I remember something I’d forgotten in the trenches of That’s Amore! – I’m a good worker. Having served a hundred of them in two hours, I can now draw you a shamrock in a Guinness foam with a flick of the wrist under the tap, while pushing an optic with the other.
As the crowd thins out, the middle of the space turns into a dancefloor.
I find a crate of fizz that’s been lost in the melee and mention it to a flushed and expansive Devlin.
‘Call me Dev! I am only ever Devlin to my mother and the police. Thanks for letting me know.’
He taps a flute with a fork.
‘If I can have your attention! Our wonderful barmaid has found more of the Moët. I always say, get the decent stuff out once the riff-raff have gone home. Let’s all have another glass and toast dear Dan.’
A roar.
‘And while we’re at it, a round of applause for Georgina and her tireless efforts tonight.’
Devlin points at me, everyone claps and whistles and I blush and think: well, at least Esther’s going to have no cause to mither that I’ve made Mark look bad.
As the night wears on, I’m exhilarated, I feel I’m half Gaelic now, in a superficial and appropriative way – like Rose in that bit in Titanic where she can somehow blend seamlessly into the revelry below decks by hitching up her skirts and dancing a jig to a tin whistle.
As I assemble a cluster of goblets and start doling out the second wave of champagne, I become aware of a man who’s walked in to the party, with a portly, sandy-coloured dog in tow.
He’s tall and dark in a navy jacket with its collar turned up. He has curling, jet black hair, just long enough to scrape behind his ear. I realise what’s drawn my gaze is that he’s not greeting anyone or joining in, but doing a studied, sulky performance of ‘brooding’, a modern disco’s answer to Mr Darcy at a ball.
These rowdy, twenty-first century commoners are swaying to Tina Turner’s ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ while he stares into the middle distance.
I get a funny feeling, watching him watch the room through the throng of people who keep blocking my view: should he even be here? Usually if you walk in alone you’re trying to get someone’s attention to announce your arrival? And why turn up this late to a wake anyway? Is he the wake version of a wedding crasher? But why would you make yourself conspicuous by bringing a dog? No. He must belong. I wonder what his story is, if he was close to Dan and can’t quite stomach the disrespectful raucousness.
His eyes move toward me and I quickly busy myself.
Ooh, Blondie’s ‘Atomic’. I dance a little while I tidy the bar.
‘Excuse me, blondie?’
I turn and laugh. Devlin beckons me over at the side of the bar and offers me a wad of notes.
‘You’ve been absolutely solid tonight, can’t thank you enough.’
I thank him and say honestly it’s been my pleasure and then flinch at the inappropriate phrasing when we’re marking a hideously premature death.
‘Listen. I’ve been to-ing and fro-ing over who to hire to run the bar full time because I hate interviews and CVs and that bollocks, I’d far rather meet someone and work with them. Get a sense of what they’re about. But holding auditions didn’t seem fair. How about if this was one, in retrospect? Would you be interested?’
‘Yes!’ I say. Then, with less windy desperation, more determination: ‘I’d be very very interested, thank you.’
‘Great. I’ve got to sign it off with my brother but it shouldn’t be a problem.’
As hope surges, I remind myself that job offers made verbally when three sheets to the wind are not binding.
Devlin turns back to me and I notice Lonely Glowering Man is now stood at his elbow, trying to get Devlin’s attention. He’s quite the knock-out, now I can see him fully: dark sweeps of eyebrow, sulky mouth, lightly stubbled movie star jawline, the works.
Hang on. I freeze. I realise I know this face. The terrain is altered, and it’s a long time since I’ve traced its lines, but it’s not as I’d thought, completely unfamiliar. Far from it.
The split second of recognition is a punch to the heart.
My breath stops in my throat as his gaze meets mine.
Blondie’s vocals soar as she sings about beautiful hair.
Devlin says: ‘Meet my brother, Lucas.’
9
‘Luke,’ Lucas says, hand outstretched for a brisk, brief shake as I chew air and murmur a vacant hello and the word Georgina.
(I bite back an irrational cry of: ‘Luke? Since when?’)
My skin is basted in a sudden flop sweat which I hope arrived after we made contact.
