The Rachel Incident

Caroline O’Donoghue is a New York Times bestselling author and the host of the award-winning podcast Sentimental Garbage. She has written two novels for adults, Promising Young Women and Scenes of a Graphic Nature, as well as the supernatural series for teenagers, All Our Hidden Gifts. She currently lives in London. Also by Caroline O’DonoghuePromising Young WomenScenes of a Graphic NatureFOR YA READERS:All Our Hidden GiftsThe Gifts That Bind UsEvery Gift A Curse CopyrightPublished by ViragoISBN: 978-0349-01353-4All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.Copyright © Caroline O’Donoghue 2023The moral right of the author has been asserted.‘The Famine Road’ © Eavan Boland from New Collected Poems (Carcanet Press)All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.Virago PressLittle, Brown Book GroupCarmelite House50 Victoria EmbankmentLondon EC4Y 0DZwww.littlebrown.co.ukwww.hachette.co.uk ContentsAbout the AuthorAlso by Caroline O’DonoghueCopyrightDedicationChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28April 2022Acknowledgements To the men in my life.To Ryan Farrell for loving me then,Gavin Day for loving me nowand my Dad, for loving me always. It was never my plan to write about any of this.I know journalists say that all the time, but for me, it’s true. Almost all of us are sitting on some big life experience that we’re hoping to turn into a book one day. I swear to God, that was never my intention. The process of book-making was demystified for me at the age of twenty-one, and I’ve had no instinct to be in any way involved with them since. 1I only ever really talk about Dr Byrne with James Devlin, and so I always assumed that, were he to ever come back into my life, it would be through him.I was wrong. He came via the Toy Show.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. It’s a big deal if you’re a child in Ireland, and a bigger deal if you’re an Irish adult who lives abroad. It’s a hard thing to explain to outsiders. This, in itself, is part of the appeal. 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.All over the world there are group screenings where Irish adults cheer for five-year-olds testing out Polly Pockets on live TV. I am an editor at The Hibernian Post, a newspaper for the Irish in Britain. It is my job to write about ex-pat movements, and therefore it is my job to write about the Toy Show.‘Are you sure?’ Angela says. ‘I don’t want to send you out in the cold, all the way into Soho, three weeks before Christmas.’‘It’s fine,’ I say, wrapping a long scarf up to my chin, smothering myself briefly in the process.‘I don’t want to sound like that colleague,’ she says. ‘But in your current condition … ’‘I’m grand, honestly.’ I rub at the dome of my stomach, having just recently settled into a period of relative calm in my pregnancy. 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. As far as I am concerned, I am going to be pregnant for ever.I make my way to the Soho bar that has, for one night only, become a haven for the homesick. I used to come to a lot of these ex-pat nights out, arranged around referendums and demands for change. I cared a lot. I was invested. I was also making great money. English papers were running a lot of features on the Irish fight for abortion, and I was one of the people they commissioned to write them. I interviewed campaigners, people from Marie Stopes, people who had lost daughters or wives to complicated childbirth and a doctor that refused to act on behalf of the mother. 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. My contact list heaved with people who I would drunkenly promise something to, some form of coverage that was utterly not in my jurisdiction to provide.My phone still clings to them now, four years and an iPhone upgrade later. CLARA REPEAL, SIOBHAN REPEAL, ASHLING REPEAL, DONNACHA REPEAL. Strangers to each other, but briefly connected to a family tree of people who all wanted the same thing, and, now that we have it, have almost nothing to connect them at all.We are glad to have abortion and gay marriage but we are lonely for nights like this.There are no seats, and in my current bout of ocean madness, I forget that I now have a right to a chair. A man around my own age, happily settled with a gang of friends, offers me his.‘I don’t want to break up your circle.’ The group, so vivid in their enjoyment of the evening, strike me as mostly gay. Out of courtesy to the gay social gods, I must at least pretend to resist being the intruding straight female. I am, obviously, sweating to get involved.He shakes his head, and guides me, gently, into