Don't You Forget About Me Page 6

  ‘… Richard Hardy?’ Jo whispers, quizzical, but respectful. Oh God. The danger of someone having known me this long.

  As soon as I’ve started this conversation, I realise I don’t want to have it, not now, not ever. The name being spoken has caused my insides to seize up. I make an indistinct ‘mmmm’ noise.

  ‘I see his photos sometimes. Is it Toronto where he lives now?’

  ‘Mmmm. I think he moved to Canada, yeah,’ I say, and wish my glass wasn’t empty, so I had a way of keeping my mouth busy.

  Jo pats my arm. I can feel her working out what to say and I don’t know how to stop her.

  ‘I didn’t know that you—’ she starts, and I cut her off.

  ‘Where has Rav got to? Is he trampling the grapes for this wine?’

  She looks round, and I know she senses there’s something amiss, but that this moment will have passed before she’s even started to wonder what it might be.

  7

  These first few minutes of consciousness with a hangover are the worst, like waking up in a field after being thrown from a car crash, only you were the car crash.

  The end of the night plays in my head: licking salt, biting lemons, throwing back tequilas that tasted like nail varnish remover, laughing like hyenas in the taxi. Urrrrrggggh. Shots. Nothing about the experience can legitimately be called pleasurable and the bell tolls heavily the morning after.

  Reality reassembles in a series of bare-skin-filled flashes: Lou topless and strung up, Robin presenting his junk in front of passers-by. It has the quality of a very strange dream, and for a second I think it was one, until my eyes settle on a tattered I’m Not Being Funny But tour poster on my floor with NOB BAG written on Robin’s forehead in lipstick.

  Oh God, did I make much noise? Karen will go spare. She works a week of night shifts alternating with a week of day shifts at a biscuit factory and I regularly forget which is which. When I moved in I said: ‘Do we really eat so many biscuits that we need biscuits to be baked at night?’ and she said ‘Is that a joke or are you really that stupid?’ which set the tone for our co-habitation.

  I poke a lizardy tongue out of a dry mouth, try stretching limbs, my hinges creak. I’ll have a fat Coke, two Nurofen Lemon Meltlets and try for another two hours, I think.

  What time is it? I tip my phone towards me to check and see a text message from an unknown number. I prop myself on my elbow – seeing myself in the glass chest of drawers opposite, hair like the late Rick Parfitt on a Quo comeback tour, why does drunk-sleep always give you root lift at the crown? – and swipe to unlock.

  Hi Georgina, this is Devlin, Mark gave me your number, said you could give us a hand at the wake this avvo. Can you be here around three? LMK if that works, we’re pretty desperate!

  Fuuuuuuuuc … I’ve got Mark’s client’s job! The one thing Esther doesn’t want me to fuck up! Must cancel must cancel CAN’T CANCEL. I need to not enrage my sister, not to mention the money – there’s a second text offering a pretty healthy chunk of cash in hand (plus ‘any tips you can cadge’) that’ll tide me over until next month at least.

  It’s half eleven. I’m summoned for three. Much as I could do with another hour, better get a move on – oversleeping would be fatal.

  I have a hot shower, spend ages on make-up that’s supposed to disguise my condition. I know this is temporary, with pink eyeballs and grey skin. In a steamy mirror, you convince yourself you’ve done a magical Lazarus by piling on the cosmetics, then as the day wears on, catch your exhausted reflection and see Baby Jane.

  I can’t face solids yet. I drain a strong black coffee, gritty with white sugar, while Jammy the tortoise gives me a shrewd look that says – rough as arseholes again, are we? My my.

  Oh, good. Karen’s left one of her love notes on the kitchen table.

  Georgina.

  It seems we have a TAMPON GOBLIN. This mythical creature sneaks around stealing sanitary items. I had a box of Super Plus, with approx. three left, now none. Had to use your Lil-Lets. If I wanted Lil-Lets I would buy Lil-Lets. Plus I have a heavy flow and they have nothing like the absorbency. Plz replace ASAP.

  Karen

  PS adding this at 6 a.m. as leaving for work: after crashing around your bedroom (alone? I assume) for an HOUR at 2 A.M. you think you can play your Taylor Swift songs on headphones and I won’t hear you SINGING ALONG. THE DISRESPECT IS STAGGERING.

