“Messing around is good. We like messing.”
“No, really, I don’t even mean that kind of messing around. I don’t know what I mean, really. I don’t mean anything.”
“O-K,” James said slowly.
“No. I mean, it’s just someone. It’s nothing. Nothing happened. It’s no one.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think you should say any more without the presence of a lawyer.”
“Fuck’s sake,” said Catherine now; why had she even needed to bring Conor up? She was such an idiot. She was not to talk about Conor. She was not to make an embarrassing situation even worse.
“What’s his name?” said James, tipping his ash.
“Conor.”
He shook his head. “Not a good name.”
“No,” she said, still cringing.
“Forget him.”
“Good idea.”
“We can’t have Conors going about the place. Conors are barred from this establishment now. Conors are now the outcasts of society.”
“I feel better already,” she said, laughing, and strangely enough, she realized, it was true.
“Very glad to hear it,” James said with a solemn nod.
“And you?” Her voice jumped high on the question, worrying about the territory into which it might be pulling her, but she had to ask; it was only polite to ask, after he had shown an interest in her love life, her whatever it was.
“What about me?”
“Any nice German girl?”
His eyebrows shot up. “No,” he said firmly. “No nice German girl.”
“No not-nice German girl?”
“No not-nice German girl either.”
“Oh, but you’ll have to do something about that,” she said, trying to borrow the teasing tone he had used on her. “I mean, when you go back,” she added, hurriedly.
“We’ll see,” he said, sounding bored of the subject.
“Oh, come on.”
He looked at her sharply. “Come on what?”
She stammered. “I mean, meet someone. You know. German girls, I mean. They’re good-looking, aren’t they? Blond.” She took a breath. “Some of them, like.”
He sighed. “That they are, Catherine. That they are.”
“So.”
“So,” he shrugged, and he stubbed his cigarette out. “So here we are,” he said, looking at her. He took a deep breath, and Catherine’s mouth went dry.
“I…”
“Both of us lonely,” James burst into song. “Longing for…something…”
And now what the fuck was happening? What was she supposed to do with this? She spluttered out a laugh, just for the sake of getting some other sound out into the room, something other than his weirdly passionate — what was that, a baritone? No, a baritone was lower, gruffer; his must be a tenor voice.
“You can’t really sing,” she said, which was not actually true, but she had needed to say something to break the tension, the mortification of him singing at her; she needed him to stop. What was he doing? What was she doing? Her mother would kill her—kill her — if she could see her right now, if she could know how she had spent the last hour.
“The summer,” he was saying now, having stopped with the singing, at least, but what was he saying about the summer? Catherine blinked at him.
“What?”
“I said, what are you doing with yourself for the summer?”
“Oh,” she said, relieved. “Going home. Back to Longford. I’m meant to have got a job.”
“Meant to?”
She sighed, remembering that she still had not made that phone call. “I was going to ask the editor of the local newspaper for a job.”
He looked impressed. “Oh.”
“I’ve been writing a bit for the college paper.”
“About what?”
“Art,” she said, feeling almost triumphant as she saw the effect this had on him; he pursed his lips as though conceding something. “And literature.”
“Literature,” he said mockingly, and the heat rushed back to her face, but in the next instant, he was nodding approvingly. “Very good. Very good, Catherine. So that’s what you want to do?”
“I think so.”
“Do you write anything else?”
She swallowed. “Poetry,” she said, and instantly regretted it; his eyes had lit up with something, and she was pretty sure it was scorn. “I mean, it’s shit, obviously.”
He frowned. “Why obviously?”
“Never mind.”
He was regarding her steadily. “I think it’s a very good thing that you write poetry. A very good thing indeed.”
She squirmed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous about it?”
“It’s ridiculous. This is ridiculous. My point is, I’m meant to have called up the editor of the local paper at home, I’m meant to have done it six months ago, and I told my mother that I would, and I never did it.” She took a breath. “And now I’m going home tomorrow, and she thinks I have a job, and I want to have a job, and I don’t. And I’m dead when my mother finds out.”
He frowned. “Is your mother a very violent woman, Catherine?”
She burst out laughing. “Fuck off.”
“Will she beat you? Will she lock you in the shed?”
“Fuck off. I should have done it. I shouldn’t have put it off.”
He looked at his watch. “It’s half past two,” he said. “How many hours behind is Longford?”
She stared at him. “Oh, very funny,” she said, after a moment. “Sure you’re from Leitrim.”
He shrugged. “Leitrim’s another time zone entirely.”
“Stop. It’s not funny.”
“Indeed it is not,” he said, and he got to his feet. “Come on,” he said, reaching a hand out to where she sat, looking up at him.
“Come on what?”
“Come on up,” he said. “There’s a phone in the hall, isn’t there?”
“I can’t call him now.”
“Now is better than tomorrow.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s too late. It’s months too late. I’m going to have to forget about it.”
“And what? Live all summer on the proceeds of your poems? Come on.”
“No,” she protested, as he pulled her to her feet; he stepped back to make room for her, and in the next moment they were standing in the middle of the room, clasping hands. James was looking at her with an expression of resolve beneath the surface of which a fit of laughter seemed to be twitching, but he did not laugh; he did not even smile.
“Number?” he said briskly.
“It’s in my room,” she said, with an air of misery.
“Change?” he said, and he rooted in his jeans pocket. “Here you go,” he said, handing her a fifty-pence piece.
“Oh fuck,” Catherine moaned. “I’m not even dressed.”
“It’s a phone, Catherine. Come on. We’re getting this over with, and then we’re going to drink some stolen wine.”
“Some what?”
“From the back of our Eddie’s lorry,” he said grimly, as he pushed her towards her bedroom door. “I think I earned that much. Anyway, I’m fairly sure he was stealing it in the first place.”
As she was finding the editor’s number in her address book, a new thought occurred to her. “I don’t want you standing beside me while I’m talking to him,” she shouted out to James.
He appeared at the door. “You’re terrible, Muriel,” he said, nodding towards the poster on the wardrobe.
“Seriously,” Catherine said. “You’re not standing beside me.”