Tender (5 page)

“Hello?” Catherine called out, without raising her head from the pillow. “Hello?”

In response, there was only another sound from the armchair; it protested like that when you sat forward. A shifting, now; the scrape of something on wood.

“Hello?” Catherine called again. “Who’s there?”

The voice shocked her when it came. It was a man’s, sharp and wary. “Hello?” it said, and Catherine heard again the creak of the armchair; he was standing up. “Hello?”

“Hello!” Catherine said, almost shouting, trying to push authority, a lack of patience for nonsense, into her tone, but her heart was slamming, and she knew she sounded scared. She was sitting upright now, and conscious of the fact that, apart from her T-shirt, she was naked, and that the guy, whoever he was, was walking to the sitting-room door, which was directly across from the door to her room. Her mind scanned the possibilities; Cillian, Lorraine’s boyfriend, was already gone to London for the summer, and Duffy, their landlord, had a nasal whine she would know anywhere.

“Who’s there?” the voice said, even more sharply this time. He was out of the sitting room now; he was in the hall.

“
I’m
here!” Catherine shouted, angry now.

“Who’s I?” he said, sounding equally angry.

“Don’t come in, don’t come in!” Catherine shouted, and she knocked the bag of peas to the floor, and the little green orbs scattered, and the door handle turned, and a head topped with red curls and cowlicks appeared.

“You must be Caroline,” was what he said, while Catherine sat there, the duvet snatched up around her, one naked leg sticking out, and the now-thawed peas having spilled onto the carpet below. She stared at him. She stared at his hair, and at his face sandblasted with freckles, at the amused little twist of his thin-lipped mouth. He was wearing a jumper, old-fashioned and patterned in dark greens and grays, and faded jeans, and black Docs, shoes rather than boots, the leather scuffed and scratched. He was fully in the room now, having pushed the door wide open.

“Catherine,” she said, in a tone intended to shame him—she had worked out who he was by now, she had remembered what Amy had said the night before, but still, how dare he just let himself in here? How dare he burst into her bedroom like this, as though it was still his? It was
not
his; it was not his for another couple of days yet, and she was nearly naked, and he was completely out of order, and this was something he needed to realize, this was something for which he needed to make amends—

But James was not paying Catherine, or Catherine’s tone, the slightest bit of attention. James was looking around the room, taking in everything Catherine had done to make it her own: her desk, covered now with books and lecture notes and balled-up clothes; her CDs, stacked high on the windowsill; the wardrobe, decorated now not just with his black-and-white postcards, but with things she had put there: a photocopy of a Patrick Kavanagh poem she had loved from her Writing Ireland course; a photograph of her sister Anna with muck on her T-shirt and a scraggy chain of daisies in her hair; a
Muriel’s Wedding
poster, showing Toni Collette in a shower of colored confetti; the picture from the cover of
Beetlebum,
showing the guy or girl or whichever it was lying passed out on a pile of leaves.

He looked to the peas. “You’re getting your greens, anyway, Caroline,” he said. “That’s good to see.”

“Catherine.”

He glanced at her. “Why, what did I call you?”

“Caroline.”

“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head as though appalled. “Oh, no. That’s not you at all, at all.”

He stepped over towards her, extending a hand. “I’m James. I hope Amy and Lorraine told you I was coming.”

“Oh, yes,” Catherine said, as briskly as though they were in a boardroom. “I’m sorry the place—I mean—I just finished my exams yesterday, you see. I was out—” She stopped, gesturing by way of explanation at the peas. “So.”

He burst out laughing, a high, delighted peal. “Oh, Catherine,” he said, shaking his head again. “What you do with your frozen vegetables is none of my concern.”

“I need to get dressed,” Catherine said, pulling her leg back under the duvet.

“Right you be,” James said, and he strode towards the door. He glanced back at her.

“Tea?” he said, and he was gone.

