Don't You Forget About Me

by Mhairi McFarlane

  Esther’s words ring in my ears. ‘Don’t come back with one of your amusing stories where everything is a huge mess but it isn’t your fault. No incidents. I don’t want there to be incidents and excuses.’

  This is exactly that, isn’t it?

  Thor has unbuttoned his cape and is swinging it around over his head, like a matador facing a bull.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, ducking round the bar and scuttling out, feeling extremely foolish, as Thor turns towards me, finger framing a crotch thrust by way of ‘hello’. I feel like I’ve wandered in from a National Trust garden to the Magic Mike XXL show in Vegas.

  ‘Excuse me? You can’t do this here.’

  ‘GREETINGS, MAIDEN OF EARTH!’

  ‘I’m not joking, you have to stop. I’m going to turn the music off, OK?’

  I move past him towards the table and Thor throws his cape over my head, around my front, and uses it to pull me towards him.

  ‘Have you heard of ASGARD?’ he bellows, in that daft voice he’s putting on.

  ‘Let me go! Look, please, you can’t do this here—’

  ‘Well, ladies – I am ASS HARD!!’

  With one powerful yank, Thor pulls me towards him using the cape and I’m crushed against his armour, arms trapped by my sides, while he grinds and shimmies against my rear.

  ‘Let me go!’

  He won’t let me go, the barmaid caught in his cape now being a flamboyant improvisation in his act.

  And all of a sudden, this goes from an embarrassing, inconvenient predicament to a frightening one. I know this feeling surging up inside me, I recognise it like an old enemy.

  The end of the world panic attack that caused me to run from the exam hall at the end of my first year at university and never go back.

  The loss of control, the suffocation …

  The more I wriggle and thrash, the funnier the stripper thinks it is to keep a hold of me, and it’s no use. I’m becoming hysterical in the claustrophobia. He’s not going to listen, he’s not going to stop … I push and push and wail until he loosens his grip, momentarily.

  It gives me a second or two where I have some mobility in my right arm and I draw it forward free of the cape, gather my might and elbow him in the face. I have no idea how to do this, I’ve never hit anyone, so I do a best guess. He drops the cape and I fall forwards to the floor, with a hard, humiliating bang to both wrists.

  ‘What the fuck did you do that for?!’ he shouts, in a Sheffield accent now. He has blood trickling from his nose.

  He grabs me up by the shoulders, pulling me into a sitting position, and for a moment I think he might be helping me up, until I realise it’s a far more aggressive approach than that.

  My breathing is shallow and my whole body is shaking, awash with fight or flight adrenaline. His fingers are digging into me and I can tell by the tension rolling off him in waves that he wants to hit me but is also aware lamping a woman might be a bad career move.

  ‘Get off her!’ I hear a voice by the door.

  Help at last. Thank God. Although, oh no: it’s Lucas. He strides across the room, Keith bumbling at his heels, brushes Thor to the side, offers his hand and hauls me up. ‘Are you alright?’ he says.

  I mumble I am. I don’t want to need rescuing by him.

  ‘Fuck her, look what she did to me!’ Thor says, wig lopsided, proffering a hand that’s full of blood. It does look terrible. I had no idea I could hit that hard.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ Lucas says.

  ‘I’m a male entertainer. I didn’t know you had psychos working here.’

  ‘Yeah well you don’t male entertain on these premises without clearing it with management first, which you definitely didn’t, so get out.’

  The hen-do women are bug-eyed and uncharacteristically quiet, a low burble of disbelief rolling round the group.

  Thor collects his hammer, his Bluetooth player and his cape from the floor, his smeared face looking as if he’s a zombie that’s been feasting on flesh. It’s a strangely apt look for Halloween.

  ‘This is not over!’ he spits, as he passes me, pointing at his nose. ‘Bobby does NOT forget.’ Lucas yanks him away, grabbing his arm and propelling him out of the door.

  ‘Poldark-looking fuck!’ Thor says to Lucas, as he’s bundled into the street. I’m not yet capable of finding anything funny, but I file it away to find funny later.

  The hen do decide to follow suit.

