“One reason, Citóg,” Conor had said, when she told him. “One reason. Visceral fear.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Catherine had said, delighted, as usual, to hear Conor referring to her with the nickname he had given her. It made no sense; it was the Irish word for left-handed people, and she was right-handed. But she loved it, anyway, and she tingled every time he said it. “How could I be afraid of him when I don’t even know him?”
“Right. Because that’s really stopped you being afraid of people before.”
“Fuck off.”
Then Conor had dragged someone else into the conversation, had humiliated her in front of someone who was a virtual stranger: Emmet Doyle, a quiet Dublin guy who Catherine knew vaguely from editorial meetings for Trinity News. He wrote mostly about dull student union politics, and he dressed in a slightly odd combination of smart shirts and scruffy cords, and his hair fell in soft brown curls around his face, and he blushed whenever anyone spoke to him. The blushing ought to have endeared him to Catherine, who suffered from precisely the same affliction, but instead it irritated her. She wanted men to have faces which showed not a flicker of what was going on in their minds. But now here was Emmet Doyle, blushing, and looking a little bewildered, while Conor outlined to him the farce of Catherine’s inability to call the Leader editor, and while Catherine yanked at Conor’s arm, and shoved him, and told him to stop making such a big deal out of it, Emmet proceeded, in his nice, polite, South County Dublin sentences, to suggest ways for Catherine to approach the task — what she should say to the editor; how she should make her case.
“I mean, just tell him you have, like, experience, and that you’ve done news, and that you’ve done layout, and that you’ve done different kinds of features and stuff. I mean, you’ve done stuff for TN, haven’t you? I’ve seen your name.”
She shrugged. “A few—”
“Tell him you got the last interview with Jeff Buckley,” Conor cut in.
“Jeff who?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Citóg,” Conor said, putting his hand to his face, and it went on like that, a catalogue of mortification and stupidity, until daylight was hitting the red stones of Grafton Street, and until there was nothing else for it but to go home.
The next morning: a thumping skull, trembling skin, a stomach like seasickness. Amy and Lorraine were at the exam halls, with hangovers of their own for which, they made clear as they were leaving, they held Catherine entirely responsible, and a bag of peas from the freezer was the best thing she could find in the way of relief; she took it back to bed and fell asleep a second time with its coldness pressed above one ear. That sleep was a sinkhole of utter oblivion, in which dreams were out of the question because her body had a great deal of work to do, and when her eyes opened two hours later, what she noticed firstly was that the pain was gone, and secondly, that the noise from the street outside was much louder than it ought to have been, and thirdly, that it was not actually the noise from the streets, but the noise of someone in the sitting room, someone moving around, lifting things and putting them down. Sitting now, they were: the creak of the leather armchair. One of the girls, Catherine thought. Home to kill her for having kept them out until six o’clock in the morning.
“Hello?” Catherine called out, without raising her head from the pillow. “Hello?”
In response, there was only another sound from the armchair; it protested like that when you sat forward. A shifting, now; the scrape of something on wood.
“Hello?” Catherine called again. “Who’s there?”
The voice shocked her when it came. It was a man’s, sharp and wary. “Hello?” it said, and Catherine heard again the creak of the armchair; he was standing up. “Hello?”
“Hello!” Catherine said, almost shouting, trying to push authority, a lack of patience for nonsense, into her tone, but her heart was slamming, and she knew she sounded scared. She was sitting upright now, and conscious of the fact that, apart from her T-shirt, she was naked, and that the guy, whoever he was, was walking to the sitting-room door, which was directly across from the door to her room. Her mind scanned the possibilities; Cillian, Lorraine’s boyfriend, was already gone to London for the summer, and Duffy, their landlord, had a nasal whine she would know anywhere.
“Who’s there?” the voice said, even more sharply this time. He was out of the sitting room now; he was in the hall.
“I’m here!” Catherine shouted, angry now.
“Who’s I?” he said, sounding equally angry.
“Don’t come in, don’t come in!” Catherine shouted, and she knocked the bag of peas to the floor, and the little green orbs scattered, and the door handle turned, and a head topped with red curls and cowlicks appeared.
“You must be Caroline,” was what he said, while Catherine sat there, the duvet snatched up around her, one naked leg sticking out, and the now-thawed peas having spilled onto the carpet below. She stared at him. She stared at his hair, and at his face sandblasted with freckles, at the amused little twist of his thin-lipped mouth. He was wearing a jumper, old-fashioned and patterned in dark greens and grays, and faded jeans, and black Docs, shoes rather than boots, the leather scuffed and scratched. He was fully in the room now, having pushed the door wide open.
“Catherine,” she said, in a tone intended to shame him — she had worked out who he was by now, she had remembered what Amy had said the night before, but still, how dare he just let himself in here? How dare he burst into her bedroom like this, as though it was still his? It was not his; it was not his for another couple of days yet, and she was nearly naked, and he was completely out of order, and this was something he needed to realize, this was something for which he needed to make amends—
But James was not paying Catherine, or Catherine’s tone, the slightest bit of attention. James was looking around the room, taking in everything Catherine had done to make it her own: her desk, covered now with books and lecture notes and balled-up clothes; her CDs, stacked high on the windowsill; the wardrobe, decorated now not just with his black-and-white postcards, but with things she had put there: a photocopy of a Patrick Kavanagh poem she had loved from her Writing Ireland course; a photograph of her sister Anna with muck on her T-shirt and a scraggy chain of daisies in her hair; a Muriel’s Wedding poster, showing Toni Collette in a shower of colored confetti; the picture from the cover of Beetlebum, showing the guy or girl or whichever it was lying passed out on a pile of leaves.
He looked to the peas. “You’re getting your greens, anyway, Caroline,” he said. “That’s good to see.”
“Catherine.”
He glanced at her. “Why, what did I call you?”
“Caroline.”
“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head as though appalled. “Oh, no. That’s not you at all, at all.”
He stepped over towards her, extending a hand. “I’m James. I hope Amy and Lorraine told you I was coming.”
“Oh, yes,” Catherine said, as briskly as though they were in a boardroom. “I’m sorry the place — I mean — I just finished my exams yesterday, you see. I was out—” She stopped, gesturing by way of explanation at the peas. “So.”