‘Have you sat in your garden yet?’ Jack asked.

No. ‘Yes.’

‘It’s so peaceful out there, you’d hardly know you were in a city,’ he nodded through the doorway.

‘I know.’ Tell me about it!

‘Here goes.’ He eyed the boiler. ‘This looks like a straightforward enough job, but you never know.’

Then he rolled up his sleeves, revealing the sinews of his lovely wrists, and set to work. Lisa sat in the kitchen, hugging one knee, enjoying, too much, the presence of an attractive man in her home. No matter what, she decided, they were not going to talk about the advertising situation. There would be no downers, this was a tailor-made opportunity to flirt.

‘So tell me all about you,’ she ordered with confident coquetry, to his back.

‘What do you want to know?’ He was none too civil as he banged and bashed metal against metal. Then he swung around, and exclaimed in mild outrage, ‘Lisa, come on! That kind of question would wipe anyone’s mind blank.’

‘Well, tell me how you’ve ended up being Managing Director of a commercial television station, a radio station and several successful magazines at the age of thirty-two.’ OK, so she was talking it up a bit, but she was in the business of flattery.

‘It’s a job,’ Jack said shortly, as if he suspected she was taking the piss. ‘I was sacked from my previous job, I had a living to earn.’

Sacked? She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Why were you sacked?’

‘I proposed a radical notion, which involved paying staff what they were worth and giving them a voice in management. In return they were going to make concessions on demarcation and overtime, but the board decided that I was too much of a leftie and out I went.’

‘A leftie?’ Lefties weren’t much fun, were they? They made you go on marches and they had awful cars. Trabants. Ladas. That’s if they had a car at all. But Jack had a Beemer.

‘In my younger, more idealistic days,’ he hit the pipe an almighty belt with a spanner, ‘I might have been called a socialist.’

‘But you’re not one now?’ Lisa said, in alarm.

‘No,’ he chuckled grimly. ‘Don’t sound so worried. I threw in the towel when I saw that most workers are happy doing the lotto or buying shares in privatized state bodies, and their economic well-being is something they’re happy to take care of themselves.’

‘Too right. All you have to do is work hard enough,’ Lisa soothed. That, after all, was what she had done. She was working-class – well, she would have been if her dad had actually worked – and it hadn’t been to her disadvantage.

Jack turned and gave her a complex smile. Wry and sad.

‘Give me a quick career history,’ Lisa asked.

Jack turned back to the boiler and reeled off with no obvious enthusiasm, ‘Left college with an MA in communications, did the obligatory Irish stint abroad – two years in a New York media group, four in San Francisco at a cable network – returned to Ireland just in time for the economic miracle, worked for a newspaper group, got the boot like I said. Then two years ago old Calvin Carter gives me the gig here.’

‘And how do you unwind?’ Lisa enjoyed the sight of Jack’s shirt stretched tight across his back muscles as he toiled. ‘Like,’ she gave a mischievous smile, which was unfortunately wasted on him, ‘do you play golf?’

‘That’s the last time I come to fix your boiler,’ he muttered.

‘I didn’t think you were a golf man, somehow,’ she giggled. ‘So what do you do?’

‘Lisa, don’t ask me these questions. I know –’ Over his shoulder he flashed a fleeting half-smile, ‘I fix boilers. I call around to random houses unannounced and insist on fixing people’s boilers. Sometimes when they’re not even broken.’ He fell silent to concentrate on methodically winding a screw, then said, ‘What else? I hang out with my girlfriend. I go sailing.’

‘In a yacht?’ Lisa asked eagerly, ignoring the mention of Mai.

‘No, not really. Not at all, actually. It’s a one-man craft, not much bigger than a surfboard. Ah, let’s see. I play Sim City half the night, does that count?’

‘What’s that – a computer game? ‘Course it counts. Anything else?’

‘I d’know. We go to the pub, or out to eat, and we talk a lot about going to the movies but – and I really don’t understand this – we never end up going.’

Lisa wasn’t pleased with the ‘we’ in that sentence. She presumed it referred to Jack and Mai and she didn’t know what they did instead of going to the movies, but she could take a guess.

‘I see some friends from my college days, I watch a fair bit of telly but hey, just doing my job!’

‘Oh yeah,’ Lisa scorned playfully. Then she realized something. ‘That’s what you enjoy most, isn’t it? Working on the television station?’

‘Ye–’ Then she watched Jack’s back tense up as he remembered who he was talking to. ‘Er, I enjoy the magazines too. You wouldn’t believe the amount of work Channel 9 generates for me…’

‘So you could have done without Colleen and all that extra work?’ Lisa teased.

Jack tactfully deflected her question. ‘Thing is, Channel 9 is currently very gratifying. After two years of real graft and struggle, finally the staff are well paid, corporate sponsors are pleased and consumers are getting intelligent programming. And we’re nearly on the point of attracting investment so we can commission even more quality programming.’

‘Top,’ Lisa said vaguely. She’d heard enough about Channel 9 for now. ‘What else do you do?’

‘Aahhhhh,’ Jack thought out loud. ‘I see my parents most weekends. Just pop in for an hour here and there. They’re not as young as they used to be so time with them seems that much more precious. You know what I mean?’

With desperate haste Lisa changed the subject. ‘Do you ever go to restaurant openings? Or first nights? That kind of thing?’

‘Nope,’ Jack said shortly. ‘I hate them. I was born without the shmooze gene, although I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that.’

‘How so?’ Lisa dissembled.

‘Ah, come on, I’m a narky bollocks.’