Her father shook his head at her. “He saw enough.”
Her leg was bleeding again; she rubbed at it with the sole of her foot. Beside her, her mother clicked her tongue. “How did you do that to yourself ? Couldn’t you be more careful?”
“She hasn’t the sense to be careful, Patricia. That’s the point.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Catherine,” her mother said. “I’m getting you a plaster, and you’re getting dressed, and that’s the end of this. It should never have gone this far. You know better than—”
“She doesn’t know anything, Patricia,” her father cut in. “You don’t know how the world works yet,” he said to Catherine. “Sure how would you? It’s only natural. But your mother and I know, and it’s our job to protect you. A young fellow has natural instincts, and if you go and put yourself in the way of them—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, that’s it,” Catherine said. It was not a tone she had ever used before with her father, but it was possible, she now realized, and it was somehow addictive. “For Christ’s sake,” she said again, and she looked at them both as they stared back at her. “James is not interested in me. There’s a very simple reason for that.”
“You might think—” her father began, but Catherine held up a hand.
“James is not interested in me because James is gay.”
There was silence in the room for a moment; for a moment, there seemed not even to be, in the room, any breath. But that could not be, because beside her, her mother was taking a very long breath now, Catherine could see, and letting it out again, like it was something she had to hold on to to keep herself steady on her feet, and at the table, her father had to be breathing too, because her father was shaking his head.
“Oh, Catherine,” her mother said quietly. “Why did you—”
“Now,” her father said, and his tone sounded triumphant. He was speaking to her mother, Catherine saw. “Now. Now do you see how little she can be trusted to keep an eye on herself? Now? Didn’t I tell you there was more to this than she was letting on? Didn’t I tell you?”
“Jesus Christ,” her mother said, shaking her head.
“What?” Catherine said, turning to her. “What’s the big deal? Lots of people are gay.”
“Well, I hope you don’t know any more of them,” her father said.
“Charlie,” her mother said sharply. “Stop that.”
“Is this the way you’re going on in Dublin, going around with people like that? Is this what we sent you to Trinity for, so you can meet up with this kind of crowd?”
“James doesn’t go to Trinity,” Catherine said.
“Then how the hell did you meet him? What the hell are you doing going around with him?”
“Catherine,” her mother said. “This boy is troubled.”
“He’s trouble,” her father said.
“He’s troubled. It’s no good getting close to him.”
“It can’t be cured,” her father said.
“Charlie,” her mother said. “Please.”
“Well, it’s stopping here,” her father said, and he sat down to his paper again, and he opened it and closed it. “It’s stopping here, I can tell you that. You’re not to go next nor near that place. Or you needn’t be coming back here.”
“Don’t say that to her,” her mother said, and her voice, Catherine heard in dismay, was on the verge of breaking. “Don’t ever say that to any of them.”
Her father hesitated.
“Charlie,” her mother said. “Please.”
“This is your home and it always will be, Catherine,” he said, his eyes on the newspaper. “But I don’t want you associating with the likes of that fellow. I want that to be clear.”
“I’m only going for a couple of nights,” Catherine said, and she left the room.
In the bedroom, Ellen was waiting for her, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“What the fuck was that?”
“I’m sorry,” said Catherine, as she pulled clothes out of the chest of drawers. “It had to be done.”
“You did that and now you’re just leaving me here to deal with it?”
“You don’t have to deal with it.”
“Fuck you,” Ellen said, pushing past her, and Catherine was horrified to see that she was in tears.
* * *
That night in Carrigfinn was not a pleasant one. The next day was not a pleasant day. They were a night and a day passed in the tension of inhabiting rooms, listening for who might walk into them. On the surface, it was the same house she had visited a month ago, or it might have been: Peggy, so welcoming to Catherine, embracing her, telling her how delighted she was to see her again. Calling her pet. Calling her wee darling. But she was not the same person to Peggy now, Catherine knew that, just as Peggy was not the same person to her. This Peggy was the woman who had reacted to James in the manner that she had, in just the manner that James had predicted she would, in just the manner of which Catherine had said, Oh no, no, no, that won’t happen. Everything will be all right. Everything will be more than all right.
