Skippy Dies by Paul Murray Page B

must be closing soon.’
    ‘Oh.’ She weighed her options. He was around her age and didn’t seem psychotic; it would be nice to have a conversation not
     predicated on pizza delivery. ‘Well, is there anywhere nearby I could get a drink?’
    ‘Never a problem in this town,’ he said.
    Halley had left New York, her job and her friends and come to Ireland without any real plan, other than to be elsewhere, and
     vague notions of plumbing her own depths and writing some as-yet unconceived masterpiece; now, as she took a seat in the warm,
     dim, hops-scented snug, she already wondered if her true reason had been to fall in love. She’d grown so sick of the life
     she’d been living; what better way to forget all that than to lose yourself in someone new? To literally bump into someone,
     a stranger amid millions of other strangers, and let yourself discover him: that he has a name (Howard) and an age (twenty-five)
     a profession (history teacher) and a past (finance, murky) – every hour revealing more of him, like a magical pocket map that,
     once opened, will keep unfolding until it has covered the whole of your living-room floor with places you have never been?
    (‘Just be careful,’ Zephyr said. ‘You’re so bad at these things.’ ‘Well it doesn’t have to be anything serious,’ she said,
     and didn’t mention that she’d already kissed him, on a bridge over some body of water she didn’t know the name of, before
     exchanging phone numbers and parting for the night, to walk around in the maze of heteronymous streets till she found a policeman
     who could tell her where she was; because Halley believed that a kiss was the beginning of a story, the story, good or bad,
     short or long, of an us, and once begun, you had to follow it through to the end.)
    In the following weeks they returned to the little cinema in Temple Bar and saw many more disaster movies together –
The Poseidon Adventure
,
Airport, The Swarm
– always staying right to the end; afterwards he led her through the boozy city, its rusting,
dusty charms, its rain. Working out of her guidebook, they saw the bullet holes in the walls of the GPO, the forlorn, childlike
     skeletons in the catacombs of St Michan’s, the relics of St Valentine. As they made their way, she imagined her great-grandfather
     walking down the same streets, cross-referencing the landmarks with tipsy yarns her father used to tell at the Christmas table,
     even while she laughed with embarrassment at the obese lines of her compatriots at the genealogy stand in Trinity College,
     where family trees were sold on elaborate parchment scrolls that looked like university degrees, as though conferring on their
     buyers an official place in history.
    Later, sitting in the pub, Howard would make her tell stories about home. He appeared to have spent his childhood watching
     bad American TV shows, and when she described the suburb she’d grown up in, or the high school she’d attended, his eyes would
     iridesce, assimilating these details into the mythical country that invested the CDs and books and movies stacked around his
     bed. Much as she appreciated whatever mystique her foreignness gave her in his eyes, she did try to convey the mundane truth.
     ‘It’s really not much different from here,’ she’d tell him.
    ‘It is,’ he’d insist, solemnly. He told her that he’d once thought of applying for the green card and moving over there. ‘You
     know, doing something…’
    ‘So? What happened?’
    ‘What happens to anyone? I got a job.’ He’d drifted into a position in a prestigious brokerage in London –
drifted
was his word, and when Halley challenged it he told her that most of his class at Seabrook had ended up working in the City,
     or in corresponding high-finance positions in Dublin or New York: ‘There’s a kind of a network,’ he said. Salaries were lavish,
     and he would in all probability have been there still, neither loving nor hating it, if it