“No,” she responded sadly. “Not good for books at all.”
A seed of rage sprouted in me. I had just lost my job, had been criminally underpaid by the Harrington-Byrnes for months, and here I was, a case study for the industry as a whole. I finished my wine, and then poured myself another.
“Publishing is a mess,” Deenie said. “And everyone’s still freaking out about the Kindle.”
He touched her hand. “Now, every study says that people who buy e-books are still buying physical books, too.”
He said this like he had said it a lot. Like it was a bedtime story he sometimes tucked her in with.
“Can I use your bathroom?” I asked, not waiting for an answer, just getting up and marching to the loo.
On reflection, I can see that Deenie and Dr. Byrne weren’t trying to make my firing about them. What they were trying to do was send an adult signal to someone who didn’t yet have the language to translate it. When Deenie said “publishing is a mess,” what she meant was: I would love to help you out here, Rachel, but the truth is I’m hardly holding on to a job myself.
But I didn’t have that hindsight yet. All I had was their bathroom, my rage, and the faint smudges of toothpaste on the mirrored cabinet over the sink.
I opened it. Deenie kept all her cosmetics in her bedroom, but she had some goodies in here, too. There were a few tiny perfume samples and a tube of something from L’Occitane. The ovulation strips were back. I stuffed some things in my handbag, not caring if she noticed or not.
I felt a rippling calm go through me. I didn’t have to leave, or sit through their gracious hospitality while hating them. I could drink another glass of wine and feel easy about the fact that we had all wronged each other.
I went back out, and the Harrington-Byrnes were both louder, more fun, slightly less parental.
“Listen, Miss Murray,” Dr. Byrne said, taking out a bottle of gin while his wife sliced cucumbers. “Sometimes, in life, people get fired.”
“It’s troubling,” Deenie said. “And it sucks. But things always work out.”
Dr. Byrne spun around, always nimble despite his bulky frame. He pulled a plastic bag of ice from the freezer, smashed it off the tile floor, and gathered lumps of it into his big hands. “And in the meantime,” he sang, “there’s booze.”
He slammed the ice into tumblers, then covered them with gin.
Deenie moved from the cucumbers to the vinyl player. She reset the needle, and “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival began to play.
I set my bag down, making sure the flap was closed. Fred Byrne handed me my gin. I banged it back, the big cubes of ice tickling the tip of my nose, bitter quinine coating my tongue.
I think they felt guilty that they couldn’t help me in the way that I wanted to be helped. But we would get through it the way Irish people traditionally get through things. By getting shit-faced.
Any nervousness I should have felt about getting drunk with my employer and my ex-professor evaporated. The Harrington-Byrnes threw themselves into what must have been a frequent role for them: the charming, childless couple whose lack must be covered to prevent anyone from feeling sorry for them.
Dr. Byrne told stories about the head-cases who ran the English department, stories he could comfortably tell me now that life was over for me at UCC. The professor who wore women’s used tights under his trousers. The Ph.D. student who wouldn’t stop sending love letters to his supervisor, a married woman in her sixties. The very famous author who graduated UCC in 2003, but told the papers he went to Trinity. We laughed, got drunker and drunker, and every so often I found myself shooting glances at Dr. Byrne: And the English professor who is still obsessed with his twenty-two-year-old ex-boyfriend.
Deenie, for all her softness, was also capable of a good story. They came via her late father, who had rubbed shoulders with the likes of Patrick Kavanagh and John Berger.
“Kavanagh was just an old piss head, apparently,” she giggled. “He used to go around eating baking soda from the packet.”
I had my stories, of course. Stories of young passion and squalor that people in their thirties find so refreshing to hear about. Entertaining reminders that there is nothing much about youth to miss.
It was a beautifully hot day, and we moved out to the garden, drinking and squawking at each other.
“What’s happening with your boyfriend?” Deenie asked. “Casey?”
“Carey,” I stressed, mournfully. “Carey get out your cane.” I took another gulp of my gin. “Carey, I’m getting caned.”
“I don’t like him for you, Rachel,” Fred Byrne said. “You deserve better than an invisible man.”
“What do you know about it?” Deenie asked, mystified.
A dart of panic. Dr. Byrne had forgotten that he wasn’t supposed to know me very well at all, only as a student, only as a bookshop worker.
“Oh, God, I was always sitting in Dr. Byrne’s office,” I laughed, trying to smooth things, “telling him my tales of woe.”
“Were you?” Deenie said. She wasn’t uncomfortable exactly, but she was struggling to square the circle. “You were never like that back in my day, Fred. No patience for student woes.”
“I’ve softened in my old age,” Dr. Byrne said, a song in his voice.
Deenie closed her eyes to the sun. “I need suncream. I’m starting to burn, I think.”
“I’ll get it for you.” Dr. Byrne jogged into the house, anxiety sticking to his footprints.
There was a brief silence between Deenie and me, but it felt cosy enough. We had spent so long being silent together, during our long afternoons at her kitchen table.
“Dad was a professor, too, you know,” she said. “For a few years.”
“Oh yeah? In Cork?”
“No. Dublin. UCD.”
“But you grew up here?”
“Mmm,” she said, the sunlight dancing on her eyelids. “He would live up there during term time.”
“That must have been hard.”
“Mmm,” she said again. “I didn’t notice, really. I was a teenager. But I think Mum felt it most of all. Lonely, you know. No idea what he was doing, what he was up to.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling uneasy about this line of conversation. “Yes, that must have been hard.”
“She always said, ‘Men must be allowed to have their private lives, Aideen.’” Deenie laughed softly at the memory. “I always wondered if she thought women were allowed to have private lives, too.”
James rang me. He was on lunch break from his shift, which had started an hour after mine, and had been told the news about my firing.
“Rache, are you all right? Where are you? Why didn’t you call?”
“I’m fine,” I said breezily, stretching out the vowel sounds. “I’m at the Harrington-Byrnes’。”
“What? Why?”
“To get drunk.”
“What? With Fred?”
I wasn’t sure how much of his side Deenie could hear. Her eyes were still closed.
“Rachel, you’re being annoyingly elusive,” James barked. “What’s going on?”