‘You’re too charming to be rude,’ said Charlie. ‘But just so you know: I’m hungover too and I’ve managed them okay, so no excuses.’ They shot a placating smile and went to unload the glasswasher.

Penny pushed through the doors and arranged the features of her face into the closest approximation of friendly that she could muster. The kitchen led on to what they called ‘Bottom Bar’, with five tables that were all now empty. The group of men were sat through the archway in ‘Top Bar’, meaning Penny could hear them before she saw them.

She turned the corner and they all looked up.

‘Whaaayyyyy!’ shouted one of them, like he was at a football match. ‘Chef!’

The other men around the table – six of them, all about Penny’s age, if not a tiny bit older, used their fingers to drum on the wood with increasing volume before a head of blonde curls yelled above the din, ‘Alright chaps, she gets it! She gets the point!’

Penny stood, bemused, wondering if that was it. Their drumming had made her head throb. The men resumed talking amongst themselves, arguing over who was going to pay the bill that sat in the middle of their table. They were all waving their credit cards about like swords, vying to be the one to show off by settling up what was indelibly in the high hundreds.

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ Penny said, turning back around. ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’ She would normally have added please come again but she wasn’t sure if she actually did want them to come again. They were bloody noisy.

‘Sorry about us all,’ the blonde curls bellowed after her. ‘We’ve had a great time!’

Penny didn’t turn back around. She wanted a cigarette. And she wanted the men to go home.

It was a dry day for winter, and so Penny flopped down on the back step down to the car park to smoke her roll-up. She typically didn’t like customers seeing her staff smoking or loitering, and for anybody else she would have stood and moved out of sight – but, hangover considered, she stayed where she was when she saw the lingering group from lunch leaving.

‘Oh hey!’ said one of them, clocking where she was sat. It was the blonde, curly-haired one. He wore Gucci silk joggers, boisterously shouting about their designer status with looping ‘G’s’ all over them. His collared t-shirt was similarly patterned but Louis Vuitton, and he’d pushed up the sleeves of his Burberry coat to reveal a huge Omega Seamaster weighing down his wrist – Penny spotted it because she knew Uncle David had once bought a similar one for Eric, who had made him take it back because, he said, ‘Nobody needs five grand to tell the time, you big twat.’