DEENIE
（Appalled） Rachel…I had no idea. Please. （Opens purse） Take my money.
I was terrified of appearing ungrateful, so instead I said nothing, and just became resentful. The first time she left me alone in her house I thought it was a magnanimous and very trusting gesture. She was meeting an author for lunch and didn’t have any qualms about leaving me alone with her things.
She should have had qualms. I sat still for twenty minutes to make sure she was really gone, and then I went nosing around. First, I just wanted to examine things. To turn over the trinkets of her life, and wonder how one could own both a George Foreman grill and a handwoven Nepalese rug. It was a life I wanted for myself, and still the standard by which I judge my own aesthetic choices: Would Deenie have this in her house?
I found small, stupid ways to act out. I went into her bedroom to use her hand cream. I looked in her knicker drawers. I fed her cat Honey Nut Cheerios from my hand, even though he was very fat and supposed to be on a diet.
I was angry at her for not recognising that I was no longer a simple intern, but I know that wasn’t everything. There was something spikier, crueller, underneath it. I was fond of Deenie Harrington, but in my head I had normalised that it was okay to do bad things to her. Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in. The cradle of me and Deenie would always be that she was the clueless wife of my best friend’s lover. There was a slice of me that would always condescend to her, no matter how sweet or clever or kind she was.
I found ovulation strips in her bathroom. I used one, out of interest. I was not ovulating. I was on the pill. The tests were interesting regardless.
The next time I checked the bathroom cabinet, the ovulation strips were gone. Deenie had either noticed that I had used one or run out from using them so much herself. She talked, sometimes, about her friends who all had babies, but never said a word about starting a family herself.
“Do Fred Byrne and Deenie have sex?” I asked James that night.
He shrugged. “Must do. They are married.”
“I thought maybe…”
“That they were two people in the nineteen fifties with ‘an arrangement’？ And they sleep in separate twin beds?”
“Well, yes, sort of. You never talked about it? Their sex life?”
“No,” he said, eyes still on the TV. “Oddly enough, married men don’t tend to want to talk about their wives.”
It was the first conversation we’d had about Dr. Byrne in weeks, but the uttering of his name seemed to summon him to us. He rang James the following week, and asked him to go for coffee.
“Coffee?” I said. “In the…world? In public?”
“Coffee in the world,” James replied, equally dazed.
When he came back, he flung himself onto my bed, delighted with himself.
“Oh my God, Rachel. He’s weak for me.”
“Did he say that?”
“Basically. He went on and on about how much he missed me, how special it was, what we had, and then he asked if I missed him.”
“He asked if you missed him?” I was so bad at asking people direct questions that it amazed me when others managed it. “What did you say?”
“I said that I did, sometimes, but now that I was out, my life is all about looking forward, not back.” He looked proud of this, and rightfully so. I was proud of him, too.
Of all the people we expected to take James’s coming-out badly, we had never considered Dr. Byrne. He may have been closeted, but he was still a queer person, too. We thought he would be delighted. In the moment, he was. But it planted a seed of something bad in him, and the seed sprouted wildly over the next few weeks. Dr. Byrne started ringing up James constantly, first telling him how wonderful he was, then confessing that he was “really very worried” about James, and that he needed to “rein it in.”
“He said that he didn’t want me to become one of those kinds of gays who lives for the party,” James said, baffled. “He was acting so prudey. I said he was trying to slut-shame me.”
“He is trying to slut-shame you,” I said. “Tell him to fuck off.”
“He’s just jealous. And lonely. He’s in the closet alone, now.”
He was so full of empathy for Dr. Byrne that it made me realise, at last, what went on between them that first day at the bookshop. All that casual chat about Canada and Fermoy and DVD players, the small talk that somehow became the defining passion of my friend’s young life. I realised it was loneliness. They saw it in each other instantly. Both were charismatic, both were well liked, and yet both were litter mates of solitude.
* * *
The Gaynaissance brought a welcome, summer atmosphere to our boiling and ant-filled home. It was also prohibitively expensive.
There was a patch of grass behind the Shandon Bells that got good sun. We started drinking earlier, going out later, and ending the night in the cold, blue dawn, perched on the flat roof of our cottage, overlooking our dying city.
“It’s just the two of us, at the end of the day, Rache,” he said. “No one is going to look out for me the way you look out for me.”
“You, too,” I said limply, my chin in my knees. I thought of Carey, who adored me, but who couldn’t make a plan more than a week in advance without looking agonised by circumstance. “Sometimes I feel like I was in a coma or something, before we met.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” he said, and I didn’t know if he meant that he had recognised my coma, or that he had been in one himself. I leaned my head on his shoulder, and he rolled me a cigarette from the dregs of his packet of Amber Leaf. The leftover tobacco was so fine it was almost like tea leaves.
17
WE SAVED AND SPENT like crash dieters. Whenever we managed to put a few hundred euros aside, we would declare that we deserved a celebration. James would run to the off-licence and get us a nice bottle of wine. “Nice” meant Rioja or Pinot Grigio, which usually cost somewhere close to a tenner and felt more like Europe. We would drink it on the roof and talk about how it was much healthier to enjoy a decadent treat once a week or so than to thin one’s insides with paint stripper every other night.
Sometime around ten we would go looking for paint stripper.
Someone would find a fiver from somewhere, a fiver that had not yet been counted as part of our savings because it was loose in a coat pocket. Another trip to the offy. At midnight, we would decide to go pint-stealing at The Bróg, an easy job because everyone had to leave their drinks on the cigarette machine if they wanted to go out for a smoke. Eventually we would get paranoid that the bouncer was onto us and bought some vodka lemonades. Doubles, to save money. We would wake up the next morning to find that we had somehow spent forty euro.
It was on one of these nights, in the middle of the Gaynaissance, that I ran into my own boyfriend.
We were on the dance floor when I felt Carey’s arms around my waist, his rough blond stubble on my neck. He was out with his housemates, who were used to seeing me in his boxer shorts and vest, slobbing around their house and eating their cereal.
“What are you doing out, Rache?” he said. “I thought you were broke?”
“Oh, I am,” I said, wrapping myself around him. I was wearing a small dress, and I wanted his housemates to see that I was not a cretin, but a very sexy girl. “I’m saving money.”