The Rachel Incident(28)

The routine, according to James, was this: Dr. Byrne would come through the door at lunchtime with treats and poetry. They’d spend a while on the couch (“round one,” James called it, “the appetiser”) then eventually move up to the bedroom (“mains”). After which, Dr. Byrne would ask terse, loaded questions about our nights out, what we did together, what I thought of him, where the gays were. He found it all very hard. Not just the thought of James with other people, but the thought of gay clubs and queer nights going on without him. He would get mad at James, for some answer that didn’t meet his needs, and then make James figure out what it was that had annoyed him. He often left under a cloud of silence, and it drove James crazy.

Fuck this guy, I thought. Who the fuck does he think he is?

I put my key in the door with no regard for whether they were on main course or appetiser. We had a little corridor before the living room, so they had time to put their trousers on or cover their dicks with a blanket.

Still, I was relieved to find everyone dressed.

“Hello,” I barked, looking at Fred Byrne. “I want to speak with you.”

“Rachel,” he said. He looked sticky, like he’d just been for a run.

James was scowling at me. “Rache, what are you doing home?”

“You can’t just threaten me!” I started crying. “You can’t ignore me in class and use my house as a fuckpad and then treat me like I’m some normal student.”

It was the first time I had really spoken to Dr. Byrne in months. Since the book launch, probably.

“Okay,” James said, getting up. He was sweating, too. “I’ll put the kettle on, will I?”

Fred Byrne looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him. I sat down heavily into the armchair that faced the couch.

“It’s not fair,” I said, hiccuping through my tears. “I’ve cut you a lot of slack; it’s the least you can do to cut me some.”

He coughed and sat up. “Right,” he said. “Right. Is this about your essay?”

I nodded, pushing the heel of my hand under my wet eyes. “It’s not that I want special treatment,” I said, though I did. “It’s just, I think there should be a bit of grace, you know, given the extenuating circumstances.”

At “extenuating circumstances,” I started to cry harder, because I was thinking about not just these circumstances, but all of them. I was in love for the first time properly, and he didn’t want me, and it was eating my organs.

“If,” Fred Byrne began, “there’s been a death in the family, or something, you know what I mean, we can say there was a death. I can waive the—”

“I just want you to acknowledge what’s happened,” I continued, and I was talking not so much to him but to Carey. James and I spoke so much about these two men, compared their traits and so on, that one was kind of a facsimile for the other. “Everything’s different now. I’m different now.”

Fred Byrne looked over the armchair to James, who was coming back from the kitchen with the mugs of tea.

“You’ve not been very nice to Rachel, Fred,” James said, like he was mediating a divorce. “I don’t know if you’ve behaved sensitively.”

Here is something that I love about James: he lets people have their own connections. He will never try to convince you to feel differently about someone. He will not be the delivery boy for baggage from one person’s relationship to another. However, when it comes down to fights between friends and lovers, he will put the friend first.

“Right,” Dr. Byrne said again. “No, you’re quite right, James. I thought I had compartmentalised something that I don’t think can be compartmentalised. I’m sorry, Rachel.”

His voice was soft and masculine, and James’s eyes filled with affection at the humility he was showing. Him, a man of almost forty, apologising to a twenty-one-year-old girl. He squeezed Dr. Byrne’s leg, and Dr. Byrne patted his hand.

A new flood broke over me, seeing the two of them so clearly in love. They had everything in the way of their relationship: orientation, marriage, age. But they were making it work. They had found a space for it to thrive in. I, meanwhile, couldn’t make love work with someone single and straight, purely because he could not be bothered with me.

James sat at the armchair, rubbing my back. “I’m sorry, Rache.”

“Is she okay?”

“Boyfriend,” James said.

“He’s not my—”

“He was here three nights a week. He met all your friends. I call that a boyfriend.”

“What happened to him?” Dr. Byrne sounded genuinely interested.

“Invisible Man,” James answered.

Dr. Byrne tutted with his tongue. “Rough,” he said.

He leaned forward and put his big hand on my knee. “Right, Rachel, let’s sort this out, will we?”

He said he would fix things. He would put the word out in the faculty that I was very ill and had shown him a doctor’s note. Something serious but not deadly or visible. (“Heart murmur?” James suggested.) That would get me off the hook for my essays for a while, without any penalties being applied. It would give me a clearer runway to focus on my exams, which started next week.

He said all this gently, not like he was patronising me, but like he cared.