He waved his hand over me, as if casting a spell. “Ah, you know, I got the sort of genteel middle-class thing down. Old money, old Cork. Now your mother is one of two things, haven’t decided which: fabulous thin drunk or a total wagon. Tight little mouth, like a canary’s minge. Am I warm?”
I laughed, wondering how he could possibly know this. “Warm-ish. The second one,” I said, and then felt mean. My mum worked in the practice, too, and because my father’s procedures were mostly cosmetic, they had both suffered from the shifting priorities of a country with less to smile about.
“And the boyfriend…the boyfriend, the boyfriend, the boyfriend. I’m split between two again.”
He had moved his hands so much while talking that the cherry had fallen off his cigarette, and he paused to relight it.
“Together since secondary school, sweethearts of your year, everyone thinks you’re going to get married, you’re not so sure, though. Plans to go to Thailand together.” He exhaled. “Or older man, doing a Ph.D. or something, slightly inappropriate age gap, a bit of a dry balls, your friends hate him but they haven’t told you.”
I don’t know why he thought it was okay for him to insult everyone I knew, both real and imagined. But he was comfortable that he would get away with it, and so I let him get away with it.
“Neither,” I said, defensive of Jonathan. “He’s neither of those things. He’s not categorisable.”
“But which one is he closer to?”
I thought about it. “I mean, the first one, I suppose.” Which I only said because it was the less bad one.
I was in love, or so I thought. My trouble was getting people to take it seriously. I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.
Jonathan and I were both Cork kids who had grown up in the suburbs surrounding the city and felt resentful that we went to university there. There were six good pubs and three good clubs, as far as we were concerned, and we put on a good show of being jaded about Cork city while simultaneously making no effort to visit anything or do anything that we hadn’t done when we were seventeen.
As a couple, we were serious to the point of dullness, and curiously conservative in our outlook. Not long ago, I had to venture into an old email account to change my password for something or other. While I was there I found one of my sociology essays from this time, the Jonathan period, emailed to my tutor. The essay was called “The Patriarchy in Modern Ireland.” I clicked into it, eager to see what my young self had to say about the subjugation of women in Ireland.
Whether the patriarchy is or isn’t a factor in modern Ireland is beyond the point, the opening sentence read. The question is: why has the patriarchy been so unfairly derided as an organisational principle?
The essay shocked me. I was being completely sincere. There I was, nineteen years old, the same girl who had used all her birthday money just two years prior to procure the morning-after pill in a country that made it purposefully awkward and uncomfortable to obtain, fighting on the patriarchy’s behalf. I read the whole thing and deleted it. I then walked around London for two days, paranoid. I was paranoid the way only people of my generation are paranoid, that I was about to be publicly derided by an unseen, online mass for ideological crimes committed as a teenager. I had thought I was always a feminist. Surely I was born knowing that things were unfair. But no, that all came later, in my mid-twenties, when I lived in London.
But this was the me that Jonathan knew, and that Jonathan and I had created together. We would sit in pubs and invent opinions, mostly by taking a common consensus and then reversing it. Radical thought to us was hating the film Anchorman.
James left me outside Sober Lane. I asked if he wanted to come in and meet my boyfriend. He said no.
“I wouldn’t want to make trouble for you,” he said. “I wouldn’t want him to think I was stealing his girlfriend.”
I laughed, because James was so obviously gay, and the idea of him stealing me from anyone was ridiculous. But the laugh was too long, and loud, and the way James looked at me made my face burn. He was hurt and he was closeted, and he thought that his closet was a good one. I stopped laughing.
“He’s not the jealous type,” I said quickly, and a little sunshine came back into James’s face.
I said goodbye to my new friend and disappeared inside the dark bar where Jonathan was waiting, kicking myself for being rude.
But James did steal me from Jonathan. Over the course of just a month, I would be colonised by James on a molecular level, and my personality would mould around his wherever there was space to do so. The official line is that Jonathan dumped me. The truth is that I left him for another man.
Here’s a story that James loves telling people: Rachel and I have had one fight, and it happened before we even really knew each other.
And I usually say: We had our one fight, and James still thought I was a girl called Sabrina.
And then he says: So really, my first fight was with Sabrina.
We’ve had more fights than that, of course. Two. We do not discuss them.
It had been a couple of weeks since James had walked me to Sober Lane, and he hadn’t shown the same interest in me again. I started to resent him. It wasn’t fair to shine his light so harshly and then to skip away, leaving me dark and chilly with my own dull crowd. Most of my closest friends had gone away to college. The high achievers to Trinity, the aspiring teachers to Mary I. The people I was left with were either girls who I had been tangentially friendly with in secondary school or Jonathan’s friends.
James was the first person I had met in years that I badly wanted to be friends with, but it seemed he did not want to be friends with me. On top of that, he had charmed everyone in management so much that he always got first pick of the best shifts.
I didn’t know how to be mad at people yet, so I just aped the behaviour I had seen at home: speaking to someone in tight, terse little sentences until they went insane. It was how my mother fought with me, how I fought with my younger brothers, and how they fought with their friends. It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged. People were always wronging us. That the most recent economic crisis had devastated my parents’ business and depleted their investments was yet more proof that the world was out to get the Murrays. We were responding, at that time, by giving the world the cold shoulder.
After a while, James sensed my new iciness and floated towards it. He kept on trying to engage me, making jokes about my ancestral bank-ishness. I was mostly ignoring him. The shifts thing really bothered me. I had come to the conclusion that James was a selfish, shallow person—a sociopath, maybe—and that I was going to keep clear of him until he realised his mistake and stopped hogging the good time slots.
After I had ignored a few of his attempts to engage me, he came behind the counter to sort out some orders. And he poked me with a pen at the back of the knee. He hit, as he would continue to do, a nerve. My knee buckled and I went down a little. I didn’t fall, but the disturbance in gravity made me queasy and annoyed. I told him to stop. He laughed and slipped into serving a customer as if nothing had happened.