Tender (34 page)

Because she had heard it was the only place in town to go if you wanted to really, really dance.

Because it was a Saturday night, and on a Saturday night, everywhere else would be awful.

Because Conor and Emmet had at some stage joined them, and Conor and Emmet were making outraged noises about the idea of it, but Conor and Emmet would go where everyone else was going—“I resent that!” Emmet said—and it would be such fun—“I resent that!”—to watch them squirm.

Because Zoe had heard that the DJs there always played Madonna, a lot of Madonna, and Madonna was precisely what this occasion called for.

Because none of them—could this be possible?—not even Aidan, had ever been there before.

Because the sun had gone down.

Because James.

That was the actual reason.

Because Liam.

And maybe there were other gay clubs in Dublin, but this was the one everyone knew about. This was the one everyone used, after all, in jokes.

And Catherine could go with them or she could go home now, alone, to a house that would be empty, because Amy was here, and Lorraine and Cillian were out elsewhere; she could go back to a house that would come at her every instant with new panics, new versions of what was happening a mile away, of what was being forged.

That was the choice.

And as they crossed Front Square, somebody was whooping and somebody was turning cartwheels on the cobblestones, and somebody was hoisted, wobbling, onto Aidan’s shoulders, and someone was puking, and someone was laughing, and the blue face of the clock was looking, watchful, down on them all.
Seen it all before,
it would say, if it could say, but it was a clock.

Tick-tock

Tick-tock

“The fucking drink better be cheap in this place,” she heard Emmet grumble behind her. “That’s all I can say.”

The drink was not cheap.

All these men, so handsome, so smiling—

(All these women, smiling that way too.)

“Fantastic,” Aidan kept saying, looking around as though in wonder, looking over the railings to the dance floor below.
“Fantastic.”

Emmet, leaning back stiffly against the purple walls: “Do you want binoculars, Murphy?”

Purple walls, and long velvet curtains, and velvet couches in bright reds and blues, and gilt edging on all of the furniture—everywhere was gilt, everywhere, and all of this oversized faux-Baroque, so that you could see the irony, you could see the confidence, you could see the gleeful wink and nod.

Tiny, twinkling lights strung down from the ceiling, all over the stairs.

And downstairs, in the lower part, was where the music they could hear now had its center; the bass was reaching up here, full and determined and languid, but the heart of whatever was happening was down there, still out of sight, and the tune playing was one that Catherine could not place just now, but she knew it, she did—

(“Jesus Christ,” said Emmet, as another guy in a white vest went past, smiling at him.)

“You love it, Doyle,” said Catherine, without enthusiasm; her eyes were on James. James, who was bundling, with Amy and Lisa and Zoe, onto one of the huge velvet couches. James who was falling into the cushions now, all elbows and knees and giddy laughter, something manic in the look of him—

Something scared.

So, safe enough yet?

That was what Catherine caught herself thinking. That if he was scared, if he was nervous, about being here, that then she was safe enough yet. That she might not be losing him just yet; that he might not be ready to go from her, after all—

In the next breath, despising her mind for the things it said to her. The places it allowed itself to go.

(But, safe enough yet?)

Conor and Emmet lasted twenty minutes, and then they left for the Stag’s.

“Look at us,” Catherine said to James. They were standing in front of a wall covered entirely in tiny shards of mirror. Everything glinted in the countless tiny mirrors; everything shivered.

“So many of us,” James said, and he was waving.

“Come
on!
” said Zoe, and she was grabbing them, marching them downstairs, and they were rushing, then, into the opening swell of the song that began with seagull calls, and with waves crashing, and with the mock-up chords of a tune that had come to mean a smiling bride on her father’s arm, and as they all clattered downstairs to the dance floor, there was the sound of the cymbals, and the keyboards, and as the light soared and swirled over everyone, over all of the upraised arms, there was the sound of the men’s chorus, low and even and stern.

And there was the first word. The word pulling them together.

And then their feet hit the floor.

