Tender (16 page)

“Oh, Catherine,” he said, without pulling away from her. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

She snorted. “Glad
you’re
home.”

He went very still. “Why? What did I say?”

“You said you were glad
I
was home.”

“Arrah, you, me, who gives a fuck which one it is,” he said, and he hugged her more tightly, and though she felt terrible about it, she wished that he would let go of her now: she knew that he liked to be physically affectionate, that it was just his way, but this was such a long hug, and in such an exposed, public place; she felt herself cringing at the grip of him around her now, and to try to bring it to an end, to try to wrap it up in some way, she patted him on the back with her right hand, gently but firmly: once, twice, three times. And in her arms, James burst out laughing, and with his own hand, he did exactly the same thing, except that he did not pat her back but really clapped it, almost belted it, as though they were two hurlers embracing on the pitch after one of their teams had beaten the other.

“Very funny,” she muttered into his shoulder. “Nothing gets past you, does it, Flynn?”

“Not a thing, Reilly,” he said happily, and he planted a round of quick, light kisses all down her neck.

They spent the whole day together, having coffee after coffee, one endless conversation, Catherine introducing James to as many of her friends as she set eyes on, and arguing with him over the attractiveness, or lack thereof, of various boys. There was no sign of Rafe, to Catherine’s relief, but in the evening Aidan sauntered up to them on the ramp, fresh from a Romance lecture, his Chaucer under one arm, mad to talk about the Wife of Bath. But once Catherine introduced him to James, it was James’s time in Berlin he wanted to talk about; he had heard from Catherine, he said, shooting her an unreadable glance, so much about James and what he was doing over there, about the great time he was having; it must have been such a rush, living there, was it? He himself had been there, but years ago, before the wall had come down, and he had heard such good things about the city now, about how hedonistic it was, how alive. In typical Aidan form, he did not pause for long enough to have this question actually answered by James; he continued on. James was watching him in amusement, Catherine saw, but also with something else, something more guarded.

“What did you think of him?” she said, after Aidan had taken his leave of them a few minutes later.

But James just shrugged. “I’m ready to go home,” he said. “Will we head?”

“Oh,” Catherine said, uneasily. “I have to write my article.”

“What article?” James said almost crossly.

“The McCabe interview. I told you. Tonight’s production night and I have to get it in.”

“Oh well,” he said, leaning back against the railings. “Will I wait for you?”

“No, go ahead,” Catherine said, frowning as though she could not countenance causing him such an inconvenience. “I’ll run up and get this done, and I’ll be home in an hour or so. I won’t be long.”

“Promise?” said James, in a tone of mock pleading.

“Promise,” Catherine said, and they embraced as tightly as two people who would not see each other again for weeks, or months, or years. Then she was crossing Front Square at a fast clip, thinking how lovely it was, the evening air. The moon was out, and the cobblestones were a shimmering lake of gray. For a moment, she thought she heard her name being called, but that was someone else; that was someone calling someone else’s name.

She wrote the McCabe interview up quickly once she got a desk in the crowded publications office, chopping a couple of hundred words out reluctantly when it was finished—all the good quotes he had given her were long ones, and she wished she could fit them in, but with them in there was no space for anything about the actual novel—and printed it out. Seeing it emerge on the tray, Emmet Doyle crossed the room to pick it up for her, looking at the first page as he brought it to her desk.

“‘Patrick McCabe strides into the bright surroundings of Cafe Irie in Temple Bar, looking like a man who is at once distracted and intense,’” he read aloud. “What’s this, a novel?”

“Give me that,” she said, snatching it from him. He was grinning at her, and for a moment she could almost see what James had meant—he was kind of attractive, his skin clear, his eyes a dark, striking blue, his lanky frame perched, now, on the edge of her desk, but it was so conventional, his attractiveness; it was not the kind of thing she had imagined whispering over with James.

“There’s a letter for you, by the way, Poetess,” he said, nodding towards the mailbox on the opposite wall. “Did you get it?”

“No,” Catherine said, getting up. “How long has it been here?”

“A couple of days,” Emmet shrugged. “It’s probably McCabe’s wife, warning you to stop stalking him.”

“Fuck off,” she laughed, taking down the envelope. It was handwritten, and bearing a Dublin postmark; she tore it open to find a curt note from the publicist of the novelist Michael Doonan, granting her the interview with him that she had been chasing for months. She was, the publicist explained, to be given forty minutes on a Friday afternoon the following month, and the questions were to focus on Doonan’s new novel,
Engines of Everything,
not on the earlier trilogy which had recently been made into a controversial television series. This gave her a few weeks for preparation, which was just as well, because she had read only one of Doonan’s books, and she wanted to do a good job on this interview, because he so rarely granted them.

