I said, “But it wasn’t.”
Conor said, “The two of them brought me down to see the place, when the house was ready. A Sunday: the day before they were signing the final contracts. Two years ago—bit more, because it was summer. It was hot, sticky-hot—cloudy, and the cloud pressing the air down on top of you. The place was . . .” A grim sound that could have been a laugh. “You’ve seen it. It was better then—the weeds hadn’t come up, and there was still loads of work going on, so at least it didn’t feel like a graveyard—but still: it wasn’t somewhere anyone would want to live. When we get out of the car, Jenny goes, ‘Look, you can see the sea! Isn’t it gorgeous?’ I go, ‘Yeah, great view,’ but it wasn’t. The water looked dirty, greasy; there should have been a breeze coming off of it, cool us down, but it was like the air had died. The house was pretty enough, if you like Stepford, but straight across the road was waste ground and a bulldozer. The whole place was fucking horrendous. Made me want to turn around and get out as fast as I could, drag Pat and Jenny with me.”
Richie said, “What about them? Were they happy enough?”
Conor shrugged. “Sounded like. Jenny goes, ‘They’ll be finished building across the road in just a couple of months’—didn’t look like that to me, but I kept my mouth shut. She goes, ‘It’s going to be so lovely. The mortgage people are giving us a hundred and ten percent, so we can furnish the place. I was thinking about a maritime theme for the kitchen, to go with the sea? Don’t you think a maritime theme would be nice?’
“I go, ‘Might be safer to take just the hundred percent, furnish as you go along.’ Jenny laughs—it sounded fake, but that could’ve been just the way the air flattened everything out—and she goes, ‘Oh, Conor, relax. We can afford it. So we won’t eat out as much; there’s nowhere nearby anyway. I want everything to be nice.’
“I go, ‘I’m just saying, it’d be safer. In case.’ Maybe I should’ve said nothing, but that place . . . It felt like a big dog watching you, starting to come closer, and you know right now is when you need to get the fuck out. Pat just laughs and goes, ‘Man, do you know how fast property prices are rising? We haven’t even moved in yet, and the gaff’s already worth more than we’re paying. Any time we decide to sell, we’ll come out with a profit.’”
I said, hearing the pompous note in my voice, “If they were crazy, then so was the rest of the country. Nobody saw the crash coming.”
Conor’s eyebrow flicked. “You think?”
“If anyone had, the country wouldn’t be in this mess.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have a clue about financial stuff. I’m just a web designer. But I knew nobody wanted thousands of houses out in the middle of nowhere. People only bought them because they got told that in five years’ time they could sell up for double what they’d paid, and move somewhere decent. Like I said, I’m just some idiot, but even I knew a pyramid scheme eventually runs out of suckers.”
“Well, look at Alan Greenspan here,” I said. Conor was starting to piss me off—because he had been right, and because Pat and Jenny had had every right to believe that he was wrong. “It’s easy to be right in hindsight, fella. It wouldn’t have killed you to be a little more positive for your friends.”
“You mean, give them a little more bullshit? They were getting plenty of that already. The banks, the developers, the government: Go on, buy, best investment of your lives—”
Richie balled up the sugar sachet and sank it in the bin with a sharp rustle. He said, “If I’d seen my best mates running towards that cliff, I’d’ve said something, too. Might not have stopped them, but it might’ve meant the fall came as less of a shock.”
The two of them were looking at me like they were the ones on the same side, like I was the outsider. Richie was only nudging Conor towards what the crash had done to Pat, but it grated just the same. I said, “Keep talking. What happened next?”
Conor’s jaw moved. The memory was winding him tighter and tighter. “Jenny—she always hated fights—Jenny goes, ‘You should see the size of the back garden! We’re thinking about getting a slide for the kids, and in the summer we’ll have barbecues—you can stay over afterwards, so you won’t have to worry about having a few cans—’ Only just then there’s this huge crash across the road, like a whole bale of slates falling off the top of the scaffolding, something like that. We all jump a mile. When our hearts start beating again, I say, ‘You’re positive about this. Yeah?’ Pat goes, ‘Yeah. We are. We’d better be: the deposit’s non-refundable.’”
Conor shook his head. “He’s trying to make it into a joke. I say, ‘Fuck the deposit. You can still change your minds.’ And Pat, he blows up at me. He yells, ‘Fuck’s sake! Can’t you just pretend to be happy for us?’ And that wasn’t Pat, not at all—like I said, he never lost his temper. So I knew he was having second thoughts, major ones. I go, ‘Do you actually want this gaff? Just tell me that.’
