Page 54 of Don't You Forget About Me

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 there,’ 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

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