“Restraining order?” Emmet said, coming up to her at the mailbox. He was grinning as widely as ever, but the blush was back again; she watched its progress across the smooth skin of his face.

“Very funny,” she said, stuffing the envelope into her pocket. “Well, enjoy production night. I have dinner waiting for me.”

He gave her a disbelieving look. “What, has your mother moved in with you or something?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “Just my friend. James.”

“Oh,
James,
is it?” Emmet said archly. “That’s the ginger I saw you hugging outside the arts block this morning? I was heartbroken, Reilly. I thought the time we spent together on Saturday night meant something. You came back to my place —”

“With about a hundred other people.”

“And then this morning, I’m coming out of my Politics tutorial—”

“You were not coming out of a Politics tutorial at half eleven in the morning.”

“…to see you—I resent that statement, by the way—to see you with your arms around another man. I’m heartbroken, Reilly. Devastated.”

This was Doyle’s usual routine, this layering of sarcasm onto mockery onto brazen cheek, onto what, deep down, might even be a trace of genuine honesty, until it was impossible to tell which was which and what was what. It was a code, deep irony by means of the presence of sincerity, in which he and a few of the other
TN
guys frequently spoke, and Catherine could not get her head around it. Talking to them, she tried to imitate it, but her efforts always seemed to come out just sounding bitchy.

“Fuck off, Doyle,” she said now, and exactly that thing happened, but Emmet seemed not to notice.

“You brought your friend to my party the other night, right? I was talking to him for a while.”

“Yeah. He’d just arrived from Berlin.”

“Very strong culchie accent for a German.”

“Hilarious,” she said, as she gathered her things from the desk: her notes, her jacket, her bag. “Right. I’m off home,” she said, making for the door.

Emmet followed her. “Does your friend go to college here?” he said, as they reached the hallway. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before Saturday.”

“No, he’s not a student,” Catherine said. She turned slightly, and Emmet stopped abruptly, so that he was standing very close to her. He stepped back. Catherine stepped in the other direction. There was silence between them for a long moment; Catherine did not know what to do with it.

“Don’t you have a newspaper to put to bed?” she said eventually, her tone sharp.

For a second, Emmet looked as though he did not understand the question, but then he rolled his eyes at her, and the grin was back.
“Put to bed?”
he said mockingly. “Where’d you learn that, the
Longford Leader
?”

“Good night, Emmet,” she said, waving without looking back at him, as she took the first flight.

He leaned down over the banister. “Good night, Poetess,” he called.

S
ometime after nine the next morning, Catherine tiptoed into the sitting room to wake James up in the same way she had woken him the morning before: by bouncing on his couch cushions until he groaned. But this time, instead of jumping on him, she stood and watched him for a long moment as he slept. He was on his side, with his arms raised over his face, his head pushed forward into the crooks of his elbows; it was a position she remembered from Carrigfinn during the summer, from when she had crept into his room to wake him. Now the air was thick with the smell of his sleep, the stale, slightly sickly smell of a night of dreaming breath.

James gasped and dropped his arms to his chest, and his eyes shot open, wide; they were staring right at Catherine, staring through her. She was startled by his expression, which seemed almost terrified, and she took a step back, but in the next instant James was blinking sleepily, stretching, and he looked like himself again.

“Morning,” she said brightly, reaching down to stipple her fingertips on his bare shoulder.

“No, no,” he said, burying his head in his pillow. “It’s not morning, Catherine. Go away. It’s still the middle of the night.”

“It’s getting-up time,” she said, crossing to the window and opening the shutters. “God, this room is always so stuffy the morning after we have people round.”

He raised himself to his elbows and frowned at her. “Oh, so I’m a ‘person round,’ am I?”

“What are you going to get up to today?” she said, coming back to the couch.

“You tell me,” he shrugged. “Another day of staring at the older men you have a Daddy fetish about, presumably. God, you’ve no taste at all, Reilly, do you know that?”

She pushed his head into the pillow until he bawled in protest, and then she released him, laughing. He twisted around and grabbed her, his hands tickling her waist, inching towards her belly button; she squealed and tried to wriggle away from him, but he had her. He pulled her down, and pressed his face into the back of her neck, growling, squeezing her so tight that she could hardly breathe. She pushed back against him, but he had stopped tickling her now; he had stopped moving altogether, and now his body against hers was solid and still. He sighed.

“So what are we doing today, Brain?”

It was one of their routines, a quote from a cartoon they both found hilarious, and Catherine responded without missing a beat. “The same thing we do every day, Pinky.
Try to take over the world!
”

“Oh, Reilly,” he said, nuzzling her, “we’re awful eejits, do you know that?”

“I know,” she said, happily.

“So, what are we doing today?”

“Well, I have a load of lectures. And I have to meet up with Dr. Parker to ask him about my Plath essay.”

