“I’m fine! Let’s talk later!” I hung up before he had time to argue.
Dr. Byrne was jogging back across the lawn with the SPF. Deenie opened her eyes.
“My housemate,” I said. “Checking to see if I was okay.”
“You call us the Harrington-Byrnes?” Deenie asked, sounding amused. She smeared the cream on her freckled arms. “Why?”
“What does your housemate do?” Fred asked. Too upbeat, too curious, too clearly for show.
“He works in the bookshop,” I said, resenting the theatre of this. “How did you guys get together, anyway?”
It was an important life lesson to learn, and I’ve used it a lot since: if you’re looking to distract a couple, just ask them how they met.
She had been his student, of course. That much I already knew. He was slightly young for a professor; she was slightly old to be doing a master’s. They bonded over Thackeray. Their love affair had the thrill of being somewhat controversial but not exactly scandalous. It was a story littered with “somewhats” and “slightlys.”
The evening grew cold, and we went back inside. That should have been the cue for me to go home, but I was too drunk to think about it. We danced on the kitchen tiles as it got dark, and I said a lot of things. About my parents, my brothers, and eventually, about Carey. I wept on top of Deenie, slouched on her arm while we sat on the squashy green couch.
“I just feel like I want to staple him to the ground, you know? Like, nail his shoes down,” I said, tears slipping off my chin and onto her. “I feel like we could really do love properly, if he let me.”
I don’t know why I was so upset. Carey and I were, technically, still together. But he couldn’t be relied on, and I needed so badly to have one thing I could rely on. The uncertainty overwhelmed me.
“Oh, baby.” She stroked my hair. “Men are awful. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. I’m sorry.”
“He’s not even awful. He’s very nice.”
“What’s he like, exactly? You’ve never said.”
“He’s very kind,” I explained, wiping my nose with my hand. “And very weird. Can I call him?”
“Off our phone?”
“Mine is out of credit.”
“Sure.”
I lay back on the green couch as she passed me the portable house phone. I rang Carey’s mobile and he picked up, suspicious of the ROI number. He softened when he heard it was me, and sounded glad that I was drunk and being taken care of.
“I know you think I’m too young,” I said. “But I think we could make a real go of love.”
“Yeah,” he said grimly. “Yeah, I know.”
“What’s wrong?”
“My mother has cancer.”
“What?” I spluttered. “I thought she was having tests?”
“She was. Tests for cancer. She has cancer. Pancreas.”
“Oh, Care. I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”
“I’m…I don’t know. Dad is in bits.”
“Of course, of course.”
“The girls are all coming home tomorrow. But they all have families, Rache. Babies of their own. I’m the only one…” He trailed off. I remembered our conversation, back in the bread shop. James Carey was a dosser, a born dosser. His attempts at adult life had played out like Peter Pan trying to trap his shadow. In that one unfinished sentence, he was coming to the realisation that some people create their own adulthood, and some people have it thrust upon them. He, it turned out, would be the latter kind of person.
“I need to look after things here, Rachel. I…I don’t know what I can say to you, really.”
“I understand,” I squeaked, the tears falling again.
“I do love you,” he said. “And maybe, when things settle down, you could come up for a bit. Or I’ll meet you in Dublin. But…”
“I get it,” I said. “You need to be there for your family. For your mum.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “I don’t know if I’ll be much use.”
“You will be. Can I call you, still?”
“Rachel, I’ll go mad if you don’t call me. Just once a week, with the news or something. Please. Please don’t drop off.”
I couldn’t believe this reversal. Suddenly he was the one who wanted to nail my shoes to the ground.
“Of course,” I said.
He sounded like he was going to cry. “I have to go now.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I need to.”
Deenie had gone to the kitchen, to give me privacy. There was a new record on, a jazz singer, Dinah Washington or someone like that. Deenie was in her bare feet, five foot nothing, and dancing with her husband. Looking so small that for once, I wasn’t even jealous. She looked like she could smash to pieces.
I left at around one in the morning, my bag full of stolen goods. I remember thinking that, whatever happened next with Carey or with my employment situation, it wouldn’t be so bad if I could have this little corner of adult fabulousness, this friendship with the Harrington-Byrnes.
When something good happens to you at that age, you can’t settle with the notion that it’s a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That’s how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened.
That was over ten years ago, which makes it a genuine memory, and not the pretend one I fantasised about in the cab ride home. The problem with genuine memories is that you know too much. It ruins everything. I can love that night for what it was, but I also know this: that I would only step inside that house two more times, and by winter I would never see Deenie Harrington again.
19
A CALL CENTRE had opened up in Monkstown, near where I grew up, and one of my father’s contacts got me a job there. By that point, I was in no position to draw arbitrary lines between town work and any other kind. They were offering me thirteen euros an hour to call charity donors and convince them to increase their monthly donations. “One week you could be working with Irish Guide Dogs,” my new manager told me, “and the next it could be cleft palate.”
This was sold to me as being a perk of the job. “Variation,” I was told. “You’ll never be bored. There’s always plenty to learn, if you want to learn it.”
The call centre was a large prefab the size of the auditorium of my secondary school. It smelled new and cheap. There were two vending machines, one for snacks and one for energy drinks. The snacks machine cost money but the drink machine was free. On my first day I was shown around by a girl my own age who was already a manager, having started work there in May. It was now nearing the end of August.
“What’s nice is that it’s really flexible,” she said. “Like, no one is going to call you into the office if you’re not at your desk by ten past nine, or whatever. Just meet your targets and you can do what you want.”
She looked like the girls I went to school with. Golden, highlighted and virtually eyebrow-less, dressed in baby blues and light pinks. She was probably very nice, but I felt myself resisting her. I had spent so much of the last year in a different world, one of gigs and septum piercings and page proofs, and I resented being pulled back into the world of girls I never truly liked.