storm of speculation and doom-mongering from Gouger’s Twitter followers. Richard was obviously still pissed off with me, but that would wear off once he saw everything fixed and back on track, or at the very latest once the exhibition went off beautifully. It was a shame about Tiernan’s pictures—I couldn’t see any way for them to do anything but molder in his studio, after this, although I wasn’t ruling out the possibility that I’d come up with something down the line—but he could always make more.
I needed a pint, in fact I needed a few pints; in fact, I needed a full-on night out. I was missing Melissa—we usually spent at least three nights a week together—but what I needed was the guys, the slaggings and the impassioned ridiculous debates and one of those endless sessions we hadn’t been having as much lately, where everyone crashes out on someone’s sofa around dawn after eating everything in his fridge. I had some really nice hash at home—I had been tempted to break it out a few times that week, but I didn’t really like getting drunk or high when things weren’t going well, in case it just made me feel worse; so I had saved my stash for the happy-ending celebration, as a gesture of faith that there would be one, and I had been right.
And so: Hogan’s, checking out beaches in Fiji on our phones, reaching over now and then to tug on one of Dec’s hair plugs (“Fuck off!”). I hadn’t been planning on mentioning the week’s events, but I was light-headed and bubbling with relief and somewhere around the fifth pint I found myself telling them the whole story, only skipping the late-night flashes of panic—which, in retrospect, had been even sillier than they had felt at the time—and throwing in extra flourishes here and there for laughs.
“You gobshite,” Sean said, at the end, but he was shaking his head and smiling a little wryly. I was slightly relieved; I’ve always cared about Sean’s opinion, and Richard’s reaction had left a residue of unease at the back of my mind.
“You are a gobshite,” Dec told me, more pointedly. “That could’ve blown up in your face.”
“It did blow up in my face.”
“No. Like properly blown up. Like losing your job. Maybe even getting arrested.”
“Well, it didn’t,” I said, irritated—that was the last thing I wanted to think about right then, and Dec should have realized that. “What world do you live in, anyway, where the cops care whether a picture is by some random nobody in a tracksuit or some random nobody in a fedora?”
“The show could’ve been shut down. Your boss could’ve pulled the plug.”
“And he didn’t. And even if he had, it wouldn’t exactly have been the end of the world.”
“Not for you, maybe. What about the kids doing the art? There they are, pouring their hearts out, and you’re taking the piss out of their lives like they’re a joke—”
“How was I taking the piss?”
“—their one big chance has finally come along, and you’re risking it all for a laugh—”
“Oh for God’s sake.”
“If you’d scuppered it, that would’ve been them stuck in the muck, for the rest of their—”
“What are you talking about? They could have gone to school. Instead of spending their time sniffing glue and breaking the wing mirrors off cars. They could have got jobs. The recession’s over; there’s no reason for anyone to be stuck in the muck unless they actually choose to be.”
Dec was staring at me, wide-eyed and incredulous, like I’d poked a finger up my nose. “You haven’t got a clue, man.”
Dec got into our school on a scholarship; his dad drove a bus and his mother worked in Arnotts and none of them had ever been arrested or addicted, so he had no more in common with the exhibition kids than I did, but occasionally he liked to play up the wrong-side-of-the-tracks angle, when he wanted an excuse to get chippy and self-righteous. He was still in a snit about the hair-plug thing. I could have pointed out that he was living proof that his own sanctimonious bullshit was just that—he wasn’t huddled in a squat huffing shoplifted spray paint, instead he had put in the time and effort and ended up with an excellent IT career, QED—but I wasn’t in the mood for playing along with him, not that night. “It’s your round.”
“You actually haven’t got a clue.”
“It’s actually your round. Are you going to go up