Tender Read online

  “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.

  Catherine looked up to meet it; her mother, folding a tea towel with great precision, looked away again. On the radio, a Shannonside presenter said something about the button accordion. Fuck the button accordion, Catherine thought.

  “Are you seeing any of your friends from college over the summer?” her mother said.

  “Doubt it,” Catherine shrugged. “Most of them are gone traveling to Germany and America and stuff.” This was not true, but it made some point that Catherine had suddenly found herself wanting very badly to make: that her friends had actual lives. That people her age were out there, doing things for themselves, living independently and freely. This was not actually true, for the most part, since most of her friends from college were also spending the summer working in the towns closest to where they had grown up, and were back living with their parents, but this detail, Catherine had decided, was completely irrelevant. They could have been traveling; that was the point. If they had wanted to travel—this was the point—they would have been able to. Allowed to. Zoe, that girl from Catherine’s art history tutorial, was in Italy, for instance—Zoe was the kind of person who would think nothing of heading off to Italy by herself for the whole summer. And Conor had made noises about bar work in Chicago, though he had not actually gone in the end due to lack of funds, but he had intended to. And James: James had been in Germany for the entire year! Her mother needed to know that Catherine had friends like this. Except that she did not need to know—it would not be helpful or useful for her to know—the actual details, at least not about Conor and James, because that would lead to too many questions—which was precisely, Catherine remembered, what was about to happen now. She sighed heavily.

  “What’s wrong with you?” her mother said, her suspicions raised.

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m just trying to make simple conversation, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m not stopping you.”

  Her mother took a deep breath. “I was just wondering,” she said slowly, clearly having to work to stop the words coming out sharply, “whether you have any other friend? Anyone in particular?”

  “Other friend?” Catherine said mockingly. She could not stop herself. When she was home, when she was talking to her mother, she turned into a fifteen-year-old again. It was ridiculous; she needed to snap out of it. She cleared her throat. “What do you mean, any other friend?” she said, more evenly.

  Her mother shrugged. She had on the striped navy and white top that Catherine loved on her, its vivid white, its dark navy bands; the sleeves were pushed up on her arms, which were already growing brown—Catherine wished she had inherited her mother’s olive complexion rather than her father’s gene for sunburn. On her mother’s wrist was the Swatch watch that Catherine and the others had given her for her last birthday, her forty-fifth, the strap splayed with colors, the tiny mirrored face glinting, now, as she turned the tea towel again in her hands, laid it down on the table to be folded the other way. Forty-five; her mother was forty-five. It seemed impossible, but it was nothing beside the thought that in another handful of years, she would be fifty. Fifty. Her mother, slim and tanned and brown-haired; her mother who wore jeans and runners, who had recently bought a new pair of sunglasses to wear in the car. How could she be nearly fifty? And as for Catherine’s father, that was completely outrageous—he was ten years older, and sixty was not even an age Catherine was willing to countenance for one of her parents. Sixty was, was it not, the point after which nobody much remarked if something happened to you? If, one morning or one evening, you simply slipped away? What the hell was she supposed to do if that happened to one of her parents? It panicked her, the thought of it; it kept her awake at night, staring at the wall. She had told James about this, of course, but James had come nowhere close to understanding; James had thought she was mad. Or, actually, it was not madness of which he had accused her, but something else—something she had forgotten now, a word she had not heard before—dependent somehow, dependent on them in the same way they were dependent on her—anyway, he had given her a right lecture over the phone that evening. He did not even know exactly how old his own parents were, he had said; sixties, maybe? Late fifties? Catherine had been astonished. For his parents to be that old, and for him not to be riddled with the anxiety of their mortality, with the knowledge that the clock was counting down on the very fact of them—how could he go around like that? How could he have felt relaxed enough, for instance, to have gone off to Berlin? Oh, for fuck’s sake, Catherine, James had spluttered, and then Catherine had changed the subject. They were so alike, the two of them, so alike in every way—and yet, there were moments when she saw the ways in which they were so different. And she did not like those moments. She found herself moving quickly to chase those moments away.

  “Well,” her mother said now, more pointedly; Catherine had not given her any answer to her question. “Well? Is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anyone you—”

  “No,” Catherine said, pushing back from the table.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Catherine said. “And I think that tea towel’s folded now.”

  “Don’t be so bloody smart!”

  “I’m not being smart.”

  “I’m only trying to have a simple conversation with you!”

  “About Pat fucking Burke,” Catherine spat.

  “Catherine!” Her mother glanced, horrified, towards the open back door. “Watch what you’re saying!”

  “Well?
That’s it, isn’t it?” Catherine said, crossing to the sink angrily. “He saw me with my friend up at the train station, and he told Daddy, and now I’m in trouble, and I didn’t even do anything.” Forget fifteen: she sounded ten, now, and she was dismayed at how easily this had happened, at how automatically her voice had become this babyish whine; but in the next moment, she had decided that she was perfectly entitled to whine, and that she might as well go the whole hog, and she banged down her bowl. “It’s not fair,” she said, folding her arms.

  “Stop that, Catherine,” her mother said warningly. She put one hand on the table and the other on the counter, blocking Catherine’s way to the door. “I just want to talk to you.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Catherine said, and she tried for a contemptuous laugh which would make clear her feelings about all of this, but as soon as she started it she realized that it would come out as a sob, so she swallowed it back down. “Pat Burke is nothing but a creep. Everyone hates him, and yet you all still listen to him.”

  Her mother raised an eyebrow, as though to say she could not argue with this, but nor could she openly agree. “He says he saw you with your boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Well, you were seen holding hands with him, whatever he is.”

  “We were listening to my Walkman, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Well, if you’re going to be so public about it, you can’t be surprised when somebody sees you.”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God. We weren’t doing anything! He’s a friend! He’s an old friend of Amy and Lorraine’s, and he was going in the direction of the train station anyway, and I wanted to tell him about this song—this song I like—”

  She stopped. She could hear how unconvincing it sounded. And, also, she was reeling a little, in shock a little, that already she had pushed an untruth into the story; James had not, after all, been going in the direction of the train station anyway. He had gone there especially for her. To sit with her. To hug her goodbye. To wave her off from the platform, with his arms going madly, not giving a shit who was seeing him or laughing at him, doing it with such glee and enthusiasm that Catherine had cringed. But she could not tell her mother this; she could not tell her mother any of it. Her mother would not understand. Her mother, like her father, had surely never known this kind of friendship, the kind of friendship in which you did not want to waste a single minute, in which every minute was a chance to talk about something more—