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in my chest. They were talking about me. These people I didn’t know were talking about me. My mouth went dry, and I struggled to breathe. I felt sick. Go away , I thought. Please, go away . I looked at Matthew. “I thought you said there was nobody on this site.”
    “There wasn’t. Jim just called to ask what was going on.”
    Oh no, not Jim. “I thought you cleared it with him.”
    “Forgot.”
    Jim had one of those e-mail notification alerts set up for any messages on spacemonkeys.com. He’d forgotten he had it until a few days earlier. Red Horizon had a radio interview at the beginning of the week, and he’d mentioned that he used to be in a band called Space Monkeys. A few diehards googled him. That’s how quickly it happened, how quickly it took off, and that’s probably when I should have pulled the plug. Only problem was, now Jim was involved.

4
    M atthew and I got to Grogan’s at seven thirty. Jim had invited us to a Red Horizon gig there. Grogan’s is a tumbledown, creaky pub like an old man with a broken back and knobbly fingers who keeps dirty gold under his mattress. It’s down a back street in the city center, where it’s been for a hundred years. Dublin is full of old pubs laced with heavy carpets and sticky furniture. They’re permanent fixtures in the city. New bars (not pubs) opened and closed every few months within meters of them. They were polished and shiny, with white walls and gleaming mirrors guarded by menacing bouncers with necks as pink as pigs. Now that the Celtic Tiger was roaring like a crazed animal, there seemed to be no end of money to be spent and money to be made. Bars were being redone, and marble and crystal glassware was everywhere. Dublin competes with itself all the time. It feels like it should move on and look modern, but it doesn’t really want to.
    It was rumored that U2 had played Grogan’s back in the seventies, but every pub started that rumor. I wasn’t sure why Red Horizon were playing there—I thought they were bigger than that. Grogan’s hosted the faded stars, the has-beens and the never-beens, not the up-and-comings. Red Horizon felt like a band on the cusp: DJs name-dropped them, they were featured on the back pages ofmusic magazines, guys with long fringes wore their T-shirts. Once in an interview, Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones had mentioned them. “Red Horizon, they’re good,” he’d said. He was drunk at the time, but still, it was impressive. They were almost there.
    An Asian woman with a strong Dublin accent, dropping her t ’s and elongating her vowels, pretended to name-check us on the door. She didn’t even have a list. We marched on in. It was no longer unusual to see Asian people in Dublin, but fifteen years earlier we’d been a nation of freckled-skinned, frizzy-haired individuals, thanks, probably, to an enormous amount of inbreeding due to strict immigration controls. Back then, any pillowcase-wearing member of the Ku Klux Klan might have arrived in Dublin, excited about the rumor of an all-white society, a true Aryan race, only to shake his head in despair when the reality of a really bad-looking nation peered back at him. Thankfully, the gene pool is being rapidly diluted, and soon we’ll no longer have to give christening gifts of sunblock to babies.
    There were about sixty people inside Grogan’s that night, busy for a Thursday. Ten were standing at the bar, all men cradling pints. Engaged in thoughtful conversation, they shuffled slowly from foot to foot. The band was vacuum-packed onto the stage. I say stage, but it was really just a step that put them a good half an inch higher than us mere mortals.
    The pub smelled of clashing perfumes and furniture polish. The all-female audience on the floor swayed from side to side, their shiny hair flickering in the dim lighting. Chests heaved in unison— Look at me, Jim, look at me . I slid into the mob and caught the rhythm. Look at me, Jim.
    Jim was wrapped around the