Don't You Forget About Me

by Mhairi McFarlane

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘… Why kiss me?’

  ‘You kissed me.’

  My mouth falls open. ‘Oh right, sorry, I thought this had involved two people but I accosted you, did I? I just fondled myself?’

  ‘Georgina,’ Lucas says, and he looks upset now, ‘You’re gorgeous. You’re amazing. No one would easily turn you down. But you work for me. So, no. I can’t.’

  I know consolation prize compliments when I hear them. He’s turning me down with no real trouble at all.

  ‘Honestly, Lucas, spitting me out like you found a lump of cat food in your chilli con carne is one thing, making up reasons for it is another. You can tell the truth. I’m a grown-up. This polite brush-off is the worst.’

  Lucas looks stung by this, more agitated than ever. ‘That’s bollocks though, isn’t it? The truth isn’t some wholesome thing that sets us free. It’s messy and best left alone, and you should know that better than most.’

  Does he mean my dad? Or …?

  We’re breathing heavily, silent as his words land in the space between us.

  ‘So,’ I choke. ‘So you’re admitting that you’re not actually bothered we work together, and it is something else?’

  ‘… Yeah,’ he says, hesitating. I can tell he already wishes he’d not said what he just said, that he was needled by me and didn’t think more than one move ahead. Too late.

  My bluff has been called. In my confusion and mortification, I’ve been pretending so much more confidence than I actually have. This is gutting, even frightening. But I’ve come too far to back down.

  ‘… You didn’t hear what I was saying to Kitty? About … love? I can clarify that if so. I’m not looking for a ring.’

  He frowns. ‘No.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does.’

  If the real reason was bad enough to need a white lie to cover it, it’s going to be awful. And he doesn’t know I’ve gossiped with Kitty about him being ready to date again, so if he invokes the spectre of Niamh, it’s another white lie. I think I know what might be coming and yet I would rather hear anything – anything – other than what I think he might be about to say.

  Could it be …? No, surely not …

  ‘Really, I’d rather hear it.’

  ‘Why? To what end?’

  ‘It’s better than wondering,’ I say around the lump in my throat.

  Brash claim: I have no idea if it’s better than wondering. The pub doesn’t feel cosy any more. It feels dark and silent and treacherous. The spark between us has snuffed out, now smoking like a guttering candle. Lucas looks away, then back, right into my eyes.

  ‘I associate you with one of the worst nights of my life.’

  We stare at each other.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean, I’m sure.’

  ‘But …’ I trail off. Not ready. I’ve had twelve years to prepare and I am not ready.

  ‘Cast your mind back. We were eighteen years old and what I think was once called “going steady”.’

  He’s known who I am all along. Worst night of his life? Ha. He has no idea. And I’ve spent all this time not knowing he felt this way.

  My face must be ashen. Lucas says: ‘And yes, I did pretend not to remember you, once Dev had given us no choice about working together. I thought it was easier.’

  ‘You’re the boss. You could have said you wouldn’t work with me.’

  This is irrelevant, but I need to say something as a placeholder while I sort my thoughts out. He knew?

  A cab beeps and both of us ignore it.

  ‘I didn’t want to persecute you for something that happened in another lifetime. It’s not as if I could care less now. But yeah, with the choice of any barmaids in Sheffield, for preference I’d have gone with one who hadn’t broken my heart.’

  He’s telling me this now?

  ‘I broke your heart?’ I say.

  Lucas doesn’t reply.

  ‘You broke my heart,’ I say, into the silence.

  Lucas laughs. He actually laughs at this.

  ‘Nice try. I think that might be false memory syndrome.’

  There’s so much to say, but I’m completely unprepared for this. I don’t know how, in hostility and rejection, to discuss it. While I can still feel the pressure of his lips on mine, where he’s touched my skin.

  ‘But … you didn’t want me?’ I say.

  Lucas gives me a look. Heavy, sardonic. Full of contempt, and things he won’t say and I ought to know.

  ‘Yeah. That is true. Afterwards, I didn’t want you.’

