Tender (4 page)

The problem—although Catherine herself did not see it as a problem—was that she did not want something real. Shifting someone you actually knew; she could not imagine it. How would you look them in the eye the next day? There was just so much—liquid. Slither, that was how she thought of it; slither that had been allowed into the space between you. It was appalling. Undignified. It was way too close a range. And sex: no. Just no. She was not going there; not until she worked it out somehow, how she could do it without dying of shame. Which would involve doing it, obviously, or doing some of it, at least; but this was a glitch in her own logic which Catherine felt perfectly entitled to ignore.

It was the morning after things had finally come to a head with Conor that Catherine had first met James. She had been drinking in the Pav, which was the bar at the back of campus for the cricket players, but in which everyone drank at the end of exams—or indeed, as in the case that evening of Amy and Lorraine, before exams were over. But Catherine had sat her final paper, a disastrous art history one, and to obliterate the memory of it she had been getting good and plastered, which was hardly the best of ideas when Conor was around. By half past nine, she was slumped in a booth beside him, pulling her oldest trick, the trick she had been pulling unsuccessfully with boys she fancied for years, which was to pretend to fall asleep on the boy’s shoulder, and to hope that he would notice, and react by putting an arm around her and pulling her close.

Conor did not put an arm around her. Conor moved away from her, so abruptly that she almost smacked her head on the wood of the booth, and Conor began making jokes about Catherine to the other guys at the table, and Conor reached over and nudged Catherine—who was still, mortifyingly, pretending to be asleep, her head hanging, because she could not think what best to do—and told her that she had to get up, now; that she had to go home. And then Conor was calling Amy over, which was the last thing that Catherine wanted, because she knew that Amy would kill her stone dead for being so pathetic, and sure enough, she opened her eyes and there was Amy with a face like thunder, and there, on Catherine’s elbows, was Amy’s strong, angry grip.

“Take this kid back to Baggot Street, will you, Ames,” Conor said, “or put her on a bus or something.”

Catherine pouted, another of her old tricks, with an equally low success rate. “I don’t
want
to go home.”

“I’m not taking her home,” Amy said. “It’s not even ten o’clock.” She shoved Catherine in front of her, in the direction of the tiny bathroom at the front of the bar. “And my name is not Ames,” she shot back at Conor.

“Whatever, sweetheart,” Conor replied.

“Dickhead,” Amy said, as she poked Catherine in the back. “Come on, keep going.”

“To do what?”

“To puke, and then to have cold water splashed all over your silly little face by me,” Amy said. “Are you wearing mascara?”

“I told you, I don’t wear eye makeup.”

“Well, that’s another thing we’re going to need to discuss,” Amy said, as they reached the bathroom, and she pushed Catherine into a cubicle. “Bend,” she said. “Think of something that disgusts you.”

“Conor disgusts me.”

“Shut
up
about Conor,” Amy said. “Think of vermin or something. Worms.”

“I don’t have any problem with worms,” Catherine said. “I grew up on a farm, remember?”

“Shut up about that fucking farm as well,” Amy said. “Nobody cares that you grew up on a farm. Anyone would think you’d crawled to college straight from the famine, the way you go on. Cows and tractors, for Christ’s
sake
. So what? My dad has a ride-on lawn mower. Do you hear me going on about that? No, you do not. Now, come here.” She pulled Catherine closer, so that their faces were inches apart. “Open your gob.”

“What for?” Catherine whined.

“Open your
mouth,
” Amy said, and when Catherine obeyed, Amy shoved two fingers down her throat, so that it came right up, the lunch from that day, and quite a lot of the cider from that evening.

“That’s better,” Amy said, her hand on the nape of Catherine’s neck. “Good girl.”

“I
hate
Conor,” Catherine said, coughing and rubbing at her mouth. “I
hate
him.”

“Then act like it,” Amy said, and she turned the cold tap on. “Now you and I are going to get plastered all over again, and when James gets home from Berlin tomorrow, we are going to spend the whole day getting pissed with him, and you are not going to waste another fucking minute of your glorious state of drunkenness talking to Conor Moran. Or even thinking about him. Now splash.” She pointed to the sink, and then, moving to the toilet, she hitched her skirt up and began to ease her knickers down.

