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bloody twenty-four-hour golfing range all night.’
    ‘That bloody twenty-four-hour golfing range’s worth five grand a year if I can steal John away from his current accountants.’
    ‘The idea is to have a decent dinner, couple of bottles of wine — each — general conviviality and crack; not discuss how home working and the information revolution can cut so many hundred a month off accountancy fees. I don’t want to talk shop the whole evening.’
    ‘Same goes, Rosh, for the Northern Ireland Police Service.’
    ‘All right, no police, no clients. Who then?’
    ‘Conrad and Pat.’
    ‘They’re gay.’
    ‘Things have moved on a little in this country since they chained the playground swings up on Sundays. We’re supposed to be tolerant, a multi-cultural, rainbow nation. There are aliens living down the road, for God’s sake.’
    ‘We’ll have Louise here.’
    ‘It’s not an infection, it’s not like whooping cough or meningitis. She’s not going to be scandalized or have her emergent sexuality warped. And they’re good crack.’
    ‘OK. Conrad and Pat. Who would go with them? What about Sean and Donna?’
    ‘Sean and Donna. This is going to be an alternative lifestyles evening, I can see. We’ll be the boring bourgeois farts.’
    ‘Next problem,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘What will you cook?’
    At the moment Louise, aged six months and eight days, decides she’s bored with Coronation Street and starts to grizzle in her plastic baby carrier. Roisin Dunbar and Michael dive simultaneously to attend to her. Within seconds they’re disagreeing over which end of Louise is causing the distress and who’s to do the picking up and cooing and rocking thing. And that, Roisin Dunbar thinks, watching Michael jiggling his daughter and singing songs and snatches from Gilbert and Sullivan, is the un-problem underlying the trivialities of who to invite and who not to invite and what to feed them.
    Babies change things. They’d warned her, she didn’t believe them. She’d thought she could be police and mother. She’d opted for the shortest maternity leave because there was promotion dangled at the other end of it, and this affirmation of her abilities would slop over into the rest of her life, turn her into wonder-mother, -wife, -supporter while Mikey got his consultancy airborne, — social Rosh, — everything. But you can’t be police and mother; you can’t be police and anything; wife, lover, supporter, friend. It won’t let you. You’re police, and you’re police.
    Louise had been more than a baby. She’d been a career opportunity for both of them. Somebody had to stay at home and do the parent thing, and Mikey had wanted to get out of Renswick Bart and do it on his own, one man, one accountancy package, one Internet connection, freeing Roisin to go back to three stripes on the sleeve of her detective’s beige trench coat. Except she knows that the parent thing is more time-consuming and boring and schedule-disrupting than Mikey’s saying. Louise is sitting in her trug and waving her fists and smiling and bringing it down around him. She knows he’s lost one client because of a missed deadline. He’s never said. He never will. Like he never will say that he’s jealous she’s moving on and he’s running to stand still. Maybe not even standing still any more. Watching her pull away from him.
    Jesus, Mikey. You should tell me this. Communicate with me. You spend three hundred quid a month on connecting with the infosphere through that white box on the study floor, but you won’t connect with me, for free. Or is that what you want, contact without communion? The great lie of the network age, that connection is communication.
    The Communication Age is great and dandy while it’s just ourselves to talk to. Suddenly there’s another voice to answer back, and we realize we’ve never really had very much to say. What we have on show doesn’t impress them, our scrap-books and fetishes and football