Tender Read online

  “Look, Catherine,” her mother said, shaking her head. “We don’t expect you not to have boyfriends. You’re old enough for that now. You don’t have to tell me lies.”

  “Oh, thanks very much,” Catherine said, the words tart with bitterness. “That’s very good of you.”

  “I told you not to be so bloody smart!”

  “I’m not being smart,” Catherine said, and she slammed her hands down on the edge of the sink. There had to be a better way to do this, she thought; there had to be a better way to argue and protest and stand up for yourself. A dignified way; a grown-up way. She would ask James about it the next time she talked to him, she decided; James would know. James would know how to keep your voice level in a situation like this, and how to sound confident, and how to come out the winner with just a few carefully chosen words.

  “I hate that old prick!” she shouted suddenly across the kitchen, and then she burst into ragged, jerky sobs. Her mother rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Catherine. Get a hold of yourself. You’re eighteen years old.”

  “I know I’m eighteen!” Catherine wailed. “That’s my whole point! James is my friend! He’s a friend of the girls, and he was in Germany all year, and he’s back now, I mean just for the summer, and we were listening to music, and I was just saying hello to him at the train station, and I’m sick of not being able to do what I want!”

  “Catherine,” her mother said, and she actually laughed. “Stop being so ridiculous. Of course you can”—she made a face—“listen to music with whoever the hell you want. Or say hello to them, or whatever it is that you call it now. Daddy was just upset that he had to hear about it from Pat Burke. That Pat Burke was able to tell him something he didn’t already know. And something I didn’t know.”

  “Oh my God,” Catherine said, putting her hands to her head. “Oh my God. I can’t take this. I can’t—”

  “Well,” her mother said, laying the tea towel flat on the table and smoothing it as though it was a map she was intending to read. “You’re getting very bloody worked up about something you claim to be nothing at all.”

  James was not her boyfriend. No one was her boyfriend. There had been no boyfriend while she was at school, and there had been no boyfriend during the long summer after her Leaving Cert, and there had been no boyfriend during the first year of college, and there was no boyfriend now. How could there be, when she was back living at home? Which was not an acceptable excuse, according to Catherine’s sister Ellen, who was sixteen, and who therefore lived at home all of the time, and who did not let this stop her from having boyfriends, and as many boyfriends as she felt like. It was not that their parents were any less strict with Ellen than they had been with Catherine; it was just that Ellen ignored their strictness, or rather worked around it, with the skill of someone dismantling a bomb. Especially now that she was going into her Leaving Cert year, she explained to Catherine, there were simply certain experiences she refused to go without. So, if she wanted to go to the pub where the people her age drank, she made up a story about maths grinds at a friend’s house, and when their father collected her four or five hours later, she was ready and waiting, chewing gum to hide the bang of cider and equipped with a perfect explanation for why her clothes smelled of smoke. She was never asked for the explanation. Their father, Ellen told Catherine, needed so much to believe that she would not do such a thing, would not go boozing and smoking and shifting fellas in an alleyway in town, that he simply went on doing that: he believed. Their mother knew; their mother, Ellen said, had come into the bedroom and ranted at her on more than one occasion, but Ellen had gone on denying everything, and doing everything, and she suspected, deep down, that their mother respected her for that.

  “If she saw Shane Keegan, she’d want me to go with him,” she’d said, setting out her case to Catherine earlier that year. “He’s a complete ride. You couldn’t pass up a chance like that.”

  “Yeah, right,” Catherine had scoffed. “If they found out you were shifting one of the Keegans, they’d ground you until you were twenty-five.”

  “They could try,” Ellen had said, bouncing a tennis ball off the bedroom wall. “Anyway, one of us has to be shifting fellas. It’s a complete waste of time you being up at college if you’re not even going to get together with anyone. I would have got together with that Conor fella ages ago if I was you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Yeah, I would. He sounds like good craic.”

  “Yeah, well,” Catherine said weakly. “It’s not that simple once you get to college.”

  “Course it is,” Ellen said, the ball slapping against her hand. “You just don’t know how to do it.”

  You’re not even ugly: that was something else that Ellen had said about Catherine’s ongoing celibacy. Or, not celibacy—when she was out, she often shifted guys, or acquiesced to their requests to shift her; she took their tongues into her mouth and let their hands roam over the cheeks of her arse—but whatever it was. Singlehood. Gomhood, Ellen had called it when Catherine had described it that way. Catherine was tall, Ellen pointed out, and she had some nice clothes, and long hair, and her skin was all right, and so what? What was stopping her? All she had to do, Ellen explained, was to go to the cinema with someone, or to the pub, and shift him, and talk to him, and then, once she got tired of him, she could break up with him. It was just what you did. Unless you were ugly, that was.

  Not even ugly: for Catherine, in a strange way, this was enough. In college this past year, it had become clearer to her that boys found her attractive; boys looked at her, they flirted with her, they told her where the parties were going to be. And living with Amy and Lorraine had meant that she had met lots of boys, too. The whole business with Conor they disapproved of; Conor, who was in one of Catherine’s English tutorials and over whom she had been stupidly mooning all year, and with whom she maintained a friendship which consisted mainly of him slagging her, and of her thinking of suitable retorts half an hour later.

