The Rachel Incident(19)
9
IN IRELAND, spring begins on 1 February. It’s a pagan thing, I think, because it’s certainly not a climate thing. Most Februarys are overcast, frigid, and with only a few green shoots visible through the gates of Bishop Lucey Park.
That spring was different, though, because James and I were the hopeful green shoots, pushing up through frozen earth with brand-new velocity.
James was now officially out to one person and that one person was me. It opened up things. There is a photograph of us on a Facebook page somewhere, attending a burlesque night at a gay club. Me, in a red corset and black jeans, breasts reaching towards my ears, white fat slipping over my waistband. Him, dressed as the emcee from Cabaret, if the emcee from Cabaret had to dress for winter. If you were to look at the photo now you would say he was dressed as a mime, the white make-up is that thick.
When I started doing his face, he was sitting on a hard wooden dining chair in our living room, and we were each drinking from our own bottle of a four-euro wine called Marqués de Léon. It was available only at the big Tesco, and when it was warm it tasted like piss and when it was very cold it tasted like nothing. We drank it with a lot of ice and very quickly.
I swept rouge on his face, drew black lines over his eyes. I filled in his top lip with liquid liner.
He looked in the mirror of my compact. “Rachel, no,” he said. “I still look like me.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do. I’m not a make-up artist.”
“More white,” he said. “Like a mask.”
I started painting it on with a pastry brush that came with the house and smelled like sunflower oil.
That night we danced to “Coin-Operated Boy” by The Dresden Dolls, and “Babooshka” by Kate Bush, and yes, songs from Cabaret itself. The burlesque dancer had a Hula Hoop and for a few minutes it was on fire. At some point, James peeled off, his sweat dissolving the clown paint, and ended up glued to some boy in the corner. I don’t know what I did. I don’t remember ever being bored, or lonely, or like I was an accessory to his sex life. I was starting to come out of myself, too.
Hell: I was wearing a corset in public.
Most often, I was in the smoking area with another young gay guy, or a group of them. I began to realise that everything I had ever really loved as a child—Death Becomes Her; the concept of Bette Midler; pulling the neck of your T-shirt around your shoulder and then posing in the mirror, slightly kissing yourself—was all very gay. I had a camp mindset. I picked over certain quotes, certain women, certain micro-moments in pop culture. My quote-reeling had been dimly appreciated by Dr. Byrne (“what is your body now if not a famine road?”) but was embraced enthusiastically by the random men I met out. “He doesn’t look any bigger than the Mauretania,” I said once, to a boy who was pointing out a huge man on the dance floor that he wanted to sleep with. He grabbed my hand and laughed, and we reeled off Titanic quotes for the best part of an hour. “Best part” in that it was the majority of the hour, and best part in that it really was the best part. For me, anyway.
I look at the photo from the burlesque night a lot. I attach a lot of memory to it, memories from other nights out that we attended together but do not have photos of. Themed queer-adjacent nights with specific costume prompts, gay bars that paid for guest appearances by the Vengaboys, parties held by the drama students at UCC in order to fundraise the props for their next play. Every now and then I would see a club photographer propelling around James and whatever boy he was kissing, and I would tap him on the shoulder and politely ask him to fuck off.
“Just come out,” I said, on the walk home once. We were eating chips, cheese and garlic sauce. “Why are you even bothered? Most people assume you’re gay, anyway.”
“My mam,” he said. “She’d find it very upsetting. I think she worries about me a lot as it is.”
This felt like a lame answer to me. His mother, after all, had married a drug addict, a criminal. She knew about the world. “Have you considered that she might already know?”
He scowled at me. “I just don’t want things to change.”
“But they are changing,” I insisted. “They have changed.”
We didn’t just go to queer nights. We still went out with our friends from the bookshop, who had somehow managed to expand and morph into our friends from the music shop, friends from Topshop, friends from HMV. Without realising, I collected the names of roughly a hundred people aged between eighteen and thirty who were working part-time jobs in Cork city, each of them with boyfriends or girlfriends in bands, on campus radio or working as bookers at live music venues.
There were a lot of gig tickets going around. UK-based bands who had hung Cork dates on the end of their tour like stray socks on a clothes line. Glasvegas, Dirty Pretty Things, The Pigeon Detectives. And others, ones who you wouldn’t even remember. Bands that are kind of a punchline now, a shorthand for short-lived fame and flat-ironed fringes. But they occupied a delicious role for us, a magical sweet space between celebrity and accessibility. Despite the fact that I have lived in London for almost ten years, which is supposedly the land of the desperately clutching wannabe, I have never known fame clutching like the kind I knew in Cork in 2010. I’m sure all regional cities are the same. You’re so far away from it all that even a fragment of notoriety can make you high.