Bodies pulsing everywhere. Voices roaring out every syllable. Chests and hips and shoulders—

Lips and hands and tongues—

And the music like a shimmering, oceanic wall.

And this,
this,
now, this was a
really
brilliant song—

Everyone on the dance floor shouting for joy as they recognized it.

The people dancing on the stage actually dropping down, for a moment, to their knees—

Singing of mystery, of the mystery that life was.

And no, but really, had all these songs always been so brilliant, all along? These songs that had been only tinny radio rackets in your childhood, and only things you thought embarrassing in your teenage years, and now—now they were genius. Now they were perfect.

Was this just irony, this dancing, this sheer, sheer happy love, now, or was this honesty?

Were you meant to actually know which one it was?

(She could not work out anything; she could not work out anything about how things were meant to be.)

And full throttle now.

And on the dance floor, on the balcony, on the stairwell: full capacity. All the bodies, reaching; all the bodies, arching; all the bodies, surging in an imitation of prayer—

(Except: no imitation.)

And sweating, and singing, and hands held high, and the song was sweeping them up now, the song was bringing them home, and again there was a choir in the background, but this time it was a happy choir, this time it was a choir and you could hear that they were smiling—

And yes, it felt like…

And on the stage, the dancers were incredible. The dancers were heaven. Their bodies like angels. Their smiles like light.

Like this was another country.

That was what Catherine saw.

Everyone chanting now. Everyone, now, just part of the chorus.

(And how many other songs were there from your childhood that turned out to be so much about your life? Not just your life, but everybody’s life? Everybody’s happiness? Everybody’s love?)

And so, so beautiful, James’s face now; so, so beautiful, his body, with his arms in the air. Sweat dark under the arms of his T-shirt, now, and sweat shining on his forehead. And a twist of something on his face, now: pure pleasure, and pure joy—

(Nothing, it hit Catherine, that she had seen before.)

He opened his eyes, and he smiled at her.

And Catherine reached out her hand.

And around his waist at that moment, other hands came, and other arms, and James leaned back into them, smiling, and James let fall; James let go.

James let everything go.

And the girls whooping and cheering as though they were at a concert, and as though James and Liam were the stars. As though, just by touching each other, just by dancing together the way they now were, they had walked out on stage, smiling at everyone—

(But they were only smiling at each other, Catherine saw.)

And the girls—the girls were smiling at each other, as though together they had achieved something, together they had brought something into being—

Slipping away from the two of them now, melting away discreetly from the group they had been, so that the group became a smaller one, and so that James and Liam were in a space all of their own—

And who could not be happy for them?

Who could not want to smile, just at the sight of them?

Five minutes later, Catherine was walking through the door of the Stag’s.

Conor, standing at the bar with some people she did not recognize. He studied her as she walked towards them. Her skin, she knew, still slick with sweat. Her hair still damp. Her eyes must have been wild.

Emmet—

“He’s gone, Citóg,” Conor said. “You couldn’t expect him to just keep waiting around for you.”

“No,” she said, her voice small and hollow.

“Do you want a pint?”

“No. I think I’ll go home.”

“Have a good summer, Citóg,” he said, and he gave her a hug.

A
nd now: be good.

Now: be so, so good. Be good the way you had to be good; be good the way you told yourself you could be good, before—

Be good. Be good and then be still more good. Love is patient, remember. Love is kind. Love does not—

Love does not—

“We’re just friends, for God’s sake,” James said to Catherine, when he called around to Baggot Street the following evening. “It was just a bit of dancing, was all it was. It was just a bit of saying hello.”

“Oh-ho, Jimbo!” said Cillian, upon seeing him in the kitchen, and he put his hand up for a high five. James obliged, blushing, shaking his head, on his lips a shy, half-hidden smile.

“Good man, Jimbo,” said Cillian, slapping him hard on the back. “I hear the seal is well and truly broken. Fair fucking fucks to you. Literally.”

“About fucking time!” said Lorraine, as she came in, now, and she threw her arms around James. “Well!” she said, holding him back so that she could get a good, interrogative look at him.
“Well?!”

