Don't You Forget About Me

by Mhairi McFarlane

  ‘Here, Georgina,’ Devlin appears, lightly coated in dust from renovations, ‘Can you nip up to the flat and ask Lucas if the plumber’s coming at four? Just shout him as you go up the stairs.’

  I nod and feel a small-child thrill at being allowed into Lucas’s lair, a new, private part of the building. The flat upstairs is a door on the left behind the bar, as opposed to the right hand one that takes you up to the function room.

  I pad up the stairs and call, hesitantly:

  ‘Lucas? Lucas …?’

  I can’t hear anything beyond so I rap on the open door at the top with my knuckles. Still nothing. I peer round.

  I hear his voice before he walks out of a bedroom, mobile pressed to ear. I jolt: he’s only wearing a small towel across his mid-section, grasped at the hip with one hand. In all the weeks rummaging in each other’s clothes we never actually saw anything. At first, I actually turn and cover my eyes like someone in a Carry On movie.

  ‘… Don’t care what you say Niamh would’ve wanted and don’t care what she did want when she was here, either, so invoking the wishes of my late wife is lost on me. Yeah well she’s not around to insist so it’s up to me. Deal with it.’

  My face is hot oh no no no, stop this, I can’t blush, it’ll make it clear I was excited by sight of his chest and maybe some upper groin and perhaps I will glance again, wave at him to make my presence clear …

  I look back. Phew. Yes, he has definitely filled out … Then his blazingly furious eyes meet mine, and widen, and I blunder backwards and out of the room, muttering ‘didn’t realise you were busy’ apologies.

  I’m dying of embarrassment, but also, what the hell was that conversation about …? I hover for a second, trying to make sense of it, put it in a context that makes it innocuous, or at least reasonable. Of all the jarring things I could’ve overheard, Lucas sounding savage about Niamh is the last thing I expected. It wouldn’t have been anywhere near a list.

  It would’ve helped to separate out the issues if he hadn’t been half naked at the time. I belt back down the stairs in a slight daze.

  I contemplate the possibility that for all his solidity as a boss, Lucas McCarthy isn’t very nice to those in his personal life. Yes, he was magnificent about Robin, but I am old enough to know that people are complicated. You can be saviour in one situation, diabolical in another. I don’t know him – I must keep reminding myself of this fact. I pull myself up for thinking the way I did, for imagining we were slipping into any sort of relaxed closeness.

  I walk back down and Dev says: ‘Plumber definitely on his way at four, then?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ I feel guilty, even though I’ve done nothing wrong. ‘He was on his phone.’

  ‘Right. I’ll catch him in a bit, don’t worry. Kitty and I were talking about diaries, did you ever keep one?

  ‘I did, actually!’ I’m effusive, in my need to channel my thoughts in another direction: ‘That was the last bit of writing I’d done, before this open mike competition. Back at school.’ Imagine if you knew the juicy sections are about your younger brother. Imagine if he knew, come to that.

  Dev nudges Kitty. ‘You should start one. I wish I’d done one now.’

  ‘Oh my God, no one does that, what am I, some sort of Victorian person!’ Kitty says. ‘Yeah, like, I wrote my diary in my big death nightie and, like, ate mutton pie and that. Wrote it with one of those pens that are feathers.’

  ‘What the hell is a big death nightie?!’ I say, putting aside the fact Kitty called me ancient.

  ‘Those nighties that ghosts wear and they put old people in. You know. Like in a Muppet’s Christmas Carol.’

  ‘Hahahhaa. The Muppets’ Christmas Carol. RIP Charles Dickens.’ Devlin says.

  ‘I know who Charles Dickens is!’

  ‘Do you? My bad,’ Devlin says.

  ‘He’s the bear, he tells the story.’

  Devlin and I look at each other and hoot and Kitty says, ‘Oh piss off!’

  Lucas reappears in the bar, fully clad, and the hilarity for me evaporates. I promptly find cleaning to do, keeping my head down and keeping busy. I sense Lucas wanting to meet my eye as some sort of safety check or reassurance, and I manage to swerve any interaction. Eventually, he corners me by the ice bucket.

  ‘Georgina. Would you have the time for a quick chat tonight? After we’ve closed up? Come find me in the flat at half eleven?’

