I don’t ask what he means by ‘everything that’s happened’, though I am violently curious. I don’t want to pry. Or more accurately, I don’t want the image of someone who’d pry. Lucas can’t claim I’ve been gossiping about him.

I’d feared that Lucas would scrutinise my work in this first shift of just the two of us and hang over me, given he’d never wanted me here in the first place. Again, the opposite turns out to be true.

Lucas has barely laid eyes on me, giving me a wide berth. It’s like we have separate dance spaces, he keeps rigid control, never stepping into mine.

It might be a little more difficult to avoid me all evening, though.

‘Are we doing anything special for Halloween?’ I ask Lucas as we set up the back of the bar.

‘No, nothing special, the usual. Cotton wool across the bar taps, spiders in the plant pots, fancy dress, “Thriller” on the speakers. I’m doing a few bowls of punch with gummy worms in, and so on. Keith’s going to wear devil horns.’

He gestures at Keith in his basket. (As Official Pub Dog, he is already a colossal hit. ‘And getting steadily fatter on contraband peanuts; the vet is going to flay me,’ Lucas says.)

My mouth falls open. Fancy dress?

‘What are you here as?’ He looks my black-jeans-black-t-shirt up and down, leaving me feeling seen and yet wanting. ‘I’ve got a Beetlejuice suit going spare. You could hairspray your hair up.’ Lucas studies it. ‘Bit of talc.’

I hate antics. And with him? I’m going to feel the very dickhead.

‘I do ask you stay in character throughout the evening. Can you do a Beetlejuice voice?’

A smile flickers onto his face and I finally twig he’s winding me up. I wouldn’t have been so slow, but I’m on hyper alert around him. My appalled expression softens.

‘Oh, you SWINE.’ I get my first ever Lucas grin in return. I didn’t know his face could still do that. It radically alters it.

‘Heh.’

‘I believed you for a moment!’

‘Nah, nothing, not even a carved pumpkin. To be honest, theme or no theme, it’s early days so it’s hard to call if we’re going to be rammed or not.’

For the first hour or two, it seems ‘not’, and then things gather pace. Lucas has been letting me serve alone and leaving me to myself, but we’re sufficiently full by 8 p.m. that this is no longer an option. Apart from the occasional muttered ‘Excuse me’ ‘No after you’ when we’re reaching for the same bottle, there’s not much chat.

There is the excruciating moment when I bend down and my backside collides with something solid, and when I straighten I see it was Lucas. There’s more padding on me than when we dated and I feel like a panto dame. He moves away from the scene of the collision with a humiliating speed.

Then there’s a lull, and we’re forced to find some conversation. This is the real problem with working for the McCarthys – I have no blank slate (or, it might be blank for him, it’s full of scrawl for me). It makes moments that should be easy or neutral, a minor agony.

‘Lot of effort for Devlin to go back and forward to Ireland,’ I say. ‘I didn’t realise his kids were over there, that must be tough.’

‘It’s only an easyJet flight away, not too arduous,’ Lucas says. ‘He lives in central Dublin, so it’s not much of a hike on the other side.’

‘Still, when your child’s sick, you want to be with them as soon as.’

‘And he is with them.’

‘Ehm, OK. Was only expressing sympathy,’ I say, no longer able to hide my irritation.

I see Lucas see this and take a breath and rearrange his attitude a little. ‘I don’t mean to snipe at you. It’s a sibling thing. Dev’s the impetuous one who acts on instinct and I’m the one who generally gets invited to clear up afterwards. I didn’t think it was the right time to be expanding the mini empire to South Yorkshire, with his family commitments. He convinced me it’d be a breeze, us knowing the city from when we were kids. He said we needed a change of scene. Dublin’s great but it’s small when you’ve been there as long as we have.’

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.