Tender (2 page)

Catherine was back in Longford until October partly because she had got a summer job—at the local newspaper, where she spent her time making press releases look like news stories—but mostly because her parents wanted her home for the summer, because her parents did not see any reason for her to stay in Dublin when she did not need to go to classes or to the library. When she had been going to Dublin in the first place, her parents had wanted Catherine to move in with her father’s sister in Rathmines, rather than get a place with friends from school, and when the place with those friends had fallen through in Freshers’ Week, a year of living with her aunt Eileen had seemed unavoidable, but then on the student-union notice board, Catherine had seen an ad for a room on Baggot Street, and had scribbled down the number, and that number had led her to Amy and Lorraine. They were also first years at Trinity, but studying science subjects rather than arts, and this guy James had gone to Berlin just before the October rent had been paid, and so they needed, badly needed, someone new for his room. Would Catherine be interested? She said yes, her heart racing, and she moved in that evening. They were from Leitrim; that was the detail she used as a bargaining chip with her mother, or as a kind of security clause; Leitrim, after all, was a neighboring county to Longford, so it was almost as though she was living with people from home; it was not as though she was moving in with Dublin people, or with English people—or with boys. To Catherine’s amazement, her mother had agreed reluctantly, and had said that she would come up with some way of explaining it to Catherine’s father, and Catherine had spent a happy year living with the girls, who were such fun, and so easygoing, and who treated the flat as a home, not just as somewhere to stay a couple of nights a week before going home again for the weekend. They were both up there for the summer, of course, and she envied them so much, getting to live with James; she envied them even the month they had lived with him before she knew any of them, even the years when they had all been together at secondary school. How could you envy a time of which you could not possibly have been a part? And yet she did. She looked at James now, as he knelt beside her on the blanket, passing her a glass of lemonade. It was cool and solid in her hand.

“You’re going to burn,” she said, her gaze on his bare arms.

“We’re all going to burn, Catherine,” he said sternly. “Sure look at the getup of you, sitting out where decent people can see you, and your naked body on display.” He shook his head. “Pat Burke is watching, Catherine. Pat Burke is scandalized, that’s what he is.”

“Oh, shut up about that old bastard,” Catherine said, taking a mouthful of lemonade.

“Chin-chin,” James said, making it sound somehow like a warning, and he clinked his glass against hers. He drank deeply and looked down the hill to the canal. A boat, a small cruiser, was moving away from the lock. Catherine could hear the noise of the gates as they closed again.

“That’s right,” James shouted down in the boat’s direction, although there was no way the people could hear, and, quite apart from that, he had no idea who they were. “Bate on now, ye fuckers! We don’t want your type around here!”

“You’re terrible, Muriel,” Catherine said, which was one of the lines which had become theirs over the past few weeks; it was from a film they both loved.
You’re terrible, Muriel.
The right way to say it was in an Australian accent, with a wide-eyed expression of shock and dismay, but Catherine was too hot and lazy to bother just now, and anyway, James, attempting to squeeze onto the blanket beside her, was not even listening.

“Shove over, Reilly,” he said; they were shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. The physical contact was a jolt for Catherine; her mind was casting about frantically for a way to break what she felt to be the tension of the moment. But her mind could not be trusted; her mind responded to the request to divert attention from his body by dumping attention onto it even more crudely than if she had reached out and stroked it from top to toe.

“Your skin,” she said, her voice sounding weird and insistent. “Your skin will be destroyed in this sun. You need some cream for it. You need to rub in some of that cream your mother gave you.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” James grunted. “That stuff is ancient. You’d be as well off covering yourself with jam.”

“Well, I have it on, and I’m not burning.”

Which had been another stupid thing to say, because now James was up on one elbow, peering at her body, taking it all in: her bare thighs, her stomach, her cleavage, such as it was in this ridiculous eighties bikini. She felt an impulse to wrap herself, hide herself, in the blanket. James was really staring at her now; she tried to laugh, but it came out as a gasp.

“You’re turning blue, Catherine,” James said, settling down again as though this was nothing. “You look like you’re coming down with cholera. It must be something in the cream.”

