“Rachel,” she said, her voice sounding cheerful, and like she had missed me. “How are you? Listen, I’m having a dinner next Friday for dad’s book. The fifteenth. Will you come?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “You want me there?”
“Of course,” she cried. “You worked hard on this. You’re part of the team.”
I didn’t know I was pregnant yet. My seven-day pill breaks were decorated by brown spotting and nothing else. I thought that was fine.
Truthfully, I thought if anything was wrong with me it was that I was depressed. I even looked it up a few times online. I was tired, sluggish, snappy. I hated my new job, hated phoning people up to guilt them into charitable donations when many of them were on the verge of poverty themselves. I heard this a lot. The businessman suicides started up again, and I ended up talking to quite a few middle-aged women whose healthy husbands had suddenly died. This all struck me as good reasons to be depressed.
“I’d love to,” I said. “And I can’t wait to read the book!”
“Why don’t you come round on Saturday? As in, the day after tomorrow. I have a big box of advance copies. I’ll give you one, and we can have a glass of something.”
It sounded like heaven. I agreed immediately.
I came to the house on Saturday to find a journalist from The Irish Times talking to Deenie and a photographer snapping away at her next to a stack of her father’s old editions. Being the young, photogenic daughter of the dead poet, the PR people had put her forward for all kinds of interviews in the Irish press.
She was sunny for the hour they were there, but as soon as The Irish Times left, she went to the bathroom to wash her face.
“So sorry about that. I totally forgot they were coming. This isn’t really my scene at all,” she said grimly. “But I suppose it has to be done.”
I thought she was being falsely modest. “Oh, come on. Getting your photo in the paper, hair and make-up.”
She gave me a look. “Christ, don’t remind me. Seriously, I wish I didn’t have to, but we’re really hoping this makes a bit of money. Dad’s poetry brings in fuck all. I honestly have no idea what Mum is going to do. The cash won’t last another five years. Never marry a poet, Rachel.”
I couldn’t tell how much of it was an exaggeration. In my head, Deenie was rich. She was in her thirties and she had nice clothes and a nice house. Surely if her mother was broke, Deenie wouldn’t live so well. I didn’t understand, then, that having extra at the end of the month to spend on pastries and wine is not the same as having a mother who can retire. One was a matter of hundreds, and the other was thousands.
“How’s Carey?” she asked.
“Oh…I don’t know,” I replied, not wanting to talk about it. “If I’m honest, I think it’s over for good. Our lives are just in very different places.”
“That’s awful,” she said, and she sounded genuinely sympathetic. “I know you were mad about him. Are you okay? You look a bit…is heartbroken too presumptuous?”
“It’s not not accurate.”
There was a box of books on the kitchen table. Little Fire: A Response to the Poetry of Alistair Harrington.
（Years later, when Little Fires Everywhere came out, I wondered whether the sales of the poetry anthology went up. I checked Amazon; it is no longer in print.）
The book was beautifully made, olive green with reflective red foil flames. It was classy. Something you’d buy as a gift. There was a foreword written by Deenie, a dedication to her mother, and then thirty or so poems.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said admiringly.
“Look in the acknowledgements.”
There was effusive praise to the poets, the people who managed the estate, the publishing house, the Harrington family. And then, a few lines from the end:
To Rachel Murray, who helped police the vibe.
I smiled at her. “Thank you. I did police the vibe, didn’t I?”
She nodded. “You’re going to have a huge career in publishing, babe. I can tell.”
The final line of the acknowledgements was apart from all the others.
To Fred, the Bill to my Grover: thank you. For everything.
“Who are Bill and Grover?”
“Oh, God.” Deenie looked embarrassed. “Bill Withers and Grover Washington?”
“Okay.”
“It’s a silly thing. They sang ‘Just the Two of Us’ together. It’s a bit of a lame private joke.”
My heart thudded and my armpits began to sweat. Fred Byrne’s stricken face came back to me, his soft voice telling me that he was always disappointing his wife. The psychological heaviness of sex with her that followed their many pregnancy attempts.
I became extremely nauseous, a symptom of both my nerves and the fact that I was—unbeknownst to myself—eight weeks pregnant. I sat down on her kitchen chair.
“Can I have a glass of water, please?”
“Sure.” She looked worried, and fetched a jug of filtered water from the fridge. She put a heavy-bottomed glass in front of me. It felt expensive. “Is something else wrong, Rachel?”
I took a long glug of water. “I’m just not feeling so well lately. Ever since the new job.”
“Is it that bad?”
“It’s a call centre,” I said. “I need to find a way out.”
“I really wish there was something I could do for you, but absolutely nowhere is hiring. I heard my company is taking on unpaid interns who actually have master’s degrees. It’s a terrible time to start a career.”
Deenie said this like I had chosen 2010 to start looking for a job, against all better business advice from my accountants.
“What about…other editors like you? Slush pile reading?”
“I don’t know. No one likes to admit they need help, and it’s not…it’s not a very well-paid industry as it is. I don’t think people can afford to employ someone in the way I did for you.”
I smarted at this, this note of charity in her voice. The way I did for you. Deenie had underpaid me hugely. Exploited me, really.
“Maybe at the dinner next week you could make a few contacts. Get your face seen. It will be a lot of publishing people.”
“How’s Fred?” I asked, feeling vomity already, and even more so at the thought of pecking away at Deenie’s contacts like a crow over a dead body.
“Oh, fine.” She furrowed her brow briefly. “I don’t know. He’s a bit international man of mystery sometimes. I think he’s a bit disappointed about Kensington. There was a piece in the paper about Dad’s book and…Oh, I don’t know.”
“What did it say?”
“Oh”—she waved her hand—“about how I’m the daughter of a poet and I married an author.”
“Okay?”
“And, well”—she rolled her eyes, to let me know that the article was definitely full of shit—“the kind of author Fred is. It was some nothingy aside about him being…ah. Middlebrow, I think was the word.”
She looked at me, slightly desperate, hoping for a contradiction.
“That’s bollocks,” I said dutifully.