Page 20 of 56 Days
She smiles. “ ‘Coding’?”
“Oh yes, I knowallthe lingo.”
“Do you now?”
“What can I say? I read alotof Wikipedia.”
She laughs. “I don’t code. I’m in web services. It’s like technical customer service. I’m basically the IT guy who asks if you’ve tried turning it off and on, but withcloud-computingclients so it’s alittlebit more complicated than that.”
“I thought you lot made apps or something.”
“That’s just what we want you to think. The actual money is in server farms, cloud computing, slowly but surely moving toward a place where the entire internet will run on our equipment so our maleficent leader will effectively control the world... That kind of thing.”
“Should I be scared?”
“It won’t change anything.”
“Let’s go get a drink, then.”
He suggests a pub on Haddington Road, around the corner. They walk toward it side by side, without touching.
“You’re not thinking of going to Cork?” he asks. “To your parents?”
She’s confused and not just by theparents, plural. “For what?”
“It’s just that, one of the guys in the office, that’s his plan. Legging it to Galway tomorrow. His dad is a GP and he’s telling them that we’ll all be confined to our localities soon. There’ll be no going anywhere. Although personally I think he’s just looking for an excuse to make his mother do his washing. He’s a bit younger than us, so...”
“How do you know that?”
“What?”
“That he’s younger thanus.”
Oliver raises an eyebrow. “Should I be bracing myself for a bombshell?”
She lets a beat pass, enjoying this. “I’mtwenty-five.”
“Phew.” Hemock-wipesat his brow. “Although I figured. You said you were Class of 2017. I did the maths.”
“Well done.”
“On a calculator.”
They cross Baggot Street by the bridge, passing a man carrying two boxes of beer, one stacked on top of the other, hurrying in the opposite direction.
Priorities, she thinks.
“This is the bit where you tell me how oldyouare,” she says.
He grins. “Is it?”
They reach the pub, which is actually more of a sports bar. One elderly man sits in the far corner of an enclosed smoking area at the front of the building, a box of cigarettes and a lighter neatly aligned on the table next to his pint.
As Oliver pulls the door open he says to her, “I’m twenty-nine. Just.”
Inside, a long, narrow room with a bar on the left stretches away from them. It’s full of nooks and crannies, of snugs and booths, and all of them are empty. Suspended screens are tuned to Sky Sports. There’s no music to compete with the commentators. If it hadn’t been for the man with the pint outside, she might think they’ve accidentally walked into a place that’s not open for business yet.
She tells Oliver he has quite the eclectic taste in drinking establishments.
