirst, but from my point of view, there’s not much of an upside to catering to their whims and shouting to be heard over their squawking. They end up with table service, as we’re quite keen on a herd and trap where they stay in their designated area and cause minimal disruption.

  I’ve got a system going where one of them snaps fingers and points at the upside-down bottle in the ice bucket. I collect it from their table, along with their card for contactless, returning shortly after with a fresh fizz and a receipt to prove I’m not skimming.

  ‘Give it here,’ Lucas says on the fifth go-round, ‘You’ve got your hands full.’

  I watch him set the drink down on their table and soon several of the women have their hands full of Lucas McCarthy. They snake round his jeans, up and down his legs and – I can’t help but notice from my point of view behind the bar – rather fine denim-clad behind, as if he’s surrounded by Hindu goddesses, or has fallen into a mosh pit.

  Woah. I can’t see what’s happening at the front but I can’t imagine they’re showing much restraint there, either.

  He detaches them with some difficulty and backs off, to shrill whooping and cat calling. I feel a little discomfited by it: it’s not as if groping and harassment gets much better when you swap the sexes. He got molested.

  ‘Let me go deal with them next time,’ I say to Lucas.

  He replies: ‘I can cope, thanks,’ in a way that seems terse and defensive rather than grateful.

  I can’t get the measure of Lucas, at all. He’s at turns standoffish, slyly funny, dour, mischievous, helpful, haughty. It’s behaviour borne of beauty privilege, I decide, watching him from the corner of my eye, watching the women, watch him.

  You don’t get treated in standard fashion when you look like Lucas McCarthy. The rules are different. You’ve got women falling over themselves to understand your complexities and decode your dark moods. When you have his jaw and brow, hair the colour of petrol, eyes with depths you can swim in, it’s not common or garden ‘grumpy’. It’s a brooding saturnine countenance.

  It isn’t: What’s got into that mardy arse?

  It’s: Ooh. What’s up with HIM?

  However, Lucas McCarthy, as Mrs Pemberton said – pretty faces grow old too.

  Maybe the years of being overlooked and marginalised at school curdled into some deep resentment, and now he cuts a swathe through the beauties of the Emerald Isle, letting his contempt show after he’s completed his conquest.

  I smile to myself, imagining him in one of those romance novel paperback covers – shirt open, manly arms trapping a wayward, headstrong damsel in a crushing embrace. The Irish Publican’s Virgin Bride.

  I keep thinking it’s a shame if he’s grown hard and cold, but maybe I need to face up to the fact that he probably always was.

  As the night enters its final furlong, Lucas breaks it to me that he’s leaving me alone for half an hour to take Keith to stay at a friend’s. He goes into a degree of detail I wouldn’t have deemed necessary about why he has to do it now, given he’s the boss, which only leaves me wondering if he’s spinning a yarn to avoid me.

  ‘Sorry to leave you on your own, it’s not fair. This is why I wasn’t down with Devlin’s brilliant tactical maverick understaffing.’

  I shake my head: ‘It’s fine, go.’

  Though I can’t tell how much this is authentic concern for me and how much was a chance to knock his brother. (That said, the very thought of working with Esther …)

  ‘Sheila’s Wheels, over t
here,’ Lucas nods towards the hen, and I laugh, ‘As long as they’re not disturbing anyone else, keep serving them, though it’s incredible they’ve not keeled over. How many Nebuchadnezzars of prosecco is it now? Nine? OK.’

  After a shaky start, I think I can grow to like him as a boss. He might not be all over me trying to be my best mate, but this starchy professionalism is preferable anyway. Whenever anyone acted like your mate at That’s Amore! they were either trying to get into your knickers or swap for a Bank Holiday shift.

  At gone ten, shortly after Lucas has left, the door slaps open like a saloon bar in a western, with a gust of icy air, and a man in a high end Halloween costume enters. He’s got a blond wig with a ponytail, fake armour, a large red cape spilling down his back. He raises a large foam hammer and says, using a cod-dramatic voice: ‘I’m looking for BECKY!’

  Oh, God.

  The hen do erupts into excited shrieking and the warrior makes his way over to their table.

  ‘Becky?’ he booms.

  ‘Yes yes it’s me!’ A woman with a bridal veil attached to an Alice band half stands, at the back of the semi-circle, and windmills her arms.

  ‘Hello, Becky, I am Thor. Do you like my hammer?’

  Becky’s near hyperventilating in her desire to let it be known that she likes his hammer.

  Thor puts down a Bluetooth portable speaker that he had secreted somewhere about his person, and Sisqo’s ‘Unleash The Dragon’ blares out.

  Aw God no! A stripper?!

  He starts swinging his hammer from side to side.

  ‘You’ve heard of RAGNAROK! Well who wants to see RAGNACOCK?!’

  18

  There’s deafening screaming and the rest of the pub is split between those who’ve abandoned their drinks to watch and those who’ve simply abandoned their drinks, got up and left. We may well not get these people back again. The Wicker is in the reputation-making phase. This is a disaster.

  I have to intervene. For self-interest if nothing else – I can’t have Lucas walk in to find me standing watching some bloke with his wang out. I could be sacked. ‘Well, Devlin, that girl I said was best suited to Hooters? She had a fella wafting his hot rod round the place within minutes of being left in charge.’