“He can’t,” Daniel said softly. “He should, obviously, but . . . Someday.”
Abby shrugged. “Well, then . . .” she said. She sent the cards arcing from hand to hand with a fast, sassy flourish and dealt, five hands. Daniel smiled across at her and pulled his chair up, ready.
The phone was still going strong; the word “arse” came up regularly, in what sounded like a wide variety of contexts. Rafe’s chin was tucked in like he was braced against gale-force wind. Justin touched his arm; his eyes flew open and he stared at us, reddening right up to his hairline.
The rest of us had already thrown in our stakes. I had a hand like a foot—a seven and a nine, not even suited—but I knew exactly what the others were doing. They were pulling Rafe back, and the thought of being part of that sent something intoxicating through me, something so fine it hurt. For a split second I thought of Rob hooking one foot around my ankle, under our desks, when O’Kelly was giving me a bollocking. I waved my cards at Rafe and mouthed, “Ante up.”
He blinked. I cocked one eyebrow, gave him my best cheeky Lexie grin and whispered, “Unless you’re scared I’ll kick your ass again.”
The frozen look dissolved, just a little. He checked his cards; then he put the phone down on the bookshelf beside him, carefully, and tossed ten pence into the middle. “Because I’m happy where I am,” he told the phone. His voice sounded almost normal, but that angry red flush was still covering his face.
Abby gave him a tiny smile, fanned three cards deftly on the table and flipped them over. “Lexie’s drawing to a straight,” said Justin, narrowing his eyes at me. “I know that look.”
The phone had apparently spent a lot of money on Rafe and wasn’t planning to see it flushed down the bog. “She’s not,” Daniel said. “She may have something, but not the makings of a straight. I call.”
I was nowhere near a straight, but that wasn’t the point; none of us were folding, not till Rafe hung up. The phone made a big statement about a Real Job. “In other words, a job in an office,” Rafe informed us. The rigidity was starting to go out of his spine. “Maybe even, someday, if I’m a team player and I think outside the box and work smarter not harder, an office with a window. Or am I aiming a little high?” he asked the phone. “What do you think?” He mimed See your one and raise you two, at Justin.
The phone—it obviously knew it was being insulted, even if it wasn’t sure exactly how—said something belligerent about ambition and how it was about bloody time Rafe grew up and started living in the real world.
“Ah,” Daniel said, glancing up from his stack. “Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world—we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”
“It’s all jealousy,” Justin said, considering his cards and flipping two more coins into the middle. “Sour grapes.”
“Nobody,” Rafe told the phone, flapping a hand at us to keep our voices down. “The television. I spend my days watching soap operas, eating bonbons and plotting society’s downfall.”
The last card came up a nine, which at least gave me a pair. “Well, certainly in some cases jealousy is a factor,” Daniel said, “but Rafe’s father, if half what he says is true, could afford to live any life he wanted, including ours. What does he have to be jealous of? No, I think the mentality has its origins in the Puritan moral framework: the emphasis on fitting into a strict hierarchical structure, the element of self-loathing, the horror of anything pleasurable or artistic or unregimented . . . But I’ve always wondered how that paradigm made the transition to become the boundary, not just of virtue, but of reality itself. Could you put it on speakerphone, Rafe? I’m interested to hear what he has to say.”
Rafe gave him a wide-eyed, are-you-insane stare and shook his head; Daniel looked vaguely puzzled. The rest of us were starting to get the giggles.
“Of course,” Daniel said politely, “if you’d prefer . . . What’s so funny, Lexie?”
“Lunatics,” Rafe told the ceiling in a fervent undertone, spreading his arms to take in the phone and Daniel and the rest of us, who by now had our hands over our mouths. “I’m surrounded by wall-to-wall lunatics. What have I done to deserve this? Did I pick on the afflicted in a previous life?”
