I groped at the air with my hands. “I’m just some dumpy chick who works in a bookshop, Carey, you could have rung and broke it off with me without it becoming the dance of the seven veils.”
He was furious at me then. “Rachel, you’ve got a body like Wonder Woman; don’t give me that shite.”
I kissed him. Not because of the Wonder Woman thing, which I still think is bollocks, but because I had lost the will to not kiss him. He held me close, kissed me hard, and the smell of sweat and bread swept over me.
After a terrible and beautiful few minutes, I reached for his belt buckle.
“Now, now,” he said, taking my hand gently. “Not here.”
“Yes,” I said. “Here.”
“That’s old-life stuff, Rachel,” he said. “I need to be a grown-up now.”
He sounded hopeful and sad, like Peter Pan. I kissed him on the forehead and tried to hide my disappointment.
“Then I’ll be a grown-up, too.”
13
THERE’S PLENTY OF LANGUAGE, now, for what Carey did to me in April of 2010. Women I’m friends with would describe it as ghosting, as psychological manipulation. As gaslighting, even. The only credit they would give him would be the fact that he rightly assessed his situation. That he was too old for me, that the relationship was doomed, that he was too childish, and that he needed to grow up and get an age-appropriate girlfriend. He did need to take life seriously. And if that involved keeping a wide berth of me, then so be it.
But none of this rationale changes the hard facts of the case. We were mad about each other. And in the name of this madness, we really tried, and for a time succeeded, to be grown-ups together.
Our version of adulthood was this: we bought bagels at night.
“Have you bought bagels for the morning?” I would say, calling him on the way home from the bookshop, proud of myself. I was doing four days at the shop, and two with Deenie. Those bags of American-style sesame bagels were apparently the only thing that could get us up before 8 a.m. On the days Carey wasn’t working, he went to the library to fill out job applications for real jobs.
He started showering every day. I started hanging up my clothes. We said “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” fanatically, adding them extraneously to our sentences, like the word “Father” in prayer. I heard him on the phone.
Me and Rachel will be there, my girlfriend…I went there on Thursday, with my girlfriend…You want to go out to Douglas? Rachel, my girlfriend, is from there.
I learned more about him, and the painful gap of time when he pretended I didn’t exist. We gave ourselves a pre-midnight bedtime for weekdays, and yet never fell asleep before two. I twined myself around his terrier body and collected facts.
“I was very poorly when I was a little boy,” he said, and I shrieked with love at the use of the word poorly, when everyone I knew would just say sick. “Extremely poorly.”
He was the youngest of five, with four older sisters, and had an array of mysterious symptoms that were eventually diagnosed as lupus. I had heard of lupus. A contestant on America’s Next Top Model had it.
“Aye,” he said. “Mercedes.”
He was a surprising person that way. I didn’t know whether he knew about Mercedes because he watched Top Model or because he knew everyone famous who had lupus.
“It’s fine now, but I don’t know, I think I was babied a lot,” he sighed. “Between Mam and the girls, I could do no wrong.”
He had done two college courses, dropped out of them both, took out loans to go travelling, wandered. He was bailed out of endless jams with the explanation that he had missed out on a lot of his childhood. There was always sympathy, and he had constant charm to meet it with. The first wake-up call came the previous year, when his father pulled strings to get him the Apple job in Cork, and told him that it was the last thing the family was ever going to do for him.
I nodded in the darkness and tried to put aside my own rejection in favour of the bigger picture. I tried not to see Carey’s actions as good or bad but as in keeping with who he was.
* * *
If I was uninterested in my family during Carey’s first tenure as my boyfriend, I had almost forgotten them by his second. Knowing I wouldn’t come home of my own free will, my mother chased me down for coffee dates in town. Thinking about those coffees, even now, burns my guts. I wanted to completely reset the parameters of our relationship, and I had no interest in giving her time to adjust. I tried to rush the parent-child relationship into an adult-adult one, and I did this by drinking only black coffee, rolling cigarettes at the table, and then—most mortifying of all—sliding the rollie behind my ear.
It drove her crazy. It’s a set of memories that I always witness in the third person, as if I’m a film director: my too-long hair, my cheap dresses, my tits pushed up too much. I had one black Wonderbra, and I wore it to death, until the black straps were practically falling to my elbows. My mother squinting in disbelief, even burying her forehead in her palm. “Rachel,” she’d scowl. “Rachel, for God’s sake.” They had worked so hard to send me to a private girls’ school, to tennis clubs and pony camps, to end up—with what? With a daughter who keeps cigarettes behind her ear. I came home from those coffees and threw myself on the couch, waiting for attention from James.
“My mother,” I would say, “just can’t stand that I’m self-sufficient.”
My brothers I forgot about, and I assumed that they forgot about me. There wasn’t a firm pecking order in our house. Chris and I played together when we were small, but once Kevin came along and I started school, they became a separate entity to me. They were the boys and I was Rachel. I was a child who liked reading, and writing to auction houses to request that they send me their catalogues, and being treated with dour respect. I was a kid who put “cameo brooch” on her Christmas list. The boys lived on Boy Island. I think my lost precociousness was part of my mother’s misery that I was becoming such a stupid, tarty adult. There were only a few times when I still felt like the eldest sibling, and Carey was there for one of them.
We were in bed together and heard a thump coming from the yard outside. It sounded, at first, like a cat knocking over plant pots. Then the cat made a human, moaning sound.
“Stay here,” Carey said. “I’ll look.”
I followed him, of course. I was too turned on by the notion of a man protecting me not to follow him. I remember him so clearly, half-lit by the bulb above the oven: gingham checked boxers, no shirt, and the most incongruous gold-rimmed reading glasses that he kept near the bed.
“Who is it?” I rasped. “A robber?”
“A robber. Jesus. As if you have anything worth robbing.”
“We have a TV!”
“It’s some drunk lad.”
“What’s going on?” a bleary James said, from the top of the stairs. “Are we being robbed?”
“We might be,” I said. “We may be.”
“It’s just some waster,” Carey corrected. “Rachel, throw me a hoodie and I’ll go out to him.”
“What if he hits you?”
Carey gave me a withering look. He had that strange, straight-boy thing of not being afraid of physical confrontation.