The Rachel Incident(3)
“Funny how all pets were strays in the nineties,” he said. He was signing in to the till, punching in a six-digit number. “You just got your dog from the middle of the road, back then.”
I had a certain expectation, when I started at the bookshop, about how conversations should go inside one of them. Conversations would be about books, I thought. But we rarely talked about reading. The reading taste among staff was extremely diverse, but rather than stimulating lively debate about literature, this meant we just sat quietly with our books in the staffroom. Ben liked his Joyce. Sabrina loved Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams and all those other sorts of writers where you were never sure whether they were joking or not. There were other members of staff who were variously fascinated by pop psychology, Freakonomics, local history, and the Simon’s Cat franchise, but I could never find common ground with them either.
I was usually reading…well, novels. Mainly older ones. Books that were rancidly popular in the mid-twentieth century and therefore approved by the cultural establishment, but were forgotten enough by my contemporaries to make me feel special. I liked dead women talking glibly about society. I liked long paragraphs about rationing and sexual awakenings in France. Until I started working at the bookshop I had considered myself quite well read.
I was eager to not ask James about reading, because I had lost too many prospective friendships to this line of questioning already. I wanted to ask him something real, or what my twenty-year-old brain considered to be real. I wanted something as good as his scabies thing.
There was no time however, because at that moment a dozen customers arrived, and we rang up their purchases side by side. I had done this hundreds of times by now: standing next to a colleague for hours, working the till, making occasional small talk between customers. I had always felt entirely on my own planet. It sounds silly to say this, or like I’m assigning huge emotions to this one late shift long after the fact, but this felt different. It felt warm, like the occasional silences on road trips with dear friends.
When our shift was over, he asked me what I was doing next.
“I’m meeting my boyfriend,” I said, instantly worried that by going to meet Jonathan I was missing out on my one opportunity to be James’s best friend.
James was already lighting up a cigarette. “Which way you walking?”
“Sober Lane.”
“Ah!” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he had burned himself or had come to some kind of epiphany. “I’m Travers Street. I’ll walk you there.”
We walked that way together, and despite my longing to crack open James and live in him, it seemed like there was no time for me to ask questions. James didn’t really want to ask questions either. He wanted to make assumptions.
“All right, now let’s see. Your father works in the bank.”
I smiled. “Wrong.”
“Grandfather in the bank, then. There’s a bank-ish hue.”
“My grandfather was in the bank, yes. But my dad’s a dentist.”
“See, that’s it. I knew it.”
“You didn’t know anything!”
He waved his hand over me, as if casting a spell. “Ah, you know, I got the sort of genteel middle-class thing down. Old money, old Cork. Now your mother is one of two things, haven’t decided which: fabulous thin drunk or a total wagon. Tight little mouth, like a canary’s minge. Am I warm?”
I laughed, wondering how he could possibly know this. “Warm-ish. The second one,” I said, and then felt mean. My mum worked in the practice, too, and because my father’s procedures were mostly cosmetic, they had both suffered from the shifting priorities of a country with less to smile about.
“And the boyfriend…the boyfriend, the boyfriend, the boyfriend. I’m split between two again.”
He had moved his hands so much while talking that the cherry had fallen off his cigarette, and he paused to relight it.
“Together since secondary school, sweethearts of your year, everyone thinks you’re going to get married, you’re not so sure, though. Plans to go to Thailand together.” He exhaled. “Or older man, doing a Ph.D. or something, slightly inappropriate age gap, a bit of a dry balls, your friends hate him but they haven’t told you.”
I don’t know why he thought it was okay for him to insult everyone I knew, both real and imagined. But he was comfortable that he would get away with it, and so I let him get away with it.
“Neither,” I said, defensive of Jonathan. “He’s neither of those things. He’s not categorisable.”
“But which one is he closer to?”
I thought about it. “I mean, the first one, I suppose.” Which I only said because it was the less bad one.
I was in love, or so I thought. My trouble was getting people to take it seriously. I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.
Jonathan and I were both Cork kids who had grown up in the suburbs surrounding the city and felt resentful that we went to university there. There were six good pubs and three good clubs, as far as we were concerned, and we put on a good show of being jaded about Cork city while simultaneously making no effort to visit anything or do anything that we hadn’t done when we were seventeen.
As a couple, we were serious to the point of dullness, and curiously conservative in our outlook. Not long ago, I had to venture into an old email account to change my password for something or other. While I was there I found one of my sociology essays from this time, the Jonathan period, emailed to my tutor. The essay was called “The Patriarchy in Modern Ireland.” I clicked into it, eager to see what my young self had to say about the subjugation of women in Ireland.