The Rachel Incident(2)

“New York,” I say proudly. “He’s doing really well, you know, and not just on the Instagram videos. He writes for one of the talk shows.”

He looks blankly back at me, and so I name the talk show. Another empty look.

He furrows his brow. “You were in his third-year seminar group, weren’t you?” he says. “Dr. Byrne? Victorian Lit?”

“Dr. Byrne,” I repeat, and for a second, my brain disconnects. Like a power cut. A thousand lights in an apartment building switching off at once.

“You were in UCC with me, I’m pretty sure?” he says slowly. “You were in my group with him. Fred Byrne’s class.”

“Yes,” I reply, and despite my shock at hearing the name, I’m already conscious of the PR message my face is sending. I smooth my expression, but it’s too late. I need to explain something to this stranger, but where would I start? How could you understand the year in Shandon Street unless you were there, with us, living it?

“Listen, I didn’t mean to…” he says, realising that he has somehow put a foot wrong, but with no clue where or how to retrieve it. “I just thought, you know, you were one of his favourites, or it seemed like you were, and maybe you knew.”

“Knew what?” I say. How can I subtly inform this stranger that I was not, despite popular myth around Cork at the time, having sex with Dr. Byrne?

“He’s in a coma,” he says, dropping the information so he can run quickly away from it. “He got some crazy brain illness, and now he’s in a coma.”

Being this pregnant makes me feel my body in layers—crust, mantle, core—and all of it rumbles at once when I think about Dr. Byrne. Big, strange Dr. Byrne, lover of French wine and fancy little cakes. The Portuguese tarts he brought us, still warm from the English Market. That deep yellow taste, the freckles of blackened sugar on the top.

The music pours out of the speaker to inform us that the ad break has ended, and the Toy Show comes back on, and a little boy from Wicklow rides his bike around in a circle.

I need to call James.





2


IT’S FUNNY that James and I turned out to be such great friends, considering that for the first two weeks of our friendship he thought I was someone else entirely.

I remember our first meeting like it’s a scene from a movie about someone else. It was a Thursday in November, and I was standing behind the counter at O’Connor Books. This was 2009. It was my final year at university, and there were twenty-nine days until Christmas. Our manager, Ben, was already worried that it would be a disappointing season, and was always walking around saying things about “the industry.” He talked about the book industry as if it were a dragon that was chained in the basement, and would tear us limb from limb at any moment. He spoke about that year’s spate of stocking-filler books—Dawn French and Julie Walters had competing memoirs out, I believe—as if they were charred corpses that we were flinging into the dragon’s throat to keep it sated.

“This will keep the industry going,” Ben said, with almost touching sincerity. He had more faith in the memories of character actresses than I imagine either Julie Walters or Dawn French had when writing them down. I lifted another stack out of the stockroom, the book tower starting at my waist and sitting under my chin.

James Devlin had started as a Christmas temp the Thursday before, which I had taken as time off so I could finish my end-of-year essays for college. James had spent his first shift with Sabrina. Later, he would say that he was so inundated with new faces and names on his first shift that they were a blur, and when I said that was bullshit, he threw his hands up and said straight women all looked the same to him.

The first shift with Sabrina must have been fun—puzzling, considering how little craic Sabrina was generally understood to be—because when James opened the wooden flap to the counter area, he was full of conspiracy.

“Someone here has scabies,” he said, “and they left the lotion in the jacks.”

It feels strange now, setting that first conversation down like this, because it does nothing to communicate how James was. How utterly charming this opener was to me. “Someone here has scabies.” He said it like he was Poirot investigating a country house blighted by murder. Like someone who saw the inherent prejudices of our polite society and was prepared to unveil it. The second part of the sentence was a whole different thing: “and they left the lotion in the jacks.” He was Cork county, Fermoy to be exact, which was strictly country to me. But he had grown up in the UK—all over it, I would later learn—and so his voice had a peculiar quality that was hard to place. I was born in Douglas, a suburban little village that was two miles south of the city centre, and I was still living there.

“What?” I said, the shock of the sentence shattering the glassy reserve that I had cultivated as part of my persona. The persona broadly known as Girl Who Works in Bookshop. “And what are scabies?”

“They’re like a parasite.”

“Like worms?”

“Worms are inside. Scabies are outside. Have you ever had worms before?”

“No.”

“Even when you were a kid?”

I thought about it. “Ringworm. Is that the same?”

“How did you get that?”

He was genuinely interested. It made me go digging in memories that I had not remembered before, and I felt as if I had discovered a new part of the ocean floor. “We had a cat, a stray. I think I got it from him?”