He took a long stick, and reached up to pull the shutters of the bread stall down. He got on his tiptoes in his banged-up grey trainers, the kind most men now wouldn’t even wear to the gym. And I watched his stomach.
Another thing about Carey.
He had the most beautiful stomach of any man I had ever been with. Before or since.
Without even trying, he had one of those stomachs that low-slung jeans were invented for. Hip bones like ivory. Abdominal muscles that slanted in a V-shape towards his crotch. Faint golden hair under his belly-button. He had no awareness about any of this, I don’t think. He was completely oblivious to how much I was objectifying him, while remaining mute on my stool.
“Thank you for staying,” he said. The shop was shut. I was once again in an enclosed space with a man.
He looked, for once, genuinely sorry.
“The thing about you, Rachel,” he said softly, “is that you make me insane.”
“Fucking hell,” I blurted out. “Is that it?”
“It’s true! And I make you insane!” He picked up his phone. He still had a Nokia, not the 3210, but not much more advanced than that, either. “I have the tapes.”
I tried to swallow my shame about the voicemails, and to stay angry.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Carey.”
“Pet, listen to me. I’m twenty-seven.”
“So?”
“Twenty-seven is very old to be dossing off work to stay in bed with a teenager.”
“I’m twenty-one, Carey,” I spluttered. “Which you would know if you came to my birthday party.”
He let that one hang there.
Northern Irish men.
They know when to shut the fuck up.
“I’m sorry I didn’t wish you a happy birthday,” he said carefully. “But, I don’t know. Things got very serious, between us.”
“No, they didn’t!” I practically shouted. “We literally weren’t even calling one another boyfriend and girlfriend.”
For some reason, everything out of my mouth made me sound like a disgruntled four-year-old.
“Seriously un-serious, I think is what I mean,” he clarified. I narrowed my eyes at him. “Listen, Rache. I’m a dosser. A born dosser. I’ve been dossing around all my life. I’ve dossed in Derry. I’ve dossed in Belfast. And when I moved down to Cork, I thought, Okay, real job, real life, real flat. You’ve got it together, James.”
I looked around, as if James had just appeared, and then I remembered that I was the only person who called him Carey.
“Then I met you, and Jesus Christ, girl, if I didn’t piss it all up the wall immediately.”
I couldn’t believe how he was spinning this. In all the conversations I had imagined with Carey, I had never once thought of this.
“I never asked you to call in sick,” I said. “Or wear the same clothes for four days in a row.”
“I know you didn’t, pet,” he said. He touched my face, grazed it with the back of his knuckles. My rage flowed away and I pressed my cheek into his hand.
“But you’re very young,” he continued. “You’re still doing the student thing. And why not? It’s a laugh! But it takes so little for me to slip back into that. Sleeping till noon and all the rest of it. I’ve no self-control.”
Neither did I. I wanted him to grab me, then and there, to screw me next to the focaccia.
“When did you lose your job?” I asked.
“About two days before your birthday,” he said, looking ashamed of himself. “And you know, it was a wake-up call. I said to myself: Listen, this is what happens, running around with younger girls.”
The age difference had never come up before, and I was immediately suspicious.
“Suddenly I’m a twenty-seven-year-old who can’t buy his college girlfriend a birthday present,” he said glumly. “I had to have a word with myself. I went home.”
“Home home? Derry?”
“I knew if I stayed, my dick would drag me back to Shandon Street.”
He sighed, as if his dick was always doing that.
“You could have rung,” I said.
“I know,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”
“I really hate you for that.”
“You should hate me,” he agreed. “But I knew if I heard your voice…” He gazed off into the distance, looking sorrowful.
“Oh, come on,” I snapped. “Stop acting like that.”
“Acting like what?”
I groped at the air with my hands. “I’m just some dumpy chick who works in a bookshop, Carey, you could have rung and broke it off with me without it becoming the dance of the seven veils.”
He was furious at me then. “Rachel, you’ve got a body like Wonder Woman; don’t give me that shite.”
I kissed him. Not because of the Wonder Woman thing, which I still think is bollocks, but because I had lost the will to not kiss him. He held me close, kissed me hard, and the smell of sweat and bread swept over me.
After a terrible and beautiful few minutes, I reached for his belt buckle.
“Now, now,” he said, taking my hand gently. “Not here.”
“Yes,” I said. “Here.”
“That’s old-life stuff, Rachel,” he said. “I need to be a grown-up now.”
He sounded hopeful and sad, like Peter Pan. I kissed him on the forehead and tried to hide my disappointment.
“Then I’ll be a grown-up, too.”
13
THERE’S PLENTY OF LANGUAGE, now, for what Carey did to me in April of 2010. Women I’m friends with would describe it as ghosting, as psychological manipulation. As gaslighting, even. The only credit they would give him would be the fact that he rightly assessed his situation. That he was too old for me, that the relationship was doomed, that he was too childish, and that he needed to grow up and get an age-appropriate girlfriend. He did need to take life seriously. And if that involved keeping a wide berth of me, then so be it.
But none of this rationale changes the hard facts of the case. We were mad about each other. And in the name of this madness, we really tried, and for a time succeeded, to be grown-ups together.
Our version of adulthood was this: we bought bagels at night.
“Have you bought bagels for the morning?” I would say, calling him on the way home from the bookshop, proud of myself. I was doing four days at the shop, and two with Deenie. Those bags of American-style sesame bagels were apparently the only thing that could get us up before 8 a.m. On the days Carey wasn’t working, he went to the library to fill out job applications for real jobs.
He started showering every day. I started hanging up my clothes. We said “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” fanatically, adding them extraneously to our sentences, like the word “Father” in prayer. I heard him on the phone.
Me and Rachel will be there, my girlfriend…I went there on Thursday, with my girlfriend…You want to go out to Douglas? Rachel, my girlfriend, is from there.
I learned more about him, and the painful gap of time when he pretended I didn’t exist. We gave ourselves a pre-midnight bedtime for weekdays, and yet never fell asleep before two. I twined myself around his terrier body and collected facts.