Belinda McKeon - Tender

“So it’s the perfect solution,” he said, sounding very pleased with himself. “God, I would have been great to have around during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“I can’t come,” Catherine said, hoping that none of the journalists in the office around her would hear. She covered her mouth with her hand. “There’s no way I could get away.”

“What do you mean?” he said impatiently. “There’s a breaking Longford Missile Crisis, is there? I thought they only let you write the Births and Deaths?”

“It’s not work,” she said, as quietly as she could. “It’s just home.”

James said nothing.

“Hello?” she said, a little desperately. “I mean, I’d love to. I just wouldn’t be able to get away for—”

“Catherine,” James cut across her. “Not this again. Not this complete shite about your parents. I’m tired of listening to you talking this nonsense. You’re not in primary school anymore. You can do what you want.”

“I can’t just up and go to your house for the weekend. What would I tell them?”

“Why do you have to tell them anything?”

“I just have to.”

“So you tell them that you’re going up to Dublin. You live in Dublin, remember? You’re just visiting Longford for the summer.”

“No I’m not.”

“Sorry? What are you telling me? You’ve decided not to go back to college?”

“No. You know what I mean. I mean, yeah of course I live in Dublin, but this is my actual home.”

“Catherine,” James said sharply. “You have a flat in Dublin. As far as your parents are concerned, you have a reason to be in it this weekend. Tell them — I don’t know — tell them it’s Amy’s birthday.”

“I stayed up the weekend for Amy’s birthday in May.”

“Lorraine’s birthday, then. Lorraine’s engagement party. Lorraine’s funeral. I don’t care. Tell them whatever you have to tell them. Tell them that you’re getting the half six train to Dublin, and get yourself to the train station. Then wait for the train passing through from Dublin and get on it. I will be on it. I will be keeping a seat for you.”

“I don’t know, James. Someone might—”

“Pat Burke? You’re not using the Pat fucking Burkes of the world to get out of this, Reilly. I want to see you on that train. I will see you on the train. In fact, just to make absolutely sure that you get on the train, I will see you on the platform in Longford. Never before in the history of this country has that sentence contained such excitement and anticipation.”

“I don’t know,” Catherine had begun to say. But James had hung up.

When she got off the phone, she went into the kitchen, where Anna was filling in a coloring book at the table while their mother stood at the sink, rinsing lettuce and radishes for a salad.

“You were talking on the phone an awful long time,” Anna said without looking up from her page.

“Was I?” Catherine said, glancing at her mother’s back.

Anna nodded, a twist of distaste suddenly taking over her face; it looked almost grotesquely adult on her little features. “How the hell can you have that much to say to anyone?”

Catherine burst out laughing; it was so clearly a mimicry of something their mother must have said while the phone call was going on. Now her mother said Anna’s name sharply, but she did not glance with a grin at Catherine, her eyebrows raised, the way she did whenever they both heard the child say something funny or precocious or endearing. She kept her back turned, looking out the window at the lawn, or at the meadows, or at the hedgerow or at the sky; at the young calves, bucking and leaping, or at the plastic swing, drifting, or at the white garden chair, upturned by Anna or by a gust of wind. Catherine had left a book out there, she remembered; she went out to bring it in.

In truth, it was not just the question of how to get to Carrigfinn for the weekend which bothered Catherine; it was also the question of what going to Carrigfinn for the weekend meant. Days with him. Nights with him, without the company — the buffer — of the girls. That day in Dublin, the Pat Burke day, they had hugged goodbye at the station, and Catherine had wondered if she was meant to understand it, what was going on between them. Because something was going on. She felt so close to him already by that stage, and the phone calls that followed confirmed it; the way James spoke to her during the phone calls confirmed it. The directness. The openness. That first afternoon in Baggot Street, it had shocked her a little, to hear him talk about how much he was looking forward to seeing Amy and Lorraine again, about how he could hardly wait to see them; outside of television, she had never heard a boy talk so sincerely, so emotionally, before. She had actually squirmed, listening to him. If he had been joking, if he had been being ironic, that would be one thing, but this was not irony; this was a strange, unafraid openness. And now, during their phone calls, it was the same, and again, she felt herself wanting to scuttle away from it somehow; from the way he told her that he missed her, that he wanted to see her, that he wanted to have her company again. Always she listened for the irony, for the trace of mockery, but it was never there; he was serious. He was saying aloud the stuff that, Catherine now realized, she had always thought you were meant to keep silent.

And of course the real irony was in her own reaction. Because she had wanted this, for so long, or had believed she wanted it; she had spent so long trying to get close to various boys in this way. And now she had it, apparently. Now she had someone who talked like this to her. And what was she meant to do with it? Because James was not her type. The way he talked so much. The way he looked. The red hair, clumped, untamed. The freckles like cowshit spatters. The clothes: baggy jumpers, worn-down Docs, navy socks ribbed and faded, jeans bunched in with a canvas belt. He was grand, he was fun to talk to — but beyond that, no. And yet, she was enjoying him so much, so much more than she had enjoyed anyone before. She felt her brain grow, talking to him. She felt herself wanting to live her life so much more fully. There had been nobody like this for her before. So did that not mean something? After all, what did she really know? Of it, of being with someone, of being — was this what it was? — in a relationship with someone, of actually being in love, instead of just thinking you were? Instead of all the things she was, by now, so accustomed to doing: storing up every sighting of them, counting the moments of eye contact as though they were coins, as though they could get you somewhere, buy you passage to somewhere? This was not how it was with James, and so maybe this, after all, was what it was meant to be like. Maybe she had misunderstood this, as she had misunderstood so many things, all these years. That first night he had phoned her, the excitement and gladness she had felt at hearing his voice had unnerved her, and she had heard it in his voice, too — and something more in his voice, as well: a kind of relief. A relief that she was glad to hear from him. And what did that mean?

It was Lorraine’s birthday, she told her mother, and Amy was throwing her a small party; at “small party,” her mother shot Catherine a look which made clear not just that she did not believe her, but that she was disappointed that Catherine, in lying to her about her reasons for going to Dublin for the weekend, would come up with so pathetic an offering. But getting her mother to believe that she would be staying in Baggot Street until Sunday evening was all that mattered. She left the Leader office at six, and walked to the station, and she watched as the half six train to Dublin departed, and she sat and waited for the one coming in the other direction. As it pulled in ten minutes later, James was standing with his head out the carriage door, waving; Catherine was immediately mortified. He looked insane. He was doing, she knew, some kind of regal wave; pretending to be royalty arriving into Longford. She saw people on the platform notice him, raise their eyebrows at him warily, or with bafflement, or in outright disgust. A man in the uniform of the train company shook his head slowly as he waited for the carriages to come to a stop. He put a hand to James’s door.