Which didn’t mean I wasn’t insecure. There were so many beautiful women in London, and diets were useless. If I didn’t have carbs three times a day I couldn’t finish a sentence, and that was that. But men were never a problem. I dated a lot, had sex quite a bit, but my long spell of monogamy was broken. I dressed like I would have been afraid to dress in Ireland: big prints, loud colours, mad accessories. “Your clothes,” a fashion editor once told me, “have a sense of humour, don’t they?”
A newspaper back home let me write a fashion column for them for fifty euros a week, mostly taking the piss out of trends, and I still write the same column now. They have adjusted my rate for inflation; I now make seventy-five euros a week. But I have fun, and sometimes a brand will send me a scarf. So.
I left the bookshop two years after joining it, when the only person of my original set left was Byron. I was running fiction now, but I had too many responsibilities, the new hires were younger than me, and it felt like time to move on. I became a staff writer at a magazine called The Chelsea Buyer, which was run by a woman who ate mackerel straight from the packet and whose office was the basement in her Notting Hill townhouse.
James got his first joke on TV. It was about Obama’s tan suit. I watched it on YouTube the next morning. I cried and left a voicemail on his phone to say that I was proud of him.
That was the first year I had enough money to visit him in New York. He took me to a warehouse party in some district he was too poor to live in, showing me the cool things he knew about in New York. We rented bikes and rode over Brooklyn Bridge. I asked him if he did this with everyone who visited and he said yes. I knew he was tired, and would have preferred to be on the couch, but had spent so long complaining about Sabrina that he felt he had to prove he was fun.
“Do you ever miss Cork?” he asked, on my last night. “And knowing people?”
“I know people.”
“I mean really knowing them.”
I thought about them all the time. When I saw large men with dark-haired women, when I found second-hand anthologies of Irish poets, when someone asked me about university. I never told anyone about the Harrington-Byrnes. At first because the wound was too raw, and then because the story was too complicated, and eventually because the story was all so Irish that I felt embarrassed. There was no way of telling the story without paraphrasing it as a Maeve Binchy novel. Bright young girl. Insular little city. Life almost ruined by pregnancy, but not quite. It was humiliating. I did not like Ireland very much, once I got settled in England. I was angry about the abortion I had extorted my friends to almost-have, and livid that my country had put me in that position in the first place. I kept waiting to hear from them again. I was easy to get hold of. I had a website.
I started covering Irish abortion stories for the English press, did some holiday cover at The Guardian, got a job at another magazine, with a real office. I wasn’t earning very much more than I was at the bookshop, but I was also not spending. There was always some event where you could drink for free.
A story about an Irish woman who had died after taking illegal abortion pills made it into our English newsroom.
“Why didn’t she just fly over?” someone asked.
“Because it costs money,” I replied.
“How much?”
I totted it up for them. I made it look like mental maths, and not a figure that had been living in my head for six years.
“Write it up,” my editor said. “‘The True Cost of an Irish Abortion.’ Hotels, trains, everything.”
I went through each step again, the ones I had already completed with James years ago, stepping neatly into my old footprints. I wondered whether now was the time to talk about it. There were so many people adding their voices to the pro-choice debate, but they were all better women. Married women with fatal foetal abnormalities. That kind of thing. Even the women who were more like me, the girls in their teens and early twenties who simply were not adhering to their birth control schedule closely enough, at least their stories were all similar. The traditional abortion arc: going to the airport alone, shuffling past the protestors at the clinic, feeling tender and awkward in the hostel, and then on the plane back. It was bad, but it was familiar, like a fairy story at its most savage and transcribed from the original Danish.
Plus, my story was not an abortion story. My story was a miscarriage story, but I had no place with the miscarriage women either, who all seemed to want their babies.
Writing the “True Cost” piece gave me a headache so severe that I had to ask my boss if I could go home. Someone else did the piece instead.
One month before the Irish abortion referendum in 2018 my wrist began to seize up while I typed. I was still on staff for a newspaper, but freelancing in the evenings. Every UK newspaper wanted to have an upsetting piece about a woman who was sent her foetal remains in a jam jar, and it was my job to interview them. First my wrist froze, then my fingers would become temporarily stuck in a claw position. One day while washing my hair, I found that I could not create a lather with my fingers, and had to knead the shampoo with the heel of my hand. I bought a cast from the pharmacy, one with Velcro straps that wrapped around my knuckles. Food crumbs and lint stuck to it.
My editor saw me struggling to put my coat on one day, my Velcro hand sticking to the inside lining.
“Rachel, for fuck’s sake,” he said. “Go see a physio.”
I was pretty sure that my injury had come from typing, on the kitchen counter, on the coffee table, and in my bed. I made an appointment for a physiotherapist, only after my editor confirmed that they would pay for it. I took myself and my Velcro hand to Pimlico and sat in a treatment room with a fibreglass model of the human spine.
“Rachel Murray?”
I looked up, still cradling my huge hand.
And there, eight years after he left me in Shandon Street, was James Carey.
James Carey, thirty-five years old, with lines on his forehead.
James Carey, built like a terrier and just as common, somehow wider and squarer than I had ever known him, the strawberry-blond hair shorter, but all him, all Carey.
James Carey, who once told me that I did not understand the point of loving people, who said that when you loved them you loved all of them.
James Carey, the first sexual partner I had legitimately orgasmed with. Here he was, holding a clipboard that said I was experiencing wrist trouble, had no history of blood clots, and was not allergic to penicillin.
“Carey,” I said.
It was like the word had opened a portal, and he had to decide whether or not to step through it. I remembered that I was the only one to ever call him that. He stepped through the portal.
“Rachel,” he said. “Your hair.”
It was still short, a little longer than a pixie cut, and ashy blonde.
“I cut it,” I said.
“When?”
“Um…” I thought about it carefully. “Twenty thirteen?”
He put his clipboard down, and started to laugh. I laughed, too, out of awkwardness. I wasn’t really sure what we were laughing at, my hair or the year 2013.
“Well, give me a hug then, you silly cow.”
He smelled like a person who showers every day, and like a man who puts a scent on, and both the cleanliness and the scent were so alien to me that I wondered if this really was the James Carey who broke my heart. But the hug went on, and my nose picked up on that faint earthiness living under the clean body. I wondered if he was doing the same, if that was the reason that the hug was going on six seconds longer than the hug of old friends. I wondered if he could find the Rachel underneath the patient who had just walked into his office.