Six Weeks Later
(SEPTEMBER 2012)
He's late to meet her. The bus was caught in traffic because of some rally in town and now he's eight minutes late and he doesn't know where the cafe is. He has never met Marianne 'for coffee' before. The weather is too warm today, a scratchy and unseasonal heat. He finds the cafe on Capel Street and walks past the cashier towards the door at the back, checking his phone. It's nine minutes past three. Outside the back door Marianne is sitting in the smoking garden drinking her coffee already. No one else is out there, the place is quiet. She doesn't get up when she sees him.
Sorry I'm late, he says. There was some protest on so the bus was delayed.
He sits down opposite her. He hasn't ordered anything yet.
Don't worry about it, she says. What was the protest? It wasn't abortion or anything, was
it?
He feels ashamed now that he didn't notice. No, I don't think so, he says. The household tax or something.
Well, best of luck to them. May the revolution be swift and brutal.
He hasn't seen her in person since July, when she came home for her father's Mass. Her lips look pale now and slightly chapped, and she has dark circles under her eyes. Although he takes pleasure in seeing her look good, he feels a special sympathy with her when she looks ill or her skin is bad, like when someone who's usually very good at sports has a poor game. It makes her seem nicer somehow. She's wearing a very elegant black blouse, her wrists look slender and white, and her hair is twisted back loosely at her neck.
Yeah, he says. I would have a bit more energy for protesting if it was more on the brutal side, to be honest.
You want to get beaten up by the Gardai.
There are worse things than getting beaten up.
Marianne is taking a sip of coffee when he says this, and she seems to pause for a moment with the cup at her lips. He can't tell how he identifies this pause as distinct from the natural motion of her drinking, but he sees it. Then she replaces the cup on the saucer.
I agree, she says.
What does that mean?
I'm agreeing with you.
Have you recently been attacked by the guards or have I missed something? he says. She taps a little extra sugar from a sachet into her cup and then stirs it. Finally she glances up at him as if remembering he's sitting there. Aren't you going to have coffee? she says.
He nods. He's still feeling a little breathless after the walk from the bus, a little too warm under his clothes. He gets up from the table and goes back into the main room. It's cool in there and much dimmer. A woman in red lipstick takes his order and says she'll bring it right out.
*
Until April, Connell had been planning to work in Dublin for the summer and cover the rent with his wages, but a week before the exams his boss told him they were cutting back his hours. He could just about make rent that way but he'd have nothing left to live on. He'd always known that the place was going to go out of business, and he was furious with himself for not applying anywhere else. He thought about it constantly for weeks. In the end he decided he would have to move out for the summer. Niall was very nice about it, said the room would still be there for him in September and all of that. What about yourself and Marianne? Niall asked. And Connell said: Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I haven't told her yet.
The reality was that he stayed in Marianne's apartment most nights anyway. He could just tell her about the situation and ask if he could stay in her place until September. He knew she would say yes. He thought she would say yes, it was hard to imagine her not saying yes. But he found himself putting off the conversation, putting off Niall's enquiries about it, planning to bring it up with her and then at the last minute failing to. It just felt too much like asking her for money. He and Marianne never talked about money. They had never talked, for example, about the fact that her mother paid his mother money to scrub their floors and hang their laundry, or about the fact that this money circulated indirectly to Connell, who spent it, as often as not, on Marianne. He hated having to think about things like that. He knew Marianne never thought that way. She bought him things all the time, dinner, theatre tickets, things she would pay for and then instantly, permanently, forget about.
They went to a party in Sophie Whelan's house one night as the exams were ending. He knew he would finally have to tell Marianne that he was moving out of Mali's place, and he would have to ask her, outright, if he could stay with her instead. Most of the evening they spent by the swimming pool, immersed in the bewitching gravity of warm water. He watched Marianne splashing around in her strapless red swimsuit. A lock of wet hair had come loose from the knot at her neck and was sealed flat and shining against her skin. Everyone was laughing and drinking. It felt nothing like his real life. He didn't know these people at all, he hardly even believed in them, or in himself. At the side of the pool he kissed Marianne's shoulder impulsively and she smiled at him, delighted. No one looked at them. He thought he would tell her about the rent situation that night in bed. He felt very afraid of losing her. When they got to bed she wanted to have sex and afterwards she fell asleep. He thought of waking her up but he couldn't. He decided he would wait until after his last exam to talk to her about moving home.
Two days later, directly after his paper on Medieval and Renaissance Romance, he went over to Marianne's apartment and they sat at the table drinking coffee. He half-listened to her talking about some complicated relationship between Teresa and Lorcan, waiting for her to finish, and eventually he said: Hey, listen. By the way. It looks like I won't be able to pay rent up here this summer. Marianne looked up from her coffee and said flatly: What?
Yeah, he said. I'm going to have to move out of Mali's place.
When? said Marianne.
Pretty soon. Next week maybe.
Her face hardened, without displaying any particular emotion. Oh, she said. You'll be going home, then.
He rubbed at his breastbone then, feeling short of breath. Looks like it, yeah, he said.
She nodded, raised her eyebrows briefly and then lowered them again, and stared down into her cup of coffee. Well, she said. You'll be back in September, I assume.
His eyes were hurting and he closed them. He couldn't understand how this had happened, how he had let the discussion slip away like this. It was too late to say he wanted to stay with her, that was clear, but when had it become too late? It seemed to have happened immediately. He contemplated putting his face down on the table and just crying like a child. Instead he opened his eyes again.
Yeah, he said. I'm not dropping out, don't worry.
So you'll only be gone three months.
Yeah.
There was a long pause.
I don't know, he said. I guess you'll want to see other people, then, will you?
Finally, in a voice that struck him as truly cold, Marianne said: Sure.
He got up then and poured his coffee down the sink, although it wasn't finished. When he left her building he did cry, as much for his pathetic fantasy of living in her apartment as for their failed relationship, whatever that was.
Within a couple of weeks she was going out with someone else, a friend of hers called Jamie. Jamie's dad was one of the people who had caused the financial crisis - not figuratively, one of the actual people involved. It was Niall who told Connell they were together. He read it in a text message during work and had to go into the back room and press his forehead against a cool shelving unit for almost a full minute. Marianne had just wanted to see someone else all along, he thought. She was probably glad he'd had to leave Dublin because he was broke. She wanted a boyfriend whose family could take her on skiing holidays. And now that she had one, she wouldn't even answer Connell's emails anymore.
By July even Lorraine had heard that Marianne was seeing someone new. Connell knew people in town were talking about it, because Jamie had this nationally infamous father, and because there was nothing much else going on.
When did you two split up, then? Lorraine asked him.
We were never together.
You were seeing each other, I thought.
Casually, he replied.
Young people these days. I can't get my head around your relationships. You're hardly ancient.
When I was in school, she said, you were either going out with someone or you weren't. Connell moved his jaw around, staring at the television blandly. Where did I come from, then? he said.
Lorraine gave him a nudge of reproach and he continued to look at the TV. It was a travel programme, long silver beaches and blue water.
Marianne Sheridan wouldn't go out with someone like me, he said. What does that mean, someone like you?
I think her new boyfriend is a bit more in line with her social class.
Lorraine was silent for several seconds. Connell could feel his back teeth grinding together quietly.
I don't believe Marianne would act like that, Lorraine said. I don't think she's that kind of person.
He got up from the sofa. I can only tell you what happened, he said. Well, maybe you're misinterpreting what happened. But Connell had already left the room.
*
Back outside the cafe now, the sunlight is so strong it crunches all the colours up and makes them sting. Marianne's lighting a cigarette, with the box left open on the table. When he sits down she smiles at him through the small grey cloud of smoke. He feels she's being coy, but he doesn't know about what.
I don't think we've ever met for coffee before, he says. Have we?
Have we not? We must have.
He knows he's being unpleasant now but he can't stop. No, he says.
We have, she says. We got coffee before we went to see Rear Window. Although I guess that was more like a date.
This remark surprises him, and in response he just makes some non-committal noise like: Hm.
The door behind them opens and the woman comes out with his coffee. Connell thanks her and she smiles and goes back inside. The door swings shut. Marianne is saying that she hopes Connell and Jamie get to know each other better. I hope you get along with him, Marianne says. And she looks up at Connell nervously then, a sincere expression which touches him.
Yeah, I'm sure I will, he says. Why wouldn't I?
I know you'll be civil. But I mean I hope you get along.
I'll try.
And don't intimidate him, she says.
Connell pours a splash of milk in his coffee, letting the colour come up to the surface, and then replaces the jug on the table.
Oh, he says. Well, I hope you're telling him not to intimidate me either. As if you could find him intimidating, Connell. He's shorter than I am. It's not strictly a height thing, is it?
Seen from his point of view, she says, you're a lot taller, and you're the person who used to fuck his girlfriend.
That's a nice way of putting it. Is that what you told him about us, Connell's this tall guy who used to fuck me?
She laughs now. No, she says. But everyone knows.
Does he have some insecurities about his height? I won't exploit them, I'd just like to know.
Marianne lifts her coffee cup. Connell can't figure out what kind of relationship they are supposed to have now. Are they agreeing not to find each other attractive anymore? When were they supposed to have stopped? Nothing in Marianne's behaviour gives him any clue. In fact he suspects she is still attracted to him, and that she now finds it funny, like a private joke, to indulge an attraction to someone who could never belong in her world.
*
Back in July he went to the anniversary Mass for Marianne's father. The church in town was small, smelling of rain and incense, with stained-glass panels in the windows. He and Lorraine never went to Mass, he'd only been in there for funerals before. He saw Marianne in the vestibule when he arrived. She looked like a piece of religious art. It was so much more painful to look at her than anyone had warned him it would be, and he wanted to do something terrible, like set himself on fire or drive his car into a tree. He always reflexively imagined ways to cause himself extreme injury when he was distressed. It seemed to soothe him briefly, the act of imagining a much worse and more totalising pain than the one he really felt, maybe just the cognitive energy it required, the momentary break in his train of thought, but afterwards he would only feel worse.
That night, after Marianne went back to Dublin, he went out drinking with some people from school, to Kelleher's first, and then McGowan's, and then that awful nightclub Phantom around the back of the hotel. No one was around that he had ever been really close with, and after a few drinks he became aware that he wasn't there to socialise anyway, he was just there to drink himself into a kind of sedated non-consciousness. He withdrew from the conversation gradually and focused on consuming as much alcohol as he could without passing out, not even laughing along with the jokes, not even listening.
It was in Phantom that they met Paula Neary, their old Economics teacher. By then Connell was so drunk that his vision was misaligned, and beside every solid object he could see another version of the object, like a ghost. Paula bought them all shots of tequila. She was wearing a black dress and a silver pendant. He licked a line of salt off the back of his own hand and saw the ghostly other of her necklace, a faint white trace on her shoulder. When she looked at him she did not have two eyes, but several, and they moved around exotically in the air, like jewels. He started laughing about it, and she leaned in close with her breath on his face to ask him what was so funny.
He doesn't remember how he got back to her house, whether they walked or took a taxi, he still doesn't know. The place had that strange unfurnished cleanliness that lonely houses sometimes have. She seemed like a person with no hobbies: no bookcases, no musical instruments. What do you do with yourself at the weekends, he remembers slurring. I go out and have fun, she said. This struck him even at the time as deeply depressing. She poured them both glasses of wine. Connell sat on the leather sofa and drank the wine for something to do with his hands.
How is the football team looking this year? he said.
It's not the same without you, said Paula.
She sat beside him on the couch. Her dress had slipped down slightly, exposing a mole over her right breast. He could have fucked her back when he was in school. People joked about it, but they would have been shocked if it had really happened, they would have been scared. They would have thought his shyness masked something steely and frightening.
Best years of your life, she said.
What?
Best years of your life, secondary school.
He tried to laugh, and it came out very goofy and nervous. I don't know, he said. That's a sad thought if that's true.
She started to kiss him then. This seemed like a strange thing to happen to him, unpleasant on the surface level, but also interesting in a way, as if his life was taking a new direction. Her mouth tasted sour like tequila. Briefly he wondered if it was legal for her to kiss him, and he concluded it must be, he couldn't think of a reason why it wouldn't be, and yet it felt substantially wrong. Every time he pulled away from her she seemed to follow him forward, so that he found himself puzzled about the physics of what was going on, and he was no longer sure whether he was sitting upright on the sofa or reclining backwards against the arm. As an experiment he tried to sit up, which confirmed he was in fact sitting up already, and the small red light which he thought might have been on the ceiling above him was just a standby light on the stereo system across the room.
Back in school Miss Neary had made him feel so uncomfortable. But was he mastering that discomfort now by letting her kiss him on the sofa in her living room, or just succumbing to it? He'd hardly had time to formulate this question when she started unbuttoning his jeans. In a panic he tried to push her hand away, but with such an ineffectual gesture that she appeared to think he was helping her. She got the top button undone and he told her that he was really drunk, and maybe they should stop. She put her hand inside the waistband of his underwear and said it was okay, she didn't mind. He thought he would probably black out then, but he found he couldn't. He wished he could have. He heard Paula saying: You're so hard. That was an especially insane thing for her to say, because he actually wasn't.
I'm going to get sick, he said.
She jerked back then, pulling her dress after her, and he took the opportunity to stand up from the sofa and button his jeans back up. Cautiously she asked if he was okay. When he looked at her he could make out two separate Paulas sitting on the couch, so clearly delineated that it was no longer obvious which was the real Paula and which the ghost. Sorry, he said. He woke up the next day fully clothed on the floor of his living room. He still has no idea how he made it home.
*
He must be insecure about something, says Marianne now. I don't know what. Maybe he'd like to be more cerebral.
Maybe he just has good self-esteem.
No, definitely not that. He's ...
Her eyes flick back and forth quickly. When she does this, she looks like an expert mathematician performing calculations in her head. She sets the coffee cup back in the saucer.
He's what? says Connell.
He's a sadist.
Connell stares at her across the table, simply allowing his face to express the alarm he feels at this remark, and she gives a cute little smile. She twists her cup around on the saucer.
Are you serious? says Connell.
Well, he likes to beat me up. Just during sex, that is. Not during arguments.
She laughs, a stupid laugh that doesn't suit her. Connell's visual field shudders violently
for a second, like the beginning of a gigantic migraine, and he lifts a hand to his forehead. He realises he is scared. Around Marianne he often feels somehow innocent, though really he's a lot more sexually experienced than she is. And you're into that, are you? he says.
She shrugs. Her cigarette is burning out in the ashtray. She picks it up quickly and drags on it before stubbing it out.
I don't know, she says. I don't know if I really like it. Why do you let him do it, then? It was my idea.
Connell picks up his cup and takes a large mouthful of very hot coffee, wanting to do something efficient with his hands. When he replaces the cup it splashes up and spills over into the saucer.
What do you mean? he says.
It was my idea, that I wanted to submit to him. It's difficult to explain. Well, go on and try if you want. I'm interested.
She laughs again now. It's going to make you feel very awkward, she says. Okay.
She looks at him, maybe to see if he's joking, and then she lifts her chin at an angle, and he knows she won't back down from telling him about it, because that would be giving in to something she doesn't believe about herself.
It's not that I get off on being degraded as such, she says. I just like to know that I would degrade myself for someone if they wanted me to. Does that make sense? I don't know if it does, I've been thinking about it. It's about the dynamic, more than what actually happens. Anyway I suggested it to him, that I could try being more submissive. And it turns out he likes to beat me up.
Connell starts coughing. Marianne picks a small wooden coffee-stirrer out of a jar on the table and starts twisting it in her fingers. He waits for the coughing to subside and then says: What does he do to you?
Oh, I don't know, she says. He hits me with a belt sometimes. He likes choking me, things like that.
Right.
I mean, I don't enjoy it. But then, you're not really submitting to someone if you only submit to things you enjoy.
Have you always had these ideas? Connell says.
She gives him a look. He feels like the fear has consumed him and turned him into something else now, like he has passed through the fear, and looking at her is like swimming towards her across a strip of water. He picks up the cigarette packet and looks into it. His teeth start chattering and he puts a cigarette on his lower lip and lights it. Marianne is the only one who ever triggers these feelings in him, the strange dissociative feeling, like he's drowning and time doesn't exist properly anymore.
I don't want you to think Jamie's a horrible guy, she says.
He sounds like one.
He's not really.
Connell drags on the cigarette and then lets his eyes half-close for a second. The sun is very warm, and he can sense Marianne's body close to him, and the mouthful of smoke, and
the bitter aftertaste of coffee.
Maybe I want to be treated badly, she says. I don't know. Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I'm a bad person.
He exhales. In the spring he would sometimes wake up at night beside Marianne, and if she was awake too they would move into each other's arms until he could feel himself inside her. He didn't have to say anything, except to ask her if it was alright, and she always said it was. Nothing else in his life compared to what he felt then. Often he wished he could fall asleep inside her body. It was something he could never have with anyone else, and he would never want to. Afterwards they'd just go back to sleep in each other's arms, without speaking.
You never said any of this to me, he says. When we were ... It was different with you. We were, you know. Things were different. She twists the little strip of wood with both hands and then releases it on one side so it recoils from her fingers.
Should I be feeling insulted? he says.
No. If you want to hear the simplest explanation, I'll tell you. Well, is it a lie? No, she says.
She pauses. Carefully she sets down the wooden coffee-stirrer. She has no props now, and reaches to touch her hair instead.
I didn't need to play any games with you, she says. It was real. With Jamie it's like I'm acting a part, I just pretend to feel that way, like I'm in his power. But with you that really was the dynamic, I actually had those feelings, I would have done anything you wanted me to. Now, you see, you think I'm a bad girlfriend. I'm being disloyal. Who wouldn't want to beat me up?
She covers her eyes with her hand. She's smiling, a tired and self-hating smile. He wipes the palms of his hands on his lap.
I wouldn't, he says. Maybe I'm kind of unfashionable in that way. She moves her hand away and looks at him, the same smile, and her lips still look dry. I hope we can always take each other's sides, she says. It's very comforting for me. Well, that's good.
She looks at him then, like she's seeing him for the first time since they sat down together.
Anyway, she says. How are you?
He knows the question is meant honestly. He's not someone who feels comfortable confiding in others, or demanding things from them. He needs Marianne for this reason. This fact strikes him newly. Marianne is someone he can ask things of. Even though there are certain difficulties and resentments in their relationship, the relationship carries on. This seems remarkable to him now, and almost moving.
Something kind of weird happened to me in the summer, he said. Can I tell you about it?
Four Months Later
(JANUARY 2013)
She's in her apartment with friends. The scholarship exams finished this week and term is about to start again on Monday. She feels drained, like a vessel turned out onto its rim. She's smoking her fourth cigarette of the evening, which gives her a curious acidic sensation in her chest, and she also hasn't eaten dinner. For lunch she had a tangerine and a piece of unbuttered toast. Peggy is on the sofa telling a story about interrailing in Europe, and for some reason she insists on explaining the difference between West and East Berlin. Marianne exhales and says absently: Yes, I've been there.
Peggy turns to her, eyes widened. You've been to Berlin? she says. I didn't think they let people from Connacht travel that far.
Some of their friends laugh politely. Marianne taps the ash off her cigarette into the ceramic tray on the arm of the sofa. Extremely hilarious, she says.
They must have given you time off from the farm, says Peggy.
Quite, says Marianne.
Peggy continues telling her story then. She has lately taken to sleeping over in Marianne's apartment when Jamie's not there, eating breakfast in her bed, and even following her to the bathroom when she showers, clipping her toenails blithely and complaining about men. Marianne likes to be singled out as her special friend, even when this expresses itself as a tendency to take up vast amounts of her leisure time. But at certain parties lately, Peggy has also started to make fun of her in front of others. For the sake of their friends, Marianne tries to laugh along, but the effort contorts her face, which only gives Peggy another chance to tease her. When everyone else has gone home she snuggles into Marianne's shoulder and says: Don't be mad with me. And Marianne says in a thin, defensive voice: I'm not mad at you. They are right now shaping up to have this exact exchange, yet again, in just a few short hours.
After the Berlin story concludes, Marianne gets another bottle of wine from the kitchen and refills people's glasses.
How did the exams go, by the way? Sophie asks her.
Marianne gives a humorous shrug and is rewarded with a little laughter. Her friends sometimes seem uncertain about her dynamic with Peggy, volunteering extra laughter when Marianne tries to be funny, but in a way that can seem sympathetic or even pitying rather than amused.
Tell the truth, says Peggy. You fucked them up, didn't you?
Marianne smiles, makes a face, puts the cap back on the wine bottle. The scholarship exams finished two days ago; Peggy and Marianne sat them together. Well, they could have gone better, Marianne says diplomatically.
This is one hundred per cent typical you, says Peggy. You're the smartest person in the world but when it comes down to it, you're a bottler. You can sit them again next year, says Sophie.
I doubt they went that badly, Joanna says.
Marianne avoids Joanna's eyes and puts the wine back in the fridge. The scholarships offer five years of paid tuition, free accommodation on campus, and meals in the Dining Hall every evening with the other scholars. For Marianne, who doesn't pay her own rent or tuition and has no real concept of how much these things cost, it's just a matter of reputation. She would like her superior intellect to be affirmed in public by the transfer of large amounts of money. That way she could affect modesty without having anyone actually believe her. The fact is, the exams didn't go badly. They went fine.
My Stats professor was on at me to sit them, says Jamie. But I just couldn't be fucked studying over Christmas.
