Don’t You Forget About Me(43)

This sounds just slightly ominous to me. Angry creditors? Scorned women?

‘But Dev’s done the “whoops would you mind” dropping a custard pie on my feet a few too many times to me lately. Things are a bit strained.’

He means me! I strained things. I am a custard pie. I even have custard-coloured hair.

‘Oh, I see. I didn’t know.’

‘No, well. Why would you.’

I get the impression Lucas meant this to be conciliatory statement of fact, but it doesn’t land as completely without rancour.

I shuffle uneasily, arranging and rearranging the paper straws in their holders on the bar. The end of this shift can’t come fast enough.

‘I don’t mean I mind him being with Oscar, I should add. I’m just not the right person to muse on Poor Dev at the moment.’

I nod.

‘He has two kids, he said?’

‘Oscar and Niamh.’

We’re drawn away from a discussion that’s bringing pleasure to neither of us, to witness the sight of a dozen girls pouring through the door. They’re in angel wings, football skirts and Aertex t-shirts saying BEC’S HEN, and commandeer a large booth in the window, throwing down their paraphernalia and accessories with the entitlement of a gang walking onto their own yacht.

‘What’s our policy on stags and hens?’ I mutter.

One of the women screeches with delight at the sight of wobbling penis deely boppers hauled out from a bag and handed around like Academy Award statuettes. The phalluses are glittery and protrude from gobbets of cerise fluff. Humans are strange, really.

‘We don’t have one. I have a feeling we will do, by the end of the night.’

‘I’m surprised they’d come to a place like this for a hen?’ I say.

Lucas gives me a grim look.

‘You know why, don’t you?’

‘No?’

‘Cos they’ve probably been told no everywhere else?’

It’s a rule of restaurants that your spunkiest spenders are the most trouble. I guess there’s some justice in that, effort versus reward, only if you’re not the proprietor, you’re not seeing any of the latter.

And let me tell you this, as immutable law: the bigger the table, the smaller the tip. Something to do with diffusion of responsibility, Rav reckons.

So BEC’S HEN are pouring profits into The Wicker with their unslakeable prosecco thirst, but from my point of view, there’s not much of an upside to catering to their whims and shouting to be heard over their squawking. They end up with table service, as we’re quite keen on a herd and trap where they stay in their designated area and cause minimal disruption.

I’ve got a system going where one of them snaps fingers and points at the upside-down bottle in the ice bucket. I collect it from their table, along with their card for contactless, returning shortly after with a fresh fizz and a receipt to prove I’m not skimming.

‘Give it here,’ Lucas says on the fifth go-round, ‘You’ve got your hands full.’

I watch him set the drink down on their table and soon several of the women have their hands full of Lucas McCarthy. They snake round his jeans, up and down his legs and – I can’t help but notice from my point of view behind the bar – rather fine denim-clad behind, as if he’s surrounded by Hindu goddesses, or has fallen into a mosh pit.

Woah. I can’t see what’s happening at the front but I can’t imagine they’re showing much restraint there, either.

He detaches them with some difficulty and backs off, to shrill whooping and cat calling. I feel a little discomfited by it: it’s not as if groping and harassment gets much better when you swap the sexes. He got molested.

‘Let me go deal with them next time,’ I say to Lucas.

He replies: ‘I can cope, thanks,’ in a way that seems terse and defensive rather than grateful.

I can’t get the measure of Lucas, at all. He’s at turns standoffish, slyly funny, dour, mischievous, helpful, haughty. It’s behaviour borne of beauty privilege, I decide, watching him from the corner of my eye, watching the women, watch him.

You don’t get treated in standard fashion when you look like Lucas McCarthy. The rules are different. You’ve got women falling over themselves to understand your complexities and decode your dark moods. When you have his jaw and brow, hair the colour of petrol, eyes with depths you can swim in, it’s not common or garden ‘grumpy’. It’s a brooding saturnine countenance.

It isn’t: What’s got into that mardy arse?

It’s: Ooh. What’s up with HIM?

However, Lucas McCarthy, as Mrs Pemberton said – pretty faces grow old too.

Maybe the years of being overlooked and marginalised at school curdled into some deep resentment, and now he cuts a swathe through the beauties of the Emerald Isle, letting his contempt show after he’s completed his conquest.

I smile to myself, imagining him in one of those romance novel paperback covers – shirt open, manly arms trapping a wayward, headstrong damsel in a crushing embrace. The Irish Publican’s Virgin Bride.

I keep thinking it’s a shame if he’s grown hard and cold, but maybe I need to face up to the fact that he probably always was.

As the night enters its final furlong, Lucas breaks it to me that he’s leaving me alone for half an hour to take Keith to stay at a friend’s. He goes into a degree of detail I wouldn’t have deemed necessary about why he has to do it now, given he’s the boss, which only leaves me wondering if he’s spinning a yarn to avoid me.