Lucas starts speaking closely into Devlin’s ear in a confidential way that doesn’t invite contribution, and after waiting enough seconds so it doesn’t look like I’m fleeing, I escape to the loo.
I’m glad of it being empty, a place where the air is cooler and the music pounds through the wall.
I lock myself in a cubicle, sit fully clothed on the toilet and stare at the partition between myself and the empty stall next door.
Devlin is a Devlin McCarthy? Lucas McCarthy is out there?
Jesus Christ. How? What? Why?
I recall Lucas having some looming threat older brother who’d left school, but he was that many years ahead I never even knew his name. Our mouths were usually fastened on each other rather than used for swapping family biographies.
Oh God, oh God. I wish I’d had some warning. Someone of his significance shouldn’t be able to simply walk back in without fanfare, without a build-up. It reminds me of that line about death just being another room. Lucas was dead to me and yet he’s in this room. It’s impossible.
I mean, I’ve always known it could happen. But after twelve years, you’re convinced it won’t happen.
After a forced wee – strategy: as now I can’t plausibly need a real one in five minutes’ time – I rinse my clammy hands in cold water and inspect my reflection, my vanity overclocking. I grit my teeth to check there’s nothing in them, furiously rub away some make-up that’s drifted from above to below my eye.
I’m shaking slightly. And look at him now?!
In my mind’s eye, Lucas McCarthy was still the skinny eighteen-year-old I once knew. The idea he’d blossomed into some sort of stunning leading man in the interim hadn’t once occurred to me. He’s turned from an underfed, slightly hunted-looking slender indie boy into fully fledged Byronic poetry.
And me? I’ve certainly not transformed into some femme fatale. I fear I’m the same fruit, gone mouldy in the bowl.
I hear Tony’s voice: ‘Julie Goodyear.’
I tuck my hair behind my ears and stand up straighter and try to think positive thoughts. I’m fine. It’s fine. I feel the waistband on my jeans pressing into soft flesh and wish I was hard-bodied and defiant, polished up like a gemstone, and oh God, do I have jowls?
Thing is, I’m fretting – but Lucas didn’t recognise me. Of this I’m virtually certain. I’m good at reading people. I know what it’s like to have people looking at you, talking about you. To be covertly observed.
With Lucas there was no microscopic tell – no whisper of awkwardness, or apprehensiveness, no acknowledgement whatsoever. His expression was the fixed absent-polite-neutral of someone going through the motions with a person who has nothing to do with you. His eyes were flat, they said nothing.
Is that possible? Georgina’s not a rare name, but it’s not one you meet everywhere either. It’s been twelve years. Is that long enough to forget someone entirely? A voice whispers: you have your answer. And you don’t know how many ‘someones’ there are, do you. Losing a Georgina in a huge playing field of other Georginas ain’t so difficult.
I don’t want Lucas to know who I am, yet the idea is also utterly gutting.
I decide to be pragmatic, wailing can wait. At least this earthquake has happened as the wake passes into its final hours.
Back out on the floor, and behind the bar, I get a crick i
n the neck from studiously not looking at whatever Lucas McCarthy’s doing. My customers are a trickle, then they dry up completely.
Devlin’s wife Mo says I can ‘probably get off’ and I crush her into a hug of gratitude, moving fast enough not to be asked how I’m getting home. Over her shoulder, Devlin makes the ‘I’ll call you’ sign with finger and thumb to ear at me and I respond with a thumbs up, and a hard weight inside.
There’s the exit, don’t look left or right, stay on target, door shut behind you … And breathe.
I smoke a much-needed Marlboro Light as I wait for the taxi I ordered to sweep round the corner, stamping my feet in the cold. I don’t care about the temperature, just relieved to have escaped. I check the tracking app on my phone: my driver Ali is 4 MINS away.
I pace around, ostensibly to warm my body up, more to cool my brain down. The music throbs through the door and I wonder how late they’re going to stay up with the remaining bottles of scotch, reminiscing.
Lucas McCarthy is Devlin’s brother. Devlin is Lucas McCarthy’s brother. I can’t get my head round this.
I clutch my elbow with my free hand and pace and watch figures flitting across the non-misted spaces in the patterns in the windows. If I can see them, they can see me.
What if someone asks why the barmaid is lurking, mentions it? It’s daft to think they will, but seeing Lucas has left me edgy as a stray cat. I wander round the side of the pub, out of view.
