Nine days into the break, James was standing in a Porsche showroom on the south side of Dublin, and nobody in it was pretending very well.
The salesman had known who he was before he got his hand out. He said "Mr Ganner" with the slight lift of somebody who had practised not making a thing of it, and then he made a thing of it anyway by walking them past three cars to the one James had come to see without being told which one that was.
Two staff at the far desk kept finding reasons to look up. A young lad by the coffee machine had his phone half raised until the woman with him put her hand on his wrist and pushed it down again, without looking at him, like she had done it before.
The floor was polished so hard that every car stood on its own reflection. There was music somewhere, low enough that James could not have said what it was. The whole place smelled of leather and new plastic and the kind of air that had been cleaned on purpose.