Marianne produces another vacant smile. Jamie didn't sit the exams because he knew he wouldn't pass them if he did. Everyone in the room knows this also. He's trying to brag, but he lacks the self-awareness to understand that what he's saying is legible as bragging, and that no one believes the brag anyway. There's something reassuring in how transparent he is to her.
Early in their relationship, without any apparent forethought, she told him she was 'a submissive'. She was surprised even hearing herself say it: maybe she did it to shock him. What do you mean? he asked. Feeling worldly, she replied: You know, I like guys to hurt me. After that he started to tie her up and beat her with various objects. When she thinks about how little she respects him, she feels disgusting and begins to hate herself, and these feelings trigger in her an overwhelming desire to be subjugated and in a way broken. When it happens her brain simply goes empty, like a room with the light turned off, and she shudders into orgasm without any perceptible joy. Then it begins again. When she thinks about breaking up with him, which she frequently does, it's not his reaction but Peggy's she finds herself thinking about most.
Peggy likes Jamie, which is to say that she thinks he's kind of a fascist, but a fascist with no essential power over Marianne. Marianne complains about him sometimes and Peggy just says things like: Well, he's a chauvinist pig, what do you expect? Peggy thinks men are disgusting animals with no impulse control, and that women should avoid relying on them for emotional support. It took a long time for it to dawn on Marianne that Peggy was using the guise of her general critique of men to defend Jamie whenever Marianne complained about him. What did you expect? Peggy would say. Or: You think that's bad? By male standards he's a prince. Marianne has no idea why she does this. Any time Marianne makes the suggestion, however tentative, that things might be coming to an end with Jamie, Peggy's temper flares up. They've even fought about it, fights that end with Peggy curiously declaring that she doesn't care whether they break up or not anyway, and Marianne, by then exhausted and confused, saying they probably won't.
When Marianne sits back down now, her phone starts ringing, a number she doesn't recognise. She stands up to get it, gesturing for the others to continue talking, and wanders back into the kitchen.
Hello? she says.
Hi, it's Connell. This is a bit awkward, but I've just had some of my things stolen. Like my wallet and my phone and stuff. Jesus, how awful. What happened?
I'm just wondering— See, I'm all the way out in Dun Laoghaire now and I don't have
money to get in a taxi or anything. I wonder if there's any way I could meet up with you and maybe borrow some cash or something.
All her friends are looking at her now and she waves them back to their conversation. From the armchair Jamie continues to watch her on the phone.
Of course, don't worry about that, she says. I'm at home, so do you want to get a taxi over here? I'll come outside and pay the driver, does that suit you? You can ring the bell when you're here.
Yeah. Alright, thanks. Thanks, Marianne. I'm borrowing this phone so I'd better give it back now. See you in a bit.
He hangs up. Her friends look at her expectantly as she holds the phone in one hand and turns to face them. She explains what's happened, and they all express sympathy for Connell. He still comes to her parties occasionally, just for a quick drink before heading on somewhere else. He told Marianne in September what had happened with Paula Neary, and it made Marianne feel unearthly, possessed of a violence she had never known before. I know I'm being dramatic, Connell said. It's not like she did anything that bad. But I feel fucked up about it. Marianne heard herself in a voice like hard ice saying: I would like to slit her throat. Connell looked up and laughed, just from shock. Jesus, Marianne, he said. But he was laughing. I would, she insisted. He shook his head. You have to tone down these violent impulses, he said. You can't be going around slashing people's throats, they'll put you in prison. Marianne let him laugh it off, but quietly she said: If she ever lays a hand on you again I will do it, I don't care.
She has only spare change in her purse, but in a drawer in her bedside cabinet she has three hundred euro in cash. She goes in there now, without switching the light on, and she can hear the voices of her friends murmur through the wall. The cash is there, six fifties. She takes three and folds them into her purse quietly. Then she sits on the side of the bed, not wanting to go back out right away.
*
Things at home were tense over Christmas. Alan gets anxious and highly strung whenever they have guests in the house. One night, after their aunt and uncle left, Alan followed Marianne down to the kitchen, where she had taken their empty cups of tea. State of you, he said. Bragging about your exam results.
Marianne turned on the hot tap and measured the temperature with her fingers. Alan stood inside the doorway, arms folded. I didn't bring it up, she said. They did.
If that's all you have to brag about in your life I feel sorry for you, said Alan. The water from the tap got warmer and Marianne put the plug in the sink and squeezed a little dish soap onto a sponge.
Are you listening to me? said Alan. Yes, you feel sorry for me, I'm listening. You're fucking pathetic, so you are. Message received, she said.
She placed one of the cups on the draining board to dry and dipped another into the hot water.
Do you think you're smarter than me? he said.
She ran the wet sponge around the inside of the teacup. That's a strange question, she said. I don't know, I've never thought about it. Well, you're not, he said. Okay, fair enough.
Okay, fair enough, he repeated in a cringing, girlish voice. No wonder you have no friends, you can't even have a normal conversation. Right.
You should hear what people in town say about you.
Involuntarily, because this idea was so ridiculous to her, she laughed. Enraged now, Alan wrenched her back from the sink by her upper arm and, seemingly spontaneously, spat at her. Then he released her arm. A visible drop of spit had landed on the cloth of her skirt. Wow, she said, that's disgusting. Alan turned and left the room, and Marianne went back to rinsing the dishes. Lifting the fourth teacup onto the draining board she noticed a mild but perceptible tremor in her right hand.
On Christmas Day her mother gave her an envelope with five hundred euro in it. There was no card; it was one of the small brown-paper envelopes she used for Lorraine's wages. Marianne thanked her, and Denise said airily: I'm a bit concerned about you. Marianne fingered the envelope and tried to arrange her face into a suitable expression. What about me? she said.
Well, said Denise, what are you going to do with your life?
I don't know. I think I still have a lot of options open. I'm just focusing on college at the moment.
And then what?
Marianne pressed her thumb on the envelope and smudged it until a faint dark smear appeared on the paper. As I said, she repeated, I don't know.
I'm worried the real world will come as a bit of a shock to you, said Denise. In what way?
I don't know if you realise that university is a very protective environment. It's not like a workplace.
Well, I doubt anyone in the workplace will spit at me over a disagreement, said Marianne. It would be pretty frowned upon, as I understand.
Denise gave a tight-lipped smile. If you can't handle a little sibling rivalry, I don't know how you're going to manage adult life, darling, she said.
Let's see how it goes.
At this, Denise struck the kitchen table with her open palm. Marianne flinched, but didn't look up, didn't let go of the envelope.
You think you're special, do you? said Denise. Marianne let her eyes close. No, she said. I don't.
*
It's almost one in the morning by the time Connell rings the buzzer. Marianne goes downstairs with her purse and finds the taxi is idling outside the building. In the square opposite, a mist wreathes itself around the trees. Winter nights are so exquisite, she thinks
of saying to Connell. He's standing talking to the driver through the window, with his back turned. When he hears the door he turns around, and she sees his mouth cut and bloody, dark blood like dried ink. She steps back, clutching her collarbone, and Connell goes: I know, I saw myself in the mirror. But I'm okay actually, I just need to get cleaned up. In a state of confusion she pays the driver, almost dropping her change in the gutter. On the staircase inside she sees Connell's upper lip is swollen into a hard shiny mass on the right side. His teeth are the colour of blood. Oh god, she says. What happened? He takes her hand kindly, stroking her knuckles with his thumb.
Some guy came up and asked me for my wallet, he says. And I told him no, for some reason, and then he hit me in the face. I mean, it was a bad idea, I should have just given him the money. Sorry for calling you, it's the only number I knew off the top of my head.
Oh, Connell, how awful. I have friends round, but what suits you? Do you want to have a shower or something and you can stay here? Or do you want to just get some cash and go home?
They're outside the door of her apartment now, and they pause there. Whatever's good for you, he says. I'm really drunk, by the way. Sorry. Oh, how drunk?
Well, I haven't been home since the exams. I don't know, do I still have pupils? She looks in his eyes, where his pupils are swollen to round black bullets. Yes, she says. They're huge.
He strokes her hand again and says more quietly: Oh well. They get like that when I see you anyway.
She laughs, shaking her head.
You're definitely drunk if you're flirting with me, she says. Jamie's here, you know. Connell breathes in through his nose and then glances over his own shoulder. Maybe I'll just go back out and get punched in the face again, he says. It wasn't that bad. She smiles, but he lets go of her hand. She opens the door.
In the living room her friends all gasp and make him retell the story, which he does, though without the desired drama. Marianne gets him a glass of water, which he swills in his mouth and then spits into the kitchen sink, pink like coral.
Fucking lowlife scum, says Jamie.
Who, me? Connell says. That's not very nice. We can't all go to private school, you know.
Joanna laughs. Connell isn't usually hostile and Marianne wonders if getting punched in the face has put him in a hostile mood, or else he's more drunk than she thought.
I was talking about the guy that robbed you, says Jamie. And he was probably stealing to buy drugs, by the way, that's what most of them do.
Connell touches his teeth with his fingers as if to ascertain that they're still in his mouth. Then he wipes his hands on a dishtowel.
Oh well, he says. It's not an easy life out there for a drug addict.
No, indeed, says Joanna.
They could always try, I don't know, giving up drugs? says Jamie. Connell laughs and says: Yeah, I'm sure they've just never thought of that. Everyone's quiet and Connell gives a bashful smile. His teeth are less insane-looking now that he's rinsed them with water. Sorry, everyone, he says. I'll get out of your way.
They all insist he's not in their way, except Jamie, who says nothing. Marianne experiences a flash of maternalistic desire to run Connell a bath. Joanna asks him if he's in pain, and he responds by rubbing his front teeth with a fingertip again and then saying: It's not that bad. He's wearing a black jacket over a stained white T-shirt, under which Marianne recognises the glimmer of an unadorned silver neckchain he's had since school. Peggy once described the neckchain as 'Argos chic', which made Marianne cringe, though she couldn't tell which friend she was cringing for.
How much cash do you think you'll need? she says to Connell. The question is sensitive enough that her friends start to talk amongst themselves, so she feels she has him almost alone. He shrugs. You might not be able to make withdrawals without your bank card, she says. He squeezes his eyes shut and touches his forehead.
Fuck me, I'm so drunk, he says. I'm sorry, I feel like I'm hallucinating. What are you asking me?
Money. How much can I give you?
Oh, I don't know, ten quid?
Let me give you a hundred, she says.
What? No.
They argue like this for a while, until Jamie comes up and touches Marianne's arm. She is suddenly conscious of his ugliness, and wants to pull away from him. His hairline is receding and he has a weak, jawless face. Beside him, and even covered in blood, Connell radiates good health and charisma.
I'll probably have to head off shortly, says Jamie.
Well, I'll see you tomorrow, says Marianne.
Jamie looks at her in shock and she swallows the impulse to say: What? Instead she smiles. It's not like she's the world's best-looking person, far from it. In certain photographs she appears not only plain but garishly ugly, baring her crooked teeth for the camera like a piece of vermin. Guiltily she squeezes Jamie's wrist, as if she can perform the following impossible act of communication: to Jamie, that Connell is injured and regrettably requires her attention, while to Connell, that she would rather not be touching Jamie at all.
Alright, says Jamie. Well, goodnight, then.
He kisses the side of her face and goes to get his jacket. Everyone thanks Marianne for having them. Glasses are left on the draining board or in the sink. Then the front door closes and she and Connell are alone. She feels her shoulder muscles relaxing, like their solitude is a narcotic. She fills the kettle and takes cups down from the press, then places some more of the dirty glasses in the sink and empties the ashtray.
Is he still your boyfriend, then? says Connell.
She smiles, and so does he. She takes two teabags from the box and tamps them down into the cups while the kettle is boiling. She loves to be alone with him like this. It makes her life seem very manageable suddenly.
He is, yes, she says.
And why would that be the case?
Why is he my boyfriend?
Yeah, says Connell. What's going on there? In terms of like, why you're still going out with him.
Marianne snorts. I presume you'll have tea, she says. He nods. He puts his right hand in his pocket. She takes a carton of milk from the fridge, it's damp in her fingers. Connell is standing against the kitchen counter now, his mouth swollen but most of the blood rinsed off, and his face looks brutally handsome.
You could have a different boyfriend, you know, he says. I mean, guys are constantly falling in love with you, from what I hear.
Stop that.
You're the kind of person, people either love you or hate you.
The kettle clicks its switch and she lifts it out of the cradle. She fills one of the cups and then the other.
Well, you don't hate me, she says.
He doesn't say anything at first. Then he says: No, I'm immune to you, in a way. Because I knew you in school.
When I was an ugly loser, says Marianne. No, you were never ugly.
She puts the kettle back down. She feels a certain power over him, a dangerous power. Do you still think I'm pretty? she says.
He looks at her, probably knowing what she's doing, and then looks at his own hands, as if reminding himself of his physical stature in the room.
You're in a good mood, he says. Must have been a good party.
She ignores this. Fuck you, she thinks, but she doesn't mean it. She dumps the teabags in the sink with a spoon, then uses the milk and replaces it in the fridge, all with the rapid movements of someone dealing impatiently with a drunk friend.
I'd rather literally anyone else, says Connell. I'd rather the guy who mugged me was your boyfriend.
What do you care?
He says nothing. She thinks of the way she treated Jamie before he left, and rubs her face with her hands. Some milk-drinking culchie, Jamie called Connell once. It's true, she has seen Connell drink milk directly from the carton. He plays video games with aliens in them, he has opinions about football managers. He's wholesome like a big baby tooth. Probably never in his life has he thought about inflicting pain on someone for sexual purposes. He's a good person, he's a nice friend. So why does she go after him like this all the time, pressing him for something? Does she have to be her old desperate self around him always?
Do you love him? says Connell.
Her hand pauses on the door of the fridge.
Unlike you to take an interest in my feelings, Connell, she says. I kind of thought that stuff was off-limits for us, I have to say. Alright. Okay.
He rubs at his mouth again, looking distracted now. Then he drops his hand and looks out the kitchen window.
Look, he says, I probably should have told you before, but I've been seeing someone. I've been with her for a while, I should have mentioned it to you.
Marianne is so shocked by this news that it feels physical. She looks at him, plainly, unable to disguise her astonishment. In the time they've been friends he has never had a girlfriend. She's never even given much thought to the idea that he might want one.
What? she says. How long have you been together?
About six weeks. Helen Brophy, I don't know would you know her. She studies Medicine.
Marianne turns her back on him and takes her cup from the counter. She tries to hold her shoulders very still, frightened that she'll cry and he'll see her.
Why are you trying to get me to break up with Jamie, then? she says. I'm not, I'm not. I just want you to be happy, that's all. Because you're such a good friend, is it? Well, yeah, he says. I mean, I don't know.
The cup in Marianne's hands is too hot to hold, but instead of placing it down again she just lets the pain seep into her fingers, down into her flesh. Are you in love with her? she says. Yeah. I do love her, yeah.
Now Marianne starts crying, the most embarrassing thing that has happened to her in her entire adult life. Her back is turned but she feels her shoulders jerk upwards in a horrible involuntary spasm.
Jesus, says Connell. Marianne.
Fuck off.
Connell touches her back and she jolts away from him, like he's trying to hurt her. She puts the cup down on the counter to wipe her face roughly with her sleeve. Just go away, she says. Leave me alone.
Marianne, don't. I feel awful, okay? I should have told you before, I'm sorry. I don't want to talk to you. Just leave.
For a while nothing happens. She chews on the inside of her cheek until the pain begins to settle her nerves and she's not crying anymore. She dries her face again, with her hands this time, and turns around.
Please, she says. Please just go.
He sighs, he's looking at the floor. He rubs his eyes.
Yeah, he says. Look, I'm really sorry to ask, but I do kind of need that money to get home. Sorry.
She remembers then and feels bad. In fact she smiles at him, that's how bad she feels. Oh god, she says. In the excitement there I forgot you actually got assaulted. Can I give you two fifties, is that okay? He nods, but he's not looking at her. She knows that he feels bad; she wants to be a grown-up about things. She finds her purse and hands him the money, which he puts in his pocket. He looks down, blinking and clearing his throat, like he's going to cry too. I'm sorry, he says.
It's nothing, she says. Don't worry about it.
He rubs at his nose and looks around the room like he's never going to see it again.
You know, I didn't really know what was going on with us last summer, he says. Like, when I had to move home and that. I kind of thought maybe you would let me stay here or something. I don't really know what happened with us in the end.
She feels a sharp pain in her chest and her hand flies to her throat, clutching at nothing.
You told me you wanted us to see other people, she says. I had no idea you wanted to stay here. I thought you were breaking up with me.
He rubs his palm flat against his mouth for a second, and then breathes out.
You didn't say anything about wanting to stay here, she adds. You would have been welcome, obviously. You always were.
Right, okay, he says. Look, I'll head off, then. Have a good night, yeah? He leaves. The door clicks shut behind him, not very loudly.
In the Arts Block the next morning Jamie kisses her in front of everyone and says she looks beautiful. How was Connell last night? he says. She grips Jamie's hand, she gives a conspiratorial roll of her eyes. Oh, he was so out of it, she says. I got rid of him eventually.
Six Months Later
(JULY 2013)
He wakes up just after eight. It's bright outside the window and the carriage is warming up, a heavy warmth of breath and sweat. Minor train stations with unreadable names flash past and vanish. Elaine is already awake but Niall is still sleeping. Connell rubs his left eye with his knuckles and sits up. Elaine is reading the one novel she has brought with her on the journey, a novel with a glossy cover and the words Now a Major Motion Picture along the top. The actress on the front has been their constant companion for weeks. Connell feels an almost friendly affinity with her pale period-drama face. Whereabouts are we, do you know? says Connell.
Elaine looks up from the book. We passed Ljubljana about two hours ago, she says. Oh, right, he says. We're not far, then.
Connell looks over at Niall, whose sleeping head is bobbing slightly on his neck. Elaine follows his gaze. Out for the count as usual, she says.
There were others at the beginning. Some friends of Elaine's went with them from Berlin to Prague, and they met a few of Mali's Engineering classmates in Bratislava before they crossed over to Vienna on the train. Hostels were cheap, and the cities they visited had a pleasantly temporary feeling about them. Nothing Connell did there seemed to stay with him. The whole trip felt like a series of short films, screened only once, and afterwards he had a sense of what they were about but no exact memories of the plot. He remembers seeing things out the windows of taxis.
In each city he finds an internet cafe and completes the same three rituals of communication: he calls Helen on Skype, he sends his mother a free text message from his phone network's website, and he writes Marianne an email.
Helen is on a Jl in Chicago for the summer. In the background of their calls he can hear her girlfriends chatting, doing things with each other's hair, and sometimes Helen will turn and say something to them like: Guys, please! I'm on the phone! He loves seeing her face on-screen, especially when the connection is good and her movements are smooth and lifelike. She has a great smile, great teeth. After the end of their call yesterday he paid at the counter, walked back out into the sunshine and bought himself an overpriced glass of Coke with ice. Sometimes when Helen has a lot of friends around or if the internet cafe is especially crowded, their conversations can get a little awkward, but even still he feels better after talking to her. He finds himself rushing to the end of the conversation so they can hang up, and then he can retrospectively savour how much he likes seeing her, without the moment-to-moment pressure of having to produce the right expressions and say the right things. Just to see Helen, her beautiful face, her smile, and to know that she continues loving him, this puts the gift of joy into his day, and for hours he feels nothing but a lightheaded happiness.
Helen has given Connell a new way to live. It's as if an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air. It is physically possible to
type and send a message reading: I love you! It had never seemed possible before, not remotely, but in fact it's easy. Of course if someone saw the messages he would be embarrassed, but he knows now that this is a normal kind of embarrassment, an almost protective impulse towards a particularly good part of life. He can sit down to dinner with Helen's parents, he can accompany her to her friends' parties, he can tolerate the smiling and the exchange of repetitive conversation. He can squeeze her hand while people ask him questions about his future. When she touches him spontaneously, applying a little pressure to his arm, or even reaching to brush a piece of lint off his collar, he feels a rush of pride, and hopes that people are watching them. To be known as her boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward.
The texts he sends Lorraine are fairly businesslike. He updates her when they see historic landmarks or cultural treasures. Yesterday:
hey from Vienna. Stephen's cathedral fairly overrated to be honest but the art history museum was good, hope things are ok at home.
She likes to ask how Helen's doing. The first time they met, Helen and his mother hit it off right away. Whenever Helen visits, Lorraine is always shaking her head at Connell's little behaviours and saying: How do you put up with him, sweetheart? But whatever, it's nice they get along. Helen is the first girlfriend he has introduced to his mother and he finds he's curiously eager to impress on Lorraine how normal their relationship is and how nice a person Helen considers him to be. He's not sure where this stems from exactly.
In the weeks they've been apart, his emails to Marianne have become lengthy. He's started drafting them on his phone in idle moments, while waiting for his clothes in a launderette, or lying in the hostel at night when he can't sleep for the heat. He reads over these drafts repeatedly, reviewing all the elements of prose, moving clauses around to make the sentences fit together correctly. Time softens out while he types, feeling slow and dilated while actually passing very rapidly, and more than once he's looked up to find that hours have gone by. He couldn't explain aloud what he finds so absorbing about his emails to Marianne, but he doesn't feel that it's trivial. The experience of writing them feels like an expression of a broader and more fundamental principle, something in his identity, or something even more abstract, to do with life itself. In his little grey journal he wrote recently: idea for a story told through emails? Then he crossed it out, deciding it was gimmicky. He finds himself crossing things out in his journal as if he imagines some future person poring over it in detail, as if he wants the future person to know which ideas he has thought better of.