An open window nearby is letting heat from the kitchen escape. As I draw near it I can hear a conversation. Voices come in and out of range as they move around the room. I idly listen in, fiddle with my phone. Tracking app: your driver Ali is 1 MIN away.
‘Pick that up. No, it goes there. Look.’
‘Which …’
‘… Luke! No, there, look.’
I straighten. One of these disembodied voices is Lucas? I give their dialogue my full attention. I strain: they’re speaking rapidly, with forcefulness, but I can’t make out the words.
And suddenly, they must move so they’re positioned right by me, as I can follow it perfectly.
‘… Not a doubt. It was bedlam at times and she handled herself well. She’s got no attitude. Exactly what we want.’
‘Based on what? You’re spannered.’
The sound of a heavy weight being dropped, with control.
‘Yeah because she kept my glass full!’
The guffaw that follows is unmistakably Devlin.
‘Pouring liquid into glasses isn’t astrophysics, is it?’
‘Nor is running a pub.’
They’re talking about me?
Oh, no … my taxi is here. I make a silent, frantic, ‘yes coming, just finishing my cigarette’ mime and the driver looks unimpressed.
‘… Great, our recruitment policy is whichever blondes happen to catch my brother’s eye. It’s not Hooters, Dev.’
I can’t believe this is about me, and yet it’s clearly about me.
‘She’s obviously a nice, sound lass. There’s a way about her that I like a lot. I don’t see your problem.’
‘We don’t know anything about her, we don’t know she’s nice. You’ve gone over my head and promised her, is my problem. Where’s my tick?’
‘Give her a chance, you cynical twat. The lesson of tonight was not to be a cynical twat.’
‘I thought the lesson was about not doing stupid things when you’re heavily intoxicated. Also, who puts shamrocks in Guinness? To be sure to be sure. Let her go work in Scruffy Muffy’s or whatever it’s called these days.’
A howl of laughter. ‘Ah God, I wonder how we’d fix a flaw in her like that, Luc, I mean it’s IMPOSSIBLE …’
The driver shouts: ‘I’m starting the meter now, love, come on!’ and I startle and rush over, trying to pick my footsteps carefully so the brothers don’t twig to me having been nearby.
I just heard Lucas McCarthy equate the wisdom of hiring me with killing yourself.
When we pull up in Crookes, as I get money out to pay, I find Devlin’s given me fifty quid more than we agreed. Usually you’d put that down to inebriation but I get the sense that Devlin is always this garrulous and generous.
Damn. For a brief, blissful moment, I thought I’d fallen into a job that I’d like, for a person I like. But he’s Lucas McCarthy’s brother.
And since when was he ‘Luke’? I bridle at this, ludicrously, as if he’s committing a fraud. A betrayal. Betrayal. I turn the word over. It has pointed edges that cause lacerations. It’s like swallowing a Sticklebrick.
I walk, trance-like, from kitchen to bathroom sink to pulling on my pyjamas, not present in any single task, mind floating elsewhere.
We don’t know anything about her
Oh, really.
It’s not Hooters, Dev
Supercilious arsehole! How sexist is that?! Would any place hire you because of your hair? It may be lustrous but I’m thinking not. OK, he’s also possibly referring to the DD cup. Pig. Like I chose this pair in the Grattan catalogue.
So Lucas is now a grown-up who owns and runs places. I’m thirty and begging to work in them. The indignity.
I don’t want your job anyway, so the joke’s on you.
But oh God. I do want the job. Before this encounter, I’d have said that working for Lucas McCarthy would’ve been what my dad called a cheese-before-bed nightmare.
Now the initial encounter is over with, my feelings are more conflicted. I’ve heard him saying I’d be trouble – or that they ‘don’t know I’m nice’ – and my pride wants to face that down.
Was Lucas only pretending not to recognise me, then ruling out my working for them as a result? That’s the version that suits me, so I’m suspicious of it. It would mean he hasn’t forgotten, it did matter. Even if nothing like as much as it does to me, I’m not that deluded.
That beats being Some Blonde.
I scour the memory of our reunion for the smallest twitch of discomfort on his side and conclude: no, there was none. No one’s that good at a poker face, outside international poker tournaments.