“Do you need me to leave?” Catherine said, embarrassed.

“Splash, Catherine, and look lively about it,” Amy said, and she leaned back her head as her loud, easy flow began to come.

In Baggot Street all that year, James had been a photograph, blu-tacked to the mantelpiece mirror; in the photo he was all legs, sprawled out on the carpet in front of the couch, with Amy’s arms around his neck, and his hair a mop of red curls and waves and cowlicks; his expression was one of suffering, but in an ironic, delighted way.

Also, James was a set of drawings which every night in her sleep Catherine was keeping pressed like so many dried flowers, without even knowing she was doing so for the first couple of months. If it had not been for a film she and the girls had been watching one night close to Christmas, a film about an artist whose drawings, Amy said, were very like those of James, Catherine might never have known what she was sleeping on, but Amy went into Catherine’s bedroom and pulled the large, flat folder out from under the mattress. Lorraine cleared a space on the carpet, moving aside the tea things and the cigarette packets and the
Evening Herald
that had been there for a fortnight, and Amy laid down the folder and opened it up.

Nobody was looking directly at him; that was what Catherine first noticed. He drew with charcoal, in strokes which were careful, which seemed to leave nothing to chance, going after detail—the ring on a finger, the rib of a cuff, the hard skin on an elbow—as though it was something threatened, something which had to be caught and preserved. And yet, for all his obedience to detail, it was the expressions—not just the faces, but the moods and preoccupations traveling through those faces, running under their surfaces like hidden streams—which came up out of the pages torn from a sketchbook and which set going in Catherine an anxiety which she could not understand.

“Nobody knows,” she said then, surprising herself; she had said it before consciously realizing it. “Nobody knows he’s drawing them.”

Beside her, Amy nodded. “That’s what he does. He catches people unawares.”

“He’s a little stalker,” Lorraine said. “A little paparazzi fucker.”

“See this one of Lorraine,” Amy said, and Lorraine gave a protesting wail.

“I have a double chin!”

“No, no, it’s you,” Catherine said, taking the drawing. “I mean, you, except with a double chin.”

“He’s a sneaky little bastard,” Lorraine said, reaching for her cigarettes. “He did not have my permission to do that.”

Catherine looked at Amy. “Has he done you?”

She nodded. “Somewhere in there. It was while we were in Irish class last year.”

“She was staring out the window deciding whether or not to give a hand job to Robbie Fox,” Lorraine said.

“Shut up, you,” said Amy, laughing. She went through the drawings more quickly now, lifting them up at the right-hand corner, separating them carefully; about fifteen or so in, she stopped. “Here I am,” she said, pulling the page out slowly.

“It’s lovely,” Catherine said quietly.

“Lovely for Robbie,” Lorraine snorted.

“No, really,” Catherine said, above their laughter. She leaned in to look more closely. It was Amy, in a school jumper, with a tie loosely knotted beneath a shirt collar, sitting with her knuckles pressed to her chin. Lorraine had remembered correctly: she was looking out a window. James had drawn the wooden frame, and an outline of the buildings outside, and he had drawn the small hoop in Amy’s right earlobe, and the biro in her hand. As with the other portraits, he had caught something in the eyes, and something about the mouth, which brought on a feeling of—Catherine could only think of it as worry, a kind of unease. Even though this Amy in charcoal, her attention on something outside or on something deep within her mind; even though she looked beautiful, soft-eyed—even for all this, there was something about the portrait that made Catherine feel that it was somehow wrong to be looking at it. Then it struck her: how direct the angle was. James would have needed to have been sitting almost right in front of Amy, only slightly to her right, to capture her like this; he would have needed to have been two desks or so in front of her, and turned fully around.

“How did you not
see
him?” she said to Amy, and Amy just shrugged.

“That’s the thing about the way he does them. He has some way of not letting anyone notice him. I don’t know how he manages.”