(Love does not do any of the things that you ask it, nicely, to do.)

And James, constantly smiling now. Even when he was not actually smiling, it was there; he had become, somehow, a smile.

“I’m telling you,
we’re just friends,
” he said to Lorraine again, when she teased him.

Something so content, so utterly delighted with itself, in his eyes.

And Catherine standing right there beside him, feeling as though she was choking on all of the questions that she did not dare to ask.

Some evenings he met with her after work, but some evenings he was not available to do this. Now he emailed her, something he had only ever done, before, when he had been chasing her; when he had been lonely for her letters in Berlin, wondering where she was, what she was doing instead of writing to him.

But now he was not chasing her. Now he was not lonely for want of word from her.

Love to the
others?

But be good.

Be so, so good.

In the backyard of Baggot Street, a feral cat close to giving birth. Dragging herself around. The noise of her. Trying, as they watched from the steps, to burrow into a tangle of ivy.

“She’s trying to get away from the pain of it,” Cillian said. “She doesn’t understand it’s inside of her.”

Catherine stared at him. Could that be true? Could that possibly, possibly, be true?

The kittens, a few days later: tiny gray clouds of mewling, already with the pus on their eyes.

“Get, get,” Lorraine said, scattering them with the snap of a tea towel. Her face, tense with guilt when she came back into the house. “There’s no point,” she said to Catherine, though Catherine had not said a word.

She missed him. She missed him so much that the city did not feel like the same city anymore. It felt like the trace of a city, into which she had blindly wandered. Without him beside her, what were these streets?

Darkroom again this evening, I’m afraid—Lisa has been asking to see some possible photos for the show. You free for lunch on Saturday, maybe? Maybe get some food and bring it to the Green?

Lunch was for people you had tossed down to the
Sometime
pile. Everyone knew that.

She missed Zoe, she realized. She had not expected that to be the case.

She missed everyone. Even Emmet, who she did not think would be sending her any emails from Chicago, flirtatious or otherwise. Missing him surprised her. Everything surprised her.

And yet nothing did.

Because what had she been up to?

Sleep, as long as it lasted. Which was not—which was never—long enough.

And then the waking. And with it the thinking,
Maybe this time it will be different. Maybe this time it will not be so bad.

But then the other waking. Then the second waking, the real one. Because how it worked, she had discovered, was this: body woke first, but body was innocent, body contained within itself space for some kind of oblivion. Mind; when mind kicked in, mind put a stop to that gallop. Mind; mind got to. Cranked it up. Piled it on; piled it down. Not just thoughts; they did not feel like just thoughts. They were whole life forms, living in the crevices; they were real things, happiest in the mornings, when they could pulse and they could roam. They were of her, but so much more than that, they were about her, and they were things—she felt sure of this—that she would not necessarily have come up with, herself, about herself, left to her own, small devices—

So much energy they had, the thoughts. Seemingly boundless, endless energy; she almost had to admire it in them.

And to have tried to drag Emmet down into this shit: unforgivable.

The skin on her arms, those mornings: so alive with the desire to be cut.

Tingling with the want of it. With the love of it.

But skin was dead, though, wasn’t it?

Skin was the part of you that was already the leftovers of the past.

Or most obviously the leftovers, maybe; most visibly. Maybe that was what it was.

In work, they were delighted with her. They raised her pay another ten pence a script.

A dream. More than once, the same dream. A bed pushed into the corner of a room. Boxes piled high around it, so that its warmth became a hiding place, and within that hiding place was the still deeper, still warmer cocoon of his arms. She curled into him; she smelled his smell. She dozed, blissful; woke to the sound of his voice saying,
Catherine, you’re—

Never the end of the sentence. Never what it was that he thought she was, what it was that he believed of her. She tried playing it over to herself during her waking hours: sitting on the bus, staring at the cursor, drinking the powdered coffee the factory machine made—

But it never finished itself. And Catherine could not finish it either.