“Hi, Mr. Burke,” Catherine said before she could stop herself, her head jerking upwards, which caused James to jolt beside her and follow her gaze.
“Miss Reilly,” Burke said with heavy emphasis, as though he was a butler announcing her arrival to a room, and with a little bow and a long look at James — a look, Catherine thought, that was more like a leer — he walked away.
“Who the fuck was that?” James said, taking the headphone from his ear and watching as Burke made for the Sligo train.
“A neighbor,” Catherine said. Her heart was thumping; the blush was searing itself into her cheeks, postponed by the shock but coming on fully now.
“He looked like he was coming to claim your soul.”
“Don’t look at him.”
“We hope — that you choke — that you cho-o-oke,” James sang in a low, rasping whisper, and Catherine elbowed him.
“Stop,” she said. “It’s bad enough.”
James snorted. “What’s bad enough? Those trousers? Did you see the state of them? The arse like an old turf bag.”
“It’s just bad enough,” Catherine said, and she lowered her head to indicate that she was giving all her attention, again, to the song.
Sure enough, two mornings later, which was Catherine’s first summer Sunday at home, she noticed her mother looking at her awkwardly, in the way that meant she had something to say. Catherine braced herself. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cornflakes and Coco Pops mixed together the way she liked them. It was after eleven, and because she had not dragged herself out of bed earlier, she would now have to go with her father to one o’clock Mass; the others had already been. Catherine had been out the night before, in Fallon’s and then on to Blazer’s with some of the girls she had known in school, but it had been the usual shit: bumping into people she never saw anymore, and having bitty conversations with them, and then worrying whether her ID would be enough to get her into the club — it was just her luck that now that she had finally turned eighteen, all the clubs in town had adopted an over-nineteens policy, and getting in depended on whether you knew the bouncer, or on whether he decided he fancied you, or on whether you could plead with him, as Catherine had eventually had to do the night before, pointing out to him that she wasn’t even drunk, that she could never get properly drunk in Longford, because her father always insisted on collecting her, no matter how late she was out — parking, sometimes, right outside the nightclub door. She reckoned the bouncer had felt sorry for her; that that was why he had let her in. Certainly he had looked at her, just before nodding her through, with something like pity in his eyes.
And then Blazer’s had been rubbish, as usual. Cringey dancing to songs from Trainspotting; girls who’d been in her Science and Geography classes trying to look like they were off their heads on E when all they’d had was eight bottles of Mug Shot. Clodhopper morons asking if you wanted a shift, the saliva already flecking and bubbling at the corners of their mouths. Anyone half-decent-looking already getting the face worn off them in a corner, and David Donaghy, who’d ignored Catherine’s attentions on the school bus from September 1991 to June 1996, ignoring her all over again, and then shifting Lisa Mulligan, who Catherine was pretty sure was his second cousin. Catherine’s old schoolfriend Jenny screaming, “You need to get pissed!” at her, over and over, and then falling asleep slumped against the mirrored walls, and then shifting David Donaghy when his cousin was finished with him. Two o’clock could not come quickly enough. Catherine had almost been glad of the sight of her father’s Sierra pulled up tight to the steps at the front.
But then he had been silent all the way home, so Catherine knew that Burke had said something to him. There was no danger of her father raising the subject with her himself — the rules might come from him, but that did not mean that he had to articulate them, at least not with Catherine and Ellen, and definitely not when they related, in even the most peripheral of ways, to what Catherine and Ellen might get up to with boys — but in the morning, Catherine’s mother would pause at the kitchen counter, just as she was pausing now, and she would glance in Catherine’s direction, and she would clear her throat: a short, almost apologetic rev.
Catherine looked up to meet it; her mother, folding a tea towel with great precision, looked away again. On the radio, a Shannonside presenter said something about the button accordion. Fuck the button accordion, Catherine thought.
“Are you seeing any of your friends from college over the summer?” her mother said.
“Doubt it,” Catherine shrugged. “Most of them are gone traveling to Germany and America and stuff.” This was not true, but it made some point that Catherine had suddenly found herself wanting very badly to make: that her friends had actual lives. That people her age were out there, doing things for themselves, living independently and freely. This was not actually true, for the most part, since most of her friends from college were also spending the summer working in the towns closest to where they had grown up, and were back living with their parents, but this detail, Catherine had decided, was completely irrelevant. They could have been traveling; that was the point. If they had wanted to travel—this was the point — they would have been able to. Allowed to. Zoe, that girl from Catherine’s art history tutorial, was in Italy, for instance — Zoe was the kind of person who would think nothing of heading off to Italy by herself for the whole summer. And Conor had made noises about bar work in Chicago, though he had not actually gone in the end due to lack of funds, but he had intended to. And James: James had been in Germany for the entire year! Her mother needed to know that Catherine had friends like this. Except that she did not need to know — it would not be helpful or useful for her to know — the actual details, at least not about Conor and James, because that would lead to too many questions — which was precisely, Catherine remembered, what was about to happen now. She sighed heavily.
“What’s wrong with you?” her mother said, her suspicions raised.
“Nothing.”
“I’m just trying to make simple conversation, for God’s sake.”
“I’m not stopping you.”