We looked up at the big fish, this strange landmark of north Cork, and we ran out of things to say. He put his hand on the small of my back, looked at me sideways. His eyes grey-blue. Mischief.
And then I was kissing him, holding his head like a cantaloupe, and his hands jumped around me in surprise, not knowing how to keep up.
I took him back to the house, my first real gentleman caller since Jonathan and I broke up. James wasn’t home, and I went through the exact steps I had heard him go through weeks before: flicking on the kettle, getting two cups out, making small talk about how long we had lived there, how much the rent was. Then he came up behind me, hands on my hips, mouth on my ear.
“You’re a fucking stunner. Did you know that?”
The clatter of the cups being pushed back, my bum on the counter, tights off. The counter was a great height for this kind of carry-on. It was far and away the best sex I had ever had, yet I couldn’t stop thinking about James and Dr. Byrne. The fact that they had been in this room—probably in this position, more or less—and that I had been upstairs trying not to overhear. I wonder if having them in my head made the sex that bit more extraordinary. It was an orgy while still being extraordinarily intimate, and exclusively me and Carey.
He was still wearing his jacket, a black pea coat that smelled badly of cigarettes, and I shuddered into the collar, my fingers digging into the lapels. I remembered what James said about this being his first second time. This was a first time for me, too. It was my first time having sex with a stranger, and it was the first real orgasm I’d ever had with another person in the room. Life felt very full, and very funny. There was a whole life of first times to have, first times I hadn’t even considered yet!
“Jesus,” Carey said, and I was relieved. He looked haunted. He was older than me, and obviously more experienced, but it hadn’t been an ordinary thing for him either. “Jesus. Fucking hell, Rachel. What was all that about?”
He said it like we were old friends, and I laughed, and dragged him up the stairs. There were Portuguese tarts left over from Dr. Byrne’s last visit, and I took them to bed with us.
Crumbs in my hair, sweet custard coating his mouth, I decided I would never again judge Fred Byrne for what he needed to do, regardless of his wife. It was easy, now that I understood passion properly, to see why you would move heaven and earth to secure it.
12
THE THING ABOUT me and Carey is that we were both dirty. By which I mean: we were both perverted, and we were both unclean. I bled on his sheets and the stain remained for the duration of our relationship. He met me from the bus once wearing sweatpants, a string vest, and swigging from a pint bottle of full-fat milk. He smelled like sweat and like someone who had been digging outside, though he had no garden. I loved it all. When we had sex I could taste the day on him. I walked around with my nose in my collar afterwards, catching pockets of his smell on myself.
Things got weird with us quickly. Not kinky exactly: we didn’t have the money for that. Kinky to me was suspenders and small, dishwasher-proof vibrators. But intense. We had a very soft way of asking each other to do obscene things.
“Let me run this knife against the inside of your leg, will you, Rache?” he said once, us both lying on his couch. The big kitchen knife was sitting on his coffee table, having been used to crumble up a small brick of hash the night before. He kissed me tenderly, his left hand stroking my hair, his right holding the cold blade against my skin while he moved inside me.
“Shh, shhh,” he said. “Don’t be frightened.”
It was, quite simply, fantastic.
Carey lived with two other guys near the Mercy hospital. My experience of them was having them suddenly arrive home while Carey and I were being degenerates. If we weren’t eating chocolate mousse from a vat intended for catering, we were having loud, odd sex. I should have been more embarrassed. There were previous iterations of my personality that would have been. But with Carey I discovered new depths of shamelessness, and I liked it. We didn’t need regular meals, or real sleep, or date nights. Our love had short fingernails. It was clawing and mischievous and it wrapped us in spit. I couldn’t pull myself away from it, so it amazed me when he could.
This was the problem. I could stay with Carey for as long as I wanted, but as soon as I left, it was hard to get back in again. Like a Grimms’ fairy tale, or a reverse Hotel California. Once, I spent three nights at his house, and when I ran out of underwear I finally moved to go home.
“Ah, don’t go,” he whined, wrapping his arms around my waist, his head on my stomach. “Who will I chat to?”
“You’ve got two perfectly good housemates.”
“They’re nerds.”
“Look, I’ll go home, get some new clothes, and come straight back. Okay?”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
I went home, packed a new bag, chatted to James, and was back by dinnertime. I picked up chips from the chipper, ice cream from Centra. I rang his doorbell, and waited. No answer. I rang it again. I listened to the bell echo around his house, leaning on the buzzer again and again, until his next-door neighbour came out of her house to say I was waking up her baby. I sat on the doorstep, ate the chips, and went home.
When I got hold of him, two days later, he said he had fallen asleep. Which wasn’t surprising, considering how late we were staying up, and how much weed we were smoking. “Well, you did say you’d come straight back,” he said defensively. “How was I to know that meant two hours?”
It seemed churlish to me that someone who didn’t know whether it was Wednesday or Thursday could get hung up over a stray sixty minutes. But he was firm, keeping to the letter and not the spirit of my original statement, and the more I argued with him the more he drifted away from me.
April is a dangerous time to get obsessed with a man who is harder to pin down than egg whites. It was supposed to be my study month, and I should have been working on my final essays. Instead, I was either dazed from a night with Carey or sure that he was dead. He went days at a time without talking to me. He was always concerned, after he turned up, to hear that I was so upset at his disappearance. But he was concerned the way your friend is when you tell them that the NHS won’t book in your mammogram for another eight weeks: Oh no! What a badly run system?! Too bad it’s the only one we have, eh!
James, who was going through a similar thing with Dr. Byrne, asked me if I thought Carey was sleeping with other people. Eleven years later, and with the benefit of hindsight, interrogation and a greater knowledge of men, I still think no. I think he just couldn’t get it together. And by “it,” I mean “life.” He called in sick because he missed the bus. He couldn’t be bothered buying salt （“I don’t need a whole thing of it”）， so he shoplifted small quantities when he was in Tesco, pouring it into an empty envelope. He was a person who did what he wanted, when he wanted, and if you weren’t directly in his eyeline you became part of the smoky ether.
“The thing about Carey,” James said once, when we were up late and commiserating over our hopeless men, “is that he would walk over hot coals for you, but he won’t commit to lunch plans.”