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.
I started laughing all over again and clinked my glass against his, and after a moment Dec laughed loudest of all and clashed his glass against both of ours, and we went back to arguing over where to go for our holiday.
I’d gone right off the idea of bringing them home with me, though. When Dec was in this mode he got unpredictable as well as aggressive—he wasn’t brave enough to do anything really disastrous, but still, I wasn’t in the mood. Things still felt a bit precarious, wobbly at the joints, as if they shouldn’t be prodded too hard. I wanted to lie back on my sofa and smoke my hash and melt nicely into a giggly puddle, not keep an eye on Dec while he buzzed around my living room collecting things to use in a makeshift game of bowling and I tried not to glance at