“What?” Catherine said in another gasp, and she sat up in a rush, stretching her arms out in front of her. Instantly she saw that he was not serious, that this was just another of his jokes, and he was convulsed with laughter beside her now, but still she found herself making a show of checking herself—stomach, thighs, calves, and then she lifted her hips and examined what she could see of her arse cheeks, for good measure. There was no blueness, obviously; her freckled skin stared back at her, still bright with the sheen of the lotion, the tiny fair hairs shining in the sun.

“Fucker,” she said, shoving James.

“Ha ha,” he half sang, one minor chord following another, and he did not even open his eyes. She thought about doing something to him, something to get revenge on him; she wanted something, she realized, to make him sharply aware of her again, even though she had been wishing for just that kind of awareness to slide away from her only a moment ago. The cold lemonade, maybe, all over his T-shirt and onto his rolled-up jeans; all down his long, thin legs, over his knobbly feet, white and uncallused and naked. Or maybe a couple of ice cubes, tipped out of her glass and slapped onto the exposed length of his throat, gone down under his collar before he had the chance to realize what it was she had in her hand.

“Reilly,” James said, in a drowsy undertone, and he let the back of one hand flop onto her stomach before taking it away again. “You’re blocking my sun.”

Pat Burke; it was extraordinary how red-faced, horrible old Pat Burke had become one of the private jokes between her and James, one of their lines, but he had. Pat Burke this, Pat Burke that.
Pat Burke is watching; Oh, that’s one for Pat Burke, now; Good
God,
Catherine, what would Pat Burke say?
His name was shorthand for pretended moral indignation, and Catherine loved it, though when they used it she always felt, at the same time, the quickened heartbeat of guilt and of unease at doing something at which her parents would be so horrified. Burke was recovering from a heart attack the previous summer, and on the first Friday of every month he still had to take the train to Dublin for treatment; each time, he came back with a store of gossip about other Longford people who had been heading up to the city and coming home again. At the bar in Leahy’s, he would unveil the tasty particulars of what he had seen and heard: the shoppers, the holidaymakers, the sibling-visitors, the ashen people facing tests and diagnoses and tubes and machines; the goners, the chatters, the chancers. And in the city itself, and in the train station, there was also so much to see, which was how on the first Friday in June, Pat Burke happened upon a great morsel, which was the sight of young Reilly, Catherine or whatever her name was, Charlie Reilly’s eldest girl, sitting on a bench in the middle of the day, holding hands with some young fella, a huge haystack of red hair on him, bold as brass and without a whit of concern for whoever might be looking their way.

They had not been holding hands. They had been sitting on one of the wooden benches in the gloomy space facing the train platforms, and their heads had been close together, each of them with a hand up to an ear. And yes, maybe, Catherine thought afterwards, maybe their hands had been touching, because they had been listening to her headphones; she had wanted James to hear the Radiohead song she loved, the miserable, beautiful one from
OK Computer
. Catherine had been taking the train back to Longford for the summer, and James had insisted on walking her to the train station, and she had been feeling sad and shaky at the prospect of leaving him—Longford was over two hours from Dublin, and it was unlikely that she would be back up very much during the summer—and shaky, too, at the fact of this, at the fact of this all having come upon her so quickly—three days previously, she had never even met him—and at the fact of it rattling her, now, so deeply, and embarrassed by it, and confused—and worse still, she knew that James was feeling sad about their parting also, because he had told her, and because, in fact, he kept saying so, and Catherine had no idea what to do with this, how to take this, this openness, this unbothered honesty, which seemed to cost him nothing—no blushing, no shiftiness in his eyes or around his mouth—and yes, the fact was, their hands had been touching, or more like their wrists, the press of his wrist and the press of hers, skin against skin, bone against bone, and it was so strange, it had struck her, that a wrist could be such a boring part of someone and yet so massively, overwhelmingly
them
. And the grim lament of “Exit Music (For A Film)” plunged into this feeling so perfectly, so intimately, that she felt weird about sharing it with him, actually; felt as though it might be saying something somehow dangerous, and the fact that he was nodding, that he was closing his eyes, offered no comfort to her, no breeze of reassurance, and then Thom Yorke was droning, telling someone to breathe, and in that moment Catherine glanced up for some reason, and there, in front of her, was that old weirdo Pat Burke from home, wearing a black suit and a black tie as though he was coming from a funeral, a splattering of small silver badges on his right lapel, and he gave Catherine a wink; a slow, delighted wink.

