Tender (19 page)

“James,” Catherine said quietly. “I didn’t mean it like that. I know you—”

“You know
what?
” James almost spat at her. His eyes were huge.

She shook her head rapidly. “I didn’t mean it.”

“You know nothing, Catherine,” he said, not to her, but to the ash from his cigarette as it fell to the floor. “You know
nothing
about me. What do you know about me? What have I told you?”

Again, she shook her head. “I know plenty,” she said. “I know we haven’t talked about Berlin yet; but I read your letters—I know it was hard for you. I’ve wanted to talk to you about it; but we can’t do it now. We can’t do it tonight. Let’s go to bed. Can we? Let’s go to bed, and—”

He coughed out an angry laugh. “So you’re telling me now when to go to bed as well as when to get up?”

“James,”
she said, the word barely sounding like his name at all; in her shock, it had slipped out before she had even finished saying it.

“What?” he snapped, glaring. “What do you want from me? You want me to be funny for you? You want me to be great fucking fun?”

“James!”

“I’m fucking exhausted, Catherine. I’m completely worn out. I’m only three days home, and I can already remember why I left here, and it’s not as though I can go back to that other hole either—so tell me, what the fuck is it, exactly, that I’m supposed to do?”

“Just be here,” she said, uselessly.

“Be here,” he nodded, as though seriously considering this. “And listen to everyone’s plans for me, is it? And look at all the gorgeous fucking fellas that everyone wants to giggle over with me. And look with you all at these fellas, and know that while you can disappear off to the pub with them, for me, there is not a chance, not a single fucking chance…”

His voice cracked. Catherine, almost crying herself now, tried to go towards him, but he held up his hands to tell her to stay where she was.

“I watch everyone, Catherine. I watch them live their lives, and I watch them meet the people they can love, and I watch them go on their dates, and take over sitting rooms to have sex with them, and I—what am I supposed to do?”

“James, you’re only just home! There’ll be—”

“There’ll be what? There’ll be
what,
Catherine? There’ll be Zoe’s friend from England coming for a visit sometime, maybe this year, maybe next? There’ll be some poor fucker as pathetic as I am from the
Society
—oh, thank you so much, Catherine, by the way, for pointing me towards the
Society
—because sure if I can use the college darkroom, I can use the college queer society, and sure then everything will be just perfect, won’t it, just as long as I can remember not to let anybody outside the
Society
see. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that how it goes?”

“What about that guy in Hodges Figgis today?” she blurted, not quite believing she was bringing him up. “He seemed…”

James looked at her, seeming astonished. “He seemed what?”

Catherine shrugged helplessly. “He scratched his eyebrow—I thought maybe…”

“Are you trying to mock me, Catherine?” he said, his face screwed up horribly. “Is that meant to be funny?”

“No! I didn’t know—I thought that maybe you and that guy were giving each other the eye or something. You disappeared.”

“I disappeared to stare at him, Catherine,” he said coldly. “To stalk him. That’s what I do; that’s what I’ve been doing for five years now, and what I made into a fucking art form in Berlin, and what I’ll be spending my time doing here, too, by the looks of it. I stare at them, and they’re either completely oblivious to me or they’re completely disgusted.” He shook his head. “
He scratched his eyebrow.
Jesus!”

“James,” she said, finally humiliated into tears; she sobbed like a child, holding her fists up to her mouth. “Please. It’s not like that. It’ll be OK here, I promise you. It’ll get better, I promise.”

But he bent his head, and put his own fists to his forehead, and he pounded. And Catherine felt so desperate for him, so frightened for him, that she knew she could not go towards him. She knew she could not put her arms around him. She did not try to comfort him; she knew he did not want to be comforted. She knew he did not want for her to attempt to cover over his aloneness. He pounded his own skull, and he clutched at his own hair, and when he was finished, his breath long and ragged, she told him that it was time for them to sleep.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to be taking up room in your bed.”

She had not meant that he would come into her bed; she had meant that he would sleep on her floor, but she could hardly point this out, she felt now, and anyway, it did not matter. It was sleep. It was James. He was not going to jump her; he was not going to wake her up in the night, pushing his impatient dick into her thigh. He was going to rest, and she was going to help him, and in the morning everything was going to be better—of this Catherine was more determined than she had ever been of anything before.