  Time stands still for a moment. I stand still, I say nothing. I accept my coat from Lucas, pick up my bag from the seat nearby, and walk away.

  ‘Night?’ he says, half-sarcastic, half hopeful.

  I answer him only with the door, swinging back in his face.

  38

  I allowed for the possibility I might wake up and feel different. I don’t. If anything, I am even more empty. And yet with nothing to lose, I feel myself gaining strength I hadn’t known was there.

  When I arrive for the lunchtime shift, I catch Devlin on his way out to collect some new furniture. Lucas won’t be here ’til mid-afternoon, I’m told, which suits me just fine.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to give you my notice. Is it a week for the first six months?’

  He looks like I goosed him.

  ‘For treasured staff like you, it’s as long or short as you like, but never mind that, where are you going? What utterly sneaky bastard has poached you?’

  ‘Nowhere, actually. I’ve saved up a bit of cash and I’m going to assess my options. Can’t pull pints forever, at the big Three Oh,’ I say, with a wan smile. The money saving is actually true. The Wicker pay fantastically well, and have thrown bonuses at me, and I’ve been working too hard to spend anything. I really shouldn’t be leaving.

  But I can’t stay.

  Devlin looks baleful. ‘Awww no … I’m knocked for six. You feel like one of the family. Tell me this, is this a negotiation, is there anything I could offer you to make you stay? Or is your mind made up? I know Mo sometimes wants me to guess the answer.’

  I laugh. ‘No mind games, I promise. It is what it looks like.’

  Not entirely true, but I’m hardly going to enlighten him.

  I expect Lucas to hear soon enough, but I don’t expect him to know already when he finally arrives after four. Dev must’ve texted him, because from where I’m standing, they’ve had no chance to confer in person.

  He gives me a straight hard look when he reappears. While Kitty’s handling the front of house transactions with relative ease, I hear Lucas shout me from the back.

  ‘Can you point me to where the limes are?’ he asks, from inside the kitchen, holding the door open with his foot.

  ‘Aren’t they in the top of the fridge like usual?’

  He doesn’t answer, so, braced for impact, I walk inside and he shuts the door with a sharp click, standing in front of it.

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  I can’t meet his eye, can’t tell if he’s trying to meet mine.

  ‘Taking a break. I have some money I’ve …’

  ‘Yeah I know what you told Dev. You’re leaving with nothing to go to. Why are you really leaving?’

  I shrug, nudging the edge of the lino with my foot.

  ‘As you said. You don’t need complications with someone you work with.’

  ‘We don’t have any complications. We didn’t complicate it.’

  Oh, boy. We didn’t sleep together, I knocked you back, so everything’s cool. I am angry enough that I have to fight to control it.

  ‘You think we’ve got no problem, after what you said to me?’ I say, with force.

  Lucas looks taken aback; chastened, almost nervous of me. This role reversal where he feels under siege – and
wants something from me I won’t give – it’s cold comfort, but it’s some comfort nonetheless.

  ‘I did say raking up the past wasn’t a good idea. You wanted to know.’

  ‘I did. Now spoken, it can’t be un-known.’

  ‘So I’m being punished for telling you something you wanted to know and I told you, you wouldn’t like?’

  ‘You’re being punished? Ha. Of all the barmaids in Sheffield, I’m sure you can find a replacement. I’m the one foregoing my salary.’

  ‘I don’t want you to!’

  ‘I can’t stay,’ I say, simply.

  ‘I don’t …’ Lucas puts his hand on the back of his head, his body taut with tension. I can see him trying to figure out how much more truth will help, or make things worse.

  ‘… Was it honestly that much of a surprise I felt that way? All I said was that what happened, it upset me. At the time, I mean. It’s like it happened to someone else now.’

  I can feel an urge to pursue this, to point out he can’t simultaneously be indifferent and repulsed by me. But my simple steeliness is the only thing holding me together right now, more from him on this might break me open. I breathe deeply.

  ‘That’s not all, though, is it. You branded me a brassy slut.’ I say this emphatically, deliberately, and he can’t meet my eyes.

  ‘I didn’t do that!’ Lucas says, flushing. ‘Oh my God, we were kids, who cares, honestly.’