  The problem—although Catherine herself did not see it as a problem—was that she did not want something real. Shifting someone you actually knew; she could not imagine it. How would you look them in the eye the next day? There was just so much—liquid. Slither, that was how she thought of it; slither that had been allowed into the space between you. It was appalling. Undignified. It was way too close a range. And sex: no. Just no. She was not going there; not until she worked it out somehow, how she could do it without dying of shame. Which would involve doing it, obviously, or doing some of it, at least; but this was a glitch in her own logic which Catherine felt perfectly entitled to ignore.

  It was the morning after things had finally come to a head with Conor that Catherine had first met James. She had been drinking in the Pav, which was the bar at the back of campus for the cricket players, but in which everyone drank at the end of exams—or indeed, as in the case that evening of Amy and Lorraine, before exams were over. But Catherine had sat her final paper, a disastrous art history one, and to obliterate the memory of it she had been getting good and plastered, which was hardly the best of ideas when Conor was around. By half past nine, she was slumped in a booth beside him, pulling her oldest trick, the trick she had been pulling unsuccessfully with boys she fancied for years, which was to pretend to fall asleep on the boy’s shoulder, and to hope that he would notice, and react by putting an arm around her and pulling her close.

  Conor did not put an arm around her. Conor moved away from her, so abruptly that she almost smacked her head on the wood of the booth, and Conor began making jokes about Catherine to the other guys at the table, and Conor reached over and nudged Catherine—who was still, mortifyingly, pretending to be asleep, her head hanging, because she could not think what best to do—and told her that she had to get up, now; that she had to go home. And then Conor was calling Amy over, which was the last thing that Catherine wanted, because she knew that Amy would kill her stone dead for being so path
etic, and sure enough, she opened her eyes and there was Amy with a face like thunder, and there, on Catherine’s elbows, was Amy’s strong, angry grip.

  “Take this kid back to Baggot Street, will you, Ames,” Conor said, “or put her on a bus or something.”

  Catherine pouted, another of her old tricks, with an equally low success rate. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “I’m not taking her home,” Amy said. “It’s not even ten o’clock.” She shoved Catherine in front of her, in the direction of the tiny bathroom at the front of the bar. “And my name is not Ames,” she shot back at Conor.

  “Whatever, sweetheart,” Conor replied.

  “Dickhead,” Amy said, as she poked Catherine in the back. “Come on, keep going.”

  “To do what?”

  “To puke, and then to have cold water splashed all over your silly little face by me,” Amy said. “Are you wearing mascara?”

  “I told you, I don’t wear eye makeup.”

  “Well, that’s another thing we’re going to need to discuss,” Amy said, as they reached the bathroom, and she pushed Catherine into a cubicle. “Bend,” she said. “Think of something that disgusts you.”

  “Conor disgusts me.”

  “Shut up about Conor,” Amy said. “Think of vermin or something. Worms.”

  “I don’t have any problem with worms,” Catherine said. “I grew up on a farm, remember?”

  “Shut up about that fucking farm as well,” Amy said. “Nobody cares that you grew up on a farm. Anyone would think you’d crawled to college straight from the famine, the way you go on. Cows and tractors, for Christ’s sake. So what? My dad has a ride-on lawn mower. Do you hear me going on about that? No, you do not. Now, come here.” She pulled Catherine closer, so that their faces were inches apart. “Open your gob.”

  “What for?” Catherine whined.

  “Open your mouth,” Amy said, and when Catherine obeyed, Amy shoved two fingers down her throat, so that it came right up, the lunch from that day, and quite a lot of the cider from that evening.

  “That’s better,” Amy said, her hand on the nape of Catherine’s neck. “Good girl.”

  “I hate Conor,” Catherine said, coughing and rubbing at her mouth. “I hate him.”

  “Then act like it,” Amy said, and she turned the cold tap on. “Now you and I are going to get plastered all over again, and when James gets home from Berlin tomorrow, we are going to spend the whole day getting pissed with him, and you are not going to waste another fucking minute of your glorious state of drunkenness talking to Conor Moran. Or even thinking about him. Now splash.” She pointed to the sink, and then, moving to the toilet, she hitched her skirt up and began to ease her knickers down.

  “Do you need me to leave?” Catherine said, embarrassed.

  “Splash, Catherine, and look lively about it,” Amy said, and she leaned back her head as her loud, easy flow began to come.

  * * *

  In Baggot Street all that year, James had been a photograph, blu-tacked to the mantelpiece mirror; in the photo he was all legs, sprawled out on the carpet in front of the couch, with Amy’s arms around his neck, and his hair a mop of red curls and waves and cowlicks; his expression was one of suffering, but in an ironic, delighted way.

