‘We signed off on the contracts in the office at noon. Been here since. Good that we could rely on at least one layabout to answer the call to quietly celebrate,’ Fiachra said.

For the next ten minutes or so, Bobby interacted. He choked out questions, smiled, and nodded meaningfully at replies. He was trying to interpret Fiachra’s ­tone – whether it contained a buried note of contrition or at least an awareness of his having, from Bobby’s perspective, rejected him for Jess. There was the gruesome possibility that Fiachra simply expected Bobby to take developments at face value, and be happy for Tombes. Bobby excused himself. In the toilet he closed his fist, hyperventilated, and punched the metal ­hand-­dryer. He looked at his hand. He was pretty convinced he had broken something in his middle finger, through which a steady and piercing voltage of pain now vibrantly coursed. Bobby went back out and drank five pints. Fiachra, with a significant head start but still intent on trying to keep up, rapidly became unintelligible, then unconscious. Jess ordered during each round, bought her own, yet seemed to sit before the same glass of wine drained to the same unvarying depth all night long.

‘Do you feel good?’ Bobby asked for what felt like the hundredth time, though it may have been the first time he had actually said it out loud to her.

Jess took her time before answering, as she took her time before answering any question. She was looking at him, and he was looking at her, and she was looking at him looking at her. There she sat, ­twenty-­one or ­twenty-­two, icily wreathed in all her untradable surplus time, watching not just Bobby and Fiachra but also somehow herself, insinuated within yet in some way already ­beyond – already extricated ­from – this scene, this moment. Bobby could see now the abiding apartness in her look. It had always been there. And within him rose again the habitual suspicion, the deep intestinal hunch: his work was shit. Rich, black, viscous, tarry shit. So, essentially, was Fiachra’s, and everybody else’s. But Tombes’s, whatever it was, was not. Jess Tombes was going to last, and Bobby could feel himself, in her spectral, incipiently canonical gaze, being transubstantiated, molecule by molecule, into obscurity. Whether she knew it or ­not – and Bobby hazarded she probably did ­not – she was killing them all so that she could go on, so that she could make it. This was how the machine worked.

‘I do,’ she said in a voice so low it sounded as if it was coming from inside Bobby’s own skull.

He looked at his phone. It was getting late. The bar had filled up. He wanted to cry. He put his hand on Jess’s knee. She looked at his hand.

‘What is that?’ she asked.