Ben tapped a pen on his teeth. “The industry is in a bad way,” he said. On top of the recession, there was also a lot of anxiety around the Kindle and what it would do to bookshops. Getting an author in might make a case for the shop’s own relevancy.
The seminars I had with Dr. Byrne were every Wednesday morning and ninety minutes long. They were intensive. He burned through material. Nothing he was teaching us was particularly mind-bending. It was a lot of dead Irish people through the eyes of dead English people then reinterpreted through Irish scholars who, like Fred Byrne himself, needed to write a book about something.
Every week, fifteen badly groomed children sat around in near silence while their odour suggested they were being pickled from within. I was no better. I had given up on becoming enlightened and was just getting drunk all the time. James and I were going out three nights a week, usually with the other Christmas temps from the shop, sometimes just by ourselves.
Dr. Byrne didn’t mind us being hung-over, but he wanted those hangovers to fuel us, not mute us. I think Dr. Byrne liked the idea of a crowd of stinking drunks arguing about Trollope. What he couldn’t abide was silence. On this particular day, he was raging at a Kerry boy called Elliot about The Playboy of the Western World.
“Elliot, in your opinion, was the controversy around Playboy an inappropriate response?”
Elliot blinked. “Yes.”
“Mr. O’Donovan, your own father is a farmer,” Dr. Byrne said. “Are you telling me that you find no problem with a global vision of Ireland where people kill their fathers by bludgeoning them with a spade?”
“No, that’s bad,” Elliot answered. “That’s like, that’s stereotypes.”
Dr. Byrne moved on, disgusted. There were always a few people who had done the reading and were willing to argue, and the majority of the class relied on them to do the heavy lifting. I was becoming one of those hot young arguers, high on my own ability to plagiarise an opinion. I picked up the thread, and blathered something from Yeats, butchering a quote I had read on JSTOR about when a country creates a genius, the country is always mad at the genius for not reflecting the right idea of the country itself.
（Which, oddly enough, was a line I repeated to James years later when a tweet he wrote went Bad Viral.）
Dr. Byrne was pleased with the Yeats quote. He obviously knew it himself, but was glad I knew it, too.
After the class I hung around for Dr. Byrne and told him that my manager wanted to know if he would like to launch his book at O’Connor Books.
James and I had planned this conversation carefully, and in all versions of it, Fred Byrne would be delighted. In some hypothetical eventualities, he took me out for a drink afterwards.
But he was just confused.
“I don’t understand, Rachel,” he said. “It’s not exactly going to attract a big crowd. It’s mostly still an academic text, even if it has some crossover appeal.”
This was not a conversation he was having with me, but a repeat of a conversation someone else had recently had with him. An agent or a publisher or maybe his wife, trying to temper expectations.
“No, no,” I said. “We’re very excited about it.”
“Do you get authors in a lot?”
“All the time!”
Which was true, but they were mostly fiction writers. On the last Sunday of every month we invited a children’s book author, of which there were seemingly an endless supply, to read to kids.
Dr. Byrne eventually agreed to the launch. I said I would email him about it, and introduce him to Ben. “Hang on,” he said, tearing a piece of paper out of a jotter. For a brief, brilliant second, I thought he was writing down his phone number. “Make sure you include Deenie on the email.”
I looked down at the email address he had written down. [email protected].
“And who is…？”
“My wife,” he answered. “And, well, my publisher.”
My face was turning red. “Oh, of course,” I said.
6
ONCE, on a press trip to Iceland, I was stuck on a broken-down coach an hour outside of Reykjavik. We were on our way back from the geysers. The geyser was beautiful, and it splashed everyone, and the splash was so happily received that it felt like a version of Sea World for people who read The New York Times on their phone. But on the way back, the water stuck to our skin and froze there, as we waited, and waited, for roadside assistance. The whole time I stamped my feet and ate my frigid packed lunch and thought: But is this as cold as January in Shandon Street? No.
It was so cold that we couldn’t be downstairs any more. We went down for food and to use the bathroom, but we lived in James’s room, both duvets stacked on the bed, the radiator going, the space heaters choking us with rancid air. We brought the TV upstairs and watched season boxsets of shows that we found in charity shops.
James was far more housebroken than I was. He washed his sheets every week, ironed them, and had specific ideas about fabric softener. I had never done my own laundry. I had no perception that clothes could go stale in the washing machine if you left them there too long.
“You smell like a troll,” he said one day.
I sniffed under my arms, surprised my body was even warm enough to sweat.
“No, I mean, like you live under a bridge. Your clothes smell like dirty water.”
And it was up to him to show me how laundry worked.
I was unusually stupid about household things, my mother having pampered us all without any of us realising. I thought because I unloaded the dishwasher at home that I knew how a house worked. In my defence, James was advanced. He’d had to take care of himself early, and had lots of rules about housekeeping. He also had an obsession with magazines, and would pick up GQ or Take a Break or Hello! whenever he went to the shops, like I might pick up a chocolate bar.
I once asked him why this was, and he said: “They were my toys.”
“What?”
“My mum would sometimes come into our rooms and say, ‘We’re going tomorrow,’ and we’d have to fill two carrier bags. You can fit a lot of magazines into a carrier bag.”
Nothing in his tone sought to arrange the information as though it were tragic backstory. Sometimes he would just drop these things into conversation and I would have to force him to backtrack, ask him all the questions he asked me about my dentist father, except James would get bored of answering and move on.
Over the first month of living together, I had learned the following: that James was born in Manchester, that his father was an addict, and that he was periodically in prison. He had two older sisters, and a mother he loved very much. On release, his father would often try to track down the family in an attempt to reunite with them, wherein James’s mother would move them on. She didn’t do this because she hated James’s father. She did it because she loved him, knew that she couldn’t say no to him, and that if she said yes, the lives of her children would become worse. She was trying to recover herself. When James was nine, she moved them to Ireland, where she quickly met his stepfather, and he had been in Cork ever since.
His English accent was mostly gone, but he still peppered his speech with words like “minge.” He called college “uni,” which I liked because “Rachel’s off to uni” made me feel clean and jolly hockey sticks about my education.