Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

  You’ll let me know when you do, I hope.

  I might.

  For a few seconds she stood there in the room, very still, while he wandered around a little and pretended to look at things. They knew then, both of them, what was about to happen, though neither could have said exactly how they knew. She waited impartially while he continued glancing around, until finally, perhaps with no more energy to delay the inevitable, he thanked her and left. She walked him down the stairs—part of the way down. She was standing on the steps when he went out the door. It was one of those things. Both of them afterwards felt bad, neither of them certain really why the evening had been such a failure in the end. Pausing there on the stairs, alone, she looked back up at the landing. Follow her eyes now and notice the bedroom door left open, a slice of white wall visible through the banister posts.

  2.

  Dear Eileen. I’ve waited so long for you to reply to my last email that I am actually—imagine!—writing you a new one before receiving your reply. In my defence I’ve gathered up too much material now, and if I wait for you I’ll start forgetting things. You should know that our correspondence is my way of holding on to life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my—otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless—existence on this rapidly degenerating planet … I include this paragraph chiefly to make you feel guilty about not replying to me before now, and therefore secure myself a swifter response this time. What are you doing, anyway, if not emailing me? Don’t say working.

  I am going crazy thinking about the rent you’re paying in Dublin. You know it’s more expensive there now than Paris? And, forgive me, but what Paris has Dublin lacks. One of the problems is that Dublin is, and I mean literally and topographically, flat—so that everything has to take place on a single plane. Other cities have metro systems, which add depth, and steep hills or skyscrapers for height, but Dublin has only short squat grey buildings and trams that run along the street. And it has no courtyards or roof gardens like continental cities, which at least break up the surface—if not vertically, then conceptually. Have you thought about it this way before? Maybe even if you haven’t, you’ve noticed it at some subconscious level. It’s hard to go very far up in Dublin or very low down, hard to lose yourself or other people, or to gain a sense of perspective. You might think it’s a democratic way to organise a city—so that everything happens face to face, I mean, on equal footing. True, no one is looking down on you all from a height. But it gives the sky a position of total dominance. Nowhere is the sky meaningfully punctuated or broken up by anything at all. The Spire, you might point out, and I will concede the Spire, which is anyway the narrowest possible of interruptions, and dangles like a measuring tape to demonstrate the diminutive size of every other edifice around. The totalising effect of the sky is bad for people there. Nothing ever intervenes to block the thing from view. It’s like a memento mori. I wish someone would cut a hole in it for you.

  I’ve been thinking lately about right-wing politics (haven’t we all), and how it is that conservatism (the social force) came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism. The connection is not obvious, at least to me, since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions. What could be ‘conservative’ about such a process? But it also strikes me that the idea of ‘conservatism’ is in itself false, because nothing can be conserved, as such—time moves in one direction only, I mean. This idea is so basic that when I first thought of it, I felt very brilliant, and then I wondered if I was an idiot. But does it make some sense to you? We can’t conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way. Just look at what conservatives make of the environment: their idea of conservation is to extract, pillage and destroy, ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’—but because of that very fact, it’s no longer the same earth we do it to. I suppose you think this is all extremely rudimentary and maybe even that I’m un-dialectical. But these are just the abstract thoughts I had, which I needed to write down, and of which you find yourself the (willing or unwilling) recipient.

  I was in the local shop today, getting something to eat for lunch, when I suddenly had the strangest sensation—a spontaneous awareness of the unlikeliness of this life. I mean, I thought of all the rest of the human population—most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty—who have never seen or entered such a shop. And this, this, is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! All the various brands of soft drinks in plastic bottles and all the pre-packaged lunch deals and confectionery in sealed bags and store-baked pastries—this is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations. All for this! This convenience shop! I felt dizzy thinking about it. I mean I really felt ill. It was as if I suddenly remembered that my life was all part of a television show—and every day people died making the show, were ground to death in the most horrific ways, children, women, and all so that I could choose from various lunch options, each packaged in multiple layers of single-use plastic. That was what they died for—that was the great experiment. I thought I would throw up. Of course, a feeling like that can’t last. Maybe for the rest of the day I feel bad, even for the rest of the week—so what? I still have to buy lunch. And in case you’re worrying about me, let me assure you, buy lunch I did.

  An update on my rural life and then I’ll sign off. The house is chaotically huge, as if in the habit of producing new, previously unseen rooms on a spontaneous basis. It’s also cold and in some places damp. I live a twenty-minute walk from the aforementioned local shop and feel as if I spend most of my time walking there and back in order to buy things I forgot about on the last trip. It’s probably very character-building, and by the time we see one another again I’ll have a really amazing personality. About ten days ago I went out on a date with someone who worked in a shipping warehouse and he absolutely despised me. To be fair to myself (I always am), I think I have by now forgotten how to conduct social intercourse. I dread to imagine what kind of faces I was making, in my efforts to seem like the kind of person who regularly interacts with others. Even writing this email I’m feeling a little loose and dissociative. Rilke has a poem that ends: ‘Who is now alone, will long remain so, / will wake, read, write long letters / and wander restlessly here and there / along the avenues, as the leaves are drifting.’ A better description of my present state I couldn’t invent, except it’s April and the leaves aren’t drifting. Forgive the ‘long letter’, then. I hope you’ll come and see me. Love love love always, Alice.

