Belinda McKeon - Tender

“Hi, Mr. Burke,” Catherine said before she could stop herself, her head jerking upwards, which caused James to jolt beside her and follow her gaze.

“Miss Reilly,” Burke said with heavy emphasis, as though he was a butler announcing her arrival to a room, and with a little bow and a long look at James — a look, Catherine thought, that was more like a leer — he walked away.

“Who the fuck was that?” James said, taking the headphone from his ear and watching as Burke made for the Sligo train.

“A neighbor,” Catherine said. Her heart was thumping; the blush was searing itself into her cheeks, postponed by the shock but coming on fully now.

“He looked like he was coming to claim your soul.”

“Don’t look at him.”

“We hope — that you choke — that you cho-o-oke,” James sang in a low, rasping whisper, and Catherine elbowed him.

“Stop,” she said. “It’s bad enough.”

James snorted. “What’s bad enough? Those trousers? Did you see the state of them? The arse like an old turf bag.”

“It’s just bad enough,” Catherine said, and she lowered her head to indicate that she was giving all her attention, again, to the song.

Sure enough, two mornings later, which was Catherine’s first summer Sunday at home, she noticed her mother looking at her awkwardly, in the way that meant she had something to say. Catherine braced herself. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cornflakes and Coco Pops mixed together the way she liked them. It was after eleven, and because she had not dragged herself out of bed earlier, she would now have to go with her father to one o’clock Mass; the others had already been. Catherine had been out the night before, in Fallon’s and then on to Blazer’s with some of the girls she had known in school, but it had been the usual shit: bumping into people she never saw anymore, and having bitty conversations with them, and then worrying whether her ID would be enough to get her into the club — it was just her luck that now that she had finally turned eighteen, all the clubs in town had adopted an over-nineteens policy, and getting in depended on whether you knew the bouncer, or on whether he decided he fancied you, or on whether you could plead with him, as Catherine had eventually had to do the night before, pointing out to him that she wasn’t even drunk, that she could never get properly drunk in Longford, because her father always insisted on collecting her, no matter how late she was out — parking, sometimes, right outside the nightclub door. She reckoned the bouncer had felt sorry for her; that that was why he had let her in. Certainly he had looked at her, just before nodding her through, with something like pity in his eyes.

And then Blazer’s had been rubbish, as usual. Cringey dancing to songs from Trainspotting; girls who’d been in her Science and Geography classes trying to look like they were off their heads on E when all they’d had was eight bottles of Mug Shot. Clodhopper morons asking if you wanted a shift, the saliva already flecking and bubbling at the corners of their mouths. Anyone half-decent-looking already getting the face worn off them in a corner, and David Donaghy, who’d ignored Catherine’s attentions on the school bus from September 1991 to June 1996, ignoring her all over again, and then shifting Lisa Mulligan, who Catherine was pretty sure was his second cousin. Catherine’s old schoolfriend Jenny screaming, “You need to get pissed!” at her, over and over, and then falling asleep slumped against the mirrored walls, and then shifting David Donaghy when his cousin was finished with him. Two o’clock could not come quickly enough. Catherine had almost been glad of the sight of her father’s Sierra pulled up tight to the steps at the front.

But then he had been silent all the way home, so Catherine knew that Burke had said something to him. There was no danger of her father raising the subject with her himself — the rules might come from him, but that did not mean that he had to articulate them, at least not with Catherine and Ellen, and definitely not when they related, in even the most peripheral of ways, to what Catherine and Ellen might get up to with boys — but in the morning, Catherine’s mother would pause at the kitchen counter, just as she was pausing now, and she would glance in Catherine’s direction, and she would clear her throat: a short, almost apologetic rev.

Catherine looked up to meet it; her mother, folding a tea towel with great precision, looked away again. On the radio, a Shannonside presenter said something about the button accordion. Fuck the button accordion, Catherine thought.

“Are you seeing any of your friends from college over the summer?” her mother said.

“Doubt it,” Catherine shrugged. “Most of them are gone traveling to Germany and America and stuff.” This was not true, but it made some point that Catherine had suddenly found herself wanting very badly to make: that her friends had actual lives. That people her age were out there, doing things for themselves, living independently and freely. This was not actually true, for the most part, since most of her friends from college were also spending the summer working in the towns closest to where they had grown up, and were back living with their parents, but this detail, Catherine had decided, was completely irrelevant. They could have been traveling; that was the point. If they had wanted to travel— this was the point — they would have been able to. Allowed to. Zoe, that girl from Catherine’s art history tutorial, was in Italy, for instance — Zoe was the kind of person who would think nothing of heading off to Italy by herself for the whole summer. And Conor had made noises about bar work in Chicago, though he had not actually gone in the end due to lack of funds, but he had intended to. And James: James had been in Germany for the entire year! Her mother needed to know that Catherine had friends like this. Except that she did not need to know — it would not be helpful or useful for her to know — the actual details, at least not about Conor and James, because that would lead to too many questions — which was precisely, Catherine remembered, what was about to happen now. She sighed heavily.

“What’s wrong with you?” her mother said, her suspicions raised.

“Nothing.”

“I’m just trying to make simple conversation, for God’s sake.”

“I’m not stopping you.”

Her mother took a deep breath. “I was just wondering,” she said slowly, clearly having to work to stop the words coming out sharply, “whether you have any other friend? Anyone in particular?”

“ Other friend?” Catherine said mockingly. She could not stop herself. When she was home, when she was talking to her mother, she turned into a fifteen-year-old again. It was ridiculous; she needed to snap out of it. She cleared her throat. “What do you mean, any other friend?” she said, more evenly.

Her mother shrugged. She had on the striped navy and white top that Catherine loved on her, its vivid white, its dark navy bands; the sleeves were pushed up on her arms, which were already growing brown — Catherine wished she had inherited her mother’s olive complexion rather than her father’s gene for sunburn. On her mother’s wrist was the Swatch watch that Catherine and the others had given her for her last birthday, her forty-fifth, the strap splayed with colors, the tiny mirrored face glinting, now, as she turned the tea towel again in her hands, laid it down on the table to be folded the other way. Forty-five; her mother was forty-five . It seemed impossible, but it was nothing beside the thought that in another handful of years, she would be fifty. Fifty. Her mother, slim and tanned and brown-haired; her mother who wore jeans and runners, who had recently bought a new pair of sunglasses to wear in the car. How could she be nearly fifty? And as for Catherine’s father, that was completely outrageous — he was ten years older, and sixty was not even an age Catherine was willing to countenance for one of her parents. Sixty was, was it not, the point after which nobody much remarked if something happened to you? If, one morning or one evening, you simply slipped away? What the hell was she supposed to do if that happened to one of her parents? It panicked her, the thought of it; it kept her awake at night, staring at the wall. She had told James about this, of course, but James had come nowhere close to understanding; James had thought she was mad. Or, actually, it was not madness of which he had accused her, but something else — something she had forgotten now, a word she had not heard before — dependent somehow, dependent on them in the same way they were dependent on her — anyway, he had given her a right lecture over the phone that evening. He did not even know exactly how old his own parents were, he had said; sixties, maybe? Late fifties? Catherine had been astonished. For his parents to be that old, and for him not to be riddled with the anxiety of their mortality, with the knowledge that the clock was counting down on the very fact of them — how could he go around like that? How could he have felt relaxed enough, for instance, to have gone off to Berlin? Oh, for fuck’s sake, Catherine, James had spluttered, and then Catherine had changed the subject. They were so alike, the two of them, so alike in every way — and yet, there were moments when she saw the ways in which they were so different. And she did not like those moments. She found herself moving quickly to chase those moments away.