The Rachel Incident(45)
Sometime around ten we would go looking for paint stripper.
Someone would find a fiver from somewhere, a fiver that had not yet been counted as part of our savings because it was loose in a coat pocket. Another trip to the offy. At midnight, we would decide to go pint-stealing at The Bróg, an easy job because everyone had to leave their drinks on the cigarette machine if they wanted to go out for a smoke. Eventually we would get paranoid that the bouncer was onto us and bought some vodka lemonades. Doubles, to save money. We would wake up the next morning to find that we had somehow spent forty euro.
It was on one of these nights, in the middle of the Gaynaissance, that I ran into my own boyfriend.
We were on the dance floor when I felt Carey’s arms around my waist, his rough blond stubble on my neck. He was out with his housemates, who were used to seeing me in his boxer shorts and vest, slobbing around their house and eating their cereal.
“What are you doing out, Rache?” he said. “I thought you were broke?”
“Oh, I am,” I said, wrapping myself around him. I was wearing a small dress, and I wanted his housemates to see that I was not a cretin, but a very sexy girl. “I’m saving money.”
“How?”
“Oh, the gentlemen callers, the gentlemen callers,” I replied. James and I had these characters we sometimes played, two Southern belles who were desperate for money but equally desperate for glamour. “We always rely on the kindness of strangers.”
I picked up my stolen pint of Bulmers and winked at him, which must have looked more like an asymmetrical blink, somewhere between Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois. Carey turned away from me and started talking to his friends.
I wavered on my feet, waiting to be looked at again. I couldn’t see James anywhere, and Carey’s back was to me. Why was his back to me?
I tapped him on the shoulder, my finger rigid. “I’ll allow you to buy me a drink,” I said, which was supposed to be funny, but only sounded petulant and spoiled.
Carey made an odd face, like he was moving his teeth around in a new order. “I don’t know, Rachel,” he said, and then went back to talking to his friends. I was mortified. The friends looked awkward and sorry for me. Was this it, then? Was Carey done with me again?
I did the only thing available to a woman in a situation like this. I stormed out.
The cold air hit me immediately, and I realised that the further and faster I walked from The Bróg, the less chance there was of Carey having a sudden change of heart and rushing out to find me. It was still half an hour until closing time, so the footpath was scattered with groups of girls who were either crying or getting sick. I refused to be either. I sat on my own, freezing without a coat, and bummed a cigarette off a man walking past. I shivered, looked glassily ahead, and waited for him to come.
He did, of course. Built like a terrier and every bit as common.
“Rache,” he said. “What are you doing out here? You’ll freeze.”
It strikes me now that no one in Cork ever worried about each other’s safety. Just our body temperature.
“What do you care?” I said dismally. I was extremely drunk, but I was never much of a shrieker. My version of being a bad drunk was suddenly becoming surly and immovable. “You’re breaking up with me anyway, aren’t you?”
“I could say the same to you,” he said, genuine fury in his voice. “What’s all this about? You were the one who wanted to be all official. Now you’re out here dressed like this, not telling me, not wanting to get pints with me during the week. Going on about gentlemen callers.”
Every so often a feminist argument makes it into the public consciousness that even the most self-hating of young women will adopt. There was a lot of chat around then about slut-shaming, around men policing how women dressed, around what the term “asking for it” actually meant. We had identified Fred Byrne’s slut-shaming tendencies not two weeks prior. The idea was in my mind, and so I seized on this fragment of what Carey was saying—dressed like this—and ignored the context of what he was actually talking about. What he was talking about was secrecy, and the possibility that I was cheating on him. What I had heard was a critique of my outfit.
“Fuck you, Carey?” I said, my voice low and serious. “I can dress how I want.”
That set us off. Suddenly we were in the kind of fight where both people act like they’re in a film, mugging for a camera that didn’t exist. We kept saying strident, passionate and broadly untrue things. I accused him of being jealous, which he wasn’t. He accused me of being uncaring, when that couldn’t have been further from the truth. I cared so deeply about preserving the status quo with Carey that I was always hiding the facts of myself from him. Not just London, but the stuff with James, too: his relationship with Dr. Byrne, the afternoon trysts at our house, how I had got the job with Deenie. I was hiding so much from Carey that sometimes I wonder what on earth we actually talked about.
“You can do whatever you fancy, Rachel, but you don’t have to make me feel like a fucking idiot when you do it.” He exhaled heavily, like he was trying to control himself from slapping me. “The lads were saying to me all evening, why not get Rachel over, we’ll all go out, she’s hardly over here any more. And I’m like, ah, she’s broke, she’s saving money, she’s worried about her job. Then we get out and you’re already here, three sheets to the wind.”