by Sally Rooney
Anyway, yes, please do come to see me after the wedding. Shall I invite Simon along as well? Together, the two of us can surely explain to him why it is wrong for him to date incredibly beautiful women who are younger than us. I’m not totally sure yet why it would be wrong, but between now and then I can definitely come up with something. All my love, Alice.
11.
The evening after she received this email, Eileen was walking through Temple Bar toward Dame Street. It was a fine bright Saturday evening in early May and the sunlight slanted golden across the faces of buildings. She was wearing a leather jacket over a printed cotton dress, and when she caught the eyes of men passing by, young men in fleece jackets and boots, middle-aged men in fitted shirts, she smiled vaguely and averted her gaze. By half past eight, she had reached a bus stop opposite the old Central Bank. Removing a stick of mint gum from her handbag, she unwrapped it and put it in her mouth. Traffic passed and the shadows on the street moved slowly eastward while she smoothed the foil wrapper out with her fingernail. When her phone started ringing, she slipped it out from her pocket to look at the screen. It was her mother calling. She answered, and after exchanging hellos, Eileen said: Listen, I’m actually in town waiting for a bus, can I call you later on?
Your father’s upset about this business with Deirdre Prendergast, said Mary.
Eileen was squinting at an approaching bus to make out the number, chewing on her gum. Right, she said.
Could you not have a word with Lola?
The bus passed without stopping. Eileen touched her forehead with her fingers. So Dad is upset with Lola, she said, and he talks to you, and you talk to me, and I’m the one who has to talk to Lola. Does that sound reasonable?
If it’s too much bother for you, forget about it.
Another bus was drawing up now and Eileen said into the phone: I have to go, I’ll ring you tomorrow.
When the bus doors opened, she climbed on, tapped her card and went to sit upstairs near the front. She typed the name of a bar into a map application on her phone, while the bus moved through the city centre and southward. On Eileen’s screen, a pulsing blue dot started to make the same journey toward her eventual destination, which was seventeen minutes away. Closing the application, she wrote a message to Lola.
Eileen: hey, did you not invite Deirdre P to the wedding after all?
Within thirty seconds she had received a reply.
Lola: Lol. Hope mammy and daddy are paying you good money to do their dirty work for them.
Reading this message, Eileen drew her brows together and exhaled briskly through her nose. She tapped the reply button and began typing.
Eileen: are you seriously disinviting family members from your wedding now? do you realise how spiteful and immature that is?
She closed the message application then and reopened the map. When instructed by the dot on the screen, she pressed the stopping bell and made her way downstairs. After thanking the driver she got off the bus, and with frequent cautious glances at her phone began to walk back up the street in the direction the bus had come, past a hairdresser’s, a women’s clothing boutique, over a pedestrian crossing, until a flag appeared on-screen with a line of blue text reading: You have arrived at your destination. She deposited her chewed gum back into its foil wrapper then and threw it into a nearby waste bin.
The entrance was through a cramped porch, leading onto a front bar, and behind that a private room with couches and low tables, lit entirely by red bulbs. The appearance was quaintly domestic, like a large private living room from an earlier era, but drenched in lurid red light. Eileen was greeted at once by several friends and acquaintances, who put their glasses down and rose from sofas to embrace her. At the sight of a man named Darach she said brightly: Happy birthday, you! After that she ordered a drink and then sat down on one of the faintly sticky leather couches beside her friend Paula. Music was playing from speakers affixed to the walls and a bathroom door swung open at the end of the room periodically, releasing a brief flood of white light before swinging shut again. Eileen checked her phone and saw a new message from Lola.
Lola: Hmmm do I really want to hear about how immature I am from someone who’s stuck in a shitty job making no money and living in a kip at age 30..….
Eileen stared at the screen for a while and then pocketed her phone again. Beside her a woman named Roisin was telling a story about a broken window in her street-level apartment which her landlord had refused to fix for over a month. After that, everyone began sharing horror stories about the rental market. An hour, two hours, elapsed in this way. Paula ordered another round of drinks. Silver platters of hot food were brought out from behind the bar: cocktail sausages, potato wedges, chicken wings glistening in wet sauce. At ten to eleven, Eileen got up, went to the bathroom and took her phone from her pocket again. There were no new notifications. She opened a messaging app and tapped on Simon’s name, displaying a thread from the previous evening.
