“Call centres,” I corrected. “I’m not killing myself at college to work at a call centre.”
But I wasn’t killing myself, that was the problem. I was torturing myself over a Northern Irish man who was six years older than me and shoplifted individual grains of salt. College I couldn’t gather the roughage to give a shit about. Classes were over but there were still end-of-year essays due, and I didn’t know where to begin with them.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Publishing,” I said. “I think I should work in publishing.”
I had run into Deenie Harrington recently, while I was with Carey. We were having a coffee near campus, and Deenie was there, a stack of pages in front of her. She was running the nib of her red pen along every sentence, making circles and notes as she went. She saw me, cackling on a high stool in the window. She waved. Her smile big and, crucially, real.
I left my stool and went over. “Hiya,” I said. “Nice to see you.”
Now, aged thirty-one, I would feel much more awkward about saying hello to the woman whose husband was spending random afternoons at my house. But I had accepted then that this was an arrangement that worked for everyone: Dr. Byrne was happy, James was sort of happy, Deenie seemed fine, the fridge was full of cheese.
“Rachel!” she said brightly. “How are you? Gosh—do you want to sit down?”
“I can’t,” I said. I pointed to Carey, pouring sugar into his coffee. “I’m with my…”
We had not talked about whether he was my boyfriend yet. The closest we got to talking about it was the second time we had sex, when he said: Rachel, why on earth don’t you have a boyfriend?
“…I’m with him,” I finished.
“Ah,” she said, and seemed tickled at this early-twenties problem of having a man in your life whose role you cannot name. “Well, lucky you. I’m stuck in line edits.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s like the last edit before it goes to the copy editor.”
“And who is that?”
“The person who looks for grammar mistakes, factual errors, that kind of thing.”
“You don’t do that?”
“No, I’m more policing the general story, whether the plot works, the vibe.”
“I would like to police a vibe,” I said.
The conversation had stuck in my head. It sounded like a great job. I loved to read, or I used to, before my main hobby was getting drunk. And Deenie had said that publishing was all about who you knew, and I knew her. I knew her in a weird way, but I knew her.
My mum put a bowl of crab linguine in front of me, then dusted parmesan over it. “I don’t know if there are jobs in books in Cork,” she said.
“There aren’t jobs in anything in Cork,” my dad replied.
“There are jobs,” James said. “Just no good ones.”
By May it became clear that I had, quite frankly, fucked myself.
We had a party at the house on the night of my twenty-first. My parents kindly gifted us two big bottles of Smirnoff vodka on our way out. Our cottage was bursting with people, thirty-five bodies jumping away like hot fleas. I never remember any neighbours from that time. They must have existed, but we never saw them. Carey had known about the party, had been invited, and of course had not shown up. When he was gone, he was very gone.
My heart was shattered. I left a long voicemail for him at one thirty, telling him that I deserved better than a boyfriend who forgot my birthday. I left an additional voicemail to say I knew he wasn’t my boyfriend. Then I left another to say I was sorry.
At 3 a.m., I grabbed hold of a boy who worked at the Opera House and dragged him by the collar into the shower. The bedrooms were full of people. James turned the water on and ran out, laughing manically. I slipped and my heel went through the wall, knocking three tiles off. We never fixed them.
I slept the rest of the weekend. I didn’t go to college on Monday. On Tuesday, I received emails from three of my tutors saying that my end-of-year essays were late, and that in accordance with faculty rules, they were going to dock my marks: 10 per cent if I got the essay in this week, 20 per cent next week, and after that they would not accept the essay at all.
One of the emails was from Dr. Byrne. It was another form letter. It asked me to kindly submit my essay before the new deadline, lest I be docked further.
I left the library there and then, knowing precisely where Dr. Byrne was.
Kindly!
Submit!
I did not simmer down on the walk home. The grief at losing Carey so quickly after finding him, the fact of college ending with so little to show for it, the prospect of a call centre on the horizon. The bookshop was not doing well. Ben used to call me at least once a week to pick up an extra shift; now he never called about extra days, and my bank balance was starting to show it.
And then there was Dr. Byrne. He had been doing this thing with James for almost two months now, and it was driving my poor friend insane. Fred Byrne’s well-established vanity had morphed into a deep anxiety that James was seeing other people, something he could not forbid but was desperate to know both everything and nothing about.
The routine, according to James, was this: Dr. Byrne would come through the door at lunchtime with treats and poetry. They’d spend a while on the couch (“round one,” James called it, “the appetiser”) then eventually move up to the bedroom (“mains”). After which, Dr. Byrne would ask terse, loaded questions about our nights out, what we did together, what I thought of him, where the gays were. He found it all very hard. Not just the thought of James with other people, but the thought of gay clubs and queer nights going on without him. He would get mad at James, for some answer that didn’t meet his needs, and then make James figure out what it was that had annoyed him. He often left under a cloud of silence, and it drove James crazy.
Fuck this guy, I thought. Who the fuck does he think he is?
I put my key in the door with no regard for whether they were on main course or appetiser. We had a little corridor before the living room, so they had time to put their trousers on or cover their dicks with a blanket.
Still, I was relieved to find everyone dressed.
“Hello,” I barked, looking at Fred Byrne. “I want to speak with you.”
“Rachel,” he said. He looked sticky, like he’d just been for a run.
James was scowling at me. “Rache, what are you doing home?”
“You can’t just threaten me!” I started crying. “You can’t ignore me in class and use my house as a fuckpad and then treat me like I’m some normal student.”
It was the first time I had really spoken to Dr. Byrne in months. Since the book launch, probably.
“Okay,” James said, getting up. He was sweating, too. “I’ll put the kettle on, will I?”
Fred Byrne looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him. I sat down heavily into the armchair that faced the couch.
“It’s not fair,” I said, hiccuping through my tears. “I’ve cut you a lot of slack; it’s the least you can do to cut me some.”