“Go on,” he said.
“Go on, what?”
“Go on and scream at me, no one will hear you.”
“I don’t want to,” I said, wanting very much to scream at him. “I just want to know why you’ve participated in this fucking fiction of London when you’re moving to New York with Sabrina of all people? Do you even like her? Are you even friends?”
The field smelled of animals and moisture, and I felt swallowed by the vastness of it.
“I didn’t think any of this would come off,” he replied. “Look, I went round the houses with the London agents, and the production companies, and they’re all saying that I should get my face out there as a comedian, do comedy festivals, get in the theatre, and, I don’t know, that sounds okay, but not me. I started looking at other stuff, and I found this internship.”
“An internship?” I scoffed. “You’re moving to America for an internship?”
“It’s a proper one. One of the late-night shows, the ones that shoot in New York, they do these internship programmes for people from under-represented groups trying to get into comedy. You start as a writing assistant, and they have all this infrastructure to help you work your way up.”
I had never heard him use the word “infrastructure” before. I pictured him on phone interviews with a sleek TV person who must exist and yet had never been mentioned to me. Me, who was supposed to know everything about him.
“And that’s you, is it?” I said. “You’re an under-represented group?”
“I’m a gay man. And working class. So. Yes?”
I had never thought about the paper facts of our existence before. I was surprised by how much it upset me. I didn’t want any more reminders that me and James were two different people.
“So, what? When did you apply for this?”
“June.”
“June!”
“I never thought anything would come of it! It was more like a writing exercise. And then they called me, and I had an interview, and they said I was on the second stage, then the third stage, and then they called last month and said I had got it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Oh, Rache, you were going through so much. Carey and…you know. And I didn’t think in a million years that I’d get it.”
“I can’t believe you’ve been lying to me, James. We’ve been saving and talking about London for months. And you had already entered this fucking competition to live in New York.”
It made me feel better, somehow, to call it a competition.
“I literally just filled out a form in June. I filled out a form to live in Paris back in February, but I never mentioned that either, because it never came to anything. I just, I don’t know, you apply for things, don’t you?”
“I don’t!” I exploded. “I don’t just apply for things!”
He kicked at a clod of dirt.
“Well, no, Rachel, because you don’t have to, do you?”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means.” He was bored of eating humble pie. “It means: your dad is a dentist and your grandad was a banker and you have a university degree. The playing field is not level, Rache.”
Today, I would have probably accepted that retort lying down. I have read so many articles on middle-class privilege, and even written some. But this was 2010, and I had too much fight in me.
“Are you high, James?” I screeched. “Look around you.”
I gestured back to the big house behind us, the fields of farmland his stepfather owned. He was the one who could get emergency cash off his mother. He was the one who got to borrow the family car. “You’re better off than my family, and you know it.”
This was supposed to be an argument about London and New York. About secrecy, and about lies. Why were we talking about class, and whose grandfather was a banker?
“Babe, I went from shitty estate to shitty estate until I was nine. I moved schools too much to learn long division properly. I barely got a Leaving Cert, no chance of uni, and I have no connections. Unless I want to get a job in a piggery, I’m fucked. I’m in retail for ever. Maybe I get a phone job and I work my way up to head office. But you can do anything, Rache. You can do any career. The real way. That’s why you don’t have to enter competitions.”
I rolled my eyes. It was all melodrama to me, all tactics to distract from the real point, which was that James had lied to me.
“You think I’m talking shite,” he said, his nostrils flaring. “But you’ll see, pal. These little graces you’ve picked up from your family, from university, they mean something. Hearing ‘Homer’ and knowing when someone doesn’t mean ‘Simpson.’ Knowing what part of the animal paté comes from. It all adds up. It all means something.”
I don’t know whether James’s words were a prediction, or a spell, but he was right. It did, and would, mean something. After I moved to London, I found that my accent, my good manners and my vague ability to reference Trollope helped build a picture for my English peers that became more than the sum of its parts. “You have one of those nice Irish voices,” someone once said to me. “Soft.”
They thought I had a bohemian background, or perhaps was some distant cousin of the aristocracy. They all thought I went to Trinity, and knew lots of poets personally, and asked me for tips on racehorses. I was once invited to Ascot and was asked if I could introduce the group to any jockeys. I found it all hilarious, of course, and told James about it, but I rarely corrected anyone. The difference between the truth and the reality was so marginal. What’s the difference between upper-middle and middle-middle, really?
“I just can’t believe you’re going to leave me,” I said. “After everything.”
James wrapped his arms around me and held on tightly, there, in the middle of his stepfather’s field. “I don’t want to leave you either,” he said, starting to cry. “Rache, I’m so scared.”
We held each other like that for a long time. I tried to imagine him walking down big New York streets, his scrawny body and his slightly too big head bobbing along as he fetched coffees and lunches and dry-cleaning. I thought about a world where I only saw him a few times a year. And I wondered about what I would do next.
We walked back to the party, arms draped at our waists, and I told him how proud I was of him, and how Michael and Alice were going to keep on living together even if we weren’t. How Michael and Alice would sweep the Emmys one day, and we would be on the red carpet, collecting statues on their behalf.
The house was lit up, the party still in full swing. It’s so hard to know what music to play at a Stephen’s Day party, the Christmas music already feeling so tired out, so someone had put Elton John on. Elton, who is Christmas without being Christmas. I said this to James, and he laughed and told me it was funny.
He stopped at the front gate. “I’ll have to go through our savings account,” he said. “I’ll just add up all my deposits and take that out.”
The account was now tickling four grand. The two thousand the Harrington-Byrnes had paid me to go away was my money, I suppose. James would have never dreamed to claim it for his own. It was my pregnancy, my would-be abortion. My pound of flesh.