The Rachel Incident(35)

At some point, Chris’s high softened and conversation became more normal. We, in that way siblings do for outsiders, tried to make a travelling circus out of our childhood. Stories about old holiday rentals and falling out of trees. Carey was a generous audience, asking us questions, laughing at the right time. We eventually went to bed at around five, leaving my drooping brother on the couch.

“Thank you,” I said, reaching out to touch his arm. “You were so good with him.”

“He’s a nice lad.”

“You don’t think he’s a junkie, or something?”

“Nah. Brother of yours? Never.”

“I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

He sighed a strange, tired sigh. “You can do anything without me.”

He fell asleep then. Leaving me to bask in the oddness of the comment, and to wish that he had stopped at the word “anything.”

At this point in our relationship, I was so obsessed with Carey that I had to stop myself from constantly comparing him to famous movie stars. I complimented him vividly, begged him for sex, hung on his every elusive statement. And yet he would still come out with statements like these. Melancholic, nocturnal comments that implied I would outgrow him, or see him for who he truly was. He was wonderful, but he didn’t have a great deal of self-esteem. He was a dosser, after all. A born dosser.

My parents had always taught me that what mattered most in a person was direction. Which is another way of saying: it doesn’t matter if they have money now, as long as they plan to have money later. It became clear to me that Carey had no direction, but I didn’t mind. He was kind, and he was mad about me, and while he probably should have thought more about his career at the age of twenty-seven, I was quietly glad that he didn’t. It gave him more time to focus on more important things. Namely, me.

The year in Shandon Street did a lot for me, but it did this most of all. It detached me from any kind of inherited moral system. I stopped sizing others up in accordance with the values I had been taught: who was a loser, who was closeted, who was cheating on their wife. I learned the value of context, and of people. It came in handy later on, when I became a journalist.



* * *





At 8 a.m., I went downstairs. Chris’s eyes flew open right away.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay. Tea?”

“Yeah. Tea.”

He got up, all long and teenage, looking like he had extra hands and feet. He followed me into the kitchen.

“I think Dad is depressed,” he said. “Capital d.”

I had spent a lot of time worrying about our parents, in the years I spent living at home during college. As far as I was concerned it was Chris’s turn to carry the burden. My job was keeping out of their hair. It is amazing to me, now, how convinced I was that my emotional debt to the people who had raised me was paid, simply because I no longer lived with them.

“If it ever gets too much,” I said, “just come here. You’re always welcome.”

But it was sentences like this—you’re always welcome—that erected an invisible wall of formality between us. I needed Carey to come downstairs, to treat Chris like he was any old bloke on the street, to help me build a bridge between the Boy Island my brothers were on and the grubby glamour of me and James. But Carey did not wake up for another four hours, and by that point Chris was gone. He never came back to the house on Shandon Street.



* * *





Just as it was the summer of Carey, it was the summer of Deenie, too.

The Harrington-Byrnes’ home was a ground-floor flat in an old house in Sunday’s Well, on the other side of Fitzgerald’s Park, the only decent green space in Cork city. The house was Edwardian, with big bay windows you could sit in, and bookshelves and strange rugs in every room. It was the most beautiful house I’d ever been in. At that age, you’ve only ever been in family homes or student houses. The home of two artsy professionals in their thirties is a magnificent thing to behold, more enchanting than an old Russian palace.

It had three bedrooms. The one they slept in, the one Deenie worked in, and the one Dr. Byrne worked in. The living room was a tiny, cosy red room with a small TV and a green squashy couch. The kitchen was huge and full of sun.

I found it hard not to hate Deenie, for the first hour I was in her house. She seemed to take it all for granted. She opened the door wearing a pinafore dress with a black roll neck underneath, and her headband was the same colour as the dress. I knew that she dressed like something between a primary school teacher and Daphne from Scooby-Doo, but the fact that she looked like this in her own home was too much. She led me through to the kitchen, shoeless in black tights. I felt enormous next to her.

“How are you?” she asked, as if I had just popped by socially. “Are you still with that lovely-looking boy I saw you with that day?”

I don’t know whether she really thought Carey was lovely looking. Not everybody did. James used to say a lot of sly “eye of the beholder” stuff whenever his physical appearance came up. What I did see, however, was that she wanted to check if I had a boyfriend.

“Carey,” I confirmed. “Yeah, he’s back on the scene.”

“Was he off the scene?”

“Oh, yeah.” I shrugged. “We fell out of contact for a bit, there.”