My best friend from school was a girl called Gemma Dwyer. She was doing her first teaching placement in Cork, so was usually free in the afternoons. We fell into a pleasant, if somewhat dull, routine of meeting at a café on French Church Street at around 4 p.m., where I would eat a big sandwich before my shift started at six. She would tell me long stories that made her students sound like the Railway Children, and made her sound like a benevolent goddess that taught them about goodness and compassion.
One afternoon, Gemma leaned towards me.
“Rachel, there are two women behind you who won’t stop looking at us.”
I turned around. Two women in their forties had their heads together and were making no secret of the fact that they were discussing us.
“Oh. God.”
“What shall we do?” Gem said.
“I don’t know. Ignore them.”
“They’re still looking.”
“Well, so?”
“It’s rude.”
“People are rude!”
When we got up to leave, Gemma marched up to them while I was putting on my coat.
“Excuse me—do we know each other?” she said.
“No, I don’t think so,” one of them responded.
“Well, you’ve been looking at me and my friend for this entire meal. I thought you might have something to say.”
One of the women looked bashful, but the other met my gaze.
“You’re Rachel Murray,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied. “Hello?”
“My husband works with Aideen Harrington.” Her tone was a cold bare bulb in an interrogation room. The woman had not been at the party, which was the most terrifying thing. She just knew me, the way people often knew each other in Cork. She knew me by reputation. She knew me to see.
My stomach dropped into my hips. I waited for a few seconds for the blood to come back to my face, then walked out.
“What was that?” Gemma asked. “Who was that?”
I just said goodbye, and walked fast to my bar shift with my head down.
After that, I noticed strangers’ reactions to me more and more. I felt naked, stripped of a shell, a soft baby-pink thing. It’s hard, when you work behind a bar, to know who is looking at you and who is looking at the drinks lined up behind you. Intense eye contact is often just someone trying to focus on what tequila you carry. But it registered the same with me: the tequila gazers, and the people who knew who Rachel Murray was and what she had done.
Another night, a drunk girl came up to me and told me that we used to be in the same American Lit class.
“Cool,” I said. “You have a good memory. That class was huge.”
“Yeah,” she said, then bent her head low, conspiratorial. I smelled the high synthetic sting of a vodka Red Bull on her breath. “You know, I always wondered if his dick was as big as he was.”
She laughed and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re a legend, girl,” she said, and my gut sank as I noticed a table of her girl friends, looking over at our conversation like they had scripted the opening line.
These kinds of interactions didn’t happen every day, or even every week. But I behaved as if they were about to. I was always conscious that I was minutes away from my next Dr. Byrne–related run-in, and held myself stiff. I didn’t want to be caught doing something that would further cement me in the Cork consciousness as That Girl.
Round red circles, the size of coins, appeared on the tops of my breasts and arms.
“Oh my God,” James said, smothering a laugh. “You actually have ringworm?”
Ringworm and scabies. The first thing we ever talked about, and we had just passed our first anniversary of it.
I did not have ringworm. I had something my family GP called “button psoriasis.” I was asked if I had any new stresses in my life.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I lied. “The economy?”
Our savings were more important than ever. I never went out any more, because I worked nights, and I never spent during the day, because I was asleep or getting ready to work again. James was also vigilant, and we were both putting away fifty a week.
“We need to get out,” I said to James.
“We need to get out,” he confirmed.
* * *
A Google search, December 2021:
Dr. Fred Byrne UCC cork
Dr. Fred Byrne UCC cork sick
Dr. Fred Byrne UCC cork sick coma
Aideen Harrington
Aideen Harrington sick husband coma
Deenie Harrington sick husband coma
And finally:
Alistair Harrington daughter husband sick coma
I search them all, like telegrams posted into the ether. Strangely enough, Alistair Harrington proves fruitful. A short interview in the Evening Echo had run at the beginning of October.
CORK POET TO RECEIVE RETROSPECTIVE AT CRAWFORD ART GALLERY
My eyes skitter down the page, taking in nonsense phrases like “the homecoming Cork’s poet laureate deserves” before finally landing on a quote from Deenie.
Speaking on behalf of her father’s estate, Aideen Byrne has said that she is “thrilled” the event will finally be taking place, her archival work having been delayed several times due to family illness.
“There’s been a lot of renewed interest in Dad’s work over the years. Poetry is big again, and I think younger audiences are beginning to realise how resonant his work still is.”
Alistair Harrington: Ashes to the Fire, Crawford Art Gallery, 10 October–15 December, Tickets €8
My first thought is: I should book my flight right now, brave the Christmas crowds at Stansted, and surprise my parents with a visit from their heavily pregnant daughter. Stand in the Crawford, my butt cheeks clenched, trying not to let out nervous pregnancy wind while I stare at the letters and photos that I once touched in the sun-drenched kitchen of the Harrington-Byrnes.
Or, the Byrnes.
She’s going by just Byrne now. Why, Deenie, when you were so comfortable with Harrington before, would you take your husband’s name? After everything he did to me and James, after everything he must have continued to do after I evaporated from your life completely? I circle back to the question I have asked myself hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the years: How did she make the marriage work? How much did she swallow and forgive? How much did he change and promise?
I am good at a few things, but I am great at being married. As I learned that year in Shandon Street, there is nothing that my personality or my humour thrives on more than being able to see the same person at the same time every day. I thrive on over-exposure, on elaborate jokes, on private mythology.
I am a huge advocate for marriage, and yet I still don’t understand how Deenie kept hers going.
I should go, I think, looking at flight comparison websites, to confirm to myself that it did all happen. That there was a person called Rachel Murray, and she existed in the summer of 2010, full of sex and books, surrounded by the men she was in love with.
And then the baby kicks and it feels like an earthquake from the inside.
26
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN James and me, which was unpleasant yet organic, began to morph into something else.
I woke up one morning in November unusually early. I woke up with my neck crooked, my nose blocked, and beginning to wonder why on earth I lived in this house at all. The ants in summer, the frigid cold in the winter. Nothing fun had happened in Shandon Street since the exodus of Carey and Dr. Byrne. We drank but not joyously; ate junk food, but never with a sense of shared sin, always because it was the warmest, quickest thing to shove into our bodies. We were heartbroken. Every now and then we would inform one another that we had “really turned a corner” with our sadness, and that we were “over it” now. It wasn’t true. We were not over it.