Tender (32 page)

T
he summer job was horoscopes, it turned out. A woman setting up a new website, a subscription service that would email users their daily, custom-made horoscope, which meant that by the site launch in September, there needed to be five thousand freshly written horoscopes banked and ready to go. They would not be
entirely
fabricated, the woman explained at Catherine’s interview, flicking her bleach-blond hair back over her shoulder; the writers would use a code book to generate “atmospheric and thematic guidelines,” based on the given combination of symbol and star sign and shape and shade churned out, for every individual horoscope, by the database her team had designed.

“Right,” Catherine said doubtfully. “I—”

“I’m offering a pound per horoscope,” the woman cut in.

“Yes, exactly that sort of thing,” the woman said, and hired her.

(James, laughing so hard when she told him that he started, actually, to get on her nerves. That she snapped at him to stop.)

(He did not stop.)

“Ouch!”
he said, after she had pinched him.

Shock on his face. Disbelief on it.

And could she be more terrible than this, this person who felt only proud, in this moment, of having been able to get right at him in this way?

And more: the next time he talked of a boy he wanted to be with, Catherine did not look at the ceiling.

The next time, Catherine did not just lie there, and lie still.

Cillian, Lorraine’s Cillian, he talked of, and Catherine snatched the cigarette from his hand. She held it a moment, his eyes looking at her in confusion; then she pointed it, the glint-gray head of it only a fraction away from his white, naked skin. He jerked back from her, astonished, but she followed; she stared.

“Catherine,” he said, his voice just a breath.

She held his gaze for another second, and then she bent and stubbed the cigarette out on his bedroom floor. Into the carpet, its dirty threads; let the little smother of it leave a brand mark, round and black and hard.

“Catherine,” he said, clambering across her, incredulous. “My landlady! Are you—”

“Your landlady would probably approve,” she said, and she turned to the wall.

And,
Catherine,
he said, the next night, and she knew what was coming, she knew it was another attempt to call a halt, but she pushed the words away with her hands. She pushed the words away with her mouth.

And his eyes stayed closed, as they always did.

But she could manage without his eyes.

There were quotes from “Luke,” a student union insider who had been shocked by the sight of two men sitting with their knees almost touching in the library, and from “Mary,” a first-year Irish and History student who was suffering the crippling social repercussions of having been spotted by an old schoolmate standing at the LGB Society stand during Freshers’ Week, lured there by the promise of free rainbow-colored M&Ms. To illustrate “the profound damage inflicted on normal campus relations between the sexes,” there was a quote from an unnamed senior lecturer, who reported that it was now almost impossible to extort blow jobs from female colleagues and students by threatening to expose them as lesbians; there was simply not the same level of fear, he said. More than one student had quite cheerfully told him that she actually
was
a lesbian. A senior
TN
source, meanwhile, revealed that he had been deprived of the location in which he had always sold pills when LGBSoc had been granted larger rooms at the start of this college year. And a college counselor complained that she was experiencing a severe downturn in gay and lesbian students who wanted to kill themselves. It was just not on, Emmet wrote in his concluding paragraph. Freedom was one thing, but this was getting out of hand. He was calling on the Provost to institute a college-wide Straight Week as a matter of urgency. Awareness needed to be raised. Order needed to be restored.

James loved it.

James read it over and over, and the first time he almost cried with laughter, and the second time he laughed more quietly, and the third time and the fourth time and the fifth time, he did not laugh at all.

“It’s really good,” he said to Catherine, nodding over it again. “It’s really very, very good. It’s clever, I mean. This line about what’s normal…”

He read her the line.

“Yeah, yeah, I saw it,” Catherine said.

“It’s brilliant.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, no. I have to say I didn’t think he had it in him, young Robert Emmet.”

Catherine said nothing.

He glanced up. “Did anything ever happen between you two, in the end?”

She slammed the door.

She was tempted to write it on the wall of the publications office, what she thought of Emmet’s column. She was tempted to leave it there, in huge black letters.

But she said it to his face instead.

Strain in it. Hurt in it, as he tried to keep grinning his grin.

But his grin would not stay with him.

And that was the first time she had seen that, she realized: Emmet’s face, without any kind of smile.

Something in his eyes that made her heart want to give in to something huge.

But, what, was she supposed to account for other people’s feelings now as well?

James was going home for the weekend, he announced. His parents had known for a while now that he was back in Dublin, and he could not put it off any longer, the visit. It would be fine, he said. It would be fine. It would be his mother pretending nothing had happened, and his father not knowing that anything had happened, anyway, and he would try to take a few photographs around the place, maybe—because he really needed, by now, to start preparing properly for Lisa’s show—and he would have a couple of pints with his brother, and he would be back on Monday or Tuesday, and he would see her then.

And she should go to the ball, he said. He knew she still had her ticket. She should go to Jenny Vander’s and buy that dress.

“With
what?
”

“You have the mouth,” he said, laughing.

“Oh,
fuck
off.”

But no, no, she should go to the ball, he said, and she should have a good time, and she should do whatever a good time entailed.

And he would see her Monday. Or Tuesday. And he would call her at some stage. Of course, of course he would call her. Sure he would have plenty to tell her. He would have plenty to report.