The phone, which was obviously working up to a big finish, informed Rafe that he could have a Lifestyle. “Guzzling champagne in the City,” Rafe translated, for us, “and shagging my secretary.”
“What the fuck is wrong with that?” the phone shouted, loud enough that Daniel, startled, reared back in his chair with a look of sheer astounded disapproval. Justin exploded with a noise somewhere between a snort and a yelp; Abby was hanging over the back of her chair with her knuckles stuffed in her mouth, and I was laughing so hard I had to stick my head under the table.
The phone, with a magnificent disregard for basic anatomy, called us all a bunch of limp-dicked hippies. By the time I pulled myself together and came up for air, Rafe had flipped over a pair of jacks and was scooping in the pot, pumping one fist in the air and grinning. I realized something. Rafe’s mobile had gone off about two feet from my ear, and I hadn’t even flinched.
“You know what it is?” Abby said out of nowhere, a few hands later. “It’s the contentment.”
“Who said which to the what now?” inquired Rafe, narrowing his eyes to examine Daniel’s stack. He had switched his phone off.
“The real-world thing.” She leaned sideways across me to pull the ashtray closer. Justin had put on Debussy, blending with the faint rush of rain on the grass outside. “Our entire society’s based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you’re perfectly happy with what you’ve got—specially if what you’ve got isn’t even all that spectacular—then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules, you’re undermining the sacred economy, you’re challenging every assumption that society’s built on. That’s why Rafe’s dad throws a mickey fit whenever Rafe says he’s happy where he is. The way he sees it, we’re all subversives. We’re traitors.”
“I think you’ve got something there,” said Daniel. “Not jealousy, after all: fear. It’s a fascinating state of affairs. Throughout history—even a hundred years ago, even fifty—it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it’s contentment. What a strange reversal.”
“We’re revolutionaries,” Justin said happily, poking a Dorito around in the salsa jar and looking phenomenally unrevolutionary. “I never realized it was this easy.”
“We’re stealth guerrillas,” I said with relish.
“You’re a stealth chimpanzee,” Rafe told me, flipping three coins into the middle.
“Yes, but a contented one,” said Daniel, smiling across at me. “Aren’t you?”
“If Rafe would just quit hogging the garlic dip, I’d be the most contented stealth chimpanzee in the whole of Ireland.”
“Good,” Daniel said, giving me a little nod. “That’s what I like to hear.”
Sam never asked. “How’s it going?” he would say, in our late-night phone calls, and when I said, “Fine,” he would move on to something else. At first he told me bits about his side of the investigation—carefully checking out my old cases, the local uniforms’ list of troublemakers, Lexie’s students and professors. The more he got nowhere, though, the less he talked about it. Instead he told me about other things, small homey things. He had been over at my flat a couple of times, to air it out and make sure it didn’t look too obviously empty; the next-door cat had had kittens at the bottom of the garden, he said, and awful Mrs. Moloney downstairs had left a snotty note on his car informing him that Parking was for Residents Only. I didn’t tell him this, but it all seemed a million miles away, off in some long-ago world so chaotic that even thinking about it made me tired. Sometimes it took me a moment to remember who he was talking about.
Only once, on the Saturday night, he asked about the others. I was hanging out in my lurk lane, leaning back into a hawthorn hedge and keeping one eye on the cottage. I had a kneesock of Lexie’s bundled around the mike, which gave me an attractive three-boobed look but meant that Frank and his gang would only pick up about 10 percent of the conversation.
I was keeping my voice down anyway. Almost since I went out the back gate, I’d had the feeling that someone was following me. Nothing concrete, nothing that couldn’t be explained away by the wind and moon shadows and countryside night noises; just that low-level electrical current at the back of your neck, where your skull meets your spine, that only comes from someone’s eyes. It took a lot of willpower not to whip around, but if by any chance there really was someone out there, I didn’t want him knowing he’d been sussed, not till I decided what I was going to do about it.
“Do ye never go to the pub?” Sam asked.