James hardly needed to go to college, anyway; James already seemed to know about everything. Art, obviously; Catherine was a year into a degree that was half art history and he knew ten times more than her. He seemed to know more about her other subject, English, too, though on poetry she thought she had the advantage. But when it came to people and the way they behaved, James could talk for hours, and when it came to other things, too; politics, for instance. One night a couple of weeks previously, Catherine had found herself lying awake for hours, thinking about the North — or rather, thinking about the question of whether, if you talked about the North on the phone — as she and James, or rather James, had for a long time that night — your call was likely to be picked up on, to be noted, along with your name and your whereabouts. Because James had said that this often happened; at the end of the call, James had mentioned, as casually as though it were nothing at all, that he and Catherine were probably on some list now, the two of them, that phone calls all over the country were monitored for conversations just like theirs.
Catherine had rung off as quickly as she could, pleading some obligation or other, and she had sat for a long moment afterwards, staring at the phone, at the cord pulled through from the hall, at the plump, cheerful-looking digits on the buttons, her head feeling as though it was pulsing in and out of something unreal. Then she had gone into the sitting room, where her mother was watching television with Anna, Catherine’s six-year-old sister, and she had been unable even to look at either of them, worrying about what could happen to them now, because of what she and James had done. Which was the height of paranoia, of course it was, but James had had an answer for that too, the next night, when she described to him the stress she had gone through. And it was true. It didn’t make it any less real, all of that; that she thought they were being paranoid didn’t make it any less real at all. Catherine had not been able to change the subject quickly enough, that night, to get onto something that was not dangerous, and she did not want to think about it now, either. She did not want to think about it anytime. She wanted lemonade, which was what James had gone into the house for, glasses of cold lemonade for the two of them, and he would be back out with them now, she thought, squinting up at the sunlight; he would be back out any minute. The glasses would be gorgeously cool, would be glistening with ice, and Catherine would sit up on the blanket to see James as he came towards her from the house, and you desperate wee shite, she would call out to him, and he would pretend to scowl at her, stepping through the metal archway his mother had set down at the edge of the lawn. Roses — or at least Catherine thought they were roses — were trained up the archway, a vivid red against the paintwork, and now she heard him; she heard, close to the patio door and now coming across the driveway, his footsteps, and yes, there it was, the ice, the clinking, and Catherine clenched all the muscles of her arms and her shoulders and her thighs, just for the pleasure of it, just for the loveliness of releasing them again, stretching out on the blanket so that her fingers and toes touched the grass now, its cool, clipped pile. She sighed, as the sun bleached white the world shut out by her eyelids, and once again she tried to train her vision — was it still vision if your eyes were closed? — on one of the tiny black floaters swirling in and out of view. But there was no holding them; they came and went like birds.
This was her second day in Carrigfinn.
* * *
James’s hair had grown over the summer; it rose in an unruly quiff over his forehead. He had the reddest hair of any boy Catherine had ever known, which was probably down to the fact that, until James, she had had such a dislike of red-haired boys that she had not even wanted to look at them, let alone talk to them. They made her think of misery, somehow; of small houses and V-neck jumpers and of that helpless, defeated look that came over the faces of some children in primary school when the teacher was humiliating them and there was nothing the child could say or do to change this. She had not articulated this to James, actually, this association; she thought now, as she watched him duck down under the archway of roses, that she must say it to him, that he would find it fascinating, would find it, probably, quite clever, quite funny. Analyzing it, picking it apart, he would make it, of course, much funnier still. And what’s so offensive about V-neck jumpers? she imagined him asking, and she laughed in anticipation of it, hugging herself a little with the pleasure of it, so that James looked at her suspiciously now, his lips pursed in a manner that set her laughing harder still. He was so funny, James; it was probably the thing that was most brilliant about him. He was funnier than anyone she’d ever met. Everything about him was so lit up by this brilliant, glinting comedy; he was so quick, and such a good mimic — so good it was almost disturbing, sometimes — and he had this gift for getting right to the truth about people with a single, seemingly casual line. And he was so loud, and he cared nothing for what other people thought of him; more than once during those first days in Dublin, Catherine had cringed at the attention paid to them by people on the street as James, marching along beside her, had held forth energetically on whatever was grabbing — seizing — his attention at that moment. Passersby had glanced at him, or stared at him, or raised a withering eyebrow in his direction, but James never seemed to notice; he just charged on. It had been the same, even, in Carrick the previous evening, as he and Catherine had walked from the train station towards the road for Carrigfinn. No thought to who might be listening. No care for who might say he was a right dose, a right pain in the head, that Flynn fella with the hill of red hair. Even as they thumbed a lift, then — Catherine feeling ill with nerves in case they might be seen by someone who could report back to her parents — James had had her in stitches, and when they finally got a lift, from two old women who were neighbors of James’s parents — two old women who made sure to get a good look at Catherine, as the girl James Flynn was bringing home — it had actually hurt, the effort of keeping the laughter in. James, all the way home, had stayed straight-faced, keeping up a jolly, newsy patter with the two women, gossiping with them about other neighbors, agreeing with their assessments and their complaints; but the whole time, he had been kicking Catherine’s foot, trying to make her laugh, alerting her to intimations, innuendoes, in the things he was saying. Catherine had barely been able to breathe by the time the car had left them at the bottom of the lane.
Catherine was back in Longford until October partly because she had got a summer job — at the local newspaper, where she spent her time making press releases look like news stories — but mostly because her parents wanted her home for the summer, because her parents did not see any reason for her to stay in Dublin when she did not need to go to classes or to the library. When she had been going to Dublin in the first place, her parents had wanted Catherine to move in with her father’s sister in Rathmines, rather than get a place with friends from school, and when the place with those friends had fallen through in Freshers’ Week, a year of living with her aunt Eileen had seemed unavoidable, but then on the student-union notice board, Catherine had seen an ad for a room on Baggot Street, and had scribbled down the number, and that number had led her to Amy and Lorraine. They were also first years at Trinity, but studying science subjects rather than arts, and this guy James had gone to Berlin just before the October rent had been paid, and so they needed, badly needed, someone new for his room. Would Catherine be interested? She said yes, her heart racing, and she moved in that evening. They were from Leitrim; that was the detail she used as a bargaining chip with her mother, or as a kind of security clause; Leitrim, after all, was a neighboring county to Longford, so it was almost as though she was living with people from home; it was not as though she was moving in with Dublin people, or with English people — or with boys. To Catherine’s amazement, her mother had agreed reluctantly, and had said that she would come up with some way of explaining it to Catherine’s father, and Catherine had spent a happy year living with the girls, who were such fun, and so easygoing, and who treated the flat as a home, not just as somewhere to stay a couple of nights a week before going home again for the weekend. They were both up there for the summer, of course, and she envied them so much, getting to live with James; she envied them even the month they had lived with him before she knew any of them, even the years when they had all been together at secondary school. How could you envy a time of which you could not possibly have been a part? And yet she did. She looked at James now, as he knelt beside her on the blanket, passing her a glass of lemonade. It was cool and solid in her hand.