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roguery.

—JOHN DONNE
"Elegy 3: Change"

    One night at the end of January, Síle and Kathleen were sitting in a pub in Dublin's Smithfield Market. Outside the window, gigantic poles bore flaming gas torches; light gleamed across the scoured cobbles. "The architect won some prize, didn't he?" said Kathleen, sipping her wine.
    "Did he? It looks like Colditz to me. I used to love walking down here on Saturdays to buy my veg, when it was a real market," said Síle.
    Kathleen tucked a creamy strand behind one ear. "I don't know why you bother; they're always rotten by the time I turn up to cook them."
    "They're decorative," said Síle, smiling. "And then the bloody Corpo pretty much did away with the horse fair too. I miss the surrealism of bareback lads clattering down my street. Gentrification's grand when it means people like me moving into the inner city," she added with a touch of self-mockery, "but not when it means scouring away every bit of colour or grit."
    "Oh, Stoneybatter still has too much grit for me," said Kathleen with a little shudder.
    Though they'd been together for—what was it?—almost five years now, Kathleen had never expressed an interest in moving in; she still kept her high-ceilinged Georgian flat in Ballsbridge, around the corner from her tennis club. So Síle got to have a partner and her house to herself, which most days seemed the best of both worlds, despite the rancid spinach.
    Her gizmo played "Leaving on a Jet Plane." After a brief exchange with her friend Jael, she rang off and said, "Domestic disaster, another fifteen minutes."
    "There's the real difference between the New Ireland and the Old," said Kathleen: "Mobiles let your friends tell you how late they're going to be, as if that absolves them."
    "Last night I got talking to a passenger who wanted to feature me in a piece on Ireland since the Celtic Tiger."
    "Oh yeah? He wasn't just chatting you up?"
    "She," Síle corrected her; she liked it that Kathleen still got proprietorial. "Can't you just imagine? 'Veteran crew member Síle O'Shaughnessy, chic at thirty-nine, tosses back the hip-length tresses she owes to her deceased mother's Keralan heritage,'" she ad-libbed.
    Kathleen took it up. "'People are just people, under the skin,' laughs Indo-Hibernian Síle as she wheels her smart green carry-on across Dublin Airport's busy departures level.'"
    " Bustling departures level."
    " Thronged and bustling."
    "'Her soignée blond life-mate, Kathleen Neville," Síle added, "is a senior administrator in one of the vibrant Celtic capital's top hospitals...'"
    Kathleen grinned at that. "God, we're ungrateful mockers. In our student days, didn't we sit around griping that Ireland was trapped in the nineteenth century, and then the minute the money flowed in and it jumped to the twenty-first—"
    "We've a lot to be ungrateful for, especially in Dublin," Síle protested. "You pay an arm and a leg for a fragment of sea bass, everybody's stressed and rude and booked up a month in advance..."
    "At least you're not the only brown face anymore," Kathleen pointed out.
    "That's true. In fact, compared to the women in chadors I hardly look foreign at all. Hey, did I tell you what happened to Brigid?"
    "Which Brigid?"
    "You must have met her at parties, she's ground staff. Black hair, tans easily, but County Cavan all the way back. She was on a bus the other day, got told, 'Go home, Paki bitch!'"
    Kathleen looked revolted.
    "She and I had a laugh about it. You have to laugh," Síle added after a second.
    Kathleen covered a yawn with short cream nails and gulped the last of her wine. "I have to go to bed. If Anton and Jael do ever turn up—"
    "They'll be here in a minute, sure."
    "I don't wait an hour for anyone, sweetie. Give them my best."
    "Okay," said Síle a little glumly. "I shouldn't be that late."
    "I doubt you'll wake me." Kathleen bent to kiss her.
    "We'll have a lovely breakfast."
    "Sorry, I've an early budget meeting. Coffee in bed, anyway,"