The Rachel Incident(4)

Whether the patriarchy is or isn’t a factor in modern Ireland is beyond the point, the opening sentence read. The question is: why has the patriarchy been so unfairly derided as an organisational principle?

The essay shocked me. I was being completely sincere. There I was, nineteen years old, the same girl who had used all her birthday money just two years prior to procure the morning-after pill in a country that made it purposefully awkward and uncomfortable to obtain, fighting on the patriarchy’s behalf. I read the whole thing and deleted it. I then walked around London for two days, paranoid. I was paranoid the way only people of my generation are paranoid, that I was about to be publicly derided by an unseen, online mass for ideological crimes committed as a teenager. I had thought I was always a feminist. Surely I was born knowing that things were unfair. But no, that all came later, in my mid-twenties, when I lived in London.

But this was the me that Jonathan knew, and that Jonathan and I had created together. We would sit in pubs and invent opinions, mostly by taking a common consensus and then reversing it. Radical thought to us was hating the film Anchorman.

James left me outside Sober Lane. I asked if he wanted to come in and meet my boyfriend. He said no.

“I wouldn’t want to make trouble for you,” he said. “I wouldn’t want him to think I was stealing his girlfriend.”

I laughed, because James was so obviously gay, and the idea of him stealing me from anyone was ridiculous. But the laugh was too long, and loud, and the way James looked at me made my face burn. He was hurt and he was closeted, and he thought that his closet was a good one. I stopped laughing.

“He’s not the jealous type,” I said quickly, and a little sunshine came back into James’s face.

I said goodbye to my new friend and disappeared inside the dark bar where Jonathan was waiting, kicking myself for being rude.

But James did steal me from Jonathan. Over the course of just a month, I would be colonised by James on a molecular level, and my personality would mould around his wherever there was space to do so. The official line is that Jonathan dumped me. The truth is that I left him for another man.

Here’s a story that James loves telling people: Rachel and I have had one fight, and it happened before we even really knew each other.

And I usually say: We had our one fight, and James still thought I was a girl called Sabrina.

And then he says: So really, my first fight was with Sabrina.

We’ve had more fights than that, of course. Two. We do not discuss them.

It had been a couple of weeks since James had walked me to Sober Lane, and he hadn’t shown the same interest in me again. I started to resent him. It wasn’t fair to shine his light so harshly and then to skip away, leaving me dark and chilly with my own dull crowd. Most of my closest friends had gone away to college. The high achievers to Trinity, the aspiring teachers to Mary I. The people I was left with were either girls who I had been tangentially friendly with in secondary school or Jonathan’s friends.

James was the first person I had met in years that I badly wanted to be friends with, but it seemed he did not want to be friends with me. On top of that, he had charmed everyone in management so much that he always got first pick of the best shifts.

I didn’t know how to be mad at people yet, so I just aped the behaviour I had seen at home: speaking to someone in tight, terse little sentences until they went insane. It was how my mother fought with me, how I fought with my younger brothers, and how they fought with their friends. It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged. People were always wronging us. That the most recent economic crisis had devastated my parents’ business and depleted their investments was yet more proof that the world was out to get the Murrays. We were responding, at that time, by giving the world the cold shoulder.

After a while, James sensed my new iciness and floated towards it. He kept on trying to engage me, making jokes about my ancestral bank-ishness. I was mostly ignoring him. The shifts thing really bothered me. I had come to the conclusion that James was a selfish, shallow person—a sociopath, maybe—and that I was going to keep clear of him until he realised his mistake and stopped hogging the good time slots.

After I had ignored a few of his attempts to engage me, he came behind the counter to sort out some orders. And he poked me with a pen at the back of the knee. He hit, as he would continue to do, a nerve. My knee buckled and I went down a little. I didn’t fall, but the disturbance in gravity made me queasy and annoyed. I told him to stop. He laughed and slipped into serving a customer as if nothing had happened.

An hour later, he did it again. The same thing happened. The buckling, the nausea, the fury. I yelled at him to stop, and he made a big show of cowering: the tiny, big-eyed Jerry to my huge, hulking Tom. He had already sniffed out that I was insecure about my size—5'11, which was close enough to six foot that I often skipped the formality and told people that I was six foot to cut any argument about it off at the pass.

There was no one around except our manager, Ben, and the minute I turned around James did it again, and the motion was so unexpected that I went down fully. Ben laughed so hard he forgot about the dragon. I was so angry that I temporarily mislaid my suburban manners and pushed James, using the full force of my body, into the wall behind the counter. The shelf above, loaded with pre-orders put aside for loyal customers, shook and the pile toppled. The hardback thoughts of Dawn French hit James and opened the skin above his eye. He started to bleed, his flat-ironed fringe clotting around the wound like gauze.