I look at the photo from the burlesque night a lot. I attach a lot of memory to it, memories from other nights out that we attended together but do not have photos of. Themed queer-adjacent nights with specific costume prompts, gay bars that paid for guest appearances by the Vengaboys, parties held by the drama students at UCC in order to fundraise the props for their next play. Every now and then I would see a club photographer propelling around James and whatever boy he was kissing, and I would tap him on the shoulder and politely ask him to fuck off.
“Just come out,” I said, on the walk home once. We were eating chips, cheese and garlic sauce. “Why are you even bothered? Most people assume you’re gay, anyway.”
“My mam,” he said. “She’d find it very upsetting. I think she worries about me a lot as it is.”
This felt like a lame answer to me. His mother, after all, had married a drug addict, a criminal. She knew about the world. “Have you considered that she might already know?”
He scowled at me. “I just don’t want things to change.”
“But they are changing,” I insisted. “They have changed.”
We didn’t just go to queer nights. We still went out with our friends from the bookshop, who had somehow managed to expand and morph into our friends from the music shop, friends from Topshop, friends from HMV. Without realising, I collected the names of roughly a hundred people aged between eighteen and thirty who were working part-time jobs in Cork city, each of them with boyfriends or girlfriends in bands, on campus radio or working as bookers at live music venues.
There were a lot of gig tickets going around. UK-based bands who had hung Cork dates on the end of their tour like stray socks on a clothes line. Glasvegas, Dirty Pretty Things, The Pigeon Detectives. And others, ones who you wouldn’t even remember. Bands that are kind of a punchline now, a shorthand for short-lived fame and flat-ironed fringes. But they occupied a delicious role for us, a magical sweet space between celebrity and accessibility. Despite the fact that I have lived in London for almost ten years, which is supposedly the land of the desperately clutching wannabe, I have never known fame clutching like the kind I knew in Cork in 2010. I’m sure all regional cities are the same. You’re so far away from it all that even a fragment of notoriety can make you high.
James got off with someone in one of these bands. I’m not being discreet. I literally don’t remember which. We were at their gig and he disappeared, then texted me an hour later to meet him outside. James and I had an agreement that we were allowed to vanish but never on one another. He would never go home with someone if it meant me walking home alone, and vice versa. We either put the other person in a cab or made sure they were en route to a house party somewhere.
I met James outside the Savoy, freezing in front of an open minivan. “Are you coming?” he said, stamping his feet. I had no idea where we were going. Inside I could see four skinny English boys, jittering away like dashboard nodding dogs. “Of course,” I answered.
In the long dark cab ride to the Vienna Woods in Glanmire—preposterously out of the way, at least a thirty-minute drive from the city centre—I was allowed to choose which of the band, if any, I was going to get off with. There was one girl in the van already. Balanced, predictably, on the knee of the singer. James was with the guitarist. The bass player and drummer were mine to destroy, a fact which would have made me feel more powerful if they weren’t constantly asking me: “Do you have any mates, love?”
I went with the drummer.
I had been studying literature for almost three years at that point. I had read about the Bloomsbury Group, and Paris in the 1920s. But despite all that I was blind to the emergence of a scene when it was happening right in front of me. I never considered that the bands I saw, the things we wore or the people we slept with were the edges of a larger circumference, the makings of a circle. I suppose it’s because none of them ever became famous. Or never stayed famous. Maybe fame is what confers importance, and not, as my essays for college would suggest, the other way around.
The drummer had one of those faces where the skin sits very close to the bone. Maybe a year of touring had thinned him out somewhat, not in weight but in essence. We kissed, foreheads together, on one of the twin double beds in the room he shared with the bass player. James was in the next room.
“Is it true what I’ve heard about Irish girls?” he said. He was Northern. Leeds, I think.
“What’s that?” I whispered.
“That you all swallow?”
I kissed him to make him shut up but I left quickly after. James came with me.
As for Dr. Byrne, the whole thing was dissolving into the past for us. It was the catalyst for this new life together, this breakthrough of sexual frankness, but we didn’t discuss it very much. In many ways, I was glad it had happened. For the first few weeks of me and James, I was always slightly confused as to why he was so bothered about being friends with me. Now that I was his secret keeper, I felt like I had a role in his life. I put this to him once, drunk and years after the fact. He was lightly horrified. He said he loved me always. And despite saying crazy things like this, loved me still.
The only time I ever had to think about it was in my Wednesday seminars, where Dr. Byrne had not acknowledged my presence for weeks.
I have read a lot of books about the lasting trauma of young women and their dastardly, corrupt English professors, and what happens when they fuck you. I have read nothing whatsoever on the trauma of when your English professor decides not to fuck you. Fred Byrne, who had briefly considered me a sparring partner, now preferred to skip over me in tutorial discussions, and only nodded when I spoke. I understood that he was embarrassed, and aware of the thin line of secrecy that I represented—I had his wife’s email address!—but I still felt it was extremely unfair. I had done nothing wrong. I hadn’t even tried to sleep with him, except in my own head. Sometimes, during those long seminars where everyone in the class got shouted at except for me, I wondered if Dr. Byrne had understood the plan all along. Maybe he felt sorry about not being attracted to me, and about fancying my housemate instead.
Still, I thought sniffily. That didn’t mean he had to deprive me of an education.
I tried to shrug it off. By April I would be finished with classes for good, and in May I would sit my final exams. The time for knowing Dr. Byrne was starting to pass. College was mattering less and less to me, if it had ever mattered at all.
But the law of small cities meant that we bumped into Fred Byrne anyway. It’s not as if Dr. Byrne was out cruising. He was too married for that. But there was an older class of arty Cork person that he belonged to, and those people sometimes touched the outer edges of our groups. He was still in his thirties, and childless, so he and Deenie socialised a lot. We ran into them at a Goldfrapp gig. They attended it the way I go to gigs with my own husband now—fun, dinner first, home by eleven, something to do. There’s only a short stretch in your life where you can attend gigs with spiritual commitment.
“Hello!” I said, too loudly, over the music.
“Rachel,” they both said at once, and then they nodded at James, Deenie not remembering his name, Dr. Byrne not wanting to appear to.