And her hands. Her hands, trembling so violently, Catherine saw now, that the radio should surely have fallen. That the radio could not stay—
And in that moment, the radio fell. Bouncing off the carpet; the battery cover knocked off, the batteries spread—
The voices silenced.
“Catherine,” Lorraine said, “Have you heard from James today? Have you heard from Liam?”
Catherine stared. Was this some kind of joke?
“Catherine,” Lorraine said, and now a sob had leapt into her voice, and her hands, which had been hanging, went to her temples, went to her hair. “Catherine,” she said, and she said a sentence that Catherine did not understand. Some of the words she understood, and one of them she could not but understand — it was not a word you could ignore — but another of them, the most important of them, she could not understand; not just what it was, but how it was relevant, how it was relevant to them. Relevant to Lorraine, standing, really crying now, crying ragged, frightened tears in the doorway, the parts of the radio scattered, useless, at her feet; relevant to Catherine, sitting, still half hearing the putt and applause, in her big soft armchair in the afternoon sun. Relevant to James, or relevant to Liam, who were up with Liam’s parents in Enniskillen, or Derry, or wherever it was—
And then Catherine understood the other word.
Ah, a quiet old spot, she heard Liam’s voice saying, from a day when Liam had not yet been Liam.
Except, she had been wrong about that, as well.
“Catherine,” Lorraine was saying now, trying to pull herself together; dragging palms across her streaming eyes, pushing wrists against her streaming nose. Gathering the batteries of the radio, as though that mattered; as though hearing those voices, and the news they were bringing, would change a single thing. “Catherine. We have to do something. We have to—”
But Catherine could only stare.
Because what was it, exactly, that they were meant to do?
What was it that they, two people standing in a sitting room, could possibly do?
Untitled
James gave the same name to every portrait he took that day.
Untitled
Gelatin Silver Print, 1998
178 x 120cm
Untitled
Gelatin Silver Print, 1998
178 x 120cm
Untitled
Gelatin Silver Print, 1998
178 x 120cm
Untitled
Gelatin Silver Print, 1998
275 x 180cm
Untitled
Gelatin Silver Print, 1998
178 x 120cm
Untitled
Gelatin Silver Print, 1998
178 x 120cm
Untitled
Gelatin Silver Print, 1998
178 x 120cm
Liam was the larger portrait. Liam: not the portrait of him that Lisa had expected as the centerpiece, but a newer portrait, and a starker one. The Irish Times review a few days later described how people at the opening had crowded around the portrait; how they had asked whether anything was known of its subject; whether he had recovered; whether he would be OK.
But then people had probably wondered that about all seven of the portraits, Catherine thought, about all seven of the subjects: about the three other men, one of them very elderly, staring gravely at the camera; about the three women, one of them pregnant, one of them crying, the tears glistening on her face.
The series was titled simply Omagh, and it was shown in its entirety at the show on John Street, a month and four days after the bombing. Which was too soon, some people said, especially given that most of the subjects were either still in the hospital where James had photographed them, or only recently discharged. Not to mention that so many others had never even made it to a hospital bed.
But James would not care for what people said, Catherine knew. James, she knew, would be very, very clear about what he was doing with the photographs, and why.
James. Who had escaped injury. Who had escaped worse. Who had separated from Liam for half an hour that afternoon to go to a camera shop on the other side of town, leaving Liam to run an errand for his mother. Milk, it had been. Just milk. To buy the milk, he had headed for a supermarket down the town, taking his time in getting there, calling in to the record shop on the way, to the bookshop, to the shop where, occasionally, they had in some decent-looking jeans. But what did any of this detail matter? Liam gave it to a journalist a few weeks later — the journalist, in fact, who had been at the party for Ed Dunne — and the journalist, writing a story on James’s show, had worked the details up into a narrative stark and unsettling in its simplicity, in the simplicity of a twenty-year-old man going out, on a Saturday, to buy his mother a carton of milk—
What did any of the details matter? A red Vauxhall, a Cavalier, the explosives packed into it like things needed for a trip. The number plates changed; the two men who had parked it gone, long gone, and the warnings phoned in to three different places, so that the overall effect was one of confusion — deliberately, accidentally, who knew? Who would differentiate? It was half past two on a Saturday afternoon. Liam was already on Market Street, weaving through the crowds of shoppers and tourists, when the evacuations began, when the police began cordoning people into the area, people who were complaining, but not particularly worried; laughing and chatting, many of them. Long grown used to this kind of drilclass="underline" the threat, the scare, the all-clear shortly afterwards, the afternoon interrupted and the groceries yet to be bought.
Ten past three.
And for a few seconds after the explosion, said the next day’s newspapers, there was a silence, a frozen, disbelieving silence.
And then the screaming.
* * *
James, on the other side of the cordons, frowning down towards the other end of town, asking people around him if they knew any more than he did.
And then the noise of it. A noise like nothing he had ever heard before, he told the journalist, but a noise, still, that he could not but recognize. Not like a thunderclap, no, no. Nothing like a thunderclap.
What had it sounded like? It had sounded like the thing that it had been.
And then the silence.
And then the screaming. Except that James described it as wailing. James described it as wailing that rose from the streets in front of him and climbed, twisting and growing, into the blackened, burned air.
* * *
(Although maybe that had been the description of the journalist. The journalist who so loved the look of her own words; so loved the shapes they made, the rhythms of them.)
* * *
Catherine was not at the opening. Catherine knew that it was not her place to be there.
But she went to see the photographs, the next day, when the gallery — not even a gallery, just the stripped-down floor of what had until recently been a shoe factory — was quiet, when the only other person there was the attendant, a girl her own age, who did not give her a second glance.
After the reviews began to come, the gallery would not be quiet anymore. But on that day, it was just Catherine, and just the attendant, and then the attendant slipped out, and it was just Catherine, and just what James had seen. What James had understood.
They were the photographs which made his name.
Frieze (2012)
Astonishing piece, isn’t it?” said the gallery assistant, thin as a hat stand and with the face of a John Currin child, as she joined Catherine in front of the new Zhu Wang. The piece was enormous, its thickly sludged canvas taking up almost the entire back wall of the Lewis booth, and it was astonishing, all right, but for all the worst possible reasons: its gimmickry, its sloppiness, and the artist’s very obvious hunger to be done with it so that he could move on to its equally high-earning successor. Catherine shook her head slowly, to suggest that words could not suffice in the face of such artistry, and let her gaze scan them again, the red and scarlet clumps of oil paint, the rusted nails pressed into them like twigs crushed underfoot.