The Rachel Incident

by Caroline O'Donoghue

he threw his hands up and said straight women all looked the same to him.

I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.

As a couple, we were serious to the point of dullness, and curiously conservative in our outlook.

I laughed, because James was so obviously gay, and the idea of him stealing me from anyone was ridiculous. But the laugh was too long, and loud, and the way James looked at me made my face burn. He was hurt and he was closeted, and he thought that his closet was a good one. I stopped laughing.

I didn’t know how to be mad at people yet, so I just aped the behaviour I had seen at home: speaking to someone in tight, terse little sentences until they went insane.

It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged. People were always wronging us.

In the years since, I’ve asked other Irish people if they remember the suicides, the businessman suicides that happened around this time.

I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along.

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.

Sitting in his pokey little office, I thought what I always do when I’m in a small room with a man I’m not related to, which is: Are we gonna fuck?

That wife had been a student.

there was also a lot of anxiety around the Kindle and what it would do to bookshops.

“You’ve never fantasised about fucking someone in the stockroom?”

I had a camp mindset.

I did not want a boyfriend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.

“That was my first time,” he said at last. “My first time it not being a first time.”

It was easy, now that I understood passion properly, to see why you would move heaven and earth to secure it.

he would walk over hot coals for you, but he won’t commit to lunch plans.”

They were the boys and I was Rachel.

I’ve had enough queer friends in the years since to know this: the mothers always cry. No matter how much they knew already. No matter how obvious it was.

The Gaynaissance.

There is a certain personality type that is addicted to the concept of its own intellect.

They are the people who insist they saw the twist in the movie coming, who always thought that the divorced couple were unhappy, that the female celebrity seemed crazy. They are also the people who always knew you were gay, and they can’t resist talking about it.

“Checked the store cameras, did you?” James said smoothly,

Both were charismatic, both were well liked, and yet both were litter mates of solitude.

“I love you,” I said, my thumbs on the famous stomach. “I love you like I’ve never loved anyone.” “Rachel,” he said, sounding a little sad, “you love everyone.”

Entertaining reminders that there is nothing much about youth to miss.

if you’re looking to distract a couple, just ask them how they met.

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 had spent so much of the last year in a different world, one of gigs and septum piercings and page proofs, and I resented being pulled back into the world of girls I never truly liked.

It’s tiring in a different way. It’s tiring on the soul.”

I was glacially calm. I effortlessly went through the movements of good daughterhood. I looked as though I was coping magnificently, and so my friends stopped checking in as much, and then when the real breakdown happened a month later I found myself not just in tears but curiously alone.

“I thought, Oh God, how silly, she’s just a chubby student with a crush.”

I-

“I just don’t think…” James said. “I don’t think I’m one of those people that gets to be happy, in this area.”

Happiness felt very far away, and like something only the innocent were entitled to.

“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.”

“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?”

A person was beginning to emerge, or perhaps had been emerging for a long time. He was funny, I realised.

To my delight, James and Sabrina were not getting along as housemates. He found her prim and judgemental, and despite selling him on the delights of New York’s social scene, she wanted to spend every night doing craft projects. “I’m watching her knit,” he snapped. “I’m twenty-three years old in the greatest city on earth, and I’m watching this dumb bitch watch TV and knit.”

was happy to introduce me to people that I would later befriend and/or sleep with.

Radhika, who did rare editions, had a double first from Oxford, where she had also, in her own words, “caught” anorexia. She was over it now, she said.

There was something ravishing about being back in the world of women again, and not schoolgirls or students, but women.

“Make your wrist go limp,” he said, and I did, the fingers pointing down like a homophobic gesture.

He was hospitalised, and we were stuck in South Carolina for weeks, and we thought he was going to die, and being sick in America is like staying at the Ritz Carlton and ordering everything on room service every night, money wise, but he didn’t die.

“But all those years after, being open, and talking about our fears, not once did I get any clarity on The Rachel Incident.”