The Rachel Incident(50)
Deenie had gone to the kitchen, to give me privacy. There was a new record on, a jazz singer, Dinah Washington or someone like that. Deenie was in her bare feet, five foot nothing, and dancing with her husband. Looking so small that for once, I wasn’t even jealous. She looked like she could smash to pieces.
I left at around one in the morning, my bag full of stolen goods. I remember thinking that, whatever happened next with Carey or with my employment situation, it wouldn’t be so bad if I could have this little corner of adult fabulousness, this friendship with the Harrington-Byrnes.
When something good happens to you at that age, you can’t settle with the notion that it’s a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That’s how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened.
That was over ten years ago, which makes it a genuine memory, and not the pretend one I fantasised about in the cab ride home. The problem with genuine memories is that you know too much. It ruins everything. I can love that night for what it was, but I also know this: that I would only step inside that house two more times, and by winter I would never see Deenie Harrington again.
19
A CALL CENTRE had opened up in Monkstown, near where I grew up, and one of my father’s contacts got me a job there. By that point, I was in no position to draw arbitrary lines between town work and any other kind. They were offering me thirteen euros an hour to call charity donors and convince them to increase their monthly donations. “One week you could be working with Irish Guide Dogs,” my new manager told me, “and the next it could be cleft palate.”
This was sold to me as being a perk of the job. “Variation,” I was told. “You’ll never be bored. There’s always plenty to learn, if you want to learn it.”
The call centre was a large prefab the size of the auditorium of my secondary school. It smelled new and cheap. There were two vending machines, one for snacks and one for energy drinks. The snacks machine cost money but the drink machine was free. On my first day I was shown around by a girl my own age who was already a manager, having started work there in May. It was now nearing the end of August.
“What’s nice is that it’s really flexible,” she said. “Like, no one is going to call you into the office if you’re not at your desk by ten past nine, or whatever. Just meet your targets and you can do what you want.”
She looked like the girls I went to school with. Golden, highlighted and virtually eyebrow-less, dressed in baby blues and light pinks. She was probably very nice, but I felt myself resisting her. I had spent so much of the last year in a different world, one of gigs and septum piercings and page proofs, and I resented being pulled back into the world of girls I never truly liked.
I was shown to my new desk. There was a phone, a computer, and it had privacy partitions on each side. There was a stapled two-pager waiting on my chair, which I presumed would be an introduction to the company but was actually a script about blood cancer research.
“There’s great opportunity for advancement,” she said. “I’m on sixteen an hour, now.”
“Sixteen?”
“Well, I don’t just do phones. I’m management.”
“Sure, of course.”
“The important thing is to just keep people on the phone. If they’ve talked to you long enough, they’ll feel guilty. Ask them about their pets, their grandkids. Eventually they’ll agree to donate.”
“Right.”
“But don’t spend too long on, either. Some old grannies will chew your ear off. You have targets.”
“Right.”
As soon as I was on the phone, I felt myself becoming righteously angry with James. I was so obviously wrong for this job, and he was so obviously right for it. Who was better at convincing people than James? Meanwhile, he was continuing to work at O’Connor Books, despite the fact—and this last came in the bitchiest voice of all—that he didn’t even read real books. Just screenwriting manuals.
I called Carey on my lunch break. There was nowhere to eat your lunch, so I found a bit of grass next to a road and leaned on a fence there.
“Is it awful?”
“Dreadful. No one wants to talk to me.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Can you pay me thirteen quid an hour? Anyway. How’s home?”
“Mam’s in the hospital for the time being, and Dad’s hip is bad again, so I’m driving him to physio every other day. Only, he won’t do the stretches or anything, so I have to do them with him.”
I had wished for Carey to be stapled to the ground, and now he was nailed there good and fast. His life was steeped in chemo appointments, pick-ups, drop-offs, nieces, nephews, getting lunch on, getting dinner on, managing his sisters’ in-fighting, his mother’s depressions, his father’s stubborn refusal to move his leg clockwise and anti-clockwise in repeated, circular movements. My longing for Carey to become dependable had sprouted into him becoming absolutely reliable to everyone in the city of Derry, which was approximately three hundred miles away.
“You’re an amazing son,” I said to him. “And brother. And uncle.” I was about to add “and boyfriend,” but we were consciously avoiding titles. We knew we loved each other, but we didn’t know what to do with it, given the current circumstances, or what it meant. Neither of us knew how long this would go on for, and neither wanted to hold the other down.