His correspondence with Marianne includes a lot of links to news reports. At the moment they're both engrossed in the Edward Snowden story, Marianne because of her interest in the architecture of global surveillance, and Connell because of the fascinating personal drama. He reads all the speculation online, he watches the blurry footage from Sheremetyevo Airport. He and Marianne can only talk about it over email, using the same communication technologies they now know are under surveillance, and it feels at times like their relationship has been captured in a complex network of state power, that the network is a form of intelligence in itself, containing them both, and containing their
feelings for one another. I feel like the NSA agent reading these emails has the wrong impression of us, Marianne wrote once. They probably don't know about the time you didn't invite me to the Debs.
She writes to him a lot about the house where she's staying with Jamie and Peggy, outside Trieste. She recounts the goings-on, how she feels, how she surmises the others are feeling, and what she's reading and thinking about. He writes to her about the cities they visit, sometimes including a paragraph describing a particular sight or scene. He wrote about coming up from the U-Bahn station in SchonleinstraEe to find it was suddenly dark out, and the fronds of trees waving over them like spooky fingers, and the noise from bars, and the smell of pizza and exhaust fumes. It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he's trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him. He told Marianne once that he'd been writing stories, and now she keeps asking to read them. If they're as good as your emails they must be superb, she wrote. That was a nice thing to read, though he responded honestly: They're not as good as my emails.
He and Niall and Elaine have arranged to get the train from Vienna to Trieste to spend their last few nights in Marianne's holiday home, before they all fly back to Dublin together. A day trip to Venice has been mentioned. Last night they got on the train with their backpacks and Connell texted Marianne: should be there by tomorrow afternoon, won't have time to reply to your email properly before then. He has almost no clean clothes left by now. He's wearing a grey T-shirt, black jeans and dirty white trainers. In his backpack: various lightly soiled clothes, one clean white T-shirt, an empty plastic bottle for water, clean underwear, a rolled-up phone charger, his passport, two packets of generic paracetamol, a very beaten-up copy of a James Salter novel, and for Marianne, an edition of Frank O'Hara's selected poems he found in an English-language bookshop in Berlin. One soft-covered grey notebook.
Elaine nudges Niall until his head jerks forward and his eyes open. He asks what time it is and where they are, and Elaine tells him. Then Niall links his fingers together and stretches his arms out in front of him. His joints crack quietly. Connell looks out the window at the passing landscape: dry yellows and greens, the orange slant of a tiled roof, a window cut flat by the sun and flashing.
*
The university scholarships were announced back in April. The Provost stood on the steps of the Exam Hall and read out a list of the scholars. The sky was extremely blue that day, delirious, like flavoured ice. Connell was wearing his jacket and Helen had her arm wrapped around his. When it came to English they read out four names, alphabetically, and the last one was: Connell Waldron. Helen threw her arms around him. That was it, they said his name and moved on. He waited in the square until they announced History and Politics, and when he heard Marianne's name he looked around to see her. He could hear a circle of her friends cheering, and some applause. He put his hands in his pockets. Hearing Marianne's name he realised how real it was, he really had won the scholarship, they both had. He doesn't remember much of what happened then. He remembers calling Lorraine after the announcements and she was just quiet on the phone, shocked, and then she murmured: Oh my god, Jesus Christ.
Niall and Elaine arrived beside him, cheering and slapping his back and calling him 'an absolute fucking nerd'. Connell was laughing at nothing, just because so much excitement demanded some kind of outward expression and he didn't want to cry. That night all the new scholars had to go to a formal black-tie meal together in the Dining Hall. Connell borrowed a tux from someone in his class, it didn't fit very well, and at dinner he felt awkward trying to make conversation with the English professor seated next to him. He wanted to be with Helen, and with his friends, not with these people he had never met before and who knew nothing about him.
Everything is possible now because of the scholarship. His rent is paid, his tuition is covered, he has a free meal every day in college. This is why he's been able to spend half the summer travelling around Europe, disseminating currency with the carefree attitude of a rich person. He's explained it, or tried to explain it, in his emails to Marianne. For her the scholarship was a self-esteem boost, a happy confirmation of what she has always believed about herself anyway: that she's special. Connell has never really known whether to believe that about himself, and he still doesn't know. For him the scholarship is a gigantic material fact, like a vast cruise ship that has sailed into view out of nowhere, and suddenly he can do a postgraduate programme for free if he wants to, and live in Dublin for free, and never think about rent again until he finishes college. Suddenly he can spend an afternoon in Vienna looking at Vermeer's The Art of Painting, and it's hot outside, and if he wants he can buy himself a cheap cold glass of beer afterwards. It's like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That's money, the substance that makes the world real. There's something so corrupt and sexy about it.
*
They get to Marianne's house at three, in baking afternoon heat. The undergrowth outside the gate hums with insects and a ginger cat is lying on the bonnet of a car across the street. Through the gate Connell can see the house, the same way it looks in the photographs she's sent him, a stonework facade and white-shuttered windows. He sees the garden table with two cups left on its surface. Elaine rings the bell and after a few seconds someone appears from around the side of the house. It's Peggy. Lately Connell has become convinced that Peggy doesn't like him, and he finds himself watching her behaviour for evidence. He doesn't like her either, and never has, but that doesn't strike him as relevant. She races towards the gate, her sandals clapping on the gravel. The heat beats down on the back of Connell's neck like the feeling of human eyes staring. She unlocks the gate and lets them in, grinning and saying ciao, ciao. She's wearing a short denim dress and huge black sunglasses. They all walk up the gravel towards the house, Niall carrying Elaine's backpack as well as his own. Peggy fishes a set of keys from her dress pocket and unlocks the front door.
Inside the hall a stone archway leads down a short flight of steps. The kitchen is a long room with terracotta tiles, white cupboards and a table by the garden doors, flooded with sunlight. Marianne is standing outside, in the back garden among the cherry trees, with a laundry basket in her arms. She's wearing a white dress with a halter-neck and her skin
looks tanned. She's been hanging washing on the line. The air outside is very still and the laundry hangs there in damp colours, not moving. Marianne puts her hand to the door handle and then sees them inside. This all seems to happen very slowly, though it only takes a few seconds. She opens the door and puts the basket on the table, and he feels a sort of enjoyably painful sensation in his throat. Her dress looks immaculate and he's conscious of how unwashed he must appear, not having showered since they left the hostel yesterday morning, and that his clothes aren't really clean. Hello, says Elaine.
Marianne smiles and says ciao, as if she's making fun of herself, and she kisses Elaine's cheeks and then Mali's and asks about their journey and Connell stands there, overwhelmed by this feeling, which might only be total exhaustion, an exhaustion that has been accumulating for weeks. He can smell the scent of laundry. Up close he sees Marianne's arms are lightly freckled, her shoulders a bright rose colour. Presently she turns to him and they exchange kisses on each cheek. Looking in his eyes she says: Well, hello. He senses a certain receptivity in her expression, like she's gathering information about his feelings, something they have learned to do to each other over a long time, like speaking a private language. He can feel his face get warm as she looks at him but he doesn't want to look away. He can gather information from her face too. He gathers that she has things she wants to tell him.
Hi, he says.
Marianne has accepted an offer to spend her third year of college in Sweden. She'll be leaving in September and, depending on their plans for Christmas, Connell may not see her again until next June. People are always telling him he's going to miss her, but until now he's been looking forward to how long and intense their email correspondence will be while she's away. Now he looks into her cold interpretive eyes and thinks: Okay, I will miss her. He feels ambivalent about this, as if it's disloyal of him, because maybe he's enjoying how she looks or some physical aspect of her closeness. He's not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about each other.
In a series of emails they exchanged recently about their own friendship, Marianne expressed her feelings about Connell mainly in terms of her sustained interest in his opinions and beliefs, the curiosity she feels about his life, and her instinct to survey his thoughts whenever she feels conflicted about anything. He expressed himself more in terms of identification, his sense of rooting for her and suffering with her when she suffers, his ability to perceive and sympathise with her motivations. Marianne thought this had something to do with gender roles. I think I just like you a lot as a person, he replied defensively. That's actually very sweet, she wrote back.
Jamie comes down the steps behind them now and they all turn around to greet him. Connell makes a half-nodding gesture, just barely inclining his chin upwards. Jamie gives him a mocking smile and says: You're looking rough, mate. Jamie has been a continual object of loathing and derision for Connell since he became Marianne's boyfriend. For several months after he first saw them together Connell had compulsive fantasies about kicking Jamie in the head until his skull was the texture of wet newspaper. Once, after speaking to Jamie briefly at a party, Connell left the building and punched a brick wall so hard his hand started bleeding. Jamie is somehow both boring and hostile at the same time, always yawning and rolling his eyes when other people are speaking. And yet he is the most
effortlessly confident person Connell has ever met. Nothing fazes him. He doesn't seem capable of internal conflict. Connell can imagine him choking Marianne with his bare hands and feeling completely relaxed about it, which according to her he in fact does.
Marianne puts on a pot of coffee while Peggy cuts bread into slices and arranges olives and Parma ham onto plates. Elaine is telling them about Mali's antics and Marianne is laughing in a generous way, not because the stories are so funny but to make Elaine feel welcome. Peggy passes plates around the table and Marianne touches Connell's shoulder and hands him a cup of coffee. Because of the white dress and because of the small white china cup, he wants to say: You look like an angel. It's not even something Helen would mind him saying, but he can't talk like that in front of people anyway, saying whimsical affectionate things. He drinks the coffee, he eats some bread. The coffee is very hot and bitter and the bread is soft and fresh. He starts to feel tired.
After lunch he goes upstairs to shower. There are four bedrooms, so he has one to himself, with a huge sash window over the garden. After his shower he dresses in the only presentable clothes he has left: a plain white T-shirt and the blue jeans he has had since he was in school. His hair is wet. He feels clearheaded, an effect of the coffee, and the high water pressure in the shower, and the cool cotton on his skin. He hangs the damp towel over his shoulders and opens the window. Cherries hang on the dark-green trees like earrings. He thinks about this phrase once or twice. He would put it in an email to Marianne, but he can't email her when she's downstairs. Helen wears earrings, usually a pair of tiny gold hoops. He lets himself fantasise about her briefly because he can hear the others are downstairs anyway. He thinks about her lying on her back. He should have thought about it in the shower, but he was tired. He needs the WiFi code for this house.
*
Like Connell, Helen was popular in school. She still goes to lengths to keep in touch with old friends and extended family, remembering birthdays, posting nostalgic photographs on Facebook. She always RSVPs to parties and arrives on time, she's always taking group photographs again and again until there's one everybody is happy with. In other words she's a nice person, and Connell is beginning to understand that he actually likes nice people, that he even wants to be one. She's had one serious boyfriend in the past, a guy called Rory, who she broke up with in first year of college. He's in UCD so Connell has never bumped into him, but he has looked at his photographs on Facebook. He's not unlike Connell in build and complexion, but somehow gawky-looking and unfashionable. Connell admitted to Helen once that he'd looked him up online, and she asked what he'd made of him.
I don't know, said Connell. He seems kind of uncool, doesn't he?
She thought that was hilarious. They were lying in bed, Connell had his arm around her.
Is that your type, you like uncool guys? he said.
You tell me.
Why, am I uncool?
I think so, she said. I mean that in a nice way, I don't like cool people. He sat up slightly to look down at her.
Am I really? he said. I'm not offended but honestly, I thought I was kind of cool. You're such a culchie, though.
Am I? In what way am I?
You have the thickest Sligo accent, she said.
I do not. I can't believe that. No one's ever said that to me before. Do I really? She was still laughing. He stroked his hand over her belly, grinning to himself because he was making her laugh.
I can hardly understand you half the time, she said. Thankfully you're the strong and silent type.
He had to laugh then too. Helen, that is brutal, he said.
She tucked a hand behind her head. Do you honestly think you're cool? she said. Well, not anymore.
She smiled to herself. Good, she said. It's good that you're not.
Helen and Marianne first met back in February, on Dawson Street. He and Helen were walking along holding hands when he saw Marianne coming out of Hodges Figgis wearing a black beret. Oh, hi, he said in an agonised voice. He thought of dropping Helen's hand but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Hi, Marianne said. You must be Helen. The two women then made perfectly competent and genial conversation while he stood there panicking and staring at various objects in the surrounding environment.
Afterwards Helen asked him: So you and Marianne, were you always just friends, or ...? They were in his room then, off Pearse Street. Buses went by outside and threw a column of yellow light on the bedroom door.
Yeah, more or less, he said. Like, we were never together as such.
But you've slept together.
Yeah, kind of. No, yeah, to be fair, we have. Is that a big deal?
No, I'm just curious, said Helen. It was like a friends-with-benefits thing?
Basically. In final year of school, and for a while last year. It wasn't serious or anything.
Helen smiled at him. He was raking his bottom lip with his teeth, something he remembered to stop doing only after she'd already seen him.
She looks like she goes to art college, said Helen. I guess you think she's really chic.
He gave a little laugh, looked at the floor. It's not like that, he said. We've known each other since we were kids.
It doesn't have to be weird that she's your ex, Helen said.
She's not my ex. We're just friends.
But before you were friends, you were ...
Well, she wasn't my girlfriend, he said.
But you had sex with her, though.
He covered his entire face in his hands. Helen laughed.
After that, Helen was determined to make friends with Marianne, as if to prove a point. When they saw her at parties Helen went out of her way to compliment her hair and clothing, and Marianne would nod vaguely and then continue expressing some in-depth opinion about the Magdalene Laundry report or the Denis O'Brien case. Objectively Connell did find Marianne's opinions interesting, but he could see how her fondness for expressing them at length, to the exclusion of lighter conversation, was not universally charming. One evening, after an overly long discussion about Israel, Helen became irritable, and on the walk home she told Connell that she found Marianne 'self-absorbed'.
Because she talks about politics too much? said Connell. I wouldn't call that self-
absorbed, though.
Helen shrugged, but drew a breath inwards through her nose that indicated she didn't like his interpretation of her point.
She was the same way in school, he added. But she's not putting it on, she's genuinely interested in that stuff.
She really cares about Israeli peace talks?
Surprised, Connell replied simply: Yeah. After a few seconds of walking along in silence he added: As do I, to be honest. It is fairly important. Helen sighed aloud. He was surprised that she would sigh in that petulant way, and wondered how much she had had to drink. Her arms were folded up at her chest. Not being preachy, he went on. Obviously we're not going to save the Middle East by talking about it at a house party. I think Marianne just thinks about that stuff a lot.
You don't think maybe she does it for the attention? said Helen.
He frowned in a conscious effort to look thoughtful. Marianne was so totally uninterested in what people thought of her, so extremely secure in her own self-perception, that it was hard to imagine her caring for attention one way or another. She did not altogether, as far as Connell knew, actually like herself, but praise from other people seemed as irrelevant to her as disapproval had been in school.
Honestly? he said. Not really.
She seems to like your attention well enough.
Connell swallowed. He only then understood why Helen was so annoyed, and not trying to veil her annoyance. He didn't think Marianne had been paying him any special notice, though she did always listen when he spoke, a courtesy she occasionally failed to pay others. He turned his head to look at a passing car.
I didn't notice that, he said eventually.
To his relief, Helen dropped this specific theme and settled back into a more general critique of Marianne's behaviour.
Every time we see her at a party she's always flirting with like ten different guys, said Helen. Talk about craving male approval.
Pleased that he was no longer implicated in the censure, Connell smiled and said: Yeah. She wasn't like that in school at all.
You mean she didn't act so slutty? said Helen.
Feeling suddenly cornered, and regretting that he had let his guard down, Connell again fell silent. He knew that Helen was a nice person, but he forgot sometimes how old-fashioned her values were. After a time he said uncomfortably: Here, she's my friend, alright? Don't be talking about her like that. Helen didn't respond, but hiked her folded arms further up her chest. It was the wrong thing to say anyway. Later he would wonder if he was really defending Marianne or just defending himself from an implied accusation about his own sexuality, that he was tainted somehow, that he had unacceptable desires.
By now the unspoken consensus is that Helen and Marianne don't like each other very much. They're different people. Connell thinks the aspects of himself that are most compatible with Helen are his best aspects: his loyally, his basically practical outlook, his desire to be thought of as a good guy. With Helen he doesn't feel shameful things, he doesn't find himself saying weird stuff during sex, he doesn't have that persistent sensation that he belongs nowhere, that he never will belong anywhere. Marianne had a wildness that
got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.
One night he was waiting for Helen in college, just outside the Graduates Memorial Building. She was coming from the gym at the other end of campus and they were going to get the bus to her house together. He was standing on the steps looking at his phone when the door behind him opened and a group of people came out in formal dresses and suits, all laughing and talking together. The light in the hallway behind them cast them into silhouette, so it took him a second to recognise Marianne. She was wearing a long dark-coloured dress and had her hair piled up high on her head, making her neck look slender and exposed. She caught his eye with a familiar expression. Hello, she said. He didn't know the people she was with; he guessed they were from the debating society or something. Hi, he said. How could his feeling for her ever be anything like his feeling for other people? But part of the feeling was knowing the terrible hold he'd had over her, and still had, and could not foresee ever losing.
Helen arrived then. He only noticed her when she called out to him. She was wearing her leggings and trainers, gym bag slung over one shoulder, a damp sheen on her forehead visible under the street light. He felt a vast rush of love for her, love and compassion, almost sympathy. He knew that he belonged with her. What they had together was normal, a good relationship. The life they were living was the right life. He took the bag off her shoulder and lifted a hand to wave Marianne goodbye. She didn't wave back, she just nodded. Have fun! Helen said. Then they went to get the bus. He was sad for Marianne after that, sad that nothing in her life had ever truly seemed healthy, and sad that he'd had to turn away from her. He knew that it had caused her pain. In a way he was even sad for himself. Sitting on the bus he continued to picture her standing in the doorway with the light behind her: how exquisite she looked, and what a glamorous, formidable person she was, and that subtle expression that came over her face when she looked at him. But he couldn't be what she wanted. After a time he realised Helen was speaking, and he stopped thinking about all that and started listening.
*
For dinner Peggy cooks pasta and they eat at the round garden table. The sky is a thrilling chlorine-blue, stretched taut and featureless like silk. Marianne brings a cold bottle of sparkling wine out from the house, with condensation running down the glass like sweat, and asks Niall to open it. Connell finds this decision judicious. Marianne is very smooth and sociable on these occasions, like a diplomat's wife. Connell is seated between her and Peggy. The cork sails over the garden wall and lands somewhere no one can see it. A crest of white spills over the lip of the bottle and Niall pours the wine into Elaine's glass. The glasses are broad and shallow like saucers. Jamie turns his empty one upside down and says: Do we not have proper champagne glasses?
These are champagne glasses, says Peggy.
No, I mean the tall ones, Jamie says.
You're thinking of flutes, says Peggy. These are coupes.
Helen would laugh at this conversation, and thinking of how much she would laugh,
Connell smiles. Marianne says: It's not a matter of life and death, is it? Peggy fills her glass and passes the bottle to Connell.
I'm just saying, these aren't for champagne, says Jamie.
You're such a philistine, Peggy says.
I'm a philistine? he says. We're drinking champagne out of gravy boats.
Niall and Elaine start laughing, and Jamie smiles under the mistaken impression that they are laughing at his witticism. Marianne touches a fingertip to her eyelid lightly, as if removing a piece of dust or grit. Connell hands her the bottle and she accepts it.
It's an old style of champagne glass, says Marianne. They belonged to my dad. Go inside and get yourself a flute if you prefer, they're in the press over the sink.
Jamie makes wide ironic eyes and says: I didn't realise it was such an emotional issue for you. Marianne puts the bottle in the centre of the table and says nothing. Connell has never heard Marianne mention her father like that in casual conversation. Nobody else at the table seems aware of this; Elaine may not even know Marianne's father is dead. Connell tries to catch Marianne's eye, but he can't.
The pasta is delicious, says Elaine.
Oh, says Peggy. It's very al dente, isn't it? Maybe too al dente. I think it's nice, Marianne says.
Connell takes a mouthful of wine, which foams cold in his mouth and then disappears like air. Jamie starts telling an anecdote about one of his friends, who is on a summer internship at Goldman Sachs. Connell finishes his wine and unobtrusively Marianne refills his glass. Thanks, he says quietly. Her hand hovers for a second as if she's going to touch him, and then she doesn't. She says nothing.
*
The morning after the scholarships were announced, he and Marianne went to the swearing-in ceremony together. She'd been out the night before and looked hungover, which pleased him, because the ceremony was so formal and they had to wear gowns and recite things in Latin. Afterwards they went for breakfast together in a cafe near college. They sat outside, at a table on the street, and people walked by carrying paper shopping bags and having loud conversations on the phone. Marianne drank a single cup of black coffee and ordered a croissant which she didn't finish. Connell had a large ham-and-cheese omelette with two slices of buttered toast, and tea with milk in it.
Marianne said she was worried about Peggy, who was the only one of the three of them not to get the scholarship. She said it would be hard on her. Connell inhaled and said nothing. Peggy didn't need subsidised tuition or free on-campus accommodation, because she lived at home in Blackrock and her parents were both doctors, but Marianne was intent on seeing the scholarships as a matter of personal feeling rather than economic fact.
Anyway, I'm happy for you, Marianne said.
I'm happy for you too.
But you deserve it more.
He looked up at her. He wiped his mouth with the napkin. You mean in terms of the financial stuff? he said.
Oh, she replied. Well, I meant that you're a better student.
She looked down critically at her croissant. He watched her.
Though in terms of financial circumstances too, obviously, she said. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous they don't means-test these things.
