Tender (40 page)

“Don’t, Catherine, please,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, horrified, mortified, not even sure what she was apologizing for. “Never mind me, never mind me.”

“It’s not that it’s not nice of you to say something like that.”

“No, it was stupid. Of course it was stupid. We don’t know each other anymore. It’s not my place.”

“No, it’s not that,” he said, walking again now, shaking his head. “I mean, yes. Of course yes, we don’t, you know—it’s true. We don’t know each other anymore.” He sighed. “Which makes me sad, actually.”

“Me too.”

“But, you know,” he said, “this is how it is. Time moves. It takes you with it. Life changes. You know?”

There was far more to it than that, Catherine thought, but she did not say this. She nodded. “I’m sorry about what happened, James,” she said. It seemed hopelessly inadequate, but it had to be said. It should have been said many years previously. She had tried; she had started the letters. But his own letter, written to her a week after what had happened, had been clear. No more. No contact. No way; no explanations; no point. It had been unfair to keep Baggot Street from him, to keep the girls from him—they had been his friends first, after all—so she had found a flatshare with some other people from college in Ranelagh. Zoe had come home from Italy; Zoe had been her friend. Emmet had come home; Emmet had been more than she could ever have believed Emmet could be to her. Heartbreak, in the end, too; heartbreak enough to make up her mind about moving to London; heartbreak, in its way, far worse than it had been, a year previously, with James; was that irony? Was that a justice somehow served? Was that just life?

Yes, yes, probably that was just life.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “It’s not enough, it’s not even a beginning, but it’s true, James.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

She stared at him. “What?” she said, and she almost laughed. “Of course it was my fault. If it wasn’t for me—” She shook her head. “You shouldn’t even have been up there. Either of you.”

“No,” he said firmly. “You see, that’s not true. We should have been able to be anywhere we felt like being, anywhere we wanted to be. Everybody who was there that day should have been able to be there. Without that. Without being blown to bits by a bunch of fucking psychopaths.”

“But that’s different,” Catherine said, frowning. “That’s a separate thing.”

“No,” James said, shaking his head. “You didn’t do that to us.”

“I did part of it. I did enough.”

“No,” he said firmly. “There’s no point in telling yourself that. If you want to tell yourself, that’s another matter. That’s, however you put it, a separate thing.”

He was not trying to comfort her, Catherine realized. He was not trying to take something painful away. It was as if he was trying to tell her that something painful had never been hers to hold on to at all.

“You were supposed to be in Baggot Street that weekend,” she said, “the two of you. You were going to come for dinner, stay the night…”

He made a noise of disbelief. “Why would we need to stay the night? We didn’t need to use someone else’s house. We would have gone home to Liam’s place, or to mine.”

“It was something I heard Lorraine suggesting. That you would stay. Make a weekend of it. And then there was the photo.”

“What photo?”

“The photo of Liam.”

He squinted at her. “The photo of Liam was taken afterwards.”

Not that photo,
she wanted to say, but there was no point—there was no point in raking this over. It was so long ago. It had been, anyway, such a small thing.

But James was still frowning, still shaking his head. “You must be misremembering, Catherine. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I think the idea was—”

“Because we weren’t hiding,” he said over her.

“Yes, you were,” she said quietly.

“No,” he said sharply. “No, we weren’t. Hiding from you, maybe. But that was different. That was”—he changed his intonation—“a separate thing.”

“So you do blame me.”

“Blame?”
he spat. “I blame the bastards who parked that car. I blame the bastards who stole it, the ones who drove it up there knowing—”

“But you were up there because of what I did,” Catherine said, and she saw, then, a bin, and she threw her coffee into it; it landed with a slosh.

“You weren’t really into that, were you?” James said, and she was astonished to see that he was almost laughing. She stared at him.

“Do you even know what I said to him? What I told Liam that day?”

“You told him we were fucking,” James said, in the same vaguely bemused tone. “And you said I was—how was it that your mother put it that time?”

“My
mother?
”

“Troubled,” James said, nodding in evident satisfaction at having remembered the word, or at having had the chance to present it. “Troubled, that’s what you said I was. Which he had no trouble, so to speak, believing. The rest of it, though”—he shrugged—“sure, all he had to do was ask me.”