Tea, Father,
actually; that was what he had said, a perfectly pitched imitation of the mad housekeeper in the sitcom about the three idiot priests. So he was funny, like the girls had said; he was clearly also a bit weird, or lacking normal manners, or something—the way he had just opened her bedroom door like that and let himself in. She took her time about getting dressed, not because she wanted to do it with any degree of care—she could not be bothered to shower just yet, for one thing—but because she wanted to postpone the strangeness, the inevitable awkwardness, of being out there with this guy when nobody else was home. She could have hidden, could have stayed in bed for the rest of the afternoon—what could he do about it?—but she was hungry, and anyway, she was not at all sure that he would not come barging in again, maybe bearing tea, maybe making himself comfortable at the end of her bed, talking her head off for hours. That was another thing Amy and Lorraine had said about him: that he talked. Talked and talked; there was nobody else like him for that, Amy had said, meaning it as a good thing, and Catherine had found herself quite looking forward to meeting him, then, this talkative James. To see what that looked like: a boy who could talk. But now, standing in the mess of her bedroom, buttoning her old flannel shirt and stepping into a pair of shorts she had found at the bottom of her wardrobe, she felt wary. Wary not so much of him, but of herself—how would she handle this? What account would she give of herself? What would he think of her, when she was forced to actually talk to him? But then, it struck her: what did she care? He was a redhead, wearing the wrong kind of Docs and a jumper like something her mother would buy for her father. What did she care what he thought of her? She tied her hair up into a ponytail and headed barefoot down the hall.

“How are you now, Catherine?” he said without looking up, as she came into the kitchen. On the counter, the little transistor radio was going;
Doesn’t make it right,
a woman was singing in a kind of wail. Catherine turned it off. James was sitting at the table, leaning over a newspaper, which had not been there earlier that morning; he must have brought it. He pointed to the teapot, to a plate of toast.

“Help yourself,” he said.

“Thanks.”

He clicked his tongue and she glanced at him in alarm, but it was only something in the newspaper, it seemed. He was reading it intently, his cheek pressed into his knuckles.

She sat. The butter was still visible on the toast, which was something she hated; she preferred it melted in completely. Still, she took a slice, and poured herself a mug of tea, and then she sat there, watching him frown over the paper, wondering if she should go to the sitting room and get something to read herself. But maybe that would be abrupt, or something; probably, he was just finishing that one article, and then he would be ready to talk to her. She ate her toast, and she looked around the kitchen, and then she looked at him. Considered him. His hair was longer than it had been in the photograph, and really quite wild; he looked a bit insane. His freckles went everywhere, even behind his ears; his eyes were a light, cold-looking blue. He wore a silver digital watch, and he bit his nails, she could see—the tips seemed buried in the underskin. This made her shudder, the thought of how tender it was there, and just as she was pushing the thought away, his gaze shot up to meet hers.

“You’re like a cat we have at home,” he said sharply.

“Sorry,” Catherine laughed, pretending confusion. “I was miles away.”

“You were not,” he said. “You were having a good old look.”

She felt herself blush. “I was
not
.”

“Arrah, well,” he said, shrugging. “Look away, Catherine. Sure beggars can’t be choosers.”

She laughed again, but he ignored her, turning back to his paper, and really, she thought now, he was a bit bloody rude. After all, this was her house, at least until Friday, and he was only visiting, and so he should be putting in a bit of an effort, shouldn’t he? And yet it was very clear to Catherine that he was not at all interested in talking to her, not trying at all to think of topics for conversation. Instead, here she was, her mind clacking through possibilities like a panicked secretary, instantly discarding each one: too stupid, too boring, too bland, not something she knew anything about. And there he was, turning the pages of his newspaper. Like he was the only one in the world who could read the fucking
Irish Times
.

“So, Catherine,” he said, and he closed the paper swiftly and folded it over. “Tell me how your year has been.”

“My…year?”

He nodded, leaning back in his chair, looking at her encouragingly. “Have you enjoyed your first year of college?”

Catherine stared at him. How was she supposed to answer a question like that? Was there any need for him to be so blunt? There were other ways in, after all. There was such a thing as small talk.

“You sound like one of my aunts,” she heard herself saying.

