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.
“You’d want to keep that tidier, now,” he’d say, pointing to some corner of a room, some mountain of clothes or tower of dishes. “It’s not nice, now, to see girls not looking after a place like that.”
Catherine had been nervous around him at first, but had taken her cue from Amy and Lorraine, and now she talked to him the same way they did, in bored-sounding monosyllables that provided only the barest minimum of information. Duffy had been pleased to see Catherine move into the room which had been occupied by James; he had not, he had told them, liked to see a “young fella” living in among girls, and he had not, anyway, liked the look of this particular young fella.
“And he couldn’t find work in Dublin?” he had said, when Amy and Lorraine told him that James had gone to Berlin. “Well, and I suppose he couldn’t. The getup of him. I doubt one like him will get on any better out there, either.”
“Prick,” Amy had mouthed to Catherine across the room.
Now James was checking the rent box for cigarettes; he found none there but came across a packet of Marlboro on the bookshelf. He lit up and took the armchair, kicking his Docs off.
“It’s good to be back here, I have to say.”
Catherine, settling on the couch opposite him, nodded. “I know the girls will be glad to have you home.”
“Can’t wait to see them.”
It surprised her, the little twinge of jealousy she felt hearing him talk about Amy and Lorraine this way; she had only just met him, for Christ’s sake. And yet she knew what it was, why it made her feel somehow wistful, hearing him talk that way: she herself had drifted away from her schoolfriends, the girls who had been her closest confidantes not even a year ago, and she often envied Amy and Lorraine the way they had remained so close. And now here was James, someone else they had remained close with, and beside the three of them — even though Amy and Lorraine were not yet here, even though it was just her and James — she felt her outsider status very keenly.
“Berlin must have been cool, was it?” she said, wanting to change the subject.
“Cool,” he said, imitating her. “Yeah, it was grand.”
“And did you like your job?”
He smirked. “You sound like one of my aunts.”
“Very funny.”
James gestured over to Catherine for the ashtray, which was on the floor under the couch. “Ah, no,” he said, as she passed it over to him. “I did. Old Malachy is as odd as bejaysus. But the work is interesting. Certainly a lot more interesting than anything I’d have a chance of getting here.”
“How did you get the job?”
He shrugged. “I wrote to him.”
“Wow.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Well.”
“And what do you do?”
“I assist, Catherine,” he said, arching an eyebrow. “Which means I do everything. Well, Malachy presses the shutter. Most of the time.”
“Amy says he’s pretty famous. I haven’t—”
He glanced at her. “You haven’t heard of Malachy?”
She shook her head, the blush pricking her cheeks again. Why had she said that? She should have kept her mouth shut and just let him talk; there had been no need to expose her own ignorance like that. But James looked delighted; he was laughing to himself.
“Poor ol’ Malachy would take to his bed for a week if he heard that. He thinks he’s on every college curriculum going.” He took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled a thin plume. “There was a piece of his in a group show at IMMA this year, with Wolfgang Tillmans. You didn’t see that?”