The shoot had gone well, Aidan said, though he did not really think of it as having been a shoot, just a half hour reading on a bench in the rose garden while James stepped around him with a camera clicking. James, Aidan said, was a bit of a perfectionist — which translated, upon further cross-examination from Zoe, into James having insisted on continuing to take photographs even when it had started to rain, and into his having asked Aidan not to put his copy of Housman away even though it was getting wet.
“What a monster,” Zoe said, sniggering. “You should sue.”
“Oh, I’m sure the end result will be worth it,” Aidan said, putting a boot-clad foot up on the chair in front of him. “He seems to know what he’s doing.” He glanced at Catherine. “He’s photographed you, I presume?”
Catherine hesitated; in fact, while James had photographed her several times the previous summer, he had yet to take her photograph as part of this new series; several times he had mentioned his intention to do so, but had not yet got around to it. But she found that she did not want to admit this to Aidan. “Yeah,” she said casually, as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. “A few times. Mostly back in the flat, you know. There’s good light there.”
“Oh, he said to me this morning that he doesn’t really like shooting indoors,” Aidan said. “Still, you work with what you’ve got, I suppose.”
“Yeah,” Catherine said, not looking at either of them.
“James says he’s hoping to get his own place soon, actually,” he said, and now she looked at him; now she looked at him as though he had insulted her. “I said I’d keep an ear out for him. My landlady has a couple of houses up around the Liberties. Bought them for a pittance ten years ago. If only we’d all had that kind of foresight.”
“I was nine ten years ago,” Catherine said, because she was feeling a sudden, very angry urge to dig at Aidan, and a dig about how much older he was seemed like the easiest way to get at him. It also carried with it, she realized in the same moment, a reminder of how much younger she was, and therefore an intimation of his sleaziness and lack of scruples in having come on to her that night the previous term. Which was ridiculous, because this was not at all how she felt about having snogged Aidan, but right at this moment, she found, she did not much care for the facts of the thing. She cared about the jagged bolt of shock and distress he had sent hurtling into her with his remark about James moving out of Baggot Street, and with his casual declaration that he intended to help James move out of Baggot Street, and she wanted to hurt him.
But it did not work: Aidan merely shrugged. “Could have used your Communion money,” he said, flashing her a grin. “The pair of you could probably have got a cottage on Cork Street if you’d gone in together.”
Zoe laughed. “What do you think, Cits? The pair of us as flatmates? We could rent a bedroom to James and insist on vetting all his gentleman callers.”
“I have to go,” Catherine said, pushing up and away from the table. “I forgot, I have a TN meeting.”
“Oooh,” Zoe started to croon, but Catherine did not stay to listen to the rest of it.
The morning after the argument with James, Catherine had woken to discover the bed empty beside her, and to find that Lorraine and Cillian were still asleep in the sitting room, and Amy alone in her bedroom, and that there was nobody in the kitchen or the bathroom or even in the hall; James’s bedclothes were just where Lorraine had left them the night before, and it was half past eight in the morning, and James was gone. She had paced her room, and then the kitchen, and then the corridor; she had stared at the pay phone in the hallway, willing it into usefulness. But who could she call? He would not have gone home to Carrigfinn; he had told her on Sunday as they had walked in the park, Catherine still hungover from the party, that he had no intention of going home to Carrigfinn. They did not even know that he was back in Ireland. Zoe? Would he have gone to Zoe’s house in Stillorgan? That was impossible. James turning up on Zoe’s doorstep, before nine in the morning; there was no way he was going to do that. So then where? Was he just wandering the streets? Checked into a hostel? He still had some money left over from the wages Malachy had paid him, but it was mostly in marks; he had not had the chance to convert it yet, and anyway, it was not much, and he had been meaning to look for bar work to have something else to live on—
The sound of the front door had startled her; she had been so caught up in obsessing over where he had gone that she had not considered the possibility that he might not, after all, have gone anywhere, or that he might be coming back. She had rushed to the hall door to meet him, and when she had thrown her arms around him, he had laughed, letting her hug him a moment but then holding her back from him with a look of bafflement on his face; he had only gone to the shop to buy breakfast things, but because it was so early the nearest shop had been closed, so he had walked to the next one, and that had been closed too, and the one he had found had been close to town, and what was she talking about, she thought he had gone?
She had laughed about it too, after a while, and at the breakfast table Amy and Lorraine and Cillian had laughed, and everyone had teased her, and she knew it was a story she would be teased about for ages; but at the same time, in James’s eyes, she had seen something that was not laughter. Something that was not the enjoyment of how silly she had been, and how melodramatic. It had not been a coldness; that was too strong. He was still James, he was still right beside her, draping his arms around her every couple of minutes, still saying her name with that rich, layered affection. But it had been a change. There had been something — a carefulness — in the way he had looked at her. A decision, it seemed to her, about how he was going to be with her from now on, and about how he was going to be with, and for himself.
And it had driven her mad.
That was the only way she could see this, this thing that had happened to her over the last ten days: a madness. James had done exactly what Catherine had wanted him to do — he had stopped crowding her, stopped needing to be with her, beside her, every single minute — and she had reacted by becoming exactly as he had been. By clinging. Craving his company. Demanding it. For quite a few days now, the coffee breaks, the lunch breaks, the trips to the galleries, the long walks, had not been James’s idea. The irony was — everything was irony now, it seemed to Catherine — James had found it difficult to get away to do these things with her, because James had other things on now — he had got himself work in O’Brien’s, a pub near Christchurch, three evenings a week and two afternoons, and he was beginning, on top of that, to take his photographs, to put together the series he had talked to her about that afternoon — which now seemed so, so long ago — of the ID cards. He was approaching people in the street and asking if he could photograph them; he had also started to photograph some of the people Catherine had introduced him to in college. He was in the darkroom any chance he got, making prints, and Catherine had seen them all, and they were brilliant; they were wonderful — stark and strange and disorienting. They did not look like the ID card photographs — they were much more beautiful than that — but they had the same sense of people being caught in their unguarded moments, accessed in the pureness and vulnerability of who they really were: a man in construction gear, his gaze sliding warily to the side, an old woman in an apron, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes closed, a boy their age — a boy who was cute, which should have been a source of pleasure to Catherine but felt instead like a scourge — in a football shirt, leaning back against a car, glaring at a point in the middle distance.