“Dad,” I said, standing in the campus bookshop, having stepped out of the customer queue to call him, “did you forget to pay off the card?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t forget.” There was a plunge in my guts that felt like fear but in fact was the first dose of reality I had ever tasted. Since the crash, my parents had stopped travelling, stopped going to restaurants, and stopped buying new things. I thought they were being prudent. I had not realised how broke we were. It was on this call that I was told that, in addition to the credit card being cancelled, I would also have to find a way to pay my college fees.
College fees were quite nominal in Ireland back then, a few grand a year at the most, and everyone I knew had their fees paid for them. This goes some way to telling you how stratified my world was. My father was ashamed and I was embarrassed for him.
“We’ll have to figure out something between us, Rachel,” he said, as if he were sating an angry bookie. He did not want me to get a student loan. His trust in banks was too damaged for that.
“Of course,” I said quickly. “I can work.”
“Right,” he said. “And it would be…between us. The boys don’t need to know.”
I had kept it between us. But now it was between me and James, too. I felt bad about breaking my father’s trust, but I wanted to lasso my new friend in with confidences. Luckily, it was working. James felt the drama of the situation very keenly.
“This is very…I don’t know. It’s like a play.”
I burst out laughing. “It is not a play.”
“It’s very a play,” he said sternly.
“It’s not so bad,” I said, wary of attracting pity. “I’ve paid my fees for this year and I’m not doing a master’s so now I’m just…flush.” I gestured at the table. “We should order some actual food,” I said.
“We should live together,” he said.
“What?” I choked on my wine. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know that your name is Rachel,” he said, and at the time it felt like a joke, because I did not know about the Sabrina thing yet. “And that I like you.
“Anyway, I don’t love my gaff, as it is.” He examined a cashew. “And I think we’d have a laugh, don’t you? There’s some nice places up by Shandon Street. Which I know is technically north side, but you’ll get over it, won’t you? South-side princess falling on hard times, on the wrong side of the tracks? Very theatre. Very a play.”
I looked at him cockeyed. “You’ve found the gaff already, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And whoever you were going to move in with has dropped out.”
“Yes,” he said, without contrition.
“And I’m your last resort.”
“No, no, Rachel! No!” He looked at me aghast. “It just occurred to me now, in this minute. You’re the random flight of fancy before I consult my list of last resorts.”
“Oh.”
“Well, think about it.”
We moved on, chatted all sorts of bollocks, and when I came home on the 11 p.m. bus my parents were both at the kitchen table. The man who owned my father’s office building had drowned himself in the Lee. It was in the Evening Echo. Dad had never met the landlord, had always worked through a lawyer. My parents were worried about whether the man’s widow would raise the rent or sell the building.
In the years since, I’ve asked other Irish people if they remember the suicides, the businessman suicides that happened around this time. They all say no, not really. Maybe I’m asking the wrong people, or everyone’s just forgotten. Maybe Cork was hit worse, or the recession was just an idea, not a real thing that everyone talked about every day.
“I’m moving out,” I announced, and my mother looked at me like I had smashed a jar of pasta sauce on the floor and was now hopping over it, with the excuse that I had a taxi waiting outside.
“With who?”
“A guy from work.”
The tactlessness. It makes me want to climb into a car and set myself on fire. It makes me want to scream at my own unborn child, Don’t you fucking dare abandon me like that.
“You guys have been talking about downsizing anyway,” I said. Which was true. We had five bedrooms: theirs, mine, Christopher’s, Kevin’s, and a little spare room that we used for a study. There was a hot tub, outside, that was a present from my father to my mother on her fortieth birthday. They talked about selling the house constantly.
“In a few years you’ll all be gone,” my dad had said. “And this house will be worth even less.”
My mother would interject here. “Or more,” she would say. “We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
My mother was glaring at me. Hating me for collaborating in the downsizing scheme. But it was too late, and I had made up my mind.
I came home, with laundry, for Christmas. I remember thinking that they looked older, but no one could have aged that much in ten days. The truth was that I had been extremely sheltered. I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along.
“Twenty is late to realise that,” James says. He’s probably right.
3
A TEXT from James.
How are the poos babydoll??
Month seven has made me constipated, and the only people in the world who know are my husband and James Devlin. I am not, generally, a poo-talking sort of woman. But there was never a version of this pregnancy where I didn’t tell James every movement, every phase, every symptom.
Shandon Street is historically a poor part of Cork city, but is strangely picturesque. It’s full of old houses, but also modern riffs on ancient architecture. A pantheon-shaped theatre; an old market hall known simply as the Butter Exchange; a church with real bells and a big fish on the steeple.
The house itself was a cottage, built to house the tubercular families of the 1930s, and the only bathroom was downstairs, through the kitchen. There were two boxy bedrooms upstairs, each big enough for a queen-sized bed, a pine wardrobe and a chest of drawers. In my head, there was no “better room.” James, however, had lived in more places—fifteen homes by that time, and he was only twenty-two—and knew how to take an instant inventory. He saw things I didn’t, like where was bound to get the best of the morning sunlight and which had a window too close to the head of the bed.
“Do you want the room nearest the stairs?” he asked, in a way that made it seem like the stairs room was the best room and he was being chivalrous in offering it to me.
“Sure,” I said, and tossed a black bin bag full of clothes on the bed, where it exploded like an overcooked dumpling.