I didn’t talk to James much that day, which I was grateful for. I knew he would make a lot of jokes about this being “the big night,” and I didn’t want to tell him that the plan was never really on. I wanted us all to pretend that this was a normal event for a local author and that life would quietly resume afterwards.
Dr. Byrne came in just after six. He was wearing a dark grey sports jacket and a pair of tan brogues, and both were splattered with rain. He looked handsome and wilted, like a tough flower that was gallantly surviving despite over-watering. I realised then how much my crush had developed, even though I had decided to do nothing about it. I admired Dr. Byrne when he was my fiery, huge professor. He made me feel better about studying English literature in a recession, because he was a professor who acted like professors in films acted. He added heft to the grand pointlessness of mooning over set texts. But over the last few weeks, my hero worship had crusted over into something more knobbly, more textured. He had been so happy to believe me about the pre-orders. I wanted to protect him against the world’s many disappointments, guard him with my body like I would a baby or a small dog.
On top of all that, he was the only man I’d met who made me feel petite, and to feel protective over someone who physically towers over you is a hell of a drug.
“Oh my God,” James said, when he saw him across the shop. “I bet he’s hung like a chandelier.”
“Shut up.”
“Do you have clean knickers on?” he prodded. “You don’t have your under-the-bridge-troll knickers?”
“I’m not discussing this here.”
“No one holidays at the swamp.”
“James!”
“I’m just saying.”
It was the kind of thing we found hysterically funny at home but James would sometimes drag into public life, where I was still trying to be Bookshop Girl. I wanted to be caught in a beam of sunlight looking elegant and melancholy, possibly writing a poem at the same time. I tried this for years and it took me until my mid-twenties to realise that it’s strictly for short women.
But all the same, I was wearing nice knickers.
I approached Dr. Byrne from the side, as if not to spook a horse, and he had a wide, nervous smile for me. He smelled like rain and cigarettes.
“Hello,” I said. “You just missed your wife.”
“When?” he answered.
“Oh…two hours ago.” I bumbled around. “She seems nice.”
He merely nodded, and I thought: What right do I have to tell this grown man that his wife is nice?
“We’re really excited about tonight,” I went on. “Everyone at the shop.”
James came over, proof that other people worked there. “Hello,” he said. “Can I just say, your book is fantastic. I started reading it on my lunch. I’m already on chapter two. Unreal.”
Fred Byrne smiled gratefully. “Really?”
“Yes. And I’m a useless reader. But, like, I grew up in England, and they get taught none of this stuff over there. It’s all the Empire this, the Empire that, no one would be able to hold their knife and fork if the Empire hadn’t taught them to.”
“Quite right,” Dr. Byrne said, his lecture-hall confidence starting to come back to him. “And when did you move here?”
“Nineteen ninety-seven. My mum married a farmer.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Fermoy.”
“Ah.”
“I know. Don’t worry about it. I have nothing good to say about Fermoy either.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Nowhere’s too bad if you have a DVD player in your room.”
“God, if only we had that when my family moved to Canada.”
With every word spoken I felt like I was becoming more and more invisible.
“You lived in Canada?” I asked, my voice oddly strangled.
“For a few years,” he said, and at that moment Ben came over with a bowl of refreshments.
About thirty people came, in the end. Twenty-two of them were friends, family or work colleagues of the Harrington-Byrnes. The rest were drifters, or people sheltering from the rain. I delivered a short, burbling introduction that was adapted from the press release that was written by his wife. Afterwards Dr. Byrne read the introduction from his book, and I remember feeling that his writing was nowhere near as compelling as he was. The book teetered between big statements designed to provoke a headline in the culture section of The Irish Times (“in all Irish art, whether it’s Yeats or The Corrs, the long shadow of the famine still lingers”) and long, drifting asides about how the Irish were not just literally starved but continue to be starved by the British on a soul-level. Dr. Byrne almost sounded like he thought the famine was a good thing. He seemed to think most worthwhile books and paintings sprung out of the potato blight, and I wondered if Deenie ever told him to calm it down a little.
I’ve wondered how The Hibernian Post might have covered such a book, or whether we would cover it at all. Since being made editor I’ve thought about whether Dr. Byrne would reach out with subsequent books, and what I would say if he did. I think I would have run a review, slipped it in on the weekend edition, five hundred words long and written by yours truly. I think I would have been generous, used phrases like “tour de force,” and justified it to myself by saying that there was a much bigger market for cultural reflections on Irish oppression now. We’re feeling confident the last few years, and open to hearing about the ways we were wronged.
There wasn’t so much of an appetite for it then. Our opinion of ourselves was very low. I remember going home one Sunday to parrot Dr. Byrne’s theories about the famine as an attempted genocide, and my father folded down his paper to look at me. “What were they supposed to do?” he said, meaning the English. “We were the ones too stupid to grow anything else.”
After the reading, Dr. Byrne was set up at a table that we usually used to stack the toilet books on. His friends and colleagues queued up to speak to him. A photographer from the Evening Echo was there to take pictures for the social diary. He was ushered in by Deenie, who seemed to know him, and Dr. Byrne posed for shots, holding the book in different positions. The photographer fulfilled the same role as a clown might at a child’s birthday party. There was a sense that, without him, it was just a bunch of adults who knew each other and were willing to participate in the role play that one of them was famous for a day. It seemed a revolutionary act of kindness, like the Make-A-Wish Foundation but for well-liked men nearing forty.