She nodded vaguely, pulling at her hair.
‘I noticed because you stayed right to the end. Most people leap out of their seats the instant they see the credits appear. I always wonder what they’re in such a hurry to get back to.’
‘It’s hard to comprehend,’ she agreed.
‘Yeah,’ the man said, pursing his lips reflectively. The conversation had reached its natural conclusion and she knew he was considering whether he should leave it there in its brief, formal perfection or risk ruining that perfection by attempting to bring it a stage further; she found herself hoping he would take the chance. ‘You’re not from Dublin, are you?’ he said.
‘Hence the map,’ she said, and then, realizing this sounded acerbic, ‘I’m from the United States. California originally. But I’ve come from New York. What about you?’
‘Here,’ he said, gesturing at the surrounding streets. ‘So – where was it you were looking for?’
‘Oh,’ she said. Not wanting to admit the dismal truth, that she had been looking merely for a destination, any destination, she squeezed her eyes tight shut and tried to remember one of the little triangles on the tourist map. ‘Uh, the museum?’ There was bound to be a museum.
‘Ah right,’ he said. ‘You know, I’ve never been there since it moved. But I can show you where it is. It’s not far.’ With a shall-we gesture, he turned, and she followed him downhill to the quays, a fracas of trucks and bus stops and seagulls. He pointed upriver at the far bank. ‘It’s about half an hour’s walk,’ he said. ‘Although, actually, I’d imagine it must be closing soon.’
‘Oh.’ She weighed her options. He was around her age and didn’t seem psychotic; it would be nice to have a conversation not predicated on pizza delivery. ‘Well, is there anywhere nearby I could get a drink?’
‘Never a problem in this town,’ he said.
Halley had left New York, her job and her friends and come to Ireland without any real plan, other than to be elsewhere, and vague notions of plumbing her own depths and writing some as-yet unconceived masterpiece; now, as she took a seat in the warm, dim, hops-scented snug, she already wondered if her true reason had been to fall in love. She’d grown so sick of the life she’d been living; what better way to forget all that than to lose yourself in someone new? To literally bump into someone, a stranger amid millions of other strangers, and let yourself discover him: that he has a name (Howard) and an age (twenty-five) a profession (history teacher) and a past (finance, murky) – every hour revealing more of him, like a magical pocket map that, once opened, will keep unfolding until it has covered the whole of your living-room floor with places you have never been?
(‘Just be careful,’ Zephyr said. ‘You’re so bad at these things.’ ‘Well it doesn’t have to be anything serious,’ she said, and didn’t mention that she’d already kissed him, on a bridge over some body of water she didn’t know the name of, before exchanging phone numbers and parting for the night, to walk around in the maze of heteronymous streets till she found a policeman who could tell her where she was; because Halley believed that a kiss was the beginning of a story, the story, good or bad, short or long, of an us, and once begun, you had to follow it through to the end.)
In the following weeks they returned to the little cinema in Temple Bar and saw many more disaster movies together – The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, The Swarm – always staying right to the end; afterwards he led her through the boozy city, its rusting, dusty charms, its rain. Working out of her guidebook, they saw the bullet holes in the walls of the GPO, the forlorn, childlike skeletons in the catacombs of St Michan’s, the relics of St Valentine. As they made their way, she imagined her great-grandfather walking down the same streets, cross-referencing the landmarks with tipsy yarns her father used to tell at the Christmas table, even while she laughed with embarrassment at the obese lines of her compatriots at the genealogy stand in Trinity College, where family trees were sold on elaborate parchment scrolls that looked like university degrees, as though conferring on their buyers an official place in history.
Later, sitting in the pub, Howard would make her tell stories about home. He appeared to have spent his childhood watching bad American TV shows, and when she described the suburb she’d grown up in, or the high school she’d attended, his eyes would iridesce, assimilating these details into the mythical country that invested the CDs and books and movies stacked around his bed. Much as she appreciated whatever mystique her foreignness gave her in his eyes, she did try to convey the mundane truth. ‘It’s really not much different from here,’ she’d tell him.
‘It is,’ he’d insist, solemnly. He told her that he’d once thought of applying for the green card and moving over there. ‘You know, doing something…’
‘So? What happened?’
‘What happens to anyone? I got a job.’ He’d drifted into a position in a prestigious brokerage in London – drifted was his word, and when Halley challenged it he told her that most of his class at Seabrook had ended up working in the City, or in corresponding high-finance positions in Dublin or New York: ‘There’s a kind of a network,’ he said. Salaries were lavish, and he would in all probability have been there still, neither loving nor hating it, if it hadn’t been for the cataclysm he’d brought down on himself. Cataclysm was his word too; he also referred to it as a blowup and a wipeout.
After this cataclysm, whatever it was, he’d returned to Dublin and for the last couple of months had been teaching History at his old school. It was plain when she met them that Howard’s parents – although, he said, they had enrolled his younger self in Seabrook as a conscious effort to bump the family a few rungs up the ladder – regarded teaching there as an unambiguously downward move. Dinner chez Fallon was a riot of cutlery on good china amidst long lakes of silence, like some unlistenable modernist symphony; beneath the prevailing veneer of politeness, a seething cauldron of disappointment and blame. It was like eating with some Waspy clan in New Hampshire; Halley was surprised at how un-Irish they seemed, but then most things in Dublin she found to be un-Irish.
She’d always suspected his relationship with Seabrook to be more complicated than he made out; it wasn’t until they’d been together almost a year that he told her about the accident at Dalkey Quarry. To her it sounded like the kind of drunken disaster so typical of the lives of teenage boys, but for Howard, it became clear, everything that happened before and after was cast in its light. She began to wonder why he had gone back to the school – was it to punish himself? Some kind of atonement? It was as if, she thought, he were trying to deny the past and embed himself in it at the same time; or deny it by embedding himself in it. She didn’t know how healthy a situation this was; whenever she tried to talk about it, though, he’d get irritable and change the subject.
That didn’t matter; there were other things to talk about. Around that time Halley found out about the severance package from the brokerage. It was three times Howard’s salary as a teacher; he had left it sitting in the bank.
She didn’t push him into buying a house. She just told him it was dumb to leave so much money lying dormant. ‘That’s simple economics,’ she said. Howard was the one person in Ireland who wasn’t obsessed with property. The rest of the country talked of nothing else – house prices, stamp duty, tracker mortgages, throwing around the terminology like realtors at a convention – but the concept of actually owning a place had evidently never occurred to him. He needed someone to force him to pay attention to his own life, she told him. ‘Otherwise you’re going to drift right off the face of the Earth.’