The Rachel Incident(73)

“I just wanted to leave you out of it. Because I do love you. You know that. I’m always saying it.”

“That’s not an act of love, Rache. It’s an act of…I don’t know, ambivalence. It’s an act of distance.”

“Your mum was sick.”

“I don’t care if my entire family were thrown into a volcano, Rachel, I want to fucking know if I’m having a child with someone.”

There is a parallel world where I said the right things to Carey that day. Made the right displays of affection, showed more signs of regret, wept and mourned the miscarriage in the way he wanted to. Perhaps in that world I got on the train to Dublin with him, and then to Derry. But I didn’t have the strength or the character. My mind was still in the graduation ceremony, with Dr. Byrne and his red robes. With the eyes of hundreds of people, who all knew there was something wrong with me, but didn’t quite know what.

I was a pretty cheerful person by nature. Emotionally dependable, like a good horse. Perhaps if I had been a more melancholy girl I would have been able to recognise that I was in the middle of a trauma, a word that still feels like it’s for other people. But I was so far away from myself, and it didn’t matter that a man I loved was trying to bring me back. He was too late, and it wasn’t enough.

He came home with me. He sat on my bed, and I started to kiss him, feeling his face and chest with my hands. We couldn’t have sex. I was still wearing the thick pads given to me by the doctor. I was desperate to get through to the part of Carey only I was able to reach, the sticky passionate silly place that transcended real life. I tried to convince him that my desperation was legitimate horniness, and for about three minutes, he was prepared to believe me.

I hid my face in his crotch, committing to an overly emotional blow job that we both knew was intended as an act of penance. I looked up at him, quickly, and saw that his face was tilted to the window. His cheekbones lit up by the street lamp, his eyes like an empty glass bowl.

He left for Dublin the next morning. I did not see him again.

Somehow, life went on.

I managed to get bar work, which didn’t suit me as much as the bookshop but suited me much more than the call centre. There was a pub on Washington Street that took me on, near the small plates restaurant that had since closed. It was easy, and fun sometimes, although I never felt easy or fun any more.

I was rigid and off the pace. James wasn’t all there, either. Our relationship had shifted its feet, adjusting for the amount of weight it was now holding. We still watched TV, and ate dinner, and checked in to see when the other person was coming home. But there was a change you could only see from the inside. Our conversations moved in the same directions—Why doesn’t Glenn Close have an Oscar? Why don’t they put crisps in the sandwiches at Subway?—but the flow, the sound, the echo, was different. I felt like we were playing cover songs of our own conversations. We just didn’t enjoy each other in the same way.

Behind it all was anger, I think. We were both quietly suspicious that each of us had ruined the other’s life. I would spend days angry that Dr. Byrne’s affair with James had exploded my chances at a nice job, as well as my entire sense of self. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Carey had said: that it was my co-dependence on James that had caused him to act distant.

James, I suspect, was brooding about how my pregnancy and subsequent scamming of the Harrington-Byrnes had severed his link to love for ever. I would be mean to James, make little digs about his not going to college, or engage in “playful” banter about his more feminine qualities. Things we would have laughed at before hit differently now that this new edge was here. He would become irritated by my messiness, and go on a patronising tirade about how I was useless, couldn’t work a Hoover, couldn’t fill an iron, couldn’t do anything right, really.

Then the feelings would switch, and change their direction of flow. I would feel guilty about my part in James’s sorrow, and suddenly lavish him with affection and treats from the shop. He would do the same: call me gorgeous, point at celebrities from the magazines he still compulsively bought, say, “You look a bit like her, don’t you?”

We could never match up these moments. James was never in the mood to be loved when I wanted to love him, and vice versa. We started to spend more time with other people. James had a gang of three other gay boys, and they went to Chambers Bar together on the nights I was working. With college over, it was easier for me to meet up with secondary-school friends. People were moving back to Cork, having finished their own degrees elsewhere, with the exception of the Trinity students who we resented and who never came back. We played at adults, going for coffees and sandwiches during the day. They were feeling equally as hopeless about the future, and we lamented our useless degrees together.

My best friend from school was a girl called Gemma Dwyer. She was doing her first teaching placement in Cork, so was usually free in the afternoons. We fell into a pleasant, if somewhat dull, routine of meeting at a café on French Church Street at around 4 p.m., where I would eat a big sandwich before my shift started at six. She would tell me long stories that made her students sound like the Railway Children, and made her sound like a benevolent goddess that taught them about goodness and compassion.

One afternoon, Gemma leaned towards me.

“Rachel, there are two women behind you who won’t stop looking at us.”