All right; that was not what this was. There were moments, that night, that next day, when Catherine looked up to see that Peggy was staring at her, on her face an expression that was not very far from blame. They were in trouble, she and James. They were in so much trouble. Being in trouble in this way made Catherine wary of moving; wary, even, of meeting anyone’s eye. James’s father was confused by the quiet and the caution, she knew; James’s father did not know what James’s mother now knew. He kept trying to joke with them, to draw them both out, and he kept giving up, flashing curious looks in Peggy’s direction, going outside to the farm, where things could be managed, where reactions could be trusted to be what he expected them to be. He thought that they were miserable, all of them, over James’s imminent departure, Catherine thought—and he was right about that, actually, because if there was one thing that she dreaded more than heading back to the house out of which she had walked the evening before, it was not having James to phone up and James to visit; it was the thought of James being a thousand miles away, in a city and a country to which she had never been, not that it would have made a damn bit of difference if she had been there. He would be gone, and she would be here, and that was what she was facing into, and the thought of it made her breath feel as though it was going to refuse to come. But that was not the thing to think about now, she knew; that was not the important thing. The important thing was James. The important thing was to be with James, now. On his bedroom walls, it struck her, there were no posters—they were, in that respect, so different from her bedroom walls at home, still covered with the school years collage of pictures from Just Seventeen and NME. His walls were covered with wallpaper, a pattern of ivy, or something else rising and green. Catherine sat propped against one side of the wall, and James sat propped against the other, and they sat there waiting for the hours to pass, James seeming absorbed in Mrs. Dalloway, Catherine having tried and given up on Orlando. Outside, it was sunny, but outside was not a matter for them. Catherine lay down now, feeling the urge to sink into sleep, and James shifted in his seating, so that his legs were still draped across her, the weight of them pinning her just above her knees. Soon, it would be dinnertime, and they would have to go up to the kitchen, to the table, where James’s mother would smile and sigh across the table, at once pretending that nothing was the matter and making very clear that something was, and James’s father would try to get everyone laughing, and James would be monosyllabic and sarcastic, and Catherine would end up overcompensating, and chattering, and thus betraying him, the way she had done at breakfast, the way she had done at lunch. What was she meant to do, stay quiet and hurt and angry also? They could not both be that way.
But sleep; all she wanted was sleep. She felt so tired. She felt, for a moment, a longing to go home, to run home, but she could not do that either, and even the thought of it struck panic inside her like a match. Ellen’s face; he
r mother’s face; her father’s face—she pushed them away. Tomorrow was the day for leaving. Tomorrow was the day for home.
“Are you asleep?” James said, nudging her with his leg.
“No,” Catherine said, the word all in a drowse.
“Don’t go to sleep,” he said, and she heard him turn a page.
Moonfoam and Silver
(1998)
1
Half of each can was a curving block of red, the familiar font of the brand name swooping over it, and at the bottom, in yellow-piped block capitals, the word SOUP.
ONION MADE WITH BEEF STOCK sounded vile. PEPPER POT; what, even, was pepper pot soup? And barley was some kind of crop, wasn’t it? A crop grown in places where the land was good enough to hold it.
These were the actual soup cans; that was the thing to understand. That gold circular canvas over there was an actual Marilyn, and in another room were the actual Jackie O paintings, the canvases washed over with an eerie blue. And somewhere else in the gallery was the actual Mao, smug and bleary and bloated. Or, one of the actuals, actually. One of the Maos, six of the Jackies, one of the Marilyns, her lipstick glossy even in monochrome, her beauty spot like a sharp bud of dirt in the paint. Not the actual. That was the point. That was the—
“Let me guess, Citóg,” said a voice from behind her. “You’re mulling over the layers of irony. You’re thinking of how they’re themselves and yet at the same time not themselves. You’re thinking, what am I looking at, actually? What am I—”
“Why am I looking at you, Moran, is the question?” Catherine said, turning to face him. “What are you doing here?”
