Page 66 of Don't You Forget About Me

‘She accepts, with much huffing and tutting and hissing, that she will have a cucumber salad.

‘I go back to the kitchen. They are absolutely FURIOUS I allowed someone to order off menu, when they explicitly refused the request. More shouting and bare refusals. But I’ve told her she can have it. At some point between a rock and a hard place, you have to choose.

‘So I end up making it myself, with chefs around me deliberately jostling me because they’re so angry I’m even in there. I serve it, and she looks like I shat in my hand and shook hers.’

A laugh. That was a bona fide laugh.

‘She doesn’t touch the salad. The whole table doesn’t tip, and leave giving me dirty looks. I got laid off two weeks later because “We don’t need so many people after the rush is over” and it’s in no way because this woman emailed to complain about “your waitress’s attitude” afterwards and her company regularly spent money at this café and had a tab there. No way. I had to sell some of my Christmas presents to make my rent.

‘Anyway, a few weeks later I walk past this woman in town and she’s demolishing a mint choc chip Cornetto.’ I give a small bow. ‘The End.’

The room erupts into applause. I step off the stage and neck my prosecco in one, feeling like a badass. I side-eye the judges’ table and even Mr Keith is patting his hands together, albeit in a desultory fashion.

‘Was that the right sort of thing to read?’ I say, shakily, to a beaming Gareth.

‘If you want to win the competition, I’d say yes.’

22

I’d thought doing my stand-up debut during a shift at work would be unnecessarily pressuring but in fact, coming back to the bar and saying assertively: ‘Who’s next, please!’ is a good way of dealing with the post-performance ebbs and jitters.

‘Hey, come here, you!’ Devlin says, following the punters as they trickle back out. He grabs me into an awkward embrace over the bar. ‘No one’s had this good a laugh in one of my pubs since my nude photos leaked. Luc – this girl was fantastic.’

Lucas is by us, holding a box of Britvic bitter lemons, and merely jerks his head in acknowledgement. Hmm. Appropriate beverage.

‘Did you win?’ he asks.

‘Don’t find out until the last one, it’s a best of three,’ Devlin says. ‘You’re going to do them all, right?’

‘Yes, that was the plan,’ I shrug and smile. ‘If I didn’t tank on the first.’

‘That was very far from a tank.’

Lucas glances at me and looks away.

I have déjà vu, all of a sudden. The guarded expression on his face resembles a look he once gave me, when we had to jointly present an essay on ‘IsWuthering Heightsa story of redemption or despair?’ I quoted him without his permission, veering off script to get a laugh.

His face said, back in that classroom: ‘I’m not sure who you are.’ Only why feel that now? Of course he doesn’t know who I am. Maybe people have the same face all their life, the same tics, and I’m overthinking this.

‘Was that story true, or did you make it up?’ Dev says, jolting me back into the room.

‘All true, unfortunately. I’d have preferred not to have lived it.’

It was a well-worn anecdote, polished up. That’s the problem with my life: it produces too many anecdotes and not much else. No one wants to be miserable in order to leave a funny-poignant memoir, like Kenneth Williams.

‘It was about this vegan, Luc …’ Dev says, but Lucas has suffered selective hearing, ignoring Devlin in favour of an incoming customer. Even in my euphoria, I have a little flicker ofWhy can’t he be pleased for me?

‘Here she is!’ Rav leads Clem, Jo, Esther and Mark up to the pumps. ‘Really good choice, George, told with perfect timing.’

They collectively burble about how much they enjoyed it and I bask in it. I know I have to subtract percentages from the whole for 1) their knowing me, and 2) their being glad I didn’t stuff it up, but some of this is authentic admiration. I glow, an unfamiliar feeling which feels like a shaft of sunshine after weeks of rain. For once, I am not in the middle of the mess, but centre of a tiny triumph. I have done something valuable, using my own initiative. I feel … oh this sounds daft, but I feel like an individual for a change. My workplaces only ever usually afford me the identity of ‘love’ or ‘darling’ or ‘the blonde lass’.

My friends pile off to the snug; even Esther and Mark have decided to stay for one more ‘as we paid the babysitter ’til ten’. All is well, and calm, until I’m flipping the tap on the fourth European lager in a round for a man in a FAC 51 t-shirt, when the door opens and a windswept Robin saunters in.

He’s in a funnel-necked navy coat I’ve not seen before and is wearing an air of cocky insouciance I’ve definitely seen before. He’s with a short, balding man in a camel Crombie coat who, to my eyes, whispers quiet wealth, in a ‘London’ way. Robin surveys the room in that way he has, as if he is both apart from and above the company, and it’s the job of the contents of the room to impress him. Natural self-consequence.

He sees me mere seconds after I see him, no time for any ducking or dissembling.

‘Oh! Hi,’ Robin says, eyes widening. ‘Suddenly she is nowhere, and she is everywhere.’

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