“I’m not giving you hassle. I’m asking.”
He hadn’t moved, but there was something new and sharpened in his face, an unblinking intentness, as if there was something important he wanted from me; and I felt an obscure urge to explain myself to him after all, explain about Melissa and being twenty-eight and the big firms and getting serious, tell him how occasionally these days—I would never have admitted it in front of Dec, had never mentioned it even to Melissa—I pictured a tall white Georgian house overlooking Dublin Bay, me and Melissa snug under one of her cashmere throws in front of a roaring fire, maybe even two or three little blond kids tumbling with a golden retriever on the hearthrug. A couple of years earlier the image would have given me the screaming heebie-jeebies; now it didn’t actually seem like a bad idea.
I wasn’t really in the right state to describe incipient epiphanies to Sean—there was no way I could even have pronounced “incipient epiphanies”—but I did my best. “OK,” I said. “OK. All the other times you’re talking about, yeah, that was kid stuff. For the laugh, or because I wanted free pizza or a chance at snogging Lara Mulvaney. But we’re not kids any more. I know that. I get that. I mean, we’re not like adult adults, but we’re definitely heading that way—well, Jesus, who am I telling? I know we were taking the piss out of you there, but honest to God, what you and Audrey have, it’s great. You’re going to be . . .” I had lost my train of thought. The bar was getting louder and the acoustics couldn’t handle it, all the sounds were blurring into one sourceless stuttering roar. “Yeah. And that’s what this was all about, the Gouger thing. That’s what it was for. I’m going after the big stuff now. Not free pizza. The real stuff. That’s the difference.”
I sat back and looked at Sean hopefully.
“Right,” he said, after what felt like half a second too long. “Fair enough. Good luck with it, man. I hope you get what you’re after.”
Maybe it was my imagination or the heaving noise all around us, but he sounded remote, almost disappointed, although why? He even looked farther away, as if he had deliberately receded a few steps down some long passageway, although I was pretty sure that had to do with the booze.
The part he didn’t seem to be getting, frustratingly, was that the Gouger stuff really had been precisely about making those changes—the better the show did, the better my chances with those big firms, the better a place I could afford to get with Melissa, and so on and so on—but before I could find a way to articulate that, Dec was back with the pints. “Do you know what you are?” he asked me, setting the glasses down and managing to slop only a bit onto the table.
“He’s a gobshite,” Sean said, tossing a beer mat onto the spillage. That sudden gleam of intensity was gone; he was back to his usual placid, easy self. “We established that earlier.”
“No. I’m asking him. Do you know what you are?”
Dec was grinning, but the note had changed; there was an unreliable, staticky glitter to him. “I’m a prince among men,” I said, leaning back spread-legged in my seat and grinning right back at him.
“There you go.” He pointed at me triumphantly, like he’d somehow scored. “That’s what I’m talking about.” And when I didn’t take him up on it, he demanded—pulling his stool closer to the table, settling in for the fight—“What would’ve happened to me, if I’d pulled a stupid fucking stunt like that at work?”
“You’d be out on your ear.”
“I would, yeah. I’d be ringing my mum right now, asking if I could move back home till I got a new gig and could afford rent again. Why aren’t you?”
Sean sighed heavily and sank a good third of his pint. We both knew Dec in this mood: he was going to keep needling away at me more and more aggressively, jab jab jab, till he either got to me or got drunk enough that we had to load him into a taxi and give the driver his address and his fare.
“Because I’m a charmer,” I said. Which was sort of true—people tended to like me, and that did tend to get me out of trouble—but it was totally beside the point and I was only saying it to annoy Dec. “And you’re not.”
“Nah nah nah. You know why it is? It’s because you’re not renting. Your parents bought you the gaff.”
“No they didn’t. They put down the deposit. I pay the mortgage. What the hell does that have to do with—”
“And if you were really up against it, they’d pay your mortgage for a couple of months. Wouldn’t they?”
“I haven’t got a clue. I’ve never needed—”
“Ah, they would. Your ma and da are lovely.”
“I don’t know. And anyway, so what if they would?”
“So”—Dec was pointing at me, still smiling, a smile that could have passed for friendly if I hadn’t known better—“so that’s why your boss didn’t give you the heave-ho. Because you didn’t go in desperate. You didn’t go in panicking. You went in knowing that, no matter what happened, you’d be grand. And so you were grand.”
“I was grand because I went in there and apologized and told him how I could fix it. And because I’m good at my job and he doesn’t want to lose me.”
“Just like in school.” Dec was really into this: leaning over the table at me, pint forgotten. Sean had taken out his phone and was swiping, checking the news headlines. “Like when you and me robbed the toupee off Mr. McManus. The pair of us did it. The pair of us got spotted. The pair of us got brought in to Armitage. Right? And what happened to us?”
I rolled my eyes. I had no idea, actually; I remembered leaning over banisters to hook the toupee, McManus’s panicky bleat fading below us as we hurtled away laughing, toupee swinging from my dad’s fishing rod, but I couldn’t remember what had happened after that.
“You don’t even remember.”
“I don’t care.”
“I got suspended. Three days. You got detention. One day.”
“Are you serious?” I gave him an incredulous stare. I was getting sick of this; the air was leaking out of my shiny happy balloon of relief, and I felt like I deserved to hang on to it for at least one evening, after the week I’d had. “That was like fourteen years ago. You’re still pissed off about it?”
Dec was waving a finger at me, shaking his head. “Not the point. The point is, you got a slap on the wrist and the scholarship kid got a kicking. No, hear me out, I’m talking here”—when I flopped back in my seat, eyes to the ceiling. “I’m not saying Armitage did that out of badness. I’m saying I went in there petrified that I was going to get kicked out, wind up down the shithole community school. You went in there knowing that even if you were expelled, your ma and da would just find you another lovely school. That’s the difference.”
He was getting loud. The brunette was losing interest in me—too much electricity in the air around me, too much hassle, on which I totally agreed with her. “So,” Dec said. “What are you?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about any more.”
“Get it over with,” Sean said, not glancing up from his phone. “For fuck’s sake.”
Dec said, “You’re a lucky little prick, is what you are. That’s all. Just a lucky little prick.”
I was looking for a smart retort when all of a sudden it caught me, warm and buoying and irresistible as a thermal current: he was right, he was speaking the absolute truth, and it was nothing to get annoyed about, it was pure joy. I took what felt like my deepest breath in days; it came out in a rush of laughter. “I am,” I said. “That’s exactly what I am. I am one lucky bastard.”
Dec was eyeing me, not done yet, deciding where to take this next. “Amen,” said Sean, putting his phone down and raising his glass. “Here’s to lucky little pricks, and to just plain little pricks,” and he tilted his glass at Dec.