  ‘You do, obviously, given what it stopped.’

  Lucas swallows. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you or misjudged anything I said. I felt we’d been down that path before and it didn’t need a revisit.’

  Didn’t need a revisit. His attempts at minimisation are only going to offend me further.

  ‘… I meant to say: I like being friends, let’s not spoil that.’

  ‘I’m not happy with the whole “pretending not to remember me” thing either, the game playing. We could’ve got it out of the way at the start.’

  ‘Well, were we going to chew the fat about it? Oh hey remember when we …’ He trails off, glowering. I ignore his sulky beauty, it can go to hell. ‘You baffle me, Gina.’

  Is it deliberate, resurrecting his pet name for me? Much as I’d like to hate him for it, call him sassy things like ‘a player’, I suspect it isn’t. This is why he didn’t want to discuss the past, it makes him vulnerable. He’s forgetting himself.

  ‘I’m sure I do. If you’re so arrogant you thought I’d accept your poor opinion of me, and carry on.’ My voice nearly breaks on my last words but I’m holding this together while I still can. I will damn well leave with some dignity.

  ‘I don’t have a poor opinion of you. You’ve been great here, and we don’t want you to leave. Both of us, me and Dev. And if seeing less of me is what it takes to keep you, I’m going back to Dublin soon. It’ll be Dev and Mo running the show until they hand over to a new manager.’

  Bloody hell, he doesn’t even want me here because he cares about me, it really is about professional competence. What he thinks is his ace card is in fact the worst thing he could’ve said. I’m not leaving for the reason I told Devlin, and I’m not actually leaving for the reason I’m giving Lucas, either, and this knowledge allows me to pull myself up, raise my chin and meet his eye again.

  ‘Thank you. I’m still going.’

  I sidestep him and smash through the kitchen door, back out to the bar and say, loudly: ‘Yes, who’s waiting, please?’

  Screw Lucas McCarthy, and not in that sense.

  Funnily enough, telling Kitty is the worst. She cries.

  ‘I feel like you’re my sister,’ she says, hugging me.

  ‘I’ll still come in here, we’ll still see each other.’

  ‘Yeah but it won’t be the same. I feel like I’ve learned so much from you.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yeah. You were the one who explained to me that “offal” is what the meat’s called, when I thought people were saying eating brains and bumholes was “awful”.’

  ‘We will be friends forever. I promise. I make friends for life,’ I say. Lucas walks past and I squeeze Kitty again.

  ‘How can you let her go?!’ Kitty wails to Lucas, in an excruciating moment I can nevertheless only commend her for.

  ‘Sadly, God gave her free will,’ Lucas says to Kitty. ‘To use as she pleases,’ he says to me.

  ‘Or misuse, apparently.’

  This is a glib riposte, not thought through. I see a hurt look on Lucas’s face and tell myself I don’t care. I do.

  39

  In the end, I didn’t stay a week. That was my last shift as I knew I couldn’t bear to spend another second in Lucas’s presence. Dev was brilliant about it and after thrusting far more than he should have into my hands, he kissed my cheeks, twice, and gave me a hug that felt like it cracked my ribs.

  ‘Don’t be a stranger now, Georgina, d’you hear? There’ll always be a job here for you.’

  I’d thanked him, gathered up the pink fluffmonster and left, not looking back, no goodbye to Lucas, who’d slammed upstairs, not to reappear. I told myself I was fine with that.

  Now, sitting at home on my laptop on my first afternoon of unemployment, listlessly scrolling, I got an alert about Robin’s latest triumph. He never bothered with a personal account on Facebook, but I’d forgotten I’d ‘Liked’ Robin McNee’s fan page.

  Once upon a time, you broke up with someone, and if they didn’t live in your postcode, you never saw them again. You might not have heard of them again either. I’m not a fan of this modern alternative where you can become a spectator of everything they do for the rest of their lives, simply by typing their name into the search bar on Facebook, or vice versa.

  I promptly click Unlike. Then my eyes drift down to the item.

