Belinda McKeon - Tender

“James,” Catherine said quietly. “I didn’t mean it like that. I know you—”

“You know what? ” James almost spat at her. His eyes were huge.

She shook her head rapidly. “I didn’t mean it.”

“You know nothing, Catherine,” he said, not to her, but to the ash from his cigarette as it fell to the floor. “You know nothing about me. What do you know about me? What have I told you?”

Again, she shook her head. “I know plenty,” she said. “I know we haven’t talked about Berlin yet; but I read your letters — I know it was hard for you. I’ve wanted to talk to you about it; but we can’t do it now. We can’t do it tonight. Let’s go to bed. Can we? Let’s go to bed, and—”

He coughed out an angry laugh. “So you’re telling me now when to go to bed as well as when to get up?”

“James,” she said, the word barely sounding like his name at all; in her shock, it had slipped out before she had even finished saying it.

“What?” he snapped, glaring. “What do you want from me? You want me to be funny for you? You want me to be great fucking fun?”

“James!”

“I’m fucking exhausted, Catherine. I’m completely worn out. I’m only three days home, and I can already remember why I left here, and it’s not as though I can go back to that other hole either — so tell me, what the fuck is it, exactly, that I’m supposed to do?”

“Just be here,” she said, uselessly.

“Be here,” he nodded, as though seriously considering this. “And listen to everyone’s plans for me, is it? And look at all the gorgeous fucking fellas that everyone wants to giggle over with me. And look with you all at these fellas, and know that while you can disappear off to the pub with them, for me, there is not a chance, not a single fucking chance…”

His voice cracked. Catherine, almost crying herself now, tried to go towards him, but he held up his hands to tell her to stay where she was.

“I watch everyone, Catherine. I watch them live their lives, and I watch them meet the people they can love, and I watch them go on their dates, and take over sitting rooms to have sex with them, and I — what am I supposed to do?”

“James, you’re only just home! There’ll be—”

“There’ll be what? There’ll be what, Catherine? There’ll be Zoe’s friend from England coming for a visit sometime, maybe this year, maybe next? There’ll be some poor fucker as pathetic as I am from the Society —oh, thank you so much, Catherine, by the way, for pointing me towards the Society —because sure if I can use the college darkroom, I can use the college queer society, and sure then everything will be just perfect, won’t it, just as long as I can remember not to let anybody outside the Society see. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that how it goes?”

“What about that guy in Hodges Figgis today?” she blurted, not quite believing she was bringing him up. “He seemed…”

James looked at her, seeming astonished. “He seemed what?”

Catherine shrugged helplessly. “He scratched his eyebrow — I thought maybe…”

“Are you trying to mock me, Catherine?” he said, his face screwed up horribly. “Is that meant to be funny?”

“No! I didn’t know — I thought that maybe you and that guy were giving each other the eye or something. You disappeared.”

“I disappeared to stare at him, Catherine,” he said coldly. “To stalk him. That’s what I do; that’s what I’ve been doing for five years now, and what I made into a fucking art form in Berlin, and what I’ll be spending my time doing here, too, by the looks of it. I stare at them, and they’re either completely oblivious to me or they’re completely disgusted.” He shook his head. “ He scratched his eyebrow. Jesus!”

“James,” she said, finally humiliated into tears; she sobbed like a child, holding her fists up to her mouth. “Please. It’s not like that. It’ll be OK here, I promise you. It’ll get better, I promise.”

But he bent his head, and put his own fists to his forehead, and he pounded. And Catherine felt so desperate for him, so frightened for him, that she knew she could not go towards him. She knew she could not put her arms around him. She did not try to comfort him; she knew he did not want to be comforted. She knew he did not want for her to attempt to cover over his aloneness. He pounded his own skull, and he clutched at his own hair, and when he was finished, his breath long and ragged, she told him that it was time for them to sleep.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to be taking up room in your bed.”

