Tender (18 page)

“Come on, Poetess,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere we can get a pint that’s not made up from the dregs. Are you barred from the Stag’s?”

E
mmet, out of his usual environment—not, of course, that the Stag’s was out of his usual environment, but it was not, at least, on campus—was different. Not radically different; he still called Catherine “Poetess,” and when he was not calling her that he was goading her about being a culchie, and before they’d even been served their pints he had made several statements about people which, in print, would almost certainly have constituted libel, but he was different. He was more hesitant, somehow; that was how Catherine would have put it, if she had been asked to—and she realized that, automatically, in her mind, she was shaping this thought about the difference in him as she might have written it in a letter to James. She could tell James about it in person later, naturally—she would have to tell him, since she would need to explain to him where she had suddenly disappeared to—but that was not the same. She preferred the idea of putting it in a letter, the story of how Emmet had come up to her in the Buttery (she would, of course, leave out the part about James sitting, laughing, at a nearby table), and about how she had walked with him, keeping up a wry, sarcastic banter, across Front Square and up Dame Street and down the little tiled alleyway that led to the Stag’s Head, and about how they had found a table in the snug, where there were hardly ever any free tables, and about how the decrepit taxidermied fox had looked down on them, and how Emmet had gone to the bar and come back with two pints.

It was a kind of holding back, she thought, this new hesitancy; a kind of pause. He was not actually holding back—he was not sitting there, tongue-tied, or boring, or having decided that he did not want to talk to her after all—but there was something; she could not put her finger on it. It was as though, even as they spoke, he was not fully listening to her, or talking to her, but watching her—watching her in the way you might watch someone if they were talking to someone else, if they were part of a conversation on the other side of the table from you, safe to look at, safe for you to think your thoughts about, without them having to know.

He smiled more often, too; that was something else about him. And not the manic grin of The Doyle as he marched around campus, trailing trouble, but a smile she did not remember seeing him smile before. What did he need with that grin, she found herself wondering, when he had a smile like this? It was almost sweet. It was almost shy. Although you could not say that of Emmet Doyle, really, no matter how nicely he smiled after a few mouthfuls of Guinness, no matter how his blush might sometimes betray him.

“So,” he was saying, and now the smile had disappeared again and the grin was back in its place. “I read the rest of your interview with the guy from Monaghan. It was actually pretty good.”

“Thanks,” Catherine said, surprised.

“He sounds like fun.”

“Yeah. He’s gas.”

“Gas,”
he repeated, in an exaggerated rural accent. “Did he mind that you hadn’t read the book?”

She glanced at him. “What?”

“You were
obviously
winging it! The poor guy clearly didn’t know where to look.”

“Listen, Doyle,” Catherine said, pointing a finger at him. “Unlike you, I don’t actually just make stuff up.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s your first mistake,” and, lifting his pint, he made as though he was going to toast her, but switched instead, just as her glass was approaching his, to the fox.

“So,” he said, after they had gone through what publications office gossip they could muster, Emmet recreating in vivid detail the 5 a.m. panic attack of Derek Galvin, the
TN
editor, as the entire sports section had deleted itself before his eyes, “did your mate have your dinner ready for you when you got home last night?”

“Well, there was toast,” Catherine said, which was a lie—James had made shepherd’s pie for everyone the night before—and one she had not intended to tell, but it had just come out for some reason, perhaps because it had seemed funnier, because it would make Emmet laugh, the way he was laughing now, his face lit up with pleasure, his eyes bright.

“He must have had an amazing time in Berlin, did he?” he said after a moment. “Your mate.”

“James.”

“James,” he said, with a mock-formal nod. “What was he doing over there?”

“He’s an artist,” Catherine said, hearing how her voice had thickened with the importance of the phrase; she cleared her throat. “He was working for a really famous photographer over there. Malachy Clark.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of him, and I’m a very well-known patron of the arts, so he can’t be that famous.”

“Do you ever talk seriously about anything?” Catherine said, frowning at him over her glass. She had meant it as another joke, but as soon as she had said it she realized that he would probably not take it that way, and she saw already the blush on his face, a bloom and blotch of crimson at the tops of his cheeks, and she felt bad.

