He put on a purple hoodie of mine, too snug to zip up more than halfway. He stepped outside, and James and I looked at each other as if Carey had just shot himself into space. I heard Carey, gentle but firm.
“You all right, mate? Had a bit much, have you? Do you need a cup of tea?”
“A cup of tea?” James hissed. “Is he going to offer him my room, too?”
I heard a mumbling, staggering voice, but the bass of it was still recognisable. I ran out into the yard.
“Chris!” It was my brother. Six foot three, seventeen years old, and his jeans soaked in blood. “What happened?”
I sat him down on one of our kitchen chairs. He smelled not just of drink and blood, but of something strong and medical.
“That’s my sister,” he said crossly to Carey, tilting around in his seat. “That’s my big sister. Who are you? Are you guys fucking? Are you banging my sister? Rachel, what happened to the last guy? Long face. Long sad horse face.”
“Christ,” James said, already bored. “He’s on meow meow.”
“He can’t be on Mephedrone,” I snapped. “He’s a teenager.”
“I just need to hang out here for a while,” Chris said. “Until it wears off and I can go to sleep. I’ll go first thing in the morning. Please, Rachel, please, don’t send me home. Come on. Be sound.”
“Is Mum expecting you?” I said, my back ramrod straight. “And why are you bleeding?”
“Don’t be a gowl, Rachel.” He turned to Carey. “Dude, do you have a cigarette?”
He showed Carey the cut on his leg. He got it climbing through a broken window in a squat house where they had all been taking the stuff. I worried whether this meant my brother was a drug addict, but the more he spoke the more I realised that he was playing at this the same way I was playing at black coffee. He had made some kind of realisation about the diminishing fortunes of our family, and was trying out new lifestyles. His previous summer had been spent on a family friend’s boat in west Cork, and this summer was about squats.
Carey found tweezers, an old pillowcase and a bottle of vodka. Chris refused to take off his jeans so Carey carefully cut a hole with kitchen scissors around the wound, which pleased Chris very much. “People buy jeans with holes in them,” he kept saying. “But I got this fairly. Through noble means.”
He still seemed so much like a baby to me. His big soft face and sandy hair, looking like a toddler’s impression of James Dean. Carey picked glass out of Chris’s leg, shard by shard, with the tweezers. Chris chatted to Carey the whole time, both of them smoking, Carey with his gold-rimmed spectacles on. James went to bed. I sat on the couch, a background character, as Carey cleaned the wound with vodka and wrapped it in torn-up strips of pillow case. I had nothing to add, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene. I felt like I was in the 1930s. Nothing so male had ever happened in my house, unless you count the great number of men fucking other men.
At some point, Chris’s high softened and conversation became more normal. We, in that way siblings do for outsiders, tried to make a travelling circus out of our childhood. Stories about old holiday rentals and falling out of trees. Carey was a generous audience, asking us questions, laughing at the right time. We eventually went to bed at around five, leaving my drooping brother on the couch.
“Thank you,” I said, reaching out to touch his arm. “You were so good with him.”
“He’s a nice lad.”
“You don’t think he’s a junkie, or something?”
“Nah. Brother of yours? Never.”
“I don’t know what we would have done without you.”
He sighed a strange, tired sigh. “You can do anything without me.”
He fell asleep then. Leaving me to bask in the oddness of the comment, and to wish that he had stopped at the word “anything.”
At this point in our relationship, I was so obsessed with Carey that I had to stop myself from constantly comparing him to famous movie stars. I complimented him vividly, begged him for sex, hung on his every elusive statement. And yet he would still come out with statements like these. Melancholic, nocturnal comments that implied I would outgrow him, or see him for who he truly was. He was wonderful, but he didn’t have a great deal of self-esteem. He was a dosser, after all. A born dosser.
My parents had always taught me that what mattered most in a person was direction. Which is another way of saying: it doesn’t matter if they have money now, as long as they plan to have money later. It became clear to me that Carey had no direction, but I didn’t mind. He was kind, and he was mad about me, and while he probably should have thought more about his career at the age of twenty-seven, I was quietly glad that he didn’t. It gave him more time to focus on more important things. Namely, me.
The year in Shandon Street did a lot for me, but it did this most of all. It detached me from any kind of inherited moral system. I stopped sizing others up in accordance with the values I had been taught: who was a loser, who was closeted, who was cheating on their wife. I learned the value of context, and of people. It came in handy later on, when I became a journalist.
* * *
At 8 a.m., I went downstairs. Chris’s eyes flew open right away.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay. Tea?”
“Yeah. Tea.”
He got up, all long and teenage, looking like he had extra hands and feet. He followed me into the kitchen.
“I think Dad is depressed,” he said. “Capital d.”
I had spent a lot of time worrying about our parents, in the years I spent living at home during college. As far as I was concerned it was Chris’s turn to carry the burden. My job was keeping out of their hair. It is amazing to me, now, how convinced I was that my emotional debt to the people who had raised me was paid, simply because I no longer lived with them.
“If it ever gets too much,” I said, “just come here. You’re always welcome.”
But it was sentences like this—you’re always welcome—that erected an invisible wall of formality between us. I needed Carey to come downstairs, to treat Chris like he was any old bloke on the street, to help me build a bridge between the Boy Island my brothers were on and the grubby glamour of me and James. But Carey did not wake up for another four hours, and by that point Chris was gone. He never came back to the house on Shandon Street.
* * *
Just as it was the summer of Carey, it was the summer of Deenie, too.
The Harrington-Byrnes’ home was a ground-floor flat in an old house in Sunday’s Well, on the other side of Fitzgerald’s Park, the only decent green space in Cork city. The house was Edwardian, with big bay windows you could sit in, and bookshelves and strange rugs in every room. It was the most beautiful house I’d ever been in. At that age, you’ve only ever been in family homes or student houses. The home of two artsy professionals in their thirties is a magnificent thing to behold, more enchanting than an old Russian palace.
It had three bedrooms. The one they slept in, the one Deenie worked in, and the one Dr. Byrne worked in. The living room was a tiny, cosy red room with a small TV and a green squashy couch. The kitchen was huge and full of sun.