“Wow,” I said. “Well done.”
Just as I had been willing to accept that James was straight when we first moved in, I was prepared to allow for this fiction also. My suspicion was that Fred Byrne had finished with him in Dingle.
“I’m going to get another job. I’m sick of being poor. And I’m going to finish the TV show.”
I nodded. “I’m so pleased, pal. That’s great.”
I was relieved that we didn’t have to officially discuss my no longer writing the TV show with him. I had lost all interest at that point, but it felt rude to say.
“I’m twenty-three in November, Rache.”
“I know.”
“I want to have a plan by then. Not just a plan. But, like, prospects.”
I hugged him. Carey came out of the shower with my towel around his waist and his famous stomach on display.
“Carey, can I come to the library with you today?” James asked.
“Course, mate,” Carey replied, grabbing a plate. “What are you at?”
“I’m going to become a screenwriter.”
“Quality,” he replied, leaving the room with his bagel.
Carey had no idea about James and Fred Byrne, and had no concept of Fred Byrne outside of him being my ex-professor and the husband of my boss. It’s amazing to me now, how many secrets I kept from him, but it just never seemed to come up. He never asked questions about James’s sexuality, although I’m sure he assumed. Equally, I knew he didn’t care. Not that he was making a conscious choice to be accepting; but that it literally didn’t figure on his radar.
There were many, many things that did not figure on Carey’s radar. The longer we were together, the more I could tell that everyone who knew him was frustrated by the way he existed. His eldest sister, Cate, had started calling me when trying to find him. I had never met her, but she understood that we were locked into the same fate and had to find a way to work together. “Rachel, how are ya?” she began every call. She did not wait for a response. “Listen, James needs to charge his phone and call Mam. She’s not well again. And it’s Dad’s birthday on Saturday. Can you tell him?”
Our chats, short as they were, always felt like two people who were managing a child after an amiable divorce. Sometimes it was a lupus thing. Carey would never say it, but there were days where he just had to sleep, or to stay still, and he refused to call me on those days. It was the only thing I ever saw him be embarrassed about.
But mostly, it was just him being a flake.
“Why can’t you just charge your phone?” I would say to him. “Why can’t you just…?”
“I don’t know,” he would answer, equally mystified. “I just don’t know.”
For as many things that didn’t figure on his radar, there were many quite wonderful things that did. Once he rang me from a payphone outside the library, having once again forgotten to charge his mobile.
“Rache,” he said, “listen to this. Back in the whaling days, eighteen hundreds or whatever, they figured out the best oil was in the sperm whale’s brain. They called that the junk. And they would lower someone down, with a winch or whatever, into the whale’s skull, and he would have to, like, scoop out the brains. Did you know that?”
“I did not know that.”
“What do you think that smelled like?” he asked. “We’re talking a brain that’s as big as your house.”
I heard a faint tapping sound on his end of the line. “What?” Carey said.
“Sir, you cannot take books from the library if you’ve not checked them out.”
“I’m only reading this to my girlfriend. Rachel, are you still there? The oil was called spermaceti. Because it looked like cum.”
“You need to bring the book back inside, sir.”
I howled with laughter, gasping so hard that I had to explain it to Deenie. In those moments, I didn’t care about Carey’s fundamental flakiness, or the fact that he was supposed to be in the library filling out job applications. But the fear always came back. I had long, paranoid nights of wondering whether he had died. There were days when I didn’t hear from him. But I was learning that this was part of love, or of loving him anyway.
“If he was anyone else in the world,” I said to James one night, after looking at my phone for the fiftieth time, “I’d tell him to go fuck himself.”
“But he isn’t anyone else in the world,” said James, warm sadness rising in his throat.
I laced his fingers through mine. It had been weeks since he had seen Dr. Byrne.
14
IN JULY, Ben called a meeting and said he had to cut our pay. Up until that point I was on 9.50 an hour, and James was on nine. The extra fifty cents reflected the two years of seniority I had on him, plus the fact that I had keys to the till and could do cash refunds. We had time-and-a-third on Sundays and on bank holidays. The only way he could keep our jobs, Ben explained, was to cut us all down to eight an hour, and to get rid of time-and-a-third until further notice.
He didn’t want to fire anyone, he said, because we were like family. But he urged us to look for jobs. “I can be flexible if you guys have interviews,” he said mournfully.
People took the hint. Sabrina, who I still quietly saw as a rival, handed in her notice the next day. She was moving to New York at the end of the summer. A few others started working for the big call centre out in Bishopstown. Carey, James and I were all terrified of the big call centre in Bishopstown. It made us feel like old horses, about to be turned into glue. Carey didn’t help matters. He had a phone job when he worked at Apple.
“Apple is the best of the best, fruit baskets and all that, and I still wanted to kill myself.” He grimaced. “Can’t imagine what that other place must be like.”
James and I were like those old broke ladies you meet in London, who say “of course, I could never live south of the river” and would rather starve in their pre-war Kensington flats. We had standards. We were town people. We would rather be on our feet all day, working at GAP, than tied to some desk phone.
People left O’Connor’s, which meant there were more hours for me and James, but now that our wages had been cut we were still taking home the same money. We became very bratty, and absolutely awful at our jobs. We closed progressively earlier every day, blared our own music during work hours, failed to update the bestseller charts every Thursday night. We developed a deep hatred of women who bought The Help to read on holiday.
“They should The Help us,” James sniped. “Their husbands should have The Help-ed the country by not The Help-ing themselves.”
We didn’t understand what was going on with the economy. Just that it was bad, not just regular bad, but corrupt bad. There were a few buzz phrases that we picked up from the customers, who would recycle information that they had heard on the radio. “The bloody banks,” we would say. “Bertie Ahern and his fucking brown envelopes.”