And the chief blared over him, ‘Do you really think the job’s so hard it can’t be done by an eight-year-old girl? We’d train monkeys to do it if they weren’t all immigrants. Don’t go on holiday next time. Or if you do, go to Canada and stay there. Marry a Canuck, eat pancakes, get a job on the Toronto Courier. You’ll love it.’

Jeremy was about to complain, but the chief clapped him on the arm and said, ‘Good to have you back, you mad bastard. Now where’s that eight-year-old with my flatplan?’ And he bustled off.

3

‘What the hell?’ said Jeremy to Max, too surprised and embarrassed even to really swear, and opened his arms out wide as if to draw some referee’s attention to what had happened. The pleasure of return was jostled from its glass and in it was left a grainy sediment of nastiness, monotony, the killing feeling that he was running on a wheel that moved no faster or slower whether or not he was on it. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, he’d been demoted to a smaller wheel.

He could see Max, his round shoulders hunched up to his ears, considering before he spoke. Jeremy knew him well enough to predict that he would try to preserve the lordly feeling of professional mastery – the sense that nothing could disturb their command of what was in front of them, nor their steady ascent in rank and remuneration – though Jeremy always wanted to point out that that applied more to Max than to him. And, indeed, Max said: ‘So, after all your griping, you’ve realized you do want to be a pod leader.’

‘I don’t want to be pushed out of it by a kindergartener. Come on, Max, I’ve been here for fourteen years. And in one week away they just… It’s just…’ He felt as if he were about to lie down and capitulate.

‘I think you’ll find it’s thirteen years. If it was fourteen, you’d be almost as senior as me.’

‘What the fuck, Max?’ His voice was still plaintive, with no fight in it. ‘You take one miserable week off in a dump like Dublin and they turn on you before you’ve even had time to come back and sit down. One day, when I keel over and die right here in the newsroom, they’ll just complain that my body’s too big to stuff into the bin.’

‘If that was true, they wouldn’t bother making all those pension contributions.’