The Rachel Incident(30)

“That’s not the same.”

“I just think it’s mental that we’re drinking C?tes du Rh?ne and eating fish fingers.”

I was too busy with exams to look for extra work, but James found a job at a cloakroom. It made him miserable: it was deeply lonely, and he was always the last to go home. He wasn’t even invited out with the bar people afterwards, not that he could afford to go.

I was home one day, studying on the couch, when he came down from his room with his laptop.

“I’ve had enough of this!” he said. “Enough!”

“Enough of what?”

“Waiting for my life to start. We’re going to write a TV show.”

He opened his Microsoft Word to show that he had already started writing one. There were two characters talking, one called “Alice,” one called “Michael.”

“It’s about two hot twenty-somethings in a struggling bookshop,” he said. “He’s gay and she’s the only one who knows.”

I looked at him sideways. “Are you serious?”

“As cancer.”

He had switched the font to Courier New, the typewriter lettering, and had centre-aligned all the text to make it look like a real script. He had written two pages.





INT. BOOKSHOP. DAY.



MICHAEL, 22 and metrosexual, stands behind the counter of a bookshop. He talks to ALICE, 20, beautiful and studious.



“Metrosexual!” I squealed. “Beautiful! Studious!”

“Just read it,” he said, sounding defensive.

We read it out loud, together. I don’t remember much of what was in the script, but it was funny and warm, or maybe it just felt that way because I was with my best friend and we were playing.

“What happens next?” I said.

“Well, they say that you need a big event towards the end of the pilot, something that sets up the idea for the whole show,” he said, wrinkling his brow. I was amazed. James and I both worked part-time hours at O’Connor’s, but it never occurred to me that while I was going to college every day, he was learning about screenwriting.

“Where have you learned all this?” I asked. “Since when do you say words like ‘pilot’?”

“The DVD extras on Frasier,” he said. “The commentary.”

James was often shy about his lack of education. He had got a Leaving Cert, barely, and went straight into retail and service jobs after school.

“You could make it about you and Fred,” I said. I was trying to call Dr. Byrne “Fred” around him, to show that I was okay with it, even though he was always Dr. Byrne or Fred Byrne to me.

“No, no.” He shook his head. “I want it to be a comedy. Not, like, a drama.”

“But sitcoms need to have some drama, don’t they?”

“Drama like Alice putting books under a dead person’s name to shift copies of her crush’s book. That’s how dramatic I’m willing to get.”

I laughed. “But why would anyone care about that?”

He rolled his eyes at me to show that I didn’t understand comedy. I looked at the top of the page and saw the title of the show. Michael & Alice.

“I think people are going to think of Will & Grace straight away,” I said. “Especially if it’s a man and a woman’s name, separated by an ampersand.”

“They don’t own the ampersand,” he said. We had a very complicated relationship with Will & Grace. People brought it up with us a lot, wherein James would remind them that he wasn’t gay. Though the longer the relationship with Fred Byrne was going on, the less he jumped to defend himself.

We got high and paranoid that our co-workers would sue once we were famous, so we changed the setting to a movie rental place. Money being tight, we stopped going out three or four nights a week. We were now down to a paltry—and in our eyes, borderline antisocial—two. We made up for it with trips to the legal high head shop, where a bag of synthetic cannabis cost a tenner and lasted us a week. My essays had finally been handed in, and college was over. We had endless hours to smoke the dense, giggly herbal blend.

Dr. Byrne, who was supposed to be working on his next book, sometimes dropped by to declare his disapproval. He was less nervous of me now, and treated me like a younger sister.

“I wish you two would smoke ordinary weed,” he said.

“What are we? Millionaires?” I said, then James shushed me, eager that Dr. Byrne wouldn’t feel sorry for him.

“What’s your book about, Fred?” I could only call him Fred when I was high.

“The Big House novel in early-twentieth-century Irish fiction,” he said. “Gothic tensions, figurative ghosts versus the real ghosts from the…”

“Famine?” I said, and then spluttered with laughter.

Dr. Byrne, to his enduring credit, saw the funny side. “I know, I know, me and the famine.”

“What is it?” I giggled. “What is it with you and the famine?”

He sighed, and did something extraordinary. He took the horrible joint of synthetic weed from James, and inhaled. “Honestly, Rachel? I think it started because I wanted to be thin.”

James sat up, affection for Fred Byrne suddenly washing over him, clearing the hazy high. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, babe.”