  Hey everyone! See Chortle’s write up below! We’ve got a few tickets left for a special sneak preview of Robin’s new show which he’s doing at The Last Laugh tonight. Rolling out to a full tour plus Edinburgh in the new year!! SEE YOU THERE £5 on door / 7 sharp

  Despite finding TV fame with Idiot Soup, Robin McNee’s long been a cherished secret of the comedy circuit. With this new self-revelatory work, Sheffield’s finest stand-up is unlikely to be secret much longer.

  ‘My Ex-Girlfriend’s Diary’ uses fictional excerpts of his lost, much lamented love’s journal, which he ‘finds’ when prowling in her bedroom. It’s My Dad Wrote A Porno meets Judy Blume. He recounts how his nosiness rebounds on him, as he’s privy to her lustful feelings towards her teenage boyfriend. By contrast, their time between the sheets is somewhat lacklustre.

  McNee uses the diary discoveries as a jumping off point to ask – can men ever understand what women want from them, and have a hope of fulfilling it? By snooping on her fevered adolescent fantasies about another man, McNee realises his own inadequacy as a later life successor. Expect to laugh, cry and wince at the use of ‘cleft’.

  I stop, palms slick with sweat. I read it. I re-read it. I read it four times more and pace the room, saying, ‘You utter BASTARD’ out loud. I tear up the stairs and check, hands clumsy as I push my clothes aside in the drawer. It’s there. It’s still there. I yank it out and riffle the pages, heart pounding. It’s all here. I hold it to my chest and sob, like a scene in a soap opera. My words, taken from me.

  With shaky hands, I flick through the pages. This would be hard to read at any time, but after the showdown with Lucas, it’s excruciating. Like peeling back a bandage and plunging your fingertips into the surgical incision underneath.

  … I lose track of time when we’re Doing Stuff, I mean completely, three hours had passed and all I can remember about the entire time is thinking about where his left hand was. Got home and felt like everyone could see on my face what I’d been doing all afternoon. Rubbish tea, I hate lamb stew with the fatty speckly bits. George Best has died and Dad seems sad about it. Mum said, ‘He had it coming with his behaviour’ and Dad said, ‘Mr Best, where did it all go wrong?’ and they ha
d one of their moods with each where they’ve pissed each other off at some special level Esther and I can’t understand …

  … Persuaded Mum I needed new bras and pants and so we went to Marks and Sparks and she tried to have THE TALK with me after about being safe with boys after aaaaarggh noooo. I said, ‘I don’t have a boyfriend’ which would’ve worked like a dream with Dad, probably because he doesn’t want to think about it. But Mum just raised an eyebrow and said, ‘they’re not always your boyfriend.’ I knew what was coming next, some 1950s code for ‘don’t be a slag’ and YES there it was: ‘Georgina, remember nice boys want to date nice girls.’ …

  … He is the most sexy boy to ever live, I’m sure of it, even though he’s my first and I’ve only been alive for 18 years. He is the personification of sexy and I don’t think he knows how beautiful he is. He says that to me! I keep trying to imagine what actual sex will be like. How are you supposed to know what to do? You have to patch it together from films, TV, the gross magazines that Gary Tate used to bring in to school and the awful ‘How A Baby Is Made’ video we were once shown in biology GCSE, when a man and a woman were smiling at each other, went up to a bedroom and then it cut to a ballet dancer leaping around with a ribbon and the whole class started laughing …

  I slam it shut again and feel a wave of shame and disgrace and fury at this invasion.

  How? I remember one time, no, maybe more than that, a few times, when Robin stayed in my room after I went to work. ‘Leave by the back door and pull it shut, it’s a Yale, then you don’t need my keys.’

  Left unattended in here, he went through my things. He read my diary. Did he copy out sections from my diary? I wouldn’t put it past him, and from what I can tell he’s either got perfect recall (with the amount he smokes? Unlikely) or (so much more likely) took photos of the pages. And he put them into his act.

  What did Lucas say? ‘If he has anything he can use against you’? Right now, Lucas doesn’t look smart so much as clairvoyant.

  It takes a very large wine and five more re-readings of the preview on Chortle to come up with what I should do.