“On a date,” he shrugged. “What do you think of this stuff?”
“I think he was at his best in the mid-sixties, really, wasn’t he?” she said evenly.
“Oh, no doubt,” Conor said. “Sixty-five to sixty-six, I’d say, to be even more precise about it.”
“Pretty downhill after that.”
“Mmm,” Conor said, nodding vigorously, and together, they drifted on to the huge silkscreen of the dollar sign.
In truth, Catherine didn’t have a clue when Andy Warhol had been at his best, but the mid-sixties seemed a likely possibility, and it seemed like the kind of thing that would be said about Warhol; so she had put it out there, as she often did now, and as often happened now, it had worked. She had got away with it. She was still not quite able to believe that this happened, but it did. You said something, sounding confident as you said it, keeping your voice level, and people nodded, and people agreed with you, and people looked at you as a person who apparently knew their stuff. That was it. It was so easy.
This was what she had discovered this year at college: that when you gave the world the impression that you were up to it, ready for whatever it wanted to throw at you, the stuff the world threw at you turned out to be not that big of a deal after all. It turned out, actually, to be kind of comically manageable. Essays. Reading lists. Meetings with her lecturers. Writing articles for Trinity News; she was doing loads for the books pages of TN now, and getting on nicely. Also, boys, there had been lots of boys, once she had copped herself on and stopped mooning over Conor, who was just a mate now, and actually not a bad one; one among many. This was one of the things of which she was proudest about this second year at college: that she had so many friends now. Maybe too many. Or maybe they were acquaintances, rather than friends, but she didn’t think about the distinction. She just liked it. She liked the way that it was no longer possible, when she walked through Front Arch in the morning, on the way to her class or to the library, to get to where she was going without bumping into at least a couple of people she knew, and maybe more, depending on the time of day; sometimes, if she was not in a rush, not on her way to a lecture or a tutorial, it could take her a full hour to get where she was going, such was the volume of people she would bump into, such were the chats to be had. It gave her a buzz, the feeling that her days were teeming, that there were never enough hours to talk to all the people she wanted to talk to, let alone for all the books she wanted to read, all the poems she wanted to write, all the things she wanted to know about, and talk about, and add to her store.
“Anyway,” she said now, joining up with Conor again. “Who’s the lucky lady?”
“Alice from Modern Theatre,” he said. “Great girl.”
“Aren’t they always?”
“Don’t be jealous,” Conor said. “You here with Rafey?”
“I’m meeting Zoe. Rafe and I broke up.”
“What?” Conor said, looking shocked. “But you were together on Valentine’s night!”
“Yeah. And I decided that was that.”
“Ah, Citóg. After all the trouble I went to, introducing you to him?”
She shrugged. She was enjoying this, she realized: Conor looking crestfallen because she’d dumped the guy he’d set her up with. She should do this kind of thing more often.
“Jesus, you’re hard pleased,” Conor said, shaking his head. But then he grinned, and Catherine rolled her eyes; she knew that something lewd was coming.
“Don’t, Moran,” she warned.
“I’d say it was a good experience, though, all the same?”
“Moran!”
“Clitóg no more, I’d say. Made a woman out of you at long last, did he, Rafey?”
“Oh, would you ever just fuck off,” Catherine said, but she was laughing; she could not help laughing when Conor slagged her off.
“The Doyle’s having a party in his rooms later,” he said, leaning against the wall. “You coming?”