“Hi, Mr. Burke,” Catherine said before she could stop herself, her head jerking upwards, which caused James to jolt beside her and follow her gaze.

“Miss Reilly,” Burke said with heavy emphasis, as though he was a butler announcing her arrival to a room, and with a little bow and a long look at James—a look, Catherine thought, that was more like a leer—he walked away.

“Who the fuck was that?” James said, taking the headphone from his ear and watching as Burke made for the Sligo train.

“A neighbor,” Catherine said. Her heart was thumping; the blush was searing itself into her cheeks, postponed by the shock but coming on fully now.

“He looked like he was coming to claim your soul.”

“Don’t look at him.”

“We hope—that you choke—that you cho-o-oke,”
James sang in a low, rasping whisper, and Catherine elbowed him.

“Stop,” she said. “It’s bad enough.”

James snorted. “What’s bad enough? Those trousers? Did you see the state of them? The arse like an old turf bag.”

“It’s just bad enough,” Catherine said, and she lowered her head to indicate that she was giving all her attention, again, to the song.

Sure enough, two mornings later, which was Catherine’s first summer Sunday at home, she noticed her mother looking at her awkwardly, in the way that meant she had something to say. Catherine braced herself. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cornflakes and Coco Pops mixed together the way she liked them. It was after eleven, and because she had not dragged herself out of bed earlier, she would now have to go with her father to one o’clock Mass; the others had already been. Catherine had been out the night before, in Fallon’s and then on to Blazer’s with some of the girls she had known in school, but it had been the usual shit: bumping into people she never saw anymore, and having bitty conversations with them, and then worrying whether her ID would be enough to get her into the club—it was just her luck that now that she had finally turned eighteen, all the clubs in town had adopted an over-nineteens policy, and getting in depended on whether you knew the bouncer, or on whether he decided he fancied you, or on whether you could plead with him, as Catherine had eventually had to do the night before, pointing out to him that she wasn’t even drunk, that she could never get properly drunk in Longford, because her father always insisted on collecting her, no matter how late she was out—parking, sometimes, right outside the nightclub door. She reckoned the bouncer had felt sorry for her; that that was why he had let her in. Certainly he had looked at her, just before nodding her through, with something like pity in his eyes.

And then Blazer’s had been rubbish, as usual. Cringey dancing to songs from
Trainspotting;
girls who’d been in her Science and Geography classes trying to look like they were off their heads on E when all they’d had was eight bottles of Mug Shot. Clodhopper morons asking if you wanted a shift, the saliva already flecking and bubbling at the corners of their mouths. Anyone half-decent-looking already getting the face worn off them in a corner, and David Donaghy, who’d ignored Catherine’s attentions on the school bus from September 1991 to June 1996, ignoring her all over again, and then shifting Lisa Mulligan, who Catherine was pretty sure was his second cousin. Catherine’s old schoolfriend Jenny screaming, “You need to get pissed!” at her, over and over, and then falling asleep slumped against the mirrored walls, and then shifting David Donaghy when his cousin was finished with him. Two o’clock could not come quickly enough. Catherine had almost been glad of the sight of her father’s Sierra pulled up tight to the steps at the front.

But then he had been silent all the way home, so Catherine knew that Burke had said something to him. There was no danger of her father raising the subject with her himself—the rules might come from him, but that did not mean that he had to articulate them, at least not with Catherine and Ellen, and definitely not when they related, in even the most peripheral of ways, to what Catherine and Ellen might get up to with boys—but in the morning, Catherine’s mother would pause at the kitchen counter, just as she was pausing now, and she would glance in Catherine’s direction, and she would clear her throat: a short, almost apologetic rev.