He took the morning train.

By evening:

The train now boarding on Platform Four is the 19:45 service to Sligo. Calling at Maynooth, Enfield, Mullingar, Mostrim, Longford, Dromod—

Carrick-on-Shannon station, a quarter past ten. Around about now, the others would be walking through Front Gate into the square and the cobblestones lit up in all the pinks and blues.

Fifty pence in her pocket for the pay phone. James’s mother answered; surprise and then delight in her voice as she called out to him.

Jem! Jem! You’ll never guess who’s here!

“Oh, he’ll be thrilled,” she said, coming back to the mouthpiece, to Catherine. “Oh, he’ll be only thrilled.”

(Her accent making Catherine think, for a second, of Liam.)

Because how could she have got through a whole weekend?

(James’s face, as he beckoned her from the car twenty minutes later, was something, but it was not thrilled.)

(But no matter. No matter. She would bring him right around.)

(And he looked beautiful even when he was angry. He looked beautiful even when he was grim.)

No, his day had not been a good one, he said as he drove back to Carrigfinn. No, it had not. His mother, interrogating him all day, that was why. About what? Well, about everything, really. But mostly, since Catherine had asked, about Catherine.

About Catherine and him.

(If Catherine had been in the driving seat she would, at that moment, have run the car off the road.)

“About
me?
”

(No response.)

“But why? You mean, about why I came here tonight?”

(No, no. These questions had come long before James and his mother had known of Catherine’s arrival. Catherine’s arrival had only consolidated, for James’s mother, all the grand ideas in her mind.)

“I don’t…”

(She did not
what?
)

Him, banging on the steering wheel.

Her, making herself sound small and vulnerable and frightened, so that he would not continue to talk to her in this way.

Because, it turned out, his mother had been praying for Catherine. Yes,
praying
for her. Praying for her, or for someone like her; it was not personal—it did not need to be her. No offense.

(A tone which said,
Take as much offense as you like.
)

Yes, his mother had been praying for this. Praying for James to find himself a girl, a girl who would shake himself out of himself; who would bring him out of the terrible, hopeless place into which he had wandered. And his mother, because she had met Catherine the previous summer—no, no interruptions, really, this was worth hearing all the way through—his mother had had high hopes for Catherine, and his mother had made Catherine the forerunner. The
forerunner
. For what, did Catherine
think?
For everything that mattered. For the only things that mattered, obviously. For what was normal.

(That word spat, like a seed, onto the dash of the car.)

And so all day, James had faced questions about Catherine: about whether he had come back to Ireland because of Catherine, and about whether it was because of Catherine that he had not come home until now, and about whether he saw Catherine often in Dublin, and about whether he enjoyed her company, and about whether he had
thoughts
about her, or
desires
for her—yes,
desires
. Yes,
desires;
yes, she had used that fucking word. The sound of it, in his mother’s mouth. And, worse again, asking him if he wanted, in any part of himself, to
lie with
Catherine, and had he ever lain with her, and he would not lie to his mother about this now, would he? Would he? He would not lie to his mother, if there was any chance, if there was any way, because she had prayed so hard, she had prayed so constantly—

Because I’m your mother, Jem, and I’m the one knows what’s true of you, deep, deep down.

And Catherine hated herself, in that moment. For wanting to ask what she wanted to ask. For needing to. She tried to stop herself; she tried to bite it back, beat it back, this swelling in her: this awful, unforgivable surging of hope.

But she could not. She could not harangue herself out of hoping.

And so she looked at him. Her heart a frantic drum.

“And?” she said, her voice tripping, slipping on the word. “And? What did you say?”

(Hoping
what,
exactly? Hoping that his reply would have opened the way to something different? Hoping it would show that his eyes had been opened, somehow, to something
new?
)

She was an idiot. She was a child. His long silence, before speaking, told her everything she was.

His top lip curling.

“I said, ‘Mother, we’re not discussing this again.’ What do you think I was going to say to her? I said, ‘We’ve discussed this before, Mother, and nothing has changed; nothing has changed about me, and nothing is
going
to change.’”

Catherine, nodding, agreeing, with all of her might.

And James saying that he was leaving again in the morning. That he did not even know why he had come home at all.

“I’ll go with you,” Catherine said eagerly. Wanting to show her support. Wanting to show—

His laugh, high and angry.

“Oh, you don’t fucking
say
.”

Twenty-five pages of it, and writing it exhausted her. Almost twenty hours in the computer labs at the back of campus; she finished it with only minutes to go to the deadline.

Afterwards, all she wanted to do was find him. Was fuck him. Was sleep with him, sleep tucked and hidden in his arms.

His arms around her. His arms, making her feel she was home.

But no.

No more.

Songs that had the exact shape of your heartbreak: they were the songs you had to cross the room to turn off.

Because he was suddenly nowhere she could find him. Not in the darkroom when she expected him to be in the darkroom. Not in O’Brien’s when she expected him to be on a shift there. Not in Thomas Street: she called the number, she knocked on the door, but no, his landlady said, she had not seen him this morning / this afternoon / this evening, she had no idea when he would be home—

And the ball had been absolutely
brilliant,
Zoe said.

And Liam’s drinks party, before the ball, had been very interesting indeed.