Belinda McKeon - Tender

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, I would. He sounds like good craic.”

“Yeah, well,” Catherine said weakly. “It’s not that simple once you get to college.”

“Course it is,” Ellen said, the ball slapping against her hand. “You just don’t know how to do it.”

You’re not even ugly: that was something else that Ellen had said about Catherine’s ongoing celibacy. Or, not celibacy — when she was out, she often shifted guys, or acquiesced to their requests to shift her; she took their tongues into her mouth and let their hands roam over the cheeks of her arse — but whatever it was. Singlehood. Gomhood, Ellen had called it when Catherine had described it that way. Catherine was tall, Ellen pointed out, and she had some nice clothes, and long hair, and her skin was all right, and so what? What was stopping her? All she had to do, Ellen explained, was to go to the cinema with someone, or to the pub, and shift him, and talk to him, and then, once she got tired of him, she could break up with him. It was just what you did. Unless you were ugly, that was.

Not even ugly: for Catherine, in a strange way, this was enough. In college this past year, it had become clearer to her that boys found her attractive; boys looked at her, they flirted with her, they told her where the parties were going to be. And living with Amy and Lorraine had meant that she had met lots of boys, too. The whole business with Conor they disapproved of; Conor, who was in one of Catherine’s English tutorials and over whom she had been stupidly mooning all year, and with whom she maintained a friendship which consisted mainly of him slagging her, and of her thinking of suitable retorts half an hour later.

The problem — although Catherine herself did not see it as a problem — was that she did not want something real. Shifting someone you actually knew; she could not imagine it. How would you look them in the eye the next day? There was just so much — liquid. Slither, that was how she thought of it; slither that had been allowed into the space between you. It was appalling. Undignified. It was way too close a range. And sex: no. Just no. She was not going there; not until she worked it out somehow, how she could do it without dying of shame. Which would involve doing it, obviously, or doing some of it, at least; but this was a glitch in her own logic which Catherine felt perfectly entitled to ignore.

It was the morning after things had finally come to a head with Conor that Catherine had first met James. She had been drinking in the Pav, which was the bar at the back of campus for the cricket players, but in which everyone drank at the end of exams — or indeed, as in the case that evening of Amy and Lorraine, before exams were over. But Catherine had sat her final paper, a disastrous art history one, and to obliterate the memory of it she had been getting good and plastered, which was hardly the best of ideas when Conor was around. By half past nine, she was slumped in a booth beside him, pulling her oldest trick, the trick she had been pulling unsuccessfully with boys she fancied for years, which was to pretend to fall asleep on the boy’s shoulder, and to hope that he would notice, and react by putting an arm around her and pulling her close.

Conor did not put an arm around her. Conor moved away from her, so abruptly that she almost smacked her head on the wood of the booth, and Conor began making jokes about Catherine to the other guys at the table, and Conor reached over and nudged Catherine — who was still, mortifyingly, pretending to be asleep, her head hanging, because she could not think what best to do — and told her that she had to get up, now; that she had to go home. And then Conor was calling Amy over, which was the last thing that Catherine wanted, because she knew that Amy would kill her stone dead for being so pathetic, and sure enough, she opened her eyes and there was Amy with a face like thunder, and there, on Catherine’s elbows, was Amy’s strong, angry grip.

“Take this kid back to Baggot Street, will you, Ames,” Conor said, “or put her on a bus or something.”

Catherine pouted, another of her old tricks, with an equally low success rate. “I don’t want to go home.”

“I’m not taking her home,” Amy said. “It’s not even ten o’clock.” She shoved Catherine in front of her, in the direction of the tiny bathroom at the front of the bar. “And my name is not Ames,” she shot back at Conor.

“Whatever, sweetheart,” Conor replied.

“Dickhead,” Amy said, as she poked Catherine in the back. “Come on, keep going.”

“To do what?”

“To puke, and then to have cold water splashed all over your silly little face by me,” Amy said. “Are you wearing mascara?”

“I told you, I don’t wear eye makeup.”

“Well, that’s another thing we’re going to need to discuss,” Amy said, as they reached the bathroom, and she pushed Catherine into a cubicle. “Bend,” she said. “Think of something that disgusts you.”

“Conor disgusts me.”

“Shut up about Conor,” Amy said. “Think of vermin or something. Worms.”

“I don’t have any problem with worms,” Catherine said. “I grew up on a farm, remember?”

“Shut up about that fucking farm as well,” Amy said. “Nobody cares that you grew up on a farm. Anyone would think you’d crawled to college straight from the famine, the way you go on. Cows and tractors, for Christ’s sake . So what? My dad has a ride-on lawn mower. Do you hear me going on about that? No, you do not. Now, come here.” She pulled Catherine closer, so that their faces were inches apart. “Open your gob.”

“What for?” Catherine whined.

“Open your mouth, ” Amy said, and when Catherine obeyed, Amy shoved two fingers down her throat, so that it came right up, the lunch from that day, and quite a lot of the cider from that evening.

“That’s better,” Amy said, her hand on the nape of Catherine’s neck. “Good girl.”

“I hate Conor,” Catherine said, coughing and rubbing at her mouth. “I hate him.”

“Then act like it,” Amy said, and she turned the cold tap on. “Now you and I are going to get plastered all over again, and when James gets home from Berlin tomorrow, we are going to spend the whole day getting pissed with him, and you are not going to waste another fucking minute of your glorious state of drunkenness talking to Conor Moran. Or even thinking about him. Now splash.” She pointed to the sink, and then, moving to the toilet, she hitched her skirt up and began to ease her knickers down.

“Do you need me to leave?” Catherine said, embarrassed.

“Splash, Catherine, and look lively about it,” Amy said, and she leaned back her head as her loud, easy flow began to come.

* * *

In Baggot Street all that year, James had been a photograph, blu-tacked to the mantelpiece mirror; in the photo he was all legs, sprawled out on the carpet in front of the couch, with Amy’s arms around his neck, and his hair a mop of red curls and waves and cowlicks; his expression was one of suffering, but in an ironic, delighted way.

Also, James was a set of drawings which every night in her sleep Catherine was keeping pressed like so many dried flowers, without even knowing she was doing so for the first couple of months. If it had not been for a film she and the girls had been watching one night close to Christmas, a film about an artist whose drawings, Amy said, were very like those of James, Catherine might never have known what she was sleeping on, but Amy went into Catherine’s bedroom and pulled the large, flat folder out from under the mattress. Lorraine cleared a space on the carpet, moving aside the tea things and the cigarette packets and the Evening Herald that had been there for a fortnight, and Amy laid down the folder and opened it up.