The Rachel Incident(88)

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“James is very insecure. Carey was quite a cool customer, you know.”

“You’re so glamorous now, you see, I’ll never keep up.”

“Stop!” I said, then snuggled down into the sheets. “Go on.”

I could not understand why he was single. At the same time, I could completely understand why he was single. He still had no concept of time. He was still filthy, deep down, though better at maintaining a front. He was still bad at sustaining interest in anything that he found remotely boring. He would suddenly leave parties, or conversations, sometimes conversations that I was still having with him. “Why did you walk away?” I would call after him. “Oh,” he’d respond, “it sounded like you already knew what you thought.”

He still has deep convictions on what love is, and how it functions.

We moved in together quickly, renting a place in Chalk Farm. We were better as live-in lovers than we ever were as daters. We were beans on toast people, two joints on a Saturday night people, keeping watch while the other person took a wild piss on a country walk people. It was instantly cosy, even if he could still be infuriating. One evening he didn’t come home after work, and his phone was off. It was the kind of summer evening that should have been spent drinking wine in a pub garden, and he was spoiling it. I brimmed with anxiety that he had lost interest and was right now making a mockery of my fidelity. I walked miserably to the shop, ready to drown my sorrow in a bottle of Australian wine, and found Carey sitting on the street next to a free book box with an open can of Bulmers. It was almost 9 p.m.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked.

“Reading?” he said simply, looking up from a book about octopuses.

“Just bring the books home, then? They’re free? I’ve been worried!”

“We have enough books at home,” he said. He lifted a black plastic bag of corner-shop cans. “Do you want one?”

So we sat on the pavement and drank cider and looked at the books from the free book box until it was too dark to read. Carey could be spacey and unreliable, but he didn’t live with secrets. Not the way I did.

I told him the full story: the exile from Cork, the whole scenario with the Harrington-Byrnes, the abortion money we kept to emigrate. We were living together for six months before I found the courage to talk about it. Not because I thought he would leave me, but because I didn’t want him to hate James.

“Christ,” he said, marvelling, as if I were describing the finale of a TV show he had given up on watching. And then: “I wish I had known.”

“I never really let you know anything.”

“No,” he agreed, pulling me close. “No, you didn’t.”

We are home for a week. We go out with the buggy, and we bump into all sorts of people. People who moved away and came back, people who insist that Ireland has the best primary schools and would not subject their children to the schools in England. What with the horrendous eleven plus exam, which is a surprisingly common talking point among the Irish.

It is my first trip home that I have not worried about running into the Harrington-Byrnes. He is sick. He is possibly even dead. Deenie will not be wandering the Cork streets. She is the wife of a sick person. They do different things.

Two days before we are due to leave for London, I receive an email.


Dear Rachel,


I hope you don’t mind my getting in contact. I realise it has been a very long time, and the last time we saw each other it was not on pleasant terms. I also realise that this is an understatement.


You may already know that Fred has not been well the past year. It has been a harrowing time for us both, and while I have been extremely busy with his care, there has been a lot of time—decidedly too much time—for reflection.


I do not want to worry or bother you, but I would love to find a way to speak. I saw from your (very funny) column this week that you are planning a trip home—perhaps you would like to meet then?


Congratulations on your career, which looks like it has been exciting. I read a lot of your pieces during the referendum. I feel proud to have known you.


Hope this email finds you well,

Deenie Byrne



When I first extorted the Harrington-Byrnes, I did so with the conviction that it was the only thing to do. Dr. Byrne had betrayed me and James terribly, and I needed the money for the abortion. But then I didn’t need the money for the abortion. I just needed it, period.

It was this fundamental dishonesty that led me to believe that I deserved the weird looks on the street, the girls coming up to me in bars, the incident at my graduation. That I deserved the hate of the Harrington-Byrnes. And so I crawled out of the country with my head down. I avoided people from Cork and, just to be safe, from all of Munster. For years, there was no one in my circle who was Irish, and I believed this to be appropriate punishment for the way I had acted as a twenty-one-year-old girl in 2010.

And now I am an editor at a paper about the Irish in London, and Deenie Byrne wants to talk to me.



* * *





By the time I decide that I am definitely going to meet Deenie, my husband is at golf with my brothers, and my parents are at work. This means I have no choice but to bring Shay with me.

I do not know what Deenie Byrne’s fertility journey has been like since I last met her, but something about her email says that she is still childless. She said she was “reflecting” a lot, which I suppose anyone could do at any time, but feels unlikely if she has a brood of children under ten.