“Well, look at Alan Greenspan here,” I said. Conor was starting to piss me off—because he had been right, and because Pat and Jenny had had every right to believe that he was wrong. “It’s easy to be right in hindsight, fella. It wouldn’t have killed you to be a little more positive for your friends.”

“You mean, give them a little more bullshit? They were getting plenty of that already. The banks, the developers, the government: Go on, buy, best investment of your lives—”

Richie balled up the sugar sachet and sank it in the bin with a sharp rustle. He said, “If I’d seen my best mates running towards that cliff, I’d’ve said something, too. Might not have stopped them, but it might’ve meant the fall came as less of a shock.”

The two of them were looking at me like they were the ones on the same side, like I was the outsider. Richie was only nudging Conor towards what the crash had done to Pat, but it grated just the same. I said, “Keep talking. What happened next?”

Conor’s jaw moved. The memory was winding him tighter and tighter. “Jenny—she always hated fights—Jenny goes, ‘You should see the size of the back garden! We’re thinking about getting a slide for the kids, and in the summer we’ll have barbecues—you can stay over afterwards, so you won’t have to worry about having a few cans—’ Only just then there’s this huge crash across the road, like a whole bale of slates falling off the top of the scaffolding, something like that. We all jump a mile. When our hearts start beating again, I say, ‘You’re positive about this. Yeah?’ Pat goes, ‘Yeah. We are. We’d better be: the deposit’s non-refundable.’”

Conor shook his head. “He’s trying to make it into a joke. I say, ‘Fuck the deposit. You can still change your minds.’ And Pat, he blows up at me. He yells, ‘Fuck’s sake! Can’t you just pretend to be happy for us?’ And that wasn’t Pat, not at all—like I said, he never lost his temper. So I knew he was having second thoughts, major ones. I go, ‘Do you actually want this gaff? Just tell me that.’

“He goes, ‘Yeah, I do. I always did. You know that. Just because you’re happy renting some bachelor pad for the rest of your life—’ I go, ‘No. Not a gaff. This gaff. Do you want it? Do you even like it? Or are you only buying it because you’re supposed to?’

“Pat goes, ‘So it’s not perfect. I bloody well knew that already. What the fuck do you want us to do? We’ve got kids. When you’ve got a family, you need a home. What’s your problem with that?’”

Conor ran a hand up his jaw, hard enough that it left a red streak. “We were yelling. Back where we grew up, there’d have been half a dozen old ones sticking their noses out the doors by now. Out there, nothing even moved. I go, ‘If you can’t buy something you actually want, then keep renting till you can.’ Pat goes, ‘Sweet Jesus, Conor, that’s not how it works! We need to get on the property ladder!’ I go, ‘Like this? By going a million miles into debt for some dive that might never be a decent place to live? What if the wind changes and you get stuck like that?’