Belinda McKeon - Tender

“You’re not talking about The Doyle?” she said, incredulously.

“Oh, yeah,” James snorted. “I forgot about that ridiculous nickname. Yeah, I was impressed by him at the party the other night as well. He’s very nice. Very nice indeed.”

“Oh, come on, ” Catherine spluttered. “He’s The Doyle.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s a messer,” Catherine said. “He’s a TN hack.”

“So are you.”

“Yeah, but he really is. He practically lives in the publications office. And the rest of the time he’s just swaggering around campus, doling wisecracks and insults out to everybody.”

“Sounds like your friend Conor.”

“No, he’s worse,” Catherine said. “He saw some of my poems up in the publications office and he’s been slagging me about them ever since. Quoting them at me. He’s a fucker.”

“Well, I don’t care about his taste in poems. I just think he’s a right little bit of stuff.”

“Ah, James.”

“I do. Those lovely ruddy cheeks of his.”

“James!”

“You have a filthy mind, Reilly. What did you say his real name was again? Or are we only allowed to use his nom de plume? ”

“Emmet,” she said sulkily.

“Ah, after Robert Emmet the patriot, presumably. Well, I’ll write your epitaph for you, Sonny. Come over here to me and I’ll write you a lovely one.”

“I don’t think he’s a patriot, exactly. He went to Gonzaga.”

“Come up, you fearful Jesuit!” James said then, in a roar, which horrified Catherine — she covered her face with her hands, the sight of which only served, of course, to encourage James, and by the time he had finished with his commentary, Catherine was almost falling off the bench with a mixture of laughter and mortification, and James was holding on to her, helplessly laughing himself, and in the next moment he was hugging her, his arms tightly around her, his breath hot on her neck. His body was still quaking with the laughter, and against her shoulder he was making a noise like crying, and for a horrified moment she thought that he actually might be crying, but as he gave a long, low sigh she knew that he was all right, that he was just recovering, just steeped in the enjoyment of how funny he himself had been.

“Oh, Catherine,” he said, without pulling away from her. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

She snorted. “Glad you’re home.”

He went very still. “Why? What did I say?”

“You said you were glad I was home.”

“Arrah, you, me, who gives a fuck which one it is,” he said, and he hugged her more tightly, and though she felt terrible about it, she wished that he would let go of her now: she knew that he liked to be physically affectionate, that it was just his way, but this was such a long hug, and in such an exposed, public place; she felt herself cringing at the grip of him around her now, and to try to bring it to an end, to try to wrap it up in some way, she patted him on the back with her right hand, gently but firmly: once, twice, three times. And in her arms, James burst out laughing, and with his own hand, he did exactly the same thing, except that he did not pat her back but really clapped it, almost belted it, as though they were two hurlers embracing on the pitch after one of their teams had beaten the other.

“Very funny,” she muttered into his shoulder. “Nothing gets past you, does it, Flynn?”

“Not a thing, Reilly,” he said happily, and he planted a round of quick, light kisses all down her neck.

They spent the whole day together, having coffee after coffee, one endless conversation, Catherine introducing James to as many of her friends as she set eyes on, and arguing with him over the attractiveness, or lack thereof, of various boys. There was no sign of Rafe, to Catherine’s relief, but in the evening Aidan sauntered up to them on the ramp, fresh from a Romance lecture, his Chaucer under one arm, mad to talk about the Wife of Bath. But once Catherine introduced him to James, it was James’s time in Berlin he wanted to talk about; he had heard from Catherine, he said, shooting her an unreadable glance, so much about James and what he was doing over there, about the great time he was having; it must have been such a rush, living there, was it? He himself had been there, but years ago, before the wall had come down, and he had heard such good things about the city now, about how hedonistic it was, how alive. In typical Aidan form, he did not pause for long enough to have this question actually answered by James; he continued on. James was watching him in amusement, Catherine saw, but also with something else, something more guarded.

“What did you think of him?” she said, after Aidan had taken his leave of them a few minutes later.

But James just shrugged. “I’m ready to go home,” he said. “Will we head?”

“Oh,” Catherine said, uneasily. “I have to write my article.”

“What article?” James said almost crossly.

“The McCabe interview. I told you. Tonight’s production night and I have to get it in.”

“Oh well,” he said, leaning back against the railings. “Will I wait for you?”

“No, go ahead,” Catherine said, frowning as though she could not countenance causing him such an inconvenience. “I’ll run up and get this done, and I’ll be home in an hour or so. I won’t be long.”

“Promise?” said James, in a tone of mock pleading.

“Promise,” Catherine said, and they embraced as tightly as two people who would not see each other again for weeks, or months, or years. Then she was crossing Front Square at a fast clip, thinking how lovely it was, the evening air. The moon was out, and the cobblestones were a shimmering lake of gray. For a moment, she thought she heard her name being called, but that was someone else; that was someone calling someone else’s name.

She wrote the McCabe interview up quickly once she got a desk in the crowded publications office, chopping a couple of hundred words out reluctantly when it was finished — all the good quotes he had given her were long ones, and she wished she could fit them in, but with them in there was no space for anything about the actual novel — and printed it out. Seeing it emerge on the tray, Emmet Doyle crossed the room to pick it up for her, looking at the first page as he brought it to her desk.

“‘Patrick McCabe strides into the bright surroundings of Cafe Irie in Temple Bar, looking like a man who is at once distracted and intense,’” he read aloud. “What’s this, a novel?”

“Give me that,” she said, snatching it from him. He was grinning at her, and for a moment she could almost see what James had meant — he was kind of attractive, his skin clear, his eyes a dark, striking blue, his lanky frame perched, now, on the edge of her desk, but it was so conventional, his attractiveness; it was not the kind of thing she had imagined whispering over with James.

“There’s a letter for you, by the way, Poetess,” he said, nodding towards the mailbox on the opposite wall. “Did you get it?”

“No,” Catherine said, getting up. “How long has it been here?”

“A couple of days,” Emmet shrugged. “It’s probably McCabe’s wife, warning you to stop stalking him.”

“Fuck off,” she laughed, taking down the envelope. It was handwritten, and bearing a Dublin postmark; she tore it open to find a curt note from the publicist of the novelist Michael Doonan, granting her the interview with him that she had been chasing for months. She was, the publicist explained, to be given forty minutes on a Friday afternoon the following month, and the questions were to focus on Doonan’s new novel, Engines of Everything, not on the earlier trilogy which had recently been made into a controversial television series. This gave her a few weeks for preparation, which was just as well, because she had read only one of Doonan’s books, and she wanted to do a good job on this interview, because he so rarely granted them.