He looked taken aback. “Well,” he said, after a moment, and there was a high, presumably joking, primness in his tone, “what’s wrong with that? I’m sure your aunts are very respectable women.”

“You haven’t met them,” she said, nonsensically. What was wrong with her? What was she even saying to him?

“All in good time, Catherine,” James smirked, and he rapped on the table. “So. College. Tell me. What are your subjects?”

“English and art history.”

He looked at her more closely. “Really?”

“Yeah. I know you’re—”

“So you know your art.”

“Not really,” Catherine said, which was an understatement; art history might as well have been theoretical physics for all the headway she felt she had managed to make with it this year, and English even more so. It had been a tough year, a year in which most of what she had had to study, and the ways in which she had been expected to study it, had come as a shock. The exams this past fortnight had frightened the life out of her. Probably, she had passed them, but in some cases this would not be by very much; she had written a mortifyingly bad answer to the
Pride and Prejudice
question on her Literature and Sexualities paper, three pages of waffle, mainly about the fact that Darcy had not seemed bothered by Elizabeth’s tan. All through school, Catherine had pulled in As and Bs without much effort, but the weeks before these exams had made her realize that she knew hardly anything about, well, knowledge, at all. In school, she had been able to learn reams of stuff off by heart, and to throw it down on paper when necessary, but in college, that was not how the business of learning worked: in college, they expected you to use your mind. Did she even
have
a mind? she had found herself wondering, this year, on more than one occasion. It was so disheartening. To discover that, actually, what you’d had all this time, been praised for all this time—what had got you off the hook all this time—was not, after all, intelligence, but a shallow robotic skill.

“I mean, yeah, I’ve enjoyed it,” she said now with a shrug. “Not the fucking exams, though.”

“My God, Catherine,” he said, feigning shock. “I hope you don’t talk like that to your aunts.”

She laughed. There was a pleasure in hearing him use her name; it was so direct. It was somehow a higher level of attention than she usually got from people; almost cheekily personal. Intimate, that was what it was. And yet pulled clear of intimacy, at the last second, by the reins of irony which seemed to control everything he said, by his constant closeness to mockery. She found herself wanting more of it, and she found, too, that it held a challenge: to edge him away from that mockery towards something warmer. To make him see that he was wrong in whatever decision he had made about her, about her silliness, about her childishness, about whatever it was he had, by now, set down for her in his mind.

He yawned. “Jesus, I’m knackered,” he said, hanging his head.

“Did you have a long flight?”

He looked at her. “Flight?” he almost spat.

“When you came—”

“I didn’t fucking
fly
. I’ve just spent three days in the cab of a lorry.”

“Three
days?
”

“The driver had to go all over Europe making deliveries.”

“Oh.”

“Holland. Every back road in Belgium. Sleeping in the cab at bloody rest stops. The snores off the fucker. France. And then pegged out on O’Connell Bridge half an hour ago like a Bosnian refugee.”

“Oh.”

“I fucking
wish
I’d had the price of a flight. A friend of my old fella arranged the lift for me. That’s how I got over there in the first place, and it’s how I’ll be going back. It’s free.”

“Oh, well,” Catherine said. “I’ve actually never been on a plane.”

He looked at her. “I can well believe it,” he said.

She felt a blush sting her cheeks.
Fuck off,
she wanted to say, but she had only just met him; she could hardly say that, could she? Or,
How many planes have
you
been on?,
but that would just let him know how much he had bothered her. She sat there, stewing in her own silence. After a moment, he looked at her and sighed.

“Ah, don’t mind me, Catherine. I’m sorry. I’m just grumpy from the journey. It was a nightmare.”

“It must have been awful,” she said, carefully.

“It
was
awful. You’d want to have heard your man, the driver. Blacks, blacks, blacks. Faggots, faggots, faggots. Women. The tits on that. Oh, he says to me, I had a great little Italian whore where you’re sitting, right there, the lovely little arse on her. And you know, I was sure she’d give me something, you know, crabs or an ol’ itch or something, but no, she was clean as a whistle. Great little girl.”