The Rachel Incident(84)

“Now,” he said, “tell me where the strain is.”

I blundered my way through my various ailments. The freezing fingers, the wrist pain, the stuck thumb.

“You work too much,” he said, and it was hard to tell whether it was a physiotherapist’s opinion or the opinion of James Carey.

“Make your wrist go limp,” he said, and I did, the fingers pointing down like a homophobic gesture. He put his hand flat in front of mine, his palm to my knuckles. “Now push against me.”

I pushed my hand towards his, my fingertips grazing the lines of palm.

“Harder, go on. Hard as you can.”

I flushed, and wondered whether I should ask for a different physiotherapist. This was too strange. Like a dream I would wake up and tell James about.

“Harder, go on, you’re not trying.”

My wrist was getting tired. “I am trying.”

He took his other hand and worked his thumb up my arm, pressing hard, slightly massaging. “Here,” he finally said, triumphantly. He rested his thumb in a spot below the elbow. “This muscle here. It’s inflamed.”

He dug his thumb deeper, rolling on the muscle he had found. I felt a strange release, of something being broken, kneaded, and then flooding into the rest of my body. Blood coursed up and down my arm and into my shoulder, my chest. I could not look at Carey, so instead I looked at the model of the human spine. Kiss me, I thought violently. Fuck me in your weird office.

“You’ll need to do exercises,” he said. “To strengthen your muscles there. And if you can do audio typing, that might help. Rest your hand as much as you can.”

“No hand jobs for crack, then,” I said, and immediately wanted to drown myself. It belonged to the time where I knew him last. It was a South Park joke, from a moment when South Park kind of mattered.

He laughed, this time out of bemusement, rather than from the cosmic coincidence that had brought us together again.

I have ruined it, I thought. I have ruined it all, again. He showed me the exercises, and I counted down the minutes until I could leave and phone James.

But as I got up to go, Carey the physiotherapist disappeared. “Go on then, Murray,” he said. “Give us your phone number.”



* * *





Carey suggested meeting on the South Bank on Saturday at noon, which told me that he had not been living in London very long. I met him by the book stall outside the BFI, where he was reading Cher’s autobiography.

“Did you know she had an affair with Warren Beatty when she was still a teenager?” was the first thing he said.

“Didn’t he have an affair with everyone?”

“I know, but still.”

“Are you going to buy that?”

“No, let’s go.”

My physiotherapy appointment had been on Wednesday. It was a long time to wonder about James Carey. I had had other boyfriends in the years since, and it would be easy for me to say here that they never meant as much to me as Carey did, but of course they did. They meant all kinds of things to me, but now I couldn’t remember what those things were. That Saturday, it seemed like my romantic life had been held on a screensaver for years. I was walking next to Carey, the Carey, and my heart was expanding and being crushed at the same time.

“I couldn’t believe it when you walked into the practice,” he said. Hands in his pockets, face to the ground. “Rachel. It was like…I don’t know, some kind of lucid dream.”

“You must have known I was in London,” I countered. “I was the one surprised. You, who said you’d never live in England.”

“I never said that.”

“Oh yes you did. ‘Come Out, Ye Black and Tans’ on the Underground. You said that.”

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“But you did,” I stressed, a little too powerfully. “You did.”

“Well, you’re the journalist.”

“And you’re a physiotherapist?” I was still baffled by this development.

“You’re a physiotherapist, full stop, Mr. Carey. Not ‘You’re a physiotherapist,’ question mark. I know punctuation is everything to you types.”

“Sorry. But. Since when?”

“You thought I was just sitting on my hole back in Derry, did you?”

“No,” I said. He raised his eyebrows. “Sort of,” I admitted.

“Sure, look. I don’t blame you.” We were walking up the South Bank now, a circle gathering around a man beatboxing into a microphone, both of us straining to hear each other.

“When did you start training? It must have taken a while?”

His mother had died a year after he had last seen me. He lived with his father after that. His father, who was generally “infirm” but not particularly unwell, though, needed a lot of attention to keep limber. Carey had gone to therapy with him, and drilled him on the movements at home. He found that his lupus symptoms were playing up less as a result of the physio, and started studying it at Ulster University, commuting from home several days a week. In three years, he was qualified. In four, he was working in Derry. After five, he started studying acupuncture, and after six, his father died, after complications following a stroke.

“I’m so sorry, Care,” I said. “That’s a lot.”