“I told you, I don’t wear eye makeup.”
“Well, that’s another thing we’re going to need to discuss,” Amy said, as they reached the bathroom, and she pushed Catherine into a cubicle. “Bend,” she said. “Think of something that disgusts you.”
“Conor disgusts me.”
“Shut up about Conor,” Amy said. “Think of vermin or something. Worms.”
“I don’t have any problem with worms,” Catherine said. “I grew up on a farm, remember?”
“Shut up about that fucking farm as well,” Amy said. “Nobody cares that you grew up on a farm. Anyone would think you’d crawled to college straight from the famine, the way you go on. Cows and tractors, for Christ’s sake. So what? My dad has a ride-on lawn mower. Do you hear me going on about that? No, you do not. Now, come here.” She pulled Catherine closer, so that their faces were inches apart. “Open your gob.”
“What for?” Catherine whined.
“Open your mouth,” Amy said, and when Catherine obeyed, Amy shoved two fingers down her throat, so that it came right up, the lunch from that day, and quite a lot of the cider from that evening.
“That’s better,” Amy said, her hand on the nape of Catherine’s neck. “Good girl.”
“I hate Conor,” Catherine said, coughing and rubbing at her mouth. “I hate him.”
“Then act like it,” Amy said, and she turned the cold tap on. “Now you and I are going to get plastered all over again, and when James gets home from Berlin tomorrow, we are going to spend the whole day getting pissed with him, and you are not going to waste another fucking minute of your glorious state of drunkenness talking to Conor Moran. Or even thinking about him. Now splash.” She pointed to the sink, and then, moving to the toilet, she hitched her skirt up and began to ease her knickers down.
“Do you need me to leave?” Catherine said, embarrassed.
“Splash, Catherine, and look lively about it,” Amy said, and she leaned back her head as her loud, easy flow began to come.
* * *
In Baggot Street all that year, James had been a photograph, blu-tacked to the mantelpiece mirror; in the photo he was all legs, sprawled out on the carpet in front of the couch, with Amy’s arms around his neck, and his hair a mop of red curls and waves and cowlicks; his expression was one of suffering, but in an ironic, delighted way.
Also, James was a set of drawings which every night in her sleep Catherine was keeping pressed like so many dried flowers, without even knowing she was doing so for the first couple of months. If it had not been for a film she and the girls had been watching one night close to Christmas, a film about an artist whose drawings, Amy said, were very like those of James, Catherine might never have known what she was sleeping on, but Amy went into Catherine’s bedroom and pulled the large, flat folder out from under the mattress. Lorraine cleared a space on the carpet, moving aside the tea things and the cigarette packets and the Evening Herald that had been there for a fortnight, and Amy laid down the folder and opened it up.
Nobody was looking directly at him; that was what Catherine first noticed. He drew with charcoal, in strokes which were careful, which seemed to leave nothing to chance, going after detail — the ring on a finger, the rib of a cuff, the hard skin on an elbow — as though it was something threatened, something which had to be caught and preserved. And yet, for all his obedience to detail, it was the expressions — not just the faces, but the moods and preoccupations traveling through those faces, running under their surfaces like hidden streams — which came up out of the pages torn from a sketchbook and which set going in Catherine an anxiety which she could not understand.
“Nobody knows,” she said then, surprising herself; she had said it before consciously realizing it. “Nobody knows he’s drawing them.”
Beside her, Amy nodded. “That’s what he does. He catches people unawares.”
“He’s a little stalker,” Lorraine said. “A little paparazzi fucker.”
“See this one of Lorraine,” Amy said, and Lorraine gave a protesting wail.
“I have a double chin!”
“No, no, it’s you,” Catherine said, taking the drawing. “I mean, you, except with a double chin.”
“He’s a sneaky little bastard,” Lorraine said, reaching for her cigarettes. “He did not have my permission to do that.”
Catherine looked at Amy. “Has he done you?”
She nodded. “Somewhere in there. It was while we were in Irish class last year.”
“She was staring out the window deciding whether or not to give a hand job to Robbie Fox,” Lorraine said.
“Shut up, you,” said Amy, laughing. She went through the drawings more quickly now, lifting them up at the right-hand corner, separating them carefully; about fifteen or so in, she stopped. “Here I am,” she said, pulling the page out slowly.
“It’s lovely,” Catherine said quietly.
“Lovely for Robbie,” Lorraine snorted.
“No, really,” Catherine said, above their laughter. She leaned in to look more closely. It was Amy, in a school jumper, with a tie loosely knotted beneath a shirt collar, sitting with her knuckles pressed to her chin. Lorraine had remembered correctly: she was looking out a window. James had drawn the wooden frame, and an outline of the buildings outside, and he had drawn the small hoop in Amy’s right earlobe, and the biro in her hand. As with the other portraits, he had caught something in the eyes, and something about the mouth, which brought on a feeling of — Catherine could only think of it as worry, a kind of unease. Even though this Amy in charcoal, her attention on something outside or on something deep within her mind; even though she looked beautiful, soft-eyed — even for all this, there was something about the portrait that made Catherine feel that it was somehow wrong to be looking at it. Then it struck her: how direct the angle was. James would have needed to have been sitting almost right in front of Amy, only slightly to her right, to capture her like this; he would have needed to have been two desks or so in front of her, and turned fully around.
“How did you not see him?” she said to Amy, and Amy just shrugged.
“That’s the thing about the way he does them. He has some way of not letting anyone notice him. I don’t know how he manages.”
But on the morning James came back to Dublin, Catherine had quite forgotten about him — or rather, Catherine was too preoccupied with other matters to remember that he was coming. The other matters related to the night before, which had ended on Grafton Street not long before dawn, with Conor taking hold of her shoulders and telling her that she was a great chick, a great chick, over and over, while still, so enragingly, failing to actually put his arms around her and hold her, which by that time she had wanted so badly, for so long, that she felt as though she might just vaporize, standing there in front of him, with his useless fingers on her useless skin, or that she might instead just knee him in the balls, which was what she had done, come to think of it — she could hear again Amy’s voice saying, Oh Jesus, Catherine—but not even that successfully, because Conor had stood upright far too quickly afterwards, and he had been pleased, she could see, and now he was gone home to Wexford for the summer, to work in his uncle’s pub, and it would be October before she would see him again. About this, she felt miserable, but also relieved: there would be no more of his snideness, no more of his mockery, no more of his moods. She could recall asking him, before they left the Pav for the club — she had not stayed away from him after Amy’s lecture in the bathroom, or had managed to do so for only about twenty minutes — for advice on her situation, or indeed non-situation, with her summer job at the Longford Leader: since January, she had been meaning to phone the editor and remind him that he had told her, the summer before, to come back when she was in college. But she had not phoned him, for various reasons.