“Are you coming in?” he called, and I padded into his warm, clean room, and got into bed with him.
“I’m sorry,” I said, once the light was out.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said. I could feel his breath on my face. “He was yours.”
“No, no,” I replied. “He was never mine.”
In the years since, I have heard about the night James was first kissed by Fred Byrne so many times that I feel like I was there, experiencing every beat of it. I feel this way about a lot of James’s life. I pass certain stations on long train journeys and I think: Sandhurst. When have I been to Sandhurst? And then I remember that I have never been there, but that James lived there for a year in the nineties.
At some point while I was arguing with Ben about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dr. Byrne made a crack to James about being under no illusion that the many signed copies of his book would sell. He asked if the shop would be out of pocket; he wondered whether he should feel guilty, times being what they were.
“Never feel bad,” James had replied. Then he named a memoir by a disgraced politician that was currently taking up half the stockroom. The politician was one of those brown-envelope guys who were apparently responsible for the downfall of the country.
“He signed every copy, so we can’t send it back. Now we just use it to stop the water coming in on wet days. It’s like a dam.”
This being a wet day, Fred Byrne asked if he could see the dam of political betrayal. At some point, James felt a hand on the small of his back. Just a graze, the warm palm of plausible deniability. He turned his face, and there he was. Big and handsome and feeling, probably, like he deserved a glamorous treat on his big night. While I was trying so desperately hard to be Bookshop Girl, James was effortlessly being that rarer, more beautiful thing: Bookshop Twink.
I’ve often asked James why he didn’t come out sooner. Shame and terror aside, he just didn’t feel like he needed to. Coming out, he reminds me, is a political decision and not a practical one. At least for gay men, anyway. He was part of a culture that had been both highly sexual and deeply underground for hundreds of years. “Coming out” only really started after AIDS. There have always been enough men who simply got it without having to be told. Fred Byrne was one of those men, but there had been others. There had been bathrooms and staff kitchens and, yes, stockrooms before.
I was amazed by this. I, Rachel Murray, had spent my short adult life disappointed that random men didn’t want to have sex with me in random places; meanwhile James was getting it constantly.
“Not constantly,” he corrected. “Not even frequently.”
At twenty-two, he had fewer than ten of these experiences to his name. But they were sexy and sustaining and you could never quite tell when the next one was going to occur. Only one thing was certain: when they did happen, you didn’t say no.
“You can always say no,” I said, thinking this was a consent thing.
“No.” He shook his head. “You’re not understanding me. I mean me, personally. James Devlin. I cannot say no.”
He looked genuinely sorry. “I know he was yours, Rachel, but let’s be honest, you were never going to actually go there and we both knew it.”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “I wasn’t.”
James was too nice to say: And he would have never gone for you anyway.
I was desperate to know more information about Fred Byrne. I thought that the two of them fucking for twenty-five minutes in the stockroom of O’Connor’s after closing meant that James had downloaded Dr. Byrne’s entire autobiography into his head.
“Does he do this a lot, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he secretly gay? Or just, you know, openly bisexual?”
“No idea.”
“Does his wife know?”
“Not a clue.”
“You didn’t talk about his wife at all?”
“Funnily enough, she never came up.”
I only learned a few facts about Dr. Byrne that first night, and they were thus: that he was, indeed, hung like a chandelier. That he wore boxers. And that, after they were done, he was not drenched with shame and distance, the way many married men were. In fact, as he had been led out of the stockroom, he had kissed James, very softly, on the back of the neck.
9
IN IRELAND, spring begins on 1 February. It’s a pagan thing, I think, because it’s certainly not a climate thing. Most Februarys are overcast, frigid, and with only a few green shoots visible through the gates of Bishop Lucey Park.
That spring was different, though, because James and I were the hopeful green shoots, pushing up through frozen earth with brand-new velocity.
James was now officially out to one person and that one person was me. It opened up things. There is a photograph of us on a Facebook page somewhere, attending a burlesque night at a gay club. Me, in a red corset and black jeans, breasts reaching towards my ears, white fat slipping over my waistband. Him, dressed as the emcee from Cabaret, if the emcee from Cabaret had to dress for winter. If you were to look at the photo now you would say he was dressed as a mime, the white make-up is that thick.
When I started doing his face, he was sitting on a hard wooden dining chair in our living room, and we were each drinking from our own bottle of a four-euro wine called Marqués de Léon. It was available only at the big Tesco, and when it was warm it tasted like piss and when it was very cold it tasted like nothing. We drank it with a lot of ice and very quickly.
I swept rouge on his face, drew black lines over his eyes. I filled in his top lip with liquid liner.
He looked in the mirror of my compact. “Rachel, no,” he said. “I still look like me.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do. I’m not a make-up artist.”
“More white,” he said. “Like a mask.”
I started painting it on with a pastry brush that came with the house and smelled like sunflower oil.
That night we danced to “Coin-Operated Boy” by The Dresden Dolls, and “Babooshka” by Kate Bush, and yes, songs from Cabaret itself. The burlesque dancer had a Hula Hoop and for a few minutes it was on fire. At some point, James peeled off, his sweat dissolving the clown paint, and ended up glued to some boy in the corner. I don’t know what I did. I don’t remember ever being bored, or lonely, or like I was an accessory to his sex life. I was starting to come out of myself, too.
Hell: I was wearing a corset in public.
Most often, I was in the smoking area with another young gay guy, or a group of them. I began to realise that everything I had ever really loved as a child—Death Becomes Her; the concept of Bette Midler; pulling the neck of your T-shirt around your shoulder and then posing in the mirror, slightly kissing yourself—was all very gay. I had a camp mindset. I picked over certain quotes, certain women, certain micro-moments in pop culture. My quote-reeling had been dimly appreciated by Dr. Byrne （“what is your body now if not a famine road?”） but was embraced enthusiastically by the random men I met out. “He doesn’t look any bigger than the Mauretania,” I said once, to a boy who was pointing out a huge man on the dance floor that he wanted to sleep with. He grabbed my hand and laughed, and we reeled off Titanic quotes for the best part of an hour. “Best part” in that it was the majority of the hour, and best part in that it really was the best part. For me, anyway.