by Sally Rooney
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 Niall’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 pe
rson 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 Niall’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 loyalty, 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.