Later in the night, she woke, and instantly realized why: she was freezing. James had taken all of the quilt. Gently, she tried to pull it from him, and he grunted; she tried again, and he shouldered her away. In the half-light, shivering now, she peered at him, holding onto her duvet—as determined a sleeper, it struck her, as he was determined in everything else. His face was so delicate as she watched him: the fineness of his cheekbones, the fullness of his lips, the dark slice of shadow beneath his chin. He was beautiful, it struck her, something she had never seen in him before; he was not handsome in the way that she usually found men handsome, but he was something else, something fuller, something so much more solid. It was not right, that nobody should look at this face the way she was looking at it now, from this angle, in this intimacy; it was not right that nobody should lie beside James and watch him while he hogged their pillow and their duvet. She shivered again and this time grabbed at the quilt much more forcefully; but still James would not yield it, so she nudged him, hard, with her elbow. He cried out, and it was a sound so full of disbelief and outrage that Catherine could not help laughing.

“What did you do to me?” James said, lifting his face to her; he sounded as panicked and confused as though he had woken on top of a moving train. “What did you do to me?”

“Give me the duvet,” Catherine said, tugging it away from him. “You’re keeping it all to yourself.”

“You didn’t have to
hit
me,” he said, in a tone of deep grievance.

“I didn’t hit you,” she said. “I couldn’t wake you.”

“You hit me.”

“Go back to sleep,” she said, and he did.

C
ome on.” Zoe’s voice interrupted Catherine as she sat in the library the following week, trying to prepare for her Michael Doonan interview. “You’ve been hunched up at this desk all day. Time for a cuppa.”

“I can’t,” Catherine said, gesturing to the books on her desk.

“Engines of Everything,”
Zoe said, picking one of them up. “What a pretentious bloody title. I’m taking you away from it. You look like you haven’t had fresh air in days.”

It was not that she had gone days without fresh air—quite the opposite; she had spent most of the last two weeks slacking off to spend time with James—but it did not surprise Catherine to hear Zoe say that she looked unwell. She felt heavy, and sluggish, and as though she was dragging herself around—and yet at the same time, she felt in her limbs the constant jitter of something like panic. She had been sitting here, trying to read Doonan’s books, but on each attempt a line was all she had been able to manage, or two, before the words and the page in front of her had dissolved. She did not know what was wrong with her; it was as though she was restless and yet paralyzed at the same time. James was in the darkroom, developing photographs he had taken of Aidan that morning outside the Old Library, and she was meeting him at four o’clock to head home, but for ages now she had not been able to stop looking at her watch, seeing how long was left to go; she was getting absolutely nothing done. Just when Zoe had come up to her, she had been considering whether she could get away with going over to the darkroom, letting herself into House Four and up the stairs, into the PhotoSoc offices; could she think of some plausible reason for showing up like that? That she had wanted to see how the work was going? But she could not, surely, just go into the darkroom; she would let the light in, and destroy the photographs, and—no, she could not do that, of course she could not do that. But why did she even want to go up there at all? And yet she did; she wanted to see him. It was ridiculous. She would see him at four o’clock, which was, now, hardly even an hour away. She would have the whole evening with him. And she had had pretty much the whole week with him, and the week before that; they had spent most of every day sitting in cafés, or on the Green, or going to exhibitions, or looking around the shops. And not much more than a week ago, she had been feeling crowded by him; not much more than a week ago, she had been wishing that he would do more of his own thing, and leave her to hers. And now—this. But what was this? What was this feeling? What were these feelings, because there was more than one of them: there were several of them, and it was by them, now, that she was crowded; it was by them, now, that she was feeling cornered, feeling overwhelmed. James—

“Come on,” Zoe said again, pulling her up by the shoulders. “I’m staging an intervention, Citsers. Tea.”

As Catherine had known she would do, Zoe steered the conversation around again to the subject of Emmet, and to the question of how things were between Emmet and Catherine, as Zoe put it, “post-Stag’s.”

“Which is not
quite
as promising as ‘post-shags,’” she said, arching an eyebrow, “but it’s a start.”

“I’m telling you, Zoe. You’re barking up the wrong tree. It was just a drink. We were talking about
TN
stuff. There’s nothing more than that happening. How could there be?”

“Why wouldn’t there be?”

“Because he’s Emmet. He’s a messer.”

“He’s cute. And he clearly likes you. He’s been flirting with you all year.”

“I told you, Zoe, it’s not flirting. He’s
Emmet
. He’s The Doyle. It’s just the way he goes on. Everything is a joke with him. Everything is a parody.”