I guess we're from very different backgrounds, class-wise.
I don't think about it much, she said. Quickly she added: Sorry, that's an ignorant thing to say. Maybe I should think about it more.
You don't consider me your working-class friend?
She gave a smile that was more like a grimace and said: I'm conscious of the fact that we got to know each other because your mother works for my family. I also don't think my mother is a good employer, I don't think she pays Lorraine very well.
No, she pays her fuck all.
He cut a thin slice of omelette with his knife. The egg was more rubbery than he would have liked.
I'm surprised this hasn't come up before, she said. I think it's totally fair if you resent me. No, I don't resent you. Why would I?
He put his knife and fork down and looked at her. She had an anxious little expression on her face.
I just feel weird about all this, he said. I feel weird wearing black tie and saying things in Latin. You know at the dinner last night, those people serving us, they were students. They're working to put themselves through college while we sit there eating the free food they put in front of us. Is that not horrible?
Of course it is. The whole idea of 'meritocracy' or whatever, it's evil, you know I think that. But what are we supposed to do, give back the scholarship money? I don't see what that achieves.
Well, it's always easy to think of reasons not to do something.
You know you're not going to do it either, so don't guilttrip me, she said.
They continued eating then, as if they were acting out an argument in which both sides were equally compelling, and they had chosen their positions more or less at random, only in order to have the discussion out. A large seagull landed at the base of a nearby street light, its plumage magnificently clean and soft-looking.
You need to get it straight in your mind what you think a good society would look like, said Marianne. And if you think people should be able to go to college and get English degrees, you shouldn't feel guilty for doing that yourself, because you have every right to.
That's okay for you, you don't feel guilty about anything.
She started rooting around in her handbag looking for something. Offhandedly she said: Is that how you see me?
No, he said. Then, uncertain of how guilty he thought Marianne felt about anything, he added: I don't know. I should have known coming to Trinity that it would be like this. I'm just looking at all this scholarship stuff thinking, Jesus, what would people in school say?
For a second Marianne said nothing. He felt in some obscure sense that he had expressed himself incorrectly, but he didn't know how. To be fair, she said, you were always very concerned with what people in school would say. He remembered then, about how people had treated her at that time, and how he himself had treated her, and he felt bad. It wasn't the conclusion he was hoping the conversation would have, but he smiled and said: Ouch. She smiled back at him and then lifted her coffee cup. At that moment he thought: just as
their relationship in school had been on his terms, their relationship now was on hers. But she's more generous, he thought. She's a better person.
*
When Jamie's story is finished, Marianne goes inside and comes back out again with another bottle of sparkling wine, and one bottle of red. Niall starts unwrapping the wire on the first bottle and Marianne hands Connell a corkscrew. Peggy starts clearing away people's plates. Connell unpeels the foil from the top of the bottle as Jamie leans over and says something to Marianne. He sinks the screw into the cork and twists it downwards. Peggy takes his plate away and stacks it with the others. He folds down the arms of the corkscrew and lifts the cork from the neck of the bottle with the sound of lips smacking.
The sky has dimmed into a cooler blue now, with silver clouds on the rim of the horizon. Connell's face feels flushed and he wonders if he's sunburned. He likes imagining Marianne older sometimes, with children. He imagines they're all here in Italy together and she's making a salad or something and complaining to Connell about her husband, who is older, probably an intellectual, and Marianne finds him dull. Why didn't I marry you? she would say. He can see Marianne very clearly in this dream, he sees her face, and he feels that she has spent years as a journalist, maybe living in Lebanon. He doesn't see himself so well or know what he's been doing. But he knows what he would say to her. Money, he would say. And she would laugh without looking up from the salad.
At the table they're talking about their day trip to Venice: which trains they should take, which galleries are worth seeing. Marianne tells Connell he would like the Guggenheim, and Connell is pleased that she has spoken to him, pleased to be singled out as an appreciator of modern art.
I don't know why we're bothering with Venice, says Jamie. It's just full of Asians taking pictures of everything.
God forbid you might have to encounter an Asian person, Niall says.
There's a stillness at the table. Jamie says: What? It's clear from his voice and from the delayed pace of his response that he's now drunk.
It's kind of racist, what you just said about Asian people, Niall says. I'm not making a big thing of it.
Oh, because all the Asians at the table are going to get offended, are they? says Jamie.
Marianne stands up abruptly and says: I'll go get dessert. Connell is disappointed by this display of spinelessness, but he says nothing either. Peggy follows Marianne into the house and everyone at the table is silent. A huge moth circles in the dark air and Jamie bats at it with his napkin. After a minute or two Peggy and Marianne bring dessert out from the kitchen: a gigantic glass bowl of halved strawberries with a stack of white china dishes and silver spoons. Two more bottles of wine. The dishes are passed around and people fill them with fruit.
She spent all afternoon halving these little bastards, Peggy says.
I feel so spoilt, says Elaine.
Where's the cream? Jamie says.
It's inside, says Marianne.
Why didn't you bring it out? he says.
Marianne pulls her chair back from the table coldly and stands up to go inside. It's almost dark out now. Jamie ranges his eyes around the table, trying to find someone who will look back at him and agree that he was right to ask for the cream, or that Marianne was overreacting to an innocent query. Instead people seem to avoid looking at him, and with a loud sigh he knocks his chair back and follows her. The chair tips over noiselessly onto the grass. He goes in the side door to the kitchen and slams it behind him. There's a back door too, which leads down into the other part of the garden, where the trees are. It's walled off from here, so only the tops of the trees are visible.
By the time Connell turns his attention back to the table Niall is staring at him. He doesn't know what Mali's stare means. He tries squinting his eyes to show Niall he's confused. Niall casts a significant look at the house and then back at him. Connell looks over his right shoulder. The light is on in the kitchen, leaking a yellowish glow through the garden doors. He only has a sidelong view so he can't see what's going on inside. Elaine and Peggy are complimenting the strawberries. When they stop, Connell hears a raised voice coming from the house, almost a shriek. Everyone freezes. He stands up from the table to go to the house, and feels his blood pressure drop. He's had a bottle of wine to drink by now, or more.
When he reaches the garden doors he sees Jamie and Marianne are standing at the counter, having some kind of argument. They don't see Connell through the glass right away. He pauses with his hand on the door handle. Marianne is all flushed, maybe from too much sun, or maybe she's angry. Jamie is unsteadily refilling his champagne glass with red wine. Connell turns the handle and comes inside. Alright? he says. They both look at him, they both stop talking. He notices Marianne is shivering as if she's cold. Jamie lifts his glass sarcastically in Connell's direction, sloshing wine over the rim and onto the floor.
Put that down, says Marianne quietly.
I'm sorry, what? says Jamie.
Put that glass down, please, says Marianne.
Jamie smiles and nods to himself. You want me to put it down? he says. Okay. Okay, look, I'm putting it down.
He drops the glass on the floor and it shatters. Marianne screams, a real scream from her throat, and launches her body at Jamie, drawing her right arm behind her as if to strike him. Connell steps in between them, glass crunches under his shoe, and he grabs Marianne by her upper arms. Behind him Jamie is laughing. Marianne tries to push Connell aside, her whole body shudders, and her face is blotchy and discoloured like she's been crying. Come here, he says. Marianne. She looks at him. He remembers her in school, so bitter and stubborn with everyone. He knew things about her then. They look at each other and the rigidity leaves her and she goes slack like she's been shot.
You're a fucking mental case, you are, says Jamie. You need help.
Connell turns Marianne's body around and steers her towards the back door. She offers no resistance.
Where are you going? says Jamie.
Connell doesn't answer. He opens the door and Marianne goes through it without speaking. He closes it behind them. It's dark now in this part of the garden, with only the mottled window providing any light. The cherries glow dimly on the trees. Over the wall they can hear Peggy's voice. Together he and Marianne walk down the steps and say
nothing. The kitchen light goes out behind them. They can hear Jamie on the other side of the wall then, rejoining the others. Marianne is wiping her nose on the back of her hand. The cherries hang around them gleaming like so many spectral planets. The air is light with scent, green like chlorophyll. They sell chlorophyll chewing gum in Europe, Connell has noticed. Overhead the sky is velvet-blue. Stars flicker and cast no light. They walk down a line of trees together, away from the house, and then stop.
Marianne leans against a slim silver tree trunk and Connell puts his arms around her. She feels thin, he thinks. Was she so thin before. She presses her face into his one remaining clean T-shirt. She's still wearing the white dress from earlier, with a gold embroidered shawl now. He holds her tightly, his body adjusting itself to hers like the kind of mattress that's supposedly good for you. She softens into his arms. She starts to seem calmer. Their breathing slows into one rhythm. The kitchen light goes on for a time and then off again, voices rise and recede. Connell feels certain about what he's doing, but it's a blank certainty, as if he's blankly performing a memorised task. He finds that his fingers are in Marianne's hair and he's stroking the back of her neck calmly. He doesn't know how long he has been doing this. She rubs at her eyes with her wrist.
Connell releases her. She feels in her pocket for a packet of cigarettes and a crushed box of matches. She offers him a cigarette and he accepts. She strikes a match and the flare of light illuminates her features in the darkness. Her skin looks dry and inflamed, her eyes are swollen. She breathes in and the cigarette paper hisses in the flame. He lights his own, then drops the match in the grass and compresses it under his foot. They smoke quietly. He walks away from the tree, surveying the bottom of the garden, but it's too dark to make much out. He returns to Marianne under the branches and absently pulls at a broad, waxy leaf. She hangs the cigarette on her lower lip and lifts her hair into her hands, twisting it into a knot that she secures with an elastic tie from her wrist. Eventually they finish their cigarettes and stub them out in the grass.
Can I stay in your room tonight? she says. I'll sleep on the floor.
The bed is massive, he says, don't worry about it.
The house is dark when they get back inside. In Connell's room they undress down to their underwear. Marianne is wearing a white cotton bra that makes her breasts look small and triangular. They lie side by side under the quilt. He's aware that he could have sex with her now if he wanted to. She wouldn't tell anyone. He finds it strangely comforting, and allows himself to think about what it would be like. Hey, he would say quietly. Lie on your back, okay? And she would just obediently lie on her back. So many things pass secretly between people anyway. What kind of person would he be if it happened now? Someone very different? Or exactly the same person, himself, with no difference at all.
After a time he hears her say something he can't make out. I didn't hear that, he says.
I don't know what's wrong with me, says Marianne. I don't know why I can't be like normal people.
Her voice sounds oddly cool and distant, like a recording of her voice played after she herself has gone away or departed for somewhere else. In what way? he says.
I don't know why I can't make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born.
Lots of people love you, Marianne. Okay? Your family and friends love you.
For a few seconds she's silent and then she says: You don't know my family. He had hardly even noticed himself using the word 'family'; he'd just been reaching for something reassuring and meaningless to say. Now he doesn't know what to do. In the same strange unaccented voice she continues: They hate me.
He sits up in bed to see her better. I know you fight with them, he says, but that doesn't mean they hate you.
Last time I was home my brother told me I should kill myself.
Mechanically Connell sits up straighter, pushing the quilt off his body as if he's about to get up. He runs his tongue around the inside of his mouth. What did he say that for? he says.
I don't know. He said no one would miss me if I was dead because I have no friends. Would you not tell your mother if he talked to you like that? She was there, says Marianne.
Connell moves his jaw around. The pulse in his neck is throbbing. He's trying to visualise this scene, the Sheridans at home, Alan for some reason telling Marianne to commit suicide, but it's hard to picture any family behaving the way that she has described.
What did she say? he asks. As in, how did she react?
I think she said something like, oh, don't encourage her.
Slowly Connell breathes in through his nose and exhales the breath between his lips. And what provoked this? he says. Like, how did the argument start? He senses that something in Marianne's face changes now, or hardens, but he can't name what it is exactly.
You think I did something to deserve it, she says. No, obviously I'm not saying that.
Sometimes I think I must deserve it. Otherwise I don't know why it would happen. But if he's in a bad mood he'll just follow me around the house. There's nothing I can do. He'll just come into my room, he doesn't care if I'm sleeping or anything.
Connell rubs his palms on the sheet.
Would he ever hit you? he says.
Sometimes. Less so since I moved away. To be honest I don't even mind it that much. The psychological stuff is more demoralising. I don't know how to explain it, really. I know it must sound ...
He touches his hand to his forehead. His skin feels wet. She doesn't finish the sentence to explain how it must sound.
Why didn't you ever tell me about it before? he says. She says nothing. The light is dim but he can see her open eyes. Marianne, he says. The whole time we were together, why didn't you tell me any of this?
I don't know. I suppose I didn't want you to think I was damaged or something. I was probably afraid you wouldn't want me anymore.
Finally he puts his face in his hands. His fingers feel cold and clammy on his eyelids and there are tears in his eyes. The harder he presses with his fingers, the faster the tears seep out, wet, onto his skin. Jesus, he says. His voice sounds thick and he clears his throat. Come here, he says. And she comes to him. He feels terribly ashamed and confused. They lie face-to-face and he puts his arms around her body. In her ear he says: I'm sorry, okay? She holds onto him tightly, her arms winding around him, and he kisses her forehead. But he always
thought she was damaged, he thought it anyway. He screws his eyes shut with guilt. Their faces feel hot and damp now. He thinks of her saying: I thought you wouldn't want me anymore. Her mouth is so close that her breath is wet on his lips. They start to kiss, and her mouth tastes dark like wine. Her body shifts against him, he touches her breast with his hand, and in a few seconds he could be inside her again, and then she says: No, we shouldn't. She draws away, just like that. He can hear himself breathing in the silence, the pathetic heaving of his breath. He waits until it slows down again, not wanting to have his voice break when he tries to speak. I'm really sorry, he says. She squeezes his hand. It's a very sad gesture. He can't believe the stupidity of what he's just done. Sorry, he says again. But Marianne has already turned away.
Five Months Later
(DECEMBER 2013)
In the lobby of the Languages and Literature building she sits down to check her email. She doesn't remove her overcoat because she'll be getting up in a minute. Beside her on the desk is her breakfast, which she just purchased from the supermarket across the street: one black coffee with brown sugar, one lemon pastry roll. She eats this exact breakfast regularly. Lately she has started to eat it slowly, in lavish sugary mouthfuls that congeal around her teeth. The more slowly she eats, and the more consideration she gives to the composition of her food, the less hungry she feels. She won't eat again until eight or nine in the evening.
She has two new emails, one from Connell and one from Joanna. She dabs her mouse back and forth between them, and then selects Joanna's.
no real news from here, as usual. I've recently taken to staying home at night and watching my way through a nine part documentary series about the american civil war. I have a lot of new information about various civil war generals to share with you next time we're on Skype. how are you? how is Lukas? did he take those photos yet or is that today? and the big question ... can I see them when they're done?? or is that prurient. I await your word, xx
Marianne lifts the lemon pastry, takes a large, slow bite, and lets it dissolve in layers on her tongue. She chews, swallows, then lifts the coffee cup. One mouthful of coffee. She replaces the cup and opens Connell's message.
I don't know what you mean by your last sentence there exactly. Do you mean just because we're far away from each other or because we've actually changed as people? I do feel like a pretty different person now than I was then but maybe I don't seem that different, I don't know. By the way I looked your friend Lukas up on Facebook, he's what you would call 'Scandinavian looking'. Sadly Sweden did not qualify for the World Cup this time so if you end up with a Swedish boyfriend I'll have to think of another way to bond with him. Not that I'm saying this guy Lukas is going to be your boyfriend or would want to talk to me about football if he was, although it's something I am putting out as a possibility. I know you like the tall handsome guys as you say, so why not Lukas, who looks tall and is also handsome (Helen has seen his photo and agrees). But whatever, I'm not pushing the boyfriend thing, I just hope you have confirmed he's not a psychopath. You don't always have a good radar on that.
Unrelatedly we were getting a taxi through Phoenix Park last night and we saw a lot of deer. Deer are kind of strange looking creatures. In the night they have a ghostly appearance and their eyes can reflect headlights in an olive green or silver colour, like a special effect. They paused to observe our taxi before moving on. To me it's weird
when animals pause because they seem so intelligent, but maybe that's because I associate pausing with thought. Deer are elegant anyway I have to say. If you were an animal yourself, you could do worse than be a deer. They have those thoughtful faces and nice sleek bodies. But they also kind of startle off in unpredictable ways. They didn't remind me of you at the time but in retrospect I see a similarity there. I hope you're not offended by the comparison. I would tell you about the party prior to us getting the taxi through Phoenix Park but it was honestly boring and not as good as the deer. No one was there who you would know that well. Your last email was really good, thank you. I look forward to hearing more as always.
Marianne checks the time in the top-right corner of the screen: 09:49. She navigates back to Joanna's message and hits reply.
He's taking the photos today, I'm actually heading over there now. Of course I will send them to you when they are finished AND I expect long flattering commentary on each individual photograph. I'm excited to hear what you've learned about the US Civil War. All I've learned here is how to say 'no thank you' (nej tack) and 'really, no' (verkligen, nej). Talk soon xxx
Marianne closes her laptop, eats another two bites of the pastry and folds the rest up in its little greaseproof wrap. She slips her laptop into her satchel and removes her soft felt beret, which she pulls down over her ears. The pastry she disposes of in a nearby bin.
Outside it's still snowing. The exterior world looks like an old TV screen badly tuned. Visual noise breaks the landscape into soft fragments. Marianne buries her hands in her pockets. Flakes of snow fall on her face and dissolve there. A cold flake alights on her top lip and she feels for it with her tongue. Head down against the cold, she is on her way to Lukas's studio. Lukas's hair is so blonde that the individual strands look white. She finds them on her clothing sometimes, finer than thread. He dresses all in black: black shirts, black zip-up hoodies, black boots with thick black rubber soles. He's an artist. The first time they met, Marianne told him she was a writer. It was a lie. Now she avoids talking to him about it.
Lukas lives near the station. She takes her hand from her pocket, blows on her fingers and presses the buzzer. He answers, in English: Who is it? It's Marianne, she says. Ah, you're early, says Lukas. Come on in.
Why does he say 'you're early'? Marianne thinks as she climbs the stairs. The connection was fuzzy but he seemed to say it with a smile. Was he pointing it out to make her appear too eager? But she finds she doesn't care how eager she appears, because there is no secret eagerness to be discovered in her. She could be here, ascending the staircase to Lukas's studio, or she could be in the campus library, or in the dorm making herself coffee. For weeks now she has had this feeling, the feeling of moving around inside a protective film, floating like mercury. The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside. So whatever Lukas's reason for saying 'you're early', she finds it doesn't matter to her.
Upstairs he's setting up. Marianne removes her hat and shakes it. Lukas looks up, then
back at the tripod. Are you getting used to the weather? he says. She hangs her hat on the back of the door and shrugs. She begins to take off her coat. In Sweden we have a saying, he says. There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.
Marianne hangs her coat beside her hat. What's wrong with my clothes? she says mildly.
It's just an expression, says Lukas.
She honestly can't tell now if he meant to criticise her clothes or not. She's wearing a grey lambswool sweater and a thick black skirt with knee-high boots. Lukas has bad manners, which, to Marianne, makes him seem childish. He never offers her coffee or tea when she arrives, or even a glass of water. He starts talking right away about whatever he has been reading or doing since her last visit. He doesn't seem to crave her input, and sometimes her responses confuse or disorientate him, which he claims is an effect of his bad English. In fact his comprehension is very good. Anyway, today is different. She removes her boots and leaves them by the door.
There's a mattress in the corner of the studio, where Lukas sleeps. The windows are very tall and run almost to the floor, with blinds and thin trailing curtains. Various unrelated items are dotted around the room: several large potted plants, stacks of atlases, a bicycle wheel. This array impressed Marianne initially, but Lukas later explained he had gathered the items intentionally for a shoot, which made them seem artificial to her. Everything is an effect with you, Marianne told him once. He took this as a compliment about his art. He does have immaculate taste. He's sensitive to the most minuscule of aesthetic failures, in painting, in cinema, even in novels or television shows. Sometimes when Marianne mentions a film she has recently watched, he waves his hand and says: It fails for me. This quality of discernment, she has realised, does not make Lukas a good person. He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly.
She and Lukas have had an arrangement for a few weeks now. Lukas calls it 'the game'. Like any game, there are some rules. Marianne is not allowed to talk or make eye contact while the game is going on. If she breaks the rules, she gets punished later. The game doesn't end when the sex is finished, the game ends when she gets in the shower. Sometimes after sex Lukas takes a long time before he lets her get in the shower, just talking to her. He tells her bad things about herself. It's hard to know whether Marianne likes to hear those things; she desires to hear them, but she's conscious by now of being able to desire in some sense what she does not want. The quality of gratification is thin and hard, arriving too quickly and then leaving her sick and shivery. You're worthless, Lukas likes to tell her. You're nothing. And she feels like nothing, an absence to be forcibly filled in. It isn't that she likes the feeling, but it relieves her somehow. Then she showers and the game is over. She experiences a depression so deep it is tranquillising, she eats whatever he tells her to eat, she experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter.
Since she arrived here in Sweden, but particularly since the beginning of the game, people have seemed to her like coloured paper shapes, not real at all. At times a person will make eye contact with Marianne, a bus conductor or someone looking for change, and she'll be shocked briefly into the realisation that this is in fact her life, that she is actually visible to other people. This feeling opens her to certain longings: hunger and thirst, a desire to
speak Swedish, a physical desire to swim or dance. But these fade away again quickly. In Lund she's never really hungry, and though she fills a plastic Evian bottle with water every morning, she empties most of it back into the sink at night.