She stared at him. The collar of his denim shirt, fluttering slightly in the breeze. The gray in his beard. A freckle high on his cheek, maybe a mole; he should get that checked. But that was not something she should even be noticing; that was not something it was her place to notice.

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said again, feeling the need to insist on it.

He shook his head. “You don’t need to tell me that, Catherine. That’s your business. The being sorry, I mean. That’s part of
your
life. I don’t mean anything harsh by that. I don’t mean that it’s worthless or anything, your being sorry, or your apology, or sorrow, or however you’d put it. I just mean, it’s yours.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said, her voice hollow. She felt she was being fobbed off, somehow; she felt as if, all over again, she was being refused.

“I have my own things,” he said, and he gave a short laugh. “Fuckin’ plenty of them.”

He sighed. “That’s the walkway,” he said, pointing up ahead. A bright green lane for cyclists and pedestrians arched across the river, pinned at two points by tall, thin towers at the top of which sentry windows were visible. It was a strange structure, looking like something out of a graphic novel against the clouds, against this city which seemed, dourly, to have turned its back to them. As they watched, a cyclist whizzed down the platform and onto the island path, disappearing behind the scraggy trees.

“People come out here to get a bit of headspace,” James said. “It’s a weird old spot.” He pointed to the city. “Look, there’s the Chrysler, look, peeking out between those two lumps of things. Can you see it?”

She squinted. “I think so.”

“Well, you wouldn’t mistake the Chrysler. It’s beautiful. Where are you staying?”

“The Standard.”

“Oh-ho,” he said, gleefully. “Sex with Michael Fassbender up against the plate-glass windows?”

Catherine made a face. “I wouldn’t complain.”

“Well, you’re a free agent now,” he said, and he took her arm. The touch of him, the solidness of him; for a moment, Catherine could not breathe. He swayed into her, and she swayed against him, and then they were in step; then they had their rhythm. The path, and the yellow flowers, and the grass verging scruffy against the gravel, and the water’s edge, and the bridge was coming, and the bridge would take him away.

“You trusted me, and I don’t think I did the right thing with that, James,” Catherine said. “I don’t know why I did what I did with it.”

He shrugged; she felt it, against the arm he was holding, as a tug. “I wasn’t that good to you, either.”

“Not deliberately.”

“Neither of us was acting deliberately. Maybe that was the problem.”

“Maybe,” she said doubtfully.

“We were kids, Catherine. We were wains, as my mother would say. It’s all a long time ago now.”

“Not
that
long.”

“Are you joking?” he said, and he pointed to his face. “Look at these wrinkles.” He made a show of examining the skin around her eyes. “You’re not doing too badly, actually. Fuck you anyway.”

She burst out laughing; he was laughing too. It was a performance, of course; a performance with which he could steer them out of dicey territory. It was what he had always done, and he was still doing it now, only now he was so much better at it—Catherine saw it, the smoothness, the quickness, the practice he had had. He stuck out his bottom lip now, in a mock sulk, and pretended to glower at her skin again, and she laughed again, like he wanted her to, like he needed her to do.

“You’re terrible, Muriel,” she said, in an Australian accent.

“I’m terrible, Muriel,” he said, in exactly the same twang. He gripped her arm very tightly for a moment, and then he let it go.

At the entrance to the walkway, they hugged goodbye; not a long hug, but not a short hug, either, and as he stepped back away from her, James sighed. Nothing had been said about keeping in touch, or about meeting up again during the rest of her stay here; they had not exchanged email addresses or phone numbers, had not said anything, even, about finding each other on Facebook. Catherine would have felt ridiculous suggesting this, even though it seemed to be staring them in the face as something obvious now, something natural; they had, after all, mentioned it several times. But she could not do it; she felt that the move, if it was to be made, was up to him. And what was it anyway, only staged photos and inane ramblings? They were better off without it, probably. They were better off just bumping into one another whenever the world sent them one another’s way.

“Listen,” James said now, and he glanced towards the city. “This show of mine, Catherine. In the gallery.”

