Eileen tapped on the kitchen door, pushed it open. Nugent was sitting on a ragged little settee with a trucker cap covering his bald spot. Murt was at the kitchen table in a ­cement-­coloured hoodie, his laptop in front of him. Jamie was up and in motion, wearing an ­olive-­green forestry jacket over a ­T-­shirt, sweatpants, and a pair of battered Chelsea boots, the heels of the boots snapping like fingers as he paced the planked floor. Sara Duane was in an easy chair, drinking Calpol cough medicine straight out of the bottle, a purple tinge banding her top lip.

‘Currency is anyway a legacy structure,’ Jamie said.

‘Sorry for interrupting,’ Eileen said, looking from Nugent to Jamie and then Murt. Murt had the glassy, heaped dis­position of one routed recently from his bed.

‘Eileen,’ Nugent said. He rose to his feet, looked down at the settee, and sighed. ‘Change,’ he said, ‘is the bane of my existence,’ and bent to recover the coins that had just seeped from his pockets.

Nugent, a man once unthinkingly robust, had suffered a stroke several years back. Among the litany of mutinies perpetrated by his body on his body was a lasting deformity to his hands: each thumb and forefinger had wrenched back and locked in place, an effect that surgery had only partially reversed. His thumbs remained severely kinked, like claws, obliging Nugent to roughly sweep at the cushion with one palm and catch the splattering coins in the other.

‘Coins are at least aesthetically pleasing objects. Notes are just dirty paper,’ Jamie said.

‘We’re on economics now,’ Nugent said to Eileen. ‘You already missed a lecture on biology.’

‘Currency’s a sentiment we can let go of at any time,’ Jamie said. ‘We just don’t want to yet, but rest assured.’

‘Not going to happen,’ Murt said.

‘Trust me,’ Jamie replied. ‘Currency, computers, they are just technologies, and it’s in the nature of technologies to go away. A thing arrives, it proliferates, it grows into ubiquity. And, like everything else that reaches ubiquity, it one day disappears.’

‘Your dog is outside, so you know,’ Eileen said.

‘I do know,’ Sara said.

‘Cheerio has a ferocious tolerance for his own company,’ Jamie said. ‘Which is commendably undogly of him.’

‘I would say he looks a little bit lost out there,’ Eileen said.

‘He came out of his mammy’s crease looking exactly as lost,’ Jamie said. ‘Don’t judge a thing off him by that look.’

‘What are you saying about my dog?’ Sara said to Jamie. ‘And she’s a she, for Christ’s sakes. Millionth time I’m telling you.’ She had the pinched, flushed look of someone enduring something viral.

‘I brought doughnuts,’ Eileen said.

‘Doughnuts,’ Jamie sneered.

‘Doughnuts,’ Sara repeated.

‘What’s wrong with doughnuts?’ Eileen said.

‘Nothing. Only there’s no credible way for a Mayo accent to say ­dough-­nutz,’ Jamie said.