"The Rachel Incident"

[fiefoe]

Caroline O'Donoghue's Rachel is a very lucky girl, to have found both a true friend and a true love when she was barely out of her twenties, out of all this romantic tangle. It might be the Irish charm, but all the main characters are quite easy to like, despite their foibles.

• The Late Late Toy Show is an annual Irish TV event whereby small children review the year’s best toys and advise other children what to put on their Santa lists... Either you get it or you don’t. You’re one of us or you’re not. Perhaps it’s because so many people claim Irishness that we keep putting our private jokes on higher and higher shelves, so you have to ask a member of staff to get them down for you.
• The rough nausea and perilous uncertainty of the early months had made me feel like I was in the first stages of a long whaling voyage. I had, after all, miscarried before. But by month seven, I have reached a kind of plaintive ocean madness. I cannot imagine land.
• English papers were running a lot of features on the Irish fight for abortion... It was a blip of a moment, where being an Irish journalist in England meant something. I went to protests and ended up at parties afterwards.
• ‘He’s in a coma,’ he says, dropping the information so he can run quickly away from it... Being this pregnant makes me feel my body in layers – crust, mantle, core – and all of it rumbles at once when I think about Dr Byrne.
• He spoke about that year’s spate of stocking-filler books – Dawn French and Julie Walters had competing memoirs out, I believe – as if they were charred corpses that we were flinging into the dragon’s throat to keep it sated.
• Mainly older ones. Books that were rancidly popular in the mid twentieth century and therefore approved by the cultural establishment, but were forgotten enough by my contemporaries to make me feel special. I liked dead women talking glibly about society. I liked long paragraphs about rationing and sexual awakenings in France... I was eager to not ask James about reading, because I had lost too many prospective friendships to this line of questioning already. I wanted to ask him something real, or what my twenty-year-old brain considered to be real.
• I got the sort of genteel middle-class thing down. Old money, old Cork. Now your mother is one of two things, haven’t decided which: fabulous thin drunk or a total wagon... <> because my father’s procedures were mostly cosmetic, they had both suffered from the shifting priorities of a country with less to smile about.
• I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.
• the opening sentence read. The question is: why has the patriarchy been so unfairly derided as an organisational principle?... I read the whole thing and deleted it. I then walked around London for two days, paranoid. I was paranoid the way only people of my generation are paranoid, that I was about to be publicly derided by an unseen, online mass for ideological crimes committed as a teenager. I had thought I was always a feminist. Surely I was born knowing that things were unfair. But no, that all came later, in my mid twenties, when I lived in London.
• But James did steal me from Jonathan. Over the course of just a month, I would be colonised by James on a molecular level, and my personality would mould around his wherever there was space to do so.
• It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged... We were responding, at that time, by giving the world the cold shoulder.
• 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... By the sixteenth ‘Cecilia’, James and I had given birth to our relationship and it wandered around the house like a sticky, curious foal... He rang the doorbell and wandered into a maternity ward for private jokes.
• 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.
• 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.
• I saw James as extremely advanced, a person who had interrogated all sides of his soul. He was too emotionally intelligent to get stuck in the doldrums of what music or behaviour seemed gay or straight.
  In that moment, he wasn’t just a person to me. He was the future of people.
  The truth was that he was terrified.
• That’s how it is with Arts. People love it for the variety but can’t handle the droopy uselessness of it,
• He talked about opium, laudanum, morphine and cocaine, which were legal in Victorian England at the time. He noted that non-white writers don’t tend to put out exploratory Drug Books with quite the same tenacity, and was that because they had bigger things to say about drugs, such as how they destroyed their communities.
• I also think there’s something in the fact that most English teachers at most secondary schools are women. Having a large man teach you about a book felt exciting, like Dead Poets Society.
• Despite being so uninvolved with college, I was very aware of the situation with Dr Byrne’s wife. Crushes are like that. No matter how checked-out you are, there’s always one microphone left switched on, and it only records information about your desire.
• I wanted desperately to recommend something tense, lean and masculine to show him that I understood men. <> ‘ … Hemingway?’ I threw out, uselessly.
• So we stayed an hour after closing time to invent back-dated pre-orders for Dr Fred Byrne’s book on Victorian Ireland during the famine. I realised that I had never been in love with Jonathan, after all. I had known the love from my parents and the strange affection of a college relationship that was somehow both stale and naive. But me and James and the pre-orders: that was love.
