Belinda McKeon - Tender

IT HAS BEEN five long years since Ireland’s First Gay, former college English professor Senator David Norris, convinced Ireland’s Biggest Culchie, then-Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, to make it legal for gays and lesbians to live their homosexual lifestyles openly and without fear of being arrested, discriminated against or kicked to death in an alleyway without anyone even thinking it necessary to ring the Guards.

At the time, the people of Ireland were assured that decriminalization was a mere formality, and that everything would continue as normal. A few brazen gays would surface here and there in the initial months, but like all attention-seekers, they would slither off again, we were assured.

“Normal,” after all, equals silence and invisibility in any civilized society, and it was taken for granted that Irish gays would toe this line if they knew what was good for them.

However, this scenario has not come to pass, and here on campus we have found ourselves the unhappy petri dish for what is becoming an increasingly sinister social experiment. Being, as it is, a default hothouse for a proportion of the first generation to come to maturity since the change in law, college was perhaps inevitably going to bear the brunt of the resultant explosion in what the Equality Mafia so laughingly term “freedom,” but Muck ’s intensive investigations today reveal the shocking full extent of this crisis.

* * *

There were quotes from “Luke,” a student union insider who had been shocked by the sight of two men sitting with their knees almost touching in the library, and from “Mary,” a first-year Irish and History student who was suffering the crippling social repercussions of having been spotted by an old schoolmate standing at the LGB Society stand during Freshers’ Week, lured there by the promise of free rainbow-colored M&Ms. To illustrate “the profound damage inflicted on normal campus relations between the sexes,” there was a quote from an unnamed senior lecturer, who reported that it was now almost impossible to extort blow jobs from female colleagues and students by threatening to expose them as lesbians; there was simply not the same level of fear, he said. More than one student had quite cheerfully told him that she actually was a lesbian. A senior TN source, meanwhile, revealed that he had been deprived of the location in which he had always sold pills when LGBSoc had been granted larger rooms at the start of this college year. And a college counselor complained that she was experiencing a severe downturn in gay and lesbian students who wanted to kill themselves. It was just not on, Emmet wrote in his concluding paragraph. Freedom was one thing, but this was getting out of hand. He was calling on the Provost to institute a college-wide Straight Week as a matter of urgency. Awareness needed to be raised. Order needed to be restored.

* * *

James loved it.

James read it over and over, and the first time he almost cried with laughter, and the second time he laughed more quietly, and the third time and the fourth time and the fifth time, he did not laugh at all.

“It’s really good,” he said to Catherine, nodding over it again. “It’s really very, very good. It’s clever, I mean. This line about what’s normal…”

He read her the line.

“Yeah, yeah, I saw it,” Catherine said.

“It’s brilliant.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, no. I have to say I didn’t think he had it in him, young Robert Emmet.”

Catherine said nothing.

He glanced up. “Did anything ever happen between you two, in the end?”

* * *

She slammed the door.

* * *

She was tempted to write it on the wall of the publications office, what she thought of Emmet’s column. She was tempted to leave it there, in huge black letters.

But she said it to his face instead.

Strain in it. Hurt in it, as he tried to keep grinning his grin.

But his grin would not stay with him.

And that was the first time she had seen that, she realized: Emmet’s face, without any kind of smile.

Something in his eyes that made her heart want to give in to something huge.

But, what, was she supposed to account for other people’s feelings now as well?

* * *

James was going home for the weekend, he announced. His parents had known for a while now that he was back in Dublin, and he could not put it off any longer, the visit. It would be fine, he said. It would be fine. It would be his mother pretending nothing had happened, and his father not knowing that anything had happened, anyway, and he would try to take a few photographs around the place, maybe — because he really needed, by now, to start preparing properly for Lisa’s show — and he would have a couple of pints with his brother, and he would be back on Monday or Tuesday, and he would see her then.

And she should go to the ball, he said. He knew she still had her ticket. She should go to Jenny Vander’s and buy that dress.

“With what? ”

“You have the mouth,” he said, laughing.

* * *

“Oh, fuck off.”

* * *

But no, no, she should go to the ball, he said, and she should have a good time, and she should do whatever a good time entailed.

And he would see her Monday. Or Tuesday. And he would call her at some stage. Of course, of course he would call her. Sure he would have plenty to tell her. He would have plenty to report.

* * *

He took the morning train.

By evening:

The train now boarding on Platform Four is the 19:45 service to Sligo. Calling at Maynooth, Enfield, Mullingar, Mostrim, Longford, Dromod—

Carrick-on-Shannon station, a quarter past ten. Around about now, the others would be walking through Front Gate into the square and the cobblestones lit up in all the pinks and blues.

Fifty pence in her pocket for the pay phone. James’s mother answered; surprise and then delight in her voice as she called out to him.

Jem! Jem! You’ll never guess who’s here!

“Oh, he’ll be thrilled,” she said, coming back to the mouthpiece, to Catherine. “Oh, he’ll be only thrilled.”

* * *

(Her accent making Catherine think, for a second, of Liam.)

* * *

Because how could she have got through a whole weekend?

* * *

(James’s face, as he beckoned her from the car twenty minutes later, was something, but it was not thrilled.)

(But no matter. No matter. She would bring him right around.)

* * *

(And he looked beautiful even when he was angry. He looked beautiful even when he was grim.)

* * *

No, his day had not been a good one, he said as he drove back to Carrigfinn. No, it had not. His mother, interrogating him all day, that was why. About what? Well, about everything, really. But mostly, since Catherine had asked, about Catherine.

About Catherine and him.

* * *

(If Catherine had been in the driving seat she would, at that moment, have run the car off the road.)

* * *

“About me? ”

(No response.)

“But why? You mean, about why I came here tonight?”

(No, no. These questions had come long before James and his mother had known of Catherine’s arrival. Catherine’s arrival had only consolidated, for James’s mother, all the grand ideas in her mind.)

“I don’t…”

(She did not what? )

* * *

Him, banging on the steering wheel.

Her, making herself sound small and vulnerable and frightened, so that he would not continue to talk to her in this way.

* * *

Because, it turned out, his mother had been praying for Catherine. Yes, praying for her. Praying for her, or for someone like her; it was not personal — it did not need to be her. No offense.