James sat up, affection for Fred Byrne suddenly washing over him, clearing the hazy high. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, babe.”
They went upstairs soon after. I fell asleep on the couch, face first in a copy of Take a Break. When I woke up, it was two hours later, and Dr. Byrne was shaking me. It wasn’t even dinnertime.
“Rachel,” he said, “I’m off, but I forgot to say: Deenie has a job for you.”
I had drooled so much that my face was stuck to the pages of the magazine.
“Doing what?”
“Lord knows, but she thinks she has something for you. Fifty quid a week.”
“For how many days?”
“However many days she needs you, I suppose.”
I was confused. “So I could work one day or five days and still get fifty quid?”
“It’s an internship, Rachel Murray, and you’re lucky to be getting anything. She says to email her.” He patted my leg. “Don’t be high on your first day.”
I emailed Deenie, and she told me to come in on Monday. Four days away. She gave an address. A quiet, residential street near the college.
My guts crunched. When I asked Dr. Byrne for his wife to get me a job, I imagined myself in a big office, where I would be dropped off in the post room by Deenie on the first day and then left to make a name for myself. I did not imagine myself going to her house: their house. How was I going to work with Deenie, all day every day, and come home to the sweat-soaked bedsheets at the foot of the stairs?
I was so nervous about the whole thing that I took myself into town the next day, and searched up and down the high street for an outfit. I needed something that said I took the opportunity seriously, but also, that I was willing to be covered in printer ink if the occasion called for it. I ended up in the Barnardo’s on Prince’s Street. I bought a black knit vest for four euro, and a white shirt to go under it.
I decided to cut through the English Market on my way home, for no reason other than it brought me joy. The high ceilings, the stone walls, the smell of raw meat and briney olives. The nobility that came from it being the only place in the county where you could buy both a cream cake and all four of a pig’s trotters without having to do a full turn.
I wandered through, feeling sentimental, heavy and trapped. For the first time in my life, there was nothing to get ready for in September. I was used to entering a summer knowing that the season was a set amount of time to enjoy myself. In a few months, my results would come through, and I knew already what they would be: a not-particularly-high 2:1, from an ordinary university, in a useless subject.
What on earth would become of me? Usually, I worked full time at O’Connor’s over the summer. Now it wasn’t even worth enquiring about. The customers just weren’t there.
“Rache,” I heard someone call. “Hey! Rachel!”
There he was. Standing at a bread stall. Carey.
He grinned like there had never been a cross word between us. Which, I suppose, there hadn’t been. He just vanished, as was his well-established custom, and then I sent all those voicemails.
I couldn’t fake that I was happy to see him. Neither did I have the confidence to tell him off. I stood there, breathing hard, my nostrils warm like a dragon’s.
“Two minutes,” he called. “Give me two minutes.”
He was working at the bread stall. He was sliding two sticks of French bread into a paper bag, his hands coated in flour, smiling at a woman while she paid him. His red-blond hair had grown out too long, not down but out, spikes of it pointing this way and that.
The blood ran into my face. I couldn’t wait for him, even if it was two minutes. Any length of time was an insult. I left, and heard his voice calling after me.
On the street, the sun was shining brightly, and sweat poured from my armpits. The synthetic weed did that to me. It was fun when you smoked it but had all kinds of strange side effects the next day. I sat down on the stone wall of the Unitarian church, and waited for him. I prayed that he wouldn’t find me, and thought I might walk into traffic if he didn’t. I put my face in my hands, my breath short, my panic increasing.
“Sweetheart, what are you doing out here?” he said, and put his arm around my shoulders. “Come on now. What does Rachel Murray have to be upset about?”
The accent still killed me. The curious, amused flatness of the Derry voice. I hated myself for being Irish, and for being suckered in by an Irish accent.
“Fuck you,” I said, my face still in my hands. “Don’t do that. Not after everything.”
“I know,” he said, in that tone he used for when he knew he had acted badly. His goddamn this NHS voice.
“Don’t just say I know!” I said, raising my voice so loud that the pigeons fluttered away. “Say you’re sorry, at least.”
“I am sorry.”
“You’re not.”
“Let me buy you a coffee.”
“No.”
“Actually, you’re dead right, I can’t buy you a coffee, I’m at work.” He considered this for a second. “We close in an hour, though. Do you want to hang out with the bread while I tidy up?”
“No, I do not want to do that,” I said, though I did.
“Listen,” he said, and jangled his pocket change, “I’ve got pain au chocolats for days in there. Go round to Gloria Jean’s and get us both a drink. Then come back and you can eat pastry and drink coffee while I finish. If at any point you decide I’m too much of a shit to stay, you can leave, and you’ll have got a coffee and a cake out of it.”
“Fine.”
He gave me a fiver in change. I went to Gloria Jean’s and got us both a small black coffee. When I came back he had found a stool from somewhere, and dragged it next to the counter.
“Sit yourself up there, now, missis,” he said. He gave me the pain au chocolat, as promised, and then left me alone.
I drank my coffee and watched him serve customers. The last time I saw Carey he was a customer service rep for Apple. He wasn’t earning very much, but it was a respectable job, and there was talk of him progressing. Talk from who, I don’t know. He was obviously a terrible employee. He was for ever skipping out on work to spend time with me, and I wasn’t even important enough for him to wish me happy birthday.
I picked up that rage, and held on to it; I needed to remind myself why I hated Carey, because watching him lock up the bread shop was far too entrancing. The smell of pastry, the chocolate melting on my tongue, the bitter black coffee. I needed to remind myself of my anger, so I didn’t inadvertently mix up good snacks with a good man.
James says there are three kinds of Irish male body types: tennis, rugby and hurling. James was tennis: lean frame, long bones. Dr. Byrne was rugby: thick-set, a tendency towards chubby, and would look large regardless of how much weight he gained or lost. Carey was hurling. He was slim and small-ish, but compact, square and muscled. “Built like a Jack Russell terrier,” he said of himself. “And every bit as common.”