She sits on the corner of the mattress now while Lukas switches a lamp on and off and does something with his camera. I still don't know with the light yet, he says. Maybe we can do, like, first one and then another one. Marianne shrugs. She doesn't understand the import of what he's saying. Because all his friends speak Swedish, it has been difficult for her to work out how popular or well regarded Lukas is. People spend time in his studio often and seem to move a lot of artistic equipment up and down his stairs, but are they fans of his work, grateful for his attention? Or are they exploiting him for the convenient location of his working space while making fun of him behind his back?
Okay, I think we're ready to go, says Lukas.
Do you want me to ...
Maybe just the sweater now.
Marianne pulls her sweater off over her head. She places it in her lap, folds it, and then puts it to one side. She is wearing a black lace bra with little flowers embroidered on it. Lukas starts doing something with his camera.
*
She doesn't hear from the others much anymore: Peggy, Sophie, Teresa, that crowd. Jamie wasn't happy about the break-up, and he told people he wasn't happy, and people felt sorry for him. Things started to turn against Marianne, she could sense that before she left. At first it was unsettling, the way eyes turned away from her in a room, or conversation stopped short when she entered; the sense of having lost her footing in the social world, of being no longer admired and envied, how quickly it had all slipped away from her. But then she found it was easy to get used to. There's always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality. It depressed her to think people were so predictable. Whether she was respected or despised, it didn't make much difference in the end. Would every stage of her life continue to reveal itself as the same thing, again and again, the same remorseless contest for dominance?
With Peggy it had been hard. I'm your best friend, Peggy kept saying at the time, in an increasingly weird voice. She couldn't accept Marianne's laissez-faire attitude to the situation. You realise people are talking about you, Peggy said one night while Marianne was packing. Marianne didn't know how to respond. After a pause, she replied thoughtfully: I don't think I always care about the same things you care about. But I do care about you. Peggy threw her hands in the air wildly, walked around the coffee table twice.
I'm your best friend, she said. What am I supposed to do?
I don't really know what that question means.
I mean, what position does this put me in? Because honestly, I don't really want to take sides.
Marianne frowned, zipping a hairbrush into the pocket of her suitcase.
You mean, you don't want to take my side, she said.
Peggy looked at her, breathing hard now from her exertion around the coffee table. Marianne was kneeling down by her suitcase still.
I don't know if you really understand how people are feeling, Peggy said. People are upset about this.
About me breaking up with Jamie?
About the whole drama. People are actually upset.
Peggy looked at her, awaiting a response, and Marianne replied eventually: Okay. Peggy rubbed a hand over her face and said: I'll leave you to pack up. As she went out the door she added: You should consider seeing a therapist or something. Marianne didn't understand the suggestion. I should see a therapist because I'm not upset? she thought. But it was hard to dismiss something she had admittedly been hearing all her life from various sources: that she was mentally unwell and needed help.
Joanna is the only one who has kept in touch. In the evening they talk on Skype about their coursework, films they've seen, articles Joanna is working on for the student paper. On-screen her face always appears dimly lit against the same backdrop, her cream-coloured bedroom wall. She never wears make-up anymore, sometimes she doesn't even brush her hair. She has a girlfriend now called Evelyn, a graduate student in International Peace Studies. Marianne asked once if Joanna saw Peggy often, and she made a quick wincing expression, only for a fraction of a second, but long enough for Marianne to see. No, said Joanna. I don't see any of those people. They know I was on your side anyway.
I'm sorry, said Marianne. I didn't want you to fall out with anyone because of me.
Joanna made a face again, this time a less legible expression, either because of the poor lighting, the pixelation on-screen, or the ambivalent feeling she was trying to express.
Well, I was never really friends with them anyway, said Joanna. They were more your friends.
I thought we were all friends.
You were the only one I got on with. Frankly I don't think Jamie or Peggy are particularly good people. It's not my business if you want to be friends with them, that's just my opinion.
No, I agree with you, said Marianne. I guess I just got caught up in how much they seemed to like me.
Yeah. I think in your better judgement you did realise how obnoxious they were. But it was easier for me because they never really liked me that much.
Marianne was surprised by this matter-of-fact turn in the conversation, and felt a little castigated, though Joanna's tone remained friendly. It was true, Peggy and Jamie were not very good people; bad people even, who took joy in putting others down. Marianne feels aggrieved that she fell for it, aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that she'd participated in the commodity market they passed off as friendship. In school she had believed herself to be above such frank exchanges of social capital, but her college life indicated that if anyone in school had actually been willing to speak to her, she would have behaved just as badly as anyone else. There is nothing superior about her at all.
*
Can you turn and face to the window? says Lukas. Sure.
Marianne turns on the mattress, legs pulled up to her chest. Can you move, like ... legs down in some way? says Lukas.
Marianne crosses her legs in front of her. Lukas scoots the tripod forward and readjusts the angle. Marianne thinks of Connell's email comparing her to a deer. She liked the line about thoughtful faces and sleek bodies. She has lost even more weight in Sweden, she's thinner now, very sleek.
She's decided not to go home for Christmas this year. She thinks a lot about how to extricate herself from 'the family situation'. In bed at night she imagines scenarios in which she is completely free of her mother and brother, on neither good nor bad terms with them, simply a neutral non-participant in their lives. She spent much of her childhood and adolescence planning elaborate schemes to remove herself from family conflict: staying completely silent, keeping her face and body expressionless and immobile, wordlessly leaving the room and making her way to her bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her. Locking herself in the toilet. Leaving the house for an indefinite number of hours and sitting in the school car park by herself. None of these strategies had ever proven successful. In fact her tactics only seemed to increase the possibility that she would be punished as the primary instigator. Now she can see that her attempt to avoid a family Christmas, always a peak occasion for hostilities, will be entered into the domestic accounting book as yet another example of offensive behaviour on her part.
When she thinks of Christmastime now she thinks of Carricklea, lights strung up over Main Street, the glowing plastic Santa Claus in the window of Kelleher's with its animated arm waving a stiff, repetitive greeting. Tinfoil snowflakes hanging in the town pharmacy. The door of the butcher shop swinging open and shut, voices calling out on the corner. Breath rising as mist in the church car park at night. Foxfield in the evening, houses quiet as sleeping cats, windows bright. The Christmas tree in Connell's front room, tinsel bristling, furniture cramped to make space, and the high, delighted sound of laughter. He said he would be sorry not to see her. Won't be the same without you, he wrote. She felt stupid then and wanted to cry. Her life is so sterile now and has no beauty in it anymore.
I think maybe take this off, Lukas says now.
He's gesturing to her bra. She reaches behind her back and snaps open the clasp, then slips the straps off her shoulders. She discards it out of view of the camera. Lukas takes a few pictures, lowers the camera's position on the tripod, moves it forward an inch, and continues. Marianne stares at the window. The sound of the camera shutter stops eventually and she turns around. Lukas is opening a drawer underneath the table. He takes out a coil of thick black ribbon, made of some coarse cotton or linen fibre.
What's that? Marianne says.
You know what it is.
Don't start this now.
Lukas just stands there unwinding the cloth, indifferent. Marianne's bones begin to feel very heavy, a familiar feeling. They are so heavy she can hardly move. Silently she holds out her arms in front of her, elbows together. Good, he says. He kneels down and wraps the cloth tightly. Her wrists are thin but the ribbon is pulled so tight that a little flesh still swells on either side. This looks ugly to her and instinctively she turns away, towards the window
again. Very good, he says. He goes back to the camera. The shutter clicks. She closes her eyes but he tells her to open them. She's tired now. The inside of her body seems to be gravitating further and further downwards, towards the floor, towards the centre of the earth. When she looks up, Lukas is unwrapping another length of ribbon. No, she says.
Don't make it hard on yourself. I don't want to do this. I know, he says.
He kneels down again. She draws her head back, avoiding his touch, and quickly he puts his hand around her throat. This gesture doesn't frighten her, it only exhausts her so entirely that she can't speak or move anymore. Her chin drops forward, slack. She's tired of making evasive efforts when it's easier, effortless, to give in. He squeezes her throat slightly and she coughs. Then, not speaking, he lets go of her. He takes up the cloth again and wraps it as a blindfold around her eyes. Even her breathing feels laboured now. Her eyes itch. He touches her cheek gently with the back of his hand and she feels sick.
You see, I love you, he says. And I know you love me.
Horrified, she pulls away from him, striking the back of her head on the wall. She scrabbles with her bound wrists to pull the blindfold back from her eyes, managing to lift it far enough so that she can see.
What's wrong? he says.
Untie me.
Marianne.
Untie me now or I'll call the police, she says.
This doesn't seem a particularly realistic threat, since her hands are still bound, but maybe sensing that the mood has changed, Lukas starts to unwrap the cloth from her wrists. She's shivering violently now. As soon as the binding is loose enough that she can draw her arms apart, she does. She pulls the blindfold off and grabs her sweater, tugs it over her head, threads her arms through the sleeves. She's standing up straight now, feet on the mattress.
Why are you acting like this? he says.
Get away from me. Don't ever talk to me like that again.
Like what? What did I say?
She takes her bra from the mattress, crumples it in her hand and walks across the room to thrust it down into her handbag. She starts to pull her boots on, hopping stupidly on one foot.
Marianne, he says. What have I done?
Are you being serious or is this some kind of artistic technique? All of life is an artistic technique.
She stares at him. Improbably, he follows this remark up with: I think you are a very gifted writer. She laughs, out of horror.
You don't feel the same way for me, he says.
I want to be very clear, she says. I feel nothing for you. Nothing. Okay?
He returns to his camera, back turned to her, as if to disguise some expression. Malicious laughter at her distress? she thinks. Rage? He could not, it's too appalling to consider, actually have hurt feelings? He starts to remove the device from the tripod. She opens the door of the apartment and makes her way down the staircase. Could he really do the
gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he's acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.
Three Months Later
(march 2014)
In the waiting room he has to fill out a questionnaire. The seats are brightly coloured, arranged around a coffee table with a children's abacus toy on it. The coffee table is much too low for him to lean forward and fill out the pages on its surface, so he arranges them awkwardly in his lap instead. On the very first question he pierces the page with his ballpoint pen and leaves a tiny tear in the paper. He looks up at the receptionist who provided him with the form but she's not watching, so he looks back down again. The second question is headed 'Pessimism'. He has to circle the number beside one of the following statements:
0 I am not discouraged about my future
11 feel more discouraged about my future than I used to be
2 I do not expect things to work out for me
3 I feel my future is hopeless and will only get worse
It seems to him that any of these statements could plausibly be true, or more than one of them could be true at the same time. He puts the end of his pen between his teeth. Reading the fourth sentence, which for some reason is labelled '3', gives Connell a prickling feeling inside the soft tissue of his nose, like the sentence is calling out to him. It's true, he feels his future is hopeless and will only get worse. The more he thinks about it, the more it resonates. He doesn't even have to think about it, because he feels it: its syntax seems to have originated inside him. He rubs his tongue hard on the roof of his mouth, trying to settle his face into a neutral frown of concentration. Not wanting to alarm the woman who will receive the questionnaire, he circles statement 2 instead.
It was Niall who told him about the service. What he said specifically was: It's free, so you might as well. Niall is a practical person, and he shows compassion in practical ways. Connell hasn't been seeing much of him lately, because Connell lives in his scholarship accommodation now and doesn't see much of anyone anymore. Last night he spent an hour and a half lying on the floor of his room, because he was too tired to complete the journey from his en suite back to his bed. There was the en suite, behind him, and there was the bed, in front of him, both well within view, but somehow it was impossible to move either forward or backwards, only downwards, onto the floor, until his body was arranged motionless on the carpet. Well, here I am on the floor, he thought. Is life so much worse here than it would be on the bed, or even in a totally different location? No, life is exactly the same. Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head. I might as well be lying here, breathing the vile dust of the carpet into my lungs, gradually feeling my right arm go numb under the weight of my body, because it's essentially the same as every other possible experience.
0 I feel the same about myself as ever
11 have lost confidence in myself
2 I am disappointed in myself
3 I dislike myself
He looks up at the woman behind the glass. It strikes him now for the first time that they've placed a glass screen between this woman and the people in the waiting room. Do they imagine that people like Connell pose a risk to the woman behind the glass? Do they imagine that the students who come in here and patiently fill out the questionnaires, who repeat their own names again and again for the woman to type into her computer - do they imagine that these people want to hurt the woman behind the desk? Do they think that because Connell sometimes lies on his own floor for hours, he might one day purchase a semi-automatic machine gun online and commit mass murder in a shopping centre? Nothing could be further from his mind than committing mass murder. He feels guilty after he stammers a word on the phone. Still, he can see the logic: mentally unhealthy people are contaminated in some way and possibly dangerous. If they don't attack the woman behind the desk due to uncontrollable violent impulses, they might breathe some kind of microbe in her direction, causing her to dwell unhealthily on all the failed relationships in her past. He circles 3 and moves on.
0 I don't have any thoughts of killing myself
11 have thoughts of killing myself, but I would not carry them out
2 I would like to kill myself
3 I would kill myself if I had the chance
He glances back over at the woman again. He doesn't want to confess to her, a total strangParaer, that he would like to kill himself. Last night on the floor he fantasised about lying completely still until he died of dehydration, however long that took. Days maybe, but relaxing days in which he wouldn't have to do anything or focus very hard. Who would find his body? He didn't care. The fantasy, purified by weeks of repetition, ends at the moment of death: the calm, silent eyelid that closes over everything for good. He circles statement 1.
After completing the rest of the questions, all of which are intensely personal and the last one is about his sex life, he folds the pages over and hands them back to the receptionist. He doesn't know what to expect, handing over this extremely sensitive information to a stranger. He swallows and his throat is so tight it hurts. The woman takes the sheets like he's handing over a delayed college assignment and gives him a bland, cheerful smile. Thanks, she says. You can wait for the counsellor to call you now. He stands there limply. In her hand she holds the most deeply private information he has ever shared with anyone. Seeing her nonchalance, he experiences an impulse to ask for it back, as if he must have misunderstood the nature of this exchange, and maybe he should fill it out differently after all. Instead he says: Okay. He sits down again.
For a while nothing happens. His stomach is making a low whining noise now because he hasn't eaten breakfast. Lately he's too tired to cook for himself in the evenings, so he finds himself signing in for dinner on the scholars' website and eating Commons in the Dining Hall. Before the meal everyone stands for grace, which is recited in Latin. Then the food is served by other students, who are dressed all in black to differentiate them from the
otherwise identical students who are being served. The meals are always the same: salty orange soup to start, with a bread roll and a square of butter wrapped in foil. Then a piece of meat in gravy, with silver dishes of potatoes passed around. Then dessert, some kind of wet sugary cake, or the fruit salad which is mostly grapes. These are all served rapidly and whisked away rapidly, while portraits of men from different centuries glare down from the walls in expensive regalia. Eating alone like this, overhearing the conversations of others but unable to join in, Connell feels profoundly and almost unendurably alienated from his own body. After the meal another grace is recited, with the ugly noise of chairs pulled back from tables. By seven he has emerged into the darkness of Front Square, and the lamps have been lit.
A middle-aged woman comes out to the waiting room now, wearing a long grey cardigan, and says: Connell? He tries to contort his face into a smile, and then, giving up, rubs his jaw with his hand instead, nodding. My name is Yvonne, she says. Would you like to come with me? He rises from the couch and follows her into a small office. She closes the door behind them. On one side of the office is a desk with an ancient Microsoft computer humming audibly; on the other side, two low mint-coloured armchairs facing one another. Now then, Connell, she says. You can sit down wherever you like. He sits on the chair facing the window, out of which he can see the back of a concrete building and a rusting drainpipe. She sits down opposite him and picks up a pair of glasses from a chain around her neck. She fixes them on her face and looks down at her clipboard.
Okay, she says. Why don't we talk about how you're feeling?
Yeah. Not great.
I'm sorry to hear that. When did you start feeling this way? Uh, he says. A couple of months ago. January, I suppose.
She clicks a pen and writes something down. January, she says. Okay. Did something happen then, or it just came on out of nowhere?
A few days into the new year, Connell got a text message from Rachel Moran. It was two o'clock in the morning then, and he and Helen were coming back from a night out. Angling his phone away, he opened the text: it was a group message that went out to all their school friends, asking if anyone had seen or been in contact with Rob Hegarty. It said he hadn't been seen for a few hours. Helen asked him what the text said and for some reason Connell replied: Oh, nothing, just a group message. Happy New Year. The next day Rob's body was recovered from the River Corrib.
Connell later heard from friends that Rob had been drinking a lot in the preceding weeks and seemed out of sorts. Connell hadn't known anything about it, he hadn't been home much last term, he hadn't really been seeing people. He checked his Facebook to find the last time Rob had sent him a message, and it was from early 2012: a photograph from a night out, Connell pictured with his arm around the waist of Marianne's friend Teresa. In the message Rob had written: are u riding her?? NICE haha. Connell had never replied. He hadn't seen Rob at Christmas, he couldn't remember for certain whether he'd even seen him last summer or not. Trying to summon an exact mental picture of Rob's face, Connell found that he couldn't: an image would appear at first, whole and recognisable, but on any closer inspection the features would float away from one another, blur, become confused.
In the following days, people from school posted status updates about suicide awareness. Since then Connell's mental state has steadily, week after week, continued to deteriorate.
His anxiety, which was previously chronic and low-level, serving as a kind of all-purpose inhibiting impulse, has become severe. His hands start tingling when he has to perform minor interactions like ordering coffee or answering a question in class. Once or twice he's had major panic attacks: hyperventilation, chest pain, pins and needles all over his body. A feeling of dissociation from his senses, an inability to think straight or interpret what he sees and hears. Things begin to look and sound different, slower, artificial, unreal. The first time it happened he thought he was losing his mind, that the whole cognitive framework by which he made sense of the world had disintegrated for good, and everything from then on would just be undifferentiated sound and colour. Then within a couple of minutes it passed, and left him lying on his mattress coated in sweat.
Now he looks up at Yvonne, the person assigned by the university to listen to his problems for money.
One of my friends committed suicide in January, he says. A friend from school.
Oh, how sad. I'm very sorry to hear that, Connell.
We hadn't really kept up with each other in college. He was in Galway and I was here and everything. I guess I feel guilty now that I wasn't in touch with him more.
I can understand that, Yvonne says. But however sad you might be feeling about your friend, what happened to him is not your fault. You're not responsible for the decisions he made.
I never even replied to the last message he sent me. I mean, that was years ago, but I didn't even reply.
I know that must feel very painful for you, of course that's very painful. You feel you missed an opportunity to help someone who was suffering. Connell nods, dumbly, and rubs his eye.
When you lose someone to suicide, it's natural to wonder if there's anything you could have done to help this person, Yvonne says. I'm sure everyone in your friend's life is asking themselves the same questions now.
But at least other people tried to help.
This sounds more aggressive, or more wheedling, than Connell intended it to. He's surprised to see that instead of responding directly, Yvonne just looks at him, looks through the lenses of her glasses, and her eyes are narrowed. She's nodding. Then she lifts a sheaf of paper off the table and holds it upright, businesslike.
Well, I've had a look at this inventory you filled out for us, she says. And I'll be honest with you, Connell, what I'm seeing here would be pretty concerning.
Right. Would it?
She shuffles the sheets of paper. He can see on the first sheet where his pen made the small tear.
This is what we call the Beck Depression Inventory, she says. I'm sure you've figured out how it works, we just assign a score from zero to three for each item. Now, someone like me might score between, say, zero and five on a test like this, and someone who's going through a mild depressive episode could expect to see a score of maybe fifteen or sixteen.
Okay, he says. Right.
And what we're seeing here is a score of forty-three. Yeah. Okay.
So that would put us in the territory of a very serious depression, she says. Do you think that matches up with your experience?
He rubs at his eye again. Quietly he manages to say: Yeah.
I'm seeing that you're feeling very negatively towards yourself, you're having some suicidal thoughts, things like that. So those are things we'd have to take very seriously. Right.
At this point she starts talking about treatment options. She says she's going to recommend that he should see a GP in college to talk about the option of medication. You understand I'm not in a position to make any prescriptions here, she says. He nods, restless now. Yeah, I know that, he says. He keeps rubbing at his eyes, they're itchy. She offers him a glass of water but he declines. She starts to ask questions about his family, about his mother and where she lives and whether he has brothers and sisters.
Any girlfriend or boyfriend on the scene at the moment? Yvonne says.
No, says Connell. No one like that.
*
Helen came back to Carricklea with him for the funeral. The morning of the ceremony they dressed in his room together in silence, with the noise of Lorraine's hairdryer humming through the wall. Connell was wearing the only suit he owned, which he had bought for a cousin's communion when he was sixteen. The jacket was tight around his shoulders, he could feel it when he lifted his arms. The sensation that he looked bad preoccupied him. Helen was sitting at the mirror putting on her make-up, and Connell stood behind her to knot his tie. She reached up to touch his face. You look handsome, she said. For some reason that made him angry, like it was the most insensitive, vulgar thing she possibly could have said, and he didn't respond. She dropped her hand then and went to put her shoes on.
They stopped in the vestibule of the church to speak to someone Lorraine knew. Connell's hair was wet from the rain and he kept smoothing it, not looking at Helen, not speaking. Then, through the opened church doors, he saw Marianne. He'd known she was coming back from Sweden for the funeral. In the doorway she looked very slim and pale, wearing a black coat, carrying a wet umbrella. He hadn't seen her since Italy. She looked, he thought, almost frail. She started putting her umbrella in the stand inside the door.
Marianne, he said.
