Breen knew what the business wanted, network or studio. For one thing, poverty in Ireland didn’t sell anymore. As a matter of fact, Ireland didn’t sell anymore. Anyway, as Fanning well knew, the whole business was full to the gills with talent and writers. A few of the younger ones were smart enough to latch on the foreigner thing, like that Mira’s Story, about the divorcee who emigrates to the wilds of Galway. Light, merry, conflict-of-cultures stuff. Throw in a woman’s empowerment, craggy Irish faces, bleak and rain-swollen bog, and the search-for-home stuff. It wasn’t hard, when you thought about it.

Fanning strolled to the window display of a new decorative ironworks. A slideshow was projected onto a piece of glass just behind the window of the shop. He’d seen the stuff before, but it was still eye-catching. Pictures and movies seemed to float in the air, like holograms. Celtic designs twirled and shrank, and were morphed into door-knockers. Old photos of Victorian gaslamps dissolved into replicas in front of homes that looked Dublin-ish, or at least the U.K. A hotel balcony from a photo of Joycean Dublin gave way to an exact copy, mounted on a French window of a home with Killiney Bay in the background: “For your Juliet balcony.”

The show began to loop yet again. Just before Fanning turned away, a logo caught his eye, and he stared more intently as it appeared and grew. It was the Magritte all right, Memory: the bloodied head, the stone. Sure enough, he saw it was Mick Lally’s outfit — doublin. com. Talk about coincidence.

He hadn’t spoken to Lally in five years. Mick Lally, the great Bohemian, slagger and friend all through university and beyond, had gone into multimedia. Every time that Fanning had seen mention of Lally’s company, he was reminded of their endless arguments about Fassbinder or Antonioni and Foucault — everything and anything, for God’s sake. It was Lally who had been his partner in the first screenplay he’d ever done, made in pubs and flats, often stoned and more often half-drunk too.