Belinda McKeon - Tender

“I’m scared shitless about it, to tell you the truth,” he said, shaking his head.

“It’ll be all right,” she said, and she closed her fingers around his shoulder as she had seen his father do, and she thought he might come to her for a hug then, but he stayed where he was.

“It’ll be all right,” she said again, and with that, he seemed to decide something, and he nodded, once, briskly, and he took a step ahead.

“So now for you,” he said.

“Well,” she said, working to keep her voice steady; to keep it cheerful, even. “I’m glad you — I’m glad.”

He nodded. “Me too. I felt it was important. I felt it was time.”

“It is time,” she nodded eagerly. “It is important.” If she just repeated the words he used himself, she thought, if she just bounced them back to him, then surely she could not go far wrong. First, do no harm. Because what she had to concentrate on, she felt now, so strongly, was her face; what she had to put all her work into was the expression in her eyes, was the business of what she was doing with her mouth. Smile. Smile. Breathe through her nose — not too deeply, not like she was fighting for it. Widen her eyes; force them full of brightness. Show none of the riot going on inside; the bafflement, the confusion with all its stupid roars and plummetings, the astonishment, this weird temptation to stare. Show none of the fact that This! This! This! had now become Gay! Gay! Gay! — because that was wrong of her, utterly wrong. Nothing was more urgent now than to keep all of this out, to keep her face soft with calm and with intelligence and with openness, the face of someone wiser, someone better, the face of someone that she wanted, so badly, to be. He was reading her; he was watching her face for the story of how he would be received — for the story, almost, of what he was. And she would not give him a face by which he could justify a tone any darker than the one in which he was speaking to her now. She was Amy, she decided in that moment. She was Lorraine. She was able. She was knowing. She was for telling; she was for trusting; she was for shelter and for comfort and for relief. Still it banged in her brain, and silently she roared it away, because she should not even be thinking it, should not even be seeing it; she should just be seeing James, her friend, her best, best friend, and now he was walking, and Catherine was following, and the stone of the canal bank was so weathered and bird-stained and gray, and it led on to a path trodden down through this grass by who knew how many feet over who knew how many years.

* * *

Still, she was excited. There was this feeling — and she was far from proud of it — of having been given something. Or rather, of discovering that she’d had something all along, without realizing it; like those priests in Dublin who’d had no idea that the painting in their dining room was a Caravaggio. She had never before known anyone who was gay. Nobody real. Nobody Irish, really, other than David Norris, the senator who had fought for the law to be changed, and it was not as if Catherine actually knew him. It had almost been a fantasy — a fantasy upon a fantasy — men who were not just loving, but so loving that they were able to love other men. Ridiculous, of course, but that was how she had thought of it; that was how she could not help thinking of it now. Feeling so warm towards James as he walked beside her; feeling such tenderness for him, such — it felt almost like gratitude. Because now — now what? Now she had one of her own? There it was, her own shallowness, and it was so depressing, and it was something that James could not know. That she was not good. Not — what was it? Not neutral. Not this solid ground for him, not for him this safe, trustworthy shore.

But this was something he would not know.

And anyway, maybe she could snap out of it. Maybe, when the novelty faded, maybe then she would become a better friend. Not this silly tourist, trotting beside him up the lane, trying not to stare.

He was talking about David Norris now, she realized; or rather, about that summer, four years previously, when the decriminalization had gone through. He had been fifteen then, and going into his Junior Cert year, and it had been hell, he told her; it had been horrible. Everyone around him talking about it, jeering about it, in school, on the school bus, in the shops in town, at the church gates, and on the radio programs, especially on the radio programs — listening to everyone else talking on the subject, it seemed endlessly, it seemed everywhere you turned, and being petrified that they would work out, somehow, that they were talking about you. That you were one of them.

“Exhibit A,” he said, as they reached the gates, and for a moment she thought he was talking about the house, or about his father’s freshly painted garage door, the vivid greenness of it, which was the thing which had caught her eye, making her think back to the babbling innocence of the night before; but he was talking about himself, she realized.

“But nobody found out,” she said, to try to comfort him, seeing immediately then what a stupid thing this had been to say. “I mean, then,” she said hurriedly. “I mean, nobody found out before you wanted them to.”

“No, they did not, Catherine,” he said, crossing to where they had left the blanket on the lawn; he gathered it up and tucked it under his arm, handing her a glass to carry into the house. “No, they did not. I made damn well sure of that.”

“Well, then,” she said, uncertainly, as they passed under his mother’s painted arch.

Then they had a night that Catherine would remember, she thought, until the day she died. Nothing much happened, except that everything was perfect. The night was perfect: it was warm enough to sit outside, and the sky was on fire as the sun went down, and then it was the coming of a delicate blanket of stars. James’s mother had left stuff for dinner in the fridge for them, and they made it together; Catherine fried steaks on the pan and James went out to the vegetable garden for salad things and came in with lettuce and scallions and radishes, caked with dry muck, and, from his mother’s greenhouse, tiny tomatoes which were a deep, shining red, and sweeter than any tomatoes Catherine had tasted before. In the dining-room cabinet, James found a bottle of wine.

They ate outside. As he filled their glasses, a tractor passed on the main road below. It was traveling fast; someone in a hurry to get home. Out of habit, Catherine craned her neck to see.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” James said, following her line of vision.

“Tractor!” Catherine said, in the tone she and her sister had always used at moments like this: it was the tone in which other people might shout “Fire!” It was an old joke between them. Now James stared at her.

“OK, darling,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Now we’re going to have to give the doctor a call, and have a little chat with him about your tablets.”

She laughed. “It’s a thing Ellen and I used to do. When we were younger, and at home during the summer; we had a thing for men in tractors. Young guys, obviously. Boys. Not old fellas. We weren’t that desperate.”

“Ah,” James said, nodding. “I see.”

“When one of us would hear a tractor coming up the lane, we’d roar out to the other, and the two of us would race to our viewing spot.”

“Your viewing spot?”

“Yeah. This bit of high ground behind the hedges at the front of our house. In the rhubarb patch. The two of us would crouch down there and look out through the hedge. It was the perfect height for spotting someone in a tractor cab.”

“My God . The planning that went into that.”