“You seemed to be having a perfectly nice time with him in the Stag’s.”

“Yeah, but only because we were messing. That’s exactly my point. There can only be so much of him slagging me about being a culchie and me slagging him about having gone to a private school.”

“Well. You don’t have to talk. You can just shag.”

“Oh, God,” Catherine groaned. “Can we talk about something else, please? Do we have to spend all of our time talking about boys?”

“We
don’t
spend all of our time talking about boys,” Zoe said, but the accusation seemed to rattle her, because she stirred her tea for a long moment, staring at its milky surface. She sighed. “How’s James, then?”

Catherine coughed out a laugh. “James is a boy.”

Zoe made a face. “Yeah, but you know what I mean. How did his photo shoot with Aidan go? Any chance of a bit of hot boy-on-boy action there?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Zoe!” Catherine said, more forcefully than she had intended; she had caught the attention of several people at nearby tables, and Zoe’s eyes were wide with injured surprise. “Sorry,” she muttered, but Zoe did not even blink.

“What was that for? You’re not seriously feeling possessive of Aidan, are you?”

She spluttered. “Oh my God. Zoe!”

But Zoe’s expression had suddenly changed; she was looking over Catherine’s shoulder, and had assumed a huge, cheeky smile. “Stop talking about him,” she said, out of the corner of her mouth, waving now, and Catherine turned to see Aidan striding down the steps of the coffee dock, waving back in his laconic way.

“Oh, great,” Catherine said, reaching for her tea.

Aidan was looking well today, even handsome, wearing a checked shirt she hadn’t seen before and a pair of black jeans, and he had shaved, which was not something he always bothered to do, and she wondered if he had cleaned himself up because he was getting his photograph taken, which was an idea that ought to have made her laugh, but that instead, like almost everything at the moment, just made her feel a strange mixture of irritation and anxiety. She wondered again if she could sneak off and meet up with James at an earlier time than the one they had arranged; she felt intensely the desire to be with him, talking to him, rather than here with Zoe and Aidan. But she pushed it back. It was not something she should listen to.

The shoot had gone well, Aidan said, though he did not really think of it as having been a shoot, just a half hour reading on a bench in the rose garden while James stepped around him with a camera clicking. James, Aidan said, was a bit of a perfectionist—which translated, upon further cross-examination from Zoe, into James having insisted on continuing to take photographs even when it had started to rain, and into his having asked Aidan not to put his copy of Housman away even though it was getting wet.

“What a
monster,
” Zoe said, sniggering. “You should sue.”

“Oh, I’m sure the end result will be worth it,” Aidan said, putting a boot-clad foot up on the chair in front of him. “He seems to know what he’s doing.” He glanced at Catherine. “He’s photographed you, I presume?”

Catherine hesitated; in fact, while James had photographed her several times the previous summer, he had yet to take her photograph as part of this new series; several times he had mentioned his intention to do so, but had not yet got around to it. But she found that she did not want to admit this to Aidan. “Yeah,” she said casually, as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. “A few times. Mostly back in the flat, you know. There’s good light there.”

“Oh, he said to me this morning that he doesn’t really like shooting indoors,” Aidan said. “Still, you work with what you’ve got, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said, not looking at either of them.

“James says he’s hoping to get his own place soon, actually,” he said, and now she looked at him; now she looked at him as though he had insulted her. “I said I’d keep an ear out for him. My landlady has a couple of houses up around the Liberties. Bought them for a pittance ten years ago. If only we’d all had that kind of foresight.”

“I was nine ten years ago,” Catherine said, because she was feeling a sudden, very angry urge to dig at Aidan, and a dig about how much older he was seemed like the easiest way to get at him. It also carried with it, she realized in the same moment, a reminder of how much younger she was, and therefore an intimation of his sleaziness and lack of scruples in having come on to her that night the previous term. Which was ridiculous, because this was not at all how she felt about having snogged Aidan, but right at this moment, she found, she did not much care for the facts of the thing. She cared about the jagged bolt of shock and distress he had sent hurtling into her with his remark about James moving out of Baggot Street, and with his casual declaration that he intended to help James move out of Baggot Street, and she wanted to hurt him.

But it did not work: Aidan merely shrugged. “Could have used your Communion money,” he said, flashing her a grin. “The pair of you could probably have got a cottage on Cork Street if you’d gone in together.”

Zoe laughed. “What do you think, Cits? The pair of us as flatmates? We could rent a bedroom to James and insist on vetting all his gentleman callers.”

