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entering that
state of perfect distraction brought on by idleness, caffeine and
sitting cross-legged on something soft, the phone rang. Rob stared
at it accusingly, wondering once again why he still had a home
telephone. He allowed it four rings before he carefully transferred
the coffee mug to a pile of old newspapers and snatched up the
receiver.
    “ Yeah?”
    “ Hello?” said a confused
voice, as if the owner of that voice was worried that it had called
the Royal Castle by mistake, and not an apartment where only one
person lived. And where that person was the only one who would ever
answer that particular telephone, ever.
    Rob slapped a hand silently to
his face and took a deep breath.
    “ Oh hi mom.”
    Without further preamble, Rob's
mother started to talk and Rob did his best to listen. This wasn't
easy, as the news from home generally consisted of people Rob
vaguely knew who'd contracted cancer, produced an offspring,
mangled a limb, left the country, or died in any number of horrible
ways. A wedding or two might occasionally be mentioned but usually
it was all fairly grim stuff.
    “ Mmm,” Rob said, reading
his paper and doing his best to keep the volume of the page-turning
low. His mother pressed on, and after the last
baby-with-a-deadly-illness had been catalogued she turned to the
next phase of the conversation, the one that Rob looked forward to
the least. The How-to-fix-Rob's-life phase.
    This generally required a bit
more than an occasional grunt from Rob as he didn’t want to
inadvertently mutter “yeah” to some maternal suggestion he hadn't
really heard. So he did his absolute best to pay attention.
    “ No really mum, there's
lots of jobs. Loads. No I won't be back in the bar. No, it's not a
crash, more like a cleaning out, ye know? And I don't work in a
bank, do I? Yeah, they do have the dole over here. It's better
actually. No mom, I shouldn’t have stayed in school. No, I
shouldn't, and I don't care how good Cousin Mike is doing. He's a
tit anyway, shure you complain about him all the time!”
    Rob, although he would have
loved to cut the conversation short, felt it was his sacred duty to
allow his mother the occasional rummage through his life, just to
give her the impression that she could sort things out for him. In
fact, by his second day of unemployment, he had already formulated
his first rule of losing your job—don't tell your mother because
she will bug you to distraction and send you every clipping she
finds with any mention of work on it, even ones for which you are
hilariously unsuited and unqualified.
    Rob, still making the
occasional affirmative noise, shifted his gaze from the bed to the
window. It was a nice May day outside, a bit cloudy but bright
enough. Later on he might head on down to the Old Town and grab
something to eat, and see if anything was happening at Malone’s. Of
course there was always something happening at Malone’s, so there
was little risk he'd stick his nose in the door, find it
insufferably boring and head back home again. That was one of the
true joys of being unemployed—the right to hang out in Irish bars
on a weekday.
    “— and then she really
wants a job, so we decided she might go over and visit you for a
while and see what's there—”
    Rob's attention was suddenly
jerked back to the here and now. He pressed the receiver to his
ear. What had she just said?
    “ And I told her to go to
university but she said no, it's better to get into work as soon
as—”
    “ Wait, hang on there
mum,” he said. “Just a second. Who's maybe coming over to visit
me?”
    “ Your sister Karen! Who
else would I be talking about?”
    Rob sat up. He swung his legs
over the side of the bed and planted his feet firmly on the floor.
He passed the receiver to his right hand.
    “ Karen? Karen wants to
come here? But”—he threw a glance around his small and messy
flat—“it's feckin' tiny here, there's no way I've room for someone
else!”
    “ Well she's not