“Sorry,” she started to say, but he cut across her.

“Sorry, you’re right. Well, did James have a good time over there? It must have been an amazing year for him, was it?”

“Well,” she said, swallowing. “I mean, I think it was all right.”

“Only
all right?
I’d fucking love to spend a year in Berlin. How could it be only all right?”

She shook her head, feeling a rush of annoyance with herself; how had she walked right into this? “It’s complicated,” she said, waving the question off. “I don’t really want to talk about it. I mean, James is gay, for one thing.”

Guilt flooded her instantly; she had done it again, and silently she started to berate herself, but her attention was distracted by Emmet’s wide-eyed, enthusiastic nodding.

“Oh,” he was saying. “OK. OK. So your friend’s gay. That’s—great. That’s cool! That’s really great, Reilly. That’s cool.”

“He’s going to be gay whether you think it’s great or not, Doyle.”

He looked uncertain. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you don’t have to give him your approval.”

The same uncertainty lingered on his face then, but in the next instant it had vanished, replaced by his grin. “He doesn’t have my approval, the deviant,” he said, archly. “Running around hugging innocent culchies and taking photographs of, what, probably naked men, is it?”

“Very funny.”

“Not one bit funny, Reilly. Does your mother know you’re gadding about with homosexual men?”

She grimaced. “Well you may ask,” she said, finishing her pint.

She got another round in, and then, maybe because Emmet had mentioned her mother, they were talking about their families. He told her about his older brother, a fourth year studying Medicine, who was not much impressed, it seemed, with
Muck
or with Emmet’s reputation on campus; Emmet said that he had just that past weekend received a lecture from him on the need to mend his ways.

“So he wasn’t at the party?”

Emmet scoffed. “Saturday night. He was probably playing bridge.”

“Do you see much of him?”

Emmet shook his head. “What’s your family like?”

“Mine?” she said, surprised. “They’re fine. I mean, they’re down in Longford.”

“Do you go down much to see them?”

“The odd time. Not as much as last year.”

He clicked his tongue. “The life of the degenerate Poetess up in Dublin.”

“Any chance you might stop calling me that?”

“I’ll consider it,” he said lightly. “You have a little sister, don’t you? You told me.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah,” he grinned. “One day last year up in publications. You said she was a right little rascal.”

“Anna. Yeah. She’s seven.”

“I wish I had a brother or sister that age,” he said. “I’d say she’s some craic to go home to, is she?”

“She’s hilarious. She’d give you a run for your money in the mimicry stakes, I can tell you. You should hear her doing our mother.”

He laughed in what seemed like genuine amusement. “So when are you going to see her again?”

“Soon. I’m due a visit. Though they’re in the process of knocking down my bedroom at home to put up a new extension, so it might not be the best time.”

“They’re knocking down your bedroom?” He looked at her as though waiting for a punch line. “Jesus. They must be
really
pissed off with your degenerate lifestyle.”

“Something like that,” she said. And then her name was called from the doorway, and Emmet’s name, and when she looked up, Zoe and James were coming towards their table, waving, grinning, looking very plastered, and very pleased with themselves for having found her, and very much in the mood for more booze.

But on the walk home two hours later, James was quiet. He did not take Catherine’s arm; he did not talk about the night and how it had gone; he did not ask her any questions about her drinks with Emmet; he just looked at the ground, as though he was walking home alone, and he kept walking. Catherine attempted to make light conversation, but most of his answers were monosyllables, and by the time they were past the Green, she had pretty much given up and lapsed into silence herself.

It was when they got back to Baggot Street, into the light of the hallway, that she saw how pale he looked, and how hard-eyed with what looked like exhaustion, and she felt almost frightened, looking at him; she wanted just to go to her bedroom, and leave him to his bed in the sitting room, and close the door. But she could not do that, it turned out, because it was one of the nights when Lorraine’s boyfriend Cillian was staying over, and because Lorraine and Amy shared a bedroom, the only way for Lorraine and Cillian to have sex was for them to drag Lorraine’s mattress into the sitting room and spend the night there; James’s sleeping things had been left in a heap outside the door, and on the kitchen table Lorraine had left a note reading
Sorry, J! Kip in with C?