• Even then, I had serious questions for Dr Byrne’s publisher, who had the gall to release a book with the word ‘diet’ in the title so close to the New Year.
• Nothing he was teaching us was particularly mind-bending. It was a lot of dead Irish people through the eyes of dead English people then reinterpreted through Irish scholars who, like Fred Byrne himself, needed to write a book about something.
• I was becoming one of those hot young arguers, high on my own ability to plagiarise an opinion. I picked up the thread, and blathered something from Yeats, butchering a quote I had read on JSTOR about when a country creates a genius, the country is always mad at the genius for not reflecting the right idea of the country itself. <> (Which, oddly enough, was a line I repeated to James years later when a tweet he wrote went Bad Viral.)
• Reykjavik: The geyser was beautiful, and it splashed everyone, and the splash was so happily received that it felt like a version of Sea World for people who read the New York Times on their phone.
• ‘My mum would sometimes come into our rooms and say, “We’re going tomorrow”, and we’d have to fill two carrier bags. You can fit a lot of magazines into a carrier bag.’ <> Nothing in his tone sought to arrange the information as though it were tragic backstory.
• Deenie had shiny black hair and the kind of eggy eyes you see in portraits from the era. She had a sharp nose, a rounded chin, and the pretty look of someone academic yet slightly in-bred.
• On the morning of the launch I got an email from Deenie Harrington asking if it would be okay for her to come by the shop an hour early to drop off the wine. I told her of course. <> I felt like a child whose imaginary friend was starting to bite people. The game had already gone too far.
• This is what it’s like to love an unreliable man, or to have an untenable job, or an unsteady parent, or an ill child. It is the outfit you constantly dress up and down, accessorising it according to what insecurities hang well, what caveats are the most slimming.
• He looked handsome and wilted, like a tough flower that was gallantly surviving despite over-watering. I realised then how much my crush had developed, even though I had decided to do nothing about it. I admired Dr Byrne when he was my fiery, huge professor. He made me feel better about studying English literature in a recession, because he was a professor who acted like professors in films acted. He added heft to the grand pointlessness of mooning over set texts. But over the last few weeks, my hero worship had crusted over into something more knobbly, more textured. He had been so happy to believe me about the pre-orders. I wanted to protect him against the world’s many disappointments,
• Book launch party: it was just a bunch of adults who knew each other and were willing to participate in the role play that one of them was famous for a day. It seemed a revolutionary act of kindness, like the Make-A-Wish Foundation but for well-liked men nearing forty.
• Deenie kissed him, getting up on her tiptoes to do it, and said she’d see him at the pub. I felt annoyed by the tiptoes, the gauche expression of tiny-ness from her. Teenie Deenie. Fuck you, I thought. I’m going to shag your husband just for that.
• The fact that Dr Byrne’s hands were in James’s shaggy brown hair, and that his hands were so big one covered James’s left ear entirely. That he seemed to be gripping James with such intent that it looked like James’s head was a cantaloupe that was threatening to roll down a hill.
• ‘Can I have that?’ I said. James couldn’t believe it. I took it home and used it as a laundry basket. To this day, he refers to this period of our lives as the Mayonnaise Bucket Days.
• ‘He doesn’t look any bigger than the Mauretania,’ I said once, to a boy who was pointing out a huge man on the dance floor that he wanted to sleep with. He grabbed my hand and laughed, and we reeled off Titanic quotes for the best part of an hour.
• I have read a lot of books about the lasting trauma of young women and their dastardly, corrupt English professors, and what happens when they fuck you. I have read nothing whatsoever on the trauma of when your English professor decides not to fuck you.
• James thought about Dr Byrne the way other people think about puppy farms. It was bad, but the puppies were there, and some nice family had to take them. He didn’t want Fred Byrne to cheat on his wife but there was no doubt that he was going to, so why not with James?
• ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Sorry! But! You need to get out.’
  ‘To my room?’ I said, as if I was saying: To prison?
  ‘Take my laptop! And my headphones!’
• ‘This is the first time he’s ever gone to a guy’s house. In Ireland, anyway.’
  ‘What?’
  ‘Yeah.’ James looked dazed, like the weight of the responsibility was too much.