  3.

  At twenty past twelve on a Wednesday afternoon, a woman sat behind a desk in a shared office in Dublin city centre, scrolling through a text document. She had very dark hair, swept back loosely into a tortoiseshell clasp, and she was wearing a grey sweater tucked into black cigarette trousers. Using the soft greasy roller on her computer mouse she skimmed over the document, eyes flicking back and forth across narrow columns of text, and occasionally she stopped, clicked, and inserted or deleted characters. Most frequently she was inserting two full stops into the name ‘WH Auden’, in order to standardise its appearance as ‘W.H. Auden’. When she reached the end of the document, she opened a search command, selected the Match Case option and searched: ‘WH’. No matches appeared. She scrolled back up to the top of the document, words and paragraphs flying past so quickly as to seem almost certainly illegible, and then, apparently satisfied, saved her work and closed the file.

  At one o’clock she told her colleagues she was going to lunch, and they smiled and waved at her from behind their monitors. Pulling on a jacket, she walked to a cafe near the office and sat at a table by the window, eating a sandwich with one hand and with the other reading a copy of the novel The Karamazov Brothers.
Now and then she put the book down, wiped her hands and mouth with a paper napkin, glanced around the room as if to ascertain whether anyone there was looking back at her, and then returned to her book. At twenty to two, she looked up to observe a tall fair-haired man entering the cafe. He was wearing a suit and tie, with a plastic lanyard around his neck, and speaking into his phone. Yeah, he said, I was told Tuesday but I’ll call back and check that for you. Seeing the woman seated by the window, his face changed, and he quickly lifted his free hand, mouthing the word: Hey. Into the phone, he continued: I don’t think you were copied on that, no. Looking at the woman, he pointed to the phone impatiently and made a talking gesture with his hand. She smiled, toying with the corner of a page in her book. Right, right, the man said. Listen, I’m actually out of the office now but I’ll do that when I get back in. Yeah. Good, good, good to talk to you.

  The man ended his call and came over to her table. Looking him up and down, she said: Oh Simon, you’re so important-looking, I’m afraid you’re going to be assassinated. He picked up his lanyard and studied it critically. It’s this thing, he said. It makes me feel like I deserve to be. Can I buy you a coffee? She said she was going back to work. Well, he said, can I buy you a takeaway coffee and walk you back to work? I want your opinion on something. She shut her book and said yes. While he went to the counter, she stood up and brushed away the sandwich crumbs that had fallen into her lap. He ordered two coffees, one white and one black, and dropped some coins into the tip jar. The woman joined him, removing the clasp from her hair and then reinserting it. How was Lola’s fitting in the end? the man asked. The woman glanced up, met his eyes, and let out a strange, stifled sound. Oh, fine, she said. You know my mother’s in town, we’re all meeting up tomorrow to look for our wedding outfits.

  He smiled benignly, watching the progress of their coffees behind the counter. Funny, he said, I had a bad dream the other night about you getting married.

  What was bad about it?

  You were marrying someone other than me.

  The woman laughed. Do you talk like this to the women at your work? she said.

  He turned back to her, amused, and replied: God no, I’d get in awful trouble. And quite rightly. No, I never flirt with anyone at work. If anything they flirt with me.

  I suppose they’re all middle-aged and want you to marry their daughters.

  I can’t agree with this negative cultural imaging around middle-aged women. Of every demographic, I actually think I like them best.

  What’s wrong with young women?

  There’s just that bit of …

  He gestured his hand from side to side in the air to indicate friction, uncertainty, sexual chemistry, indecisiveness, or perhaps mediocrity.

  Your girlfriends are never middle-aged, the woman pointed out.

  And neither am I, quite yet, thank you.

  On the way out of the cafe, the man held the door open for the woman to walk through, which she did without thanking him. What did you want to ask me about? she said. Joining her on the walk back up the street toward her office, he told her he wanted her advice on a situation that had arisen between two of his friends, both of whom the woman seemed to know by name. The friends had been living together as roommates, and then had become involved in some kind of ambiguous sexual relationship. After a time, one of them had started seeing someone else, and now the other friend, the one who was still single, wanted to leave the apartment but had no money and nowhere else to go. Really more of an emotional situation than an apartment situation, the woman said. The man agreed, but added: Still, I think it’s probably best for her to get out of the apartment. I mean, she can apparently hear them having sex at night, so that’s not great. They had reached the steps of the office building by then. You could loan her some money, the woman said. The man replied that he had offered already but she had refused. Which was a relief, actually, he added, because my instinct is not to get too involved. The woman asked what the first friend had to say for himself, and the man replied that the first friend felt he was not doing anything wrong, that the previous relationship had come to a natural end and what was he supposed to do, stay single forever? The woman made a face and said: God, yeah, she really needs to get out of that apartment. I’ll keep an eye out. They lingered on the steps a little longer. My wedding invite arrived, by the way, the man remarked.