  ‘Uh …’ I hadn’t anticipated this and feel uncomfortable. I’m not sure I want to hear his excuses. On the fly, I can’t think of where I can claim to need to be at nearly midnight on a Thursday, though.

  Mere hours earlier, I’d have jumped at the chance to have a beak at his belongings, enter his lair.

  But I am back to not knowing who Lucas McCarthy is, and I don’t want to be drawn in and spat out a second time.

  29

  At the end of my shift and for a second time today, I head up the stairs to the flat, with considerably less lightheartedness than I did before.

  The door’s closed this time, and Lucas answers as soon as I knock. ‘Drink?’ he says.

  ‘Just a cup of tea, thanks.’

  ‘Aw man, making me drink alone? Can’t tempt you to a whisky?’

  I shrug. ‘Sure.’

  I don’t like this creaky, ingratiating imposter. Say what you want about your late wife, just don’t involve me. Lucas heads to a kitchen, off the sitting room we’re in, and I survey the small spartan flat, TV in one corner, potted fern in another.

  I drop down into the sofa in front of a coffee table that’s piled with pub admin flotsam and jetsam, spreadsheets, bank statements. For the first time I realise it’s probably quite lonely, being away from your home city, living above your time-sucking place of work.

  Keith clatters in, feet loud on the wooden floor, and as ever, he’s gratefully seized upon by me. He settles at my feet while I pat the scruff of his neck.

  Lucas hands me a glass and sits down opposite in a wicker (ha) chair, placing his whisky on the table between us.

  ‘I wanted to explain about earlier. The phone call I was having when you came in.’ He pauses. ‘Saying you don’t care about your late wife is quite unusual. Dev says he told you about her?’ Lucas rolls his eyes, but smiles, and I nod, self-conscious.

  ‘Lucas,’ I say, raising my voice slightly to ‘prim’, ‘you honestly don’t have to. It’s none of my business. I’d rather not pry.’

  ‘I want to explain,’ he says.

  He swigs from his drink and I do alike, rather than offer any reply. On the one hand, what I heard was ugly; on the other, why explain himself, if he is a wrong un?

  Maybe part of the brooding bad boy psyche. He needs to control his image.

  ‘I was talking to a friend of mine in Dublin … A former friend of mine. Owen. He was having an affair with Niamh right before she died.’

  I open my mouth and close it again, and gulp. ‘Oh.’

  I’d made the rules: Niamh was tragic, and devoted. Not unfaithful. Oh.

  ‘I found out a few weeks before Niamh got her diagnosis, but it had been going on months before that. She was having loads of nights out with girlfriends and I got suspicious and turned up at the bar she was out at, and caught her with her face locked onto Owen.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  He leans back.

  ‘We were in trouble anyway. We got married too young, for the wrong reasons – her family wouldn’t have us living in sin. It was never right. There wasn’t a friendship there, which is what it always has to be underneath, right?’

  I clear my throat and nod.

  ‘… I could say more, but don’t speak ill and all that. The point is, I knew we were over, before Owen. It was confirmation. Could’ve done without knowing the other man quite so well, but there we go.’

  I nod as if I understand, except I don’t really understand. I feel glad of the heat and tingle of alcohol in my stomach.

  ‘And then she found out she was ill?’


  ‘Yeah. We’d agreed she was moving out. Then she went for a routine check-up after having these headaches and was told there was no hope. It was an aggressive cancer, and it was inoperable.’

  Lucas’s voice has grown thick and I merely take in this information, knowing I will lie awake for an hour when I go to bed tonight, trying to figure out how it must’ve felt. She left you and now she’s leaving you.

  ‘They gave her six weeks. She made eight. I told her, just go and be with Owen and we’ll work out the rest.’

  ‘That’s incredibly heroic,’ I say to Lucas, then in case he thinks I’m being flip: ‘I mean that. Incredible of you.’

  ‘It sounds like that, doesn’t it?’ Lucas says. ‘Funnily enough, it wasn’t heroic of me, at all. When she told me she was terminal, she said it didn’t change anything between us and I was relieved, because it didn’t. I was devastated for her but it’s not as if a tumour could make us love each other again, or undo the hurt. I would’ve been in a far bigger mess if she’d said: sorry we’re estranged and I was shagging one of your best mates but can we be husband and wife again for as long as I’ve got? I wouldn’t have known how to do that.’

