The Rachel Incident(18)

“Did you believe it?” he said calmly.

“No!” I exploded. “But you were my friend. I was being a good friend.”

He looked down at my sodden socks. “You’re freezing,” he said. “Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

We climbed the stairs like an old married couple, hands on the banister. James changed into pyjamas. He gave me a pair, too, knowing that all mine were hanging on a drying rack downstairs. They were soft and smelled fresh, the way everything he owned did, and the way I’ve never been able to replicate no matter what laundry trick I’ve tried since.

I got into his big grey T-shirt and the big grey trousers in my room. As always, my room looked like somewhere a night porter might sleep in-between room calls. Clothes just fell as I stood, and the bedspread was permanently rumpled. There was a chipper down the road from us, and one night while we were waiting for our fish I noticed an empty, industrial-grade mayonnaise bucket behind the counter. “Can I have that?” I said. James couldn’t believe it. I took it home and used it as a laundry basket. To this day, he refers to this period of our lives as the Mayonnaise Bucket Days.

“Are you coming in?” he called, and I padded into his warm, clean room, and got into bed with him.

“I’m sorry,” I said, once the light was out.

“No, I’m sorry,” he said. I could feel his breath on my face. “He was yours.”

“No, no,” I replied. “He was never mine.”

In the years since, I have heard about the night James was first kissed by Fred Byrne so many times that I feel like I was there, experiencing every beat of it. I feel this way about a lot of James’s life. I pass certain stations on long train journeys and I think: Sandhurst. When have I been to Sandhurst? And then I remember that I have never been there, but that James lived there for a year in the nineties.

At some point while I was arguing with Ben about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dr. Byrne made a crack to James about being under no illusion that the many signed copies of his book would sell. He asked if the shop would be out of pocket; he wondered whether he should feel guilty, times being what they were.

“Never feel bad,” James had replied. Then he named a memoir by a disgraced politician that was currently taking up half the stockroom. The politician was one of those brown-envelope guys who were apparently responsible for the downfall of the country.

“He signed every copy, so we can’t send it back. Now we just use it to stop the water coming in on wet days. It’s like a dam.”

This being a wet day, Fred Byrne asked if he could see the dam of political betrayal. At some point, James felt a hand on the small of his back. Just a graze, the warm palm of plausible deniability. He turned his face, and there he was. Big and handsome and feeling, probably, like he deserved a glamorous treat on his big night. While I was trying so desperately hard to be Bookshop Girl, James was effortlessly being that rarer, more beautiful thing: Bookshop Twink.

I’ve often asked James why he didn’t come out sooner. Shame and terror aside, he just didn’t feel like he needed to. Coming out, he reminds me, is a political decision and not a practical one. At least for gay men, anyway. He was part of a culture that had been both highly sexual and deeply underground for hundreds of years. “Coming out” only really started after AIDS. There have always been enough men who simply got it without having to be told. Fred Byrne was one of those men, but there had been others. There had been bathrooms and staff kitchens and, yes, stockrooms before.

I was amazed by this. I, Rachel Murray, had spent my short adult life disappointed that random men didn’t want to have sex with me in random places; meanwhile James was getting it constantly.

“Not constantly,” he corrected. “Not even frequently.”

At twenty-two, he had fewer than ten of these experiences to his name. But they were sexy and sustaining and you could never quite tell when the next one was going to occur. Only one thing was certain: when they did happen, you didn’t say no.

“You can always say no,” I said, thinking this was a consent thing.

“No.” He shook his head. “You’re not understanding me. I mean me, personally. James Devlin. I cannot say no.”

He looked genuinely sorry. “I know he was yours, Rachel, but let’s be honest, you were never going to actually go there and we both knew it.”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “I wasn’t.”

James was too nice to say: And he would have never gone for you anyway.

I was desperate to know more information about Fred Byrne. I thought that the two of them fucking for twenty-five minutes in the stockroom of O’Connor’s after closing meant that James had downloaded Dr. Byrne’s entire autobiography into his head.

“Does he do this a lot, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he secretly gay? Or just, you know, openly bisexual?”

“No idea.”

“Does his wife know?”

“Not a clue.”

“You didn’t talk about his wife at all?”

“Funnily enough, she never came up.”

I only learned a few facts about Dr. Byrne that first night, and they were thus: that he was, indeed, hung like a chandelier. That he wore boxers. And that, after they were done, he was not drenched with shame and distance, the way many married men were. In fact, as he had been led out of the stockroom, he had kissed James, very softly, on the back of the neck.