Dumb joke, but Corinne smiles.
Dave’s insides do a little flip.
They’re standing next to each other, almost framed in the doorway, and it’s a little overwhelming – Corinne’s scent, her perfect skin, her searching eyes that -
Oh enough, Conway thinks, and steps into the playroom.
He winks at Jack, and hunkers down in front of the beanbag. Danny turns around, tears welling in his eyes, and says, ‘Where’s Mommy?’
‘She’ll be home soon,’ Conway says.
‘I had it first.’
‘I know, I know. We’ll get it back in a minute. Come here.’
He reaches across, retrieves Danny from the bean-bag, hitches him over his shoulder and stands up.
This manoeuvre used to be so easy, so natural, but now that Danny is bigger and heavier it requires a lot more effort. He squeezes his son’s still-small frame in his arms, and then breathes him in, like a vampire, waiting for that familiar emotional rush.
‘I’ve just changed Jack,’ Corinne is saying. ‘It was quite loose. What’s that word you use… splatty?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Splatty. A splatty poo. Very nice.’
Or not.
Or surreal. Or whatever.
Before Conway can say anything else, his phone rings. He lowers Danny to the floor and gets the phone out of his jacket pocket. He nods at Corinne. She bends down to distract Danny.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Time for dinner.’
As Conway moves away, he raises the phone to his ear.
‘Yeah?’
‘Dave? Phil Sweeney.’
‘Phil. How are you?’
‘Good. Listen, have you got a minute?’
‘Yeah.’ Conway heads for the door. ‘What’s up?’
‘Just something that’s come to my attention. Thought you should know about it.’
‘OK.’
As Conway listens, he walks across the hall and into the front reception room.
Phil Sweeney is an occasional PR consultant. He does strategic communications, perception management, media analysis. He identifies and tracks, Echelon-style, issues that might have a bearing on his clients’ companies.
Or lives.
Like this one.
‘And the weird thing is,’ he’s saying, ‘I actually know the guy. His old man and I worked together, back in the early days of Marino.’
‘Right.’ Conway is confused, unsure if he’s getting this. ‘Susie Monaghan, you said?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus.’
Susie Monaghan.
Drumcoolie Castle.
Conway lets out a deep, plaintive sigh here, as always happens whenever this comes up, each of the sighs like an instalment, a staged payment against the principal, itself a lump sum of a sigh so great that to release the whole thing in one go would be enough, he imagines, to kill him.
‘So what is this guy,’ he says, ‘a journalist?’
‘Yeah. Young, very smart. But he needs the work. That’s part of the problem. He got laid off back when all this meltdown shit started. So I suppose he sees it as an opportunity.’
‘Right.’
‘But look, don’t worry. I’ll talk him out of it.’
‘OK,’ Conway says, nodding. ‘Or maybe, I don’t know…’ He pauses. ‘Maybe we could find something else for him to do.’ A signature Dave Conway technique. Misdirection. He’s been in business for over fifteen years and it always seems to work. If there’s a problem with staff, some kind of dispute or disagreement, redirect their attention. Get them thinking about something else.
He walks over to the bay window.
‘Yeah,’ Sweeney says, ‘I did offer to buy out his advance, but -’
‘No. Jesus.’ With his free hand Conway massages his left temple. ‘That’s not going to work.’ He looks out over the front lawn. ‘Not if he’s young. Not if he thinks he’s Bob fucking Woodward.’
‘Yeah, you’re probably right. But he does owe me. So we’ll get around it one way or another. I just wanted to let you know.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Yeah.’
After he hangs up, Conway stands for a while staring out of the window.
Susie Monaghan.
OK. Fine.
But doesn’t he have other, more pressing shit to be concerned about?
Yes.
Like Conway Holdings going down the tubes, for instance.
Unquestionably.
So why then does he have a knot in his stomach? Why is the pounding inside his skull so much more intense now than it was five minutes ago?
Jimmy Gilroy is sitting at the quiet end of the bar. Arranged in front of him on the dark wood surface is an untouched pint of Guinness, some loose change, his keys, his phone and that morning’s paper.
It’s like a still life, familiar and comforting.
Take away the phone, replace it with twenty Major and a box of matches and this could be any time over the last fifty years. In fact, Jimmy could easily be his old man sitting here – or even his old man.
He takes a sip from his pint.
Though you’d definitely need the cigarettes and matches. And he’d need to be wearing a suit.
And they wouldn’t be Major, they’d be Benson & Hedges. Senior Service in his grandfather’s case, as he remembers – and not matches, a gold Ronson lighter.
Shut up.
And the paper. The paper would be crumpled, having been read from cover to cover.
Sports pages, obituaries, letters to the editor, classifieds.
Leaning back on his stool, head tilted to one side, Jimmy looks at the scene again. But the argument for continuity seems even thinner this time, a little less authentic. And it’s not just the lack of smokes, or the mobile phone, or that USB memory stick attached to his key ring.
It’s the unread paper.
He bought it on the way here, in the SPAR on the corner, but the truth is he’d already read most of it online earlier in the day.
Jimmy takes another sip from his pint.
He worries for the health of the printed newspaper.
Unfortunately, his own direct experience of the business was cut short by an industry-wide epidemic of falling ad revenues. But even in the few years prior to that things had started feeling pretty thinned-out. Some of the senior reporters and specialist correspondents still had good sources and were out there on a regular basis gathering actual news, but as a recent hire Jimmy spent most of his days in front of a terminal recycling wire copy and PR material, a lot of it already second-hand and very little of it fact-checked. If it hadn’t been for Phil Sweeney, Jimmy mightn’t ever have had the chance to work on anything more exciting.
The barman passes, rubbing his cloth along the wooden surface of the bar as he goes.
Jimmy reaches for his glass again.
In those final months, Sweeney steered him in the direction of quite a few stories he was able to get his teeth into, and although most of his time was still spent chained to a desk, he put in the extra hours at his own expense and managed to score a couple of direct hits. He’d been building up considerable momentum – and was even due for a review – when the axe fell.
Which is why after six months at City and a further eighteen of intermittent and even lower-grade ‘churnalism’, Jimmy leapt at this chance of doing the Susie Monaghan book.
It may sound like a rationalisation, but he welcomed the change. OK, no more job security, but also no more multiple daily deadlines, no more shameless lifting of news-in-brief items from other sources, and no more frantic, soul-sapping last-minute reliance on Google and Wikipedia.
And while the Susie story might not exactly be news anymore, it still resonates.
Jimmy downs a good third of his pint in one go. He puts the glass back on the bar and stares at it.
Susie Monaghan was a tabloid celebrity, a bottom-feeding soap-star socialite from a few years ago who the entire country seemed fixated on for a while. Every aspect of her life was covered and analysed in excruciating detail, the outfits, the tans, the openings, the reality-show appearances, even the comings and goings of the character she played on that primetime soap.