I had spent so long building up Carey as this ungovernable mystery, and apparently I was the one who had been intangible and distant the entire time.
“This is stupid,” he said, looking at his lap. “You didn’t tell me you were having my baby. I feel like we’re in a soap.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to have it, was I?” I spluttered.
He looked more wounded than ever. “You didn’t even think about having it?”
I couldn’t re-enter that world, the imagined playground of living in Derry with him and mothering one of many strawberry-blonde moppets. It was gone now, and it wasn’t a fantasy any more, but a dead universe, collapsed in on itself. “No,” I said. “I’m too young, Carey, you know that.”
“I know,” he said, his face twisting. “I just thought you would have at least considered it? You just booked an abortion straight away?”
“It’s my body,” I said limply. “My choice.”
“Yes, I know it’s your choice. But I should have had a consulting role, surely? In some sense?”
“It doesn’t matter what I wanted, does it?” I snapped. “Because I lost it—I was always going to lose it, no matter what we talked or didn’t talk about.”
We went on like this, our moods and patter changing quickly and often. He would go from being remarkably tender to remembering that he was furious with me, and then go back to feeling sorry that I went through the whole thing alone. We exhausted ourselves. I wondered if he regretted coming down to Cork.
When we finally left the pub, he didn’t touch me. “I’m trying to understand, Rache. I really am. I’m trying to get my head around it. But I feel like I don’t know you at all. It’s such a big thing to keep from someone you love. It’s the biggest thing there is. And I could have helped.”
“How?” I asked. “How could you have helped?”
“With the money. With, I don’t know, comforting you.”
He knew me well enough by that stage to know what I was thinking.
“But you had James for all that,” he said.
“Well. I did.”
He rolled his eyes.
“You can’t blame me for that,” I said. “He’s my best friend.”
“I know he’s your best friend,” he snapped. “This isn’t about James.”
“It feels like it is,” I said. I was hoping to get Carey on a charge of homophobia, thus clearing me on the charge of being a selfish and stupid person.
“Don’t you understand how condescending it is,” he said, “for someone you love not to tell you about the biggest thing happening in their life, because they don’t want to bother you? Because they think you can’t handle it?”
“I just wanted to leave you out of it. Because I do love you. You know that. I’m always saying it.”
“That’s not an act of love, Rache. It’s an act of…I don’t know, ambivalence. It’s an act of distance.”
“Your mum was sick.”
“I don’t care if my entire family were thrown into a volcano, Rachel, I want to fucking know if I’m having a child with someone.”
There is a parallel world where I said the right things to Carey that day. Made the right displays of affection, showed more signs of regret, wept and mourned the miscarriage in the way he wanted to. Perhaps in that world I got on the train to Dublin with him, and then to Derry. But I didn’t have the strength or the character. My mind was still in the graduation ceremony, with Dr. Byrne and his red robes. With the eyes of hundreds of people, who all knew there was something wrong with me, but didn’t quite know what.
I was a pretty cheerful person by nature. Emotionally dependable, like a good horse. Perhaps if I had been a more melancholy girl I would have been able to recognise that I was in the middle of a trauma, a word that still feels like it’s for other people. But I was so far away from myself, and it didn’t matter that a man I loved was trying to bring me back. He was too late, and it wasn’t enough.
He came home with me. He sat on my bed, and I started to kiss him, feeling his face and chest with my hands. We couldn’t have sex. I was still wearing the thick pads given to me by the doctor. I was desperate to get through to the part of Carey only I was able to reach, the sticky passionate silly place that transcended real life. I tried to convince him that my desperation was legitimate horniness, and for about three minutes, he was prepared to believe me.
I hid my face in his crotch, committing to an overly emotional blow job that we both knew was intended as an act of penance. I looked up at him, quickly, and saw that his face was tilted to the window. His cheekbones lit up by the street lamp, his eyes like an empty glass bowl.
He left for Dublin the next morning. I did not see him again.
Somehow, life went on.
I managed to get bar work, which didn’t suit me as much as the bookshop but suited me much more than the call centre. There was a pub on Washington Street that took me on, near the small plates restaurant that had since closed. It was easy, and fun sometimes, although I never felt easy or fun any more.
I was rigid and off the pace. James wasn’t all there, either. Our relationship had shifted its feet, adjusting for the amount of weight it was now holding. We still watched TV, and ate dinner, and checked in to see when the other person was coming home. But there was a change you could only see from the inside. Our conversations moved in the same directions—Why doesn’t Glenn Close have an Oscar? Why don’t they put crisps in the sandwiches at Subway?—but the flow, the sound, the echo, was different. I felt like we were playing cover songs of our own conversations. We just didn’t enjoy each other in the same way.
Behind it all was anger, I think. We were both quietly suspicious that each of us had ruined the other’s life. I would spend days angry that Dr. Byrne’s affair with James had exploded my chances at a nice job, as well as my entire sense of self. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Carey had said: that it was my co-dependence on James that had caused him to act distant.
James, I suspect, was brooding about how my pregnancy and subsequent scamming of the Harrington-Byrnes had severed his link to love for ever. I would be mean to James, make little digs about his not going to college, or engage in “playful” banter about his more feminine qualities. Things we would have laughed at before hit differently now that this new edge was here. He would become irritated by my messiness, and go on a patronising tirade about how I was useless, couldn’t work a Hoover, couldn’t fill an iron, couldn’t do anything right, really.
Then the feelings would switch, and change their direction of flow. I would feel guilty about my part in James’s sorrow, and suddenly lavish him with affection and treats from the shop. He would do the same: call me gorgeous, point at celebrities from the magazines he still compulsively bought, say, “You look a bit like her, don’t you?”
We could never match up these moments. James was never in the mood to be loved when I wanted to love him, and vice versa. We started to spend more time with other people. James had a gang of three other gay boys, and they went to Chambers Bar together on the nights I was working. With college over, it was easier for me to meet up with secondary-school friends. People were moving back to Cork, having finished their own degrees elsewhere, with the exception of the Trinity students who we resented and who never came back. We played at adults, going for coffees and sandwiches during the day. They were feeling equally as hopeless about the future, and we lamented our useless degrees together.