The Rachel Incident(12)

The rest of the shift passed quietly. Now that we were living together, James and I loved arranging our shifts so that we were both closing. We pulled down the shutters ten minutes early and blasted our own music through the speakers as we tidied up.

I, however, was taking longer than usual.

“What are you at?” He put his head on my shoulder, gazing at the monitor. “Who’s Dr. Frederick Byrne?”

“My college professor. The one who came in earlier? And this is his book.”

“And who’s Moira Finchley?”

“She’s an ex-customer. She died a few years ago,” I said. “She’s also one of the people who’s ordering his book in.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I stupidly told him we pre-ordered a load of his books. We haven’t ordered any, but if Ben thinks that customers are ordering it in, he’ll order some.”

“Okay.” James began to nod. “I have a question.”

“Why am I doing this?”

“Yes.”

“Because…I don’t want him to be disappointed. He’s so excited about his book.”

James practically leapt into the air.

“You dirty bitch!”

“Shut up.”

“So, what? You’re charging some old dead lady for a book she won’t read because you’re horny?”

“No! It won’t charge her. No one will pick up the book, and then I’ll just put it out on the shelf.”

“Who else are you going to make order it in? Who else is dead?”

“The rest I’m just inventing,” I said bashfully. “I’m making new customer profiles on the system.”

He looked shocked at what he perceived to be the first real insane behaviour from me.

“Jonathan broke up with me today,” I said, hoping that he would interpret my crazy behaviour as a kind of noble grief.

“He broke up with you?” he replied, in disgust. “I thought, the other way around, maybe.”

“Why! I loved him!”

“Rachel. Come on.”

“We went out for two years.”

“Well, I’m glad he’s gone.”

The fact that he could talk to me like this, after a month and a half of knowing each other, still shocks me. There are people in my life I’ve known years who I would hesitate to tell their clothes tags are showing.

“Well, Ben will know something is up if you don’t change the dates on the orders,” he said, pointing to the screen. “They’ll all say January fourteenth.”

So we stayed an hour after closing time to invent back-dated pre-orders for Dr. Fred Byrne’s book on Victorian Ireland during the famine. I realised that I had never been in love with Jonathan, after all. I had known the love from my parents and the strange affection of a college relationship that was somehow both stale and naive. But me and James and the pre-orders: that was love.



* * *





It worked better than we could have possibly expected. Late the following week, Ben was gazing into his A4 printouts and asked, “What the fuck is The Kensington Diet? Is that like Atkins?”

I may have been young, but I had been working in a bookshop for almost three years. Even then, I had serious questions for Dr. Byrne’s publisher, who had the gall to release a book with the word “diet” in the title so close to the New Year.

James picked up the baton straight away.

“Christ, Ben, did you not hear them on about it on Fergal O’Riordan’s show? They had that brilliant doctor on.” James was clicking his fingers, as if trying to recall. “Rachel, you know the guy, don’t you?”

“Dr. Byrne,” I said, trying to sound non-committal.

Ben looked at his form again. “There’s a lot of buzz around him, I gather.”

“He teaches up in UCC,” I said. And then, in a fit of genius, “We could ask him to do a signing here.”

“Or a launch,” James chimed in. “A Cork launch, on his whistle-stop tour of the country.”

“It would be very good for the shop,” I said, nodding at Ben, like he had suggested it.

Ben tapped a pen on his teeth. “The industry is in a bad way,” he said. On top of the recession, there was also a lot of anxiety around the Kindle and what it would do to bookshops. Getting an author in might make a case for the shop’s own relevancy.

The seminars I had with Dr. Byrne were every Wednesday morning and ninety minutes long. They were intensive. He burned through material. Nothing he was teaching us was particularly mind-bending. It was a lot of dead Irish people through the eyes of dead English people then reinterpreted through Irish scholars who, like Fred Byrne himself, needed to write a book about something.

Every week, fifteen badly groomed children sat around in near silence while their odour suggested they were being pickled from within. I was no better. I had given up on becoming enlightened and was just getting drunk all the time. James and I were going out three nights a week, usually with the other Christmas temps from the shop, sometimes just by ourselves.

Dr. Byrne didn’t mind us being hung-over, but he wanted those hangovers to fuel us, not mute us. I think Dr. Byrne liked the idea of a crowd of stinking drunks arguing about Trollope. What he couldn’t abide was silence. On this particular day, he was raging at a Kerry boy called Elliot about The Playboy of the Western World.