“And we won’t know if you don’t ask him.”
“I will ask him.”
I did not ask him.
A week later, James came tearing down the stairs, holding his laptop. “RACHEL!” he yelled. “RACHEL!”
I was reading a week-old magazine and feeling depressed about money.
“I’ve got an email! An email about Discs!”
Hi James,
Thank you so much for submitting your script Discs to us. Unfortunately we are not able to take this any further as we are unable to produce unrepresented writers. However, I wanted to reach out personally and say that I thoroughly enjoyed your writing, and find myself very curious about what happens next with Michael and Alice.
I expect you will run into many of the same issues with other production companies. Can I recommend you try submitting it to the BBC Writersroom, or perhaps Sky?
Many thanks,
Jennifer Romley
Development Executive
Elephant Feet Productions
It was a rejection email, but it was all he needed. The facts of this email warped rapidly to suit a new mythology, one where James almost had a TV deal, and the only reason he didn’t was because of not having some poxy agent. He followed Jennifer Romley’s advice, submitting to Sky and the BBC, and including the line “I’ve had serious interest from Jennifer Romley, at Elephant Feet” in every cover letter.
“It’s all about who you know,” he repeated. Jennifer Romley was probably someone not much older than us, and tasked with going through the slush pile just like I had to go through Deenie’s. In the 2010 fantasy, though, she was a huge person in the industry, someone whose name would be recognised anywhere. We imagined her in the Groucho Club, talking about “this fabulous new Irish writer,” and being overheard by someone from the BBC. Someone who had coincidentally received Discs that afternoon.
The agent thing was proving more troubling. No one was returning his emails. He called and called, and eventually received some curt advice from a receptionist. “Listen, mate,” she said, “no one knows who the fack you are.”
She became more English every time we told the story. It became a thing we shouted at each other, up the stairs, across the street. “No one knows who the FACK you are!”
“Why are ye always saying that?” Carey asked once, when he was round. “Doing the English voice?”
“For the craic,” I answered brightly. It was a good enough excuse. It was why we did everything.
“This is why I’d never live in England,” he said, rolling a cigarette. “That voice. Nails on a chalkboard.”
“Never?” I said, my guts trembling.
“God, could you imagine me?” He chuckled. “I’d be singing ‘Come Out, Ye Black and Tans’ on the tube.”
He was joking. Or he wasn’t. It’s hard to know. His wider family had seen a fair amount of persecution during the Troubles, as many Catholic families in Derry had. It was difficult to parse how serious his grudge against England actually was. Should it matter? Plenty of people moved to England who hated it.
In any case, I took it seriously. Which is all that really mattered, in the end.
* * *
“I need you to come to Fermoy with me on Sunday,” James said. “I’m going to come out to my mum.”
I was in the shower when he said this. I was sure that I heard him wrong. “What?”
He raised his voice. “I said, you need to come to Fermoy with me on Sunday, because I need to come out to my mum.”
I turned the water off and put on my towel. Out in the kitchen, the door was open, and James was smoking a cigarette in the beam of sunlight coming in from the yard.
“What are you coming out to Nicola for?”
There is a friend of a certain vintage who will take too much comfort in a mother’s name. James and I were of that vintage. We were best friends, despite not knowing one another very long, and we were determined to make up the time lag in our friendship with family intimacies. I was always asking after Nicola and Frank; he wanted to know about Bridget and Paul.
“She needs to know, doesn’t she?”
He had received an additional email, identical to the one he got from Jennifer Romley at Elephant Feet. It was from another bizarrely named production company, another probably quite junior person. They said his writing was “lively” and that it was refreshing to see “rounded gay characters” in a script. They also suggested the BBC Writersroom.
One thoughtful rejection letter was good. Two was even better. Two was “buzz.”
“If I’m going to become known for my rounded gay characters,” he said, “I better have a rounded gay life.”
We took the bus out and walked a mile from the village. I asked him why we couldn’t just ask his mum or stepfather to collect us, and he said he needed the walk to figure out what he was going to say.
I thought that he wanted to try out his different coming-out lines on me. He didn’t. We were silent the whole time, James walking a little ahead.
There were plenty of distractions, when we finally arrived. Nicola had a Burmese cat that had just given birth to kittens, and we cuddled them over a box in the garage while she talked us through the breeding process. She was a sweet woman, all blonde hair and gold jewellery, and constantly surprised at having ended up on a farm in Ireland. James’s stepfather was always off doing something, somewhere. I never knew enough about farming to understand what.
She touched her son a lot. Her hand on the nape of his skinny neck, her thumb rubbing along his hairline. I held the kittens, one in each hand, their claws hooking my dress.
“We’re hoping to get four hundred for the boys,” Nicola said. “Five for the girls.”
“Mum, I’m gay.”
Nicola looked at her son, then at me. I had presumed the gay conversation would happen while I was in the bathroom. I turned my attention to the cats.
“Okay,” she said, at last. Then she reached her hand higher under James’s hairline, and drew her son close to her. She hugged him for a long minute. Then she started to cry.
I’ve had enough queer friends in the years since to know this: the mothers always cry. No matter how much they knew already. No matter how obvious it was. It is the kind of crying you do while watching a movie on an airplane. Intense and unreal, high on silent terror and recycled air.
Nicola kept crying, and I put the kittens down and slowly moved out of the garage.
There was nowhere to go, so I sat on a wall and looked at an empty field. Someone, possibly James’s stepfather, was riding a lawnmower.
It was some time before James and his mother came out of the garage. “It’s nothing to do with that,” I heard him say to her. “It was always there.”
I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to make them self-conscious with my presence.
“Rachel!” Nicola called, her throat sounding dry. “Will you come in for a sandwich?”
We ate ham sandwiches at her kitchen table, and then she drove us to the bus. We moved through the motions like people after a funeral, with a sense that, even in the worst situations, people still need to be fed and get places. I knew that there was something else going on here, and that the mysterious solve for x that surrounded James and his sexuality was being revealed to me. I was being given evidence, but of what, I didn’t know.