I took the stairs down to my office at a run, jubilant, already mapping out the storm of speculation and doom-mongering from Gouger’s Twitter followers. Richard was obviously still pissed off with me, but that would wear off once he saw everything fixed and back on track, or at the very latest once the exhibition went off beautifully. It was a shame about Tiernan’s pictures—I couldn’t see any way for them to do anything but molder in his studio, after this, although I wasn’t ruling out the possibility that I’d come up with something down the line—but he could always make more.
I needed a pint, in fact I needed a few pints; in fact, I needed a full-on night out. I was missing Melissa—we usually spent at least three nights a week together—but what I needed was the guys, the slaggings and the impassioned ridiculous debates and one of those endless sessions we hadn’t been having as much lately, where everyone crashes out on someone’s sofa around dawn after eating everything in his fridge. I had some really nice hash at home—I had been tempted to break it out a few times that week, but I didn’t really like getting drunk or high when things weren’t going well, in case it just made me feel worse; so I had saved my stash for the happy-ending celebration, as a gesture of faith that there would be one, and I had been right.
And so: Hogan’s, checking out beaches in Fiji on our phones, reaching over now and then to tug on one of Dec’s hair plugs (“Fuck off!”). I hadn’t been planning on mentioning the week’s events, but I was light-headed and bubbling with relief and somewhere around the fifth pint I found myself telling them the whole story, only skipping the late-night flashes of panic—which, in retrospect, had been even sillier than they had felt at the time—and throwing in extra flourishes here and there for laughs.
“You gobshite,” Sean said, at the end, but he was shaking his head and smiling a little wryly. I was slightly relieved; I’ve always cared about Sean’s opinion, and Richard’s reaction had left a residue of unease at the back of my mind.
“You are a gobshite,” Dec told me, more pointedly. “That could’ve blown up in your face.”
“It did blow up in my face.”
“No. Like properly blown up. Like losing your job. Maybe even getting arrested.”
“Well, it didn’t,” I said, irritated—that was the last thing I wanted to think about right then, and Dec should have realized that. “What world do you live in, anyway, where the cops care whether a picture is by some random nobody in a tracksuit or some random nobody in a fedora?”
“The show could’ve been shut down. Your boss could’ve pulled the plug.”
“And he didn’t. And even if he had, it wouldn’t exactly have been the end of the world.”
“Not for you, maybe. What about the kids doing the art? There they are, pouring their hearts out, and you’re taking the piss out of their lives like they’re a joke—”
“How was I taking the piss?”
“—their one big chance has finally come along, and you’re risking it all for a laugh—”
“Oh for God’s sake.”
“If you’d scuppered it, that would’ve been them stuck in the muck, for the rest of their—”
“What are you talking about? They could have gone to school. Instead of spending their time sniffing glue and breaking the wing mirrors off cars. They could have got jobs. The recession’s over; there’s no reason for anyone to be stuck in the muck unless they actually choose to be.”
Dec was staring at me, wide-eyed and incredulous, like I’d poked a finger up my nose. “You haven’t got a clue, man.”
Dec got into our school on a scholarship; his dad drove a bus and his mother worked in Arnotts and none of them had ever been arrested or addicted, so he had no more in common with the exhibition kids than I did, but occasionally he liked to play up the wrong-side-of-the-tracks angle, when he wanted an excuse to get chippy and self-righteous. He was still in a snit about the hair-plug thing. I could have pointed out that he was living proof that his own sanctimonious bullshit was just that—he wasn’t huddled in a squat huffing shoplifted spray paint, instead he had put in the time and effort and ended up with an excellent IT career, QED—but I wasn’t in the mood for playing along with him, not that night. “It’s your round.”
“You actually haven’t got a clue.”
“It’s actually your round. Are you going to go up and get it, or do you need me to sub you because of your deprived background?”
He kept up the stare for another moment, but so did I, and eventually he shook his head ostentatiously and went up to the bar. He didn’t even bother dodging the brunette this time, not that she noticed.
“What the fuck?” I demanded, when he was out of earshot. “What was that all about?”
Sean shrugged. I had brought back a few packets of peanuts with the last round—I hadn’t had dinner, disentangling the Gouger situation had kept me too late at the office—and he had found one with something dubious on it; most of his attention seemed to be on that.
“I didn’t hurt anybody. Nobody got hurt. He’s acting like I punched his granny.” I had reached the earnest stage of the night; I was leaning forwards across the table, maybe a little too far forwards, I couldn’t tell. “And anyway look who’s talking, for Christ’s sake. He’s done stupid stuff before. Plenty of times.”
Sean shrugged again. “He’s stressed out,” he said, through the peanut.
“He’s always stressed out.”
“He was talking about getting back with Jenna.”
“Oh Jesus,” I said. Jenna was Dec’s most recent ex, a noticeably crazy schoolteacher several years older than us who had once rubbed my thigh under a pub table and, when I glanced over astonished, winked at me and stuck her tongue out.
“Yeah. He hates being single, though. He says he’s getting too old for first dates and he can’t handle all this Tinder crap, and he doesn’t want to be the forty-year-old saddo who gets invited to dinner parties out of pity and sat next to the divorced one who spends the whole night bitching about her ex.”
“Well, he doesn’t need to take it out on me,” I said. I could in fact see Dec ending up exactly like that, but it would be his own fault if he did, and as far as I was concerned right then, he deserved it.
Sean was settled back in his seat, watching me with an expression that could have been amusement or just mild interest. Sean has always had this air of comfortable detachment, of being—without either effort or smugness—a little more on top of the situation than anyone else. I always vaguely attributed it to the fact that his mother died when he was four—a fact that I regarded with a mixture of recoil, embarrassment and awe—but it could just have been because he was such a big guy: in any situation involving alcohol, Sean was inevitably going to be the least drunk person there.
When he didn’t answer: “What? Do you think I’m some kind of evil Thatcherite Fagin bastard now, too?”
“Honestly?”
“Yeah. Honestly.”
Sean shook the last of the peanut dust into his palm. He said, “I think it’s kid stuff.”
I couldn’t work out whether to be insulted or not—was he dissing my job, reassuring me that this was no big deal, what? “What are you talking about?”
“Fake Twitter accounts,” Sean said. “Imaginary skanger wars. Sneaking stuff in behind the boss’s back, keeping your fingers crossed it’ll all be grand. Kid stuff.”
This time I was genuinely injured, at least a little bit. “For fuck’s sake. It’s bad enough Dec giving me hassle. Don’t you start.”
“I’m not. Just . . .” He shrugged and upended his glass. “I’m getting married in a few months, dude. Me and Audrey, we’re talking about having a baby next year. It’s hard for me to get too excited about you pulling the same old stunts.” And when I drew my eyebrows down sharply: “You’ve done stuff like this ever since I knew you. Got caught sometimes. Sorted it out every time. This is the same old same old.”
“No. No. This is—” I made a wide, slicing arm motion that ended in a dramatic finger-snap; it felt like a pure and complete statement in itself, but Sean was still looking at me inquisitively. “This is different. From those other times. This is not the same thing. At all.”
“How is it different?”
I was miffed by this; I knew there was a difference, and I felt it was ungenerous of Sean to demand that I explain it after this many pints. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”