The Doyle was the nickname which had been bestowed this year on Emmet Doyle, the boy who had the previous summer so earnestly—so sweetly, really—counseled Catherine on how to bluff her way into a summer job. He was no longer, though, that same shy boy; over the last year, he had transformed himself into a fully fledged House Six hack. Muck, his satirical column for TN, was a nod to the generations of American journalists he had learned about in his History of the Media class, and it framed itself as an exposé of hypocrisy, pomposity and dishonesty on campus—but it was more muck-slinging than mud-raking, chiefly an exercise in ridicule and mischief, and it frequently got things appallingly wrong. In November, for instance, Emmet’s gleeful account of a senior lecturer’s very public night on the tiles at the History Ball had turned out to be a blow-by-blow account of the man’s very public fall from the wagon after seven years of sobriety. A diatribe against the college’s practice of awarding honorary doctorates to “lazy and irrelevant wasters,” meanwhile, which called for students to picket the next conferring ceremony, had run in February, on the very day that Nelson Mandela was announced as that year’s chief honoree. Mostly, though, Muck took aim at various college societies and at the students’ union, as well as at various other local targets: the tutors, the security guards, the chaplains, the American tourists who lined up to see the Book of Kells, the Freshman girl who had dyed her hair blue. He had a nickname for everyone; “Poetess” was what he called Catherine, having filched two of her poems from the slush pile for Icarus, the college literary magazine. Catherine tended, as a result, to avoid him when she saw him coming, and she was not in the mood for one of his notoriously chaotic parties tonight.
“I can’t,” she told Conor. “James is coming home tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I thought he wasn’t coming home until the summer.”
“Well,” Catherine shrugged. “He changed his mind. He’s home tomorrow. And so I don’t want to be wrecked in the morning. I’m meeting him early at the airport.”
This was not true; James was once again getting a lift home from Berlin in the cab of a lorry, and he had written to Catherine and the girls saying that he would make his own way to Baggot Street when he arrived, probably sometime in the early afternoon. It shocked her a little that she had told this lie so easily just now, and so readily, without having in any way planned it or decided that it was necessary; she blinked at Conor, f
eeling a little breathless, worrying that he would pull her up on it, that he would expose her dishonesty and, worse still, the motive behind it. Which was—because Catherine did not know—which was what, exactly? Why had she felt the need to make up a story? Why had she felt the need to disguise the extent of her excitement about James’s homecoming, to throw Conor off the scent of the preparations she wanted to go home and make? Because he would laugh at her? But Conor always laughed at her, and she liked it—but no, she realized, this time she did not want Conor to have the opportunity to laugh at her. This time there was something that she really did not want Conor to know. This time was different, she realized, watching him; this time was something somehow truly private.
“I just can’t come,” she said apologetically. “I’ll go to the next one.”
“Go to whatever parties you like, Citóg,” Conor said, shrugging. Then something seemed to occur to him. He frowned. “Here. This doesn’t have anything to do with you and Rafe breaking up, does it? This guy James coming home?”
“Rafe and I broke up because we’d run our course. We had nothing in common. And anyway, you know James is gay. I told you that.”
“Yeah, I know, I know, your precious gay friend. You’ve mentioned that. Once or twice.”
“Shut up,” Catherine said, laughing, but she could not suppress a wave of unease; James was unaware that Catherine had, over the course of the last term and a half, outed him to several of her college friends, none of whom he had actually met. It had just happened; it had just come out, so to speak, when she had been telling people about her friend the photographer in Berlin, and about how brilliant he was. Drink had usually been involved, and she had always felt bad the next morning; but then, it was not as though James was not out. He was out to Catherine, out to Amy and Lorraine, out to his mother—but still. It was something she had yet to tell him, the fact that people like Conor and Zoe knew. It was something which would have to be almost immediately addressed, given that she was so much looking forward to bringing him onto campus this week and introducing him to everyone. It was a bit of a problem, probably. It was not something, for instance, that she had mentioned in her letters to him. She felt her stomach twist with anxiety, and she must have winced, because Conor looked at her more closely.
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