  I nod, as if I understand.

  ‘But, she also wanted it kept secret. She knew a lot of family and friends would judge her for the affair with Owen. We had to go through it all presenting a united front.’

  ‘Literally no one knew you’d separated?’

  ‘No one. I told Devlin after the funeral. He and Mo had already announced they were calling their daughter after Niamh and he was committed. And you know,’ Lucas rubs his eyes and smiles. ‘It’s still a nice name, and they liked her.’

  He sounds more Irish than he usually does, in tiredness.

  ‘As to why I’m having frank exchanges of opinion. Niamh took Keith to Owen’s when she was sick. I could hardly say no. When Niamh died, Owen refused to give him back. Said it had been her dying wish that Owen keep him and I said, well, he wasn’t hers to gift. You can imagine Owen’s in a lot of pain and not seeing things straight, at the moment.’

  ‘Oh? Wow that’s … but Keith’s yours?’

  ‘Oh yeah. He was never Niamh’s dog, I got him as a puppy. So. Here’s where it turns into a Shane Meadows film plot. Devlin and I had to jail break Keith from Owen’s, and kidnap him. Dev tricked some guy we knew who was doing work on his flat to give us a spare key, and we staked it out, and burst in when he’d gone out, took Keith.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes. Not long after, I’ve come to do this work in Sheffield so Keith and I are safely at a distance from Owen’s wrath. And he’s … vociferous, I think is the word.’

  ‘Doesn’t he feel any shame for having slept with your wife and borrowed your dog and tried to keep him?’

  Lucas takes a large slug of whisky. ‘Quite the opposite. He has decided he at last freed Niamh from a tormented marriage, only to lose her, and he’s the victim in this. And I know where he’s coming from because he did love her so he must be hurting too. But he said …’

  Lucas pauses. I can see him bracing himself: ‘He said that maybe our fighting gave her stress that caused the cancer. I don’t believe for a single moment that Niamh and I screaming the odds, killed her. But what a thing to hear. I bullied her into an early grave.’

  ‘Lucas, that is …’ I swallow. I’ve gone from wanting to hard swerve all this, to wanting very much to be the friend he needs: ‘Unhappy couples fight, and say things they might regret later all the time. You no more knew what was round the corner than Niamh or Owen did. The lack of compassion in saying that … what a bastard.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He finishes the whisky. ‘Mind if I have more? Another for you?’

  I nod and hand my glass up. There’s only the sound of Keith’s light snoring until he returns.

  ‘Waaaait. That’s why you didn’t want me walking Keith?’ I say.

  ‘Oh? Yeah. I think Owen’s an unpredictable mess and I don’t let Keith out of my sight in case he decides to repatriate him to Ireland. I thought I was subtle in turning you down?’

  ‘You weren’t subtle,’ I laugh and Lucas says: ‘Sorry.’

  A brief silence.

  ‘I don’t know how to grieve Niamh. There’s not many handbooks out there for how to be sad at the death of someone who, at the time, you wanted to kill.’

  ‘Try a counsellor. They honestly help.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I went to one too,’ I say. ‘When the relationship with the person who’s gone is complicated, my counsellor used the analogy of a clean wound versus a dirty wound. The clean one is still a wound, but the healing is more straightforward. When it’s like an explosion of shrapnel, there’s infections, there’s secondary cuts. That takes longer to heal, and it heals differently. You have to accept the damage is different.’

  I didn’t, for a moment, ever forecast I’d one day be sitting with Lucas McCarthy, repeating this. Fay and I were talking about two men I knew, and one of them is in front of me.

  Lucas sits forward. ‘Do you mind me asking who you lost?’

  ‘My dad.’

  ‘And you went to see a counsellor about it?’

  Somehow, although I could tell the edited version of this history, I already know Lucas is going to be the first and only person other than Fay to hear the full.

  The emotion is blunted by Lagavulin and yet I still have to pace myself.

  ‘I was very close to my dad …’ I’ll have to deliver a sentence at a time and sort myself out in the pauses.

  ‘You don’t have to talk about this, you know,’ Lucas says.