“Daddy, Daddy…”

“Shut
up,
” she said, kicking back at him. He snorted.

“All right,” he said, and on her neck she felt the scrape of his stubble. “Will I come in with you, then? Or what do you want to do?”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “You want to come in to college with me again?”

“Oh,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “Was that not the plan? I thought—”

“No, no,” she said, feeling embarrassed herself now; she was actually blushing, and so glad that she had her back to him so that he could not see her, “Of course you can come in to college with me. I just thought…”

“Oh, well, I won’t if you don’t want me to,” he said, and she could feel the pillow jolting as he shook his head. “No, no. Of course. You have your lectures. Sure if I wanted to go to lectures, I’d have gone to college myself.”

“It’s just,” she said, and she turned around now to face him. His morning breath hit her; she reeled for a second but managed not to let her reaction show. “It’s just, yeah, I thought you’d have your own stuff to do. You said you wanted to find a darkroom this week, and look for a job, maybe, and—”

“Yeah,” he said, quietly.

“I mean, we can meet up later.”

“I’ll walk in with you anyway,” he said, “and then we can make our arrangements for later. Does that sound OK?”

“OK,” she said, but uncertainly, and she knew he heard the uncertainty in her tone, and she saw him react to it—a sort of wincing, a sort of tightening and thinning of his mouth, a darkening of his eyes—so, to try and change the mood, she shook him, and bounced on him, and tickled him until he begged her to stop.

“Now,
up,
” she said then, getting to her feet and heading towards the kitchen. “It’s a new day. New dawn.”

“Fuck the dawn,” she heard James mutter from behind her, as he snuggled back into his makeshift bed.

Once again, it took ages to get him out of the house, and by the time they reached college she was running late for her Expressionism tutorial, but as they came through the Nassau Street entrance, James grabbed Catherine’s arm suddenly and pulled her over in the direction of the security booth.

“Come here for a minute,” he said. “I want you to see something. I want to show you something.”

“James. I’m late.”

“It’ll only take a second,” he said, and then he was jabbing at the long, curved window of the booth, tapping a finger on the glass. “I love this. Look.”

All Catherine could see was the white-haired security guard, looking as though he was ready for war in his uniform of epaulettes and peaked cap. He regarded James with suspicion for a moment, before yawning and looking away.

“All these
faces,
” James was saying, from beside her, and then she saw what it was that he was talking about: the long row of student ID cards slotted into the frame behind the glass. Each of them had been found on campus, or somewhere in town, and handed in here; they stared grimly out at the passersby, a lineup of missing people who were actually not missing at all.

“I love these things,” James said, running a finger along the glass slowly, as though he was reading braille. “I love the way people always look in these kinds of photographs,” he said. “The way they’re got.”

“Got?”
she repeated, uncertainly.

“Yeah. The way people are caught in them. Before they have a chance to arrange their expressions the way people always want to when you photograph them. Before they even get a chance to think.”

“God, they’re ugly as sin, I think,” Catherine said, standing back from them a little; a guy from her American Poetry class passed by, and she smiled a greeting at him.

“No, no,” James said, hunched down at the window. “They’re perfect. I mean, look at this one.”

He was looking, now, at a card depicting a dour, pallid-looking girl; he was gazing at it with as much admiration as if it was the original Botticelli Venus. The girl was someone Catherine knew from around, actually, and in the flesh, she was quite pretty; probably, she hated this photo of herself. Possibly, she had lost her ID card on purpose, in the hope of getting a new, updated one, with a much more flattering headshot, but as Catherine herself had discovered the previous year, that trick did not work. They kept your photo on the computer system; you were stuck with it for the entire length of your degree. In her own, Catherine looked like a junkie: lank-haired, slack-mouthed, wearing the sloppy denim jacket she had worn almost every day since buying it for herself at the age of fifteen; she had only recently got rid of that jacket, by donating it to the Oxfam shop on Great George’s Street. Someone else was probably walking around Dublin in that jacket now, which was a strange thought; someone who was unaware of the previous life it had led. These days Catherine wore a brown suede jacket she had bought second-hand in Harlequin; its lining was ripped and stained in places, but the suede was soft and lovely, and she liked to stroke the collar of it when she was wearing it, while she was talking to people—a habit which Emmet Doyle, come to think of it, had picked up on and had mimicked laughingly on the ramp a couple of times.

“I’d love my photographs to look like these,” James said now. “I’d love them to be this truthful.”

“But they look like mug shots!”

“Not mug shots,” James said, shaking his head. “With mug shots there’s a definite style. And in mug shots they need you to be recognizable, for the next time you’re caught with your trousers down. With these, though, nothing matters. The second you’re within sight of the camera, that’s it.
Boom
. Got you. Don’t care what you think of you. Next!”