• With Carey I felt like a shrine. He was going at this not like a person with a plan, but a person with a calling.
• But with Carey I discovered new depths of shamelessness, and I liked it. We didn’t need regular meals, or real sleep, or date nights. Our love had short fingernails. It was clawing and mischievous and it wrapped us in spit. I couldn’t pull myself away from it, so it amazed me when he could.
• It was ending every text with an x, or three x’s, or a long line of them when you were really pleased. It was about withholding x’s when you were moody, and then they would notice, and ask you what was wrong. These were the rules of love I had learned from my all-girls school, and it confused me when someone didn’t play.
• But my parents were cosmetic dentists and had been relying on middle-aged moneyed gay men for years. They’re the ones who pay for veneers. That evening, they couldn’t have been more glad for James,
• ‘If,’ Fred Byrne began, ‘there’s been a death in the family, or something, you know what I mean, we can say there was a death. I can waive the … ’ <> ‘I just want you to acknowledge what’s happened,’ I continued, and I was talking not so much to him but to Carey. James and I spoke so much about these two men, compared their traits and so on, that one was kind of a facsimile for the other.
• There is a thing among middle-class people in Ireland, and it is called ‘contacts’. There are contacts everywhere, of course, and in England most of all, but in Ireland it works differently. In England it is smooth, filtered, insidious. In England favours are exchanged through a vast web of privilege, shunting nice girls and boys down narrowing corridors of expensive schools and cultural capital. In Ireland it is overt. You refer to people as your ‘contacts’; you ask other people about theirs.
• The Carey thing still tortured me, but I was able to eat the dull gruel of it every morning and get on with my day.
• I picked up that rage, and held on to it, I needed to remind myself why I hated Carey, because watching him lock up the bread shop was far too entrancing. The smell of pastry, the chocolate melting on my tongue, the bitter black coffee. I needed to remind myself of my anger, so I didn’t inadvertently mix up good snacks with a good man.
• We were mad about each other. And in the name of this madness, we really tried, and for a time succeeded, to be grown-ups together. <> Our version of adulthood was this: we bought bagels at night.
• I complimented him vividly, begged him for sex, hung on his every elusive statement. And yet he would still come out with statements like these. Melancholic, nocturnal comments that implied I would outgrow him, or see him for who he truly was. He was wonderful, but he didn’t have a great deal of self-esteem. He was a dosser, after all.
• The year in Shandon Street did a lot for me, but it did this most of all. It detached me from any kind of inherited moral system. I stopped sizing others up in accordance with the values I had been taught: who was a loser, who was closeted, who was cheating on their wife. I learned the value of context, and of people. It came in handy later on, when I became a journalist.
• ‘Sir, you cannot take books from the library if you’ve not checked them out.’ <> ‘I’m only reading this to my girlfriend. Rachel, are you still there? The oil was called spermaceti. Because it looked like cum.’
• It’s a big deal, to emigrate with someone.’ <> ‘Christ, I’m not asking you to get on a coffin ship with him.
• I got those camera angles, eventually. In dribs and drabs, and over the years. The sister’s friend from college. The guest room with the small TV, where James went to watch cartoons, and where the friend was staying. The soft, funny discussions that turned into harsh reality and finally a dull, oily feeling of distance.
• I was fond of Deenie Harrington but in my head I had normalised that it was okay to do bad things to her. Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in. The cradle of me and Deenie would always be that she was the clueless wife of my best friend’s lover. There was a slice of me that would always condescend to her, no matter how sweet or clever or kind she was.
• Of all the people we expected to take James’s coming-out badly, we had never considered Dr Byrne. He may have been closeted, but he was still a queer person, too. We thought he would be delighted. In the moment, he was. But it planted a seed of something bad in him
• He was so full of empathy for Dr Byrne that it made me realise, at last, what went on between them that first day at the bookshop. All that casual chat about Canada and Fermoy and DVD players, the small talk that somehow became the defining passion of my friend’s young life. I realised it was loneliness. They saw it in each other instantly. Both were charismatic, both were well liked, and yet both were litter mates of solitude.
• ‘Rache,’ he said. ‘What are you doing out here? You’ll freeze.’ <> It strikes me now that no one in Cork ever worried about each other’s safety. Just our body temperature.
