.
‘Give her a chance, you cynical twat. The lesson of tonight was not to be a cynical twat.’
‘I thought the lesson was about not doing stupid things when you’re heavily intoxicated. Also, who puts shamrocks in Guinness? To be sure to be sure. Let her go work in Scruffy Muffy’s or whatever it’s called these days.’
A howl of laughter. ‘Ah God, I wonder how we’d fix a flaw in her like that, Luc, I mean it’s IMPOSSIBLE …’
The driver shouts: ‘I’m starting the meter now, love, come on!’ and I startle and rush over, trying to pick my footsteps carefully so the brothers don’t twig to me having been nearby.
I just heard Lucas McCarthy equate the wisdom of hiring me with killing yourself.
When we pull up in Crookes, as I get money out to pay, I find Devlin’s given me fifty quid more than we agreed. Usually you’d put that down to inebriation but I get the sense that Devlin is always this garrulous and generous.
Damn. For a brief, blissful moment, I thought I’d fallen into a job that I’d like, for a person I like. But he’s Lucas McCarthy’s brother.
And since when was he ‘Luke’? I bridle at this, ludicrously, as if he’s committing a fraud. A betrayal. Betrayal. I turn the word over. It has pointed edges that cause lacerations. It’s like swallowing a Sticklebrick.
I walk, trance-like, from kitchen to bathroom sink to pulling on my pyjamas, not present in any single task, mind floating elsewhere.
We don’t know anything about her
Oh, really.
It’s not Hooters, Dev
Supercilious arsehole! How sexist is that?! Would any place hire you because of your hair? It may be lustrous but I’m thinking not. OK, he’s also possibly referring to the DD cup. Pig. Like I chose this pair in the Grattan catalogue.
So Lucas is now a grown-up who owns and runs places. I’m thirty and begging to work in them. The indignity.
I don’t want your job anyway, so the joke’s on you.
But oh God. I do want the job. Before this encounter, I’d have said that working for Lucas McCarthy would’ve been what my dad called a cheese-before-bed nightmare.
Now the initial encounter is over with, my feelings are more conflicted. I’ve heard him saying I’d be trouble – or that they ‘don’t know I’m nice’ – and my pride wants to face that down.
Was Lucas only pretending not to recognise me, then ruling out my working for them as a result? That’s the version that suits me, so I’m suspicious of it. It would mean he hasn’t forgotten, it did matter. Even if nothing like as much as it does to me, I’m not that deluded.
That beats being Some Blonde.
I scour the memory of our reunion for the smallest twitch of discomfort on his side and conclude: no, there was none. No one’s that good at a poker face, outside international poker tournaments.
But I didn’t hear who won that debate about me. I may yet not have the job.
I weigh up alternatives.
Devlin calls: Oh dear, my mistake, the vacancy is filled. This, when he sobers up, seems a likely outcome of what I overheard. It was unfair to impose me on Lucas, even without our history.
Or, I still get the job, but with Lucas resenting me, and that’ll be nothing compared to how he reacts when the penny drops about who I am? That’s a high wire act.
Lastly, best case scenario: I get the job, and it’s fine. Lucas grudgingly admits I’m sufficiently efficient, we rub along reasonably well. And he never places my face.
I lie in bed, my breath making ghosts in the damp air, wondering why my best case scenario also somehow sounds like the worst.
I didn’t know what loss meant until I lost Dad and I didn’t know what regret meant until I regretted Lucas McCarthy.
Although, as my counsellor Fay told me, I didn’t have complete control over the situation and the nature of my regret suggests I was entirely responsible when I only had power over my part of it. Lucas was an ‘independent actor’.
I said, ‘Hmm OK I regret my part in it.’
‘Accept that much, then. It’s yours, take it.’ She picked up a mug as a symbolic gesture, placed it on the desk and pushed it towards me. I didn’t think it worked that well really as it had a picture of King Kong on it and was obviously a personal artefact I wasn’t meant to literally accept.
I pulled it toward me and nodded. ‘Am I meant to feel any better?’
‘Not better as such, not automatically improved, like the words are a magic spell. But it can spring you out of self-defeating thought patterns where you continually berate and diminish yourself for what cannot be undone. You are not an omnipotent deity, you’re a human just going along, learning, making a mess sometimes in the process, as we all are.’
I wept then and she said it’s good that you can cry about it. I said: Seriously? Why? through whirlpools of my Lancôme liner as I plucked at the box of tissues on her desk. She said because admitting hurt helps you dispel its power and lets you get past it.
To be honest, a lot of counselling appears to be accepting you’re up to your tits in shit and finding you’re zen about it. Saying: at least my tits are warm.
I was glad I went, though. I liked Fay, with her henna-red wispy copper wire hair, billowing black jersey dresses and spectacles perched right on the end of her nose. The weekly hour spent in the calming room with the bamboo plant and the painting of sailboats in Mousehole harbour didn’t untie the knot, but it loosened it.
A note on the wall in the lobby told me I could tackle a number of issues, including:
• Emotional Eating
• Anxiety
• Debt Worries
• Histrionic Personality Disorder
• Internet Addiction
• Managing Chronic Pain
I thought: sounds like an average weekend round mine, har har har. (Fay told me I did this as reflex, mocking myself. I told her I couldn’t take my problems seriously, given some people are sleeping rough. ‘There are always those worse off than you. Your problems are not invalid as a result, or needing to be measured against an internationally recognised pain scale before we decide if your condition is severe enough to treat.’)
I didn’t turn up to talk about Lucas, it was to discuss my dad, but the counsellor said most people end up on different ground to the area they expected to cover. In family therapy, Fay said, you’d be amazed how often parents turn up to analyse a peculiarly difficult child and we end up looking at their problems instead.
I said: Do you know, I wouldn’t.
I never told Jo or my sister or anyone else about Lucas and it felt strange to turn thoughts I’d churned on into actual consonants and vowels, in a room, with a stranger. It gave it life outside of my head.
I still didn’t tell Fay the whole story.
I think the real damage was that Lucas and I never spoke after the leavers’ party. It wasn’t just that our relationship was unconsummated, there wasn’t a conclusion of any sort. No conversation whatsoever. Exams were over, school was out forever, and we didn’t have any mutual friends to pull us back into the same orbit, that summer or ever after. When there is so much left unsaid, your mind is free to fill in the words that were never exchanged in a hundred thousand different ways, and