James was the first person I had met in years that I badly wanted to be friends with, but it seemed he did not want to be friends with me. On top of that, he had charmed everyone in management so much that he always got first pick of the best shifts.
I didn’t know how to be mad at people yet, so I just aped the behaviour I had seen at home: speaking to someone in tight, terse little sentences until they went insane. It was how my mother fought with me, how I fought with my younger brothers, and how they fought with their friends. It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged. People were always wronging us. That the most recent economic crisis had devastated my parents’ business and depleted their investments was yet more proof that the world was out to get the Murrays. We were responding, at that time, by giving the world the cold shoulder.
After a while, James sensed my new iciness and floated towards it. He kept on trying to engage me, making jokes about my ancestral bank-ishness. I was mostly ignoring him. The shifts thing really bothered me. I had come to the conclusion that James was a selfish, shallow person—a sociopath, maybe—and that I was going to keep clear of him until he realised his mistake and stopped hogging the good time slots.
After I had ignored a few of his attempts to engage me, he came behind the counter to sort out some orders. And he poked me with a pen at the back of the knee. He hit, as he would continue to do, a nerve. My knee buckled and I went down a little. I didn’t fall, but the disturbance in gravity made me queasy and annoyed. I told him to stop. He laughed and slipped into serving a customer as if nothing had happened.
An hour later, he did it again. The same thing happened. The buckling, the nausea, the fury. I yelled at him to stop, and he made a big show of cowering: the tiny, big-eyed Jerry to my huge, hulking Tom. He had already sniffed out that I was insecure about my size—5'11, which was close enough to six foot that I often skipped the formality and told people that I was six foot to cut any argument about it off at the pass.
There was no one around except our manager, Ben, and the minute I turned around James did it again, and the motion was so unexpected that I went down fully. Ben laughed so hard he forgot about the dragon. I was so angry that I temporarily mislaid my suburban manners and pushed James, using the full force of my body, into the wall behind the counter. The shelf above, loaded with pre-orders put aside for loyal customers, shook and the pile toppled. The hardback thoughts of Dawn French hit James and opened the skin above his eye. He started to bleed, his flat-ironed fringe clotting around the wound like gauze.
“Rachel!” Ben yelled. “What are you at?”
This was when James learned my name was not Sabrina. He smiled at me while Ben ran to get the first-aid kit.
“At last,” he said, laughing with an odd, fresh sort of fondness. “There she is.”
I felt so bad about it that I took James out for a drink after work.
“Okay, killer,” he said, grinning and wrapping his extremely skinny scarf around his thin neck. “You got a table booked at the golf club?”
James’s fascination with my middle-class-ness has not changed since the day we met, and sometimes I wonder if his entire friendship with me is based on some urge to catalogue the precise livelihoods of dentists and their children. A sample question that might come at any time of the day or night: Does Bridget serve the carrots cut into circles or strips?
Strips, I will write back.
Knew it, comes the response.
At this point I would not be surprised if I found out that he’s been writing a book.
It was Christmas party season, and after a few false tries at ordinary pubs we found a tapas restaurant on Washington Street that was attempting to seduce Cork into the concept of small plates by having a bring-your-own-wine option. The whole thing became accidentally romantic, and it made me nervous that James thought that I was trying to undo my earlier faux pas by forcing him on a date with me. I started loudly narrating the menu, accusing the restaurant of trying to make ham sound fancy.
James rested his little face on two closed fists, enjoying the ham chat.
“Small plates,” he said. “So, if I needed stitches, would it have been large plates?”
“Oysters,” I replied.
“What if I broke a limb?”
“I’m not a charity,” I retorted, and he laughed.
“This is how it happens. I read the papers. The rich try to buy you off with a big gesture to keep you from suing.”
“Why do you think I’m rich? I’m not rich.”
He gestured to our surroundings, the chalkboard menu that said “Specials,” the candlesticks in the empty wine bottles that presumably had been brought by customers from the various homes of Cork city.
“I live at home, that’s all.”
“Ah. You’re working for pocket money, then?”
I told James to order whatever he wanted, and despite his assumptions about my wealth, he ordered the cheapest bottle of wine and a bowl of cashews. Seconds later, we were given a bottle of water and two tiny glasses.
“No,” he said, pouring the water. “No one works as much as you do if they don’t need it.”
“Well.” I shrugged.
“You work Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays,” he counted off on his fingers. “And I think I came in once and saw you on a Monday afternoon. But you go to college as well?”
“I come in whenever Ben rings me.” I was shrugging again, and was becoming very aware of how boring shrugging is, as a conversational tool.
“Look,” I said. The waiter came with the wine and the cashews and asked are we thinking about food yet, guys? and James said that the cashews were fine for now.
“Go on,” James said, once the waiter had left.
“I’ve had to pay my college fees,” I said, trying to keep my tone frank instead of pitiful. I told him what I had not told anyone: that my parents, who had easily sent me and my siblings to private schools, were unable to pay for college.
Back during the good days, when both my family’s finances and my reputation as a responsible child were intact, my father had given me a credit card. I had a regular babysitting job, but the credit card was to pay for incidentals like books, notepads and taxis home on nights out. The card was handed over, very ceremoniously, after a long talk about how it was better to have a credit card, because it meant you could build a credit rating.
It was something Jonathan found very funny. His parents were in the civil service, and having a girlfriend who had “Daddy’s credit card” made him feel very earthy. But the truth is, I barely used the card. Until a few weeks into my first term of UCC, when it stopped working.