“Oh, I can’t,” Catherine said. “I thought I mentioned—I’m flying back to London on Monday night.”

“I know, I know, and the opening’s not till Tuesday,” he said. “But if you wanted—if you were able—I mentioned to Meghan there as we were leaving that I’d like for you to be able to call in for a private viewing on Monday during the day sometime, and could she arrange to have someone there.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It’ll be mostly installed by then.”

“And will you be there?”

“Oh, no,” he said, flinching as though he had been stung. “I couldn’t—I can barely stand to look at them when they’re up myself, never mind to watch someone else looking at them.”

“Oh, sure, sure.”

“But I’d like you to see them. Just, you know. To see.”

“Sure,” Catherine nodded, and, feeling the need to make this somehow businesslike, she took her BlackBerry out of her jacket pocket. She toggled the screen randomly; the weather icon was what opened up. “What time?” she said, her eyes on the screen. “Ten thirty or eleven?”

“It’s up to you,” James said. “They’ll be there all day. Just go when it suits you. If it suits you.”

“Of course it suits me. I’m really looking forward to it.”

“OK,” James said, and he smiled at her.

“Thanks, James.”

“I’d better go,” he said, pointing towards the walkway as though it was something waiting for him. “I’ll chat to you?”

“I’ll chat to you,” Catherine nodded, and she watched him walk away. And when she walked away, she looked back at him, at his form going over the strange green bridge, his rucksack on his back, his arms swinging, like a tourist going to see what he could see.

But he was not the tourist, of course. The tourist was her.

His name was already printed on the frosted glass of the gallery window, low down, to the left of the entrance: James Flynn, and the name of the show,
Twenty of You
. Catherine pressed the buzzer and waited. The street was almost eerily quiet; on a Monday, the galleries were all closed to the public. The door opened a crack, and a young woman peered out; seeing Catherine, she smiled and ushered her in. She was Alice, she said, and James had called that morning to let her know that Catherine would be coming to see the work—could she get Catherine anything: coffee, water, anything?

“I’m fine, thanks,” Catherine said, glancing around the space; they were in the reception area, where a large desk—presumably Alice’s—faced a wall of catalogues of James’s work; the large hardbacks of the last two shows at Greene were there, along with the magazine-bound editions he had made with McGinley and the others, and the softbound catalogue from the first Lewis show. Catherine moved towards them, but then realized that the girl—Alice—was holding something out to her; a list, on an A4 sheet, of the works in the new show.

“Oh, no, it’s OK,” Catherine said, shaking her head. “I’d prefer just to look at them head-on, if you know what I mean. I always prefer to do it that way at first.”

“No problem,” said Alice, and she put the list back on the desk. “Well, the show starts in the next room and continues into the back room,” she said, pointing. “I hope you like it.”

All of the faces greeted her; all of the staring men. Young, most of them. Striking, all of them, each in their own way, but then that was James; that was what James did. And then, not all of them were staring, she realized; some of them were looking right out at the viewer, a sort of reckoning, but some of them were refusing, or simply not feeling obliged, to meet the viewer’s eye; glancing to the side or to the ground, to something other, something out of frame. Or maybe to nothing at all; maybe only to thought, to where a thought led.

Shaven-headed, the first of them—from the entrance, she moved to the right, to the man with the buzz cut and the vaguely disapproving mouth, the touch of bloodshot at the sides of his eyes. She did not like him, she decided; she was, somehow, afraid of him. Ridiculous, but that was her reaction, and she had learned, in all of these years walking around galleries, to realize that the reaction was the thing really worth looking at, was the place where the interesting, uncomfortable stuff was to be found.

The next boy was beautiful, the boy with the wax in his hair; more wax than he needed, but it did nothing to interfere with his beauty; nothing could. He was probably twenty-five, she thought, but he looked younger, maybe because he looked startled; maybe because the camera had caught him by surprise, clicking at him as he busied himself with something that could not be seen, something on the other side of the rock on which he was seated; it was a summer day, and he and James had been somewhere, a park, a mountain, somewhere, and James had taken up his camera and the boy’s head had turned. A bag at his feet. No trace of wariness in his eyes.