Belinda McKeon - Tender

James pushed out a long sigh. “So, Catherine.”

She swallowed. “So,” she said, making a last, desperate grab at a possible topic with which to divert him from whatever it was he was going to say to her. But nothing came. She nodded, as though accepting her fate.

“So,” he said again, winking at her. “Any fella?”

A sort of dull queasiness washed over her, like a trace of the hangover she had just about shaken off, but it was nothing to do with booze, this feeling. It was to do with something else, and there could be no denying that she had walked herself right into it. This guy, this guy she did not even know, except from a photograph, except from some drawings which were, come to think of it, still under the mattress of her bed; she had let this guy in — or, more precisely, she had let this guy let himself in — and she had got up to talk to him, and she had drunk tea with him, and she was sitting here, now, watching him smoke, and she was wearing these ridiculous shorts that she never wore, that exposed far too much of her legs, and her shirt was not even properly buttoned, and so of course he thought she was up for it; of course he did. She cursed herself. How was she supposed to talk herself out of this corner? She stared out the window, to the oblivious blue sky. From the armchair came a pointed throat-clearing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him wave.

“Hello?”

“Sorry,” she said, glancing back to him. “Sorry, I heard you.”

“So that’s a no?”

She swallowed. “It’s just not something I really have time for at the moment, being in a relationship.”

He blew out another plume. “Ah, sure, who’d have you? The state of your teeth.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “Oh my God!”

“Ah, sure, you’re as bad as Shane McGowan, Catherine, let’s face it. Worse again. Half of them broken. The other half rotten.”

“ Fuck you,” she said, sitting bolt upright. Her heart was thumping. “Fuck you, you fucking redhead!”

He threw his head back and laughed in huge, heavy peals, his throat long and exposed, his mouth open as though he had turned his face up to the sky to drink in the rain. He roared with laughter. He thumped the floor with the heels of his hands. He inhaled hard, and he dropped his chin, his eyes tightly closed, looking as though he was trying to steady himself, and then he was off again. He could almost have been crying. As soon as that thought struck her, Catherine could not stop seeing what he would look like if he actually was crying; could not but see him in the grip of a sobbing fit. It was so strange. She had never seen a man cry. She was not seeing one cry now, either, she had to remind herself, but still. She felt a weird thrill at the sight of him; a squeamish sense of staring where she was not supposed to stare. When he finally stopped, gasping for breath, sort of moaning, as though it had all been too much for him, this torture she had put him through, she had forgotten what it was they had even been talking about.

But James had not. “Oh, Catherine,” he said, shaking his head. “Catherine, Catherine. Your teeth are lovely.” He was picking up his cigarette; he gestured, now, with it up and down the length of her. “The whole lot of you is lovely. Sure the fellas must be queuing up for you.”

“No,” she said vehemently, and then instantly worried that this was the wrong answer. “I mean…”

“Oh, come on.”

She decided to take a different tack. To sound less available.

“Well,” she said, feigning hesitancy, “I suppose I have spent the year messing around with someone, but it’s nothing, really. Nothing worth talking about.”

“Messing around is good. We like messing.”

“No, really, I don’t even mean that kind of messing around. I don’t know what I mean, really. I don’t mean anything.”

“O-K,” James said slowly.

“No. I mean, it’s just someone. It’s nothing. Nothing happened. It’s no one.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think you should say any more without the presence of a lawyer.”

“Fuck’s sake, ” said Catherine now; why had she even needed to bring Conor up? She was such an idiot. She was not to talk about Conor. She was not to make an embarrassing situation even worse.

“What’s his name?” said James, tipping his ash.

“Conor.”

He shook his head. “Not a good name.”

“No,” she said, still cringing.

“Forget him.”

“Good idea.”

“We can’t have Conors going about the place. Conors are barred from this establishment now. Conors are now the outcasts of society.”

“I feel better already,” she said, laughing, and strangely enough, she realized, it was true.

“Very glad to hear it,” James said with a solemn nod.

“And you?” Her voice jumped high on the question, worrying about the territory into which it might be pulling her, but she had to ask; it was only polite to ask, after he had shown an interest in her love life, her whatever it was.

“What about me?”

“Any nice German girl?”

His eyebrows shot up. “No,” he said firmly. “No nice German girl.”

“No not-nice German girl?”

“No not-nice German girl either.”

“Oh, but you’ll have to do something about that, ” she said, trying to borrow the teasing tone he had used on her. “I mean, when you go back,” she added, hurriedly.

“We’ll see,” he said, sounding bored of the subject.

“Oh, come on.”

He looked at her sharply. “Come on what?”

She stammered. “I mean, meet someone. You know. German girls, I mean. They’re good-looking, aren’t they? Blond.” She took a breath. “Some of them, like.”

He sighed. “That they are, Catherine. That they are.”

“So.”

“So,” he shrugged, and he stubbed his cigarette out. “So here we are,” he said, looking at her. He took a deep breath, and Catherine’s mouth went dry.

“I…”

“Both of us lonely,” James burst into song. “Longing for…something…”

And now what the fuck was happening? What was she supposed to do with this? She spluttered out a laugh, just for the sake of getting some other sound out into the room, something other than his weirdly passionate — what was that, a baritone? No, a baritone was lower, gruffer; his must be a tenor voice.

“You can’t really sing,” she said, which was not actually true, but she had needed to say something to break the tension, the mortification of him singing at her; she needed him to stop. What was he doing? What was she doing? Her mother would kill her— kill her — if she could see her right now, if she could know how she had spent the last hour.

“The summer,” he was saying now, having stopped with the singing, at least, but what was he saying about the summer? Catherine blinked at him.

“What?”

“I said, what are you doing with yourself for the summer?”

“Oh,” she said, relieved. “Going home. Back to Longford. I’m meant to have got a job.”

“ Meant to?”

She sighed, remembering that she still had not made that phone call. “I was going to ask the editor of the local newspaper for a job.”

He looked impressed. “Oh.”

“I’ve been writing a bit for the college paper.”

“About what?”

“Art,” she said, feeling almost triumphant as she saw the effect this had on him; he pursed his lips as though conceding something. “And literature.”

“Literature,” he said mockingly, and the heat rushed back to her face, but in the next instant, he was nodding approvingly. “Very good. Very good, Catherine. So that’s what you want to do?”