Five minutes later, Will emerges from the gents. His trouser legs end several centimetres above his trainers. The waistcoat bulges between buttons like he’s an illustration of a fat man in a children’s book. He stands as if lost in this thoroughly familiar building, swinging his arms back and forth and certain he’s glowing bright red, when Meera bounds over to him. She’s well under five feet tall, not a day over fifteen, and she runs everywhere.

‘Follow me,’ she orders. ‘Mickey Bum Touch says I’ve got to teach you everything I know.’ She’s also Smugglers’ best waitress. ‘Just you, me and Janice today –’ a woman with crinkly blond hair waves with her back turned, laying up a table – ‘and a hundred and twenty covers for lunch. That’s just what’s booked. Gonna be fun, washer-upper man.’

‘Can’t wait.’

‘Be fine. Bum Touch given you the Magician’s Nod talk?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Such a tit,’ she says, and Will giggles along with her.

He tries to concentrate as Meera talks him through the touchscreen till and the card machine and the kids’ menu and the Pepsi machine, but he’s too busy panicking that he won’t remember anything to be able to remember anything. Briefly, he entertains the fantasy of simply walking out, but he daren’t; in a few weeks the wind and the rain will set in and Ebbswick-on-Sea will become deserted, and even jobs that pay as poorly as this one will become impossible to find.

The doors open. ‘Love Shack’ by the B-52s starts playing throughout the building, the first track of the playlist that’s been on loop for the last year. As if walking in time to the drumbeat, early-bird boozers swarm to the bar. Mick Touch hooks his arm round Will’s shoulder and guides him to a table of six seated in a window bay.

‘Here he is, your server for today,’ Mick booms as though he’s compèring at a comedy club. ‘It’s Mo! Be gentle with him, folks – first-day nerves.’ He ruffles Will’s hair and struts away, laughing.

All the guests are over sixty and dressed smartly. This puts Will partly at ease, reminding him of the Christmas parties for the elderly held by the school community club, where he served turkey dinners and alcohol-free wine in the school hall. Although those events never involved ordering, and Will is suddenly at a loss as to how to begin this interchange.

‘Drinks,’ whispers Meera, whizzing past behind him.

2 Saint Clements, he shakily scrawls, 2 pints Creamflow, 2 halfs Creamflow, and just hopes the bar knows what any of that means.