She had not meant that he would come into her bed; she had meant that he would sleep on her floor, but she could hardly point this out, she felt now, and anyway, it did not matter. It was sleep. It was James. He was not going to jump her; he was not going to wake her up in the night, pushing his impatient dick into her thigh. He was going to rest, and she was going to help him, and in the morning everything was going to be better — of this Catherine was more determined than she had ever been of anything before.

* * *

Later in the night, she woke, and instantly realized why: she was freezing. James had taken all of the quilt. Gently, she tried to pull it from him, and he grunted; she tried again, and he shouldered her away. In the half-light, shivering now, she peered at him, holding onto her duvet — as determined a sleeper, it struck her, as he was determined in everything else. His face was so delicate as she watched him: the fineness of his cheekbones, the fullness of his lips, the dark slice of shadow beneath his chin. He was beautiful, it struck her, something she had never seen in him before; he was not handsome in the way that she usually found men handsome, but he was something else, something fuller, something so much more solid. It was not right, that nobody should look at this face the way she was looking at it now, from this angle, in this intimacy; it was not right that nobody should lie beside James and watch him while he hogged their pillow and their duvet. She shivered again and this time grabbed at the quilt much more forcefully; but still James would not yield it, so she nudged him, hard, with her elbow. He cried out, and it was a sound so full of disbelief and outrage that Catherine could not help laughing.

“What did you do to me?” James said, lifting his face to her; he sounded as panicked and confused as though he had woken on top of a moving train. “What did you do to me?”

“Give me the duvet,” Catherine said, tugging it away from him. “You’re keeping it all to yourself.”

“You didn’t have to hit me,” he said, in a tone of deep grievance.

“I didn’t hit you,” she said. “I couldn’t wake you.”

“You hit me.”

“Go back to sleep,” she said, and he did.

Come on.” Zoe’s voice interrupted Catherine as she sat in the library the following week, trying to prepare for her Michael Doonan interview. “You’ve been hunched up at this desk all day. Time for a cuppa.”

“I can’t,” Catherine said, gesturing to the books on her desk.

“Engines of Everything,” Zoe said, picking one of them up. “What a pretentious bloody title. I’m taking you away from it. You look like you haven’t had fresh air in days.”

It was not that she had gone days without fresh air — quite the opposite; she had spent most of the last two weeks slacking off to spend time with James — but it did not surprise Catherine to hear Zoe say that she looked unwell. She felt heavy, and sluggish, and as though she was dragging herself around — and yet at the same time, she felt in her limbs the constant jitter of something like panic. She had been sitting here, trying to read Doonan’s books, but on each attempt a line was all she had been able to manage, or two, before the words and the page in front of her had dissolved. She did not know what was wrong with her; it was as though she was restless and yet paralyzed at the same time. James was in the darkroom, developing photographs he had taken of Aidan that morning outside the Old Library, and she was meeting him at four o’clock to head home, but for ages now she had not been able to stop looking at her watch, seeing how long was left to go; she was getting absolutely nothing done. Just when Zoe had come up to her, she had been considering whether she could get away with going over to the darkroom, letting herself into House Four and up the stairs, into the PhotoSoc offices; could she think of some plausible reason for showing up like that? That she had wanted to see how the work was going? But she could not, surely, just go into the darkroom; she would let the light in, and destroy the photographs, and — no, she could not do that, of course she could not do that. But why did she even want to go up there at all? And yet she did; she wanted to see him. It was ridiculous. She would see him at four o’clock, which was, now, hardly even an hour away. She would have the whole evening with him. And she had had pretty much the whole week with him, and the week before that; they had spent most of every day sitting in cafés, or on the Green, or going to exhibitions, or looking around the shops. And not much more than a week ago, she had been feeling crowded by him; not much more than a week ago, she had been wishing that he would do more of his own thing, and leave her to hers. And now — this. But what was this? What was this feeling? What were these feelings, because there was more than one of them: there were several of them, and it was by them, now, that she was crowded; it was by them, now, that she was feeling cornered, feeling overwhelmed. James—