After You

‘You must be Louise.’ His handshake was emphatic and without warmth. ‘I’m the new bar manager. Richard Percival.’ I took in his slick hair, his suit, his pale blue shirt, and wondered what kind of bars he had actually managed.

‘Nice to meet you.’

‘You’re the one who’s been off for two months.’

‘Well. Yes. I –’

He walked along the optics, scanning each bottle. ‘I just want you to know that I’m not a fan of people taking endless sick leave.’

My neck shifted a few centimetres back in my collar.

‘I’m just laying down a marker, Louise. I’m not one of those managers who turn a blind eye. I know that in many companies time off is pretty much considered a staff perk. But not in companies where I work.’

‘Believe me, I’ve not thought of the last nine weeks as a perk.’

He examined the underside of a tap, and rubbed at it meditatively with his thumb.

I took a breath before I spoke. ‘I fell off a building. Perhaps I could show you my surgery scars. So, you know, you can be reassured that I’m unlikely to want to do it again.’

He stared at me. ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic. I’m not saying you’re about to have other accidents, but your sick leave is, pro rata, at an unusually high level for someone who has worked for this company a relatively short time. That’s all I wanted to point out. That it has been noted.’

He wore cufflinks with racing cars on them.

‘Message received, Mr Percival.’ I said. ‘I’ll do my best to avoid further near-fatal accidents.’

‘You’ll need a uniform. If you give me five minutes I’ll get one out of the stockroom. What size are you? Twelve? Fourteen?’

I stared at him. ‘Ten.’

He raised an eyebrow. I raised one back. As he walked to his office, Carly leaned over from the coffee machine and smiled sweetly in his direction. ‘Utter, utter bellend,’ she said, from the side of her mouth.

She wasn’t wrong. From the moment I returned, Richard Percival was, in the words of my father, all over me like a bad suit. He measured my measures, checked every corner of the bar for molecular peanut crumbs, was in and out of the loos checking on hygiene and wouldn’t let us leave until he had stood over us cashing up and ensuring each till roll matched takings to the last penny.

I no longer had time to chat to the customers, to look up departure times, hand over lost passports, contemplate the planes we could see taking off through the great glass window. I didn’t even have time to be irritated by Celtic Pan Pipes, Vol. III. If a customer was left waiting to be served for more than ten seconds Richard would magically appear from his office, sighing ostentatiously, then apologize loudly and repeatedly because they had been kept waiting so long. Carly and I, usually busy with other customers, would exchange secret glances of resignation and contempt.

He spent half the day meeting reps, the rest on the phone to Head Office, bleating about Footfall and Spend Per Head. We were encouraged to upsell with every transaction, and taken to one side for a talking-to if we forgot. All that was bad enough.

But then there was the uniform.

Carly came into the Ladies as I was finishing getting changed and stood beside me in front of the mirror. ‘We look like a pair of eejits,’ she said.

Not content with dark skirts and white shirts, some marketing genius high up the corporate ladder had decided that the atmosphere of the Shamrock and Clover chain would benefit from genuine Irish clothing. This genuine Irish clothing had evidently been thought up by someone who believed that across Dublin, right this minute, businesswomen and checkout girls were pirouetting across their workplaces dressed in embroidered tabards, knee-high socks and laced-up dancing shoes, all in glittering emerald green. With accompanying ringlet wigs.

‘Jesus. If my boyfriend saw me dressed like this he’d dump me.’ Carly lit a cigarette, and climbed up on the sink to disable the smoke alarm on the ceiling. ‘Mind you, he’d probably want to do me first. The perv.’

‘What do the men have to wear?’ I pulled my short skirt out at the sides and eyed Carly’s lighter nervously, wondering how flammable I was.

‘Look outside. There’s only Richard. And he has to wear that shirt with a green logo. The poor thing.’

‘That’s it? No pixie shoes? Or little leprechaun hat?’

‘Surprise, surprise. It’s only us girls who have to work looking like porno Munchkins.’

‘I look like Dolly Parton: The Early Years in this wig.’

‘Grab a red one. Lucky us, we have a choice of three colours.’

From somewhere outside we could hear Richard calling. My stomach had begun to clench reflexively when I heard his voice.

‘Anyway, I’m not staying. I’m going to Riverdance my way out of this place and into another job,’ Carly said. ‘He can stick his bloody shamrocks up his tight little corporate arse.’ She had given what I could only describe as a sarcastic skip, and left the Ladies. I spent the rest of the day getting little electric shocks from the static.

The Moving On Circle ended at half past nine. I walked out into the humid summer evening, exhausted by the twin trials of work and the evening’s events. I took off my jacket, too hot, feeling suddenly that, having laid myself bare in front of a room full of strangers, being seen in a faux-Irish dancer uniform, which was, in truth, ever so slightly too small, didn’t really make much difference.

I hadn’t been able to talk about Will – not the way they talked, as if their loved ones were still part of their lives, perhaps in the next room.

– Oh yes, my Jilly used to do that all the time.

– I can’t delete my brother’s voicemail message. I have a little listen to his voice when I feel like I’m going to forget what he sounded like.

– Sometimes I can hear him in the next room.

I could barely even say Will’s name. And listening to their tales of family relationships, of thirty-year marriages, shared houses, lives, children, I felt like a fraud. I had been a carer for someone for six months. I’d loved him, and watched him end his life. How could these strangers possibly understand what Will and I had been to each other during that time? How could I explain the way we had so swiftly understood each other, the shorthand jokes, the blunt truths and raw secrets? How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that it made no sense without him in it?