He said this aloud without thinking about it. She looked up and saw him then. Her face was like a small white flower. She put her arms around his neck, and he held her tightly. He could smell the inside of her house on her clothes. The last time he'd seen her, everything had been normal. Rob was still alive then, Connell could have sent him a message or even called him and talked to him on the phone, it was possible then, it had been possible. Marianne touched the back of Connell's head with her hand. Everyone stood there watching them, he felt that. When they knew it couldn't go on any longer, they let go of one another. Helen patted his arm quickly. People were moving in and out of the vestibule, coats and umbrellas dripping silently onto the tiles.
We'd better go and pay our respects, Lorraine said.
They lined up with everyone else to shake hands with the family. Rob's mother Eileen was just crying and crying, they could hear her the whole way down the church. By the time
they got halfway up the queue Connell's legs were shaking. He wished Lorraine were standing with him and not Helen. He felt like he was going to be sick. When it was finally his turn, Rob's father Val gripped his hand and said: Connell, good man. I hear you're doing great things above in Trinity. Connell's hands were wringing wet. I'm sorry, he said in a thin voice. I'm so sorry. Val kept gripping his hand and looking in his eyes. Good lad, he said. Thanks for coming. Then it was over. Connell sat down in the first available pew, shivering all over. Helen sat down beside him, looking self-conscious, pulling at the hem of her skirt. Lorraine came over and gave him a tissue from her handbag, with which he wiped his forehead and his upper lip. She squeezed his shoulder. You're alright, she said. You've done your bit, just relax now. And Helen turned her face away, as if embarrassed.
After Mass they went to the burial, and then back to the Tavern to eat sandwiches and drink tea in the ballroom. Behind the bar a girl from the year below in school was dressed in a white shirt and waistcoat, serving pints. Connell poured Helen a cup of tea and then one for himself. They stood by the wall near the tea trays, drinking and not talking. Connell's cup rattled in its saucer. Eric came over and stood with them when he arrived. He was wearing a shiny blue tie.
How are things? Eric said. Long time no see.
I know, yeah, said Connell. It's been a fair while alright.
Who's this? Eric said, nodding at Helen.
Helen, said Connell. Helen, this is Eric.
Eric held out his hand and Helen shook it, balancing her teacup politely in her left hand, her face tensed in effort.
The girlfriend, is it? Eric said.
With a glance at Connell she nodded and replied: Yes.
Eric released her, grinning. You're a Dub anyway, he said.
She smiled nervously and said: That's right.
Must be your fault this lad never comes home anymore, Eric said.
It's not her fault, it's my fault, said Connell.
I'm only messing with you, Eric said.
For a few seconds they stood looking out at the room in silence. Helen cleared her throat and said delicately: I'm very sorry for your loss, Eric. Eric turned and gave her a kind of gallant nod. He looked back at the room again. Yeah, hard to believe, he said. Then he poured himself a cup of tea from the pot behind them. Good of Marianne to come, he remarked. I thought she was off in Sweden or someplace.
She was, said Connell. She's home for the funeral.
She's gone very thin, isn't she?
Eric took a large mouthful of tea and swallowed it, smacking his lips. Marianne, detaching herself from another conversation, made her way towards the tea tray.
Here's herself, said Eric. You're very good to come all the way back from Sweden, Marianne.
She thanked him and started to pour a cup of tea, saying it was nice to see him. Have you met Helen here? Eric asked.
Marianne put her teacup down in her saucer. Of course I have, she said. We're in college together.
All friendly, I hope, said Eric. No rivalry, I mean.
Behave yourself now, said Marianne.
Connell watched Marianne pouring the tea, her smiling manner, 'behave yourself, and he felt in awe of her naturalness, her easy way of moving through the world. It hadn't been like that in school, quite the opposite. Back then Connell had been the one who understood how to behave, while Marianne had just aggravated everyone.
After the funeral he cried, but the crying felt like nothing. Back in fifth year when Connell had scored a goal for the school football team, Rob had leapt onto the pitch to embrace him. He screamed Connell's name, and began to kiss his head with wild exuberant kisses. It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches. Connell still remembers the too-hard grip of his arms. And on Debs night, Rob showing them those photographs of Lisa's naked body. Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance. Connell couldn't judge him for that. He'd been the same way himself, or worse. He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing. It was Marianne who had shown him other things were possible. Life was different after that; maybe he had never understood how different it was.
The night of the funeral he and Helen lay in his room in the dark, not sleeping. Helen asked him why he hadn't introduced her to any of his friends. She was whispering so as not to wake Lorraine.
I introduced you to Eric, didn't I? Connell said.
Only after he asked. To be honest, you didn't seem like you really wanted him to meet me.
Connell closed his eyes. It was a funeral, he said. You know, someone just died. I don't think it's really a good occasion for meeting people.
Well, if you didn't want me to come you shouldn't have asked me, she said.
He breathed in and out slowly. Okay, he said. I'm sorry I asked you, then.
She sat upright in bed beside him. What does that mean? she said. You're sorry I was there?
No, I'm saying if I gave you the wrong impression about what it was going to be like, then I'm sorry.
You didn't want me there at all, did you?
I didn't want to be there myself, to be honest, he said. I'm sorry you didn't have a good time, but like, it was a funeral. I don't know what you expected. She breathed in quickly through her nose, he could hear it. You weren't ignoring Marianne, she said. I wasn't ignoring anyone.
But you seemed particularly happy to see her, wouldn't you say?
For fuck's sake, Helen, he said quietly.
What?
How does every argument come back to this? Our friend just killed himself and you want to start in with me about Marianne, seriously? Like, yeah, I was glad to see her, does that
make me a monster?
When Helen spoke it was in a low hiss. I've been very sympathetic about your friend and you know that, she said. But what do you expect me to do, just pretend I don't notice that you're staring at another woman in front of me?
I was not staring at her.
You were, in the church.
Well, it wasn't intentional, he said. Believe me, it was not a very sexy atmosphere for me in the church, okay? You can trust me on that. Why do you have to act so weird around her?
He frowned, still lying with his eyes shut, face turned to the ceiling. How I act with her is my normal personality, he said. Maybe I'm just a weird person.
Helen said nothing. Eventually she just lay back down beside him. Two weeks later it was over, they broke up. By then Connell was so exhausted and miserable he couldn't even summon up a response. Things happened to him, like the crying fits, the panic attacks, but they seemed to descend on him from outside, rather than emanating from somewhere inside himself. Internally he felt nothing. He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid. Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.
*
Yvonne nods slowly, moving her mouth around in a sympathetic way. Do you feel you've made friends here in Dublin? she says. Anyone you're close with, that you might talk to about how you're feeling?
My friend Niall, maybe. He was the one who told me about this whole thing.
The college counselling service.
Yeah, says Connell.
Well, that's good. He's looking out for you. Niall, okay. And he's here in Trinity as well. Connell coughs, clearing the dry feeling from his throat, and says: Yeah. I have another friend who I would be pretty close with, but she's on Erasmus this year. A friend from college?
Well, we went to school together but she's in Trinity now as well. Marianne. She would have known Rob and everything. Our friend who died. But she's away this year, like I said.
He watches Yvonne write down the name on her notepad, the tall slopes of the capital 'M'. He talks to Marianne almost every night on Skype now, sometimes after dinner or sometimes late when she comes home from a night out. They've never talked about what happened in Italy. He's grateful that she's never brought it up. When they speak the video stream is high quality but frequently fails to match the audio, which gives him a sense of Marianne as a moving image, a thing to be looked at. People in college have been saying things about her since she went away. Connell's not sure if she knows about it or not, what people like Jamie have been saying. Connell isn't even really friends with those people and he's heard about it. Some drunk guy at a party told him that she was into weird stuff, and that there were pictures of her on the internet. Connell doesn't know if it's true about the pictures. He's searched her name online but nothing has ever come up.
Is she someone you might talk with about how you're feeling? Yvonne says.
Yeah, she's been supportive about it. She, uh ... She's hard to describe if you don't know her. She's really smart, a lot smarter than me, but I would say we see the world in a similar way. And we've lived our whole lives in the same place, obviously, so it is a bit different being away from her.
It sounds difficult.
I just don't have a lot of people who I really click with, he says. You know, I struggle with that.
Do you think that's a new problem, or is it something familiar to you?
It's familiar, I suppose. I would say in school I sometimes had that feeling of isolation or whatever. But people liked me and everything. Here I feel like people don't like me that much.
He pauses, and Yvonne seems to recognise the pause and doesn't interrupt him. Like with Rob, that's my friend who died, he says. I wouldn't say we clicked on this very deep level or anything, but we were friends. Sure.
We didn't have a lot in common, like in terms of interests or whatever. And on the political side of things we probably wouldn't have had the same views. But in school, stuff like that didn't really matter as much. We were just in the same group so we were friends, you know.
I understand that, says Yvonne.
And he did do some stuff that I wasn't a big fan of. With girls his behaviour was kind of poor at times. You know, we were eighteen or whatever, we all acted like idiots. But I guess I found that stuff a bit alienating.
Connell bites on his thumbnail and then drops his hand back into his lap.
I probably thought if I moved here I would fit in better, he says. You know, I thought I might find more like-minded people or whatever. But honestly, the people here are a lot worse than the people I knew in school. I mean everyone here just goes around comparing how much money their parents make. Like I'm being literal with that, I've seen that happen.
He breathes in now, feeling that he has been talking too quickly and at too great a length, but unwilling to stop.
I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life, he says. But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again. I mean, those friendships are gone. Rob is gone, I can never see him again. I can never get that life back.
Yvonne pushes the box of tissues on the table towards him. He looks at the box, patterned with green palm leaves, and then at Yvonne. He touches his own face, only to discover that he has started crying. Wordlessly he removes a tissue from the box and wipes his face.
Sorry, he says.
Yvonne is making eye contact now, but he can't tell anymore whether she's been listening to him, whether she's understood or tried to understand what he's said.
What we can do here in counselling is try to work on your feelings, and your thoughts and behaviours, she says. We can't change your circumstances, but we can change how you respond to your circumstances. Do you see what I mean?
Yeah.
At this point in the session Yvonne starts to hand him worksheets, illustrated with large
cartoon arrows pointing to various text boxes. He takes them and pretends that he's intending to fill them out later. She also hands him some photocopied pages about dealing with anxiety, which he pretends he will read. She prints a note for him to take to the college health service advising them about his depression, and he says he'll come back for another session in two weeks. Then he leaves the office.
*
A couple of weeks ago Connell attended a reading by a writer who was visiting the college. He sat at the back of the lecture hall on his own, self-conscious because the reading was sparsely attended and everyone else was sitting in groups. It was one of the big windowless halls in the Arts Block, with fold-out tables attached to the seats. One of his lecturers gave a short and sycophantic overview of the writer's work, and then the man himself, a youngish guy around thirty, stood at the lectern and thanked the college for the invitation. By then Connell regretted his decision to attend. Everything about the event was staid and formulaic, sapped of energy. He didn't know why he had come. He had read the writer's collection and found it uneven, but sensitive in places, perceptive. Now, he thought, even that effect was spoiled by seeing the writer in this environment, hemmed off from anything spontaneous, reciting aloud from his own book to an audience who'd already read it. The stiffness of this performance made the observations in the book seem false, separating the writer from the people he wrote about, as if he'd observed them only for the benefit of talking about them to Trinity students. Connell couldn't think of any reason why these literary events took place, what they contributed to anything, what they meant. They were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them.
Afterwards a small wine reception had been set up outside the lecture hall. Connell went to leave but found himself trapped by a group of students talking loudly. When he tried to press his way through, one of them said: Oh, hi Connell. He recognised her, it was Sadie Darcy-O'Shea. She was in some of his English classes, and he knew she was involved in the literary society. She was the girl who'd called him 'a genius' to his face back in first year.
Hey, he said.
Did you enjoy the reading?
He shrugged. It was alright, he said. He felt anxious and wanted to leave, but she kept speaking. He rubbed his palms on his T-shirt. You weren't blown away? she said. I don't know, I don't really get the point of these things. Readings?
Yeah, said Connell. You know, I don't really see what they're for.
Everyone looked away suddenly, and Connell turned to follow their gaze. The writer had emerged from the lecture hall and was approaching them. Hi there, Sadie, he said. Connell had not intuited any personal relationship between Sadie and the writer, and he felt foolish for saying what he'd said. You read so wonderfully, said Sadie. Irritated and tired, Connell moved aside to let the writer join their circle and started to edge away. Then Sadie gripped his arm and said: Connell was just telling us he doesn't see the point of literary readings. The writer looked vaguely in Connell's direction and then nodded. Yeah, same as that, he said. They're boring, aren't they? Connell noticed that the stilted quality of his reading
seemed to characterise his speech and movement also, and he felt bad then for attributing such a negative view of literature to someone who was maybe just awkward.
Well, we appreciated it, said Sadie.
What's your name, Connell what? said the writer.
Connell Waldron.
The writer nodded. He picked up a glass of red wine from the table and let the others continue talking. For some reason, though the opportunity to leave had at last presented itself, Connell lingered. The writer swallowed some wine and then looked at him again.
I liked your book, said Connell.
Oh, thanks, said the writer. Are you coming on to the Stag's Head for a drink? I think that's where people are heading.
They didn't leave the Stag's Head that night until it closed. They had a good-natured argument about literary readings, and although Connell didn't say very much, the writer took his side, which pleased him. Later he asked Connell where he was from, and Connell told him Sligo, a place called Carricklea. The writer nodded.
I know it, yeah, he said. There used to be a bowling alley there, it's probably gone years now.
Yeah, Connell said too quickly. I had a birthday party there once when I was small. In the bowling alley. It is gone now, though, obviously. Like you said.
The writer took a sip of his pint and said: How do you find Trinity, do you like it? Connell looked at Sadie across the table, her bangles knocking together on her wrist. Bit hard to fit in, to be honest, Connell said.
The writer nodded again. That mightn't be a bad thing, he said. You could get a first collection out of it.
Connell laughed, he looked down into his lap. He knew it was just a joke, but it was a nice thought, that he might not be suffering for nothing.
He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. When someone mentioned the austerity protests that night in the Stag's Head, Sadie threw her hands up and said: Not politics, please! Connell's initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.
Four Months Later
(JULY 2014)
Her eyes narrow until the television screen is just a green oblong, yawning light at the edges. Are you falling asleep? he says. After a pause she replies: No. He nods, not taking his eyes off the match. He takes a sip of Coke and the remaining ice clinks softly in his glass. Her limbs feel heavy on the mattress. She's lying in Connell's room in Foxfield watching the Netherlands play Costa Rica for a place in the World Cup semi-finals. His room looks the same as it did in school, although one corner of his Steven Gerrard poster has come unfixed from the wall and curled inwards on itself in the meantime. But everything else is the same: the lampshade, the green curtains, even the pillowcases with the striped trim.
I can run you home at half-time, he says.
For a second she says nothing. Her eyes flutter closed and then open up again, wider, so she can see the players moving around the pitch. Am I in your way? she says. No, not at all. You just seem sleepy. Can I have some of your Coke?
He hands her the glass and she sits up to drink it, feeling like a baby. Her mouth is dry and the drink is cold and flavourless on her tongue. She takes two huge mouthfuls and then hands it back to him, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. He accepts the glass without looking away from the TV.
You're thirsty, he says. There's more downstairs in the fridge if you want some.
She shakes her head, lies back down with her hands clasped behind her neck.
Where did you disappear to last night? she says.
Oh. I don't know, I was in the smoking area for a bit.
Did you end up kissing that girl?
No, he says.
Marianne closes her eyes, fans her face with her hand. I'm really warm, she says. Do you find it hot in here?
You can open the window if you want.
She tries wriggling down the bed towards the window and reaching for the handle without actually having to sit up the whole way. She pauses, waiting to see if Connell will intervene on her behalf. He's working in the college library this summer, but he's visited Carricklea every weekend since she got home. They drive around in his car together, out to Strandhill, or up to Glencar waterfall. Connell bites his nails a lot and doesn't talk much. Last month she told him he shouldn't feel obliged to visit her if he doesn't feel like it, and he replied tonelessly: Well, it's really the only thing I have to look forward to. She sits up now and opens the window herself. The daylight is fading but the air outside feels balmy and still.
What was her name again? she says. The girl at the bar.
Niamh Keenan. She likes you.
I don't think we really share interests, he says. Eric was looking for you last night actually, did you see him?
Marianne sits cross-legged on the bed, facing Connell. He's propped up against the headboard, holding the glass of Coke on his chest.
Yes, I saw him, she says. It was weird.
Why, what happened?
He was really drunk. I don't know. For some reason he decided he wanted to apologise to me for the way he acted in school. Really? says Connell. That is weird.
He looks back at the screen then, so she feels at liberty to study his face in detail. He probably notices she's doing this, but politely says nothing about it. The bedside lamp diffuses light softly over his features, the fine cheekbone, the brow in its frown of mild concentration, the faint sheen of perspiration on his upper lip. Dwelling on the sight of Connell's face always gives Marianne a certain pleasure, which can be inflected with any number of other feelings depending on the minute interplay of conversation and mood. His appearance is like a favourite piece of music to her, sounding a little different each time she hears it.
He was talking about Rob a bit, she says. He was saying Rob would have wanted to apologise. I mean, it wasn't clear if this was something Rob had actually said to him or if Eric was just doing some psychological projection.
I'm sure Rob would have wanted to apologise, to be honest.
Oh, I hate to think that. I hate to think he had that on his conscience in some way. I never held it against him, really. You know, it was nothing, we were kids. It wasn't nothing, says Connell. He bullied you.
Marianne says nothing. It's true they did bully her. Eric called her 'flat-chested' once, in front of everyone, and Rob, laughing, scrambled to whisper something in Eric's ear, some affirmation, or some further insult too vulgar to speak out loud. At the funeral back in January everyone talked about what a great person Rob had been, full of life, a devoted son, and so on. But he was also a very insecure person, obsessed with popularity, and his desperation had made him cruel. Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.
After the funeral she spent evenings scrolling through Rob's Facebook page. Lots of people from school had left comments on his wall, saying they missed him. What were these people doing, Marianne thought, writing on the Facebook wall of a dead person? What did these messages, these advertisements of loss, actually mean to anyone? What was the appropriate etiquette when they appeared on the timeline: to 'like' them supportively? To scroll past in search of something better? But everything made Marianne angry then. Thinking about it now, she can't understand why it bothered her. None of those people had done anything wrong. They were just grieving. Of course it didn't make sense to write on his Facebook wall, but nothing else made sense either. If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that
grief revealed. She wishes that she could have forgiven Rob, even if it meant nothing to him. When she thinks of him now it's always with his face hidden, turning away, behind his locker door, behind the rolled-up window of his car. Who were you? she thinks, now that there's no one left to answer the question. Did you accept the apology? says Connell.
She nods, looking down at her nails. Of course I did, she says. I don't go in for grudges. Luckily for me, he replies.
The half-time whistle blows and the players turn, heads lowered, and start their slow walk across the pitch. It's still nil-all. She wipes her nose with her fingers. Connell sits up straight and puts his glass on the bedside table. She thinks he's going to offer her a lift home again, but instead he says: Do you feel like an ice cream? She says yes. Back in a second, he says. He leaves the bedroom door open on his way out. Marianne is living at home now for the first time since she left school. Her mother and brother are at work all day and
*
Marianne has nothing to do but sit in the garden watching insects wriggle through soil. Inside she makes coffee, sweeps floors, wipes down surfaces. The house is never really clean anymore because Lorraine has a full-time job in the hotel now and they've never replaced her. Without Lorraine the house is not a nice place to live. Sometimes Marianne goes on day trips to Dublin, and she and Joanna wander around the Hugh Lane together with bare arms, drinking from bottles of water. Joanna's girlfriend Evelyn comes along when she's not studying or working, and she's always painstakingly kind to Marianne and interested to hear about her life. Marianne is so happy for Joanna and Evelyn that she feels lucky even to see them together, even to hear Joanna on the phone to Evelyn saying cheerfully: Okay, love you, see you later. It gives Marianne a window onto real happiness, though a window she cannot open herself or ever climb through.
They went to a protest against the war in Gaza the other week with Connell and Niall. There were thousands of people there, carrying signs and megaphones and banners. Marianne wanted her life to mean something then, she wanted to stop all violence committed by the strong against the weak, and she remembered a time several years ago when she had felt so intelligent and young and powerful that she almost could have achieved such a thing, and now she knew she wasn't at all powerful, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could help only a few people. It was so much harder to reconcile herself to the idea of helping a few, like she would rather help no one than do something so small and feeble, but that wasn't it either. The protest was very loud and slow, lots of people were banging drums and chanting things out of unison, sound systems crackling on and off. They marched across O'Connell Bridge with the Liffey trickling under them. The weather was hot, Marianne's shoulders got sunburned.
Connell drove her back to Carricklea in the car that evening, though she said she would get the train. They were both very tired on the way home. While they were driving through Longford they had the radio on, it was playing a White Lies song that had been popular when they were in school, and without touching the dial or raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the radio Connell said: You know I love you. He didn't say anything else.
She said she loved him too and he nodded and continued driving as if nothing at all had happened, which in a way it hadn't.
