“So much has happened, Carey. So much you don’t even know about.”
“Well, come on now, I can’t find out if you won’t tell me. How bad can it be?”
I took him to the pub, and I told him how bad it could be. How I realised I was pregnant after he had left for Derry. How I had not wanted to burden him with my problems, when he was dealing with so many of his own. How I had planned to get a termination, but in the end, didn’t need to. I did not mention the Harrington-Byrnes. It was too complicated, and seemed irrelevant anyway.
It wasn’t, of course. It was deeply relevant. I just wanted to save face where I could.
“I don’t understand,” he said finally. “Why didn’t you say any of this to me? The baby, Rachel. How could you not say?”
“You’ve already got so much going on,” I squeaked. “With your mum and your family and everything. I wanted you to think of me as, like, a fun person.”
He looked appalled. “What does that mean? A fun person?”
“You know, whenever you called, we’d just flirt and talk shite, wouldn’t we?” I said. “I didn’t want to pile another thing on top of you. I didn’t want to become another problem. Another dependent.”
It came out all wrong. He looked more offended than ever. “I don’t look after my mum because she’s a problem or a dependent,” he said. “I look after her because I love her.”
This confused me. “I know.”
“And I love you, too. When you love someone, you sign up for the whole thing. Even if they’re grumpy or weird or sick or if they’re pregnant, Rachel. It doesn’t matter how many things you have on already. You love the whole person.”
He looked at his full pint and sighed. “I don’t think you ever got that.”
Carey was speaking in the past tense already, and it terrified me. “I get that!” I said, my voice going up an octave. “I was always just afraid you might go off me again.”
“Go off you?” he spluttered. “I’ve been mad about you for months. You’ve been the one ignoring my calls. My invites. My…feelings.”
“You went off me once before,” I hit back, more focused on winning the argument than being lovable. “Back in May. You fucked off with no warning.”
“That was once.”
“But it was for weeks.”
“Well, I didn’t think you were that arsed, did I?” he suddenly railed. “You were always running off to be with bloody James. And apparently nothing has changed. His is the only person’s opinion you actually care about, Rachel. Everyone else is just fecking window dressing.”
If only Carey knew the hours, days, I had spent lamenting his lack of interest in me to James. How I dissected his movements, his words, his gestures. I tried to tell him something like this: that I relied on James to decode Carey because Carey was so insistently undecipherable.
“I just don’t believe it, Rachel. I’ve been clear,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve been clear about you the whole time. But you always want it to look a certain way, to get a certain number of texts, to have your little life with James always just so. I can see you, you know. I can see you watching me, noting down everything like the Gestapo, ready to report back so you can deconstruct it all. And it gets irritating. Sometimes I don’t feel like providing you with the material.”
I had spent so long building up Carey as this ungovernable mystery, and apparently I was the one who had been intangible and distant the entire time.
“This is stupid,” he said, looking at his lap. “You didn’t tell me you were having my baby. I feel like we’re in a soap.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to have it, was I?” I spluttered.
He looked more wounded than ever. “You didn’t even think about having it?”
I couldn’t re-enter that world, the imagined playground of living in Derry with him and mothering one of many strawberry-blonde moppets. It was gone now, and it wasn’t a fantasy any more, but a dead universe, collapsed in on itself. “No,” I said. “I’m too young, Carey, you know that.”
“I know,” he said, his face twisting. “I just thought you would have at least considered it? You just booked an abortion straight away?”
“It’s my body,” I said limply. “My choice.”
“Yes, I know it’s your choice. But I should have had a consulting role, surely? In some sense?”
“It doesn’t matter what I wanted, does it?” I snapped. “Because I lost it—I was always going to lose it, no matter what we talked or didn’t talk about.”
We went on like this, our moods and patter changing quickly and often. He would go from being remarkably tender to remembering that he was furious with me, and then go back to feeling sorry that I went through the whole thing alone. We exhausted ourselves. I wondered if he regretted coming down to Cork.
When we finally left the pub, he didn’t touch me. “I’m trying to understand, Rache. I really am. I’m trying to get my head around it. But I feel like I don’t know you at all. It’s such a big thing to keep from someone you love. It’s the biggest thing there is. And I could have helped.”
“How?” I asked. “How could you have helped?”
“With the money. With, I don’t know, comforting you.”
He knew me well enough by that stage to know what I was thinking.
“But you had James for all that,” he said.
“Well. I did.”
He rolled his eyes.
“You can’t blame me for that,” I said. “He’s my best friend.”
“I know he’s your best friend,” he snapped. “This isn’t about James.”
“It feels like it is,” I said. I was hoping to get Carey on a charge of homophobia, thus clearing me on the charge of being a selfish and stupid person.
“Don’t you understand how condescending it is,” he said, “for someone you love not to tell you about the biggest thing happening in their life, because they don’t want to bother you? Because they think you can’t handle it?”
“I just wanted to leave you out of it. Because I do love you. You know that. I’m always saying it.”
“That’s not an act of love, Rache. It’s an act of…I don’t know, ambivalence. It’s an act of distance.”
“Your mum was sick.”
“I don’t care if my entire family were thrown into a volcano, Rachel, I want to fucking know if I’m having a child with someone.”
There is a parallel world where I said the right things to Carey that day. Made the right displays of affection, showed more signs of regret, wept and mourned the miscarriage in the way he wanted to. Perhaps in that world I got on the train to Dublin with him, and then to Derry. But I didn’t have the strength or the character. My mind was still in the graduation ceremony, with Dr. Byrne and his red robes. With the eyes of hundreds of people, who all knew there was something wrong with me, but didn’t quite know what.