She wrote the McCabe interview up quickly once she got a desk in the crowded publications office, chopping a couple of hundred words out reluctantly when it was finished — all the good quotes he had given her were long ones, and she wished she could fit them in, but with them in there was no space for anything about the actual novel — and printed it out. Seeing it emerge on the tray, Emmet Doyle crossed the room to pick it up for her, looking at the first page as he brought it to her desk.
“‘Patrick McCabe strides into the bright surroundings of Cafe Irie in Temple Bar, looking like a man who is at once distracted and intense,’” he read aloud. “What’s this, a novel?”
“Give me that,” she said, snatching it from him. He was grinning at her, and for a moment she could almost see what James had meant — he was kind of attractive, his skin clear, his eyes a dark, striking blue, his lanky frame perched, now, on the edge of her desk, but it was so conventional, his attractiveness; it was not the kind of thing she had imagined whispering over with James.
“There’s a letter for you, by the way, Poetess,” he said, nodding towards the mailbox on the opposite wall. “Did you get it?”
“No,” Catherine said, getting up. “How long has it been here?”
“A couple of days,” Emmet shrugged. “It’s probably McCabe’s wife, warning you to stop stalking him.”
“Fuck off,” she laughed, taking down the envelope. It was handwritten, and bearing a Dublin postmark; she tore it open to find a curt note from the publicist of the novelist Michael Doonan, granting her the interview with him that she had been chasing for months. She was, the publicist explained, to be given forty minutes on a Friday afternoon the following month, and the questions were to focus on Doonan’s new novel, Engines of Everything, not on the earlier trilogy which had recently been made into a controversial television series. This gave her a few weeks for preparation, which was just as well, because she had read only one of Doonan’s books, and she wanted to do a good job on this interview, because he so rarely granted them.
“Restraining order?” Emmet said, coming up to her at the mailbox. He was grinning as widely as ever, but the blush was back again; she watched its progress across the smooth skin of his face.
“Very funny,” she said, stuffing the envelope into her pocket. “Well, enjoy production night. I have dinner waiting for me.”
He gave her a disbelieving look. “What, has your mother moved in with you or something?”
“No,” she said, laughing. “Just my friend. James.”
“Oh, James, is it?” Emmet said archly. “That’s the ginger I saw you hugging outside the arts block this morning? I was heartbroken, Reilly. I thought the time we spent together on Saturday night meant something. You came back to my place —”
“With about a hundred other people.”
“And then this morning, I’m coming out of my Politics tutorial—”
“You were not coming out of a Politics tutorial at half eleven in the morning.”
“…to see you — I resent that statement, by the way — to see you with your arms around another man. I’m heartbroken, Reilly. Devastated.”
This was Doyle’s usual routine, this layering of sarcasm onto mockery onto brazen cheek, onto what, deep down, might even be a trace of genuine honesty, until it was impossible to tell which was which and what was what. It was a code, deep irony by means of the presence of sincerity, in which he and a few of the other TN guys frequently spoke, and Catherine could not get her head around it. Talking to them, she tried to imitate it, but her efforts always seemed to come out just sounding bitchy.
“Fuck off, Doyle,” she said now, and exactly that thing happened, but Emmet seemed not to notice.
“You brought your friend to my party the other night, right? I was talking to him for a while.”
“Yeah. He’d just arrived from Berlin.”
“Very strong culchie accent for a German.”
“Hilarious,” she said, as she gathered her things from the desk: her notes, her jacket, her bag. “Right. I’m off home,” she said, making for the door.
Emmet followed her. “Does your friend go to college here?” he said, as they reached the hallway. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before Saturday.”
“No, he’s not a student,” Catherine said. She turned slightly, and Emmet stopped abruptly, so that he was standing very close to her. He stepped back. Catherine stepped in the other direction. There was silence between them for a long moment; Catherine did not know what to do with it.
“Don’t you have a newspaper to put to bed?” she said eventually, her tone sharp.
For a second, Emmet looked as though he did not understand the question, but then he rolled his eyes at her, and the grin was back. “Put to bed?” he said mockingly. “Where’d you learn that, the Longford Leader?”
“Good night, Emmet,” she said, waving without looking back at him, as she took the first flight.
He leaned down over the banister. “Good night, Poetess,” he called.
3
Sometime after nine the next morning, Catherine tiptoed into the sitting room to wake James up in the same way she had woken him the morning before: by bouncing on his couch cushions until he groaned. But this time, instead of jumping on him, she stood and watched him for a long moment as he slept. He was on his side, with his arms raised over his face, his head pushed forward into the crooks of his elbows; it was a position she remembered from Carrigfinn during the summer, from when she had crept into his room to wake him. Now the air was thick with the smell of his sleep, the stale, slightly sickly smell of a night of dreaming breath.
James gasped and dropped his arms to his chest, and his eyes shot open, wide; they were staring right at Catherine, staring through her. She was startled by his expression, which seemed almost terrified, and she took a step back, but in the next instant James was blinking sleepily, stretching, and he looked like himself again.
“Morning,” she said brightly, reaching down to stipple her fingertips on his bare shoulder.
“No, no,” he said, burying his head in his pillow. “It’s not morning, Catherine. Go away. It’s still the middle of the night.”
“It’s getting-up time,” she said, crossing to the window and opening the shutters. “God, this room is always so stuffy the morning after we have people round.”
He raised himself to his elbows and frowned at her. “Oh, so I’m a ‘person round,’ am I?”
“What are you going to get up to today?” she said, coming back to the couch.
“You tell me,” he shrugged. “Another day of staring at the older men you have a Daddy fetish about, presumably. God, you’ve no taste at all, Reilly, do you know that?”
She pushed his head into the pillow until he bawled in protest, and then she released him, laughing. He twisted around and grabbed her, his hands tickling her waist, inching towards her belly button; she squealed and tried to wriggle away from him, but he had her. He pulled her down, and pressed his face into the back of her neck, growling, squeezing her so tight that she could hardly breathe. She pushed back against him, but he had stopped tickling her now; he had stopped moving altogether, and now his body against hers was solid and still. He sighed.
“So what are we doing today, Brain?”
It was one of their routines, a quote from a cartoon they both found hilarious, and Catherine responded without missing a beat. “The same thing we do every day, Pinky. Try to take over the world!”