  Given I can’t remember getting home, this will mean buying apology cava, as well as more Tampax.

  I’m absolutely sure I didn’t use hers, Karen has a faulty memory and a relish for persecution, just one of the many reasons it’s such a privilege to share with her.

  She also has no sense of humour so drawing Dobby the House Elf and captioning him ‘Blobby’ is a definite no.

  Mark’s client is a robust, friendly-but-gruff sounding man called Devlin with an Irish brogue, who has that male thing of talking on the telephone in the way you give someone directions when leaning down to a car window: staccato bursts of necessary information, delivered at volume.

  He calls me straight back after I text to say that 3 p.m. will be fine, as he wants to explain a) it’s a wake and the wake is for a friend of his, and b) the reason he needs bar staff urgently is because The Wicker on Ecclesall Road isn’t yet open after a refit – am I OK with being the only one on for most of the evening? I am, grand, grand, OK then see you at three. Click.

  The Wicker, hmm. I hope they had a few quid to spend as that wasn’t a small task.

  The Wicker was always attractive from the outside: its Victorian exterior is covered in varying shades of intense green lacquered subway tiles, the door is a giant solid gloss-painted black slab. If you didn’t know the city, you could be easily fooled into thinking it was going to be all craft ale and cheese boards with pickles in miniature Kilner jars inside. Instead it used to be gloomy and musty and the drinks were always cloudy. It’s one of the places you wouldn’t contemplate, a place very much for regulars only, regulars who must be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome to keep going back.

  ‘Hello?’ I rap my knuckles on the imposing door, which lies ajar. ‘Hello?’

  I tentatively push it open, step inside. You know when you step out of the plane door abroad and reflexively flinch for the British cold air to hit you, and instead it’s this hairdryer warmth?

  Like that, but with beauty.

  There’s a sweeping curve of mahogany bar that’s obviously original, lovingly nursed back to rude health from its knackered one-hundred-years-of-being-leaned-on patina; panels of etched vintage mirrors behind, bottles of spirits stacked against it. Classy ones which promise good drinks, too: a dozen different gins, Aperol, proper whiskies. I’m a sucker for this sort of shabby chic mixture of old and new. It’s all the glamour, as far as I’m concerned.

  They’ve gutted the place, without tearing its heart out. Booths in the windows are now oxblood leather, instead of that textured, itchy fabric they make train seat covers from. The lights are low-hanging white china pendants.

  The floor, which I recall as having a thick wodge of much-trampled sticky carpet covering it before, is varnished mole-dark parquet. The expensively atmospheric walls are the colour of sky at dusk, which if I recall Esther’s endless interior project vacillations correctly, is Farrow & Ball’s Hague Blue.

  I smell meaty food cooking. Trestle tables line the walls, holding platters of triangles of soft white bread sweating under clingfilm, and starbursts of crudités are arrayed around ramekins of dips.

  ‘Hello! You must be Georgina?’

  I turn as a man dumps down a sizeable floral display on the floor, words picked out in orange gerberas and lollipop-headed white chrysanthemums, and bolts across the room to shake my hand.

  ‘Devlin.’

  He’s nothing like I imagined him when we were on the phone. I thought from the singsong, deep voice he’d be a Hagrid-like beast. Instead he’s a livewire, five-foot-something with inky hair, deep grooves in his face and a trendy
jacket. He’s forty-ish and good-looking, in a lived-in way.

  ‘You’ve scooped us right out of the shit here, grand of you to step in.’

  ‘No problem … cor, it looks great in here.’

  ‘Ah, you think?’ Devlin looks gratified. ‘Been a back-breaker this one but I’m pleased with it. Did you know it before?’

  ‘Er … I knew it but I wasn’t a customer.’

  ‘Yes, a bit of a drinkers’ pub, as they say? The previous owners had let things get very bleak. Could see it was a diamond in the rough though.’

  ‘So much so! Wow.’

  It’s now lovely enough it makes me feel happier just being here.

  ‘We’re still a week off opening so we’ve not got the tills up and running, so it’s a free bar. Still, less for you to do.’