But I didn’t hear who won that debate about me. I may yet not have the job.
I weigh up alternatives.
Devlin calls: Oh dear, my mistake, the vacancy is filled. This, when he sobers up, seems a likely outcome of what I overheard. It was unfair to impose me on Lucas, even without our history.
Or, I still get the job, but with Lucas resenting me, and that’ll be nothing compared to how he reacts when the penny drops about who I am? That’s a high wire act.
Lastly, best case scenario: I get the job, and it’s fine. Lucas grudgingly admits I’m sufficiently efficient, we rub along reasonably well. And he never places my face.
I lie in bed, my breath making ghosts in the damp air, wondering why my best case scenario also somehow sounds like the worst.
10
I didn’t know what loss meant until I lost Dad and I didn’t know what regret meant until I regretted Lucas McCarthy.
Although, as my counsellor Fay told me, I didn’t have complete control over the situation and the nature of my regret suggests I was entirely responsible when I only had power over my part of it. Lucas was an ‘independent actor’.
I said, ‘Hmm OK I regret my part in it.’
‘Accept that much, then. It’s yours, take it.’ She picked up a mug as a symbolic gesture, placed it on the desk and pushed it towards me. I didn’t think it worked that well really as it had a picture of King Kong on it and was obviously a personal artefact I wasn’t meant to literally accept.
I pulled it toward me and nodded. ‘Am I meant to feel any better?’
‘Not better as such, not automatically improved, like the words are a magic spell. But it can spring you out of self-defeating thought patterns where you continually berate and diminish yourself for what cannot be undone. You are not an omnipotent deity, you’re a human just going along, learning, making a mess sometimes in the process, as we all are.’
I wept then and she said it’s good that you can cry about it. I said: Seriously? Why? through whirlpools of my Lancôme liner as I plucked at the box of tissues on her desk. She said because admitting hurt helps you dispel its power and lets you get past it.
To be honest, a lot of counselling appears to be accepting you’re up to your tits in shit and finding you’re zen about it. Saying: at least my tits are warm.
I was glad I went, though. I liked Fay, with her henna-red wispy copper wire hair, billowing black jersey dresses and spectacles perched right on the end of her nose. The weekly hour spent in the calming room with the bamboo plant and the painting of sailboats in Mousehole harbour didn’t untie the knot, but it loosened it.
A note on the wall in the lobby told me I could tackle a number of issues, including:
• Emotional Eating
• Anxiety
• Debt Worries
• Histrionic Personality Disorder
• Internet Addiction
• Managing Chronic Pain
I thought: sounds like an average weekend round mine, har har har. (Fay told me I did this as reflex, mocking myself. I told her I couldn’t take my problems seriously, given some people are sleeping rough. ‘There are always those worse off than you. Your problems are not invalid as a result, or needing to be measured against an internationally recognised pain scale before we decide if your condition is severe enough to treat.’)
I didn’t turn up to talk about Lucas, it was to discuss my dad, but the counsellor said most people end up on different ground to the area they expected to cover. In family therapy, Fay said, you’d be amazed how often parents turn up to analyse a peculiarly difficult child and we end up looking at their problems instead.
I said: Do you know, I wouldn’t.
I never told Jo or my sister or anyone else about Lucas and it felt strange to turn thoughts I’d churned on into actual consonants and vowels, in a room, with a stranger. It gave it life outside of my head.
I still didn’t tell Fay the whole story.
I think the real damage was that Lucas and I never spoke after the leavers’ party. It wasn’t just that our relationship was unconsummated, there wasn’t a conclusion of any sort. No conversation whatsoever. Exams were over, school was out forever, and we didn’t have any mutual friends to pull us back into the same orbit, that summer or ever after. When there is so much left unsaid, your mind is free to fill in the words that were never exchanged in a hundred thousand different ways, and believe me, I have. Then my dad died, I quit university shortly after, and really it’s been a race to the bottom since. Lucas hasn’t been a user of social media as far as I could tell from my searches – unless he blocked me from view – or I might have weakened and approached him in the years after. But being honest, I have no idea what I’d have said if I had found him. It would’ve been pretty tragic. Better that the temptation was taken away from me. What I wanted was to hear things from him I was definitely never ever going to hear.
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