Belinda McKeon - Tender

But she could also see the darkness in them; she could see the pain. Early on, he had written to her that maybe this had not been such a good idea, this second year working with Malachy in Berlin; that maybe it had been a mistake. Yes, the city was beautiful, he wrote, but there were days when its beauty seemed like a taunt, like an insult. When it was so hard not to take its beauty personally. And Catherine knew, when he wrote like this, that he was talking not just about the city, not just talking about the streets and the galleries and the squares, but about the people who walked through them; about the guys. He had met nobody. He had not broken through in that way. There had been people — of course there had been people — but they had been other people’s people; they had not been for James. After the first couple of months, almost every letter had come to have a sense of this, sometimes so vivid that Catherine felt as though she could see the scenes he was describing, the disappointments — felt, too, as though she could still do something to change them. As though she could just reach out and put her hand on James’s shoulder, for instance, as he stood in a doorway near Malachy’s studio, talking to a German boy called Florian, and saying to the boy that no, he was busy later, that he could not join Florian and his friends in a bar — Catherine, reading about this, wished that she could just reach out and push. And say, No, go; you have to go; you have to see what this might be. But he never did. He always just watched these boys that he longed for; he always just longed. And when the proof came, as it so often did, that he could not have them, that there could not be even the glimmer of a chance — the proof of a girlfriend, or even just of a sighting with a girl, his heart was always broken. Sometimes, Catherine, he had written in one letter — and in other letters variations on the same line —it is just too fucking hard. Too fucking hard. I don’t know. I try not to, but it is so hard not to feel…

Over Christmas, he wrote her a sequence of short notes, the days and dates floating in as headings, looking almost unreal by the time, well into January, that Catherine saw them— Christmas Eve, 4 p.m.; Christmas Eve, near midnight; Christmas morning, 10 a.m.; New Year’s Eve, sunset. Almost all of those days he had spent in the studio; the Tokyo show had been looming by then, and every hour had been precious to Malachy. It was overwork, Catherine had decided, which was making James’s tone so deadened, his words so rambling; it was, she decided, a kind of homesickness, no matter how vehemently he might have insisted that he was happy not to be coming home. How could he, he had written, face Christmas dinner with his mother? But his loneliness, during those last days of the year, had been seared into every word he had put down on those pages; even when he had only been writing about Malachy, and about what a slave-driver he was, Catherine could see the panic and the fear in the very shapes of his letters, in the stretch of his lines. He looked forward so much, he told her, to her letters; he wished he could have a long letter from her every day. Her letters to him, he wrote at one point, were all that he had, all that he looked forward to; and this was a line that so unnerved — and, in fact, so frightened — Catherine that she found herself skipping forward to the next page, hoping for something easier, hoping for something to make her laugh, or make her hungry to know the same things about art, about light, about Berlin, that James knew — or to make her forget. To make her forget that he was in some kind of trouble, her lovely, her wonderful, her so-brilliant friend; that he was going through a thing that she did not know how to help him with, that she worried sometimes — often — would lower itself down on him and claim him, once and for all. Her life, with her manic romances and her friends and her burrow in the library, with her notebook of poems, or half-poems, and her rattled-off articles for TN, with her visits home, where everything was still so uneasy, so awkward, between her and her parents, but where nothing was really badly wrong, really badly unbearable, the way things seemed like they would be for a long time between James and his mother — her life seemed like something harmless, something weightless, in comparison. And yet she liked her life; she loved her life; she did not want to think of her life in this way. And so, if she was honest — if she was blunt — the truth was that actually, lately, she had not really been writing to James as often as she ought to, or had been writing the letters without always actually sending them. She had been enjoying the writing of them as much as ever, but something had been stopping her from putting them in the post. Some of her letters to him lately had functioned more like diary entries, and she had kept them, because by the time she had got round to finishing them, they had been so woefully out of date — she had sent him the letter about the first time with Rafe, but the next letter, about what it was like to be Rafe’s girlfriend, and what the second time having sex with him had been like, and the third, had turned into the letter in which she had wondered about breaking up with Rafe, and then that letter had become the letter in which she had described the breakup, and Rafe’s unbothered reaction, and how it had all felt like a bit of an anticlimax, really, if James would pardon the pun. James would not have to pardon the pun, because James would not get to read the letter, unless she took it out of her desk drawer and handed it to him when he arrived in Baggot Street tomorrow afternoon. James, over the last few weeks, had noticed the lag in her correspondence, while there had been no lag in his; more than once, she had come in to college to find an email from James, teasing her, needling her, pretending to be very disappointed in Catherine and her negligence — but of course not actually pretending, not actually teasing, when it came down to it, at all.

Still. He was coming home. That was the thing to remember; that was the thing that made all of this feel as though it would be OK. He had written to her of the decision earlier that week, and in fact maybe just the knowledge that he was coming home, that they would soon be together in the flesh, had been a factor in the falloff in urgency, for Catherine, of sending him the long letters that had been the hallmark of their separation — for that was how they had both thought of it, especially during those first difficult weeks: a forced separation, a hard, mirrored exile — but now that he had decided to close up the distance between them, the physical chasm, maybe she had decided at some level that there was no need to write at such length to him anymore. Maybe she had felt, from the moment she had read his announcement— I’m coming home. I’ve had enough of this place. Get the couch cushions ready for me —that he was in some sense already home, and that to share things with him, all she had to do was write them down for herself, and because in some sense he was already here with her he could see them without needing them to be flown across the miles. He was home. Or, he was not home, not just yet, but he was as good as home, and when he was home, Catherine decided, none of that darkness which had come on him in Berlin could get to him, none of that loneliness would have a chance, not a moment, to sink its misery into him, to pull his days and his nights to shreds. Catherine would be with him. Everyone would be with him. Life would be with him, this teeming, booming, multiplying thing, and she and he could do everything together, and everything would once more be OK. Everything would be more than OK.

Zoe showed up at half three, complaining of a hangover and a broken umbrella and a bus that had failed to arrive. Catherine had already seen the whole exhibition by then, but she went around it with her again, standing for a long moment in front of 5 Deaths, the piece made from the crime scene photograph which showed an actual corpse, a dead woman, staring blindly out from beneath a massive overturned car.