That early morning in November, I padded downstairs for a glass of water. It was 10 a.m., but it felt like dawn. I had got off work at three, and had stayed awake, wired, until well after four. James was awake, on his laptop, and talking on the phone.
When he saw me at the top of the stairs, he hung up like I had just caught him masturbating.
“Who was that?”
“Hmm?”
“On the phone. Who was that?”
“No one. What are you doing up?”
“Water.”
“Ah.”
“It’s cold.”
“I know.”
“Can I take a heater?”
“In my bedroom. Take a hoodie, too, if you want.”
I snuggled into bed and fell back to sleep. I would have forgotten about it, if the same thing didn’t happen again a week later. Another dropped phone call, another smile and an offer of clothes, or food, or a drive out to the McDonald’s. I kept catching James in the middle of something, but I didn’t know what that something was.
I started to suspect that he was sleeping with Dr. Byrne again. There seemed no other explanation. Were they emailing? Hadn’t Fred Byrne learned his lesson the first time?
James’s absences from the house became longer, his speech more guarded, his body language more withdrawn. We were supposed to be emigrating together in January, just six weeks away. Was now really the time to be starting up with the man who had betrayed us so thoughtlessly?
I didn’t want to ask about it. If I asked, then he would tell me, and because I couldn’t ever say no or stay mad at James, I would end up tangled in their world again. I was already a fugitive in my own city. There was no way I was going to be an accomplice to Dr. Byrne’s betrayal of Deenie again.
“Are you all right?” James asked one day. We were assembling a fake Christmas tree, gifted to us by his mother. Slotting branches into a green pole, the plastic leaves itching our faces.
“Yes,” I said. “Are you?”
“You just seem…” He examined one of the branches. “Prickly.”
“Good one. Is that going in the script?”
“Huh?”
“Branches. Prickly.”
“Oh. Right. Hah. No.” James looked queasy.
I thought about how I would feel if it was Carey who I was forbidden from seeing, even though he only lived a mile away. I felt a pang of loneliness for him, the desperate knowledge that he was off in the world, still living his life, not even having the common decency to be dead and therefore putting a graceful end to our relationship.
He had texted me only once, since arriving back in Derry, saying that he needed to think about us. I didn’t hear from him again. I checked in, enquired about his mother’s health, but no response.
I pretended to untangle fairy lights.
“Do you want to come over on Boxing Day?” he said.
“Stephen’s Day,” I corrected. He could still be so English sometimes. “Where? To Fermoy?”
“Yeah. Mum is having a party.”
“Will you pick me up?”
“Sure.”
“Sure.”
We stepped back in surprise to see how lovely the whole room looked. I had always been brought up to think of plastic trees as tacky, that big dogs were better than small dogs, that potato waffles were common. So many of my beliefs about the world had been predicated on our once having had money. Now I knew that a real tree for forty euro is wasteful, especially as it can only be used once. That small dogs fare better in small houses. That potato waffles are useful stomach cladding when you don’t have a lot else.
There, in our living room, fairy lights bouncing off the waxy green brush, I realised there was nothing at all wrong with a plastic tree.
“We should clean the house,” I said. “Make it a bit more Christmassy.”
We swept the floors, hoovered between the sofa cushions, salvaged candles from our bedrooms. There were some empty jars in the recycling and we put tealights in them. James went to the shop and brought back a bottle of mulled wine, some spiced rum and a packet of Cadbury Yule Logs.
We mixed the mulled wine and the rum together on the hob, the window on the back-porch door steaming up. James looked so gorgeous, so different to how he had looked a year before. It was like he had found his face, grown into his nose, found shades of grey for his green eyes.
He poured the wine mix into our best mug and gave it to me. Our order of mugs went like this: big Flintstones mug, ordinary grey mug, small mug with a map of Spain on it, pretty horse mug with a slow leak, and finally a mug that a KitKat Easter egg had once sat in, and burned your fingers when you held it too long. Carey always drank from the map of Spain. Dr. Byrne had the horse. Me and James took it in turns to alternate the Flintstones and the grey.
“I hate the Spanish one now,” I said, blowing on the mixture. “Makes me sad.”
“I hate the horse.” He said it with such conviction that I began to doubt my theory that he was seeing Dr. Byrne again. We drank for a moment in silence.
“Let’s throw them off the roof.”
There was a hurley in James’s room that seemed to exist so he could tell the people he slept with that he once played hurling in secondary school. We climbed out the window, him passing the hurl out to me, along with the entire saucepan of wine.
“I’ll throw,” he said. “You hit.”
The hurl hit the Spanish mug in one clean slice, splitting it in half, so Gibraltar was on one side of the road and San Sebastian on the other.
“Fuck!” I screamed, the relief rattling through me. “Yes! Fuck!”
“Okay, I want a go,” he said. I threw the horse mug up in the air and he belted the base of it, shattering it over our heads. I covered my face in my sleeve as the pieces came down.
“That felt good,” he said. “Shit.”
“I feel so strong now. I wish we had more things to smash.”
“We don’t,” he replied. “We have only so many mugs.”
“I hate the KitKat one. Shall I get it?”
“Are you sure you want to do this? Then we’ll only have two mugs,” he said. “No more guests.”
“Yes,” I said. “No more guests, and no more cunts.”
He threw, and I batted, just missing the mug, which bounced onto the footpath and smashed.
“Hmm,” I said. “Bit of an anticlimax.”
“Because the KitKat mug didn’t stand for anything,” he said sagely. “The KitKat mug was just minding its own business.”
“Poor thing.”
We drank on the roof until it became too cold, and when we came back into the house the candles were burning low and the whole kitchen smelled of spices. It felt like the lower decks of an old ship, rough and cosy and the only safety we had against the sea.
“I think we’ve exorcised them now,” he said. “That’s it. They’re gone.”
I hugged him, and we fell asleep under the blanket downstairs. I woke up a few hours later, a frightening new thought uncoiling like a snake.
If it wasn’t Dr. Byrne he was hiding from me, then what was it?
* * *
I was glad that we had that night on the roof, because we saw little of each other for the rest of December. I worked every night until Christmas Eve, the party season getting more chaotic as we moved closer to the New Year. “Fairytale of New York” played constantly, and I was amazed that despite it being such a cliché, people still allowed themselves to be moved by it.