  ‘No, no. I want to. I visited from university after a month. You know, huge bag of washing, you feel like a character who’s been on some epic journey, forever changed by their travels.’

  Lucas laughs, softly.

  ‘Ah yes. You think you’re Frodo. Or is it Bilbo.’

  ‘I told my mum I was coming home that weekend, and my dad hadn’t been informed. My mum and my dad not communicating was kind of a hallmark of their relationship. If my dad had known, he’d have been fired up to see me, chippy tea, he’d have bought a bottle of wine. Instead I get home, travel weary from the far-off land of Newcastle and expecting this fanfare and no one’s home. But that’s OK. I threw all my washing in the machine, made myself a five-slices-of-bread-tall sandwich, head upstairs to scarf it.’

  Lucas smiles and I think I see genuine affection towards me.

  ‘Then, thanks to being an underslept fresher, I fall asleep. When I woke up, I could hear my dad’s voice. I sneak downstairs quietly, all ready to shout “SURPRISE, it’s me!” and I twig that he’s not talking to someone in the house, he’s on the landline in the hallway.’

  Time hasn’t dulled this impact. Even now, twelve years later, I feel almost as shocked as I did when it happened. I also feel like I’m betraying Dad by recounting it. I’d never known until now that’s why I’ve kept it to myself. To protect him.

  ‘And … he’s saying things, obviously to a woman. Not things you ever, ever want to hear your dad say. Things he’s going to do to her. Things he’d like her to do to him. Oh God, Lucas, porny stuff. I’ve actually managed to block a lot of it out. The C word featured.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ Lucas puts a hand to his forehead. ‘That’s … that’s so rough.’

  ‘Yeah. So I’m halfway down the stairs, I can’t move without him hearing or seeing me and I’m coming to terms with the fact I now know he’s having an affair.’

  I catch my breath. ‘He hangs up. He sees me. He absolutely loses his shit about me earwigging on him, as a way of dealing with what he knows I heard. I’m scared, I lose my shit at him. I say how awful it is to Mum, to me, to my sister. What a terrible dad and husband he is.’

  Deep breaths, Georgina, I tell myself. Like Fay said.

  ‘He stood and took it all. He couldn’t do anything else. I avoided him for the rest of the weekend, and went back to Newcastle. In pieces.’

&
nbsp; Another deep breath.

  ‘He calls me, a day later, conciliatory, and offered to drive up to Newcastle to see me. I told him to piss off.’

  Just as I think I’ve got through this, I break. I break completely on the words piss off. I put my face in my hands and my shoulders shake as I weep. This is kept in a safely locked box most of the time, and I try to mislay the key. Sometimes when I open it, the contents feel like they could consume me.

  Moments later, I feel Lucas crouching next to me. He puts his arm around me, and without thinking I turn and sob into his shoulder. The fabric smells of him, in a nice way. He is bigger and broader than the boy I was heavy petting with in the park. I wish I could lose myself into this embrace, and not only because of who he is and what he was to me. It feels so good to have someone hold me. It eases this immovable pain in my chest.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, voice gone up three octaves due to crying at same time. ‘Sorry. You were talking about your wife and now I’m booing …’

  ‘Hey hey hey. It’s fine, it’s alright to cry,’ Lucas shushes me and rubs my back. Keith lets out a confused whimper and it makes us both laugh. Lucas fetches tissues and I accept one. Much as I didn’t want to cry in front of Lucas, I feel better for having done it.

  Lucas sits down in his seat again. I crumple the tissue in both hands.

  ‘And he—’ I breathe, deeply, ‘—he died, a few weeks later. Giant heart attack. We’d never made up. That was it. “Piss off” was the last time we spoke.’

  I sniff and gasp.

  Lucas gasps too, in a different way. ‘Oh. No.’

  ‘I never told Mum or my sister about our fight, how could I? We’re burying Dad twenty-five years before we expected to, oh and by the way he was playing away, not sure with who, good luck processing this information.’ I shrug: ‘And Dad wasn’t there to defend himself. So when you couldn’t tell everyone you and Niamh weren’t together, or you felt let down by her? I get that. I couldn’t tell everyone I was the apple of my dad’s eye and he mine but my last memory is us at daggers drawn, or me hanging up on him.’