Don’t You Forget About Me(57)

‘Yes!!’ Robin pumps his fist. He’s only pleased to have some sort of result because he has an audience. If he thinks coercion by humiliation will work, good luck to him. The whole room now knows I caught my ex inside someone else. It was his fault, so why do I feel so exposed? He’s trying to drag me down with him. I was someone else here, but now I’m that woman who Robin McNee double-timed. I’m unclean, I’ve got Robin’s words all over me.

‘I can’t thank you enough,’ Robin says to the room. He gives a small bow, chair threatening to give away, and jumps down. There’s a smattering of applause. Someone male shouts ‘G’wan, Georgina!’ and whistles.

A murmur of chatter restarts and Robin walks back up to me, flushed with triumph.

‘There you are. It’s the will of the people, like Brexit.’

‘Get out,’ I say, through a ventriloquist dummy’s smile, for the benefit of onlookers. ‘How dare you …’

We’re interrupted. Lucas has walked over from the kitchen and is stood next to Robin. He taps him on the arm.

‘Can I ask you to leave, please?’

‘Who are you?’ Robin says. ‘On what authority?’

‘I’m the owner.’

‘For what reason?’

‘Disturbing other drinkers.’

‘They seemed to enjoy it.’

‘It’s not a democracy, it’s my benign dictatorship. Go.’

‘A word to the wise,’ Robin says to Lucas. ‘See the bigger picture. This here is a love story for the ages and you can choose your role in it. Don’t be “heartless landlord”.’

‘I think you’ve got our pub confused with eHarmony. Here we are,’ he escorts Robin towards his coat, lying over a chair. As Al stands up, Lucas says, picking up his phone before he can: ‘Can you delete that film you took, please?’

‘I’m allowed to film if I want!’

‘Not on these premises without permission first, unless you want a big fine. What’s it to be, big fine or deleting it?’

Al huffs and puffs and swears and holds his hand out for the phone, swiping, prodding a button and when Lucas, squinting at the screen, is satisfied, he ushers them both doorwards.

‘Excuse me, excuse me.’

They’re stopped in their tracks by Gareth from The Star.

‘Robin McNee, isn’t it? Perhaps you’d like to be involved with this? You could help judge!’

Gareth is waving a Share Your Shame bill under his nose and Robin takes it.

Oh, no.

‘Or maybe you’d like to contribute to this next week? You missed the first one but I don’t think it’d matter … Very informal, few drinks, open mike kind of thing. I’m sure you’d be a huge hit.’

God, Gareth is practically simpering.

‘It’s here? Is there a fee? You know who this is?’ Al the agent says, with a lip curl.

‘Excuse me,’ Lucas says, ‘I just asked these gentlemen to leave,’ and Robin and Al are unceremoniously ejected into the night.

‘He’s been tipped to win the Perrier award, you know!’ Gareth says to Lucas, after the door’s closed. ‘He’s going places.’

‘He can go any place he likes, as long as it isn’t this pub,’ Lucas says, and Gareth shakes his head.

I am torn between gratitude at care for me, in Lucas’s intervention, and a sense that I’m polluting the pub’s reputation, and Lucas had felt nothing for me but a mixture of disdain and pity.

My friends and family, whose vantage point means they’ve not caught what went on in the doorway, but have definitely caught what went on with Robin’s speech, have decided to make a tactful exit to spare my blushes.

‘We’d have shouted at him and pushed him off that chair,’ Clem says. ‘But Jo says you didn’t want us to make a fuss?’

I nod, miserably.

Esther and Mark are trying to work out how to arrange their faces. I could scream, cry, pummel Robin into a bloody pulp.

Tonight had been about me trying to do something bold and constructive for a change, and thanks to Robin humiliating me in my workplace, it’s all but obliterated.

When everyone has left, and I’m mopping up, I see the topic for the next episode of Share Your Shame has been posted up on the pub noticeboard.

Your Worst Date.

Lucas comes back in from putting the bins out in a sudden downpour, running his hands through the water in his black hair, pulling a sodden t-shirt away from his body and letting it limply snap back. Robin has turned off my pilot light for the time being but I can still appreciate the loveliness dispassionately. Lucas catches me staring and jerks his head towards the poster. ‘He’s barred, so don’t worry about that,’

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘And thanks for getting him out this evening. I’m still mortified. And furious. But mostly mortified.’

‘No thanks needed, I ban tossers who harass my staff as a matter of course.’

I’m going to say ‘thanks’ again but it’s witless, so I say nothing.

‘That is who he is, isn’t it?’ Lucas says, hesitantly, keys in his hand, Keith at his heels. ‘I mean, tell me if this is a Taylor / Burton type thing and he’ll be your boyfriend again by next week, as then the admissions policy needs to be more flexible.’