Marianne's brother works for the county council now. He comes home in the evening and prowls around the house looking for her. From her room she can tell it's him because he always wears his shoes inside. He knocks on her door if he can't find her in the living room or the kitchen. I just want to talk to you, he says. Why are you acting like you're scared of me? Can we talk for a second? She has to come to the door then, and he wants to go over some argument they had the night before, and she says she's tired and wants to get some sleep, but he won't leave until she says she's sorry for the previous argument, so she says she's sorry, and he says: You think I'm such a horrible person. She wonders if that's true. I try to be nice to you, he says, but you always throw it back at me. She doesn't think that's true, but she knows he probably thinks it is. It's nothing worse than this mostly, it's just this all the time, nothing but this, and long empty weekdays wiping down surfaces and wringing damp sponges into the sink.
*
Connell comes back upstairs now and tosses her an ice lolly wrapped in shiny plastic. She catches it in her hands and lifts it straight to her cheek, where the cold radiates outwards sweetly. He sits back against the headboard, starts unwrapping his own.
Do you ever see Peggy in Dublin? she says. Or any of those people.
He pauses, his fingers crackle on the plastic wrap. No, he says. I thought you had a falling-out with them, didn't you?
But I'm just asking if you ever hear from them.
No. I wouldn't have much to say to them if I did.
She pulls open the plastic packaging and removes the lolly from inside, orange with vanilla cream. On her tongue, tiny flakes of clear unflavoured ice. I did hear Jamie wasn't happy, Connell adds. I believe he was saying some pretty unpleasant things about me.
Yeah. Well, I wasn't talking to him myself, obviously. But I got the impression he was saying some stuff, yeah.
Marianne lifts her eyebrows, as if amused. When she'd first heard the rumours that were circulating about her, she hadn't found it funny at all. She used to ask Joanna about it again and again: who was talking about it, what had they said. Joanna wouldn't tell her. She said that within a few weeks everyone would have moved on to something else anyway. People are juvenile in their attitudes to sexuality, Joanna said. Their fixation on your sex life is probably more fetishistic than anything you've done. Marianne even went back to Lukas and made him delete all his photographs of her, none of which he had ever put online anyway. Shame surrounded her like a shroud. She could hardly see through it. The cloth caught up her breath, prickled on her skin. It was as if her life was over. How long had that feeling lasted? Two weeks, or more? Then it went away, and a certain short chapter of her youth had concluded, and she had survived it, it was done.
You never said anything to me about it, she says to Connell.
Well, I heard Jamie was pissed off you broke up with him and he went around talking shit about you. But like, that's not even gossip, that's just how lads behave. I didn't know
anyone really cared.
I think it's more a case of reputational damage.
And how come Jamie's reputation isn't damaged, then? says Connell. He was the one doing all that stuff to you.
She looks up and Connell has finished his ice lolly already. He's playing with the dry wooden stick in his fingers. She has only a little left, licked down to a slick bulb of vanilla ice cream, gleaming in the light of the bedside lamp.
It's different for men, she says.
Yeah, I'm starting to get that.
Marianne licks the ice cream stick clean and examines it briefly. Connell says nothing for a few seconds, and then ventures: It's nice Eric apologised to you.
I know, she says. People from school have actually been very nice since I got back. Even though I never make any effort to see them.
Maybe you should.
Why, you think I'm being ungrateful?
No, I just mean you must be kind of lonely, he says.
She pauses, the stick between her index and middle fingers.
I'm used to it, she says. I've been lonely my whole life, really.
Connell nods, frowning. Yeah, he says. I know what you mean.
You weren't lonely with Helen, were you?
I don't know. Sometimes. I didn't feel totally myself with her all the time. Marianne lies down flat on her back now, head on the pillow, bare legs stretched on the duvet. She stares up at the light fixture, the same lampshade from years ago, dusty green. Connell, she says. You know when we were dancing last night? Yeah.
For a moment she just wants to lie here prolonging the intense silence and staring at the lampshade, enjoying the sensory quality of being here in this room again with him and making him talk to her, but time moves on.
What about it? he says.
Did I do something to annoy you?
No. What do you mean by that?
When you walked off and just left me there, she says. I felt kind of awkward. I thought maybe you were gone after that girl Niamh or something, that's why I asked about her. I don't know.
I didn't walk off. I asked you if you wanted to go out to the smoking area and you said no.
She sits up on her elbows and looks at him. He's flushed now, his ears are red. You didn't ask, she says. You said, I'm going out to the smoking area, and then you walked away.
No, I said do you want to come out to the smoking area, and you shook your head. Maybe I didn't hear you right.
You must not have, he says. I definitely remember saying it to you. But the music was very loud, to be fair.
They lapse into another silence. Marianne lies back down, looks up at the light again, feels her own face glowing.
I thought you were annoyed with me, she says. Well, sorry. I wasn't.
After a pause he adds: I think our friendship would be a lot easier in some ways if, like ... certain things were different.
She lifts her hand to her forehead. He doesn't continue speaking. If what was different? she says. I don't know.
She can hear him breathing. She feels she has cornered him into the conversation, and she's reluctant now to push any harder than she has already.
You know, I'm not going to lie, he says, I obviously do feel a certain attraction towards you. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself. I just feel like things would be less confusing if there wasn't this other element to the relationship.
She moves her hand to her ribs, feels the slow inflation of her diaphragm.
Do you think it would be better if we had never been together? she says.
I don't know. For me it's hard to imagine my life that way. Like, I don't know where I would have gone to college then or where I would be now.
She pauses, lets this thought roll around for a moment, keeps her hand flat on her abdomen.
It's funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we're at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions. But you've been a very good influence on me overall, like I definitely am a better person now, I think. Thanks to you.
She lies there breathing. Her eyes are burning but she doesn't make any move to touch them.
When we were together in first year of college, she says, were you lonely then? No. Were you?
No. I was frustrated sometimes but not lonely. I never feel lonely when I'm with you.
Yeah, he says. That was kind of a perfect time in my life, to be honest. I don't think I was ever really happy before then.
She holds her hand down hard on her abdomen, pressing the breath out of her body, and then inhales.
I really wanted you to kiss me last night, she says. Oh.
Her chest inflates again and deflates slowly.
I wanted to as well, he says. I guess we misunderstood each other.
Well, that's okay.
He clears his throat.
I don't know what's the best thing for us, he says. Obviously it's nice for me hearing you say this stuff. But at the same time things have never ended well with us in the past. You know, you're my best friend, I wouldn't want to lose that for any reason.
Sure, I know what you mean.
Her eyes are wet now and she has to rub them to stop tears running. Can I think about it? he says. Of course.
I don't want you to think I'm not appreciative.
She nods, wiping her nose with her fingers. She wonders if she could turn over onto her side and face the window now so he couldn't look at her.
You really have been so supportive of me, he says. What with the depression and everything, not to linger on that too much, but you really helped me a lot.
You don't owe me anything.
No, I know. I didn't mean that.
She sits up, swings her feet off the bed, puts her face down in her hands. I'm getting anxious now, he says. I hope you don't feel like I'm rejecting you. Don't be anxious. Everything's fine. I might head home now, if that's okay. I can drop you.
You don't want to miss the second half, she says. I'll walk, it's alright. She starts putting her shoes on.
I forgot there was even a match on, to be honest, he says.
But he doesn't get up or look for his keys. She stands up and smooths her skirt down. He's sitting on the bed watching her, an attentive, almost nervous expression on his face. Okay, she says. Bye.
He reaches for her hand and she gives it to him without thinking. For a second he holds it, his thumb moving over her knuckles. Then he lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses it. She feels pleasurably crushed under the weight of his power over her, the vast ecstatic depth of her will to please him. That's nice, she says. He nods. She feels a low gratifying ache inside her body, in her pelvic bone, in her back.
I'm just nervous, he says. I feel like it's pretty obvious I don't want you to leave.
In a tiny voice she says: I don't find it obvious what you want.
He gets up and stands in front of her. Like a trained animal she stays stock-still, every nerve bristling. She wants to whimper out loud. He puts his hands on her hips and she lets him kiss her open mouth. The sensation is so extreme she feels faint.
I want this so much, she says.
It's really nice to hear you say that. I'm going to switch the TV off, if that's okay.
She gets onto the bed while he switches off the television. He sits beside her and they kiss again. His touch has a narcotic effect. A pleasurable stupidity comes over her, she wants very badly to remove her clothes. She lies back against the quilt and he leans over her. It has been years now. She feels his cock pressed hard against her hip and she shudders with the punishing force of her desire.
Hm, he says. I missed you.
It's not like this with other people.
Well, I like you a lot more than other people.
He kisses her again and she feels his hands on her body. She is an abyss that he can reach into, an empty space for him to fill. Blindly, mechanically, she starts removing her clothes, and she can hear him unbuckle his belt. Time seems so elastic, stretched out by sound and motion. She lies on her front and presses her face into the mattress, and he touches the back of her thigh with his hand. Her body is just an item of property, and though it has been handed around and misused in various ways, it has somehow always belonged to him, and she feels like returning it to him now.
I actually don't have condoms, he says.
It's okay, I'm on the pill.
He touches her hair. She feels his fingertips brush the back of her neck. Do you want it like this? he says. However you want.
He gets on top of her, one hand planted on the mattress beside her face, the other in her hair.
I haven't done this in a while, he says. That's okay.
When he's inside her she hears her own voice crying out again and again, strange raw cries. She wants to hold onto him but she can't, and she feels her right hand clawing uselessly at the quilt. He bends down so his face is a little closer to her ear.
Marianne? he says. Can we do this again like, next weekend and so on?
Whenever you want to.
He takes hold of her hair, not pulling it, just holding it in his hand. Whenever I want, really? he says.
You can do anything you want with me.
He makes a noise in his throat, leans into her a little harder. That's nice, he says. Her voice sounds hoarse now. Do you like me saying that? she says. Yeah, a lot.
Will you tell me I belong to you? What do you mean? he says.
She says nothing, just breathes hard into the quilt and feels her own breath on her face. Connell pauses now, waiting for her to say something. Will you hit me? she says.
For a few seconds she hears nothing, not even his breath.
No, he says. I don't think I want that. Sorry.
She says nothing.
Is that okay? he asks.
She still says nothing.
Do you want to stop? he says.
She nods her head. She feels his weight lift off her. She feels empty again and suddenly chill. He sits on the bed and pulls the quilt over himself. She lies there face down, not moving, unable to think of any acceptable movement.
Are you okay? he says. I'm sorry I didn't want to do that, I just think it would be weird. I mean, not weird, but... I don't know. I don't think it would be a good idea.
Her breasts ache from lying flat like this and her face prickles.
You think I'm weird? she says.
I didn't say that. I just meant, you know, I don't want things to be weird between us. She feels terribly hot now, sour heat, all over her skin and in her eyes. She sits up, faces the window, pushes her hair out of her face.
I think I'm going to go home now, if that's okay, she says. Yeah. If that's what you want.
She finds her clothes and puts them on. He starts getting dressed, he says he'll drive her home at least, and she says she wants to walk. It becomes a farcical competition between them, who can dress faster, and having a head start she finishes first and runs down the stairs. He's on the landing by the time she closes the front door behind her. Out on the street
she feels like a petulant child, slamming the door on him like that while he raced out to the landing. Something has come over her, she doesn't know what it is. It reminds her of how she used to feel in Sweden, a kind of nothingness, like there's no life inside her. She hates the person she has become, without feeling any power to change anything about herself. She is someone even Connell finds disgusting, she has gone past what he can tolerate. In school they were both in the same place, both confused and somehow suffering, and ever since then she has believed that if they could return to that place together it would be the same. Now she knows that in the intervening years Connell has been growing slowly more adjusted to the world, a process of adjustment that has been steady if sometimes painful, while she herself has been degenerating, moving further and further from wholesomeness, becoming something unrecognisably debased, and they have nothing left in common at all.
By the time she lets herself into her own house it's after ten. Her mother's car isn't in the driveway and inside the hall is cool and sounds empty. She takes her sandals off and puts them on the rack, hangs her handbag on a coat hook, combs her fingers through her hair.
At the end of the hall, Alan comes up from the kitchen with a bottle of beer in his hand.
Where the fuck were you? he says.
Connell's house.
He moves in front of the staircase, swinging the bottle at his side. You shouldn't be going over there, he says.
She shrugs. She knows a confrontation is coming now, and she can do nothing to stop it. It's moving towards her already from every direction, and there's no special move she can make, no evasive gesture, that can help her escape it.
I thought you liked him, says Marianne. You did when we were in school.
Yeah, how was I supposed to know he was fucked in the head? He's on medication and everything, did you know that?
He's doing pretty well at the moment, I think.
What is he hanging around you for, so? says Alan.
I suppose you'd have to ask him.
She tries to move towards the stairs but Alan puts his free hand down on the banister. I don't want people going around town saying that knacker is riding my sister, says Alan. Can I go upstairs now, please?
Alan is gripping his beer bottle very tightly. I don't want you to go near him again, he says. I'm warning you now. People in town are talking about you.
I can't imagine what my life would be like if I cared what people thought of me.
Before she's really aware of what's happening, Alan lifts his arm and throws the bottle at her. It smashes behind her on the tiles. On some level she knows that he can't have intended to hit her; they're only standing a few feet apart and it missed her completely. Still she runs past him, up the stairs. She feels her body racing through the cool interior air. He turns and follows her but she manages to make it into her room, pushing herself hard against the door, before he catches up. He tries the handle and she has to strain to keep it from turning. Then he kicks the outside of the door. Her body is vibrating with adrenaline.
You absolute freak! Alan says. Open the fucking door, I didn't do anything!
Forehead against the smooth grain of the wood, she calls out: Please just leave me alone. Go to bed, okay? I'll clean up downstairs, I won't tell Denise.
Open the door, he says.
Marianne leans the whole weight of her body against the door, her hands firmly grasping the handle, eyes screwed shut. From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body. She tries to be a good person. But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.
Abruptly she feels the handle slip from underneath her hand and before she can step away from the door, it bangs open. She hears a cracking noise when it connects with her face, then a strange feeling inside her head. She steps backwards while Alan enters the room. There's a ringing, but it's not so much a sound as a physical sensation, like the friction of two imagined metal plates somewhere in her skull. Her nose is running. She's aware that Alan is inside the room. Her hand goes to her face. Her nose is running really quite badly. Lifting the hand away now, she sees that her fingers are covered in blood, warm blood, wet. Alan is saying something. The blood must be coming out of her face. Her vision swims diagonally and the sense of ringing increases.
Are you going to blame me for that now? says Alan.
She puts her hand back to her nose. Blood is streaming out of her face so fast that she can't stem it with her fingers. It runs over her mouth and down her chin, she can feel it. She sees it land in heavy drops on the blue carpet fibres below.
Five Minutes Later
(JULY 2014)
In the kitchen he takes a can of beer out of the fridge and sits at the table to open it. After a minute the front door opens and he hears Lorraine's keys. Hey, he says, loud enough for her to hear. She comes in and closes the kitchen door. On the lino her shoes sound sticky, like the wet sound of lips parting. He notices a fat moth resting on the lampshade overhead, not moving. Lorraine puts her hand softly on the top of his head.
Is Marianne gone home? says Lorraine.
Yeah.
What happened in the match?
I don't know, he says. I think it went to penalties.
Lorraine draws a chair back and sits down beside him. She starts taking the pins out of her hair and laying them out on the table. He takes a mouthful of beer and lets it get warm in his mouth before swallowing. The moth shuffles its wings overhead. The blind above the kitchen sink is pulled up, and he can see the faint black outline of trees against the sky outside.
And I had a fine time, thanks for asking, says Lorraine. Sorry.
You're looking a bit dejected. Did something happen?
He shakes his head. When he saw Yvonne last week she told him he was 'making progress'. Mental healthcare professionals are always using this hygienic vocabulary, words wiped clean as whiteboards, free of connotation, sexless. She asked about his sense of 'belonging'. You used to say you felt trapped between two places, she said, not really belonging at home but not fitting in here either. Do you still feel that way? He just shrugged. The medication is doing its chemical work inside his brain now anyway, no matter what he does or says. He gets up and showers every morning, he turns up for work in the library, he doesn't really fantasise about jumping off a bridge. He takes the medication, life goes on.
Pins arranged on the table, Lorraine starts teasing her hair out loosely with her fingers. Did you hear Isa Gleeson is pregnant? she says. I did, yeah. Your old friend.
He picks up the can of beer and weighs it in his hand. Isa was his first girlfriend, his first ex-girlfriend. She used to call the house phone at night after they broke up and Lorraine would answer. From up in his room, under the covers, he would hear Lorraine's voice saying: I'm sorry, sweetheart, he can't come to the phone right now. Maybe you can talk to him in school. She had braces when they were going out together, she probably doesn't have those anymore. Isa, yeah. He was shy around her. She used to do such stupid things to make him jealous, but she would act innocent, as if it wasn't clear to both of them what she was doing: maybe she really thought he couldn't see it, or maybe she couldn't see it herself.
He hated that. He just withdrew from her further and further until finally, in a text message, he told her he didn't want to be her boyfriend anymore. He hasn't seen her in years now.
I don't know why she's keeping it, he says. Do you think she's one of these anti-abortion people?
Oh, is that the only reason women have babies, is it? Because of some backwards political view?
Well, from what I hear she's not together with the dad. I don't know does she even have a job.
I didn't have a job when I had you, says Lorraine.
He stares at the intricate white-and-red typeface on the can of beer, the crest of the 'B' looping back and inwards again towards itself.
And do you not regret it? he says. I know you're going to try and spare my feelings now, but honestly. Do you not think you could have had a better life if you didn't have a kid?
Lorraine turns to stare at him now, her face frozen.
Oh god, she says. Why? Is Marianne pregnant?
What? No.
She laughs, presses a hand to her breastbone. That's good, she says. Jesus. I mean, I assume not, he adds. It wouldn't have anything to do with me if she was. His mother pauses, hand still at her chest, and then says diplomatically: Well, that's none of my business.
What does that mean, you think I'm lying? There's nothing going on there, trust me.
For a few seconds Lorraine says nothing. He swallows some beer and puts the can down on the table. It is extremely irritating that his mother thinks he and Marianne are together, when the closest they have come in years to actually being together was earlier this evening, and it ended with him crying alone in his room.
You're just coming home every weekend to see your beloved mother, then, are you? she says.
He shrugs. If you don't want me to come home, I won't, he says. Oh, come on now.
She gets up to fill the kettle. He watches her idly while she tamps her teabag down into her favourite cup, then he rubs at his eyes again. He feels like he has ruined the life of everyone who has ever even marginally liked him.
*
In April, Connell sent one of his short stories, the only really completed one, to Sadie Darcy-O'Shea. She emailed back within an hour:
Connell it's incredible! let us publish it please! xxx
When he read this message his pulse hammered all over his body, loud and hard like a machine. He had to lie down and stare at the white ceiling. Sadie was the editor of the college literary journal. Finally he sat up and wrote back:
I'm glad you liked it but I don't think it's good enough to be published yet, thanks
though.
Instantly Sadie replied: PLEASE? xxx
Connell's entire body was pounding like a conveyor belt. No one had ever read a word of his work before that moment. It was a wild new landscape of experience. He paced around the room massaging his neck for a while. Then he typed back:
Ok, how about this, you can publish it under a pseudonym. But you also have to promise you won't tell anyone who wrote it, even the other people who edit the magazine. Ok?
Sadie wrote back:
haha so mysterious, I love it! thank you my darling! my lips are forever sealed xxx
His story appeared, unedited, in the May issue of the magazine. He found a copy in the Arts Block the morning it was printed and flipped straight to the page where the story appeared, under the pseudonym 'Conor McCready'. That doesn't even sound like a real name, he thought. All around him in the Arts Block people were filing into morning lectures, holding coffee and talking. On the first page of the text alone Connell noticed two errors. He had to shut the magazine for a few seconds then and take deep breaths. Students and faculty members continued to walk past, heedless of his turmoil. He reopened the magazine and continued reading. Another error. He wanted to crawl under a plant and burrow into the earth. That was it, the end of the publication ordeal. Because no one knew he had written the story he could not canvass anyone's reaction, and he never heard from a single soul whether it was considered good or bad. In time he began to believe it had only been published in the first place because Sadie was lacking material for an upcoming deadline. Overall the experience had caused him far more distress than pleasure. Nonetheless he kept two copies of the magazine, one in Dublin and one under his mattress at home.
*
How come Marianne went home so early? says Lorraine. I don't know.
Is that why you're in a foul mood?
What's the implication? he says. I'm pining after her, is that what you're saying?
Lorraine opens her hands as if to say she doesn't know, and then sits back down waiting for the kettle to boil. He's embarrassed now, which makes him cross. Whatever there is between him and Marianne, nothing good has ever come of it. It has only ever caused confusion and misery for everyone. He can't help Marianne, no matter what he does. There's something frightening about her, some huge emptiness in the pit of her being. It's like waiting for a lift to arrive and when the doors open nothing is there, just the terrible dark emptiness of the elevator shaft, on and on forever. She's missing some primal instinct,
self-defence or self-preservation, which makes other human beings comprehensible. You lean in expecting resistance, and everything just falls away in front of you. Still, he would lie down and die for her at any minute, which is the only thing he knows about himself that makes him feel like a worthwhile person.
What happened tonight was inevitable. He knows how he could make it sound, to Yvonne, or even to Niall, or some other imagined interlocutor: Marianne is a masochist and Connell is simply too nice of a guy to hit a woman. This, after all, is the literal level on which the incident took place. She asked him to hit her and when he said he didn't want to, she wanted to stop having sex. So why, despite its factual accuracy, does this feel like a dishonest way of narrating what happened? What is the missing element, the excluded part of the story that explains what upset them both? It has something to do with their history, he knows that. Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colours, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing this hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.
