The accent still killed me. The curious, amused flatness of the Derry voice. I hated myself for being Irish, and for being suckered in by an Irish accent.
“Fuck you,” I said, my face still in my hands. “Don’t do that. Not after everything.”
“I know,” he said, in that tone he used for when he knew he had acted badly. His goddamn this NHS voice.
“Don’t just say I know!” I said, raising my voice so loud that the pigeons fluttered away. “Say you’re sorry, at least.”
“I am sorry.”
“You’re not.”
“Let me buy you a coffee.”
“No.”
“Actually, you’re dead right, I can’t buy you a coffee, I’m at work.” He considered this for a second. “We close in an hour, though. Do you want to hang out with the bread while I tidy up?”
“No, I do not want to do that,” I said, though I did.
“Listen,” he said, and jangled his pocket change, “I’ve got pain au chocolats for days in there. Go round to Gloria Jean’s and get us both a drink. Then come back and you can eat pastry and drink coffee while I finish. If at any point you decide I’m too much of a shit to stay, you can leave, and you’ll have got a coffee and a cake out of it.”
“Fine.”
He gave me a fiver in change. I went to Gloria Jean’s and got us both a small black coffee. When I came back he had found a stool from somewhere, and dragged it next to the counter.
“Sit yourself up there, now, missis,” he said. He gave me the pain au chocolat, as promised, and then left me alone.
I drank my coffee and watched him serve customers. The last time I saw Carey he was a customer service rep for Apple. He wasn’t earning very much, but it was a respectable job, and there was talk of him progressing. Talk from who, I don’t know. He was obviously a terrible employee. He was for ever skipping out on work to spend time with me, and I wasn’t even important enough for him to wish me happy birthday.
I picked up that rage, and held on to it; I needed to remind myself why I hated Carey, because watching him lock up the bread shop was far too entrancing. The smell of pastry, the chocolate melting on my tongue, the bitter black coffee. I needed to remind myself of my anger, so I didn’t inadvertently mix up good snacks with a good man.
James says there are three kinds of Irish male body types: tennis, rugby and hurling. James was tennis: lean frame, long bones. Dr. Byrne was rugby: thick-set, a tendency towards chubby, and would look large regardless of how much weight he gained or lost. Carey was hurling. He was slim and small-ish, but compact, square and muscled. “Built like a Jack Russell terrier,” he said of himself. “And every bit as common.”
He took a long stick, and reached up to pull the shutters of the bread stall down. He got on his tiptoes in his banged-up grey trainers, the kind most men now wouldn’t even wear to the gym. And I watched his stomach.
Another thing about Carey.
He had the most beautiful stomach of any man I had ever been with. Before or since.
Without even trying, he had one of those stomachs that low-slung jeans were invented for. Hip bones like ivory. Abdominal muscles that slanted in a V-shape towards his crotch. Faint golden hair under his belly-button. He had no awareness about any of this, I don’t think. He was completely oblivious to how much I was objectifying him, while remaining mute on my stool.
“Thank you for staying,” he said. The shop was shut. I was once again in an enclosed space with a man.
He looked, for once, genuinely sorry.
“The thing about you, Rachel,” he said softly, “is that you make me insane.”
“Fucking hell,” I blurted out. “Is that it?”
“It’s true! And I make you insane!” He picked up his phone. He still had a Nokia, not the 3210, but not much more advanced than that, either. “I have the tapes.”
I tried to swallow my shame about the voicemails, and to stay angry.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Carey.”
“Pet, listen to me. I’m twenty-seven.”
“So?”
“Twenty-seven is very old to be dossing off work to stay in bed with a teenager.”
“I’m twenty-one, Carey,” I spluttered. “Which you would know if you came to my birthday party.”
He let that one hang there.
Northern Irish men.
They know when to shut the fuck up.
“I’m sorry I didn’t wish you a happy birthday,” he said carefully. “But, I don’t know. Things got very serious, between us.”
“No, they didn’t!” I practically shouted. “We literally weren’t even calling one another boyfriend and girlfriend.”
For some reason, everything out of my mouth made me sound like a disgruntled four-year-old.
“Seriously un-serious, I think is what I mean,” he clarified. I narrowed my eyes at him. “Listen, Rache. I’m a dosser. A born dosser. I’ve been dossing around all my life. I’ve dossed in Derry. I’ve dossed in Belfast. And when I moved down to Cork, I thought, Okay, real job, real life, real flat. You’ve got it together, James.”
I looked around, as if James had just appeared, and then I remembered that I was the only person who called him Carey.
“Then I met you, and Jesus Christ, girl, if I didn’t piss it all up the wall immediately.”
I couldn’t believe how he was spinning this. In all the conversations I had imagined with Carey, I had never once thought of this.
“I never asked you to call in sick,” I said. “Or wear the same clothes for four days in a row.”
“I know you didn’t, pet,” he said. He touched my face, grazed it with the back of his knuckles. My rage flowed away and I pressed my cheek into his hand.
“But you’re very young,” he continued. “You’re still doing the student thing. And why not? It’s a laugh! But it takes so little for me to slip back into that. Sleeping till noon and all the rest of it. I’ve no self-control.”
Neither did I. I wanted him to grab me, then and there, to screw me next to the focaccia.
“When did you lose your job?” I asked.
“About two days before your birthday,” he said, looking ashamed of himself. “And you know, it was a wake-up call. I said to myself: Listen, this is what happens, running around with younger girls.”
The age difference had never come up before, and I was immediately suspicious.
“Suddenly I’m a twenty-seven-year-old who can’t buy his college girlfriend a birthday present,” he said glumly. “I had to have a word with myself. I went home.”
“Home home? Derry?”
“I knew if I stayed, my dick would drag me back to Shandon Street.”
He sighed, as if his dick was always doing that.
“You could have rung,” I said.
“I know,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”
“I really hate you for that.”
“You should hate me,” he agreed. “But I knew if I heard your voice…” He gazed off into the distance, looking sorrowful.
“Oh, come on,” I snapped. “Stop acting like that.”
“Acting like what?”