“Where have you learned all this?” I asked. “Since when do you say words like ‘pilot’？”
“The DVD extras on Frasier,” he said. “The commentary.”
James was often shy about his lack of education. He had got a Leaving Cert, barely, and went straight into retail and service jobs after school.
“You could make it about you and Fred,” I said. I was trying to call Dr. Byrne “Fred” around him, to show that I was okay with it, even though he was always Dr. Byrne or Fred Byrne to me.
“No, no.” He shook his head. “I want it to be a comedy. Not, like, a drama.”
“But sitcoms need to have some drama, don’t they?”
“Drama like Alice putting books under a dead person’s name to shift copies of her crush’s book. That’s how dramatic I’m willing to get.”
I laughed. “But why would anyone care about that?”
He rolled his eyes at me to show that I didn’t understand comedy. I looked at the top of the page and saw the title of the show. Michael & Alice.
“I think people are going to think of Will & Grace straight away,” I said. “Especially if it’s a man and a woman’s name, separated by an ampersand.”
“They don’t own the ampersand,” he said. We had a very complicated relationship with Will & Grace. People brought it up with us a lot, wherein James would remind them that he wasn’t gay. Though the longer the relationship with Fred Byrne was going on, the less he jumped to defend himself.
We got high and paranoid that our co-workers would sue once we were famous, so we changed the setting to a movie rental place. Money being tight, we stopped going out three or four nights a week. We were now down to a paltry—and in our eyes, borderline antisocial—two. We made up for it with trips to the legal high head shop, where a bag of synthetic cannabis cost a tenner and lasted us a week. My essays had finally been handed in, and college was over. We had endless hours to smoke the dense, giggly herbal blend.
Dr. Byrne, who was supposed to be working on his next book, sometimes dropped by to declare his disapproval. He was less nervous of me now, and treated me like a younger sister.
“I wish you two would smoke ordinary weed,” he said.
“What are we? Millionaires?” I said, then James shushed me, eager that Dr. Byrne wouldn’t feel sorry for him.
“What’s your book about, Fred?” I could only call him Fred when I was high.
“The Big House novel in early-twentieth-century Irish fiction,” he said. “Gothic tensions, figurative ghosts versus the real ghosts from the…”
“Famine?” I said, and then spluttered with laughter.
Dr. Byrne, to his enduring credit, saw the funny side. “I know, I know, me and the famine.”
“What is it?” I giggled. “What is it with you and the famine?”
He sighed, and did something extraordinary. He took the horrible joint of synthetic weed from James, and inhaled. “Honestly, Rachel? I think it started because I wanted to be thin.”
James sat up, affection for Fred Byrne suddenly washing over him, clearing the hazy high. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, babe.”
They went upstairs soon after. I fell asleep on the couch, face first in a copy of Take a Break. When I woke up, it was two hours later, and Dr. Byrne was shaking me. It wasn’t even dinnertime.
“Rachel,” he said, “I’m off, but I forgot to say: Deenie has a job for you.”
I had drooled so much that my face was stuck to the pages of the magazine.
“Doing what?”
“Lord knows, but she thinks she has something for you. Fifty quid a week.”
“For how many days?”
“However many days she needs you, I suppose.”
I was confused. “So I could work one day or five days and still get fifty quid?”
“It’s an internship, Rachel Murray, and you’re lucky to be getting anything. She says to email her.” He patted my leg. “Don’t be high on your first day.”
I emailed Deenie, and she told me to come in on Monday. Four days away. She gave an address. A quiet, residential street near the college.
My guts crunched. When I asked Dr. Byrne for his wife to get me a job, I imagined myself in a big office, where I would be dropped off in the post room by Deenie on the first day and then left to make a name for myself. I did not imagine myself going to her house: their house. How was I going to work with Deenie, all day every day, and come home to the sweat-soaked bedsheets at the foot of the stairs?
I was so nervous about the whole thing that I took myself into town the next day, and searched up and down the high street for an outfit. I needed something that said I took the opportunity seriously, but also, that I was willing to be covered in printer ink if the occasion called for it. I ended up in the Barnardo’s on Prince’s Street. I bought a black knit vest for four euro, and a white shirt to go under it.
I decided to cut through the English Market on my way home, for no reason other than it brought me joy. The high ceilings, the stone walls, the smell of raw meat and briney olives. The nobility that came from it being the only place in the county where you could buy both a cream cake and all four of a pig’s trotters without having to do a full turn.
I wandered through, feeling sentimental, heavy and trapped. For the first time in my life, there was nothing to get ready for in September. I was used to entering a summer knowing that the season was a set amount of time to enjoy myself. In a few months, my results would come through, and I knew already what they would be: a not-particularly-high 2:1, from an ordinary university, in a useless subject.
What on earth would become of me? Usually, I worked full time at O’Connor’s over the summer. Now it wasn’t even worth enquiring about. The customers just weren’t there.
“Rache,” I heard someone call. “Hey! Rachel!”
There he was. Standing at a bread stall. Carey.
He grinned like there had never been a cross word between us. Which, I suppose, there hadn’t been. He just vanished, as was his well-established custom, and then I sent all those voicemails.
I couldn’t fake that I was happy to see him. Neither did I have the confidence to tell him off. I stood there, breathing hard, my nostrils warm like a dragon’s.
“Two minutes,” he called. “Give me two minutes.”
He was working at the bread stall. He was sliding two sticks of French bread into a paper bag, his hands coated in flour, smiling at a woman while she paid him. His red-blond hair had grown out too long, not down but out, spikes of it pointing this way and that.
The blood ran into my face. I couldn’t wait for him, even if it was two minutes. Any length of time was an insult. I left, and heard his voice calling after me.
On the street, the sun was shining brightly, and sweat poured from my armpits. The synthetic weed did that to me. It was fun when you smoked it but had all kinds of strange side effects the next day. I sat down on the stone wall of the Unitarian church, and waited for him. I prayed that he wouldn’t find me, and thought I might walk into traffic if he didn’t. I put my face in my hands, my breath short, my panic increasing.
“Sweetheart, what are you doing out here?” he said, and put his arm around my shoulders. “Come on now. What does Rachel Murray have to be upset about?”