When I started writing this all down, I told you that me and James have only ever had one fight, officially speaking. The one in O’Connor’s, where I shoved him against a wall. The one where he almost needed stitches. There have been two more, and they were the night I told him about blackmailing Dr. Byrne, and the night he told me about New York. All that said, though, I never remember St. Stephen’s Night 2010 as a fight.
I remember it as the night we decided to split the money and run.
27
I ARRIVED IN LONDON on 15 January 2011, on a day where the lift at Elephant & Castle tube station was not working.
I dragged my father’s largest suitcase up 124 steps, breathless and fiercely hoping for a chivalry that did not come. When I emerged into the freezing air, I found that my new neighbourhood was a market street next to a roaring, busy road. There were snacks and clothes on rails and chicken bones on the ground. Everything smelled like popcorn, polyester clothing and car fumes.
I was moving in with strangers. There were other options available, of course. Just as James had fallen on Sabrina, his one New York contact, I could have searched my Facebook friends list for people who had moved to London and might have a spare bedroom. But the more I thought about it, the more I imagined my hometown like a creeping shadow. I was still getting girls coming up to me in the bar, asking me odd questions, glancing back at their friends. I was too frightened to go anywhere I thought the Harrington-Byrnes might be, and that included bookshops, live music venues and the English Market.
Was it really as bad as all that? It’s hard to say. I was the centre of my world, so it felt natural to assume that everyone in Cork knew who I was and was talking about me. But could I have been imagining it all?
Whether the strange looks were real or not, they were real to me, and they affected every choice that came next. I never reached out to anyone from home: not before I moved, and not after.
I was, for the first time in my life, completely alone.
I had done a Skype interview for a flat share on the Old Kent Road. The landlord was odd. He insisted that he do a birth chart before I moved in, to check my harmony with the house, and I was asked my exact date of birth along with the time of day. I was very charmed by this, of course. It seemed exactly the kind of thing that would happen to a young heroine, moving to London alone. Plus I wanted anecdotes, for James. I couldn’t bear the thought of him making stories and me having none.
The flat was eleven floors up, no lift, and so I dragged my suitcase once again. I arrived, knocked on the door, and found my new landlord in a string vest and boxers.
“Sun in Taurus!” he said, by way of greeting. “Moon in Scorpio! Hello!”
“Hello.”
“Luxurious and hot-headed,” he carried on. “Passionate. I hope you won’t be keeping me awake, bringing boys in every hour of the day and night.”
His name was Justin. He was not gay, as this kind of language might imply, but a pervert.
My room was the shape of an old fifty-pence piece. It had a rolled-out futon and a heavy wardrobe with no drawers. For three months, I hung what could be hung and kept all my knickers and socks in my suitcase.
My first morning in the flat, Justin followed me around constantly, like a dog with an anxiety disorder. He talked about his workout routine, his job selling electronics at the airport, his twenties as a dancer in Berlin, his dream to dance again in the London Olympics—which were holding auditions, and soon—and his general love of spiritualism and the occult. He talked about my birth chart, going into extensive patter about the alignment of planets, and then finishing with an Austin Powers impression: “Does it make you horny, baby?”
I had never met someone so odd who could simultaneously be so charmless. Even now I can feel myself failing to trap him with words. I had always assumed that I loved kooky people, but maybe now I hated them.
I went to shower and he followed me to the bathroom door, then sat outside and continued to talk while I washed myself.
“Justin!” I shouted, from under the weak spray of tepid water. “Can you please fuck off?”
He fucked off. When I came out of the shower he was gone, but he had left a little tortilla wrap with ham and lettuce in it on a plate on the floor. There was a Post-it stuck to it, stuck right onto the tortilla wrap. It said: For you.
I took the plate and ate the wrap on my futon, still dripping wet, and burst into tears. It was just the kind of thing James might have done—a version of it, anyway—and now a weirdo was doing it.
But, even through my tears, I could feel something happening within myself. I had told a stranger to fuck off, and I had meant it. I had drawn a line with someone. I had never really done that before.
* * *
England was not exempt from the recession, but London was. Or rather, it was responding to the recession by having the exact same number of jobs and just paying everyone less for them. This might have been a relief for some but was a mathematical puzzle to me. I didn’t understand how an ￡18,000-a-year assistant job could require a first-class degree and over a year’s experience.
A bigger riddle was my CV. I had done a solid five-month internship with Deenie Harrington. I had put a book out into the world with her. I was in the acknowledgements. But what if they called her?
“Just put ‘references available upon request,’” James said, when we Skyped about it.
“But what happens when they request them?” I replied. “Whose name will I give them?”
“Mine. I’ll pretend to be her.”
“That will never work.”
“Hang on,” he said. He carried his laptop out into the hallway of his building. “Sorry. Sab is taking her seventh shower of the day and I can hear her singing.”
“Any good?”
“No.”
To my delight, James and Sabrina were not getting along as housemates. He found her prim and judgemental, and despite selling him on the delights of New York’s social scene, she wanted to spend every night doing craft projects.
“I’m watching her knit,” he snapped. “I’m twenty-three years old in the greatest city on earth, and I’m watching this dumb bitch watch TV and knit.”
Nobody knew his name yet at the internship. They were briefly interested in him on his first day, when they attempted to locate their grandmothers’ birthplaces by simply repeating the words “Louth?” and “No, Longford?” at him, but no one had talked to him since. His accent, which was strongly Cork with flecks of Mancunian in it, wasn’t particularly hard to understand, but it was unusual and hard to place, so people were unable to focus on what he had to say when he spoke to them.
“Today someone said that it’s a ‘good thing’ I don’t want to be in front of the camera,” he said. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“At least you have a real job.”
I did not have a real job. I didn’t have a National Insurance number either, which was why I was working at a pub that paid me cash in hand until I could legally work in the UK. I had got the job by walking down every street in central London and handing in my CV to bars, making sure I hammed up my accent as much as I could.
“Can you do the foam?” one bar manager asked.