“He goes, ‘Yeah, I do. I always did. You know that. Just because you’re happy renting some bachelor pad for the rest of your life—’ I go, ‘No. Not a gaff. This gaff. Do you want it? Do you even like it? Or are you only buying it because you’re supposed to?’
“Pat goes, ‘So it’s not perfect. I bloody well knew that already. What the fuck do you want us to do? We’ve got kids. When you’ve got a family, you need a home. What’s your problem with that?’”
Conor ran a hand up his jaw, hard enough that it left a red streak. “We were yelling. Back where we grew up, there’d have been half a dozen old ones sticking their noses out the doors by now. Out there, nothing even moved. I go, ‘If you can’t buy something you actually want, then keep renting till you can.’ Pat goes, ‘Sweet Jesus, Conor, that’s not how it works! We need to get on the property ladder!’ I go, ‘Like this? By going a million miles into debt for some dive that might never be a decent place to live? What if the wind changes and you get stuck like that?’
“Jenny tucks her hand in my elbow and she goes, ‘Conor, it’s fine, honest to God it is. I know you’re just trying to look out for us or whatever, but you’re being totally old-fashioned. Everyone’s doing it these days. Everyone.’”
He laughed, a single dry scrape. “She said it like that meant something. Like that was the argument over, end of story. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
Richie said quietly, “She was right. Our generation, how many of them were doing the exact same thing? Thousands, man. Thousands and thousands.”
“So? Who gives a fuck what everyone else does? They were buying a house, not a T-shirt. Not an investment. A home. If you let other people decide what you think about something like that, if you just follow along because it’s trendy, then who are you? When the flock changes direction tomorrow, what, you just throw away everything you think and start over, because other people said so? Then what are you, underneath? You’re nothing. You’re no one.”
That fury, dense and cold as stone. I thought of the kitchen, smashed and bloody. “Is that what you said to Jenny?”
“I couldn’t say anything. Pat—he must’ve seen it on my face—Pat goes, ‘It’s true, man. Ask anyone in the country: ninety-nine percent of them would say we’re doing the right thing.’”
That raw scrape of a laugh again. “Stood there with my mouth open, staring. I couldn’t . . . Pat was never like that. Never. Not when we were sixteen. Yeah, sometimes he’d have a smoke or a spliff just because everyone at the party was, but underneath he knew who he was. He’d never have done anything full-on brain-dead, got into a car where the driver was pissed or anything like that, just because someone tried to pressure him into it. And now here he was, a fucking grown man, bleating on about ‘Everyone else is doing it!’”
I said, “So what did you say?”
Conor shook his head. “There wasn’t anything to say. I knew that already. The two of them . . . I didn’t have a clue who they were, any more. They weren’t people I wanted anything to do with. I tried anyway—fucking eejit. I went, ‘What the fuck’s happened to you two?’
“Pat says, ‘We grew up. That’s what happened. This is what being an adult is like. You play by the rules.’
“I go, ‘No it’s fucking well not. If you’re an adult, you think for your fucking self. Are you insane? Are you a zombie? What are you?’
“We were squared up like we were about to beat the shite out of each other. I thought we were; I thought he was going to punch me, any second. But then Jenny grabs my elbow again and pulls me around, and she yells, ‘You shut up! Just shut up! You’re going to ruin the whole thing. I can’t stand it, all this negativity—I don’t want that anywhere near the kids, I don’t want it anywhere near us, I don’t want it! It’s sick. If everyone starts thinking like you, the whole country’s going to go down the toilet and then we will be in trouble. Then will you be happy?’”
Conor ran a hand over his mouth again; I saw him bite down on the flesh of his palm. “She was crying. I started to say something, I don’t even know what, but Jenny slapped her hands over her ears and walked off, fast, down the road. Pat looked at me like I was dirt. He said, ‘Thanks, man. That was great.’ And he went after her.”
I said, “And what did you do?”
“I walked away. Walked around that shit-hole estate for a couple of hours, looking for something that’d make me ring Pat and say Sorry, man, I was so wrong, this place is gonna be paradise. All I found was more shit hole. In the end I rang this other mate of mine and got him to pick me up. Didn’t hear from them again. Didn’t try to get in touch, either.”
“Hmm,” I said. I leaned back in my chair, tapping my pen off my teeth, and considered that. “I suppose I’ve heard of friendships breaking up over some weird stuff, all right. But property values? Seriously?”