What's left for them, then? There doesn't seem to be a halfway position anymore. Too much has passed between them for that. So it's over, and they're just nothing? What would it even mean, to be nothing to her? He could avoid her, but as soon as he saw her again, even if they only glanced at one another outside a lecture hall, the glance could not contain nothing. He could never really want it to. He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That's the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her.
The kettle comes to the boil. Lorraine sweeps the line of hairpins into the palm of her hand, closes her fist around them and pockets them. She gets up then, fills the cup of tea, adds milk, and puts the bottle back in the fridge. He watches her.
Okay, she says. Time for bed.
Alright. Sleep well.
He hears her touch the handle of the door behind him but it doesn't open. He turns around and she's standing there, looking at him.
I don't regret it, by the way, she says. Having a baby. It was the best decision I've ever made in my life. I love you more than anything and I'm very proud that you're my son. I hope you know that.
He looks back at her. Quickly he clears his throat.
I love you too, he says.
Goodnight, then.
She closes the door behind her. He listens to her footsteps up the stairs. After a few minutes have passed he gets up, empties the dregs of his beer down the sink and puts the can quietly in the recycling bin.
On the table his phone starts ringing. It's set to vibrate so it starts shimmying around the surface of the table, catching the light. He goes to get it before it falls over the edge, and he sees it's Marianne calling. He pauses. He looks at the screen. Finally he slides the answer button.
Hey, he says.
He can hear her breath hard on the other end of the line. He asks if she's okay. I'm really sorry about this, she says. I feel like an idiot.
Her voice in the phone sounds clouded, like she has a bad cold, or something in her mouth. Connell swallows and walks over to the kitchen window. About earlier? he says. I've been thinking about it as well.
No, it's not that. It's really stupid. I just tripped or something and I have a small injury. I'm sorry to bother you about it. It's nothing. I just don't know what to do. He puts his hand on the sink. Where are you? he says.
I'm at home. It's not serious, it just hurts, that's all. I don't really know why I'm calling. I'm sorry.
Can I come get you?
She pauses. In a muffled voice she replies: Yes, please.
I'm on my way, he says. I'm getting in the car right now, okay?
Sandwiching the phone between his ear and shoulder, he fishes his left shoe out from under the table and pulls it on.
This is really nice of you, says Marianne in his ear.
I'll see you in a few minutes. I'm leaving right now. Alright? See you soon.
Outside he gets in the car and starts the engine. The radio comes on and he snaps it off with a flat hand. His breath isn't right. After only one drink he feels out of it, not alert enough, or too alert, twitchy. The car is too silent but he can't stand the idea of the radio. His hands feel damp on the steering wheel. Turning left onto Marianne's street, he can see the light in her bedroom window. He indicates and pulls into the empty driveway. When he shuts the car door behind him, the noise echoes off the stone facade of the house.
He rings the doorbell, and almost straight away the door opens. Marianne is standing there, her right hand on the door, her left hand covering her face, holding a crumpled tissue. Her eyes are puffy like she's been crying. Connell notices that her T-shirt, her skirt and part of her left wrist are stained with blood. The proportions of the visual environment around him shudder in and out of focus, like someone has picked up the world and shaken it, hard.
What happened? he says.
Footsteps come thumping down the stairs behind her. Connell, as if viewing the scene through some kind of cosmic telescope, sees her brother reach the bottom of the staircase. Why have you got blood on you? says Connell. I think my nose is broken, she says. Who's that? says Alan behind her. Who's at the door? Do you need to go to hospital? says Connell.
She shakes her head, she says it doesn't need emergency attention, she looked it up online. She can go to the doctor tomorrow if it still hurts. Connell nods. Was it him? says Connell. She nods. Her eyes have a frightened look. Get in the car, Connell says.
She looks at him, not moving her hands. Her face is still covered with the tissue. He shakes the keys. Go, he says.
She takes her hand from the door and opens her palm. He puts the keys into it and, still
looking at him, she walks outside. Where are you going? says Alan.
Connell stands just inside the front door now. A coloured haze sweeps over the driveway as he watches Marianne get into the car. What's going on here? says Alan.
Once she's safely inside the car, Connell closes over the front door, so that he and Alan are alone together.
What are you doing? says Alan.
Connell, his sight even blurrier now, can't tell whether Alan is angry or frightened. I need to talk to you, Connell says.
His vision is swimming so severely that he notices he has to keep a hand on the door to stay upright.
I didn't do anything, says Alan.
Connell walks towards Alan until Alan is standing with his back against the banister. He seems smaller now, and scared. He calls for his mother, turning his head until his neck strains, but no one appears from up the stairs. Connell's face is wet with perspiration. Alan's face is visible only as a pattern of coloured dots.
If you ever touch Marianne again, I'll kill you, he says. Okay? That's all. Say one bad thing to her ever again and I'll come back here myself and kill you, that's it.
It seems to Connell, though he can't see or hear very well, that Alan is now crying.
Do you understand me? Connell says. Say yes or no.
Alan says: Yes.
Connell turns around, walks out the front door and closes it behind him.
In the car Marianne is waiting silently, one hand clutched to her face, the other lying limp in her lap. Connell sits in the driver's seat and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. They are sealed into the car's compact silence together. He looks at her. She's bent over her lap a little, as if in pain.
I'm sorry to bother you, she says. I'm sorry. I didn't know what to do.
Don't say sorry. It's good you called me. Okay? Look at me for a second. No one is going to hurt you like that again.
She looks at him above the veil of white tissue, and in a rush he feels his power over her again, the openness in her eyes.
Everything's going to be alright, he says. Trust me. I love you, I'm not going to let anything like that happen to you again.
For a second or two she holds his gaze and then finally she closes her eyes. She sits back in the passenger seat, head against the headrest, hand still clutching the tissue at her face. It seems to him an attitude of extreme weariness, or relief.
Thank you, she says.
He starts the car and pulls out of the driveway. His vision has settled, objects have solidified before his eyes again, and he can breathe. Overhead trees wave silvery individual leaves in silence.
Seven Months Later
(FEBRUARY 2015)
In the kitchen Marianne pours hot water on the coffee. The sky is low and woollen out the window, and while the coffee brews she goes and places her forehead on the glass. Gradually the mist of her breath hides the college from view: the trees turn soft, the Old Library a heavy cloud. Students crossing Front Square in winter coats, arms folded, disappear into smudges and then disappear entirely. Marianne is neither admired nor reviled anymore. People have forgotten about her. She's a normal person now. She walks by and no one looks up. She swims in the college pool, eats in the Dining Hall with damp hair, walks around the cricket pitch in the evening. Dublin is extraordinarily beautiful to her in wet weather, the way grey stone darkens to black, and rain moves over the grass and whispers on slick roof tiles. Raincoats glistening in the undersea colour of street lamps. Rain silver as loose change in the glare of traffic.
She wipes the window with her sleeve and goes to get cups from the press. She has work from ten until two today and then a seminar on modern France. At work she answers emails telling people that her boss is unavailable for meetings. It's unclear to her what he really does. He's never available to meet any of the people who want to meet him, so she concludes that he's either very busy or just permanently idle. When he appears in the office he often provocatively lights a cigarette, as if to test Marianne. But what is the nature of the test? She sits there at her desk breathing in her usual way. He likes to talk about how intelligent he is. It's boring to listen to him but not strenuous. At the end of the week he hands her an envelope full of cash. Joanna was shocked when she heard about that. What is he doing paying you in cash? she said. Is he like a drug dealer or something? Marianne said she thought he was some kind of properly developer. Oh, said Joanna. Wow, that's much worse.
Marianne presses the coffee and fills two cups. In one cup: a quarter-spoon of sugar, a splash of milk. The other cup just black, no sugar. She puts them on the tray as usual, pads up the hallway and knocks the corner of the tray on the door. No response. She hefts the tray against her hip with her left hand and opens the door with her right. The room smells dense, like sweat and stale alcohol, and the yellow curtains over the sash window are still shut. She clears a space on the desk to put the tray down, and then sits on the wheelie chair to drink her coffee. It tastes slightly sour, not unlike the air around her. This is a pleasant time of day for Marianne, before work begins. When her cup is empty she reaches a hand out and lifts a corner of the curtain with her fingers. White light floods the desk.
Presently, from the bed, Connell says: I am awake actually.
How are you feeling?
Alright, yeah.
She brings him the cup of black unsweetened coffee. He rolls over in bed and addresses her with small squinting eyes. She sits down on the mattress. Sorry about last night, he says.
Sadie has a thing for you, you know. Do you think?
He pulls his pillow up against the headboard and takes the cup from her hands. After one large mouthful he swallows and looks at Marianne again, still squinting so that his left eye is screwed shut.
Wouldn't be remotely my type, he adds.
I never know with you.
He shakes his head, drinks another mouthful of coffee, swallows.
Yes you do, he says. You like to think of people as mysterious, but I'm really not a mysterious person.
She considers this while he finishes his cup of coffee.
I guess everyone is a mystery in a way, she says. I mean, you can never really know another person, and so on.
Yeah. Do you actually think that, though?
It's what people say.
What do I not know about you? he says.
Marianne smiles, yawns, lifts her hands in a shrug.
People are a lot more knowable than they think they are, he adds.
Can I get in the shower first or do you want to?
No, you go. Can I use your laptop to check some emails and stuff?
Yeah, go ahead, she says.
In the bathroom the light is blue and clinical. She opens the shower door and turns the handle, waits for the water to get warm. In the meantime she brushes her teeth quickly, spits white lather neatly down the drain, and takes her hair down from the knot at the back of her neck. Then she strips off her dressing gown and hangs it on the back of the bathroom door.
*
Back in November, when the new editor of the college literary magazine resigned, Connell offered to step in until they could find someone else. Months later no one else has come forward and Connell is still editing the magazine himself. Last night was the launch party for the new issue, and Sadie Darcy-O'Shea brought a bowl of bright-pink vodka punch with little pieces of fruit floating in it. Sadie likes to show up at these events to squeeze Connell's arm and have private discussions with him about his 'career'. Last night he drank so much punch that he fell over when attempting to stand up. Marianne felt this was in some sense Sadie's fault, although, on the other hand, it was undeniably Connell's. Later, when Marianne got him back home and into bed, he asked her for a glass of water, which he spilled all over himself and on the duvet before passing out.
Last summer she read one of Connell's stories for the first time. It gave her such a peculiar sense of him as a person to sit there with the printed pages, folded over in the top-left corner because he had no staples. In a way she felt very close to him while reading, as if she was witnessing his most private thoughts, but she also felt him turned away from her, focused on some complex task of his own, one she could never be part of. Of course, Sadie can never be part of that task either, not really, but at least she's a writer, with a hidden imaginary life of her own. Marianne's life happens strictly in the real world, populated by
real individuals. She thinks of Connell saying: People are a lot more knowable than they think they are. But still he has something she lacks, an inner life that does not include the other person.
She used to wonder if he really loved her. In bed he would say lovingly: You're going to do exactly what I say now, aren't you? He knew how to give her what she wanted, to leave her open, weak, powerless, sometimes crying. He understood that it wasn't necessary to hurt her: he could let her submit willingly, without violence. This all seemed to happen on the deepest possible level of her personality. But on what level did it happen to him? Was it just a game, or a favour he was doing her? Did he feel it, the way she did? Every day, in the ordinary activity of their lives, he showed patience and consideration for her feelings. He took care of her when she was sick, he read drafts of her college essays, he sat and listened while she talked about her ideas, disagreeing with herself out loud and changing her mind. But did he love her? Sometimes she felt like saying: Would you miss me, if you didn't have me anymore? She had asked him that once on the ghost estate, when they were just kids. He had said yes then, but she'd been the only thing in his life at that time, the only thing he had to himself, and it would never be that way again.
By the start of December their friends were asking about Christmas plans. Marianne still hadn't seen her family since the summer. Her mother had never tried to contact her at all. Alan had sent some text messages saying things like: Mum is not speaking to you, she says you are a disgrace. Marianne hadn't replied. She'd rehearsed in her head what kind of conversation it would be when her mother did finally get in touch, what accusations would be made, which truths she would insist on. But it never happened. Her birthday came and went without a word from home. Then it was December and she was planning to stay in college alone for Christmas and get some work done on the dissertation she was writing on Irish carceral institutions after independence. Connell wanted her to come back to Carricklea with him. Lorraine would love to have you, he said. I'll call her, you should talk to her about it. In the end Lorraine called Marianne herself and personally invited her to stay for Christmas. Marianne, trusting that Lorraine knew what was right, accepted.
On the way home from Dublin in the car, she and Connell talked without stopping, joking and putting on funny voices to make each other laugh. Looking back now, Marianne wonders if they were nervous. When they got to Foxfield it was dark and the windows were full of coloured lights. Connell carried their bags in from the boot. In the living room Marianne sat by the fire while Lorraine made tea. The tree, packed between the television and couch, was blinking light in repetitive patterns. Connell came in carrying a cup of tea and put it on the arm of her chair. Before sitting down he stopped to rearrange a piece of tinsel. It did look much better where he put it. Marianne's face and hands were very hot by the fire. Lorraine came in and started telling Connell about which relatives had visited already, and which were visiting tomorrow, and so on. Marianne felt so relaxed then that she almost wanted to close her eyes and sleep.
The house in Foxfield was busy over Christmas. Late into the night people would be arriving and leaving, brandishing wrapped biscuit tins or bottles of whiskey. Children ran past at knee height yelling unintelligibly. Someone brought a Play-Station over one night and Connell stayed up until two in the morning playing FIFA with one of his younger cousins, their bodies greenish in the screen light, a look of almost religious intensity on Connell's face. Marianne and Lorraine were in the kitchen mostly, rinsing dirty glasses in
the sink, opening chocolate boxes, endlessly refilling the kettle. Once they heard a voice exclaim from the front room: Connell has a girlfriend? And another voice replied: Yeah, she's in the kitchen. Lorraine and Marianne exchanged a look. They heard a brief thunder of footsteps, and then a teenage boy appeared in the doorway wearing a United jersey. Immediately on seeing Marianne, who was standing at the sink, the boy became shy and stared at his feet. Hi there, she said. He flicked her a nod without making eye contact, and then trudged a retreat to the living room. Lorraine thought that was really funny.
On New Year's Eve they saw Marianne's mother in the supermarket. She was wearing a dark suit with a yellow silk blouse. She always looked so 'put together'. Lorraine said hello politely and Denise just walked past, not speaking, eyes ahead. No one knew what she believed her grievance was. In the car after the supermarket Lorraine reached back from the passenger seat to squeeze Marianne's hand. Connell started the car. What do people in town think of her? Marianne said.
Who, your mother? said Lorraine.
I mean, how do people see her?
With a sympathetic expression Lorraine said gently: I suppose she'd be considered a bit odd.
It was the first time Marianne had heard that, or even thought about it. Connell didn't engage in the conversation. That night he wanted to go out to Kelleher's for New Year's. He said everyone from school was going. Marianne suggested she might just stay in and he appeared to consider this for a moment before saying: No, you should come out. She lay face down on the bed while he changed out of one shirt into another one. Far be it from me to disobey an order, she said. He looked in the mirror and caught her eye. Yeah, exactly, he said.
Kelleher's was packed that night and damp with heat. Connell was right, everyone from school was there. They kept having to wave at people from a distance and mouth greetings. Karen saw them at the bar and threw her arms around Marianne, smelling of some faint but very pleasant perfume. I'm so glad to see you, Marianne said. Come and dance with us, said Karen. Connell carried their drinks down the steps to the dance floor, where Rachel and Eric were standing, and Lisa and Jack, and Ciara Heffernan who had been in the year below. Eric gave them a mock-bow for some reason. Probably he was drunk. It was too loud to have an ordinary conversation. Connell held Marianne's drink while she took her coat off and stowed it under a table. No one was really dancing, just standing around shouting in each other's ears. Karen occasionally made a cute boxing motion, as if punching the air. Other people joined them, including some people Marianne had never seen before, and everyone embraced and yelled things.
At midnight when they all cheered Happy New Year, Connell took Marianne into his arms and kissed her. She could feel, like a physical pressure on her skin, that the others were watching them. Maybe people hadn't really believed it until then, or else a morbid fascination still lingered over something that had once been scandalous. Maybe they were just curious to observe the chemistry between two people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave one another alone. Marianne had to admit that she, also, probably would have glanced. When they drew apart Connell looked her in the eyes and said: I love you. She was laughing then, and her face was red. She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed. It was so unlike him to behave that way in public
that he must have been doing it on purpose, to please her. How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not. She knows he loves her, she doesn't wonder about that anymore.
*
She climbs out of the shower now and wraps herself in the blue bath towel. The mirror is steamed over. She opens the door and from the bed Connell looks back at her. Hello, she says. The stale air in the room feels cool on her skin. He's sitting up in bed with her laptop on his lap. She goes to her chest of drawers, finds some clean underwear, starts to get dressed. He's watching her. She hangs the towel on the wardrobe door and puts her arms through the sleeves of a shirt.
Is something up? she says.
I just got this email.
Oh? From who?
He looks dumbly at the laptop and then back at her. His eyes look red and sleepy. She's doing the shirt buttons. He's sitting with his knees propped up under the duvet, the laptop glowing into his face.
Connell, from who? she says.
From this university in New York. It looks like they're offering me a place on the MFA. You know, the creative writing programme.
She stands there. Her hair is still wet, soaking slowly through the cloth of her blouse. You didn't tell me you applied for that, she says. He just looks at her.
I mean, congratulations, she says. I'm not surprised they would accept you, I'm just surprised you didn't mention it.
He nods, his face inexpressive, and then looks back at the laptop.
I don't know, he says. I should have told you but I honestly thought it was such a long shot.
Well, that's no reason not to tell me.
It doesn't matter, he adds. It's not like I'm going to go. I don't even know why I applied. Marianne lifts the towel off the wardrobe door and starts using it to massage the ends of her hair slowly. She sits down at the desk chair. Did Sadie know you were applying? she says. What? Why do you ask that? Did she?
Well, yeah, he says. I don't see the relevance, though. Why did you tell her and not me?
He sighs, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips, and then shrugs.
I don't know, he says. She's the one who told me to apply. I thought it was a stupid idea honestly, hence why I didn't tell you. Are you in love with her?
Connell stares across the room at Marianne, not moving or breaking eye contact for
several seconds. It's hard to tell what his face is expressing. Eventually she looks away to rearrange the towel.
Are you joking? he says.
Why don't you answer the question?
You're getting a lot of stuff messed up here, Marianne. I don't even like Sadie as a friend, okay, frankly I find her annoying. I don't know how many times I have to say that to you. I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the application thing but like, how does that make you jump to the conclusion that I'm in love with someone else?
Marianne keeps rubbing the towel into the ends of her hair.
I don't know, she says eventually. Sometimes I feel like you want to be around people who understand you.
Yeah, which is you. If I had to make a list of people who severely don't understand me, Sadie would be right up there.
Marianne goes quiet again. Connell has closed the laptop now.
I'm sorry I didn't tell you, okay? he says. Sometimes I feel embarrassed telling you stuff like that because it just seems stupid. To be honest, I still look up to you a lot, I don't want you to think of me as, I don't know. Deluded.
She squeezes her hair through the towel, feeling the coarse, grainy texture of the individual strands.
You should go, she says. To New York, I mean. You should accept the offer, you should go-
He says nothing. She looks up. The wall behind him is yellow like a slab of butter. No, he says.
I'm sure you could get funding.
Why are you saying this? I thought you wanted to stay here next year.
I can stay, and you can go, she says. It's just a year. I think you should do it.
He makes a strange, confused noise, almost like a laugh. He touches his neck. She puts the towel down and starts brushing the knots out of her hair slowly.
That's ridiculous, he says. I'm not going to New York without you. I wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for you.
It's true, she thinks, he wouldn't be. He would be somewhere else entirely, living a different kind of life. He would be different with women even, and his aspirations for love would be different. And Marianne herself, she would be another person completely. Would she ever have been happy? And what kind of happiness might it have been? All these years they've been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions. But in the end she has done something for him, she's made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that.
I'd miss you too much, he says. I'd be sick, honestly.
At first. But it would get better.
They sit in silence now, Marianne moving the brush methodically through her hair, feeling for knots and slowly, patiently untangling them. There's no point in being impatient anymore.
You know I love you, says Connell. I'm never going to feel the same way for someone else.
She nods, okay. He's telling the truth.
To be honest, I don't know what to do, he says. Say you want me to stay and I will.
She closes her eyes. He probably won't come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They've done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I'll always be here. You know that.
Acknowledgements
Thanks: firstly to John Patrick McHugh, who was with this novel long before I had finished writing it, and whose conversation and guidance contributed so substantially to its development; to Thomas Morris for his thoughtful, detailed feedback on the manuscript; to David Hartery and Tim MacGabhann for reading early drafts of the novel's opening chapters and offering wise advice; to Ken Armstrong, Iarla Mongey and all the members of the Castlebar writers' group for their early support of my writing; to Tracy Bohan for doing pretty much everything other than actually writing the book; to Mitzi Angel, who has made this a better novel and me a better writer; to John's family; to my own family, and particularly to my parents; to Kate Oliver and Aoife Comey, as ever, for their friendship; and to John, for everything.
About the Author
Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, The White Review, The Dublin Review and The Stinging Fly. Her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, was a Sunday Times, Observer and Telegraph Book of the Year and was shortlisted fpr the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Rooney is the winner of the Sunday Tzmes/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award.
By the Same Author
CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2018 by Faber & Faber Ltd Bloomsbury House 74-77 Great Russell Street London WC1B 3DA
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ISBN 978-0-571-33466-7