Don’t You Forget About Me(44)
‘Sorry to leave you on your own, it’s not fair. This is why I wasn’t down with Devlin’s brilliant tactical maverick understaffing.’
I shake my head: ‘It’s fine, go.’
Though I can’t tell how much this is authentic concern for me and how much was a chance to knock his brother. (That said, the very thought of working with Esther …)
‘Sheila’s Wheels, over there,’ Lucas nods towards the hen, and I laugh, ‘As long as they’re not disturbing anyone else, keep serving them, though it’s incredible they’ve not keeled over. How many Nebuchadnezzars of prosecco is it now? Nine? OK.’
After a shaky start, I think I can grow to like him as a boss. He might not be all over me trying to be my best mate, but this starchy professionalism is preferable anyway. Whenever anyone acted like your mate at That’s Amore! they were either trying to get into your knickers or swap for a Bank Holiday shift.
At gone ten, shortly after Lucas has left, the door slaps open like a saloon bar in a western, with a gust of icy air, and a man in a high end Halloween costume enters. He’s got a blond wig with a ponytail, fake armour, a large red cape spilling down his back. He raises a large foam hammer and says, using a cod-dramatic voice: ‘I’m looking for BECKY!’
Oh, God.
The hen do erupts into excited shrieking and the warrior makes his way over to their table.
‘Becky?’ he booms.
‘Yes yes it’s me!’ A woman with a bridal veil attached to an Alice band half stands, at the back of the semi-circle, and windmills her arms.
‘Hello, Becky, I am Thor. Do you like my hammer?’
Becky’s near hyperventilating in her desire to let it be known that she likes his hammer.
Thor puts down a Bluetooth portable speaker that he had secreted somewhere about his person, and Sisqo’s ‘Unleash The Dragon’ blares out.
Aw God no! A stripper?!
He starts swinging his hammer from side to side.
‘You’ve heard of RAGNAROK! Well who wants to see RAGNACOCK?!’
18
There’s deafening screaming and the rest of the pub is split between those who’ve abandoned their drinks to watch and those who’ve simply abandoned their drinks, got up and left. We may well not get these people back again. The Wicker is in the reputation-making phase. This is a disaster.
I have to intervene. For self-interest if nothing else – I can’t have Lucas walk in to find me standing watching some bloke with his wang out. I could be sacked. ‘Well, Devlin, that girl I said was best suited to Hooters? She had a fella wafting his hot rod round the place within minutes of being left in charge.’
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.