  Oh yes, she said. That was this week.

  Did you know they were giving me a plus-one?

  She looked at him as if to ascertain whether he was joking, and then raised her eyebrows. That’s nice, she said. They didn’t give me one, but considering the circumstances I suppose that might have been indelicate.

  Would you like me to go alone as a gesture of solidarity?

  After a pause, she asked: Why, is there someone you’re thinking of bringing?

  Well, the girl I’m seeing, I suppose. If it’s all the same to you.

  She said: Hm. Then she added: You mean woman, I hope.

  He smiled. Ah, let’s be a little bit friendly, he said.

  Do you go around behind my back calling me a girl?

  Certainly not. I don’t call you anything. Whenever your name comes up, I just get flustered and leave the room.

  Disregarding this, the woman asked: When did you meet her?

  Oh, I don’t know. About six weeks ago.

  She’s not another one of these twenty-two-year-old Scandinavian women, is she?

  No, she’s not Scandinavian, he said.

  With an exaggeratedly weary expression, the woman tossed her coffee cup in the waste bin outside the office door. Watching her, the man added: I can go alone if you’d rather. We can make eyes at each other across the room.

  Oh, you make me sound very desperate, she said.

  God, I didn’t mean to.

  For a few seconds she said nothing, just stood staring into the traffic. Presently she said aloud: She looked beautiful at the fitting. Lola, I mean. You were asking.

  Still watching her, he replied: I can imagine.

  Thanks for the coffee.

  Thank you for the advice.

  For the rest of the afternoon in the office, the woman worked on the same text-editing interface, opening new files, moving apostrophes around and deleting commas. After closing one file and before opening another, she routinely checked her social media feeds. Her expression, her posture, did not vary depending on the information she encountered there: a news report about a horrific natural disaster, a photograph of someone’s beloved domestic pet, a female journalist complaining about death threats, a recondite joke requiring familiarity with several other internet jokes in order to be even vaguely comprehensible, a passionate condemnation of white supremacy, a promoted tweet advertising a health supplement for expectant mothers. Nothing changed in her outward relationship to the world that would allow an observer to determine what she felt about what she saw. Then, after some length of time, with no apparent trigger, she closed the browser window and reopened the text editor. Occasionally one of her colleagues would interject with a work-related question, and she would answer, or someone would share a funny anecdote with the office and they would all laugh, but mostly the work continued quietly.

  At five thirty-four p.m., the woman took her jacket off the hook again and bid her remaining colleagues farewell. She unwound her headphones from around her phone, plugged them in, and walked down Kildare Street toward Nassau Street, then took a left, winding her way westward. After a twenty-eight-minute walk, she stopped at a new-build apartment complex on the north quays and let herself in, climbing two flights of stairs and unlocking a chipped white door. No one else was home, but the layout and interior suggested she was not the sole occupant. A small dim living room, with one curtained window facing the river, led onto a kitchenette with an oven, half-size fridge unit and sink. From the fridge the woman removed a bowl covered in clingfilm. She disposed of the clingfilm and put the bowl in the microwave.

  After eating, she entered
her bedroom. Through the window, the street below was visible, and the slow swell of the river. She removed her jacket and shoes, took the clasp from her hair and drew her curtains shut. The curtains were thin and yellow with a pattern of green rectangles. She took off her sweater and wriggled out of her trousers, leaving both items crumpled on the floor, the texture of the trousers a little shiny. Then she pulled on a cotton sweatshirt and a pair of grey leggings. Her hair, dark and falling loosely over her shoulders, looked clean and slightly dry. She climbed onto her bed and opened her laptop. For some time she scrolled through various media timelines, occasionally opening and half-reading long articles about elections overseas. Her face was wan and tired. Outside her room, two other people entered the apartment, having a conversation about ordering dinner. They passed her room, shadows visible briefly through the slit under the door, and then went through to the kitchen. Opening a private browser window on her laptop, the woman accessed a social media website, and typed the words ‘aidan lavin’ into the search box. A list of results appeared, and without glancing at the other options she clicked on the third result. A new profile opened on-screen, displaying the name ‘Aidan Lavin’ below a photograph of a man’s head and shoulders viewed from behind. The man’s hair was thick and dark and he was wearing a denim jacket. Beneath the photograph a text caption read: local sad boy. normal brain haver. check out the soundcloud. The user’s most recent update, posted three hours earlier, was a photograph of a pigeon in a gutter, its head buried inside a discarded crisp packet. The caption read: same. The post had 127 likes. In her bedroom, leaning against the headboard of the unmade bed, the woman clicked on this post, and replies appeared underneath. One reply, from a user with the handle Actual Death Girl, read: looks like you and all. The Aidan Lavin account had replied: youre right, insanely handsome. Actual Death Girl had liked this reply. The woman on her laptop clicked through to the profile of the Actual Death Girl account. After spending thirty-six minutes looking at a range of social media profiles associated with the Aidan Lavin account, the woman shut her laptop and lay back down on her bed.