The Rachel Incident

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

I don’t know who I was trying to impress. 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.

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?” “I just wanted to leave you out of it. Because I do love you. You know that. I’m always saying it.” “That’s not an act of love, Rache. It’s an act of…I don’t know, ambivalence. It’s an act of distance.

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

It's not that we weren't capable of warmth as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged.

If I didn’t have carbs three times a day I couldn’t finish a sentence, and that was that.

He put his hands on my hips. He was shy, all of a sudden. There was a second of feeling like two teenagers who had been set up by their friends at the school disco. We exchanged a well, look at us! expression, and he tilted his head, very slightly, to kiss me. And the kiss was like—what was it like? It was like finding your favourite pair of boots under the bed. It was like finding them on the last day of your lease, the boxes already in the van, having assumed that they must have been left at an ex-lover’s house, or simply vanished by your own carelessness. Oh, these. Oh. Oh. I love these. When I finally stopped kissing him, I put my arms around his waist, and laid my head on his shoulder. My nose dug deep to find the old smell, my hands on the rough denim of his jacket. I had missed him so much, and I hadn’t even known it. “Carey,” I said. “Carey, Carey, Carey.” “Darling,” he replied. “I think you’re a bit old to call me by my last name.” And so now, everyone I love is called James.

Puberty in the 2000s was Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and if any of that happened now we would have found a way to celebrate it, but then it was disgusting.

I was angry at her for not recognising that I was no longer a simple intern, but I know that wasn’t everything. There was something spikier, crueller, underneath it. 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.

He was a doctor and I was supposed to take what he said seriously; but he was a dentist and my dad so I didn’t.

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.

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.

I was a pretty cheerful person by nature. Emotionally dependable, like a good horse. Perhaps if I had been a more melancholy girl I would have been able to recognize that I was in the middle of a trauma, a word that still feels like it's for other people.

There was something ancient and Catholic in him, a pure defiant streak of old Rome that had been strong in his family and kept alive by living in the North. He wore a miraculous medal. He knew his saints.

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.

I don’t know anyone who chases after stuff the way you do. I think you just want this big huge exceptional life, and you’re probably going to have a huge big exceptional love that goes with it.

Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in.

Some plans get made and they drop right into your hand like a warm egg. ... Others feel vague from conception, and carry on feeling vague no matter how many details you hammer onto them.

The problem with genuine memories is that you know too much. It ruins everything.

Unable to believe how in a year where everything had changed, things had somehow managed to change again.

I think they felt guilty that they couldn’t help me in the way that I wanted to be helped. But we would get through it the way Irish people traditionally get through things. By getting shit-faced.

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.

Courtship, to me, was about text messages. It was about sending someone a good-morning and a good-night message. 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.

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’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.

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.

I felt like an animal that had to take itself somewhere to die...You forget the pain of childbirth. But you forget other kinds of pain, too.

We ran into them at a Goldfrapp gig. They attended it the way I go to gigs with my own husband now—fun, dinner first, home by eleven, something to do. There’s only a short stretch in your life where you can attend gigs with spiritual commitment.