Belinda McKeon - Tender

* * *

Once again, it took ages to get him out of the house, and by the time they reached college she was running late for her Expressionism tutorial, but as they came through the Nassau Street entrance, James grabbed Catherine’s arm suddenly and pulled her over in the direction of the security booth.

“Come here for a minute,” he said. “I want you to see something. I want to show you something.”

“James. I’m late.”

“It’ll only take a second,” he said, and then he was jabbing at the long, curved window of the booth, tapping a finger on the glass. “I love this. Look.”

All Catherine could see was the white-haired security guard, looking as though he was ready for war in his uniform of epaulettes and peaked cap. He regarded James with suspicion for a moment, before yawning and looking away.

“All these faces, ” James was saying, from beside her, and then she saw what it was that he was talking about: the long row of student ID cards slotted into the frame behind the glass. Each of them had been found on campus, or somewhere in town, and handed in here; they stared grimly out at the passersby, a lineup of missing people who were actually not missing at all.

“I love these things,” James said, running a finger along the glass slowly, as though he was reading braille. “I love the way people always look in these kinds of photographs,” he said. “The way they’re got.”

“Got?” she repeated, uncertainly.

“Yeah. The way people are caught in them. Before they have a chance to arrange their expressions the way people always want to when you photograph them. Before they even get a chance to think.”

“God, they’re ugly as sin, I think,” Catherine said, standing back from them a little; a guy from her American Poetry class passed by, and she smiled a greeting at him.

“No, no,” James said, hunched down at the window. “They’re perfect. I mean, look at this one.”

He was looking, now, at a card depicting a dour, pallid-looking girl; he was gazing at it with as much admiration as if it was the original Botticelli Venus. The girl was someone Catherine knew from around, actually, and in the flesh, she was quite pretty; probably, she hated this photo of herself. Possibly, she had lost her ID card on purpose, in the hope of getting a new, updated one, with a much more flattering headshot, but as Catherine herself had discovered the previous year, that trick did not work. They kept your photo on the computer system; you were stuck with it for the entire length of your degree. In her own, Catherine looked like a junkie: lank-haired, slack-mouthed, wearing the sloppy denim jacket she had worn almost every day since buying it for herself at the age of fifteen; she had only recently got rid of that jacket, by donating it to the Oxfam shop on Great George’s Street. Someone else was probably walking around Dublin in that jacket now, which was a strange thought; someone who was unaware of the previous life it had led. These days Catherine wore a brown suede jacket she had bought second-hand in Harlequin; its lining was ripped and stained in places, but the suede was soft and lovely, and she liked to stroke the collar of it when she was wearing it, while she was talking to people — a habit which Emmet Doyle, come to think of it, had picked up on and had mimicked laughingly on the ramp a couple of times.

“I’d love my photographs to look like these,” James said now. “I’d love them to be this truthful.”

“But they look like mug shots!”

“Not mug shots,” James said, shaking his head. “With mug shots there’s a definite style. And in mug shots they need you to be recognizable, for the next time you’re caught with your trousers down. With these, though, nothing matters. The second you’re within sight of the camera, that’s it. Boom . Got you. Don’t care what you think of you. Next!”

“I hate mine,” Catherine said sullenly.

“Oh!” James said, thrusting his hand out to her. “Can I see it?”

She snorted. “Not a hope!”

“Ah, come on. Please. Please. I want to see it. I want to make a photograph of you like these ones.”

“You must be joking! ” she said, covering her pocket with her hand, just in case he decided to delve in there. “Now I have to go, or Roberts will have the door locked. Do you know what you want to do later?”

“Oh, I’ll be around,” James said, almost dreamily, still immersed in the IDs.

He was around. He was around for coffee after her tutorial, and for lunch after her next lecture, and when they had finished their lunch he insisted that they go to Café en Seine, for a “proper coffee,” and Catherine agreed, guiltily and a little grouchily, because she was meant to be in the library preparing for her meeting with Dr. Parker, but still. How many times had she walked these streets and gone to this café without James, wishing that he had been with her in just this way? How many letters had she written to him, talking about her lectures and what she had got up to on her lunchtimes and what she had seen and what she had thought? And now he was right here, talking a blue streak about his new philosophy of portraiture, and linking her arm the way he always liked to do when they walked, and what did she have to be complaining about, exactly? What did she have to be moaning about? She could prepare for the meeting about her essay when they got back from their coffee. All she had to do was come up with a title, and five minutes glancing over the poems would be enough for that. She leaned into James, feeling again the giddiness of his still-strange presence beside her, and she nodded at something he was saying about angles, and she smiled. And then she saw him. A beautiful specimen; there was no doubt but that he could only be described as a beautiful, an absolutely fucking stunning, specimen coming towards them. A guy, their age but dressed in a suit and tie, meaning that he was probably, actually, a couple of years older, that he was probably on his lunch break from an office job. He was breathtaking: tall, and skinny, his short hair slightly scruffy, and with perfect, olive skin, and with a lovely kind of preoccupied look in his dark eyes, and with lips so full they looked as though somebody had punched them to make them that way, or kissed them, maybe — kissed them until they were swollen; and he was coming towards them now, rapidly, his hands in the pockets of his gorgeous, navy suit, his steps rushed and urgent, and Catherine did not even have to jerk James’s arm, or elbow James in the side, to get James to stop talking, to pay attention, to see what was there for the seeing, right in front of them, because James, beside her, had simply stopped walking.

“Holy shit,” he said, right there in the middle of Dawson Street, staring at the guy as though he was his long-lost brother. “Holy fucking shit.”

Catherine was mortified. “James!” she said, looking down to her feet. “Jesus!”

But James was not listening to her. He was staring; he was staring at the guy now as the guy came closer to them, and as the guy — who was somehow, mercifully, oblivious, his eyes still fixed on a point in the direction of college — passed them by.

“Do you know him?” Catherine said, stupidly.

James did not even acknowledge the question. He had turned to watch the guy go, and his mouth looked grim and his eyes almost angry, and he was saying nothing. Catherine looked at him, baffled. Was he joking? she wondered. Was this some kind of act, some kind of parody he was putting on?

“James,” she said, trying to laugh. “Are you OK?”

The guy was changing course up ahead, she saw. He veered to the left, weaving his way through the crowd, and he disappeared into the bookshop.