The Rachel Incident(65)

The house was empty now. I could feel the silence of the other rooms bearing down on this one, pushing at the walls.

Deenie got up from her bed, and took out her laptop. The rage had flown out the door with the remaining guests. She was now like a scientist in a film, one who has just discovered an asteroid is about to hit the earth.

“Show me,” she said. “Show me the email.”

It was crazy to be sitting with her on her bed, like being her assistant again. I logged in to my email account and showed her the appointment confirmation for the twenty-sixth.

“Well,” Deenie said. “There it is.”

I closed the laptop lid. “Two thousand,” I said.

“What?” Deenie said.

Fred finally had the grace to appear shocked. “Rachel, what?”

“Two thousand euro.” I clenched my fists so tight that I felt my fingernails embedding on my palms. “Two thousand euro, and you’ll never see me, or hear about this, ever again.”

“Two thousand?”

“For the abortion,” I said. “For the flights, the procedure, the hotel. And I want a friend to come with me. I’m not doing it alone.”

I cleared my throat. “My friend James.”

They looked at each other, and I wondered if Dr. Byrne was grateful to be on the same team as his wife again. I was doing them a favour. Before, they were a struggling couple. Now they were going through something together, and that thing was extortion.

“I’m going to wait in the hallway,” I said, my voice clear. “And you can discuss what you want to do.”

I said, “I didn’t want to do this. It wasn’t my plan.”

And I left them there.

I understand the instinct to judge me. Extorting Deenie Harrington for the termination of a baby that was not her husband’s is the worst thing I have done, and I sincerely hope it is the worst thing I will do.

But while the gift of hindsight has changed much about this story, in my own head at least, it is still difficult to see what else I could have done.

I sat in a wooden chair in the hallway next to the post table and waited. After ten minutes, they came out of the bedroom. Deenie had a chequebook in her hands.

“How will we know that you haven’t just kept the baby?” she said. Her hands were quivering.

I thought about this. “You won’t.”

By this point, Deenie Harrington had been glaring at me for almost an hour, but this was the first time she met my eyes. Her lips bitten, her nostrils tipped pink.

“Rachel,” she whispered. “You weren’t…you couldn’t have been this person all along, could you?”

I examined each one of my teeth with my tongue. “I’m not evil,” I said to her, and to myself. “I just…I don’t have any money, Deenie.”

She furrowed her brow. “It’s not just that.”

“But it is,” I stressed. “I assure you, it is.”

“Did I…? Was I a bad boss, or something? Is this a revenge thing?”

She tore out the cheque and gave it to me.

“Deenie,” I said, putting my hand on the front door, “I was your assistant.”

Deenie looked even more confused. I hated her, then. Hated her friends, her daughter-of-a-poet beauty, her fake money worries. I hated him. Hated his cowardice, the way he pretended to love James, the way he was a tourist in our lives. I hated that he was spoiled, and that he always got what he wanted.

“And what?” Deenie said. “I was your assistant and what?”

“And you never fucking paid me.”





23


I WAS NOT PROUD of how I handled the dinner party. But I had managed to un-fuck myself in a situation that was profoundly fucked on all sides. Either way, I was destined to be alienated from the Harrington-Byrnes. Either way, I still had to pay for an abortion. It was prudent to compound those two problems, and it was a gift to them: they were now in cahoots together. They had paid for a problem to go away, and that problem was me.

I made a mistake, however. And that was in how I told James.

I burst through the door of our house, frothing and rabid. James was lying on the sofa, reading a magazine and smoking with the window open.

“You’re home early,” he said. Then he looked at my face. “Oh, fuck, what happened?”

“They think it’s me,” I exploded. “They thought it was me fucking him.”

I began at the end: I told James that we had two grand, and then that we were never allowed to talk to the Harrington-Byrnes ever again. The rest of the story he had to prise from me through my tears, my hyperventilating, my sudden tense giggles that would end in me clutching my own arms, and then his. First he was confused, and asked hundreds of questions, made me tell the story again. I talked about the place settings, and Ciara, and the friends who had clearly never heard a thing about me, but who now would remember me for ever.

I gagged on my words as I made fresh realisations: that Dr. Sheehan and the other members of the English department would tell their colleagues, who would tell their Ph.D. students, who would tell their MA students, who would tell the BAs. That I would probably never walk through the UCC campus again without feeling as though I was being looked at. This fact, which might mean nothing if I lived in a bigger place, meant everything in Cork. The campus is almost part of the city. You attend art shows there, film screenings. You meet people.