“I have to go,” Catherine said, pushing up and away from the table. “I forgot, I have a
TN
meeting.”

“Oooh,”
Zoe started to croon, but Catherine did not stay to listen to the rest of it.

The morning after the argument with James, Catherine had woken to discover the bed empty beside her, and to find that Lorraine and Cillian were still asleep in the sitting room, and Amy alone in her bedroom, and that there was nobody in the kitchen or the bathroom or even in the hall; James’s bedclothes were just where Lorraine had left them the night before, and it was half past eight in the morning, and James was gone. She had paced her room, and then the kitchen, and then the corridor; she had stared at the pay phone in the hallway, willing it into usefulness. But who could she call? He would not have gone home to Carrigfinn; he had told her on Sunday as they had walked in the park, Catherine still hungover from the party, that he had no intention of going home to Carrigfinn. They did not even know that he was back in Ireland. Zoe? Would he have gone to Zoe’s house in Stillorgan? That was impossible. James turning up on Zoe’s doorstep, before nine in the morning; there was no way he was going to do that. So then where? Was he just wandering the streets? Checked into a hostel? He still had some money left over from the wages Malachy had paid him, but it was mostly in marks; he had not had the chance to convert it yet, and anyway, it was not much, and he had been meaning to look for bar work to have something else to live on—

The sound of the front door had startled her; she had been so caught up in obsessing over where he had gone that she had not considered the possibility that he might not, after all, have gone anywhere, or that he might be coming back. She had rushed to the hall door to meet him, and when she had thrown her arms around him, he had laughed, letting her hug him a moment but then holding her back from him with a look of bafflement on his face; he had only gone to the shop to buy breakfast things, but because it was so early the nearest shop had been closed, so he had walked to the next one, and that had been closed too, and the one he had found had been close to town, and what was she
talking
about, she thought he had gone?

She had laughed about it too, after a while, and at the breakfast table Amy and Lorraine and Cillian had laughed, and everyone had teased her, and she knew it was a story she would be teased about for ages; but at the same time, in James’s eyes, she had seen something that was not laughter. Something that was not the enjoyment of how silly she had been, and how melodramatic. It had not been a coldness; that was too strong. He was still James, he was still right beside her, draping his arms around her every couple of minutes, still saying her name with that rich, layered affection. But it had been a change. There had been something—a carefulness—in the way he had looked at her. A decision, it seemed to her, about how he was going to be with her from now on, and about how he was going to be with, and for himself.

And it had driven her mad.

That was the only way she could see this, this thing that had happened to her over the last ten days: a madness. James had done exactly what Catherine had wanted him to do—he had stopped crowding her, stopped needing to be with her, beside her, every single minute—and she had reacted by becoming exactly as he had been. By clinging. Craving his company. Demanding it. For quite a few days now, the coffee breaks, the lunch breaks, the trips to the galleries, the long walks, had not been James’s idea. The irony was—everything was irony now, it seemed to Catherine—James had found it difficult to get away to do these things with her, because James had other things on now—he had got himself work in O’Brien’s, a pub near Christchurch, three evenings a week and two afternoons, and he was beginning, on top of that, to take his photographs, to put together the series he had talked to her about that afternoon—which now seemed so, so long ago—of the ID cards. He was approaching people in the street and asking if he could photograph them; he had also started to photograph some of the people Catherine had introduced him to in college. He was in the darkroom any chance he got, making prints, and Catherine had seen them all, and they were brilliant; they were wonderful—stark and strange and disorienting. They did not look like the ID card photographs—they were much more beautiful than that—but they had the same sense of people being caught in their unguarded moments, accessed in the pureness and vulnerability of who they really were: a man in construction gear, his gaze sliding warily to the side, an old woman in an apron, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes closed, a boy their age—a boy who was cute, which should have been a source of pleasure to Catherine but felt instead like a scourge—in a football shirt, leaning back against a car, glaring at a point in the middle distance.

And no, James had not yet taken Catherine’s photograph, but she was determined that this would happen over the coming weekend.

And this was part of what had changed, too: Catherine being determined that James would act, and act towards her, in certain crucial ways. That he would come with her when she wanted him to go for coffee or to the National Gallery, for instance, or to O’Donoghue’s for an early-evening pint, even if he was working in another pub himself later and said he would prefer not to arrive there with booze on his breath; that he would walk with her on St. Stephen’s Green or along the canal; that he would, now, take her photograph.