Hickey wanted to make a big splash. That’s what I heard him blathering down the phone to the various parties involved in the launch – the publicists, the estate agents, the interior architects, the landscape technicians, the colour specialists, the fabric engineers, the carpet consultants. There were no gardeners or painters and decorators left in the country any more. You could get a degree in Lego. Hickey was audible from outside the Portakabin, even over the racket of the construction work. He had the kind of booming voice that carries across rooms, across oceans, across the waking world into sleep. I don’t need to tell you this – you’ve endured his garbled deposition. ‘I want to make a big splash!’ he’d be declaring inside the prefab while I’d be procrastinating outside, one foot on the beer crate. This stance sums up my life. ‘Lookit lads, give us a big splash!’ ‘I’m after, like, a big splash!’ As I say, he was troubled with so few ideas that he had learned to pound the living daylights out of each one.