  I smile and nod even though I am experienced enough at bar keeping to know free bars are an absolute bloodbath, and free bars at wakes, doubly so. Once you remove the need to pay, people are animals. As Mark said, the money is great, and it’s only now I start to figure why this might be. This is a wild lock in with no clear end.

  It’s also the first time I’d been near a funeral since my dad’s, twelve years ago.

  When I was fifteen or so, my mum pinned the order of service for her cousin Janet, a physiotherapist in Swansea, to the corkboard in the kitchen. It said A Celebration of The Life Of and inside there were photos of Janet in a clown’s outfit at a party, in a kayak, raising a watermelon margarita to a camera lens next to her girlfriend. The dress code was ‘be a rainbow’. Mum sent flowers.

  I recall my dad huffing and saying: ‘I don’t like this “celebrating” and holiday snaps and jollification of mortality. Let death be death. It’s sad. It doesn’t need this modernisation where we’re in Hawaiian shirts, trilling KUMBAYA MY LORD, KUMBAYA and cheering them on their way.’

  ‘Janet chose her own funeral,’ Mum said.

  ‘Then Janet is being selfish – it wasn’t for her, was it? It’s the very definition of an event where you should only think of other people’s feelings.’

  Mum gasped and Dad muttered about going to the shops if anyone wanted anything and left the room.

  It was only years later I realised Mum probably didn’t go the funeral because she knew Dad would react like this. Was he really bothered about happy-clappy send-offs? Or was it a way of providing them both with an excuse for their non-attendance, so they didn’t have to spend a weekend in Wales with each other for company? The argument wasn’t about what it was about. Maybe none of their arguments were about what they were about.

  It didn’t make Dad’s funeral three years later any easier, knowing that he wouldn’t have approved of gaiety, that he wasn’t religious and said it was ‘the plunge into eternal TV test card nothingness.’ In a strange irony, he hadn’t thought of our feelings.

  For his send-off, we had the standard package of inexpensive coffin, MDF with veneer finish, a service at a church that Dad never visited but Mum wanted as it was posher than a crematorium, then a wake in the adjoining hall where young staff in white shirts and dark trousers served hot drinks from catering-sized canisters and vinegary warm wine from boxes.

  I can taste the dislocated, bad-dream-like nauseous quality of it as if it happened yesterday. The feeling the universe had taken a sudden mad swerve, a left turn into some grotesque alt-verse that it should be possible to clamber back out of. Mum and Esther had identified the body; I was in my first year at university. An ordinary morning, when Mum heard him crash to the kitchen floor, rushed down and found him prone, lying in a lake of cafetière coffee.

  I wanted to walk up to one of the poker-faced, white-gloved men from the undertakers, schooled not to make eye contact, and grab them by the grey lapels. Say: ‘There’s been a terrible mistake. That’s my dad in that coffin. Death happens to other people, I get that, but not to my actual dad, and definitely not yet. I need to discuss something with him urgently, so get him out of there.’

  The word loss had a new meaning, or its meaning became clear: a person who loved me, in a completely unique and irreplaceable way, had vanished and took with him our relationship. And it wasn’t only Dad that disappeared, but his perspective, his encouragement, his approval, his opinion of me. There was no one else who could be my dad and I still badly needed one. I was never going to see him again? Ever?

  We hadn’t said goodbye.

  I return to these memories reluctantly. Then I push them away again. It’s like forcing too many things into a cupboard and using the door to keep them jammed in. Knowing it’s a short-term fix, and that the next time you open it – instant cascade.

  Another clue that this wake might be more ‘Cousin Janet’ than ‘my dad’ are the pictures hung like bunting, across the bar. A lantern-jawed, strawberry-blond man in his thirties, larking it up: walking the Peaks, or dressed as a Roman centurion, the yellowy quality of 1990s pub trips, documented when photographs weren’t taken on phones and every man seemed to be in lumberjack shirt and light blue jeans. A sagging banner hangs above them, spelling out: RIP DANNY.

  Oh, no. It’s a young person. The out-of-the-way, non-fashionable venue had made me assume otherwise. It stings. Someone who’d lived a long life, was in a care home and whose faculties had possibly gone to mush is one thing. I look at the images a second time, feel my throat tighten. However late this ends and thinly it spins my wages out, I won’t complain.

  ‘Should I start unboxing the glasses?’

