“I’ve always been here!” I said, laughing. “I’ve been here for years.”
“Do you think I’m very different?” he asked, and he sounded almost anxious about it. I took the question seriously.
“I don’t know. Yes. I think so. Or maybe I’m different. I don’t know, I’m less afraid of you, now.”
“Afraid of me? When were you afraid of me?”
“I was always terrified you were about to bolt.”
He pushed me then, and I swayed, knocking against the rail of the river. “Oi! What was that about?”
“I never bolted. I was in it for the long run, Murray. I was obsessed with you.”
“Care, you literally disappeared.”
“That was the first time. Never the second time. If you take the entirety of our relationship, Rachel Murray, you’ll find—rounding up—I was the one doing all the chasing.”
I shook my head. “You can’t just pretend the first time didn’t happen. It destroyed me.”
“How was I supposed to know that?” he retorted. “It was all ‘me and James, me and James, me and James.’ You didn’t seem all that arsed about having a boyfriend. You already had a James. It was the first thing you ever said to me.”
I had heard this before, or a version of it, but had never been in the position to believe it.
“Is that really how you felt?” I asked.
“I don’t lie. Never to you.”
I had often gone weeks at a time without thinking about James Carey, but never months. He was always in the background somewhere, a “what if” stacked on top of so many other “what ifs.” What if I had never got pregnant; what if I had never lost the pregnancy; what if the Harrington-Byrnes had not chased me out of Cork with their money and their web of gossip, both real and imagined.
We walked through Parliament Square, and Carey gave his opinions on each of the statues. His opinion was pretty low, given how many of them had appalling track records in Ireland.
“Henry John Temple,” he said. “He evicted a load of paddies off their land, you know, Rachel. In the famine.”
“Really?” I said, looking up at the statue. “What a cunt.”
“Dreadful man,” he said. “Hey, can I kiss you?”
“You’re asking?”
“I don’t know, you might have a boyfriend, or something. I’ve been dying to know all day, and you haven’t said a thing about it.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“You haven’t said if I can kiss you.”
“Do you think it would anger Henry John Temple?” I said, looking at the statue.
“Oh, he’d be livid.”
“Well, in that case.”
He put his hands on my hips. He was shy, all of a sudden. There was a second of feeling like two teenagers who had been set up by their friends at the school disco. We exchanged a well, look at us! expression, and he tilted his head, very slightly, to kiss me.
And the kiss was like—what was it like?
It was like finding your favourite pair of boots under the bed. It was like finding them on the last day of your lease, the boxes already in the van, having assumed that they must have been left at an ex-lover’s house, or simply vanished by your own carelessness. Oh, these. Oh. Oh. I love these.
When I finally stopped kissing him, I put my arms around his waist, and laid my head on his shoulder. My nose dug deep to find the old smell, my hands on the rough denim of his jacket. I had missed him so much, and I hadn’t even known it.
“Carey,” I said. “Carey, Carey, Carey.”
“Darling,” he replied. “I think you’re a bit old to call me by my last name.”
And so now, everyone I love is called James.
APRIL 2022
WE DIDN’T CALL THE BABY JAMES, even though James Devlin thought it was the only name that made sense.
“I just think,” he said, “that there should be an endless continuum of Jameses looking out for you. A brotherhood. A pact.”
“No.”
“A pack of Jameses. A murder of Jameses. A consortium of Jameses.”
We called him Shay, in the end, short for Séamus, which was James Carey’s dad’s name. As soon as I told James Devlin, I received the following screen grab from Wikipedia.
Séamus （Irish pronunciation: [??e?m??s?]） is an Irish male given name, of Latin origin. It is the Irish equivalent of the name James. The name James is the English New Testament variant for the Hebrew name Jacob.
Alright, I texted back. You win.
The brotherhood of James welcomes yet another member, he replied.
I have practised telling him about Dr. Byrne in my head hundreds of times, and despite many revisions to how I would do it—complete with many careful, sensitive word choices—I still have not told him. I have told Carey, which marks a strange and important first in our history: the first time I have told him something that I have not told James. His advice is to wait. Wait until I know more, wait until James comes to visit in the summer. It’s not the kind of thing you want to find out over the phone, he says, and I agree, mostly because it lets me off the hook.
And in the meantime I have written it all down. I am told that writing at night inflames my carpal tunnel syndrome, and I ignore this advice, because you’re allowed to ignore your physiotherapist once you are married to him. I wrote at first for James, and then for Deenie, with some kind of impression in my mind that I would give it to either or both of them. I never will, of course—can you imagine? Your husband in a coma, and someone gives you a three-hundred-page confession?
I wonder what I did this for. And then I look at James Carey, a well-liked man nearing forty, and wonder: Are you capable of the same kind of betrayal? And if you are—do I deserve it? I am about the same age as Deenie Harrington-Byrne was when we first met, the age she will always be in my head. The impossible adulthood she and Dr. Byrne occupied, the easy sophistication that still feels alien to me but surely must be observed by the younger women at my office. Am I their Deenie? Am I anyone’s?
I look at my baby and I am sure he is made of velvet. He has only just forgotten how to sleep, and so inevitably it is the two of us alone at night together. He clings on to bunches of my hair or jewellery or my bra strap. “Sssssshay,” I say, both his name and a request for quiet. “Sssshay, Shay, Shay.”
I think, quite a lot actually, about whether Shay is anything like the baby I would have had back in 2010, if either my brain or my body had been up to the task of keeping it.
I remember, with a kind of sharp clarity that evaded me for years, exactly what those days were like. When the beginnings of me and Carey’s first pregnancy passed through me in clots, and I felt like an animal who had to take itself somewhere to die. The pain spread from my stomach and through to my back, working its way through to each notch on my spine, tapping on the base of my neck. The days in bed, the throwing the sheets away because they were ruined, the money taken off the house deposit because of the deep blood that seeped through the mattress, staining the box springs. James Devlin, coming in and out with potato waffles, chicken dippers, beans on toast. James with his own broken heart, looking after me.