Belinda McKeon - Tender

“Come on,” Zoe said again, pulling her up by the shoulders. “I’m staging an intervention, Citsers. Tea.”

As Catherine had known she would do, Zoe steered the conversation around again to the subject of Emmet, and to the question of how things were between Emmet and Catherine, as Zoe put it, “post-Stag’s.”

“Which is not quite as promising as ‘post-shags,’” she said, arching an eyebrow, “but it’s a start.”

“I’m telling you, Zoe. You’re barking up the wrong tree. It was just a drink. We were talking about TN stuff. There’s nothing more than that happening. How could there be?”

“Why wouldn’t there be?”

“Because he’s Emmet. He’s a messer.”

“He’s cute. And he clearly likes you. He’s been flirting with you all year.”

“I told you, Zoe, it’s not flirting. He’s Emmet . He’s The Doyle. It’s just the way he goes on. Everything is a joke with him. Everything is a parody.”

“You seemed to be having a perfectly nice time with him in the Stag’s.”

“Yeah, but only because we were messing. That’s exactly my point. There can only be so much of him slagging me about being a culchie and me slagging him about having gone to a private school.”

“Well. You don’t have to talk. You can just shag.”

“Oh, God,” Catherine groaned. “Can we talk about something else, please? Do we have to spend all of our time talking about boys?”

“We don’t spend all of our time talking about boys,” Zoe said, but the accusation seemed to rattle her, because she stirred her tea for a long moment, staring at its milky surface. She sighed. “How’s James, then?”

Catherine coughed out a laugh. “James is a boy.”

Zoe made a face. “Yeah, but you know what I mean. How did his photo shoot with Aidan go? Any chance of a bit of hot boy-on-boy action there?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Zoe!” Catherine said, more forcefully than she had intended; she had caught the attention of several people at nearby tables, and Zoe’s eyes were wide with injured surprise. “Sorry,” she muttered, but Zoe did not even blink.

“What was that for? You’re not seriously feeling possessive of Aidan, are you?”

She spluttered. “Oh my God. Zoe!”

But Zoe’s expression had suddenly changed; she was looking over Catherine’s shoulder, and had assumed a huge, cheeky smile. “Stop talking about him,” she said, out of the corner of her mouth, waving now, and Catherine turned to see Aidan striding down the steps of the coffee dock, waving back in his laconic way.

“Oh, great,” Catherine said, reaching for her tea.

Aidan was looking well today, even handsome, wearing a checked shirt she hadn’t seen before and a pair of black jeans, and he had shaved, which was not something he always bothered to do, and she wondered if he had cleaned himself up because he was getting his photograph taken, which was an idea that ought to have made her laugh, but that instead, like almost everything at the moment, just made her feel a strange mixture of irritation and anxiety. She wondered again if she could sneak off and meet up with James at an earlier time than the one they had arranged; she felt intensely the desire to be with him, talking to him, rather than here with Zoe and Aidan. But she pushed it back. It was not something she should listen to.

The shoot had gone well, Aidan said, though he did not really think of it as having been a shoot, just a half hour reading on a bench in the rose garden while James stepped around him with a camera clicking. James, Aidan said, was a bit of a perfectionist — which translated, upon further cross-examination from Zoe, into James having insisted on continuing to take photographs even when it had started to rain, and into his having asked Aidan not to put his copy of Housman away even though it was getting wet.

“What a monster, ” Zoe said, sniggering. “You should sue.”

“Oh, I’m sure the end result will be worth it,” Aidan said, putting a boot-clad foot up on the chair in front of him. “He seems to know what he’s doing.” He glanced at Catherine. “He’s photographed you, I presume?”

Catherine hesitated; in fact, while James had photographed her several times the previous summer, he had yet to take her photograph as part of this new series; several times he had mentioned his intention to do so, but had not yet got around to it. But she found that she did not want to admit this to Aidan. “Yeah,” she said casually, as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. “A few times. Mostly back in the flat, you know. There’s good light there.”

“Oh, he said to me this morning that he doesn’t really like shooting indoors,” Aidan said. “Still, you work with what you’ve got, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said, not looking at either of them.

“James says he’s hoping to get his own place soon, actually,” he said, and now she looked at him; now she looked at him as though he had insulted her. “I said I’d keep an ear out for him. My landlady has a couple of houses up around the Liberties. Bought them for a pittance ten years ago. If only we’d all had that kind of foresight.”

“I was nine ten years ago,” Catherine said, because she was feeling a sudden, very angry urge to dig at Aidan, and a dig about how much older he was seemed like the easiest way to get at him. It also carried with it, she realized in the same moment, a reminder of how much younger she was, and therefore an intimation of his sleaziness and lack of scruples in having come on to her that night the previous term. Which was ridiculous, because this was not at all how she felt about having snogged Aidan, but right at this moment, she found, she did not much care for the facts of the thing. She cared about the jagged bolt of shock and distress he had sent hurtling into her with his remark about James moving out of Baggot Street, and with his casual declaration that he intended to help James move out of Baggot Street, and she wanted to hurt him.

But it did not work: Aidan merely shrugged. “Could have used your Communion money,” he said, flashing her a grin. “The pair of you could probably have got a cottage on Cork Street if you’d gone in together.”

Zoe laughed. “What do you think, Cits? The pair of us as flatmates? We could rent a bedroom to James and insist on vetting all his gentleman callers.”

“I have to go,” Catherine said, pushing up and away from the table. “I forgot, I have a TN meeting.”

“Oooh,” Zoe started to croon, but Catherine did not stay to listen to the rest of it.

The morning after the argument with James, Catherine had woken to discover the bed empty beside her, and to find that Lorraine and Cillian were still asleep in the sitting room, and Amy alone in her bedroom, and that there was nobody in the kitchen or the bathroom or even in the hall; James’s bedclothes were just where Lorraine had left them the night before, and it was half past eight in the morning, and James was gone. She had paced her room, and then the kitchen, and then the corridor; she had stared at the pay phone in the hallway, willing it into usefulness. But who could she call? He would not have gone home to Carrigfinn; he had told her on Sunday as they had walked in the park, Catherine still hungover from the party, that he had no intention of going home to Carrigfinn. They did not even know that he was back in Ireland. Zoe? Would he have gone to Zoe’s house in Stillorgan? That was impossible. James turning up on Zoe’s doorstep, before nine in the morning; there was no way he was going to do that. So then where? Was he just wandering the streets? Checked into a hostel? He still had some money left over from the wages Malachy had paid him, but it was mostly in marks; he had not had the chance to convert it yet, and anyway, it was not much, and he had been meaning to look for bar work to have something else to live on—