Belinda McKeon - Tender

“Well,” her mother said now, more pointedly; Catherine had not given her any answer to her question. “Well? Is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anyone you—”

“No,” Catherine said, pushing back from the table.

“Are you sure? ”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Catherine said. “And I think that tea towel’s folded now.”

“Don’t be so bloody smart!”

“I’m not being smart.”

“I’m only trying to have a simple conversation with you!”

“About Pat fucking Burke,” Catherine spat.

“Catherine!” Her mother glanced, horrified, towards the open back door. “Watch what you’re saying!”

“Well? That’s it, isn’t it?” Catherine said, crossing to the sink angrily. “He saw me with my friend up at the train station, and he told Daddy, and now I’m in trouble, and I didn’t even do anything.” Forget fifteen: she sounded ten, now, and she was dismayed at how easily this had happened, at how automatically her voice had become this babyish whine; but in the next moment, she had decided that she was perfectly entitled to whine, and that she might as well go the whole hog, and she banged down her bowl. “It’s not fair, ” she said, folding her arms.

“Stop that, Catherine,” her mother said warningly. She put one hand on the table and the other on the counter, blocking Catherine’s way to the door. “I just want to talk to you.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Catherine said, and she tried for a contemptuous laugh which would make clear her feelings about all of this, but as soon as she started it she realized that it would come out as a sob, so she swallowed it back down. “Pat Burke is nothing but a creep. Everyone hates him, and yet you all still listen to him.”

Her mother raised an eyebrow, as though to say she could not argue with this, but nor could she openly agree. “He says he saw you with your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Well, you were seen holding hands with him, whatever he is.”

“We were listening to my Walkman, for Christ’s sake!”

“Well, if you’re going to be so public about it, you can’t be surprised when somebody sees you.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God. We weren’t doing anything! He’s a friend! He’s an old friend of Amy and Lorraine’s, and he was going in the direction of the train station anyway, and I wanted to tell him about this song — this song I like—”

She stopped. She could hear how unconvincing it sounded. And, also, she was reeling a little, in shock a little, that already she had pushed an untruth into the story; James had not, after all, been going in the direction of the train station anyway. He had gone there especially for her. To sit with her. To hug her goodbye. To wave her off from the platform, with his arms going madly, not giving a shit who was seeing him or laughing at him, doing it with such glee and enthusiasm that Catherine had cringed. But she could not tell her mother this; she could not tell her mother any of it. Her mother would not understand. Her mother, like her father, had surely never known this kind of friendship, the kind of friendship in which you did not want to waste a single minute, in which every minute was a chance to talk about something more—

“Look, Catherine,” her mother said, shaking her head. “We don’t expect you not to have boyfriends. You’re old enough for that now. You don’t have to tell me lies.”

“Oh, thanks very much,” Catherine said, the words tart with bitterness. “That’s very good of you.”

“I told you not to be so bloody smart!”

“I’m not being smart,” Catherine said, and she slammed her hands down on the edge of the sink. There had to be a better way to do this, she thought; there had to be a better way to argue and protest and stand up for yourself. A dignified way; a grown-up way. She would ask James about it the next time she talked to him, she decided; James would know. James would know how to keep your voice level in a situation like this, and how to sound confident, and how to come out the winner with just a few carefully chosen words.

“I hate that old prick!” she shouted suddenly across the kitchen, and then she burst into ragged, jerky sobs. Her mother rolled her eyes.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Catherine. Get a hold of yourself. You’re eighteen years old.”

“I know I’m eighteen!” Catherine wailed. “That’s my whole point! James is my friend! He’s a friend of the girls, and he was in Germany all year, and he’s back now, I mean just for the summer, and we were listening to music, and I was just saying hello to him at the train station, and I’m sick of not being able to do what I want!”

“Catherine,” her mother said, and she actually laughed. “Stop being so ridiculous. Of course you can”—she made a face—“ listen to music with whoever the hell you want. Or say hello to them, or whatever it is that you call it now. Daddy was just upset that he had to hear about it from Pat Burke. That Pat Burke was able to tell him something he didn’t already know. And something I didn’t know.”

“Oh my God,” Catherine said, putting her hands to her head. “Oh my God. I can’t take this. I can’t—”

“Well,” her mother said, laying the tea towel flat on the table and smoothing it as though it was a map she was intending to read. “You’re getting very bloody worked up about something you claim to be nothing at all.”

James was not her boyfriend. No one was her boyfriend. There had been no boyfriend while she was at school, and there had been no boyfriend during the long summer after her Leaving Cert, and there had been no boyfriend during the first year of college, and there was no boyfriend now. How could there be, when she was back living at home? Which was not an acceptable excuse, according to Catherine’s sister Ellen, who was sixteen, and who therefore lived at home all of the time, and who did not let this stop her from having boyfriends, and as many boyfriends as she felt like. It was not that their parents were any less strict with Ellen than they had been with Catherine; it was just that Ellen ignored their strictness, or rather worked around it, with the skill of someone dismantling a bomb. Especially now that she was going into her Leaving Cert year, she explained to Catherine, there were simply certain experiences she refused to go without. So, if she wanted to go to the pub where the people her age drank, she made up a story about maths grinds at a friend’s house, and when their father collected her four or five hours later, she was ready and waiting, chewing gum to hide the bang of cider and equipped with a perfect explanation for why her clothes smelled of smoke. She was never asked for the explanation. Their father, Ellen told Catherine, needed so much to believe that she would not do such a thing, would not go boozing and smoking and shifting fellas in an alleyway in town, that he simply went on doing that: he believed. Their mother knew; their mother, Ellen said, had come into the bedroom and ranted at her on more than one occasion, but Ellen had gone on denying everything, and doing everything, and she suspected, deep down, that their mother respected her for that.

“If she saw Shane Keegan, she’d want me to go with him,” she’d said, setting out her case to Catherine earlier that year. “He’s a complete ride. You couldn’t pass up a chance like that.”

“Yeah, right,” Catherine had scoffed. “If they found out you were shifting one of the Keegans, they’d ground you until you were twenty-five.”

“They could try,” Ellen had said, bouncing a tennis ball off the bedroom wall. “Anyway, one of us has to be shifting fellas. It’s a complete waste of time you being up at college if you’re not even going to get together with anyone. I would have got together with that Conor fella ages ago if I was you.”