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” James muttered, sounding furious.

“Well, of course you can sleep on my floor,” Catherine said, filling a glass of water. “It’ll be fine.”

“For fuck’s sake,” he said again, his fingers to his temples. “Dumping my bedclothes outside the door. This is my fault. This is my own stupid fault. I should have a place of my own.”

She spluttered her disagreement. “You’ve only been home a couple of days! It’s no big deal. Come on. Let’s go to bed.”

But he sat down heavily at the table, snatching up one of the girls’ packets of Marlboro, and lit himself a cigarette with a grim, heavy sigh. “I’m sick of this,” he said, looking out the window to the night’s darkness. “I’m sick of this shite already.”

Maybe if she had not been so tired herself; maybe if she had not been drunk—not as drunk as he was, but drunk anyway, four or five pints along—Catherine would just have let him sit there, moaning like that; she would have known that it was only the booze talking, and the tiredness, and whatever else was eating at him—things that she had not, after all, really tried to talk to him about yet, things that any real friend would probably by now have encouraged him to talk about: Berlin, whatever had happened there or had not, all the darkness of his letters, all the sadnesses that he had hinted at, that he had run from, surely, coming back here—and that the best thing to do would be to leave it all until the morning. To leave her bedroom door open for him, so that he could come in and settle himself down on her floor after he had finished his cigarette; to put a hand on his shoulder, maybe, and say,
It’s OK, it’ll be OK,
and then kiss him on the top of the head and say that she would see him in a few minutes. Maybe, if she had not still been angry with herself over the scene that had taken place in the bookshop that afternoon, or angry with him for the way he had, in the Buttery, become everyone’s best friend, or angry with Conor for what he had said about him, or angry with James—again—for his silence and brooding on the walk home; maybe, if she had been a version of herself who was free of all that anger, of all that residue of a day that seemed to have so many parts to it that it could not, surely, have been only one day, she would have been able to do the sensible thing.

But she was not that version of herself. The bile rose in her; the anger sparked again to her fingertips. “Oh, would you
ever
stop fucking whining,” she said, and she lifted the glass of water she had just filled, and she tossed its contents into the sink. “Would you ever?”

James stared at her. “Sorry, Catherine?” he said, sounding incredulous, which just made Catherine angrier; she shook her head with an incredulity of her own.

“Why do you have to be so negative about everything?” she said. “Moaning about your bedclothes, as though it’s part of this big fucking conspiracy the whole world has against you.”

“My bedclothes,” James said, slowly and carefully, as he stood up from the table. “Oh, Catherine. This is not about my bedclothes.”

Her heart was racing; they were too drunk for this, she knew. But neither could she stop herself.

“This is not about my bedclothes, Catherine,” James said again, coming towards her. “This is about what happened in the pub tonight, isn’t it? You were having your nice cozy date with Little Emmet—”

“Little Emmet?” Catherine cut in. “The guy must be six foot tall!”

James smirked. “Is he now? Is he now? Well. Lucky you.”

“Oh my God, you’re being ridiculous. Are you actually—”

“Am I actually
what,
Catherine? Am I actually
what?
”

“I don’t give a fuck about Emmet Doyle!” she shouted, and she flung out her arms as though to illustrate how true this was. “You can have Emmet Doyle if you want him. You certainly fucking behaved like that tonight in the Stag’s.
Oh, tell me more about yourself, Emmet,
” she imitated him, tilting her head, widening her eyes. “
Tell me more about your theory of satire.
For Christ’s sake. Have him! Go on!”

He stared at her. He was somehow even paler than he had already been. He had been standing close to her, but now he stepped back—now he stepped back so that he was leaning against the kitchen counter, not, Catherine knew, because he needed the support of it, but because it was the only thing that was stopping him from backing away from her any farther. His mouth was a thin line. The cigarette was hanging out of his right hand, and its column of ash was growing longer and longer.