  Also, James was a set of drawings which every night in her sleep Catherine was keeping pressed like so many dried flowers, without even knowing she was doing so for the first couple of months. If it had not been for a film she and the girls had been watching one night close to Christmas, a film about an artist whose drawings, Amy said, were very like those of James, Catherine might never have known what she was sleeping on, but Amy went into Catherine’s bedroom and pulled the large, flat folder out from under the mattress. Lorraine cleared a space on the carpet, moving aside the tea things and the cigarette packets and the Evening Herald that had been there for a fortnight, and Amy laid down the folder and opened it up.

  Nobody was looking directly at him; that was what Catherine first noticed. He drew with charcoal, in strokes which were careful, which seemed to leave nothing to chance, going after detail—the ring on a finger, the rib of a cuff, the hard skin on an elbow—as though it was something threatened, something which had to be caught and preserved. And yet, for all his obedience to detail, it was the expressions—not just the faces, but the moods and preoccupations traveling through those faces, running under their surfaces like hidden streams—which came up out of the pages torn from a sketchbook and which set going in Catherine an anxiety which she could not understand.

  “Nobody knows,” she said then, surprising herself; she had said it before consciously realizing it. “Nobody knows he’s drawing them.”

  Beside her, Amy nodded. “That’s what he does. He catches people unawares.”

  “He’s a little stalker,” Lorraine said. “A little paparazzi fucker.”

  “See this one of Lorraine,” Amy said, and Lorraine gave a protesting wail.

  “I have a double chin!”

  “No, no, it’s you,” Catherine said, taking the drawing. “I mean, you, except with a double chin.”

  “He’s a sneaky little bastard,” Lorraine said, reaching for her cigarettes. “He did not have my permission to do that.”

  Catherine looked at Amy. “Has he done you?”

  She nodded. “Somewhere in there. It was while we were in Irish class last year.”

  “She was staring out the window deciding whether or not to give a hand job to Robbie Fox,” Lorraine said.

  “Shut up, you,” said Amy, laughing. She went through the drawings more quickly now, lifting them up at the right-hand corner, separating them carefully; about fifteen or so in, she stopped. “Here I am,” she said, pulling the page out slowly.

  “It’s lovely,” Catherine said quietly.

  “Lovely for Robbie,” Lorraine snorted.

  “No, really,” Catherine said, above their laughter. She leaned in to look more closely. It was Amy, in a school jumper, with a tie loosely knotted beneath a shirt collar, sitting with her knuckles pressed to her chin. Lorraine had remembered correctly: she was looking out a window. James had drawn the wooden frame, and an outline of the buildings outside, and he had drawn the small hoop in Amy’s right earlobe, and the biro in her hand. As with the other portraits, he had caught something in the eyes, and something about the mouth, which brought on a feeling of—Catherine could only think of it as worry, a kind of unease. Even though this Amy in charcoal, her attention on something outside or on something deep within her mind; even though she looked beautiful, soft-eyed—even for all this, there was something about the portrait that made Catherine feel that it was somehow wrong to be looking at it. Then it struck her: how direct the angle was. James would have needed to have been sitting almost right in front of Amy, only slightly to her right, to capture her like this; he would have needed to have been two desks or so in front of her, and turned fully around.

  “How did you not see him?” she said to Amy, and Amy just shrugged.

  “That’s the thing about the way he does them. He has some way of not letting anyone notice him. I don’t know how he manages.”

  But on the morning James came back to Dublin, Catherine had quite forgotten about him—or rather, Catherine was too preoccupied with other matters to remember that he was coming. The other matters related to the night before, which had ended on Grafton Street not long before dawn, with Conor taking hold of her shoulders and telling her that she was a great chick, a great chick, over and over, while still, so enragingly, failing to actually put his arms around her and hold her, which by that time she had wanted so badly, for so long, that she felt as though she might just vaporize, standing there in front of him, with his useless fingers on her useless skin, or that she might instead just knee him in the balls, which was what she had done, come to think of it—she could hear again Amy’s voice saying, Oh Jesus, Catherine—but not even that successfully, because Conor had stood upright far too quickly afterwards, and
he had been pleased, she could see, and now he was gone home to Wexford for the summer, to work in his uncle’s pub, and it would be October before she would see him again. About this, she felt miserable, but also relieved: there would be no more of his snideness, no more of his mockery, no more of his moods. She could recall asking him, before they left the Pav for the club—she had not stayed away from him after Amy’s lecture in the bathroom, or had managed to do so for only about twenty minutes—for advice on her situation, or indeed non-situation, with her summer job at the Longford Leader: since January, she had been meaning to phone the editor and remind him that he had told her, the summer before, to come back when she was in college. But she had not phoned him, for various reasons.

  “One reason, Citóg,” Conor had said, when she told him. “One reason. Visceral fear.”

  “I’m not afraid of him,” Catherine had said, delighted, as usual, to hear Conor referring to her with the nickname he had given her. It made no sense; it was the Irish word for left-handed people, and she was right-handed. But she loved it, anyway, and she tingled every time he said it. “How could I be afraid of him when I don’t even know him?”

  “Right. Because that’s really stopped you being afraid of people before.”