I didn’t want the interaction to last any longer than a pleasantry. I was still angry at Dr. Byrne for snubbing me in class the way he did. James wasn’t feeling so shy.
“You both look so elegant,” he said baldly.
Deenie smiled widely, so instantly charmed that I knew she must not have a clue about her husband’s other life. “Stop!” she said. “I’m still getting over a cold; I didn’t even want to use the tickets tonight. A friend at Red FM gave them to me.”
Did anyone actually buy their gig tickets back then? Is this why the economy was in bits?
She held up a balled tissue in her hand to prove herself, and it looked like a white flag of surrender. She winced. “My head is actually pounding.”
“Rachel has paracetamol,” James blurted. Everyone was looking at me.
“Yeah,” I agreed, “I do. Do you want some?”
“Rachel is the pill girl,” James went on. “Paracetamol, Solpadeine, ibuprofen. She’s a walking pharmacy.”
It was true. My handbags were full of half-empty pill packets, bought from the all-night Centra on the way home from a night out, my fear of hangovers great but my desire to get drunk greater.
“Solpadeine,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “Christ, can I have some?”
“I only have the sachets,” I said, waving one around. It looked, in the dark, like a condom packet.
“I don’t mind, I’ll get a glass of water from the bar.” She laughed, shook her head. “I’m so rock ’n’ roll.”
“Rache, it’s your round,” James said, holding up his plastic cup of melting ice. “Bacardi Coke?”
“Sure,” I said, realising what he was doing. I was walking to the bar with Deenie Harrington, tying ourselves in the queue’s thirsty knot.
“How’s the shop?” she asked brightly. I said it was fine. She said that she regretted having never worked in a bookshop, that most people in publishing had, and that sometimes she felt left out. “It’s funny, most people in the music industry haven’t worked in an HMV, but everyone in books has worked in a Waterstone’s.”
“How do you get into books?” I asked. I was keenly aware that in a few months I would be another unemployed graduate with an English degree, and no one at the college had given me any hint as to what I might do with it. There were no job postings for brochures and signs and things. I had looked. Books seemed like a natural next step, but apparently so natural that no one was willing to offer directions.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s about who you know.”
We surged forward in the drinks queue.
“Sorry,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “I just realised how absolutely fucking useless that was, as advice.”
“Ha! No, not at all.”
“My dad,” she said. “My dad was in the business.”
“Like an author?”
“A poet,” she said. “Not famous. But known, in a way. Alistair Harrington?” She raised her eyebrows briefly, searching for recognition. I shook my head. “That’s okay,” she said. “He’s the kind of poet a normal person hasn’t heard of but, like, Seamus Heaney has.”
“A poet’s poet,” I replied.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “A poet’s poet. It gave me an edge at the interview, I think.”
The bartender was putting out cups of water on the bar. I reached to grab one for Deenie.
“I’m sure you were great at the interview.”
I wish I knew then what I know now: that it is vanishingly rare for a person working in the arts to admit that a blood connection secured their place within it. Particularly so quickly after meeting someone. Deenie’s admission, which I saw as being polite chatter then, would have endeared her instantly to me now.
“I don’t think so. I give a terrible first impression.”
I thought about her at the bookshop two hours before her husband’s launch, and how suspicious she had been of me. Maybe she felt bad about it. More than that: maybe she was sorry. She had observed me that evening, in all my goofy largeness, and thought: My God, why was I so frightened of that poor stupid girl?
She was so bewildered by how unthreatening I was that she missed James, operating right under her nose.
10
JAMES THOUGHT ABOUT Dr. Byrne the way other people think about puppy farms. It was bad, but the puppies were there, and some nice family had to take them. He didn’t want Fred Byrne to cheat on his wife, but there was no doubt that he was going to, so why not with James?
We didn’t spend any more time with the Harrington-Byrnes that night. We drifted away, talked to our own people, did our own thing. But James’s heart wasn’t in the night any more. And because he couldn’t get into it, I couldn’t either.
“I might go,” I said, at around eleven. “I have a class in the morning.”
“Same,” he said, and we headed for the door.
As soon as we were clear of the venue, James blurted it all out.
“I gave him our address,” he said.
“Our what? Why?”
“Rachel, this is awkward to talk about, but the man was the best ride of my life.”
“Stop,” I said. “No, he wasn’t.”
I suddenly felt like he was talking about my dad.
“He was. I feel like…I don’t know.” He spat on the ground. I was so shocked that I watched the spit travel. It was such an odd thing for him to do. “Like I’m just snacking, all these empty calories, but it all tastes like nothing because it’s not what I want. What I need.”
“The guitarist from last week? He was empty calories?”
“I just…” His face was twisted, his hands were in his hair. “You saw the kiss, Rachel. You know.”
I did. I knew. It was kind of making me crazy, too. I had never been kissed the way James had been kissed in the stockroom, and now that I had seen James kissing several people, I knew he hadn’t either.
“So is he going to…？ What? Come to our house? Abandon his sick wife?”
He did not come to our house that night. He came the night after.
I was in bed with James when the doorbell rang. We were watching Absolutely Fabulous, season one. The window in his room looked down onto the street. He craned his head out, then went white.
“Get out,” he said. “Sorry! But! You need to get out.”
“To my room?” I said, as if I was saying: To prison?
“Take my laptop! And my headphones!”
I had never seen him like this, so flustered. I finally twigged who was outside.
“Dr. Byrne?” I whispered. I was holding a tub of ice cream. It was starting to leak onto the sheets. “Here? Now?”
“Jesus, just go to your room, will you?”
I went, lugging a space heater with me.
I lay in bed and shivered, listening to the sounds of my professor moving around my tiny house. I heard the murmurings of polite conversation.
I kept thinking of the different incriminating objects that populated our downstairs: the weed grinder, the unfinished can of Diet Coke, the clothes horse that I would never dismantle fully, instead just taking knickers down as needed. What was even more embarrassing was the thought of him looking at my bookshelves. The books that I had arranged so proudly—the Haruki Murakamis, the Mary Wesleys, the heavily underlined Brother of the More Famous Jack—were now getting a thorough inspection from someone whose job it was to read and criticise books. What conclusions was he drawing about me down there? Did he notice that none of the books I read in my spare time were Victorian?