“I doubt it,” Catherine said miserably. “I doubt you could come up with anything better than me sitting on a couch beside Michael Doonan and saying ‘So! Sex! Do you like it, do you?’” She shook her head. “Basically.”
“Well, when you put it like that.”
“Anyway,” Catherine shuddered. “I’m going home for the weekend. I’ll see you next week sometime. If I ever come back to this city.”
He looked at her, surprised. “Oh. You’re going down home?”
She nodded. “Yeah. It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday. Don’t you know that?”
“Well, make sure to tell your mother all about your affair with whatshisname. That’ll make a nice present.”
“I hate you.”
“Here,” he said, leaning over his desk for a sheet of A4 paper; he folded it, before scribbling something on each side. He handed it to her. “That’s for your mother.”
In blue biro on one half of the page, Emmet had drawn a vague squiggle, and on the inside, in block capitals, he had written HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, MRS. REILLY. YOURS, EMMET DOYLE.
“It’s a card,” Emmet said.
“You are actually insane.”
“Did you get your mother a card?”
“I’m getting her one at the train station.”
He clicked his tongue scornfully. “Shop-bought. You’re a great daughter.”
“You’re nuts!”
“At least I don’t go around propositioning sixty-year-old men,” he said, turning back to his computer.
“You shouldn’t proposition anybody, Doyle,” she said, trying for wryness, and she waited for his retort, but to her discomfort, nothing came; he kept looking at his screen, clicking now a couple of times on his mouse. Maybe he hadn’t heard her.
She thought about him as she walked to the train station. She had thought about him plenty; she had thought about him for weeks. She had not gone out with him since the night of the Stag’s, not that the night of the Stag’s had been a night of going out with him, in any real sense; it had just been a drink, no matter how excitedly Zoe might insist otherwise. And yet, it had not been just a drink. The way he had looked at her today when she had walked into the office; the way he had looked at her every time they had seen one another since that night. Something was different. He blushed, but then again it seemed to her that he always blushed; that his blush was just something he had not been able to get rid of, and that it dogged him all the time, not just when he was talking to her. It was not the blush; it was the way he sort of…wavered. A waver that, when they saw one another, came into his eyes. That same hesitation that she had noticed that night. As though the entire space around him was somehow taking a breath; and, in truth, she felt it in herself too, felt herself taking a breath more deeply when she saw him, felt that she had, now, always to get something settled in herself, put aside in herself, before she could actually talk to him.
And when she had said that she was going down home for the weekend, had she imagined it, or had he reacted to that? Had he sort of blinked more quickly, or done, anyway, something rapid and distracted with his eyes? And was she going mad, counting and parsing the blinks and the eye movements of Emmet Doyle? Had she lost it completely?
Oh, Catherine, Catherine, James responded in Catherine’s mind now, because of course it was James she was addressing, James to whom she was writing an imaginary, long juicy letter, as she went through all of this, as she turned it all inside out and back again. It was James she was moaning to, James to whom she was presenting the ever-more-convoluted elements of her case, and James who was absorbing it all, and James whom she was causing to frown thoughtfully, and James whom she was causing, now, to crease up with laughter, delighted with her latest drama, full of attention for this, the latest fine mess she had got herself into.
Except, of course.
Except.
And at Connolly station, as she walked towards the platform, she passed the bench where on another Friday evening, she had sat pressed up against James, listening to OK Computer. But it wasn’t “Exit Music” she was hearing now, as she went through the gates; it wasn’t the mumbling, monotone Yorke singing of escape, singing of a chill. It was the jangled nerve endings of “Lucky,” its wary promises, its leaden warnings: I feel my luck could change.
7
James’s new flat was on Thomas Street, near O’Brien’s, and also near the art college, which explained why the flat had been laid out as a studio by the previous tenant; what little furniture there was in the big sitting room had been pushed back against the walls, and the floorboards were speckled with paint drops. James’s landlady had not wanted to rent it to another artist, but he had persuaded her, promising that there would be no paint, and no smell of turpentine, and no smell of hash, either, and no loud music.
“My God, James, you’ve signed up to a very boring existence,” Aidan said, laughing. James had invited a few people around for a housewarming dinner; Amy and Lorraine and Cillian were there, and Zoe, and Lisa, the girl Catherine had met in the PhotoSoc office, and Aidan’s friend Liam was due to call in on his way home from work in the Buttery. James had cooked a huge Bolognese, and they had eaten it sitting around the room, James and Aidan and Cillian on the floor, the girls on the kitchen chairs and the couch. It was James’s second week in the flat now, and he had made it his own; his books were on a low shelf in the corner, and on the walls he had tacked up dozens of postcards and magazine images of artworks he loved. Warhol’s blue-toned Jackie O was up there, and a shot of Vito Acconci panned out under the platform in Seedbed, and one of Walker Evans’s pinched-faced sharecroppers, though James had explained to Catherine that that image was not actually Evans, that it was a piece that another artist, an American artist, had made by taking a photograph of the Evans. There was a postcard of a Matisse nude, a woman, one leg slightly bent, her hands clasped in front of her crotch, the space behind her seeming to explode with dark browns and blues. There was a whole row of Wolfgang Tillmans photographs, all of beautiful, thin people staring at the camera, their expressions as hard, in their way, as that of the Evans sharecropper; in the largest of these images, which was in black and white, a guy with a shaved head stood in front of a wall from which graffiti seemed to have been ineffectually scrubbed. He wore ripped camouflage trousers, and Doc boots, and a shiny bomber jacket of the type that Catherine could remember boys on the school bus having worn a few years ago; his arms were folded and in one hand he had a cigarette, and in the other what looked like a small stack of magazines for sale. His cheekbones were sharp, one of them marked by a mole. His eyes were two dark, unreadable dots.
Also there was one of the William Scott still lifes of pans and bowls — Catherine had told James about Scott’s work in one of her letters — and a postcard of a piece by a Japanese artist — she had forgotten his name — which consisted just of a date, April 12 1975, painted in white on a black background, and a photo of a photographer making a daguerreotype, and a Cartier-Bresson portrait of Samuel Beckett, his face a clutch of long, deep wrinkles, his mouth pursed, his eyes sharp and fixed on something out of frame. Also, a postcard of three young black boys, naked, running, kicking and splashing into the sea. Their thin arms were outstretched; the soles of their feet were lifted to the camera, smooth and calm. Catherine was staring at them, her mug of red wine in one hand, when James came up behind her, putting his arms around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder. She jumped at his touch, but in the next moment settled back against him. She felt the same flood of guilt that she felt every time he hugged her now, every time he cuddled her and nuzzled her in the way it came so naturally to him to do; she felt the wretchedness of wanting him not to stop doing it, not to detach from her again and open back out to a space which was shared with other people. The others, chatting and laughing on the other side of the room, were paying them no heed, but Catherine felt as conscious of their presence, and as bothered by it, as though they had been standing here at James’s wall of pictures as well, pulling at him, pulling him away from her. She closed her eyes, willing the feeling to pass, to lift off her, like an insect or a virus, and decide on somebody else instead; she felt exhausted from the turmoil and shame of carrying it with her everywhere, at every moment.