He had texted me only once, since arriving back in Derry, saying that he needed to think about us. I didn’t hear from him again. I checked in, enquired about his mother’s health, but no response.
I pretended to untangle fairy lights.
“Do you want to come over on Boxing Day?” he said.
“Stephen’s Day,” I corrected. He could still be so English sometimes. “Where? To Fermoy?”
“Yeah. Mum is having a party.”
“Will you pick me up?”
“Sure.”
“Sure.”
We stepped back in surprise to see how lovely the whole room looked. I had always been brought up to think of plastic trees as tacky, that big dogs were better than small dogs, that potato waffles were common. So many of my beliefs about the world had been predicated on our once having had money. Now I knew that a real tree for forty euro is wasteful, especially as it can only be used once. That small dogs fare better in small houses. That potato waffles are useful stomach cladding when you don’t have a lot else.
There, in our living room, fairy lights bouncing off the waxy green brush, I realised there was nothing at all wrong with a plastic tree.
“We should clean the house,” I said. “Make it a bit more Christmassy.”
We swept the floors, hoovered between the sofa cushions, salvaged candles from our bedrooms. There were some empty jars in the recycling and we put tealights in them. James went to the shop and brought back a bottle of mulled wine, some spiced rum and a packet of Cadbury Yule Logs.
We mixed the mulled wine and the rum together on the hob, the window on the back-porch door steaming up. James looked so gorgeous, so different to how he had looked a year before. It was like he had found his face, grown into his nose, found shades of grey for his green eyes.
He poured the wine mix into our best mug and gave it to me. Our order of mugs went like this: big Flintstones mug, ordinary grey mug, small mug with a map of Spain on it, pretty horse mug with a slow leak, and finally a mug that a KitKat Easter egg had once sat in, and burned your fingers when you held it too long. Carey always drank from the map of Spain. Dr. Byrne had the horse. Me and James took it in turns to alternate the Flintstones and the grey.
“I hate the Spanish one now,” I said, blowing on the mixture. “Makes me sad.”
“I hate the horse.” He said it with such conviction that I began to doubt my theory that he was seeing Dr. Byrne again. We drank for a moment in silence.
“Let’s throw them off the roof.”
There was a hurley in James’s room that seemed to exist so he could tell the people he slept with that he once played hurling in secondary school. We climbed out the window, him passing the hurl out to me, along with the entire saucepan of wine.
“I’ll throw,” he said. “You hit.”
The hurl hit the Spanish mug in one clean slice, splitting it in half, so Gibraltar was on one side of the road and San Sebastian on the other.
“Fuck!” I screamed, the relief rattling through me. “Yes! Fuck!”
“Okay, I want a go,” he said. I threw the horse mug up in the air and he belted the base of it, shattering it over our heads. I covered my face in my sleeve as the pieces came down.
“That felt good,” he said. “Shit.”
“I feel so strong now. I wish we had more things to smash.”
“We don’t,” he replied. “We have only so many mugs.”
“I hate the KitKat one. Shall I get it?”
“Are you sure you want to do this? Then we’ll only have two mugs,” he said. “No more guests.”
“Yes,” I said. “No more guests, and no more cunts.”
He threw, and I batted, just missing the mug, which bounced onto the footpath and smashed.
“Hmm,” I said. “Bit of an anticlimax.”
“Because the KitKat mug didn’t stand for anything,” he said sagely. “The KitKat mug was just minding its own business.”
“Poor thing.”
We drank on the roof until it became too cold, and when we came back into the house the candles were burning low and the whole kitchen smelled of spices. It felt like the lower decks of an old ship, rough and cosy and the only safety we had against the sea.
“I think we’ve exorcised them now,” he said. “That’s it. They’re gone.”
I hugged him, and we fell asleep under the blanket downstairs. I woke up a few hours later, a frightening new thought uncoiling like a snake.
If it wasn’t Dr. Byrne he was hiding from me, then what was it?
* * *
I was glad that we had that night on the roof, because we saw little of each other for the rest of December. I worked every night until Christmas Eve, the party season getting more chaotic as we moved closer to the New Year. “Fairytale of New York” played constantly, and I was amazed that despite it being such a cliché, people still allowed themselves to be moved by it.
“Fucking done with twenty ten,” people would tell me often, at the bar. “Fucking bring on twenty eleven. Death to this shit year.”
I was relieved to go home for a few days. Chris was out most of the time. Kev, still only sixteen, was in. We watched Buffy re-runs together on the Syfy channel, ate cheese from the fridge, found a rhythm that had not been there before. A person was beginning to emerge, or perhaps had been emerging for a long time. He was funny, I realised. Softly spoken, but dry.
“What’s your friend James doing, for Christmas?”
“At home, in Fermoy.”
“He’s gay, isn’t he?”
“You know he is.”
Kev went quiet. We carried on watching Buffy. James Marsters was furiously ranting about “the slayer” and what he would do to her, his bleached hair slicked back.
“Are you gay?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered, eventually.
“Well, if you are,” I said, feeling my big sisterhood very keenly, “you know that’s completely cool, right? You don’t need to hide it.”
“I know,” he said. And he did seem to know. “I’m still feeling it out.”
We didn’t talk much about it after that. I got the sense that he didn’t want to discuss it with his big sister, and I didn’t blame him. I had been checked out from his life for so long. But I was relieved he could talk about it. How he hadn’t lied, or buckled in on himself. He wasn’t going to end up leading Dr. Byrne’s double life, or have to lie like James felt he had to lie. Maybe it really was getting easier.
“I’m going to bed,” I said, and couldn’t help kissing him on the temple.
James picked me up on Stephen’s Day in his mum’s car. The dress code, he said, was semi-formal. I wore a plunge-neck black sequin dress that I had bought second-hand but was originally from French Connection.
“My God,” he said, beeping the horn in appreciation. “Rachel Murray, those legs go all the way up to your asshole!”
“Isn’t that where legs usually end?”
“It’s a figure of speech. Get in.”