“How?”
“Oh, the gentlemen callers, the gentlemen callers,” I replied. James and I had these characters we sometimes played, two Southern belles who were desperate for money but equally desperate for glamour. “We always rely on the kindness of strangers.”
I picked up my stolen pint of Bulmers and winked at him, which must have looked more like an asymmetrical blink, somewhere between Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois. Carey turned away from me and started talking to his friends.
I wavered on my feet, waiting to be looked at again. I couldn’t see James anywhere, and Carey’s back was to me. Why was his back to me?
I tapped him on the shoulder, my finger rigid. “I’ll allow you to buy me a drink,” I said, which was supposed to be funny, but only sounded petulant and spoiled.
Carey made an odd face, like he was moving his teeth around in a new order. “I don’t know, Rachel,” he said, and then went back to talking to his friends. I was mortified. The friends looked awkward and sorry for me. Was this it, then? Was Carey done with me again?
I did the only thing available to a woman in a situation like this. I stormed out.
The cold air hit me immediately, and I realised that the further and faster I walked from The Bróg, the less chance there was of Carey having a sudden change of heart and rushing out to find me. It was still half an hour until closing time, so the footpath was scattered with groups of girls who were either crying or getting sick. I refused to be either. I sat on my own, freezing without a coat, and bummed a cigarette off a man walking past. I shivered, looked glassily ahead, and waited for him to come.
He did, of course. Built like a terrier and every bit as common.
“Rache,” he said. “What are you doing out here? You’ll freeze.”
It strikes me now that no one in Cork ever worried about each other’s safety. Just our body temperature.
“What do you care?” I said dismally. I was extremely drunk, but I was never much of a shrieker. My version of being a bad drunk was suddenly becoming surly and immovable. “You’re breaking up with me anyway, aren’t you?”
“I could say the same to you,” he said, genuine fury in his voice. “What’s all this about? You were the one who wanted to be all official. Now you’re out here dressed like this, not telling me, not wanting to get pints with me during the week. Going on about gentlemen callers.”
Every so often a feminist argument makes it into the public consciousness that even the most self-hating of young women will adopt. There was a lot of chat around then about slut-shaming, around men policing how women dressed, around what the term “asking for it” actually meant. We had identified Fred Byrne’s slut-shaming tendencies not two weeks prior. The idea was in my mind, and so I seized on this fragment of what Carey was saying—dressed like this—and ignored the context of what he was actually talking about. What he was talking about was secrecy, and the possibility that I was cheating on him. What I had heard was a critique of my outfit.
“Fuck you, Carey?” I said, my voice low and serious. “I can dress how I want.”
That set us off. Suddenly we were in the kind of fight where both people act like they’re in a film, mugging for a camera that didn’t exist. We kept saying strident, passionate and broadly untrue things. I accused him of being jealous, which he wasn’t. He accused me of being uncaring, when that couldn’t have been further from the truth. I cared so deeply about preserving the status quo with Carey that I was always hiding the facts of myself from him. Not just London, but the stuff with James, too: his relationship with Dr. Byrne, the afternoon trysts at our house, how I had got the job with Deenie. I was hiding so much from Carey that sometimes I wonder what on earth we actually talked about.
“You can do whatever you fancy, Rachel, but you don’t have to make me feel like a fucking idiot when you do it.” He exhaled heavily, like he was trying to control himself from slapping me. “The lads were saying to me all evening, why not get Rachel over, we’ll all go out, she’s hardly over here any more. And I’m like, ah, she’s broke, she’s saving money, she’s worried about her job. Then we get out and you’re already here, three sheets to the wind.”
My rage started to melt away. I saw his point of view perfectly, but rather than empathise, I was stricken with this romantic idea of a Rachel that existed when I wasn’t around. Mysterious, desired, unable to be kept on a leash. Capable of driving a man crazy.
“I mean,” he carried on, “what? Do you just not want to be seen with me, is that the issue?”
A sober woman would have explained what was going on. A sober woman would have explained about London and saving money, would have owned up about her inability to say no to James and the effervescence of his Gaynaissance. A sober woman would have asked Carey if he wanted to move with her.
But I wasn’t a sober woman. I wasn’t even a woman. I was a girl, a drunk girl, in a tiny dress. And I was cold.
So I kissed him. I grabbed him, and trusted that the might of our physical connection would say all the things that I wasn’t presently capable of putting into words. He pulled away at first, his mouth tight, his jaw set.
“Come home with me,” I said, my finger on his collar. “Come home and we’ll talk.”
He came home. We didn’t talk.
The curtains in my room were thin. The street lamp outside shone a perpetual white shaft of light across the bed, one that narrowly escaped the pillows but cut a strip diagonally across the mattress. His skin looked lunar that night, like something the sky had given birth to.
“I love you,” I said, my thumbs on the famous stomach. “I love you like I’ve never loved anyone.”
“Rachel,” he said, sounding a little sad, “you love everyone.”
That wasn’t true. But it must have seemed true, to him. I loved him, and I loved James, and because that was the only sample group that Carey was working from, he had no idea how indifferently I felt about the rest of the planet. Everyone else could go to hell.
“No,” I said, starting to get upset. “You have to believe me, Carey. It’s never been this way with anyone else.”
I wanted this conversation to be as full of meaning and love as the roof chat between me and James, but that only worked if both people played ball.
“I have to go to Derry tomorrow,” he said. “Mam is sick.”
“What? Why didn’t you say? What’s wrong?”
“She’s got to go into hospital for a few days. I need to look after Dad. He’s a bit defenceless, you know. He’ll be making tomato sandwiches for every meal.”
“But you’re coming back? Aren’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
He fell asleep soon after that, and I watched him. Not the affectionate gaze of a lover, but the frantic, anxious stare of someone trying to bend spoons with their mind.
He was going again. He wouldn’t come back. The fear of heartbreak was almost worse than the reality of it. I felt as though I had swallowed a wet bath mat.
The worry and the vodka doubled on me, and I crawled on my knees to the bathroom. I vomited until I was too tired to stay awake.