But sleep; all she wanted was sleep. She felt so tired. She felt, for a moment, a longing to go home, to run home, but she could not do that either, and even the thought of it struck panic inside her like a match. Ellen’s face; her mother’s face; her father’s face — she pushed them away. Tomorrow was the day for leaving. Tomorrow was the day for home.
“Are you asleep?” James said, nudging her with his leg.
“No,” Catherine said, the word all in a drowse.
“Don’t go to sleep,” he said, and she heard him turn a page.
Moonfoam and Silver (1998)
1
Half of each can was a curving block of red, the familiar font of the brand name swooping over it, and at the bottom, in yellow-piped block capitals, the word SOUP.
ONION MADE WITH BEEF STOCK sounded vile. PEPPER POT; what, even, was pepper pot soup? And barley was some kind of crop, wasn’t it? A crop grown in places where the land was good enough to hold it.
These were the actual soup cans; that was the thing to understand. That gold circular canvas over there was an actual Marilyn, and in another room were the actual Jackie O paintings, the canvases washed over with an eerie blue. And somewhere else in the gallery was the actual Mao, smug and bleary and bloated. Or, one of the actuals, actually. One of the Maos, six of the Jackies, one of the Marilyns, her lipstick glossy even in monochrome, her beauty spot like a sharp bud of dirt in the paint. Not the actual. That was the point. That was the—
“Let me guess, Citóg,” said a voice from behind her. “You’re mulling over the layers of irony. You’re thinking of how they’re themselves and yet at the same time not themselves. You’re thinking, what am I looking at, actually? What am I—”
“Why am I looking at you, Moran, is the question?” Catherine said, turning to face him. “What are you doing here?”
“On a date,” he shrugged. “What do you think of this stuff?”
“I think he was at his best in the mid-sixties, really, wasn’t he?” she said evenly.
“Oh, no doubt,” Conor said. “Sixty-five to sixty-six, I’d say, to be even more precise about it.”
“Pretty downhill after that.”
“Mmm,” Conor said, nodding vigorously, and together, they drifted on to the huge silkscreen of the dollar sign.
In truth, Catherine didn’t have a clue when Andy Warhol had been at his best, but the mid-sixties seemed a likely possibility, and it seemed like the kind of thing that would be said about Warhol; so she had put it out there, as she often did now, and as often happened now, it had worked. She had got away with it. She was still not quite able to believe that this happened, but it did. You said something, sounding confident as you said it, keeping your voice level, and people nodded, and people agreed with you, and people looked at you as a person who apparently knew their stuff. That was it. It was so easy.
This was what she had discovered this year at college: that when you gave the world the impression that you were up to it, ready for whatever it wanted to throw at you, the stuff the world threw at you turned out to be not that big of a deal after all. It turned out, actually, to be kind of comically manageable. Essays. Reading lists. Meetings with her lecturers. Writing articles for Trinity News; she was doing loads for the books pages of TN now, and getting on nicely. Also, boys, there had been lots of boys, once she had copped herself on and stopped mooning over Conor, who was just a mate now, and actually not a bad one; one among many. This was one of the things of which she was proudest about this second year at college: that she had so many friends now. Maybe too many. Or maybe they were acquaintances, rather than friends, but she didn’t think about the distinction. She just liked it. She liked the way that it was no longer possible, when she walked through Front Arch in the morning, on the way to her class or to the library, to get to where she was going without bumping into at least a couple of people she knew, and maybe more, depending on the time of day; sometimes, if she was not in a rush, not on her way to a lecture or a tutorial, it could take her a full hour to get where she was going, such was the volume of people she would bump into, such were the chats to be had. It gave her a buzz, the feeling that her days were teeming, that there were never enough hours to talk to all the people she wanted to talk to, let alone for all the books she wanted to read, all the poems she wanted to write, all the things she wanted to know about, and talk about, and add to her store.
“Anyway,” she said now, joining up with Conor again. “Who’s the lucky lady?”
“Alice from Modern Theatre,” he said. “Great girl.”
“Aren’t they always?”
“Don’t be jealous,” Conor said. “You here with Rafey?”