‘They’re all going to be out there,’ Mossy, stubbing out his cigarette, said to Nagle. ‘They’re all going out there now to help this friend of theirs get the place ready. We’ll head out there around ten.’ He turned to Mark.
‘Are you coming?’
‘Who, me?’
‘She said there was a barbecue from eight. But if I see another hot dog today I’ll vomit blood. Ten or eleven will be time enough to get out there.’
‘I wasn’t even talking to her,’ Mark said.
‘Well, she said to tell you to come,’ said Mossy, shrugging.
‘She said to say that to me?’
‘I’m texting Lockser,’ Nagle said, reaching for his phone. ‘That blonde bird would be right up his alley. Though he’ll have to go through me first.’
‘Don’t text him then, you bollocks,’ Mossy said, and nodded over to Mark. ‘So we’ll head out there later?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Mark said, as a fist of anticipation opened, warm and opiate, within his chest. ‘Sure we’re in no rush.’
*
At Booterstown DART station, the sea was hidden behind a high wall, and Nagle complained loudly and fervently about the smell of the marsh. Two long-necked birds were moving through the rushes, making their way to the glittering pool of water banked, on the other side, by a stretch of mud.
‘It’s a fucking outrage,’ Nagle was saying. ‘You could pay two or three mil, easily, to live out here, and you open your door in the morning to the smell of shite.’
‘Snipe,’ Mossy said.
Nagle turned his head quickly as though he had been insulted, then seemed to think better of it and continued along the walkway over the marsh.
‘There’s an offy just here at the bottom of the hill,’ Mossy called out to him, and this time Nagle stopped in his tracks and gave Mossy a disbelieving stare.
‘We’re expected to bring our own fucking booze to this gaff?’ he protested. ‘What are we — students?’ He looked to Mark. ‘No offence, Casey.’
Mark shrugged and moved ahead, leaving Mossy to listen to Nagle. He was carrying, now, none of the boozy confidence with which he’d made his way from the pub to the station in Pearse Street, none of the bluster with which he’d strode around the platform, laughing with Mossy and even with Nagle, as the heat of the day hovered still in the red brick of the old building, as blue sky glinted through the great cross-hatched barn of a roof. He had felt, then, not just glad about the prospect of the party, but smug, almost; entitled, almost. Not to the girl, but to the night, to the pleasure of it, to a house where there would be a girl he wanted to get talking to, and where he’d have the whole night to do it. That was what parties were for; that was why parties, when it came to meeting someone, were the only way to go. In a pub, you’d only ever have started talking to someone like her before the barman was stacking chairs and snatching glasses and calling time, and in a club it was always too loud, too crammed, too pointless, too dark — and he knew it aged him, seeing it this way, but he didn’t care. He wanted to talk to her. And only at a party could you get a chance to talk to someone like her properly; at a party, you felt halfway to being comfortable with someone like her, even when you’d only just set eyes on them, even when you’d only glimpsed the side of their face or the curve of their ass. It was something to do with already being in a house, already surrounded by living-room furniture, by CDs all over the carpet, by books messed up on the shelves.
But now, crossing the Rock Road to the off-licence, he felt uneasy, felt conscious of all the pints, of how he must look, how he must smell. What if there were only eight or ten people at this party, all close friends, all solicitors or whatever they were, and he was about to clatter into the middle of them, with Mossy and Nagle, who were surely even more of a mess than he was? He cringed at the thought of it, and yet he kept going, hearing, as the door of the off-licence opened, the tinkling of some little bell — hearing, behind him, Mossy shouting at Nagle to quit something, to fucking quit! — and going on, and keeping going, because it was better than going back to his unfinished chapter and his hung-over tomorrow and the phone calls that were sure to come; it was better than all of that, it was different from all of that, and so he went on.
*
The place was a terraced cottage tucked well away from any chance at a sea view, a window on each side of a squat brown door. Nagle snorted at the sight of it.
‘Six fifty, minimum, and it’s a fucking gardener’s hut,’ he said.
‘High standards for someone who just took a piss in full view of the traffic,’ Mossy said. He was looking sloppy, smiling obscurely, his gaze fixing on nothing in particular, his bag of cans slung low by his side. He leaned a moment too long on the doorbell and frowned in irritation when Mark told him to leave off. Music sounded from the windows, and the busy squall of voices. They seemed all to be women’s voices.
‘Fuckin’ Beyoncé,’ Nagle said, just as the door was opened by a guy their own age in a tight striped T-shirt and cargo shorts. He greeted them brightly and immediately disappeared back into a room, leaving them to make their own way.
Inside, the place was bigger than it had seemed, and it was thronged. There were people everywhere: standing in the middle of the floor, sitting on sofas and bean-bags pushed back against the wall, leaning on low bookcases and coffee-tables and on the high silver speakers from which some female singer — maybe Beyoncé, probably Beyoncé — blared. In clusters, among the standing groups, some women were dancing. Everyone, dancing or not, seemed to be smiling, and to be confident and happy and well dressed, and to be absorbing and entertaining and exhilarating each other in conversation. The mood was not just lively, it was positively phosphorescent, delirious, delighted in the extreme: which meant that the explanation had to be somewhere nearby. And there it was, glimpsed as someone opened a door at the back of the room and quickly closed it again. A girl bent over a dresser. A couple of others waiting their turn. And the guy who had just come out of the room standing on the threshold of the dance-floor with a beatific smile on his lips, with a quick little tap and tug at his nostrils.
‘Oh, nice one!’ Mark heard Nagle roar.
*
Nobody was dancing in the kitchen, but a DJ was twitching and hovering over a pair of decks. A girl was darting around with a Polaroid camera, detonating the boxy little flash in people’s faces so that their smiles rippled, for an instant, in recoil. Mark pushed through. On a radiator by the small window, a red-haired guy was slumped, sweat stains darkening his shirt, his tie wrapped several times around one wrist; he looked defeated and belligerent all at once, and the glare with which he returned Mark’s gaze slipped off his face like oil.
‘You made it!’
Mark turned. It was the blonde. The blonde friend, that was, Mark corrected himself — wanting, even in his internal commentary, to distance himself as far as possible from Nagle. She was grinning; he didn’t think she was off her head, but he couldn’t be sure. He smiled at her. She clapped a hand on each shoulder and kissed him, hard, on the cheek. Definitely off her head. She laughed. ‘You bring your friends?’
‘Yeah.’ Mark waved back in the direction of the other room, slapping someone on the side of the head as he did so. He apologized. They seemed not even to have noticed.