Eileen: home safe?
Simon: Yes, was just about to text you
Simon: I may have brought you a present
Eileen: really??
Simon: You’ll be glad to know the shop on the ferry was doing a special offer on duty free Toblerone
Simon: Are you doing anything tomorrow night?
Eileen: actually yes for once …
Eileen: darach is having a birthday thing, sorry
Simon: Ah ok
Simon: Can I see you during the week then?
Eileen: yes please
That was the final message in the thread. She used the toilet, washed her hands, reapplied lipstick in the mirror, and then blotted the lipstick using a square of toilet roll. Someone knocked on the outside of the bathroom door and she said aloud: One second. She was staring wanly into the mirror. With her hands she pulled the features of her face downward, so the bones of her skull stood out harsh and strange under the fluorescent white ceiling light. The person was knocking on the door again. Eileen put her bag on her shoulder, unlocked the door and went back out to the bar. Sitting down next to Paula, she picked up the half-empty drink she had left on the table. All the ice had melted. What are we talking about? she said. Paula said they were talking about communism. Everyone’s on it now, said Eileen. It’s amazing. When I first started going around talking about Marxism, people laughed at me. Now it’s everyone’s thing. And to all these new people trying to make communism cool, I would just like to say, welcome aboard, comrades. No hard feelings. The future is bright for the working class. Roisin raised her glass then and so did Darach. Eileen was smiling and seemed slightly drunk. Are the platters gone? she asked. A man named Gary who was seated opposite said: No one here is really working class, though. Eileen rubbed at her nose. Yeah, she said. Well, Marx would disagree with you, but I know what you’re saying.
People love to claim that they’re working class, Gary said. No one here is actually from a working-class background.
Right, but everyone here works for a living and pays rent to a landlord, said Eileen.
Raising his eyebrows, Gary said: Paying rent doesn’t make you working class.
Yeah, working doesn’t make you working class. Spending half your pay cheque on rent, not owning any property, getting exploited by your boss, none of it makes you working class, right? So what does, having a certain accent, is it?
With an irritated laugh he answered: Do you think you can go driving around in your dad’s BMW, and then turn around and say you’re working class because you don’t get along with your boss? It’s not a fashion, you know. It’s an identity.
Eileen swallowed a mouthful of her drink. Everything is an identity now, she said. And you don’t know me, by the way. I don’t know why you’re saying no one here is working class, you don’t know anything about me.
I know you work at a literary magazine, he said.
Jesus. I have a job, in other words. Real bourgeoisie behaviour.
Darach said he thought they were just using the sam
e term, ‘working class’, to describe two distinct population groups: one, the broad constituency of people whose income was derived from labour rather than capital, and the other, an impoverished primarily urban subsection of that group with a particular set of cultural traditions and signifiers. Paula said a middle-class person could still be a socialist and Eileen said the middle class did not exist. Everyone started talking over each other then. Eileen checked her phone once more. There were no new messages, and the time displayed on the screen was 23:21. She drained her glass and started to put her jacket on. Blowing a kiss, she waved goodbye to the others at the table. I’m off home, she said. Happy birthday, Darach! See you again soon. Amid the noise and conversation, only a few people seemed to notice she was leaving, and they waved and called out to her retreating back.