  ‘You’ve ruined Becky’s hen, you bitch,’ says one of the women to me as they troop out, and I flinch. I don’t know what to say other than whimper: ‘He wouldn’t get off me.’

  Am I sacked? Please don’t let me be sacked.

  Lucas leans over the bar, pulls the cord to rattle the bell for ‘time’ and takes my hand, firmly. I have no capacity left to find this awkward, I merely submit. He leads me into the kitchen behind the bar and plonks me on a seat. Keith is here! Keith is happy to see me, at least, and breaks off from lapping water for a stroke. (Wasn’t he going to leave him at a friend’s? I totally clock that was a fib.)

  When Lucas returns, a minute later, with brown liquid in a brandy balloon, I’m on the floor with my arms round Keith’s neck. I let go guiltily, as if I’ve been caught in a clinch. Lucas says nothing apart from:

  ‘Drink this. I’ll finish up.’

  I’ve never liked brandy but I let it numb my lips as I listen to the offstage, muffled conversations and clanging of the till drawer as it shoots back into the register.

  Eventually, Lucas joins me, closing the door behind him carefully.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. I’m sorry I don’t know what happened, I told him he couldn’t strip in here. He grabbed me and I had a nervo … and twatted him. I’m so sorry, I don’t usually belt people.’

  ‘Hey, no,’ Lucas’s eyes are wide with surprise. ‘It isn’t for you to apologise. This is for us to grovel about the idiocy of leaving you on your own. I’m interviewing on Monday and we’ll get others in, and sod what Dev says.’

  ‘Oh? I … thanks.’

  ‘Leave it with us.’

  He folds his arms. Conciliatory but not quite friendly.

  There’s a pause and I say: ‘Thor is a Norse God. Felt entitled to any wench he chose. Should’ve known, really.’

  Lucas smiles and shakes his head, in appreciation I’m making light of it but also implying I shouldn’t, and says: ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there earlier.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I’ll call your taxi, I can imagine you want to go home.’

  I open my mouth to say something more, something to lever this moment open between us, and don’t quite have the nerve. But if I finish this Rémy Martin, as a chaser to so much adrenaline that I could have lifted a lorry, perhaps I will.

  As I’m walking out to my cab, Lucas is mopping blood from the floor.

  ‘Lucas,’ I say, the sound of the car’s engine ticking over outside, knowing this is wildly reckless. It feels like a moment out of the ordinary, when both our defences are down, and if I don’t do it now, I possibly never will. It’ll only get harder to ask as time goes on. And I have to know.

  ‘I’ve been thinking. Didn’t we go to school together? Or sixth form?’

  I hold my breath and swallow hard. Lucas stares at me for a moment. He half-heartedly plunges the mop in the mop bucket water, while he thinks.

  ‘… Oh, God. Yes, I think so? I thought I knew you from somewhere and didn’t want to say in case I got it wrong.’

  I squirm. I immediately wish I hadn’t raised this. Every word out of his mouth for the next thirty seconds will crucify me. I’ve devoted years of my life to second-guessing what they might be, yet he will toss them away, carelessly.

  ‘Did we …? Were we …?’ Lucas hesitates. He clears his throat: ‘I’m not sure how to phrase this in an, er, gentlemanly way. My memories from eighteen through to twenty-two or twenty-three are very hazy at best.’

  He’s asking me if we d
id it? I can feel my heart plummeting through my gut, through the floor, into the sewers beneath the city. Surely, surely not. He can’t even remember if we did it? That’s some score card. That’s some lack of meaning I had. Rav says I’m modest? So I’ve a lot to be modest about.

  I say nothing at first. I can’t even force my facial muscles to mime polite reciprocation. I’m wearing the misery like a mask.

  ‘We hardly spoke, I think,’ I say eventually, thickly.

  ‘Ah!’ Lucas says, with an evident ‘phew’, his shoulders dropping half an inch. ‘I wasn’t sure … Youth, eh? Hah.’

  Lucas looks at me in awkward hopefulness. I turn away.

  ‘Night.’

  On the journey to Crookes, silent tears that I’m not even able to staunch until I’m home flood down my cheeks.

