It made me feel better, somehow, to call it a competition.
“I literally just filled out a form in June. I filled out a form to live in Paris back in February, but I never mentioned that either, because it never came to anything. I just, I don’t know, you apply for things, don’t you?”
“I don’t!” I exploded. “I don’t just apply for things!”
He kicked at a clod of dirt.
“Well, no, Rachel, because you don’t have to, do you?”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means.” He was bored of eating humble pie. “It means: your dad is a dentist and your grandad was a banker and you have a university degree. The playing field is not level, Rache.”
Today, I would have probably accepted that retort lying down. I have read so many articles on middle-class privilege, and even written some. But this was 2010, and I had too much fight in me.
“Are you high, James?” I screeched. “Look around you.”
I gestured back to the big house behind us, the fields of farmland his stepfather owned. He was the one who could get emergency cash off his mother. He was the one who got to borrow the family car. “You’re better off than my family, and you know it.”
This was supposed to be an argument about London and New York. About secrecy, and about lies. Why were we talking about class, and whose grandfather was a banker?
“Babe, I went from shitty estate to shitty estate until I was nine. I moved schools too much to learn long division properly. I barely got a Leaving Cert, no chance of uni, and I have no connections. Unless I want to get a job in a piggery, I’m fucked. I’m in retail for ever. Maybe I get a phone job and I work my way up to head office. But you can do anything, Rache. You can do any career. The real way. That’s why you don’t have to enter competitions.”
I rolled my eyes. It was all melodrama to me, all tactics to distract from the real point, which was that James had lied to me.
“You think I’m talking shite,” he said, his nostrils flaring. “But you’ll see, pal. These little graces you’ve picked up from your family, from university, they mean something. Hearing ‘Homer’ and knowing when someone doesn’t mean ‘Simpson.’ Knowing what part of the animal paté comes from. It all adds up. It all means something.”
I don’t know whether James’s words were a prediction, or a spell, but he was right. It did, and would, mean something. After I moved to London, I found that my accent, my good manners and my vague ability to reference Trollope helped build a picture for my English peers that became more than the sum of its parts. “You have one of those nice Irish voices,” someone once said to me. “Soft.”
They thought I had a bohemian background, or perhaps was some distant cousin of the aristocracy. They all thought I went to Trinity, and knew lots of poets personally, and asked me for tips on racehorses. I was once invited to Ascot and was asked if I could introduce the group to any jockeys. I found it all hilarious, of course, and told James about it, but I rarely corrected anyone. The difference between the truth and the reality was so marginal. What’s the difference between upper-middle and middle-middle, really?
“I just can’t believe you’re going to leave me,” I said. “After everything.”
James wrapped his arms around me and held on tightly, there, in the middle of his stepfather’s field. “I don’t want to leave you either,” he said, starting to cry. “Rache, I’m so scared.”
We held each other like that for a long time. I tried to imagine him walking down big New York streets, his scrawny body and his slightly too big head bobbing along as he fetched coffees and lunches and dry-cleaning. I thought about a world where I only saw him a few times a year. And I wondered about what I would do next.
We walked back to the party, arms draped at our waists, and I told him how proud I was of him, and how Michael and Alice were going to keep on living together even if we weren’t. How Michael and Alice would sweep the Emmys one day, and we would be on the red carpet, collecting statues on their behalf.
The house was lit up, the party still in full swing. It’s so hard to know what music to play at a Stephen’s Day party, the Christmas music already feeling so tired out, so someone had put Elton John on. Elton, who is Christmas without being Christmas. I said this to James, and he laughed and told me it was funny.
He stopped at the front gate. “I’ll have to go through our savings account,” he said. “I’ll just add up all my deposits and take that out.”
The account was now tickling four grand. The two thousand the Harrington-Byrnes had paid me to go away was my money, I suppose. James would have never dreamed to claim it for his own. It was my pregnancy, my would-be abortion. My pound of flesh.
When I started writing this all down, I told you that me and James have only ever had one fight, officially speaking. The one in O’Connor’s, where I shoved him against a wall. The one where he almost needed stitches. There have been two more, and they were the night I told him about blackmailing Dr. Byrne, and the night he told me about New York. All that said, though, I never remember St. Stephen’s Night 2010 as a fight.
I remember it as the night we decided to split the money and run.
27
I ARRIVED IN LONDON on 15 January 2011, on a day where the lift at Elephant & Castle tube station was not working.
I dragged my father’s largest suitcase up 124 steps, breathless and fiercely hoping for a chivalry that did not come. When I emerged into the freezing air, I found that my new neighbourhood was a market street next to a roaring, busy road. There were snacks and clothes on rails and chicken bones on the ground. Everything smelled like popcorn, polyester clothing and car fumes.
I was moving in with strangers. There were other options available, of course. Just as James had fallen on Sabrina, his one New York contact, I could have searched my Facebook friends list for people who had moved to London and might have a spare bedroom. But the more I thought about it, the more I imagined my hometown like a creeping shadow. I was still getting girls coming up to me in the bar, asking me odd questions, glancing back at their friends. I was too frightened to go anywhere I thought the Harrington-Byrnes might be, and that included bookshops, live music venues and the English Market.
Was it really as bad as all that? It’s hard to say. I was the centre of my world, so it felt natural to assume that everyone in Cork knew who I was and was talking about me. But could I have been imagining it all?
Whether the strange looks were real or not, they were real to me, and they affected every choice that came next. I never reached out to anyone from home: not before I moved, and not after.