• I’m starting to wonder whether I’ll ever be a true member of anyone’s staff ever again. <> What if I had known, then, that O’Connor Books would be the longest I would ever work somewhere?
• She had the kind of white, pearlescent skin that worked beautifully with the colour palette of the early 2010s: emerald, raspberry, teal, sapphire. Colours that made her look like a little jewel
• In that one unfinished sentence, he was coming to the realisation that some people create their own adulthood, and some people have it thrust upon them. He, it turned out, would be the latter kind of person... I couldn’t believe this reversal. Suddenly he was the one who wanted to nail my shoes to the ground.
• it wouldn’t be so bad if I could have this little corner of adult fabulousness, this friendship with the Harrington-Byrnes. <> When something good happens to you at that age, you can’t settle with the notion that it’s a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That’s how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened.
• I didn’t know whether I had the energy for a robbery. What if I just turn around and leave?
• When we’ve chewed through all the old nostalgia, updated each other on everything we can be updated on, piled on a few fresh memories so the old ones don’t get stale. When we have tended to our friendship like the rare orchid that it is,
• ‘Gorgeous big-titted librarian, trying to find me a rare book.’ <> I had spent so much of the previous two days in my own interconnected fantasy worlds that it felt incredible to visit someone else’s.
• There’s a limited field of options, and a limited field of emotions to go with them. Frightened, sad. Angry at having to travel. Angry at yourself for being irresponsible. Angry at the doctor for asking if I was absolutely sure that I wanted a termination, which I suppose is sensible to ask, but pissed me off anyway. Or did it piss me off? Have I just read so much about this particular experience, that my feelings have attached on to a global nerve centre of Irish female thought on abortion?
• ‘Do you think Ryanair makes all their money from abortions?’ I said limply.
• ‘God, is there any way of having this conversation that doesn’t feel, like, so boring?’ She went on, her voice fat with disgust. ‘It’s so boring to be this character. This is the worst one to be, without question. Philandering husband, he gets to have loads of fun. Slutty young assistant, she has a brand-new life experience to write about in her diary.
• ‘All this sobbing you were doing on top of me,’ she carried on. ‘Were you crying about my husband? To me? That’s all I could think about this week, you know. Did she make up a boyfriend? Is she that much of a sociopath?’
• ‘I thought, Oh God, how silly, she’s just a chubby student with a crush.’ <> Of all the things Deenie Harrington said that night, this is the line that I have come back to the most.
• ‘I’m pregnant.’ <> It was one of those situations where the only way out was through... I wondered if Dr Byrne was grateful to be on the same team as his wife again. I was doing them a favour. Before, they were a struggling couple. Now they were going through something together, and that thing was extortion.
• ‘Rachel,’ she whispered. ‘You weren’t … you couldn’t have been this person all along, could you?’ <> I examined each one of my teeth with my tongue. ‘I’m not evil,’ I said to her, and to myself. ‘I just … I don’t have any money, Deenie.’
• I leaned so hard into this idea of myself as the scarlet woman of University College Cork that I didn’t even see James’s heart breaking right in front of me. <> ‘He told her that he was shagging you,’ he said. ‘That he was sleeping with you. That he was in love with you.’
• in the past week I had thought of him as merely extra storage for my own anxieties. I had not, for a single second, considered what this meant for him. That I had effectively broken up with Dr Byrne for him.
• I lay in bed with my phone next to my pillow, willing anyone in the world to reach out and say they loved me. It was the only time in the whole pregnancy where I thought seriously about keeping it. I thought: Well, here’s someone who couldn’t leave, for eighteen years at least.
• It was funny that he found the word ‘tourist’ so easily, because it was the one I had found the night before. Dr Byrne wanted to visit our youth, our poverty, our liveliness. But he didn’t want to live there.
• My eyes started to brim, a combination of pregnancy hormones and being called ‘compassionate’ when I had both deceived and extorted a reproductively challenged woman who – give or take a little exploitation – had never been anything but nice to me.
• When we came home in the evening we talked past one another, poor receptacles for the other’s unhappiness because we were both so brimming with our own.
• ‘The clot. Did you keep the clot?’
  ‘Oh. No. I flushed it.’
  She tutted, like I had cut the tags off a dress I was trying to return.
