There wasn’t so much of an appetite for it then. Our opinion of ourselves was very low. I remember going home one Sunday to parrot Dr. Byrne’s theories about the famine as an attempted genocide, and my father folded down his paper to look at me. “What were they supposed to do?” he said, meaning the English. “We were the ones too stupid to grow anything else.”
After the reading, Dr. Byrne was set up at a table that we usually used to stack the toilet books on. His friends and colleagues queued up to speak to him. A photographer from the Evening Echo was there to take pictures for the social diary. He was ushered in by Deenie, who seemed to know him, and Dr. Byrne posed for shots, holding the book in different positions. The photographer fulfilled the same role as a clown might at a child’s birthday party. There was a sense that, without him, it was just a bunch of adults who knew each other and were willing to participate in the role play that one of them was famous for a day. It seemed a revolutionary act of kindness, like the Make-A-Wish Foundation but for well-liked men nearing forty.
It was all over by nine o’clock. The friends decamped to a pub, and Dr. Byrne, without any prompting from us, said that he was going to stick around the bookshop to sign the excess copies. Deenie kissed him, getting up on her tiptoes to do it, and said she’d see him at the pub. I felt annoyed by the tiptoes, the gauche expression of tiny-ness from her. Teenie Deenie. Fuck you, I thought. I’m going to shag your husband just for that.
As usual, I was getting ahead of myself. Ben wanted me to clean up the shelves first, which had been put in disarray by all the browsing friends of the author. Hardback Fiction was in bits. James put on music, plugging his old iPod into the aux cable. More Paul Simon. “You Can Call Me Al” was our big clean-up, home-time song, belting the lyrics across the stacks. It felt weird, having Dr. Byrne there for our clean-up song. He seemed to enjoy it, though, signing his books on the counter and humming along with us.
Ben made me put the table back to its original spot, and we piled the toilet books back on top of it. We argued whether Pride and Prejudice and Zombies belonged in Humour or Fiction. Then he took the tills upstairs to start counting the day’s takings.
“Under African Skies” started playing and I realised that I was alone. The floor was clear, each book neatly slotted back in its place. The shop lights, which operated by motion sensor, had gone out on the rest of the floor. I was standing in half-darkness, only one fluorescent bulb awake above me.
I wandered the floor confused, like a girl lost in a parallel world, its differences not yet clear to me. Eventually, I decided that Dr. Byrne and the remaining staff had gone ahead to the pub without telling me. Or perhaps they had told me, shouted it over the speakers, and I hadn’t heard.
There was half a box of The Kensington Diet that would not fit on the shelves, so I gathered them into my arms and nudged my way into the stockroom. Where Dr. Byrne was, and where James looked so small in his arms that it took me a second to realise that he was not alone.
8
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW how long I stood watching my professor passionately kiss my best friend, I would say that it was just above “glimpsing” and just below “gazing.” Time slowed down, and allowed me to take in details that I would have never noticed otherwise. The fact that Dr. Byrne’s hands were in James’s shaggy brown hair, and that his hands were so big one covered James’s left ear entirely. That he seemed to be gripping James with such intent that it looked like James’s head was a cantaloupe that was threatening to roll down a hill.
Even if the kiss hadn’t been a betrayal, I would have still been captivated by it. If the kiss were happening on the street, I would have slowed down to watch it. It wasn’t just that they were men. It was that they were both so inside the kiss that they were mutually trying to prevent the other’s escape. Fred Byrne, with his hands firmly on James’s neck and skull, and James pushing his body so hard against Dr. Byrne that it seemed he would have to physically peel James off if he wanted to stop kissing him.
Which he didn’t.
They must have heard the stockroom door banging behind me. No one followed or shouted at me to wait. I stood on the shop floor for a few seconds, and then grabbed my bag and bolted home.
It was a sixteen-minute walk from the shop to our house on Shandon Street. On the journey home, I told myself what I would do the moment I got inside: put the kettle on, get into my pyjamas, and fall deep under the bed covers to cry. It had stopped raining by that time but the streets were covered in puddles. I was so dazed that I kept treading in them, and by the time I was home I was wet to the knee.
But all I could do was stand in the kitchen and shiver, eating handfuls of cereal out of the box. When my mouth started to get dry I opened one of the cans of Diet Coke that James always kept in the fridge and drank the whole thing in three swallows. I wished, desperately, for someone to talk to. There was no one. I had created a sea of problems for which James was the only navigator, because he was the only person who knew about my crush on Dr. Byrne. And there was no one to tell about James’s betrayal of me without also betraying James at the same time. Even then, in my fury, I was aware that James could find an equally interesting housemate tomorrow, but for me there was only one James.
I wondered whether this was the first gay experience he had ever had. I worried whether my hurt feelings were in fact repressed homophobia; then I reasoned that, had James been a girl, I would have been much more furious.
When he finally came home I was still shivering in the kitchen like a spooked poodle. James dropped his keys on the hall table. I waited for an additional pair of footsteps. I heard none.
“Rache,” he called. He repeated it, calling up the stairs. “Rache!”
There was no door from the kitchen to the living room. The kitchen was more of an alleyway that led to the bathroom than a real room. He stopped when he saw me.
“All right,” he said.
“Is this it, then?” I replied, not meeting his eye. “Are you out now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t see the point of you being in the closet,” I snapped, “and me telling people that you’re straight, if you’re going to fuck my professor.”
“What does you telling people I’m straight have to do with anything?”
I found a vein of anger, something other than my own shame at losing Dr. Byrne, to tap into. “I vouched for you,” I said. “People asked me if you were gay and I said no.”
“Did you believe it?” he said calmly.
“No!” I exploded. “But you were my friend. I was being a good friend.”
He looked down at my sodden socks. “You’re freezing,” he said. “Come on, let’s go upstairs.”
We climbed the stairs like an old married couple, hands on the banister. James changed into pyjamas. He gave me a pair, too, knowing that all mine were hanging on a drying rack downstairs. They were soft and smelled fresh, the way everything he owned did, and the way I’ve never been able to replicate no matter what laundry trick I’ve tried since.
I got into his big grey T-shirt and the big grey trousers in my room. As always, my room looked like somewhere a night porter might sleep in-between room calls. Clothes just fell as I stood, and the bedspread was permanently rumpled. There was a chipper down the road from us, and one night while we were waiting for our fish I noticed an empty, industrial-grade mayonnaise bucket behind the counter. “Can I have that?” I said. James couldn’t believe it. I took it home and used it as a laundry basket. To this day, he refers to this period of our lives as the Mayonnaise Bucket Days.