“What’re you on about?”
Leaning in discreetly across the table, keeping my voice down: “The plugs. Fair play to you, man.”
“I don’t have fucking hair plugs!”
“They’re nothing to be ashamed of. All the big stars are getting them these days. Robbie Williams. Bono.”
Which of course outraged Dec even more. “There’s nothing wrong with my bleeding hair!”
“That’s what I’m saying. They look great.”
“They’re not obvious,” Sean reassured him. “Not saying they’re obvious. Just nice, you know?”
“They’re not obvious because they don’t exist. I don’t have—”
“Come on,” I said. “I can see them. Here, and—”
“Get off me!”
“I know. Let’s ask your woman what she thinks.” I started to signal to the brunette.
“No. No no no. Toby, I’m serious, I’m going to actually kill you—” Dec was grabbing at my waving hand. I dodged.
“It’s the perfect conversation starter,” Sean pointed out. “You didn’t know how to get talking to her, right? Here’s your chance.”
“Fuck yous,” Dec told us, abandoning the attempt to catch my hand and standing up. “You’re a pair of shitehawks. Do you know that?”
“Ah, Dec,” I said. “Don’t leave us.”
“I’m going to the jacks. To give you two a chance to pull yourselves together. You, Chuckles”—to Sean—“it’s your round.”
“Checking that they’re all in place,” Sean told me, aside, motioning to his hairline. “You messed them up. See that one there, it’s gone all—” Dec gave us both the finger and started off through the crowd towards the jacks, trying to stay dignified as he edged between buttocks and waving pints, and concentrating hard on ignoring both our burst of laughter and the brunette.
“He actually fell for that, for a minute there,” Sean said. “Eejit. Same again?” and he headed up to the bar.
While I had a moment to myself I texted Melissa: Having a few with the guys. Ring you later. Love you. She texted me back straightaway: I sold the mad steampunk armchair!!! and a bunch of firework emojis. The designer was so happy she cried on the phone and I was so happy for her I almost did too :-) Say hi to the guys from me. I love you too xxx. Melissa ran a tiny shop in Temple Bar that sold quirky Irish-designed stuff, funny little sets of interconnected china vases, cashmere blankets in zingy neon colors, hand-carved drawer knobs shaped like sleeping squirrels or spreading trees. She had been trying to sell that armchair for years. I texted her back Congratulations! You sales demon you.
Sean came back with the pints and Dec came back from the jacks, looking a lot more composed but still intently avoiding the brunette’s eye. “We asked your woman what she thinks,” Sean told him. “She says the plugs are lovely.”
“She says she’s been admiring them all night,” I said.
“She wants to know can she touch them.”
“She wants to know can she lick them.”
“Stick it up your holes. I’ll tell you why she keeps looking over at you, anyway, fuckfeatures,” Dec said to me, pulling up his stool. “It’s not because she fancies you. It’s only because she saw your smarmy mug in the paper, and she’s trying to remember were you in there for conning a granny out of her savings or shagging a fifteen-year-old.”
“Which she wouldn’t care about either way unless she fancied me.”
“In your dreams. Fame’s gone to your head.”
My picture had been in the paper a couple of weeks earlier—the social pages, which had netted me a ferocious amount of slagging—because I had happened to be chatting to a long-serving soap actress at a work thing, an exhibition opening. At the time I did the PR and marketing for a medium-sized, fairly prestigious art gallery in the center of town, just a few laneways and shortcuts away from Grafton Street. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I was finishing college; I had been planning on one of the big PR firms, I’d only gone to the interview for the practice. Once I got there, though, I found myself unexpectedly liking the place, the tall barely renovated Georgian house with all the floors at weird angles, Richard the owner peering at me through his lopsided glasses and inquiring about my favorite Irish artists (luckily I had prepped for the interview, so I could actually come up with semi-sensible answers, and we had a long happy conversation about le Brocquy and Pauline Bewick and various other people I had barely heard of before that week). I liked the idea of having a free hand, too. In a big firm I would have spent my first couple of years huddled in front of a computer obediently watering and pruning other people’s ideas of brilliant social media campaigns, dithering over whether to delete racist troll comments about some horrifying new flavor of crisp or leave them up to generate buzz; at the gallery I could try out whatever I wanted and patch up my learner’s mistakes on the fly, without anyone hanging over my shoulder—Richard wasn’t entirely sure what Twitter was, although he knew he really should have some, and he clearly wasn’t the micromanaging type. When, to my faint surprise, I was offered the job, I barely hesitated. A few years, I figured, a few nice publicity coups to make my CV sparkle, and I could make the leap to one of the big firms at a level I would actually enjoy.
It had been five years now, and I was starting to put out feelers, to a gratifying level of response. I was going to miss the gallery—I had ended up enjoying not just the freedom but the work itself, the artists with their goofy levels of perfectionism, the satisfaction of gradually picking up enough to understand why Richard leaped on one artist and turned another one down flat. But I was twenty-eight, Melissa and I were talking about getting a place together, the gallery paid OK but nowhere near as well as the big firms; I felt like it was time to get serious.