All of that had come pretty close to going up in smoke, over the past week, but my luck had held. My mind was bouncing and dashing like a border collie and it was infectious, Sean and Dec were bent over the table laughing—we were planning a guys’ holiday for that summer but couldn’t decide where, Thailand? hang on, when’s the monsoon season?, phones coming out, when’s the coup season?—Dec kept insisting on Fiji for some reason, has to be Fiji, we’ll never get another chance, not after—and a fake-subtle tilt of his head at Sean. Sean was getting married at Christmas, and while after twelve years it was hardly unexpected, it still felt like a startling and gratuitous thing to do and the mention of it inevitably led into slaggings: The minute you say “I do” you’re on borrowed time, man, before you know it you’ll have a kid and then that’s it, your life’s over . . . Here’s to Sean’s last holiday! Here’s to Sean’s last night out! Here’s to Sean’s last blowie! Actually Dec and I both liked Audrey a lot, and the wry grin on Sean—mock-annoyed, secretly pleased as punch with himself—got me thinking about Melissa and we’d been together three years now and maybe I should think about proposing, and all that talk of last chances made me glance across at the brunette who was telling some anecdote and using her hands a lot, scarlet nails, and something in the angle of her neck told me she knew perfectly well that I was looking and that it had nothing to do with the newspaper picture— We’ll get you seen to in Thailand, Sean, don’t worry— Here’s to Sean’s first ladyboy!
After that my memory of the evening gets patchy for a while. Of course in its aftermath I went over it a million times, obsessively, combing every thread to find the knot that set the pattern changing beyond recovery; hoping there was just one detail whose significance I’d missed, the tiny keystone around which all the pieces would slot into place and the whole would flash jackpot rings of multicolored light while I leaped up shouting Eureka! The missing chunks didn’t help matters (very common, the doctors said reassuringly, completely normal, oh so very very normal): a lot came back along the way and I picked what I could from Sean’s memory and Dec’s, laboriously pieced the evening together like an old fresco from husbanded fragments and educated inferences, but how could I know for sure what was in the blank spaces? Did I shoulder someone at the bar? Did I talk too loudly, riding high in my euphoria balloon, or throw out an arm in some expansive gesture and catch someone’s pint? Was the brunette’s roid-rat ex snarling in some unnoticed corner? I had never thought of myself as the kind of person who goes looking for trouble, but nothing seemed out of the question, not any more.
Long buttery streaks of light on dark wood. A girl in a floppy red velvet hat leaning on the bar when I went up for my round, chatting to the barman about some gig, Eastern European accent, wrists bending like a dancer’s. A trodden flier on the floor, green and yellow, faux-na?f sketch of a lizard biting its tail. Washing my hands in the jacks, smell of bleach, chill air.
I do remember my phone buzzing, in the middle of an uproarious argument about whether the next Star Wars film was inevitably going to be worse than the last one, based on some intricate algorithm Dec had come up with. I jumped for it—I thought it might be something to do with the work situation, Richard wanting an update or maybe Tiernan finally returning my calls—but it was just some Facebook birthday-party invitation. “Story?” Sean wanted to know, raising his eyebrows at my phone, and I realized I had grabbed at it a little too urgently.
“Nothing,” I said, putting the phone away. “And anyway how about the Taken series, the daughter started out as the victim and next time she turned into the sidekick—” and we went back to the film argument, which by this point had gone off on so many tangents that none of us remembered what anyone’s original stance had been. This was what I had needed from the night, this, Dec leaning forwards over the table gesticulating, Sean throwing out his hands in incredulity, all of us trying to shout each other down about Hagrid— I pulled my phone back out and set it to silent.