  No doubt Fay would say it’s positive I can cry. Fay didn’t find out the love of her life forgot her.

  ‘You don’t know he’s the love of your life,’ she’d said, with a benevolent smile. ‘You’re how old? Lots of time.’

  ‘Cathy and Heathcliff knew in Wuthering Heights, and they were kids. I mean, I know that’s slightly dodgy.’

  ‘And look how that ended,’ Fay said. ‘With them dead.’

  ‘That’s the outcome in general,’ I said, and Fay noticed our hour was up.

  19

  Anyway, at least now I know the answer for sure.

  I hug my bare knees in a hot bath, a washing line of Karen’s stout underwear strung above me like bunting, melancholy coating me like tar. It’s the morning after and I still feel like I’ve been turned inside out.

  Not to be crude, but someone who doesn’t even remember whether he ever fitted a key part of his anatomy into a vital part of my anatomy in the act of physical intimacy – which by the way, would’ve been my first time, Lucas McCarthy – very clearly isn’t the love of my life.

  Unless he’s feigning forgetfulness of course, and he does know who I am. Which is barely an improvement – so The One is supposed to be someone who shudders at the thought of discussing the fact we were once close? That guy’s no Rudolph Valentino either.

  I don’t know why I find this so difficult to accept. I’ve had twelve years to get used to the idea that I’m unimportant to Lucas McCarthy.

  No, that’s not true, I do know why. It’s because he’s never been inside my body, but he’s been inside my head.

  And this pain is not because he’s now so obviously wantable. I’m not that shallow. It’s not due to the way, when his face breaks into a smile, it can apparently still crack my heart open. No. I fell for him when he was a skinny nerd in a Cure t-shirt, overlooked, wan and shy. I liked his early work.

  I’m finding my irrelevance hard to accept because there’s nothing I’ve ever trusted more in my life than that first flush of how I felt about him. It was pure heady instinct, I never had to question it for a second.

  But if Lucas didn’t feel it too, if I could be so utterly wrong about his reciprocation, I can never trust my judgement again. If that wasn’t two people falling in love, then what the hell is?

  I lie back and stare at my red-varnished toenails, protruding in the foam.

  This is the final contributing factor to my existential bleakness that is my turning thirty. In my twenties, I used to think I was a caterpillar, and I was going to pupate into a butterfly. The girl in the pink coat with the melted make-up, the roots that needed doing, holding a bag of chips and batter bits on the night bus after a brutalising shift, being asked if her boobs were fake in Rogues – she was not who I was going to be. She was an amazing origins story.

  Sooner or later, superhero Georgina Horspool was going to burst forth, fulfilling all her glorious potential.

  But now I am slowly letting go of that hope. Like that baleful line in obituaries at the start of the paragraph outlining where it all went wrong. ‘Sadly, it was not to be …’

  Lucas’s reappearance makes that brutally clear. He is something else. I am still right here.

  I point my toes, hold my leg out of the water and drag a razor up my calves, turning them this way and that to check I haven’t left a raccoon-stripe of hair.

  As a serial monogamist whose relationships have generally puttered out rather than exploded, I’ve only ever taken a detached interest in Clem’s dating advice. Now, heaving myself out of the water, I remember her inspirational protocol after a blow to the feelings.

  ‘Liking yourself is a radical act,’ Clem had instructed Jo and myself. ‘Never more so than when you’ve had a crap time from a man.’

  So when you get turned down for a second date, when you find out you were one of seven options, when your texts have the Read receipt, when the WhatsApp shows two blue ticks and your Facebook messages say SEEN – Clem says do the opposite of wallowing.

  She prescribes: spend an entire day treating yourself as you’d wish to be treated. Take yourself for margaritas, see a film you fancy, have a long walk. Buy something frivolous which brings you joy, order a takeaway. Get sheets with high thread count and lie like a starfish on them, naked.

  ‘It’s like aggressive hygge. Celebrate how great you are and what a nice time you have by yourself. Refuse to partake in the self-loathing we’re virtually commanded to, in this sick society.’

