“Catherine,” her mother said, and she actually laughed. “Stop being so ridiculous. Of course you can”—she made a face—“listen to music with whoever the hell you want. Or say hello to them, or whatever it is that you call it now. Daddy was just upset that he had to hear about it from Pat Burke. That Pat Burke was able to tell him something he didn’t already know. And something I didn’t know.”
“Oh my God,” Catherine said, putting her hands to her head. “Oh my God. I can’t take this. I can’t—”
“Well,” her mother said, laying the tea towel flat on the table and smoothing it as though it was a map she was intending to read. “You’re getting very bloody worked up about something you claim to be nothing at all.”
James was not her boyfriend. No one was her boyfriend. There had been no boyfriend while she was at school, and there had been no boyfriend during the long summer after her Leaving Cert, and there had been no boyfriend during the first year of college, and there was no boyfriend now. How could there be, when she was back living at home? Which was not an acceptable excuse, according to Catherine’s sister Ellen, who was sixteen, and who therefore lived at home all of the time, and who did not let this stop her from having boyfriends, and as many boyfriends as she felt like. It was not that their parents were any less strict with Ellen than they had been with Catherine; it was just that Ellen ignored their strictness, or rather worked around it, with the skill of someone dismantling a bomb. Especially now that she was going into her Leaving Cert year, she explained to Catherine, there were simply certain experiences she refused to go without. So, if she wanted to go to the pub where the people her age drank, she made up a story about maths grinds at a friend’s house, and when their father collected her four or five hours later, she was ready and waiting, chewing gum to hide the bang of cider and equipped with a perfect explanation for why her clothes smelled of smoke. She was never asked for the explanation. Their father, Ellen told Catherine, needed so much to believe that she would not do such a thing, would not go boozing and smoking and shifting fellas in an alleyway in town, that he simply went on doing that: he believed. Their mother knew; their mother, Ellen said, had come into the bedroom and ranted at her on more than one occasion, but Ellen had gone on denying everything, and doing everything, and she suspected, deep down, that their mother respected her for that.
“If she saw Shane Keegan, she’d want me to go with him,” she’d said, setting out her case to Catherine earlier that year. “He’s a complete ride. You couldn’t pass up a chance like that.”
“Yeah, right,” Catherine had scoffed. “If they found out you were shifting one of the Keegans, they’d ground you until you were twenty-five.”
“They could try,” Ellen had said, bouncing a tennis ball off the bedroom wall. “Anyway, one of us has to be shifting fellas. It’s a complete waste of time you being up at college if you’re not even going to get together with anyone. I would have got together with that Conor fella ages ago if I was you.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, I would. He sounds like good craic.”
“Yeah, well,” Catherine said weakly. “It’s not that simple once you get to college.”
“Course it is,” Ellen said, the ball slapping against her hand. “You just don’t know how to do it.”
You’re not even ugly: that was something else that Ellen had said about Catherine’s ongoing celibacy. Or, not celibacy — when she was out, she often shifted guys, or acquiesced to their requests to shift her; she took their tongues into her mouth and let their hands roam over the cheeks of her arse — but whatever it was. Singlehood. Gomhood, Ellen had called it when Catherine had described it that way. Catherine was tall, Ellen pointed out, and she had some nice clothes, and long hair, and her skin was all right, and so what? What was stopping her? All she had to do, Ellen explained, was to go to the cinema with someone, or to the pub, and shift him, and talk to him, and then, once she got tired of him, she could break up with him. It was just what you did. Unless you were ugly, that was.
Not even ugly: for Catherine, in a strange way, this was enough. In college this past year, it had become clearer to her that boys found her attractive; boys looked at her, they flirted with her, they told her where the parties were going to be. And living with Amy and Lorraine had meant that she had met lots of boys, too. The whole business with Conor they disapproved of; Conor, who was in one of Catherine’s English tutorials and over whom she had been stupidly mooning all year, and with whom she maintained a friendship which consisted mainly of him slagging her, and of her thinking of suitable retorts half an hour later.
The problem — although Catherine herself did not see it as a problem — was that she did not want something real. Shifting someone you actually knew; she could not imagine it. How would you look them in the eye the next day? There was just so much — liquid. Slither, that was how she thought of it; slither that had been allowed into the space between you. It was appalling. Undignified. It was way too close a range. And sex: no. Just no. She was not going there; not until she worked it out somehow, how she could do it without dying of shame. Which would involve doing it, obviously, or doing some of it, at least; but this was a glitch in her own logic which Catherine felt perfectly entitled to ignore.
It was the morning after things had finally come to a head with Conor that Catherine had first met James. She had been drinking in the Pav, which was the bar at the back of campus for the cricket players, but in which everyone drank at the end of exams — or indeed, as in the case that evening of Amy and Lorraine, before exams were over. But Catherine had sat her final paper, a disastrous art history one, and to obliterate the memory of it she had been getting good and plastered, which was hardly the best of ideas when Conor was around. By half past nine, she was slumped in a booth beside him, pulling her oldest trick, the trick she had been pulling unsuccessfully with boys she fancied for years, which was to pretend to fall asleep on the boy’s shoulder, and to hope that he would notice, and react by putting an arm around her and pulling her close.
Conor did not put an arm around her. Conor moved away from her, so abruptly that she almost smacked her head on the wood of the booth, and Conor began making jokes about Catherine to the other guys at the table, and Conor reached over and nudged Catherine — who was still, mortifyingly, pretending to be asleep, her head hanging, because she could not think what best to do — and told her that she had to get up, now; that she had to go home. And then Conor was calling Amy over, which was the last thing that Catherine wanted, because she knew that Amy would kill her stone dead for being so pathetic, and sure enough, she opened her eyes and there was Amy with a face like thunder, and there, on Catherine’s elbows, was Amy’s strong, angry grip.
“Take this kid back to Baggot Street, will you, Ames,” Conor said, “or put her on a bus or something.”
Catherine pouted, another of her old tricks, with an equally low success rate. “I don’t want to go home.”
“I’m not taking her home,” Amy said. “It’s not even ten o’clock.” She shoved Catherine in front of her, in the direction of the tiny bathroom at the front of the bar. “And my name is not Ames,” she shot back at Conor.
“Whatever, sweetheart,” Conor replied.
“Dickhead,” Amy said, as she poked Catherine in the back. “Come on, keep going.”
“To do what?”
“To puke, and then to have cold water splashed all over your silly little face by me,” Amy said. “Are you wearing mascara?”