The radiators in our bedrooms worked, but downstairs just had a bricked-up fireplace and a collection of space heaters under the stairs. The living room was a grand big space, two couches and a dining table that could seat six, with a sweet kitchen and a little yard. There was even a herb garden leftover from the previous tenant.
I couldn’t believe that we were only paying six hundred euro a month between us. I understand now that the house was incredibly run down, that only two working gas hobs out of four is unacceptable, and that moving into a mostly unheated house in the dead of an Irish winter was unwise. These things would matter to me now, but they didn’t then, and even though I spent most of the following year drunk and malnourished, I sometimes wonder if I was maybe better off not caring.
James had an iPod, one of those big clunky ones that was old even then, and he let me choose what our move-in day song would be. I ran my finger around the tricky circular dial, terrified of getting it wrong, not realising that this was all James’s music, and therefore it was kind of impossible to get it wrong. It strikes me now that, if James was really invested in me thinking he was heterosexual, he would never have let me go through his iPod. The selection was an odd mishmash: somewhere between a middle-aged straight man and a middle-aged gay one. Cher snuggled next to the Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Eagles next to Elton John. The only thing even slightly of our generation was Britney Spears.
I settled on “Cecilia” by Simon & Garfunkel. I had no reason except for the word “jubilation!,” which was repeated throughout, and was exactly how I felt, although I was far too shy to admit it.
We propped the iPhone speaker in the corridor and went to our rooms. I suddenly felt extremely self-conscious, awkward in my movements, like I was unpacking in the Big Brother house and aware of how the public would interpret my knicker folding.
The feeling lasted two minutes and fifty-five seconds, wherein “Cecilia” ended, and immediately started again.
“Cunts,” James shouted, and marched out to the speaker. The screen had frozen, leaving “Cecilia” on repeat. “It does this sometimes,” he said, and a thin blush crawled up his neck. “Fucking useless shite.” He hated having a bad thing. It’s a good job James is rich now because being poor never suited him at all.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him.
So we listened to “Cecilia” again. And again. We started singing along, our voices bouncing off the cheap plaster. By the eighth time, we were running into each other’s rooms to elaborately lip sync, our limbs in all directions, grabbing on to the song fiercely. If it were a phone book we could have torn it in half.
By the sixteenth “Cecilia,” James and I had given birth to our relationship and it wandered around the house like a sticky, curious foal. We picked up each other’s belongings—bad T-shirts, pretentious books, preserved concert tickets—and accompanied each with the same question: What the fuck is this?
“What the fuck is this?” I asked, discovering a collection of bandanas.
“What the fuck is this?” he asked, picking up my copy of The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer.
“What the fuck is this?” I retorted, finding the top half of a Subway uniform.
“What the fuck is this?” he announced, finding a packet of Femfresh wet wipes that had come in a Student Health kit and I was too suspicious to use and too frightened of my own vagina to throw away.
What we were actually asking, of course, was: Who are you? Who were you? Are you okay if we have the kind of house where I slag you off for reading? How did you get fired from Subway? Are you really the sort of girl who washes her vulva with a deodorised wipe?
We were so busy falling in love that I had forgotten completely about Jonathan, who I had asked to call over around five. One of my main motives for moving out was sex. We had both lived at home for most of college and were still relying on house parties, parked cars and our parents’ schedules to have it. It was also getting exhausting, having sex at college. Doing it in a campus bathroom is exciting the first time, but there’s something depressing about asking your boyfriend to meet you at “our bathroom.”
He rang the doorbell and wandered into a maternity ward for private jokes. I wrapped my arms around him, giddy and sweating, excited to drag him into my new world, purely so the new world would have a witness.
“This is James!” I announced. They greeted each other warmly enough, but as I looked between them I felt an instant flash of revulsion for my boyfriend of two years. He had no features. He had eyes and lips and a nose but I felt like they had all been made by the Bauhaus, obsessively streamlined to perform a function and no more. Whoever had put James together had at least tried. He was sort of runty, with big eyes and big black brows on a face that was either elfin or bloated depending on the week he was having. He had a nose like an old man’s, with deep indentations at his nostrils. James had a look that most of us described as “emo” but really just meant his clothes fit him and they were from Topman.
I hugged Jonathan again, doing a show of devoted girlfriend-dom to drown out my new feelings. He seemed grey, like a mushroom. He kissed me on the forehead. “Give me the tour, then!” he said, and the tour lasted thirty seconds before we went upstairs and I showed him my room, the sheets not yet on the bed, and then I took my shirt off. It was mostly because I had been sweating and I didn’t want him to smell me.
There’s something about sex with a long-term partner at the age of twenty that makes it the most depressing sex of your life. At least in your teens, everyone is prepared to eat humble pie together. Everyone’s embarrassed, no one knows what they’re doing, there’s slightly more is this all right? and does that feel good? In a way, the sex I had as a teenager was more mature than anything between the ages of eighteen and twenty, where the boys were so certain that they had found a winning formula. Jonathan had one girlfriend before me and had told me she fainted when he went down on her. This meant I was supposed to faint also, or at least come close. I was so annoyed at myself for not enjoying it more. The whole thing felt very ticklish and lonely.
It’s tempting, when you’re talking about your sex life as a young woman, to slip into little melancholy asides about how you gazed heavy-lidded at the ceiling while a dull brute pummelled away at you. Sadly, I don’t think I can say any of that and get away with it. The sex was unsatisfying but I couldn’t have been more obsessed with having it. I was always on top, moaning away like a stuck pig. If someone told Jonathan tomorrow that Rachel Murray said he was a bad lay, he would laugh and tell them to get fucked. I don’t think he’d entertain it for a second.
“How are you getting on with your man?” Jonathan asked afterwards, as we lay on the bed.
“James? Great.” And then, carefully: “I think we’re going to be friends, you know.”
“Are you going to become one of those fag hags?” he said. “Like Will and Grace?”
(Have patience: this was considered to be an extremely witty thing to say in 2009.)