But on the morning James came back to Dublin, Catherine had quite forgotten about him—or rather, Catherine was too preoccupied with other matters to remember that he was coming. The other matters related to the night before, which had ended on Grafton Street not long before dawn, with Conor taking hold of her shoulders and telling her that she was a great chick, a great chick, over and over, while still, so enragingly, failing to actually put his arms around her and hold her, which by that time she had wanted so badly, for so long, that she felt as though she might just vaporize, standing there in front of him, with his useless fingers on her useless skin, or that she might instead just knee him in the balls, which was what she
had
done, come to think of it—she could hear again Amy’s voice saying,
Oh Jesus, Catherine
—but not even that successfully, because Conor had stood upright far too quickly afterwards, and he had been pleased, she could see, and now he was gone home to Wexford for the summer, to work in his uncle’s pub, and it would be October before she would see him again. About this, she felt miserable, but also relieved: there would be no more of his snideness, no more of his mockery, no more of his moods. She could recall asking him, before they left the Pav for the club—she had not stayed away from him after Amy’s lecture in the bathroom, or had managed to do so for only about twenty minutes—for advice on her situation, or indeed non-situation, with her summer job at the
Longford Leader:
since January, she had been meaning to phone the editor and remind him that he had told her, the summer before, to come back when she was in college. But she had not phoned him, for various reasons.

“One reason, Citóg,” Conor had said, when she told him. “One reason. Visceral fear.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” Catherine had said, delighted, as usual, to hear Conor referring to her with the nickname he had given her. It made no sense; it was the Irish word for left-handed people, and she was right-handed. But she loved it, anyway, and she tingled every time he said it. “How could I be afraid of him when I don’t even know him?”

“Right. Because that’s really stopped you being afraid of people before.”

“Fuck
off
.”

Then Conor had dragged someone else into the conversation, had humiliated her in front of someone who was a virtual stranger: Emmet Doyle, a quiet Dublin guy who Catherine knew vaguely from editorial meetings for
Trinity News
. He wrote mostly about dull student union politics, and he dressed in a slightly odd combination of smart shirts and scruffy cords, and his hair fell in soft brown curls around his face, and he blushed whenever anyone spoke to him. The blushing ought to have endeared him to Catherine, who suffered from precisely the same affliction, but instead it irritated her. She wanted men to have faces which showed not a flicker of what was going on in their minds. But now here was Emmet Doyle, blushing, and looking a little bewildered, while Conor outlined to him the farce of Catherine’s inability to call the
Leader
editor, and while Catherine yanked at Conor’s arm, and shoved him, and told him to stop making such a big deal out of it, Emmet proceeded, in his nice, polite, South County Dublin sentences, to suggest ways for Catherine to approach the task—what she should say to the editor; how she should make her case.

“I mean, just tell him you have, like, experience, and that you’ve done news, and that you’ve done layout, and that you’ve done different kinds of features and stuff. I mean, you’ve done stuff for
TN,
haven’t you? I’ve seen your name.”

She shrugged. “A few—”

“Tell him you got the last interview with Jeff Buckley,” Conor cut in.

“Jeff who?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Citóg,” Conor said, putting his hand to his face, and it went on like that, a catalogue of mortification and stupidity, until daylight was hitting the red stones of Grafton Street, and until there was nothing else for it but to go home.

The next morning: a thumping skull, trembling skin, a stomach like seasickness. Amy and Lorraine were at the exam halls, with hangovers of their own for which, they made clear as they were leaving, they held Catherine entirely responsible, and a bag of peas from the freezer was the best thing she could find in the way of relief; she took it back to bed and fell asleep a second time with its coldness pressed above one ear. That sleep was a sinkhole of utter oblivion, in which dreams were out of the question because her body had a great deal of work to do, and when her eyes opened two hours later, what she noticed firstly was that the pain was gone, and secondly, that the noise from the street outside was much louder than it ought to have been, and thirdly, that it was not actually the noise from the streets, but the noise of someone in the sitting room, someone moving around, lifting things and putting them down. Sitting now, they were: the creak of the leather armchair. One of the girls, Catherine thought. Home to kill her for having kept them out until six o’clock in the morning.