of the product, in exchange for enough cash to support his habit (obviously we would need one with a habit, for maximum gritty authenticity), but we decided against it on the grounds that a junkie skanger would be too shortsighted for reliability: sooner or later he would either start blackmailing us or start wanting creative control, and things would get messy.
I suppose I should have been worrying about what if it all went wrong—there were so many ways it could have, a journalist getting all investigative, me screwing up the slang on Gouger’s Twitter account—but I wasn’t. Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn’t. So it caught me completely off guard when, a month before the exhibition was scheduled to open and just four days before that night, Richard found out.
I’m still not sure how, exactly. Something about a phone call, from what little I could gather (pressed against my office door, staring at the dinged-up white paint, heart rate building slowly to an uncomfortable thump at the base of my throat), but Richard threw Tiernan out so fast and on such a searing gust of fury that we didn’t get a chance to talk. Then he came into my office—I jumped back just in time to avoid a door to the face—and told me to get out and not come back till Friday, when he would have decided what to do about me.
One look at him—white-faced, collar rucked up, jaw tight as a fist—and I had more sense than to say anything, even if I had had a chance to come up with anything coherent before the door slammed behind him with a bang that spun papers off my desk. I packed up my stuff and left, avoiding Aideen the accountant’s round avid eyes through her door-crack, trying to keep my footsteps easy and jaunty on my way down the stairs.
I spent the next three days being bored, mainly. Telling anyone what had happened would have been idiotic, when there was a good chance that the whole thing would blow over. I had been startled by just how angry Richard was—I would have expected him to be annoyed, of course, but the depth of his fury seemed totally out of proportion, and I was pretty sure he had just been having a bad day and would have settled down by the time I went back to work. So I was stuck at home all day, in case anyone spotted me out and about when I shouldn’t have been. I couldn’t even ring anyone. I couldn’t spend the night at Melissa’s place or ask her over to mine, in case she wanted to walk in to work together in the morning—her shop was only five minutes beyond the gallery, so we mostly did walk in after a night together, holding hands and chattering like a pair of teenagers. I told her I had a cold, convinced her not to come over and look after me in case she caught it, and thanked God she wasn’t the type to decide I was cheating on her. I played an awful lot of Xbox, and put on work clothes when I went to the shops, just in case.
Luckily I didn’t live in the kind of place where I swapped cheery waves with my neighbors on our way out to work every morning, and if I missed a day someone would call round with cookies to make sure I was OK. My apartment was on the ground floor of a slabby, redbrick 1970s block, jammed eye-jarringly between beautiful Victorian mansions in an extremely nice part of Dublin. The street was broad and airy, lined with enormous old trees whose roots rucked up big patches of the pavement, and the architect had at least had enough sensitivity to respond to that; my living room had great floor-to-ceiling windows and glass doors on two sides, so that in summer the whole room was a glorious, disorientating tumble of sunshine and leaf-shadows. Apart from that one stroke of inspiration, though, he had done a pretty lousy job: the outside was sourly utilitarian and the corridors had the hallucinatory, liminal vibe of an airport hotel, long line of brown carpet stretching off into the distance, long line of textured beige wallpaper and cheap wooden doors on either