Belinda McKeon - Tender

“You’re like a cat we have at home,” he said sharply.

“Sorry,” Catherine laughed, pretending confusion. “I was miles away.”

“You were not,” he said. “You were having a good old look.”

She felt herself blush. “I was not .”

“Arrah, well,” he said, shrugging. “Look away, Catherine. Sure beggars can’t be choosers.”

She laughed again, but he ignored her, turning back to his paper, and really, she thought now, he was a bit bloody rude. After all, this was her house, at least until Friday, and he was only visiting, and so he should be putting in a bit of an effort, shouldn’t he? And yet it was very clear to Catherine that he was not at all interested in talking to her, not trying at all to think of topics for conversation. Instead, here she was, her mind clacking through possibilities like a panicked secretary, instantly discarding each one: too stupid, too boring, too bland, not something she knew anything about. And there he was, turning the pages of his newspaper. Like he was the only one in the world who could read the fucking Irish Times .

“So, Catherine,” he said, and he closed the paper swiftly and folded it over. “Tell me how your year has been.”

“My…year?”

He nodded, leaning back in his chair, looking at her encouragingly. “Have you enjoyed your first year of college?”

Catherine stared at him. How was she supposed to answer a question like that? Was there any need for him to be so blunt? There were other ways in, after all. There was such a thing as small talk.

“You sound like one of my aunts,” she heard herself saying.

He looked taken aback. “Well,” he said, after a moment, and there was a high, presumably joking, primness in his tone, “what’s wrong with that? I’m sure your aunts are very respectable women.”

“You haven’t met them,” she said, nonsensically. What was wrong with her? What was she even saying to him?

“All in good time, Catherine,” James smirked, and he rapped on the table. “So. College. Tell me. What are your subjects?”

“English and art history.”

He looked at her more closely. “Really?”

“Yeah. I know you’re—”

“So you know your art.”

“Not really,” Catherine said, which was an understatement; art history might as well have been theoretical physics for all the headway she felt she had managed to make with it this year, and English even more so. It had been a tough year, a year in which most of what she had had to study, and the ways in which she had been expected to study it, had come as a shock. The exams this past fortnight had frightened the life out of her. Probably, she had passed them, but in some cases this would not be by very much; she had written a mortifyingly bad answer to the Pride and Prejudice question on her Literature and Sexualities paper, three pages of waffle, mainly about the fact that Darcy had not seemed bothered by Elizabeth’s tan. All through school, Catherine had pulled in As and Bs without much effort, but the weeks before these exams had made her realize that she knew hardly anything about, well, knowledge, at all. In school, she had been able to learn reams of stuff off by heart, and to throw it down on paper when necessary, but in college, that was not how the business of learning worked: in college, they expected you to use your mind. Did she even have a mind? she had found herself wondering, this year, on more than one occasion. It was so disheartening. To discover that, actually, what you’d had all this time, been praised for all this time — what had got you off the hook all this time — was not, after all, intelligence, but a shallow robotic skill.

“I mean, yeah, I’ve enjoyed it,” she said now with a shrug. “Not the fucking exams, though.”

“My God, Catherine,” he said, feigning shock. “I hope you don’t talk like that to your aunts.”

She laughed. There was a pleasure in hearing him use her name; it was so direct. It was somehow a higher level of attention than she usually got from people; almost cheekily personal. Intimate, that was what it was. And yet pulled clear of intimacy, at the last second, by the reins of irony which seemed to control everything he said, by his constant closeness to mockery. She found herself wanting more of it, and she found, too, that it held a challenge: to edge him away from that mockery towards something warmer. To make him see that he was wrong in whatever decision he had made about her, about her silliness, about her childishness, about whatever it was he had, by now, set down for her in his mind.

He yawned. “Jesus, I’m knackered,” he said, hanging his head.

“Did you have a long flight?”

He looked at her. “Flight?” he almost spat.

“When you came—”

“I didn’t fucking fly . I’ve just spent three days in the cab of a lorry.”

“Three days? ”

“The driver had to go all over Europe making deliveries.”

“Oh.”

“Holland. Every back road in Belgium. Sleeping in the cab at bloody rest stops. The snores off the fucker. France. And then pegged out on O’Connell Bridge half an hour ago like a Bosnian refugee.”

“Oh.”

“I fucking wish I’d had the price of a flight. A friend of my old fella arranged the lift for me. That’s how I got over there in the first place, and it’s how I’ll be going back. It’s free.”

“Oh, well,” Catherine said. “I’ve actually never been on a plane.”

He looked at her. “I can well believe it,” he said.

She felt a blush sting her cheeks. Fuck off, she wanted to say, but she had only just met him; she could hardly say that, could she? Or, How many planes have you been on? but that would just let him know how much he had bothered her. She sat there, stewing in her own silence. After a moment, he looked at her and sighed.

“Ah, don’t mind me, Catherine. I’m sorry. I’m just grumpy from the journey. It was a nightmare.”

“It must have been awful,” she said, carefully.

“It was awful. You’d want to have heard your man, the driver. Blacks, blacks, blacks. Faggots, faggots, faggots. Women. The tits on that. Oh, he says to me, I had a great little Italian whore where you’re sitting, right there, the lovely little arse on her. And you know, I was sure she’d give me something, you know, crabs or an ol’ itch or something, but no, she was clean as a whistle. Great little girl.”

“Oh my God,” Catherine said.

“Dirty fucker.”

“Jesus.”

He glanced at her. “I hope I’m not shocking you.”

“No!”

“Talking to you about Italian prostitutes and you trying to eat your toast.”

“I’ve finished my toast,” she said, a little too brightly; she sounded like a toddler, she realized.

“Well, then,” James said, stretching his arms high. “Let’s retire to the parlor, shall we?”

The sitting room was huge and high-ceilinged, with cornices and corner moldings and a big front window; it was the flat’s only remnant of the grandness which must have once been in evidence through the whole house, a Georgian three-story over a basement, with stone steps sweeping up to the front door. Now the girls rented the ground floor, and two other flats upstairs held what seemed, from the noise levels, a combined population of about twenty people, and downstairs in the basement lived a couple in their thirties, who complained whenever the girls played music too loudly and who acted like martyrs if, on a Monday morning, they had to wheel the other bins out for collection as well as their own.

Duffy, the landlord, was a thin, bald man from somewhere in Westmeath; he drove a black Mercedes and always wore a suit under a shabby raincoat. The rent was due on the first of the month, but he called for it whenever he pleased, and he expected it to be waiting for him, sitting in cash in a little wooden box on the mantelpiece. When he came, he looked around the rooms to make sure that everything was in order, checking the oven, checking the shower, checking in the bedrooms with an air of long-suffering forbearance.