“No,” I said. He raised his eyebrows. “Sort of,” I admitted.
“Sure, look. I don’t blame you.” We were walking up the South Bank now, a circle gathering around a man beatboxing into a microphone, both of us straining to hear each other.
“When did you start training? It must have taken a while?”
His mother had died a year after he had last seen me. He lived with his father after that. His father, who was generally “infirm” but not particularly unwell, though, needed a lot of attention to keep limber. Carey had gone to therapy with him, and drilled him on the movements at home. He found that his lupus symptoms were playing up less as a result of the physio, and started studying it at Ulster University, commuting from home several days a week. In three years, he was qualified. In four, he was working in Derry. After five, he started studying acupuncture, and after six, his father died, after complications following a stroke.
“I’m so sorry, Care,” I said. “That’s a lot.”
“D’you know what?” he replied thoughtfully. “When you put it like that, it all sounds miserable. But it wasn’t so bad, Rachel. Honestly. We were happy as two clams, living together, and we were never on top of each other. We had good craic together. And Derry is gorgeous. And I had the girls helping out, and my nieces and nephews are brilliant, and I had loads of my old mates around. I went out with a nice girl for a few years. A new profession. It was very…”
“Grounding?” I finished, my breath held on the nice girl, wondering where she was now.
“Grounding,” he agreed. “Yes.”
It was a cold spring day, and I had dressed to be fancied. Leopard-print mini skirt, tight black funnel neck, leather jacket. I was freezing, next to the river. He could tell. “Shall we go in here?” he said, pointing at the Giraffe.
I laughed. “To Giraffe?”
“What? Is it no good?”
“No.” I laughed again. “I don’t know. I’ve never been. It’s just…I don’t know, it’s a chain.”
But Giraffe being a chain was not a good enough reason to say no to Giraffe, the way it would have been with my own friends.
“I cannot believe,” I said, picking up my menu, “I am sitting inside the Giraffe on the South Bank with James Carey.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s somewhere you go with your, like, distant cousin, who is visiting from home,” I explained. “It is not where you go with your ex-boyfriend turned physiotherapist.”
We had arrived in the middle of bottomless brunch and were surrounded by women in the early hours of a hen do or a thirtieth birthday party, high on Bloody Marys and mimosas.
“Well, Christ,” he said, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. What do you think, Rache?”
“You haven’t seen me in eight years and you want to do bottomless brunch with me?”
“Are you going to narrate everything we do today?” he asked, but nicely.
“No.”
“Always taking notes,” he said.
“Like the Gestapo?” I replied, a line which had been rolling around my head for approximately eight years.
He smiled, and I couldn’t tell if he remembered saying it or not. “Like the Gestapo, yes.”
We talked and ate and drank prosecco watered down with orange juice. Carey had been living in London for eight months. He did not know if he wanted to stay. It was so unfriendly, he thought. And pretentious.
“No, it isn’t,” I said fiercely. “London is great. It’s fab.”
“Yes, that’s coming from you, though. You’re too London to eat in Armadillo.”
“What’s Armadillo?”
“Is that not where we are?”
“Giraffe!”
I told him about what James was doing, and I was surprised that he needed filling in. I assumed everyone knew what James was doing. By now he was a senior producer at the show he started interning at, loyal to the end, even though he had offers elsewhere. The off-season was long enough that he could fly out to LA and work on scripts, including several big comedies that you have definitely heard of. He is often one of five writers behind a funny woman’s big film, and has so many Instagram followers that he sometimes does adverts for PrEP.
“God,” Carey said, leaning back into his plastic chair. “Well, he was always going to be famous, wasn’t he?”
“Did you always think that?” I said, already phrasing this information in my head as though it were a text to James. “I suppose he was always very funny. And dedicated.”
“And he gets people in his thrall very easy, doesn’t he?” Carey said.
James, who has had countless lovers in the past decade, has never enthralled anyone on a permanent basis. Every few years he will make a half-hearted play towards a relationship, but usually gets tired of the person quickly. He has a huge friend group in New York, and is as dedicated to each of them as he is to me. He is always phoning me from a rental car, where he is invariably driving upstate for a wedding, a funeral or a millionaire’s orgy.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you.”
“Was I ‘in his thrall’？”
“Yes.”
“That’s a funny way of putting it,” I said, swaying slightly from the sweet drinks. “I wouldn’t say I was in his ‘thrall.’ Just that he was my best friend. Is.”
Now I was certain Carey was thinking about our last pub trip, on the day of my graduation.
He looked at his menu. “I might have a beer, now, break up the sugar.”
We talked about my life in London and what it had brought me, but his comment about James stuck to my back teeth like hard toffee.
With James now quite rich and famous, I sometimes convinced myself that he had outgrown me, and I was his needy little hanger-on, the kind of sad person who gets brought to parties as a treat and not because she belongs there. I would see James on social media, wearing a suit at a GQ party and talking to Jenny Slate, and think, Oh, it’s over. I would mourn our friendship, privately, and decide to not be resentful. Then inevitably he would phone me and ask whether I thought Ben from the bookshop was queer all along, and I would realise how crazy I had been.
I once confessed to a friend of James’s, a beautiful gay boy called Phil, that I often felt not good enough for my own best friend.
“Oh, none of us do,” he said airily. “James secretly thinks he should be with a Harvard professor or something, doesn’t he?”
This surprised me. I thought it meant Phil knew about Dr. Byrne, but he didn’t. Phil had just witnessed Byrne’s shadow: James’s roaming sense that a boyfriend was supposed to be a big person who lectured you about books.
We stayed at Giraffe for a long time, until we got restless and released ourselves back onto the street. We still had not talked about the one thing the other person really cared about, which was whether we were both single.
“I’m not ready to go home yet,” Carey said. “Are you?”
“No.”
He put his arm around my shoulders. I had worn flats that day, so I wouldn’t be too much taller than him. He never minded about that kind of thing, but maybe he had changed somehow, and become a man who minded. “Fucking hell,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re here.”