“I was very poorly when I was a little boy,” he said, and I shrieked with love at the use of the word poorly, when everyone I knew would just say sick. “Extremely poorly.”
He was the youngest of five, with four older sisters, and had an array of mysterious symptoms that were eventually diagnosed as lupus. I had heard of lupus. A contestant on America’s Next Top Model had it.
“Aye,” he said. “Mercedes.”
He was a surprising person that way. I didn’t know whether he knew about Mercedes because he watched Top Model or because he knew everyone famous who had lupus.
“It’s fine now, but I don’t know, I think I was babied a lot,” he sighed. “Between Mam and the girls, I could do no wrong.”
He had done two college courses, dropped out of them both, took out loans to go travelling, wandered. He was bailed out of endless jams with the explanation that he had missed out on a lot of his childhood. There was always sympathy, and he had constant charm to meet it with. The first wake-up call came the previous year, when his father pulled strings to get him the Apple job in Cork, and told him that it was the last thing the family was ever going to do for him.
I nodded in the darkness and tried to put aside my own rejection in favour of the bigger picture. I tried not to see Carey’s actions as good or bad but as in keeping with who he was.
* * *
If I was uninterested in my family during Carey’s first tenure as my boyfriend, I had almost forgotten them by his second. Knowing I wouldn’t come home of my own free will, my mother chased me down for coffee dates in town. Thinking about those coffees, even now, burns my guts. I wanted to completely reset the parameters of our relationship, and I had no interest in giving her time to adjust. I tried to rush the parent-child relationship into an adult-adult one, and I did this by drinking only black coffee, rolling cigarettes at the table, and then—most mortifying of all—sliding the rollie behind my ear.
It drove her crazy. It’s a set of memories that I always witness in the third person, as if I’m a film director: my too-long hair, my cheap dresses, my tits pushed up too much. I had one black Wonderbra, and I wore it to death, until the black straps were practically falling to my elbows. My mother squinting in disbelief, even burying her forehead in her palm. “Rachel,” she’d scowl. “Rachel, for God’s sake.” They had worked so hard to send me to a private girls’ school, to tennis clubs and pony camps, to end up—with what? With a daughter who keeps cigarettes behind her ear. I came home from those coffees and threw myself on the couch, waiting for attention from James.
“My mother,” I would say, “just can’t stand that I’m self-sufficient.”
My brothers I forgot about, and I assumed that they forgot about me. There wasn’t a firm pecking order in our house. Chris and I played together when we were small, but once Kevin came along and I started school, they became a separate entity to me. They were the boys and I was Rachel. I was a child who liked reading, and writing to auction houses to request that they send me their catalogues, and being treated with dour respect. I was a kid who put “cameo brooch” on her Christmas list. The boys lived on Boy Island. I think my lost precociousness was part of my mother’s misery that I was becoming such a stupid, tarty adult. There were only a few times when I still felt like the eldest sibling, and Carey was there for one of them.
We were in bed together and heard a thump coming from the yard outside. It sounded, at first, like a cat knocking over plant pots. Then the cat made a human, moaning sound.
“Stay here,” Carey said. “I’ll look.”
I followed him, of course. I was too turned on by the notion of a man protecting me not to follow him. I remember him so clearly, half-lit by the bulb above the oven: gingham checked boxers, no shirt, and the most incongruous gold-rimmed reading glasses that he kept near the bed.
“Who is it?” I rasped. “A robber?”
“A robber. Jesus. As if you have anything worth robbing.”
“We have a TV!”
“It’s some drunk lad.”
“What’s going on?” a bleary James said, from the top of the stairs. “Are we being robbed?”
“We might be,” I said. “We may be.”
“It’s just some waster,” Carey corrected. “Rachel, throw me a hoodie and I’ll go out to him.”
“What if he hits you?”
Carey gave me a withering look. He had that strange, straight-boy thing of not being afraid of physical confrontation.
He put on a purple hoodie of mine, too snug to zip up more than halfway. He stepped outside, and James and I looked at each other as if Carey had just shot himself into space. I heard Carey, gentle but firm.
“You all right, mate? Had a bit much, have you? Do you need a cup of tea?”
“A cup of tea?” James hissed. “Is he going to offer him my room, too?”
I heard a mumbling, staggering voice, but the bass of it was still recognisable. I ran out into the yard.
“Chris!” It was my brother. Six foot three, seventeen years old, and his jeans soaked in blood. “What happened?”
I sat him down on one of our kitchen chairs. He smelled not just of drink and blood, but of something strong and medical.
“That’s my sister,” he said crossly to Carey, tilting around in his seat. “That’s my big sister. Who are you? Are you guys fucking? Are you banging my sister? Rachel, what happened to the last guy? Long face. Long sad horse face.”
“Christ,” James said, already bored. “He’s on meow meow.”
“He can’t be on Mephedrone,” I snapped. “He’s a teenager.”
“I just need to hang out here for a while,” Chris said. “Until it wears off and I can go to sleep. I’ll go first thing in the morning. Please, Rachel, please, don’t send me home. Come on. Be sound.”
“Is Mum expecting you?” I said, my back ramrod straight. “And why are you bleeding?”
“Don’t be a gowl, Rachel.” He turned to Carey. “Dude, do you have a cigarette?”
He showed Carey the cut on his leg. He got it climbing through a broken window in a squat house where they had all been taking the stuff. I worried whether this meant my brother was a drug addict, but the more he spoke the more I realised that he was playing at this the same way I was playing at black coffee. He had made some kind of realisation about the diminishing fortunes of our family, and was trying out new lifestyles. His previous summer had been spent on a family friend’s boat in west Cork, and this summer was about squats.