The Rachel Incident(38)

“I did not know that.”

“What do you think that smelled like?” he asked. “We’re talking a brain that’s as big as your house.”

I heard a faint tapping sound on his end of the line. “What?” Carey said.

“Sir, you cannot take books from the library if you’ve not checked them out.”

“I’m only reading this to my girlfriend. Rachel, are you still there? The oil was called spermaceti. Because it looked like cum.”

“You need to bring the book back inside, sir.”

I howled with laughter, gasping so hard that I had to explain it to Deenie. In those moments, I didn’t care about Carey’s fundamental flakiness, or the fact that he was supposed to be in the library filling out job applications. But the fear always came back. I had long, paranoid nights of wondering whether he had died. There were days when I didn’t hear from him. But I was learning that this was part of love, or of loving him anyway.

“If he was anyone else in the world,” I said to James one night, after looking at my phone for the fiftieth time, “I’d tell him to go fuck himself.”

“But he isn’t anyone else in the world,” said James, warm sadness rising in his throat.

I laced his fingers through mine. It had been weeks since he had seen Dr. Byrne.





14


IN JULY, Ben called a meeting and said he had to cut our pay. Up until that point I was on 9.50 an hour, and James was on nine. The extra fifty cents reflected the two years of seniority I had on him, plus the fact that I had keys to the till and could do cash refunds. We had time-and-a-third on Sundays and on bank holidays. The only way he could keep our jobs, Ben explained, was to cut us all down to eight an hour, and to get rid of time-and-a-third until further notice.

He didn’t want to fire anyone, he said, because we were like family. But he urged us to look for jobs. “I can be flexible if you guys have interviews,” he said mournfully.

People took the hint. Sabrina, who I still quietly saw as a rival, handed in her notice the next day. She was moving to New York at the end of the summer. A few others started working for the big call centre out in Bishopstown. Carey, James and I were all terrified of the big call centre in Bishopstown. It made us feel like old horses, about to be turned into glue. Carey didn’t help matters. He had a phone job when he worked at Apple.

“Apple is the best of the best, fruit baskets and all that, and I still wanted to kill myself.” He grimaced. “Can’t imagine what that other place must be like.”

James and I were like those old broke ladies you meet in London, who say “of course, I could never live south of the river” and would rather starve in their pre-war Kensington flats. We had standards. We were town people. We would rather be on our feet all day, working at GAP, than tied to some desk phone.

People left O’Connor’s, which meant there were more hours for me and James, but now that our wages had been cut we were still taking home the same money. We became very bratty, and absolutely awful at our jobs. We closed progressively earlier every day, blared our own music during work hours, failed to update the bestseller charts every Thursday night. We developed a deep hatred of women who bought The Help to read on holiday.

“They should The Help us,” James sniped. “Their husbands should have The Help-ed the country by not The Help-ing themselves.”

We didn’t understand what was going on with the economy. Just that it was bad, not just regular bad, but corrupt bad. There were a few buzz phrases that we picked up from the customers, who would recycle information that they had heard on the radio. “The bloody banks,” we would say. “Bertie Ahern and his fucking brown envelopes.”

I missed Fred Byrne. I felt like he could have explained to us what was going on.

I never got to hear what went down in Dingle. James disappeared behind a cloak of shame and ironing starch spray on the matter. The only clues I was ever given were through his TV script, which was in full flow again, and even had a title: Discs.

James decided that if he was going to work more hours for the same money, he might as well get something out of it. He spent every spare minute in the Film & TV section, analysing screenplay writing formats and reading Robert McKee. He also took full advantage of the work printer, which he used to print off sheets of his script.

“I think I know what the big event is, at the end of the pilot,” he said one day, while we were cleaning up. “I think Michael leaves his boyfriend, and has to move in with Alice.”

“Michael has a boyfriend now?”

“Yes,” he answered quickly. “We never see him.”

“Like Maris? In Frasier?”

“Like Maris.”

“So the set-up for the show is that Michael and Alice have to live and work together?”

“Yes! And like, how do they negotiate work and life balance?”

“How do we?”

“They’re not like us,” he said defensively. He was nervous of me interpreting Alice’s actions as being too much of a parody. “We’re very evolved.”





INT: THE STORE



MICHAEL bursts through the doors, looking upset. ALICE is already behind the counter.


ALICE

Michael, what kind of time do you call this?!