“I hate mine,” Catherine said sullenly.

“Oh!” James said, thrusting his hand out to her. “Can I see it?”

She snorted. “Not a hope!”

“Ah, come on. Please. Please. I want to see it. I want to make a photograph of you like these ones.”

“You must be
joking!
” she said, covering her pocket with her hand, just in case he decided to delve in there. “Now I have to go, or Roberts will have the door locked. Do you know what you want to do later?”

“Oh, I’ll be around,” James said, almost dreamily, still immersed in the IDs.

He was around. He was around for coffee after her tutorial, and for lunch after her next lecture, and when they had finished their lunch he insisted that they go to Café en Seine, for a “proper coffee,” and Catherine agreed, guiltily and a little grouchily, because she was meant to be in the library preparing for her meeting with Dr. Parker, but still. How many times had she walked these streets and gone to this café without James, wishing that he had been with her in just this way? How many letters had she written to him, talking about her lectures and what she had got up to on her lunchtimes and what she had seen and what she had thought? And now he was right here, talking a blue streak about his new philosophy of portraiture, and linking her arm the way he always liked to do when they walked, and what did she have to be complaining about, exactly? What did she have to be moaning about? She could prepare for the meeting about her essay when they got back from their coffee. All she had to do was come up with a title, and five minutes glancing over the poems would be enough for that. She leaned into James, feeling again the giddiness of his still-strange presence beside her, and she nodded at something he was saying about angles, and she smiled. And then she saw him. A beautiful specimen; there was no doubt but that he could only be described as a beautiful, an absolutely fucking stunning, specimen coming towards them. A guy, their age but dressed in a suit and tie, meaning that he was probably, actually, a couple of years older, that he was probably on his lunch break from an office job. He was breathtaking: tall, and skinny, his short hair slightly scruffy, and with perfect, olive skin, and with a lovely kind of preoccupied look in his dark eyes, and with lips so full they looked as though somebody had punched them to make them that way, or kissed them, maybe—kissed them until they were swollen; and he was coming towards them now, rapidly, his hands in the pockets of his gorgeous, navy suit, his steps rushed and urgent, and Catherine did not even have to jerk James’s arm, or elbow James in the side, to get James to stop talking, to pay attention, to see what was there for the seeing, right in front of them, because James, beside her, had simply stopped walking.

“Holy shit,” he said, right there in the middle of Dawson Street, staring at the guy as though he was his long-lost brother. “Holy fucking shit.”

Catherine was mortified.
“James!”
she said, looking down to her feet. “Jesus!”

But James was not listening to her. He was staring; he was staring at the guy now as the guy came closer to them, and as the guy—who was somehow, mercifully, oblivious, his eyes still fixed on a point in the direction of college—passed them by.

“Do you know him?” Catherine said, stupidly.

James did not even acknowledge the question. He had turned to watch the guy go, and his mouth looked grim and his eyes almost angry, and he was saying nothing. Catherine looked at him, baffled. Was he joking? she wondered. Was this some kind of act, some kind of parody he was putting on?

“James,” she said, trying to laugh. “Are you OK?”

The guy was changing course up ahead, she saw. He veered to the left, weaving his way through the crowd, and he disappeared into the bookshop.

“Come on,” James said, and he headed back the way they had come.

Nothing Catherine said to him as they stood at the Irish fiction section, pretending to look at novels but actually watching the every move of the guy—who was further down in the same aisle going through the new releases—could persuade James to be any more subtle. He stared; he frowned; he banged and messed up and dropped the books so that practically everyone else in the shop looked their way, irritated, but still the guy’s focus did not waver; he had obviously come in here looking for something, and he was going to keep searching until he got it.

“He is
lovely,
” Catherine offered, hearing how ineffectual the words sounded, how somehow naive and unworldly; it seemed beside the point, suddenly, that the guy was actually cute. James’s reaction had filled the space around them with a much starker, much more forceful energy; beside him, glancing towards the guy, she felt like a kid looking for another glittery sticker to add to her collection.

“Just look at him,” James said. “With his book.”

He said
book
as though it was something shameful, Catherine thought; as though it was something for which he was mocking the guy, rather than admiring him.

“He’s too fucking lovely altogether,” he said then, more loudly.

“James! He’ll hear you!”

He cut his eyes at her. “He’ll hear me staring?”

“No, but…”

“Well, then,” he said, and as the guy moved down the aisle now, James moved too.

“For fuck’s sake!” Catherine said, exasperated. “This is—”

“This is
what,
Catherine?” James said, turning back to her. “This is what? Do you need to go? Do you want me to meet you in the café?”

Her mouth dropped open. She felt heat sear her face. “No, but, obviously…”

He frowned. “Obviously what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, stammering now. “I mean, he doesn’t…”