I had a new flush of sympathy for Dr. Byrne, who had got through his own clashing loyalties by blanking me. I understood the temptation.
“How’s the TV show going?” I said. We had given up on saying that I was co-writing it with him. I hadn’t opened the document or written a word in a month.
He didn’t reply, and just went to take a shower. His second of the day.
Some days later, James took three buses to Dingle, eight hours in total, and gatecrashed a festival that Dr. Byrne was speaking at. It was a profoundly stupid thing to do. Dr. Byrne ignored and dodged him at the festival, sent him a terse text message to meet him at the hotel, and then they argued all night. I don’t think James actually wanted Dr. Byrne to leave his wife. He just felt like he deserved more respect, more time, a small pied-à-terre and a marabou dressing gown. He wanted the affair to be Frencher, if at all possible.
James knew all this was impossible, but he was reaching the same space that I had hit in May. He was starting to wonder what was going to become of him, too, except his case felt more drastic than mine. He didn’t even have the mediocre degree from the mediocre university.
One morning in July, he came into the kitchen, where I was toasting bagels. Carey was in the shower.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
This was three days after the Dingle trip, and James had been sequestered in his room ever since. He had the ironing board out, and was going through both my clothes and his.
“I’ve decided to get a grip,” he said. “I’m going to give up Fred.”
“Wow,” I said. “Well done.”
Just as I had been willing to accept that James was straight when we first moved in, I was prepared to allow for this fiction also. My suspicion was that Fred Byrne had finished with him in Dingle.
“I’m going to get another job. I’m sick of being poor. And I’m going to finish the TV show.”
I nodded. “I’m so pleased, pal. That’s great.”
I was relieved that we didn’t have to officially discuss my no longer writing the TV show with him. I had lost all interest at that point, but it felt rude to say.
“I’m twenty-three in November, Rache.”
“I know.”
“I want to have a plan by then. Not just a plan. But, like, prospects.”
I hugged him. Carey came out of the shower with my towel around his waist and his famous stomach on display.
“Carey, can I come to the library with you today?” James asked.
“Course, mate,” Carey replied, grabbing a plate. “What are you at?”
“I’m going to become a screenwriter.”
“Quality,” he replied, leaving the room with his bagel.
Carey had no idea about James and Fred Byrne, and had no concept of Fred Byrne outside of him being my ex-professor and the husband of my boss. It’s amazing to me now, how many secrets I kept from him, but it just never seemed to come up. He never asked questions about James’s sexuality, although I’m sure he assumed. Equally, I knew he didn’t care. Not that he was making a conscious choice to be accepting; but that it literally didn’t figure on his radar.
There were many, many things that did not figure on Carey’s radar. The longer we were together, the more I could tell that everyone who knew him was frustrated by the way he existed. His eldest sister, Cate, had started calling me when trying to find him. I had never met her, but she understood that we were locked into the same fate and had to find a way to work together. “Rachel, how are ya?” she began every call. She did not wait for a response. “Listen, James needs to charge his phone and call Mam. She’s not well again. And it’s Dad’s birthday on Saturday. Can you tell him?”
Our chats, short as they were, always felt like two people who were managing a child after an amiable divorce. Sometimes it was a lupus thing. Carey would never say it, but there were days where he just had to sleep, or to stay still, and he refused to call me on those days. It was the only thing I ever saw him be embarrassed about.
But mostly, it was just him being a flake.
“Why can’t you just charge your phone?” I would say to him. “Why can’t you just…？”
“I don’t know,” he would answer, equally mystified. “I just don’t know.”
For as many things that didn’t figure on his radar, there were many quite wonderful things that did. Once he rang me from a payphone outside the library, having once again forgotten to charge his mobile.
“Rache,” he said, “listen to this. Back in the whaling days, eighteen hundreds or whatever, they figured out the best oil was in the sperm whale’s brain. They called that the junk. And they would lower someone down, with a winch or whatever, into the whale’s skull, and he would have to, like, scoop out the brains. Did you know that?”
“I did not know that.”
“What do you think that smelled like?” he asked. “We’re talking a brain that’s as big as your house.”
I heard a faint tapping sound on his end of the line. “What?” Carey said.
“Sir, you cannot take books from the library if you’ve not checked them out.”
“I’m only reading this to my girlfriend. Rachel, are you still there? The oil was called spermaceti. Because it looked like cum.”
“You need to bring the book back inside, sir.”
I howled with laughter, gasping so hard that I had to explain it to Deenie. In those moments, I didn’t care about Carey’s fundamental flakiness, or the fact that he was supposed to be in the library filling out job applications. But the fear always came back. I had long, paranoid nights of wondering whether he had died. There were days when I didn’t hear from him. But I was learning that this was part of love, or of loving him anyway.
“If he was anyone else in the world,” I said to James one night, after looking at my phone for the fiftieth time, “I’d tell him to go fuck himself.”
“But he isn’t anyone else in the world,” said James, warm sadness rising in his throat.
I laced his fingers through mine. It had been weeks since he had seen Dr. Byrne.
14
IN JULY, Ben called a meeting and said he had to cut our pay. Up until that point I was on 9.50 an hour, and James was on nine. The extra fifty cents reflected the two years of seniority I had on him, plus the fact that I had keys to the till and could do cash refunds. We had time-and-a-third on Sundays and on bank holidays. The only way he could keep our jobs, Ben explained, was to cut us all down to eight an hour, and to get rid of time-and-a-third until further notice.
He didn’t want to fire anyone, he said, because we were like family. But he urged us to look for jobs. “I can be flexible if you guys have interviews,” he said mournfully.
People took the hint. Sabrina, who I still quietly saw as a rival, handed in her notice the next day. She was moving to New York at the end of the summer. A few others started working for the big call centre out in Bishopstown. Carey, James and I were all terrified of the big call centre in Bishopstown. It made us feel like old horses, about to be turned into glue. Carey didn’t help matters. He had a phone job when he worked at Apple.