When we parted, we could not stop laughing at each other. “What the fuck is this all about?” I spluttered. “Why are you pretending to be my physiotherapist?”
“Because I am your fucking physiotherapist.”
“I’m sorry. Last time I saw James Carey, he worked in a bread shop.”
I almost bit my lip in the lie. No, I thought. The last time I saw James Carey, he was gazing out the window of Shandon Street, wondering if there was anything left of the girl he thought he loved.
“I didn’t even know you were interested in this…” I gestured to the model of the human spine. “Stuff.”
“I know, I know. But it was either this or prison, wasn’t it?”
“I actually imagined something more glamorous and squalid, like you’d end up drinking yourself to death under a bridge.”
“Was I really such a fuck-up, then?”
“This from the man who shoplifted grains of salt from Paul Street Shopping Centre.”
“God, Rache, even as I was doing that, I knew: this girl is going to put it in a book one day.”
I grinned, overcome with happiness at seeing him.
“Carey,” I said, “what are you doing here?”
“Well, according to this chart, I’ve got to see a woman with RSI.”
“What’s that?”
“Repetitive Strain Injury. From typing, I assume? Are you a writer now, something like that? Working in books, like you wanted?”
“Journalist,” I answered. “I’m actually working overtime at the moment, covering Repeal.”
He nodded. “My sisters are doing loads for that back home. Getting it in the North, you know.”
“The women in the North tend to get ignored in this debate,” I said, sounding like I was on a panel for women in media.
“Yes, and all they get told is how ignored they are.” We both laughed again, amazed that we could sound so grown up with one another.
“Sorry, how are we talking about this?” I said.
“I know!
“Look,” he said, “I need to look at your fucking wrist. I’m off at six. We could get a drink after?”
It was four o’clock. Could I wait around for two hours for James Carey? Was I still that Rachel Murray?
“I actually have to go back to work,” I said. “But I could meet you this weekend? Proper catch-up?”
He looked disappointed. “Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The weekend. Look, I’ll give you my number, and we can sort it. Let’s look at the wrist, will we?” He gestured at my horrible Velcro glove. “Take off that thing.”
I wondered if he was married, or had children, or a girlfriend. He was a man in his thirties, and men in their thirties are never single unless there’s something wrong with them. I had heard this from many trusted sources.
He sat down on the chair opposite me, and took my wrist in his hands. The warm circle of his fingers like a bracelet.
“Now,” he said, “tell me where the strain is.”
I blundered my way through my various ailments. The freezing fingers, the wrist pain, the stuck thumb.
“You work too much,” he said, and it was hard to tell whether it was a physiotherapist’s opinion or the opinion of James Carey.
“Make your wrist go limp,” he said, and I did, the fingers pointing down like a homophobic gesture. He put his hand flat in front of mine, his palm to my knuckles. “Now push against me.”
I pushed my hand towards his, my fingertips grazing the lines of palm.
“Harder, go on. Hard as you can.”
I flushed, and wondered whether I should ask for a different physiotherapist. This was too strange. Like a dream I would wake up and tell James about.
“Harder, go on, you’re not trying.”
My wrist was getting tired. “I am trying.”
He took his other hand and worked his thumb up my arm, pressing hard, slightly massaging. “Here,” he finally said, triumphantly. He rested his thumb in a spot below the elbow. “This muscle here. It’s inflamed.”
He dug his thumb deeper, rolling on the muscle he had found. I felt a strange release, of something being broken, kneaded, and then flooding into the rest of my body. Blood coursed up and down my arm and into my shoulder, my chest. I could not look at Carey, so instead I looked at the model of the human spine. Kiss me, I thought violently. Fuck me in your weird office.
“You’ll need to do exercises,” he said. “To strengthen your muscles there. And if you can do audio typing, that might help. Rest your hand as much as you can.”
“No hand jobs for crack, then,” I said, and immediately wanted to drown myself. It belonged to the time where I knew him last. It was a South Park joke, from a moment when South Park kind of mattered.
He laughed, this time out of bemusement, rather than from the cosmic coincidence that had brought us together again.
I have ruined it, I thought. I have ruined it all, again. He showed me the exercises, and I counted down the minutes until I could leave and phone James.
But as I got up to go, Carey the physiotherapist disappeared. “Go on then, Murray,” he said. “Give us your phone number.”
* * *
Carey suggested meeting on the South Bank on Saturday at noon, which told me that he had not been living in London very long. I met him by the book stall outside the BFI, where he was reading Cher’s autobiography.
“Did you know she had an affair with Warren Beatty when she was still a teenager?” was the first thing he said.
“Didn’t he have an affair with everyone?”
“I know, but still.”
“Are you going to buy that?”
“No, let’s go.”
My physiotherapy appointment had been on Wednesday. It was a long time to wonder about James Carey. I had had other boyfriends in the years since, and it would be easy for me to say here that they never meant as much to me as Carey did, but of course they did. They meant all kinds of things to me, but now I couldn’t remember what those things were. That Saturday, it seemed like my romantic life had been held on a screensaver for years. I was walking next to Carey, the Carey, and my heart was expanding and being crushed at the same time.
“I couldn’t believe it when you walked into the practice,” he said. Hands in his pockets, face to the ground. “Rachel. It was like…I don’t know, some kind of lucid dream.”
“You must have known I was in London,” I countered. “I was the one surprised. You, who said you’d never live in England.”
“I never said that.”
“Oh yes you did. ‘Come Out, Ye Black and Tans’ on the Underground. You said that.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“But you did,” I stressed, a little too powerfully. “You did.”
“Well, you’re the journalist.”
“And you’re a physiotherapist?” I was still baffled by this development.
“You’re a physiotherapist, full stop, Mr. Carey. Not ‘You’re a physiotherapist,’ question mark. I know punctuation is everything to you types.”
“Sorry. But. Since when?”
“You thought I was just sitting on my hole back in Derry, did you?”