  I don’t have tons of funds, but I can put my dumb blonde hair in the big rollers, do a face mask, get a gel manicure at the salon two roads over, walk into town and purchase myself a Magnum Salted Caramel and a beautiful Penguin Classic edition of Wuthering Heights, which I’m going to re-read. See if it lands differently, now.

  So I do.

  I get Jammy some yellow bell pepper that he’s mad for, and go for a hot chocolate, sitting in a window so I can see the smoky-darkness of a winter evening fall, the street lamps switch on.

  And, I decide, while spooning up the last of the foam, I’m going to revisit Fay. I need to tell her about seeing Lucas again. I want her to tell me that despite the fact it feels like my chest is being crushed in a vice, it is some sort of catharsis. You want to talk to her because you won’t tell anyone else. And why is that, exactly?

  I wonder how counsellors feel when former clients reappear with their lives in as much a mess as ever. Is it like cutting someone’s unflattering ’do for years, getting them to grow out layers and stop harsh treatments, and then seeing them strutting round town with a backcombed, white straw pompadour, like a French Regency wig? Dispiriting?

  I’ll have to ask Rav.

  ‘Can I speak to Fay Wycherley?’ I say, mobile to ear in the quiet kitchen when I get in, having ascertained Karen’s definitely out. Studying my glossy nails, the colour of blood. Aggressive hygge. Glamorous defiance.

  ‘I’m sorry, she doesn’t work here anymore.’

  ‘Oh … Do you know where she went?’

  ‘She went on to a practice in Hull, I think.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Thank you. Do you have the name? I’ll try her there.’

  I won’t, because I can’t see myself travelling to Hull, but it seems a courteous farewell.

  ‘Hang on, do you mind waiting for a moment?’

  The receptionist puts me on hold to Flautist Moods: Vol 7. Then there’s the noise of a phone being crashed back out of its cradle.

  ‘Hi. Are you a former client of Fay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to tell you this but Fay passed away in 2015.’

  I pause. ‘She’s dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘… How?’

  ‘A traffic accident, I believe.’

  ‘Oh. That’s so sad … Thank you for letting me know.’

  I say bye and sit and stare at the washing up in the plastic rack. Poor Fay. She’d be what – mid-fifties? I call up images of her and try to process the fact she’s not here anymore. She was so reassuring. She kept my secrets, and she listened. And she’s gone. I wonder if she had children, and if they miss her the way I miss Dad.

  I remember a Fay remark t
hat was long lost in memory, until now: ‘No one else is going to fix you. The only person who can fix you, is you.’

  So Coldplay lied.

  Rav the counsellor you sorted me out with, Fay, she died?

  Sorry yes did I not say at the time? She was a keen cyclist, came off under a lorry on the A6 in Buxton. Grim. She was from St Ives so they held the funeral there & I couldn’t get the time off. How did you find out?

  Ah. I’d not thought I would be asked. I’ll mask it with a bad taste, black humour joke. It’s not like Rav is professionally trained and BACP certificated and will see right through it. I text:

  Thought I’d make a ‘top-up’ sort of appointment with her and the centre told me. Rav I’m in no way making light of this or making it about me but my grief counsellor has died. That doesn’t seem like a thing that should be allowed to happen.

  This is your tragedy, I see! Tell your next therapist to assess you for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (do you need another recommendation?) x

  No, thanks. Wanted to catch up with Fay really x

  Fay once caught me fagging it in the car park, after our session, and told me to quit.

  ‘Life is so short anyway, don’t make it shorter,’ she called, as she got into her racing-green Mini Cooper. ‘If I sound like your mother, that’s because I’m old enough to be your mother.’

  I grinned and waved her off and ground the butt under my heel.

  I’ll stop now, in her honour. I’m only a social smoker, really, I’ve stopped before and had no cravings.

  And there’s something else I should do, too. Regarding another thing Fay said that resonated, long after our sessions had ended.

  ‘Sometimes because the people we wanted to care for us, didn’t care for us, we live with a deliberate lack of care for ourselves. A way of getting back at them, through self-neglect.’

  I.e. treating yourself in exactly the way Clem says you shouldn’t.

  ‘You’re doing it as revenge?’ I’d asked.