• was told that there was no scroll prepared for Rachel Murray, and that I would have to watch everyone else graduate. My mother thanked her, and then rang back an hour later. How could we get the scroll prepared? The woman said she had nothing to do with the scrolls. My mother asked for the phone number of the scroll people. <> After a solid eight hours of pestering, bribery and exquisitely performed small talk, my mother called me to say that I would be collecting my scroll, after all.
• Everyone knew that something was wrong, and that the graduation ceremony felt like a forced wedding between a child and a corpse. Like a horrible rite that they all had to sit through to ensure another safe harvest.
• All I knew was that I was glad he was there, but not enough to make me happy generally. Happiness felt very far away, and like something only the innocent were entitled to. <> Carey turned the whole day around for my parents.
• 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.’
• Perhaps if I had been a more melancholy girl I would have been able to recognise that I was in the middle of a trauma, a word that still feels like it’s for other people. But I was so far away from myself, and it didn’t matter that a man I loved was trying to bring me back. He was too late, and it wasn’t enough.
• I was rigid and off the pace. James wasn’t all there, either. Our relationship had shifted its feet, adjusting for the amount of weight it was now holding... but the flow, the sound, the echo was different. I felt like we were playing cover songs of our own conversations. We just didn’t enjoy each other in the same way.
• Then the feelings would switch, and change their direction of flow. I would feel guilty about my part in James’s sorrow, and suddenly lavish him with affection and treats from the shop. He would do the same: call me gorgeous, point at celebrities from the magazines he still compulsively bought, say, ‘You look a bit like her, don’t you?’ <> We could never match up these moments. James was never in the mood to be loved when I wanted to love him, and vice versa.
• ‘My husband works with Aideen Harrington.’ Her tone was a cold bare bulb in an interrogation room.
• As I learned that year in Shandon Street, there is nothing that my personality or my humour thrives on more than being able to see the same person at the same time every day. I thrive on over-exposure, on elaborate jokes, on private mythology.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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?
• I had never met someone so odd who could simultaneously be so charmless. Even now I can feel myself failing to trap him with words. I had always assumed that I loved kooky people but maybe now I hated them.
• I suppose they didn’t need to. They were all from England. Had networks, old schoolmates, hobbies. But they were all lonely, in their own way. London eats at everyone. My loneliness became a galvanising force. It made people stay out, one more drink, another bar, Soho to the G-A-Y, then the horrible casinos in Leicester Square. Being Irish helped. People were ready to believe I was fun.
• I never told anyone about the Harrington-Byrnes. At first because the wound was too raw, and then because the story was too complicated, and eventually because the story was all so Irish that I felt embarrassed. There was no way of telling the story without paraphrasing it as a Maeve Binchy novel. Bright young girl. Insular little city. Life almost ruined by pregnancy, but not quite.
• There were so many people adding their voices to the pro-choice debate, but they were all better women. Married women with fatal foetal abnormalities. That kind of thing... The traditional abortion arc: going to the airport alone, shuffling past the protestors at the clinic, feeling tender and awkward in the hostel, and then on the plane back. It was bad, but it was familiar, like a fairy story at its most savage and transcribed from the original Danish.
• where he was reading Cher’s autobiography. <> ‘Did you know she had an affair with Warren Beatty when she was still a teenager?’ was the first thing he said.
• I remember, with a kind of sharp clarity that evaded me for years, exactly what those days were like. When the beginnings of me and Carey’s first pregnancy passed through me in clots... The days in bed, the throwing the sheets away because they were ruined, the money taken off the house deposit because of the deep blood that seeped through the mattress, staining the box springs. James Devlin, coming in and out with potato waffles, chicken dippers, beans on toast. James with his own broken heart, looking after me. <> You forget the pain of childbirth. But you forget other kinds of pain, too.
• ‘Yes, that terrible dinner party.’ She continues. ‘But Fred knew right away because the way I spoke about Dominic changed. It was right there, in the texture or something, like every sentence had new bumps and grooves on it. He said to me, a month in – Deenie, you’re sleeping with him, aren’t you? And I broke completely, and said yes.’... ‘It was because he was so fond of you, that was the giveaway. He was always saying, Rachel is a great girl, Rachel is going places. Rachel should be given a chance. Rachel picks the wrong men. It was too wholesome. If he was sleeping with you, he would never talk to me like that, would he?’