Ten minutes later, Eileen had boarded another bus, this one heading back toward the city centre. She sat alone by a window on the upper deck, slipping her phone out of her pocket and unlocking it. Opening a social media application, she keyed in the name ‘aidan lavin’, and tapped the first suggested search result. Once the profile was loaded, Eileen scrolled down mechanically, almost inattentively, to view the most recent updates, as if spurred by habit rather than spontaneous interest. With a few taps she navigated from Aidan Lavin’s page to the profile of the user Actual Death Girl, and waited for that to load. The bus was stopping at St Mary’s College then, the doors releasing and passengers alighting downstairs. The page loaded, and absently Eileen scrolled through the user’s recent updates. As the bus pulled off, the stopping bell rang again. Someone sat down next to Eileen and she glanced up and smiled politely before returning her attention to the screen. Two days previously, the user Actual Death Girl had posted a new photograph, with the caption ‘this sad case’. The photograph depicted the user with her arms around a man with dark hair. The man was tagged as Aidan Lavin. As she looked at this photograph, Eileen’s mouth came open slightly and then closed again. She tapped the photograph to enlarge it. The man was wearing a red corduroy jacket. Around his neck the woman’s arms were attractive, plump, shapely. The photograph had received thirty-four likes. The bus was pulling up to another stop now and Eileen turned her attention out the window. They were stopping at Grove Park, just before the canal. A look of recognition passed over her face, she frowned, and then with a jolt she got to her feet, squeezing past the passenger beside her. As the doors opened she jogged her way almost breathlessly down the staircase and, thanking the driver in the rear-view mirror, alighted onto the street.
It was approaching midnight now. The windows of apartments showed yellow here and there above a darkened shopfront on the corner. Eileen zipped her jacket up and fixed her handbag over her shoulder, walking, it seemed decisively, in a particular direction. As she went, she took her phone out once more and re-examined the photograph. Then she cleared her throat. The street was quiet. She pocketed the phone and smoothed her hands firmly down the front of her jacket, as if wiping them clean. Crossing the street she began to walk more briskly, with long free strides, until she reached a tall brick townhouse with six plastic wheelie bins lined up behind the gate. Looking up, she gave a strange laugh, and rubbed her forehead with her hand. She crossed the gravel and rang the buzzer on the front door. For five seconds, ten seconds, nothing happened. Fifteen seconds. She was shaking her head, her lips moving silently, as if rehearsing an imaginary conversation. Twenty seconds elapsed. She turned to leave. Then from the plastic speaker Simon’s voice said: Hello? Turning back, she stared at the speaker and said nothing. Hello, his voice repeated. She pressed the button.
Hey, she said. It’s me. I’m sorry.
Eileen, is that you?
Yes, sorry. Me, as in Eileen.
Are you okay? he asked. Come up, I’ll buzz you in.
The door-release tone sounded, and she went inside. The lighting in the hall was very bright and someone had left a bicycle leaning up against the postboxes. While Eileen climbed the stairs, she felt at the back of her head where her hair had come unravelled from its clasp and carefully with her long deft fingers refixed it. Then she checked the time on her phone, which showed 23:58, and unzipped her jacket. Simon’s door was open already. He was standing there barefoot, frowning into the light of the hallway, his eyes sleepy and a little swollen. She stopped on the top step, her hand on the banister. Oh God, I’m sorry, she said. Were you in bed?
Is everything alright? he asked.
She hung her head, as if exhausted, or ashamed, and her eyes closed. Several seconds passed before she opened her eyes and answered: Everything’s fine. I was just on my way home from Darach’s thing, and I wanted to see you. I didn’t think—I don’t know why I assumed you’d be up. I know it’s late.
It’s not really. Do you want to come in?
Staring down at the carpet still, she said in a strained voice: No, no, I’ll leave you in peace. I feel so stupid, I’m sorry.
He closed one eye and surveyed her where she stood on the top step. Don’t say that, he said. Come in, we’ll have a drink.
She followed him inside. Only one of the lights in the kitchen was switched on, illuminating the small apartment in a diminishing circle outward. A clothes horse was set up against the back wall with various items hung out to dry: T-shirts, socks, underwear. He closed the door behind her while she was taking off her jacket and shoes. She stood in front of him then, gazing humbly at the floorboards.
Simon, she said, can I ask a favour? You can say no, I won’t mind.
Sure.
Can I sleep in your bed with you?
He looked at her for a moment longer before he answered. Yeah, he said. No problem. Are you sure everything’s alright?
