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.
All of that had come pretty close to going up in smoke, over the past week, but my luck had held. My mind was bouncing and dashing like a border collie and it was infectious, Sean and Dec were bent over the table laughing—we were planning a guys’ holiday for that summer but couldn’t decide where, Thailand? hang on, when’s the monsoon season?, phones coming out, when’s the coup season?—Dec kept insisting on Fiji for some reason, has to be Fiji, we’ll never get another chance, not after—and a fake-subtle tilt of his head at Sean. Sean was getting married at Christmas, and while after twelve years it was hardly unexpected, it still felt like a startling and gratuitous thing to do and the mention of it inevitably led into slaggings: The minute you say “I do” you’re on borrowed time, man, before you know it you’ll have a kid and then that’s it, your life’s over . . . Here’s to Sean’s last holiday! Here’s to Sean’s last night out! Here’s to Sean’s last blowie! Actually Dec and I both liked Audrey a lot, and the wry grin on Sean—mock-annoyed, secretly pleased as punch with himself—got me thinking about Melissa and we’d been together three years now and maybe I should think about proposing, and all that talk of last chances made me glance across at the brunette who was telling some anecdote and using her hands a lot, scarlet nails, and something in the angle of her neck told me she knew perfectly well that I was looking and that it had nothing to do with the newspaper picture— We’ll get you seen to in Thailand, Sean, don’t worry— Here’s to Sean’s first ladyboy!
After that my memory of the evening gets patchy for a while. Of course in its aftermath I went over it a million times, obsessively, combing every thread to find the knot that set the pattern changing beyond recovery; hoping there was just one detail whose significance I’d missed, the tiny keystone around which all the pieces would slot into place and the whole would flash jackpot rings of multicolored light while I leaped up shouting Eureka! The missing chunks didn’t help matters (very common, the doctors said reassuringly, completely normal, oh so very very normal): a lot came back along the way and I picked what I could from Sean’s memory and Dec’s, laboriously pieced the evening together like an old fresco from husbanded fragments and educated inferences, but how could I know for sure what was in the blank spaces? Did I shoulder someone at the bar? Did I talk too loudly, riding high in my euphoria balloon, or throw out an arm in some expansive gesture and catch someone’s pint? Was the brunette’s roid-rat ex snarling in some unnoticed corner? I had never thought of myself as the kind of person who goes looking for trouble, but nothing seemed out of the question, not any more.
Long buttery streaks of light on dark wood. A girl in a floppy red velvet hat leaning on the bar when I went up for my round, chatting to the barman about some gig, Eastern European accent, wrists bending like a dancer’s. A trodden flier on the floor, green and yellow, faux-naïf sketch of a lizard biting its tail. Washing my hands in the jacks, smell of bleach, chill air.
I do remember my phone buzzing, in the middle of an uproarious argument about whether the next Star Wars film was inevitably going to be worse than the last one, based on some intricate algorithm Dec had come up with. I jumped for it—I thought it might be something to do with the work situation, Richard wanting an update or maybe Tiernan finally returning my calls—but it was just some Facebook birthday-party invitation. “Story?” Sean wanted to