She furrowed her brow. “It’s not just that.”
“But it is,” I stressed. “I assure you, it is.”
“Did I…？ Was I a bad boss, or something? Is this a revenge thing?”
She tore out the cheque and gave it to me.
“Deenie,” I said, putting my hand on the front door, “I was your assistant.”
Deenie looked even more confused. I hated her, then. Hated her friends, her daughter-of-a-poet beauty, her fake money worries. I hated him. Hated his cowardice, the way he pretended to love James, the way he was a tourist in our lives. I hated that he was spoiled, and that he always got what he wanted.
“And what?” Deenie said. “I was your assistant and what?”
“And you never fucking paid me.”
23
I WAS NOT PROUD of how I handled the dinner party. But I had managed to un-fuck myself in a situation that was profoundly fucked on all sides. Either way, I was destined to be alienated from the Harrington-Byrnes. Either way, I still had to pay for an abortion. It was prudent to compound those two problems, and it was a gift to them: they were now in cahoots together. They had paid for a problem to go away, and that problem was me.
I made a mistake, however. And that was in how I told James.
I burst through the door of our house, frothing and rabid. James was lying on the sofa, reading a magazine and smoking with the window open.
“You’re home early,” he said. Then he looked at my face. “Oh, fuck, what happened?”
“They think it’s me,” I exploded. “They thought it was me fucking him.”
I began at the end: I told James that we had two grand, and then that we were never allowed to talk to the Harrington-Byrnes ever again. The rest of the story he had to prise from me through my tears, my hyperventilating, my sudden tense giggles that would end in me clutching my own arms, and then his. First he was confused, and asked hundreds of questions, made me tell the story again. I talked about the place settings, and Ciara, and the friends who had clearly never heard a thing about me, but who now would remember me for ever.
I gagged on my words as I made fresh realisations: that Dr. Sheehan and the other members of the English department would tell their colleagues, who would tell their Ph.D. students, who would tell their MA students, who would tell the BAs. That I would probably never walk through the UCC campus again without feeling as though I was being looked at. This fact, which might mean nothing if I lived in a bigger place, meant everything in Cork. The campus is almost part of the city. You attend art shows there, film screenings. You meet people.
Finally, my degree. My degree, while still valid, would always have a stain on it.
And that I would, too.
I sank into this. Drowned in it. The eradication of the past three years, which would now always feel like a prelude to this event. Every tutorial and lecture, every essay that Carey had called Chomsky, every casual coffee or beer in the students’ union. It was all ruined for me now. I would always be That Girl.
I leaned so hard into this idea of myself as the scarlet woman of University College Cork that I didn’t even see James’s heart breaking right in front of me.
“He told her that he was shagging you,” he said. “That he was sleeping with you. That he was in love with you.”
I stalled. “He…he didn’t say love. He didn’t say anything, really.”
He walked around the room in a circle and sat down. Then he got up and did the same thing again. He looked like a dog who couldn’t settle.
“You told him that for two thousand euro he would never hear from you ever again.”
“Yes.”
“And he accepted that.”
“I…”
How had I not thought of this? James had been holding my hand since the moment I found out I was pregnant. For almost a year we had been joined at the hip, and in the past week I had thought of him as merely extra storage for my own anxieties. I had not, for a single second, considered what this meant for him. That I had effectively broken up with Dr. Byrne for him.
I scrambled around. “There was nothing I could do. We were fucked, anyway. It was over, James. He hadn’t called you in a week, remember? He was done. He was caught.”
James moved his body away from me, his eyes haunted. He reached for his phone.
“I need to call him,” he said. “I need to talk to him.”
“James, don’t.” I tried to take his phone away, prising his fingers off of the case. “Don’t call him. Definitely don’t call him tonight.”
“No,” he snapped. He started dialling. “Fuck off, Rachel, this is nothing to do with you.”
“Unfortunately it is,” I said, still trying to grab the phone off of him. “He made me a part of it. He’s a selfish, spoiled man who thought he could have it both ways, and when he was caught he took the most cowardly way out. You don’t want to talk to him, James.”
“I do,” he growled. “Rachel, honestly, I need you to get out of my fucking face about this.”
I leapt at my friend, and just like the day of our fight at the bookshop, I felt like an ogre towering over his impish frame. I didn’t want James to humiliate himself. But I also didn’t want him to ruin things. Deenie could still cancel the cheque. I wasn’t about to ruin my reputation and lose the two thousand euro.
“Listen,” I said, “on Monday we can cash the cheque. It will probably need two days to clear. That gives you until Wednesday to cool off and talk to him. Get closure or whatever. Call him at work. That way he won’t be caught.”
He made for the yard, still clutching the phone to his ear.
“You could probably still…I don’t know, carry on, I guess? If you wanted to, but why would you want to? James. James. JAMES.”
I lunged again. The phone flew out of his hand, hitting the yard wall, and smashing to the floor. The phone opened, the battery skittering across the flagstones. I grabbed the phone.
“Rachel. Give it back.”
“No.”
“I’m not fucking around here. Give it back.”
I backed into the house, keeping my eyes wide and wary, like an animal you find in your bins.
“Rache, I swear to God.”
I imagined a world where I had to go through everything I had just gone through, but I still had to deplete my savings to pay for my abortion. Not just deplete my savings, but tell my parents, and ask them for money that they didn’t have for a procedure they were morally against. And with that horrifying thought, I took one step indoors, and threw James’s phone into the toilet.
He looked at me, and then at the toilet, and then at me again.
“Rachel,” he said quietly, “if I don’t leave right now, I feel like I might hit you.”
I moved out of the way. James walked in one straight line out the front door and didn’t come back until the next day.
* * *
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I lay in bed with my phone next to my pillow, willing anyone in the world to reach out and say they loved me. It was the only time in the whole pregnancy where I thought seriously about keeping it. I thought: Well, here’s someone who couldn’t leave, for eighteen years at least. There were moments in that long night where I was absolutely certain that I was going to take the money and run. To start a new life as a single mother with the two thousand euro, our savings, and the few pennies left in my current account after emergency tax.