“Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s like nepotism, though, kind of.”
“It’s favourable treatment, but far less hard-working students get it all the time, so we won’t worry.”
“Are you sure?”
“Rachel, come here,” he said gravely. I moved from the armchair to the couch. He put his big arm around me, somewhere between a dad and a friend. “We’ve all had our hearts broken, and we’ve all had someone cut us some slack because of it.”
He opened his messenger bag and took out his laptop. I remember being surprised he was connected to the wifi already. Had Dr. Byrne been working here? James and I sat on either side while he tapped out an email to the department head. We decided that I wasn’t sick, but grieving, because it was true. He said that I was afraid of approaching the whole department because I was conscious of my lack of blood connection to the dead. He stipulated that, given Rachel Murray’s previous dedication to her studies, she should be given an extension until the end of May.
“Now,” he said, opening another tab on his browser, “pizza.”
Dr. Byrne ordered and went to the bathroom. I snuggled next to James, my head on his shoulder. “He is nice, though,” I said, exhausted from all the crying, “is the thing.”
And now I’m crying again, because he was a nice man, a really nice man. Is a nice man? So hard to know, when all you know about a person is that they are in a coma.
* * *
I had thought Dr. Byrne would stick around for the pizza he had paid for at least, but he made his exit as soon as it arrived.
“No, no, you two do your thing,” he said, which I liked. I appreciated when any adult acknowledged the validity of me and James’s “thing.”
“Rachel, my dear,” he said, sliding his laptop back into his messenger bag. “I just wanted to say…sorry again. I’m so fond of you, you know. I didn’t want to embarrass you. In class, I mean.”
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. “It’s over now.”
This didn’t sit right with him. He knew that he had not done enough. “Is there anything else I can do? With the department, I mean. Name it.”
This was my only chance, so I went for it. “I want a job.”
“You have a job,” James said, aghast.
“I can’t…” Dr. Byrne began, equally tortured. He couldn’t excuse my essays and give me a job. It was too suspect. He was already a man who had married his student.
“No, no,” I said. “I want to work in books. In publishing.”
He was a little alarmed. “With Deenie?”
“An internship or something. I want to work with books, and they say it’s all about who you know. And, well, she’s the only person I know.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll put it to her.”
The word “blackmail” never crossed my mind. Although it may have crossed his.
“I would never say to her…” I said, groping at the unsayable.
He put his hand up. “I know. Sort your essays first. Do your exams. I’ll talk to Dee about setting something up in June.”
There is a thing among middle-class people in Ireland, and it is called “contacts.” There are contacts everywhere, of course, and in England most of all, but in Ireland it works differently. In England it is smooth, filtered, insidious. In England favours are exchanged through a vast web of privilege, shunting nice girls and boys down narrowing corridors of expensive schools and cultural capital. In Ireland it is overt. You refer to people as your “contacts”; you ask other people about theirs. Even now, my father will call me and ask about my “contacts” in the Irish press, because he wants to get a story out about dodgy dental businesses in Turkey and the long-term effects of a cheap tooth implant. It comes from a culture of mass immigration, I think. The practice of rocking up to a street halfway across the world with the address of someone you don’t know but who went to school with your florist.
So the conversation with Dr. Byrne about a job didn’t seem sneaky or underhanded. It is just how Ireland works. Or how I thought it worked.
I got through my essays, and my exams. The Carey thing still tortured me, but I was able to eat the dull gruel of it every morning and get on with my day. I stayed mostly sober for the month, and felt the sense slowly come back to me. I listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell.
I thought about the knife on my leg, the head in my coat, the milk at the bus stop. I felt ruined for other men.
We were struggling for money. Ben had cut our Thursday-and Friday-evening shifts, and instead called either one of us at 3 p.m. to say whether he needed us. He tried to be fair to both of us, alternating phone calls. We started to take his proclamations about the industry more seriously.
“Why don’t you ask Fred?” I said one day, when we were counting up couch change. “He can spot you a few hundred.”
“How much do you think lecturers make?”
“More than us!”
“No. I’m not going to be a prostitute.”
“There’s a twenty-euro bottle of wine in there that says different.”
“That’s not the same.”
“I just think it’s mental that we’re drinking C?tes du Rh?ne and eating fish fingers.”
I was too busy with exams to look for extra work, but James found a job at a cloakroom. It made him miserable: it was deeply lonely, and he was always the last to go home. He wasn’t even invited out with the bar people afterwards, not that he could afford to go.
I was home one day, studying on the couch, when he came down from his room with his laptop.
“I’ve had enough of this!” he said. “Enough!”
“Enough of what?”
“Waiting for my life to start. We’re going to write a TV show.”
He opened his Microsoft Word to show that he had already started writing one. There were two characters talking, one called “Alice,” one called “Michael.”
“It’s about two hot twenty-somethings in a struggling bookshop,” he said. “He’s gay and she’s the only one who knows.”
I looked at him sideways. “Are you serious?”
“As cancer.”
He had switched the font to Courier New, the typewriter lettering, and had centre-aligned all the text to make it look like a real script. He had written two pages.
INT. BOOKSHOP. DAY.
MICHAEL, 22 and metrosexual, stands behind the counter of a bookshop. He talks to ALICE, 20, beautiful and studious.
“Metrosexual!” I squealed. “Beautiful! Studious!”
“Just read it,” he said, sounding defensive.
We read it out loud, together. I don’t remember much of what was in the script, but it was funny and warm, or maybe it just felt that way because I was with my best friend and we were playing.
“What happens next?” I said.
“Well, they say that you need a big event towards the end of the pilot, something that sets up the idea for the whole show,” he said, wrinkling his brow. I was amazed. James and I both worked part-time hours at O’Connor’s, but it never occurred to me that while I was going to college every day, he was learning about screenwriting.