The Rachel Incident(22)

I did. I knew. It was kind of making me crazy, too. I had never been kissed the way James had been kissed in the stockroom, and now that I had seen James kissing several people, I knew he hadn’t either.

“So is he going to…? What? Come to our house? Abandon his sick wife?”

He did not come to our house that night. He came the night after.

I was in bed with James when the doorbell rang. We were watching Absolutely Fabulous, season one. The window in his room looked down onto the street. He craned his head out, then went white.

“Get out,” he said. “Sorry! But! You need to get out.”

“To my room?” I said, as if I was saying: To prison?

“Take my laptop! And my headphones!”

I had never seen him like this, so flustered. I finally twigged who was outside.

“Dr. Byrne?” I whispered. I was holding a tub of ice cream. It was starting to leak onto the sheets. “Here? Now?”

“Jesus, just go to your room, will you?”

I went, lugging a space heater with me.

I lay in bed and shivered, listening to the sounds of my professor moving around my tiny house. I heard the murmurings of polite conversation.

I kept thinking of the different incriminating objects that populated our downstairs: the weed grinder, the unfinished can of Diet Coke, the clothes horse that I would never dismantle fully, instead just taking knickers down as needed. What was even more embarrassing was the thought of him looking at my bookshelves. The books that I had arranged so proudly—the Haruki Murakamis, the Mary Wesleys, the heavily underlined Brother of the More Famous Jack—were now getting a thorough inspection from someone whose job it was to read and criticise books. What conclusions was he drawing about me down there? Did he notice that none of the books I read in my spare time were Victorian?

Dr. Byrne’s voice moved to the kitchen. I heard a clatter, two cups knocking together, and then the sound of James’s weight on the kitchen counter.

Who was I kidding?

Why on earth would Dr. Byrne come to my house in the middle of the night to criticise my bookshelves? He had probably already forgotten that I lived there, too. I still thought I was the centre of this story, the main character, just because it had started that way.

I begged myself to fall asleep before any real noise started. James had brought a couple of people back to the house in the last few weeks, but always after a night out. I was a sleepy drunk. I was out for the count before anyone even made it upstairs, and they were usually gone by the morning.

I heard them talk again, their words indistinct but their meaning very clear. Dr. Byrne had a nuzzling kind of voice on, a coaxing, flirty timbre I hadn’t ever heard him use. Bee-loud, like Yeats said. I could tell that James was trying to keep his head straight. He didn’t want to bring Dr. Byrne upstairs, not while I was still awake.

I went under the covers with James’s laptop, the headphones stuck so far into my ears that they were tickling my brain. It was only eleven o’clock. James and I didn’t usually go to sleep until at least 1 a.m., even on the nights we stayed in.

Since Jonathan, I had not slept with anyone. I know. Aren’t you disappointed? There was kissing; there were bodies pressed up against the various walls of Cork city night clubs; there were hands in my knickers. There were boys—cute ones, nice ones—who had walked me home after the club kicked out, their jackets draped around my shoulders, their hands laced through mine. But whenever they would imply that they had walked me home for sex, had understood that I wanted to have sex also, I acted all disgraced.

“You think I’m that easy, huh?” I said to them, feigning shock that a twenty-one-year-old boy standing without a jacket in February at two in the morning might have an ulterior motive. I would send them packing, triumphant, then I would go inside and feel depressed, stupid and horny.

I don’t know who I was trying to impress. I did not want a boyfriend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.

All I can say in my defence is that I was developing at a kind of crossroads of female messaging. I think about it a lot now. Puberty in the 2000s was Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and if any of that happened now we would have found a way to celebrate it, but then it was disgusting. We thought a lot about the abortions we weren’t allowed to have and the locked-up girls of the Magdalene laundries. We swore to each other, at my girls’ school, that we had never masturbated and we accused each other of doing it on the sly. On top of that: everyone knew each other. Cork was beautiful and anarchic, but you could fit it all on the head of a pin.

Maybe that’s why the Fred Byrne fantasy had been so appealing to me, as a rebound option. Something that had to be kept a secret and that guaranteed touch, stimulus, novelty.

There was a DVD still in the disc drive. More Ab Fab. I put on a jumper over my pyjamas and watched it until I fell asleep. Feeling like Edie, longing to be Patsy.

The next morning, I woke up to a breakfast roll wrapped in clingfilm. It landed on my head, the French baguette clunking off my temple. James was in the doorway.

“There you go,” he said brightly. “Thanks for being a sounder last night.”

“Is he gone?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “I walked him to the station.”