“I’m meeting Zoe. Rafe and I broke up.”
“What?” Conor said, looking shocked. “But you were together on Valentine’s night!”
“Yeah. And I decided that was that.”
“Ah, Citóg. After all the trouble I went to, introducing you to him?”
She shrugged. She was enjoying this, she realized: Conor looking crestfallen because she’d dumped the guy he’d set her up with. She should do this kind of thing more often.
“Jesus, you’re hard pleased,” Conor said, shaking his head. But then he grinned, and Catherine rolled her eyes; she knew that something lewd was coming.
“Don’t, Moran,” she warned.
“I’d say it was a good experience, though, all the same?”
“Moran!”
“Clitóg no more, I’d say. Made a woman out of you at long last, did he, Rafey?”
“Oh, would you ever just fuck off,” Catherine said, but she was laughing; she could not help laughing when Conor slagged her off.
“The Doyle’s having a party in his rooms later,” he said, leaning against the wall. “You coming?”
The Doyle was the nickname which had been bestowed this year on Emmet Doyle, the boy who had the previous summer so earnestly — so sweetly, really — counseled Catherine on how to bluff her way into a summer job. He was no longer, though, that same shy boy; over the last year, he had transformed himself into a fully fledged House Six hack. Muck, his satirical column for TN, was a nod to the generations of American journalists he had learned about in his History of the Media class, and it framed itself as an exposé of hypocrisy, pomposity and dishonesty on campus — but it was more muck-slinging than mud-raking, chiefly an exercise in ridicule and mischief, and it frequently got things appallingly wrong. In November, for instance, Emmet’s gleeful account of a senior lecturer’s very public night on the tiles at the History Ball had turned out to be a blow-by-blow account of the man’s very public fall from the wagon after seven years of sobriety. A diatribe against the college’s practice of awarding honorary doctorates to “lazy and irrelevant wasters,” meanwhile, which called for students to picket the next conferring ceremony, had run in February, on the very day that Nelson Mandela was announced as that year’s chief honoree. Mostly, though, Muck took aim at various college societies and at the students’ union, as well as at various other local targets: the tutors, the security guards, the chaplains, the American tourists who lined up to see the Book of Kells, the Freshman girl who had dyed her hair blue. He had a nickname for everyone; “Poetess” was what he called Catherine, having filched two of her poems from the slush pile for Icarus, the college literary magazine. Catherine tended, as a result, to avoid him when she saw him coming, and she was not in the mood for one of his notoriously chaotic parties tonight.
“I can’t,” she told Conor. “James is coming home tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I thought he wasn’t coming home until the summer.”
“Well,” Catherine shrugged. “He changed his mind. He’s home tomorrow. And so I don’t want to be wrecked in the morning. I’m meeting him early at the airport.”
This was not true; James was once again getting a lift home from Berlin in the cab of a lorry, and he had written to Catherine and the girls saying that he would make his own way to Baggot Street when he arrived, probably sometime in the early afternoon. It shocked her a little that she had told this lie so easily just now, and so readily, without having in any way planned it or decided that it was necessary; she blinked at Conor, feeling a little breathless, worrying that he would pull her up on it, that he would expose her dishonesty and, worse still, the motive behind it. Which was — because Catherine did not know — which was what, exactly? Why had she felt the need to make up a story? Why had she felt the need to disguise the extent of her excitement about James’s homecoming, to throw Conor off the scent of the preparations she wanted to go home and make? Because he would laugh at her? But Conor always laughed at her, and she liked it — but no, she realized, this time she did not want Conor to have the opportunity to laugh at her. This time there was something that she really did not want Conor to know. This time was different, she realized, watching him; this time was something somehow truly private.
“I just can’t come,” she said apologetically. “I’ll go to the next one.”
“Go to whatever parties you like, Citóg,” Conor said, shrugging. Then something seemed to occur to him. He frowned. “Here. This doesn’t have anything to do with you and Rafe breaking up, does it? This guy James coming home?”
“Rafe and I broke up because we’d run our course. We had nothing in common. And anyway, you know James is gay. I told you that.”
“Yeah, I know, I know, your precious gay friend. You’ve mentioned that. Once or twice.”
“Shut up,” Catherine said, laughing, but she could not suppress a wave of unease; James was unaware that Catherine had, over the course of the last term and a half, outed him to several of her college friends, none of whom he had actually met. It had just happened; it had just come out, so to speak, when she had been telling people about her friend the photographer in Berlin, and about how brilliant he was. Drink had usually been involved, and she had always felt bad the next morning; but then, it was not as though James was not out. He was out to Catherine, out to Amy and Lorraine, out to his mother — but still. It was something she had yet to tell him, the fact that people like Conor and Zoe knew. It was something which would have to be almost immediately addressed, given that she was so much looking forward to bringing him onto campus this week and introducing him to everyone. It was a bit of a problem, probably. It was not something, for instance, that she had mentioned in her letters to him. She felt her stomach twist with anxiety, and she must have winced, because Conor looked at her more closely.
“What’s up?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Not having regrets about old Rafey?”
“Jesus!” she burst out. “Why don’t you shag Rafe, if you’re so obsessed with him?”
“Now, hang on,” Conor said, holding up his hands. “I mean, I’m glad you’re getting your own Private Idaho back again, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be lumped in with him.” He jerked his head towards the girl he had come with, who was now lingering in front of the Marilyn piece. “I’m laying my pipe the way any man with eyes in his head would.”
“You can’t say that!” Catherine spluttered, her heart slamming in her chest. He laughed, and she stared at him, feeling confused. Could he say that? Was that an insult to James? She thought so, but she could not be sure — much of what Conor said to her, to anyone, could be perceived as an insult, if you decided to see it that way; but surely it was not just about deciding? She felt she should know; she felt she should, on this question, be so much clearer, so much more solid. It was not as though Conor had a problem with gay people; he had nodded almost respectfully when Catherine had told him, one night early the previous term, about James. He knew gay people himself, he had said; there was a guy he had been to school with who he was pretty sure about, and obviously a few people in his theatre class. Obviously, Catherine had said in response, feeling the surge of pride she so often felt when she talked or thought about James, about how close she was to him. But now, here, in this moment, should she be standing up for him? Should she be angry on his behalf? She was glaring at Conor, trying to get a handle on him, and he was grinning back.