“And who is…?”
“My wife,” he answered. “And, well, my publisher.”
My face was turning red. “Oh, of course,” I said.
6
ONCE, on a press trip to Iceland, I was stuck on a broken-down coach an hour outside of Reykjavik. We were on our way back from the geysers. The geyser was beautiful, and it splashed everyone, and the splash was so happily received that it felt like a version of Sea World for people who read The New York Times on their phone. But on the way back, the water stuck to our skin and froze there, as we waited, and waited, for roadside assistance. The whole time I stamped my feet and ate my frigid packed lunch and thought: But is this as cold as January in Shandon Street? No.
It was so cold that we couldn’t be downstairs any more. We went down for food and to use the bathroom, but we lived in James’s room, both duvets stacked on the bed, the radiator going, the space heaters choking us with rancid air. We brought the TV upstairs and watched season boxsets of shows that we found in charity shops.
James was far more housebroken than I was. He washed his sheets every week, ironed them, and had specific ideas about fabric softener. I had never done my own laundry. I had no perception that clothes could go stale in the washing machine if you left them there too long.
“You smell like a troll,” he said one day.
I sniffed under my arms, surprised my body was even warm enough to sweat.
“No, I mean, like you live under a bridge. Your clothes smell like dirty water.”
And it was up to him to show me how laundry worked.
I was unusually stupid about household things, my mother having pampered us all without any of us realising. I thought because I unloaded the dishwasher at home that I knew how a house worked. In my defence, James was advanced. He’d had to take care of himself early, and had lots of rules about housekeeping. He also had an obsession with magazines, and would pick up GQ or Take a Break or Hello! whenever he went to the shops, like I might pick up a chocolate bar.
I once asked him why this was, and he said: “They were my toys.”
“What?”
“My mum would sometimes come into our rooms and say, ‘We’re going tomorrow,’ and we’d have to fill two carrier bags. You can fit a lot of magazines into a carrier bag.”
Nothing in his tone sought to arrange the information as though it were tragic backstory. Sometimes he would just drop these things into conversation and I would have to force him to backtrack, ask him all the questions he asked me about my dentist father, except James would get bored of answering and move on.
Over the first month of living together, I had learned the following: that James was born in Manchester, that his father was an addict, and that he was periodically in prison. He had two older sisters, and a mother he loved very much. On release, his father would often try to track down the family in an attempt to reunite with them, wherein James’s mother would move them on. She didn’t do this because she hated James’s father. She did it because she loved him, knew that she couldn’t say no to him, and that if she said yes, the lives of her children would become worse. She was trying to recover herself. When James was nine, she moved them to Ireland, where she quickly met his stepfather, and he had been in Cork ever since.
His English accent was mostly gone, but he still peppered his speech with words like “minge.” He called college “uni,” which I liked because “Rachel’s off to uni” made me feel clean and jolly hockey sticks about my education.
I told him about my conversation with Dr. Byrne while under two duvets eating a chow mein that came in a bag from the freezer section of Tesco and whose water chestnuts never properly defrosted. Your teeth would slide through them, particles of crusty frost landing on your tongue.
“Oh my God,” he said. “We’ll have to make it really glam.”
“What? How?”
“Let’s make it black tie.”
“James! No! It’s a book launch, not a gala.”
“Okay, but wear a skirt. Oh! And you have to give him an introduction.”
“An introduction? To what?”
“To his reading. You stand at the lectern and say, ‘It is my great honour to introduce…,’ blah blah blah.”
“Is that normal?”
“Very normal, yes.”
I have now been to enough book launches to know that sometimes the bookseller might give a short introduction, and so in a sense, it is kind of normal. But honestly, if James told me that it was normal to take your top off while working the register, I probably would have believed him.
We spent the rest of that evening researching Deenie Harrington, who was thirty years old and a senior editor at Dr. Byrne’s publisher. There wasn’t much else to “research,” except for a few grainy photos of her at publishing events.
“Christ,” he said, zooming in on her face, “you can tell he’s into the Victorians.”
It was easy to see what he meant. Deenie had shiny black hair and the kind of eggy eyes you see in portraits from the era. She had a sharp nose, a rounded chin, and the pretty look of someone academic yet slightly in-bred.
But even then, I could tell that she was a nice person. She was always smiling in photographs, a warm and nervous smile, and she had a weakness for seventies-style silk hairbands in an array of jazzy patterns.
“She seems a daft bitch,” James said, “daft” being another English-ism he had kept from childhood.
James had no love life himself, so he was prepared to throw a lot of energy into mine. I think I would have put the crush on Dr. Byrne aside if James hadn’t been there, spurring me on. He wanted me to have a glamorous, exciting rebound after Jonathan, but he was also keen for the drama. He wanted to arrange the whole thing like a photo spread in Heat magazine.
“I’ve been thinking,” he announced, a few days before the launch. “Once the drinks bit ends and everyone leaves, we make him stay.”
“How?”
“We make him sign all the copies of his book. Stick him in the stockroom. Then you can seduce him.”
This was a seduction technique stolen from Empire Records, a film we watched a lot because it was about young people in retail.
“In the stockroom?”
“You’ve never fantasised about fucking someone in the stockroom?”
Of course I had. James knew that, too, so I’m not sure why he was asking. We were already at a stage where I had told him about my obsession with strange men in enclosed spaces.
On the morning of the launch I got an email from Deenie Harrington asking if it would be okay for her to come by the shop an hour early to drop off the wine. I told her of course.
I felt like a child whose imaginary friend was starting to bite people. The game had already gone too far. The game had always been just that. A thing to keep James and me entertained while we waited for our frostbitten January to end.
I didn’t actually want to start an affair with my professor. It was a ridiculous notion. There was also the unavoidable fact that Dr. Byrne hadn’t showed the remotest bit of sexual interest in me.