Don’t You Forget About Me(42)

In what becomes a pattern during my next few shifts, he stays in the background while Devlin and I handle a steady trickle, soon a flood, of punters. The pub is in that tricky transition of shooing away the old undesirable clientele while letting the new ones know they’re not what they were. It’s got an Under New Management sign outside.

Yet my good fortune couldn’t last forever. As you might expect from a calendar date celebrating the birth of Satan, I discover at the last minute I’ll be working Halloween alone with Lucas McCarthy, as fifty per cent of the management will be in another country. And not just any Halloween: it falls on a Friday night this year.

‘I know it’s inconvenient as hell but I’ve got to dash back to the motherland. Sick child,’ Devlin explains to me. ‘It’s not fair to leave my wife on mopping-up duty any longer.’

‘Your family isn’t in Sheffield with you?’

‘Hahaha no, God no. Mo wouldn’t wear it. We have a four-year-old lad and a four-month-old. Did I not say? No, Luc and I have several boozers over there, too. The plan eventually is for this to be up and running without us and we’ll oversee it from over there. Although I dunno what Lucas wants to do, what with everything that’s happened. And he’s not got any squeakers, like me.’

I don’t ask what he means by ‘everything that’s happened’, though I am violently curious. I don’t want to pry. Or more accurately, I don’t want the image of someone who’d pry. Lucas can’t claim I’ve been gossiping about him.

I’d feared that Lucas would scrutinise my work in this first shift of just the two of us and hang over me, given he’d never wanted me here in the first place. Again, the opposite turns out to be true.

Lucas has barely laid eyes on me, giving me a wide berth. It’s like we have separate dance spaces, he keeps rigid control, never stepping into mine.

It might be a little more difficult to avoid me all evening, though.

‘Are we doing anything special for Halloween?’ I ask Lucas as we set up the back of the bar.

‘No, nothing special, the usual. Cotton wool across the bar taps, spiders in the plant pots, fancy dress, “Thriller” on the speakers. I’m doing a few bowls of punch with gummy worms in, and so on. Keith’s going to wear devil horns.’

He gestures at Keith in his basket. (As Official Pub Dog, he is already a colossal hit. ‘And getting steadily fatter on contraband peanuts; the vet is going to flay me,’ Lucas says.)

My mouth falls open. Fancy dress?

‘What are you here as?’ He looks my black-jeans-black-t-shirt up and down, leaving me feeling seen and yet wanting. ‘I’ve got a Beetlejuice suit going spare. You could hairspray your hair up.’ Lucas studies it. ‘Bit of talc.’

I hate antics. And with him? I’m going to feel the very dickhead.

‘I do ask you stay in character throughout the evening. Can you do a Beetlejuice voice?’

A smile flickers onto his face and I finally twig he’s winding me up. I wouldn’t have been so slow, but I’m on hyper alert around him. My appalled expression softens.

‘Oh, you SWINE.’ I get my first ever Lucas grin in return. I didn’t know his face could still do that. It radically alters it.

‘Heh.’

‘I believed you for a moment!’

‘Nah, nothing, not even a carved pumpkin. To be honest, theme or no theme, it’s early days so it’s hard to call if we’re going to be rammed or not.’

For the first hour or two, it seems ‘not’, and then things gather pace. Lucas has been letting me serve alone and leaving me to myself, but we’re sufficiently full by 8 p.m. that this is no longer an option. Apart from the occasional muttered ‘Excuse me’ ‘No after you’ when we’re reaching for the same bottle, there’s not much chat.

There is the excruciating moment when I bend down and my backside collides with something solid, and when I straighten I see it was Lucas. There’s more padding on me than when we dated and I feel like a panto dame. He moves away from the scene of the collision with a humiliating speed.

Then there’s a lull, and we’re forced to find some conversation. This is the real problem with working for the McCarthys – I have no blank slate (or, it might be blank for him, it’s full of scrawl for me). It makes moments that should be easy or neutral, a minor agony.

‘Lot of effort for Devlin to go back and forward to Ireland,’ I say. ‘I didn’t realise his kids were over there, that must be tough.’

‘It’s only an easyJet flight away, not too arduous,’ Lucas says. ‘He lives in central Dublin, so it’s not much of a hike on the other side.’

‘Still, when your child’s sick, you want to be with them as soon as.’

‘And he is with them.’

‘Ehm, OK. Was only expressing sympathy,’ I say, no longer able to hide my irritation.

I see Lucas see this and take a breath and rearrange his attitude a little. ‘I don’t mean to snipe at you. It’s a sibling thing. Dev’s the impetuous one who acts on instinct and I’m the one who generally gets invited to clear up afterwards. I didn’t think it was the right time to be expanding the mini empire to South Yorkshire, with his family commitments. He convinced me it’d be a breeze, us knowing the city from when we were kids. He said we needed a change of scene. Dublin’s great but it’s small when you’ve been there as long as we have.’