“Anyway, I don’t love my gaff, as it is.” He examined a cashew. “And I think we’d have a laugh, don’t you? There’s some nice places up by Shandon Street. Which I know is technically north side, but you’ll get over it, won’t you? South-side princess falling on hard times, on the wrong side of the tracks? Very theatre. Very a play.”
I looked at him cockeyed. “You’ve found the gaff already, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And whoever you were going to move in with has dropped out.”
“Yes,” he said, without contrition.
“And I’m your last resort.”
“No, no, Rachel! No!” He looked at me aghast. “It just occurred to me now, in this minute. You’re the random flight of fancy before I consult my list of last resorts.”
“Oh.”
“Well, think about it.”
We moved on, chatted all sorts of bollocks, and when I came home on the 11 p.m. bus my parents were both at the kitchen table. The man who owned my father’s office building had drowned himself in the Lee. It was in the Evening Echo. Dad had never met the landlord, had always worked through a lawyer. My parents were worried about whether the man’s widow would raise the rent or sell the building.
In the years since, I’ve asked other Irish people if they remember the suicides, the businessman suicides that happened around this time. They all say no, not really. Maybe I’m asking the wrong people, or everyone’s just forgotten. Maybe Cork was hit worse, or the recession was just an idea, not a real thing that everyone talked about every day.
“I’m moving out,” I announced, and my mother looked at me like I had smashed a jar of pasta sauce on the floor and was now hopping over it, with the excuse that I had a taxi waiting outside.
“With who?”
“A guy from work.”
The tactlessness. It makes me want to climb into a car and set myself on fire. It makes me want to scream at my own unborn child, Don’t you fucking dare abandon me like that.
“You guys have been talking about downsizing anyway,” I said. Which was true. We had five bedrooms: theirs, mine, Christopher’s, Kevin’s, and a little spare room that we used for a study. There was a hot tub, outside, that was a present from my father to my mother on her fortieth birthday. They talked about selling the house constantly.
“In a few years you’ll all be gone,” my dad had said. “And this house will be worth even less.”
My mother would interject here. “Or more,” she would say. “We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
My mother was glaring at me. Hating me for collaborating in the downsizing scheme. But it was too late, and I had made up my mind.
I came home, with laundry, for Christmas. I remember thinking that they looked older, but no one could have aged that much in ten days. The truth was that I had been extremely sheltered. I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along.
“Twenty is late to realise that,” James says. He’s probably right.
3
A TEXT from James.
How are the poos babydoll??
Month seven has made me constipated, and the only people in the world who know are my husband and James Devlin. I am not, generally, a poo-talking sort of woman. But there was never a version of this pregnancy where I didn’t tell James every movement, every phase, every symptom.
Shandon Street is historically a poor part of Cork city, but is strangely picturesque. It’s full of old houses, but also modern riffs on ancient architecture. A pantheon-shaped theatre; an old market hall known simply as the Butter Exchange; a church with real bells and a big fish on the steeple.
The house itself was a cottage, built to house the tubercular families of the 1930s, and the only bathroom was downstairs, through the kitchen. There were two boxy bedrooms upstairs, each big enough for a queen-sized bed, a pine wardrobe and a chest of drawers. In my head, there was no “better room.” James, however, had lived in more places—fifteen homes by that time, and he was only twenty-two—and knew how to take an instant inventory. He saw things I didn’t, like where was bound to get the best of the morning sunlight and which had a window too close to the head of the bed.
“Do you want the room nearest the stairs?” he asked, in a way that made it seem like the stairs room was the best room and he was being chivalrous in offering it to me.
“Sure,” I said, and tossed a black bin bag full of clothes on the bed, where it exploded like an overcooked dumpling.
The radiators in our bedrooms worked, but downstairs just had a bricked-up fireplace and a collection of space heaters under the stairs. The living room was a grand big space, two couches and a dining table that could seat six, with a sweet kitchen and a little yard. There was even a herb garden leftover from the previous tenant.
I couldn’t believe that we were only paying six hundred euro a month between us. I understand now that the house was incredibly run down, that only two working gas hobs out of four is unacceptable, and that moving into a mostly unheated house in the dead of an Irish winter was unwise. These things would matter to me now, but they didn’t then, and even though I spent most of the following year drunk and malnourished, I sometimes wonder if I was maybe better off not caring.
James had an iPod, one of those big clunky ones that was old even then, and he let me choose what our move-in day song would be. I ran my finger around the tricky circular dial, terrified of getting it wrong, not realising that this was all James’s music, and therefore it was kind of impossible to get it wrong. It strikes me now that, if James was really invested in me thinking he was heterosexual, he would never have let me go through his iPod. The selection was an odd mishmash: somewhere between a middle-aged straight man and a middle-aged gay one. Cher snuggled next to the Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Eagles next to Elton John. The only thing even slightly of our generation was Britney Spears.
I settled on “Cecilia” by Simon & Garfunkel. I had no reason except for the word “jubilation!,” which was repeated throughout, and was exactly how I felt, although I was far too shy to admit it.
We propped the iPhone speaker in the corridor and went to our rooms. I suddenly felt extremely self-conscious, awkward in my movements, like I was unpacking in the Big Brother house and aware of how the public would interpret my knicker folding.
The feeling lasted two minutes and fifty-five seconds, wherein “Cecilia” ended, and immediately started again.
“Cunts,” James shouted, and marched out to the speaker. The screen had frozen, leaving “Cecilia” on repeat. “It does this sometimes,” he said, and a thin blush crawled up his neck. “Fucking useless shite.” He hated having a bad thing. It’s a good job James is rich now because being poor never suited him at all.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him.
So we listened to “Cecilia” again. And again. We started singing along, our voices bouncing off the cheap plaster. By the eighth time, we were running into each other’s rooms to elaborately lip sync, our limbs in all directions, grabbing on to the song fiercely. If it were a phone book we could have torn it in half.