  I gesture at the stacks of Paris goblets and a spare wallpaper pasting table, with paper cloth.

  ‘Yeah that’d be great. You can pour out plenty of the red and white too because they’ll get drunk, of that I can be sure.’ He checks his watch. ‘About half an hour to lift off, they’re still chatting outside the church, it only just finished. Catholics, you know.’ He does a talking hand puppet mime. ‘They like a long ceremony.’

  My gaze focuses again on the flowers and I see the words for the first time.

  ‘… IRN BRU?’ I ask.

  Devlin turns to them, turns back. ‘Aha yeah, Dan loved Irn Bru. When we were brainstorming his favourite things it was Irn Bru, poker, booze and boobs and I didn’t think Co-op Funeral Service would agree to the others.’

  I laugh, then check myself. ‘Sorry for your loss,’ I say, knowing from direct experience how inadequate those words are.

  ‘Ah, thanks Georgina, thanks,’ Devlin says, and I notice the charm of working for someone who remembers your name and uses it. It says: I know you are not merely my lackey and have a lively existence outside of this transaction.

  ‘No age, no age at all, but Danny was never going to make old bones.’

  ‘Oh …’ I say. ‘I am sorry.’

  He shakes his head. ‘My best mate from my first job in a warehouse. Absolutely lovely guy, do anything for you, you know. But a thirsty one. Always on the hoy.’

  I sense Devlin’s not easily offended and risk asking:

  ‘Was it … alcoholism he died from?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, yes and no. Got so pished he fell down some stairs, brained himself, massive bleed. Doctors said there was no bringing him back round. Not bringing him back round as Dan, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Thirty-three, no age.’

  ‘Thirty-three!’ I put a hand to my face. ‘Awful. I’m so sorry. Devlin.’

  ‘My sister-in-law died a year ago at the same age so it’s been a grimy old time.’

  I have no variant on gasping and mumbling sorry left available to me but we’re interrupted by a man with his Wranglers falling down his arse – in the old school, can’t be bothered to belt them properly way, not as a ‘look’ – holding a speaker.

  I’m feeling less awkward now about my black t-shirt and jeans. I didn’t know if denim was too disrespectful a textile.

  ‘Where do you want this?’

  ‘Ah let’s see … by that door is fine.’

  ‘There’s going to be music?’ I say to De
vlin.

  ‘Oh yeah. Can’t have a tear up without tunes,’ he says. On noticing my faintly puzzled expression he adds: ‘I should’ve said really, I mean, this is more of a party than a wake. Danny left strict instructions in the event of a sudden departure and we’re following them to the letter.’

  Devlin pauses.

  ‘I mean, he was probably pissed when he wrote them, but still.’

  8

  I’m hugely enjoying something I didn’t expect to enjoy whatsoever, so the sense of enjoyment is potent – two and half times the strength of a scheduled pleasure. And I’m being paid.

  In my defence, everyone here seems to be having fun. The music is blaring, the conversation is near-deafening but always good spirited, and everyone I encounter is polite, no matter how trolleyed.

  Dan’s wake would surely have made Cousin Janet’s do look like a Quaker meeting, and I wish I’d met him, although I might’ve felt conflicted serving him drinks.

  Devlin gave a short speech, during which tears rolled down his cheeks, about how much Dan hated grim-faced memorials.

  ‘He has absolved you from the guilt of still being here without him, and asks you celebrate the fact instead. Which was Dan in a nutshell. To Dan,’ he toasted.

  ‘To Dan,’ everyone said, as arms went up, and I felt my eyes well as I raised my glass and wiped my face with my apron.

  Devlin said to me in the first hour: ‘Have one on the go for yourself throughout, won’t you? As long as you can see straight, it’s only fair and decent. Help yourself to the buffet too.’

  I pour myself a champagne and barely get a chance to sniff it, but it’s that satisfying-to-the-soul sort of busy where the clock leaps forward rather than crawls and I get a glow from everyone being properly looked after, as if it’s my personal largesse I’m dispensing.

  Devlin’s wife, Mo – ‘You’ll know her if you see her. She’s short, bleached blonde and will be giving me shit’ – keeps me stocked up with fruit and ice and otherwise I run the show single-handed.