“Promise.”
I went home, packed a new bag, chatted to James, and was back by dinnertime. I picked up chips from the chipper, ice cream from Centra. I rang his doorbell, and waited. No answer. I rang it again. I listened to the bell echo around his house, leaning on the buzzer again and again, until his next-door neighbour came out of her house to say I was waking up her baby. I sat on the doorstep, ate the chips, and went home.
When I got hold of him, two days later, he said he had fallen asleep. Which wasn’t surprising, considering how late we were staying up, and how much weed we were smoking. “Well, you did say you’d come straight back,” he said defensively. “How was I to know that meant two hours?”
It seemed churlish to me that someone who didn’t know whether it was Wednesday or Thursday could get hung up over a stray sixty minutes. But he was firm, keeping to the letter and not the spirit of my original statement, and the more I argued with him the more he drifted away from me.
April is a dangerous time to get obsessed with a man who is harder to pin down than egg whites. It was supposed to be my study month, and I should have been working on my final essays. Instead, I was either dazed from a night with Carey or sure that he was dead. He went days at a time without talking to me. He was always concerned, after he turned up, to hear that I was so upset at his disappearance. But he was concerned the way your friend is when you tell them that the NHS won’t book in your mammogram for another eight weeks: Oh no! What a badly run system?! Too bad it’s the only one we have, eh!
James, who was going through a similar thing with Dr. Byrne, asked me if I thought Carey was sleeping with other people. Eleven years later, and with the benefit of hindsight, interrogation and a greater knowledge of men, I still think no. I think he just couldn’t get it together. And by “it,” I mean “life.” He called in sick because he missed the bus. He couldn’t be bothered buying salt (“I don’t need a whole thing of it”), so he shoplifted small quantities when he was in Tesco, pouring it into an empty envelope. He was a person who did what he wanted, when he wanted, and if you weren’t directly in his eyeline you became part of the smoky ether.
“The thing about Carey,” James said once, when we were up late and commiserating over our hopeless men, “is that he would walk over hot coals for you, but he won’t commit to lunch plans.”
I believed it. I believe it still. He met our friends. When we were together, whether it was alone or in mixed company, I felt his eyes follow me around the room. He cornered me in kitchens at house parties, his hand up my dress, and he was constantly telling everyone about something funny I said the other day. He would read my essays for college while I was in the shower, and when I got out would start reading them back to me, smoking in my bed.
“I feel like I’m riding Noam Chomsky,” he said. “This is great stuff.”
When he was good he was very good, and when he was gone he was very gone. A lot of this, I now realise, was down to texting. There were six years between Carey and me, a gap I rarely felt unless it was regarding phone use. Courtship, to me, was about text messages. It was about sending someone a good-morning and a good-night message. It was ending every text with an x, or three x’s, or a long line of them when you were really pleased. It was about withholding x’s when you were moody, and then they would notice, and ask you what was wrong. These were the rules of love I had learned from my all-girls school, and it confused me when someone didn’t play.
I tried to hold off as long as I could on texting him in the morning, then break at around noon. I would make sure they were questions, things he had to answer to, like: Are you still coming round on Thursday? And: Remind me of your birthday, again? When he didn’t respond, I sent a barrage of “funny” messages that were supposed to read as Nancy Mitford but instead made me sound depressed, cranky and eighty years old.
I simply cannot abide the smell of Subway sandwiches
I’ve smelled fresh bread and frankly, that’s not what bread smells like
“Sandwich artists.” Get a grip!
I would send so many messages that the things I really wanted to hear back about would get lost amid my babbling nonsense, forcing me to contend with his mysterious, rare responses.
like the meatball
And then nothing, for days.
I turned twenty-one on 30 April. It was during one of his quiet spells. James, who was borrowing his mum’s car at the time, drove me out to my parents’ house for a dinner. They liked James a lot. I expected them to be shocked by my moving in with a gay man I barely knew. Truthfully, I wanted them to be shocked. I wanted to be their troublesome eldest who was spurning the family’s conservative values for a big, queer city life.
But my parents were cosmetic dentists and had been relying on middle-aged moneyed gay men for years. They’re the ones who pay for veneers. That evening, they couldn’t have been more glad for James, who ate and drank everything gratefully and with a charming stream of narration. “God, wouldn’t you go mental without paté?” he said brightly, smearing it on a cracker. “And do you know what else I’ve realised, Bridget: I actually love blue cheese.”
He was a bright spark in what I now know was a miserable time for them. Chris and Kevin were both in exam years, doing the Leaving and Junior Cert respectively, and swallowing the stress like pills without water. There was very little money coming in. The landlord’s widow had announced a rent hike, and my parents were considering moving their practice to another, cheaper part of town where they had no client base. They were only in their early fifties, but they were nodding more slowly, sighing more, and acting as if misfortune’s vision was based on movement, so they better not budge.
The fact that I was obviously unhappy didn’t help. My mind was fixed on Carey, who there hadn’t been a peep from in days, and I kept on hoping for an eleventh-hour appearance. My mum was worried about me. She never heard from me unless it was a crazy midnight phone call asking how she knew when Dad was “the one.”
“Any thoughts on what you’re going to do after exams are over, Rachel?” my dad asked. It was a fair question. Unfortunately I was not in the headspace for fair questions.
“No,” I snapped. “There are no jobs.”
“Brian Hegarty says there are jobs out in Bishopstown. Tech companies.”
Brian Hegarty was my dad’s best friend and was always referred to by his first and last name.