The trouble at work hadn’t been my fault, actually, or at least only very tangentially. It stemmed from Tiernan, the guy in charge of exhibitions, a lank, long-chinned hipster with vintage horn-rimmed glasses and two main topics of conversation: obscure Canadian alt-folk bands, and the injustice of the fact that his art (meticulous oil portraits of ravers with mindlessly glaring pigeons’ heads, that kind of thing, produced in his parent-funded studio) hadn’t achieved the prominence it deserved. The year before all this, Tiernan had come up with the idea of a group show of representations of urban spaces by disadvantaged youths. Richard and I had both leaped on it—the only way that could have been easier to publicize was if some of the disadvantaged youths were also Syrian refugees and ideally trans, and Richard, despite his general air of unworldly vagueness and ragged tweed, was well aware that the gallery needed both status and funding in order to stay open. Only a few days after Tiernan first floated the idea—offhandedly, at the monthly meeting, picking crumbs of doughnut sugar off his napkin—Richard told him to get started.
The whole thing went like a dream. Tiernan scoured the dodgiest schools and council flats he could find (in one place a bunch of eight-year-olds pounded his fixie bike into Dalí with a lump hammer, in front of him) and came up with a collection of satisfyingly scuzzy youths with low-grade criminal records and scruffy-edged drawings involving syringes and tattered blocks of flats and the occasional horse. To be fair, not all of it was that predictable: there was one girl who made small, sinister models of her various foster homes out of materials she had pilfered from derelict sites—a tarpaulin rag-doll man slouched on a sofa chipped from a lump of concrete, with his arm draped around a tarpaulin little girl’s shoulders in a way I found kind of disturbing; another kid made Pompeii-esque plaster casts of objects he found in the stairwell of his block of flats, a crushed lighter, a pair of child-sized glasses with one twisted earpiece, an intricately knotted plastic bag. I had taken it for granted that this show would be trading entirely on its moral superiority, but a few things in there were actually pretty good.
Tiernan was especially proud of one discovery, an eighteen-year-old known as Gouger. Gouger refused to talk to anyone but Tiernan, give us his real name or, frustratingly, do any interviews—he had been in and out of the juvenile system for most of his life and had developed complicated networks of enemies, who he was afraid would come after him if they saw him getting rich and famous—but he was good. He layered things, spray paint, photographs, pen and ink, with a ferocious slapdash skill that gave them a sense of urgency, look fast and hard before something comes roaring in from the side and smashes the picture to shards of color and scrawl. His pièce de resistance—an enormous whirl of howling charcoal teenagers around a spray-paint bonfire, heads thrown back, neon arcs of booze flying from waved cans—was called BoHeroin Rhapsody and had already had interest from several collectors, after I put it up on our Facebook page.
The Arts Council and Dublin City Council practically threw money at us. The media gave us even more coverage than I had expected. Tiernan brought in his youths to shuffle around the gallery, nudging each other and sniping in undertones and giving long unreadable stares to the “Divergences” show of mixed-media abstracts. Various distinguished guests responded to our invitation saying that they would be delighted to come to the opening. Richard puttered around the gallery smiling, humming bits of light opera interspersed with bizarre stuff he’d picked up somewhere (Kraftwerk??). Only then I went into Tiernan’s office without knocking, one afternoon, and found him crouched on the floor touching up the detail on Gouger’s latest masterwork.
After the first stunned second I started to laugh. Partly it was the look on Tiernan’s face, the mixture of scarlet guilt and puffy defensiveness as he flailed for a plausible excuse; partly it was at myself, for having bounced cheerfully along through all of this without a single suspicion, when of course I should have copped months earlier (since when were underprivileged youths even on Tiernan’s horizon?). “Well well well,” I said, still laughing. “Look at you.”
“Shhh,” Tiernan hissed, hands coming up, darting his eyes at the door.
“My man Gouger. In the flesh.”
“Jesus shut up, please, Richard’s—”
“You’re better-looking than I expected.”
“Toby. Listen. No no listen—” He had his arms half-spread in front of the painting so that it looked ridiculously as if he was trying to hide it, painting? what painting? “If this gets out, I’m dead, I’m, no one will ever—”
“Jesus,” I said. “Tiernan. Calm down.”
“The pictures are good, Toby. They’re good. But this is the only way, no one’ll ever look twice if they come from me, I went to art school—”
“Is it just the Gouger stuff? Or more of them?”