We didn’t speak much on the bus, or at all until we were safely back at the house in Shandon Street. We got into his bed without saying a word.
“Has nothing to do with what?” I asked.
He sighed. “I was abused.”
It reads strangely, but that was how he said it. He didn’t want to give me lots of editorial detail, lots of camera angles, and then let me come to my own conclusion. He had a lot of charisma, but he didn’t want to use it for this.
I got those camera angles, eventually. In dribs and drabs, and over the years. The sister’s friend from college. The guest room with the small TV, where James went to watch cartoons, and where the friend was staying. The soft, funny discussions that turned into harsh reality and finally a dull, oily feeling of distance.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He looked at me for the first time since we left earlier that morning. “It was after we moved to Ireland. It only happened once. I told them straight away.”
He said it all like he was reading from a telegram.
“She spent so long trying to keep us safe from my dad. I think it broke her that she had forgotten to keep us safe from other people.”
“Oh, James.” I had nothing else. Just, Oh, James.
“You know, bad things used to happen so often, back in England, to people we knew, to people in our family. I always just thought: Something is coming for me eventually. So when it happened, I almost thought, Oh, here it is.”
I laid my head on his shoulder.
“But she…she was sure it would screw me up. It ruined her. I didn’t want her to be right.”
“You’re not screwed up.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound like he believed it. “I don’t know, I was giving off gay kid vibes before I could stand. Which doesn’t help. I think men notice that kind of thing.” He paused. “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for taking me,” I replied. “And for telling me that.”
He put his arm around me, and I moved my head to his chest. We lay like that for a while. James and I slept in the same bed a lot, but we never cuddled except for that night. We fell asleep like lovers.
I woke up a few hours later, bra still on, my ribcage straining at the band. His eyes opened, and we looked at one another, conscious that we had woken up in a new world. He stroked my face, whispered my name, and softly kissed me on the mouth.
The kiss lasted ten seconds. Fifteen, tops. I don’t remember how it stopped, or why, but we went back to sleep, untroubled as babies.
We’ve never talked about the kiss. I’ve thought about it, of course. Now that he was out, was kissing a woman the last taboo left? Was he saying goodbye to women, and to the notion of straightness altogether? Was it a strange way of saying thank you for coming with him to Fermoy? The most boring answer is probably the most true one: that he simply wanted to mark the last day where he lived with secrets.
16
AUGUST WAS A MONTH so wild that now we only refer to it as one thing: The Gaynaissance.
If you were a gay or bisexual man and you lived in Cork in August 2010, then trust me, my friend James fucked you.
Unsurprisingly, James’s coming-out changed very little. Most people were very gracious about it, and just nodded and congratulated him. Others did not behave so well, and ended up on our shit list because of it.
There is a certain personality type that is addicted to the concept of its own intellect. They are the people who insist they saw the twist in the movie coming, who always thought that the divorced couple were unhappy, that the female celebrity seemed crazy. They are also the people who always knew you were gay, and they can’t resist talking about it.
“I knew that,” Ben said.
“Well, now it’s official.” James was unfussed.
“I always knew,” Ben repeated, suggesting that he knew before James did.
“Checked the store cameras, did you?” James said smoothly, and Ben’s smug face turned shocked.
“You haven’t?” he said, his face white. “In the shop?”
“Oh sorry,” James answered. “I thought you knew.”
James was no longer contained to the few queer nights that the city had on offer. He was free range now, pressing bodies up against every smoking area in Cork, and taking some of them home. I slept in my own room much more, which wasn’t quite the death sentence it used to be. Having a boyfriend had been a domesticating influence. I now had clean sheets, flowers in a jam jar, pictures on the wall. I felt I was doing very well, for twenty-one.
We never fought, officially, about the boys he brought home. They were mostly earnest and sweet, made polite chit-chat with me in the morning, asked me about my bookshelves. But there were a few, and one in particular, who radiated a certain distaste for me, and for women generally. They thought of James as Juliet, and me as his flustered loyal nurse, calling him in from the balcony.
They tried, sometimes, to bully me a little bit. Jokes about fag hags, and the stupid things straight girls did. Veiled comments about my size, about how it must be nice that James and I were able to share clothes.
James never really came to my defence, but he didn’t entertain these comments either. He didn’t need to. Invariably, Lady Gaga would come on the iPod speaker and the two of us would dissolve into our own world, leaving whoever was with us on the fringes. We sang “bedroom ants” instead of “bad romance,” because it was summer and the whole house was riddled with them.
The poetry anthology that Deenie was putting together proved to be more work than she had expected, so I was over at the Harrington-Byrnes’ a lot. The anthology was separate from her day job, and to do with her father’s literary estate. It was the twentieth anniversary of his most famous collection, and she had commissioned “Ireland’s most exciting poets” to write a poem in response to his work.
“Ireland’s most exciting poets,” she said, “who will accept two hundred quid.”
It was a lot of busy work. Emailing agents, setting deadlines, chasing them, sending updates back to the publisher. She was glad to have me, and said so often.
“I don’t think I would have ever accepted if I didn’t have you,” she said. “Organising poets is like herding cats.”
She was grateful for me, bought pastries for my coming over, but didn’t appear to have any inclination to pay me more. I felt awkward about it. Surely, the internship was now over? I looked up what a publishing assistant did, and I ticked every box. I managed correspondence. I forwarded invoices to accountants. I wrangled spreadsheets. I had taught myself all kinds of Microsoft Excel tricks to keep up with the various deadlines, and surely that was worth more than fifty a week.
It was the summer of un-aired grievances. I was too anxious to tell Carey about London, too frightened to ask Deenie for a pay rise. James wasn’t the only one writing scripts. I wrote countless long ones in my head, all conversations that revealed me to be righteous and long suffering, and other people to be insensitive and cruel.
RACHEL
You sit here in your big house, with your lovely husband, and your glass kitchen, but you don’t see what’s in front of you! Me, the person who walks here, because she can’t afford to take the bus every day!