Without raising her eyes she nodded. He filled her a glass of water from the tap and they went into his room together. It was a neat room with dark floorboards. In the centre was a double bed, the quilt thrown back, the bedside lamp switched on. Opposite the door was a window with the blind pulled down. Simon turned out the lamp and Eileen unbuttoned her dress, slipping it off over her shoulders, hanging it over the back of his desk chair. They got into bed. She drank some of the water from her glass and then lay down on her side. For a few minutes they were still and silent. She looked over at him but he was turned away from her, only the back of his head and his shoulder dimly visible. Will you hold me? she asked. For a moment he hesitated, as if to say something, but then he turned over and put his arm around her, murmuring: Here, of course. She nestled up close against him, her face against his neck, their bodies pressed together. He made a low noise in his throat like: Mm. Then he swallowed. Sorry, he said. Her mouth was at his neck. That’s okay, she said. It’s nice. He took a breath in then. Is it, he said. You’re not drunk, are you? Her eyes were closed. No, she said. She put her hand inside his underwear. He shut his eyes and very quietly groaned. For a while she touched him like that, slowly, and she was looking up at him, at his closed eyelids, damp, his mouth a little open. Can we? she asked. He said yes. They took their underwear off. I’ll get a condom, he said. She told him she was on the pill, and he seemed to hesitate. Oh, he said. Like this, then? She nodded her head. They were lying on their sides, face to face. Holding her by the hip he moved inside her. She drew a quick breath inward and he rubbed the hard fin of her hipbone under his hand. For a few seconds they were still. He pressed a little closer to her and with her eyes shut she whimpered. Hm, he said. Can I put you lying on your back, would that be okay? I think I could get a little bit deeper inside you that way, if you want that. Her eyes were closed. Yes, she said. He pulled out of her then and she turned over onto her back. When he entered her again, she cried out, drawing her legs up around him. Bearing his weight on his arms, he closed his eyes. After a minute she said: I love you. He let out his breath. In a low voice he answered: Ah, I haven’t—I love you too, very much. She was moving her hand over the back of his neck, taking deep hard breaths through her mouth. Eileen, he said, I’m sorry, but I think I might be ki
nd of close already. I just, I haven’t—I don’t know, I’m sorry. Her face was hot, she was breathless, shaking her head. It’s okay, she said. Don’t worry, don’t say sorry. After he finished, they lay in each other’s arms for a while, breathing, her fingers moving through his hair. Slowly then he moved his hand down warm and heavy over her belly, down between her legs. Is this alright? he asked. Closing her eyes, she murmured: Yes. Moving his middle finger inside her he touched her clitoris with his thumb and she was whispering, yes, yes. After that they parted and she rolled over onto her back, kicking the quilt down off her legs, catching her breath. He was lying on his side, his eyes half-closed, watching her. Alright? he asked. She let out a kind of trembling laugh. Yes, she said. Thank you. Languidly he smiled then, his gaze moving over her long slim body stretched out on the mattress. Any time, he replied.
In the morning his alarm rang at eight and woke them both, Simon sitting up on his elbow to turn it off, Eileen lying on her back, rubbing her eye with her fingers. Around the edges of the blind leaked a rectangle of white daylight. Do you have plans this morning? she asked. He put his phone back on the bedside table. I was going to go to the nine o’clock Mass, he said. But I can go later, it doesn’t make any difference. She lay with her eyes closed, looking happy, her hair disarranged on the pillow. Can I come with you? she said. He looked down at her for a moment, and then answered simply: Of course you can. They got out of bed together and he made coffee while she was in the shower. She came out of the bathroom wrapped in a large white towel, and they kissed against the kitchen countertop. What if I think bad thoughts at Mass? she asked. He rubbed the back of her neck where her hair was damp. Like about last night? he said. We didn’t do anything bad. She kissed the shoulder seam of his T-shirt. He made breakfast then while she got dressed. At a few minutes to nine they left the house and walked to the church together. Inside, it was cool and mostly empty, smelling of damp and incense. The priest read from Luke and gave a sermon about compassion. During communion, the choir sang ‘Here I Am, Lord’. Eileen let Simon out of the pew and watched him queue with the other members of the congregation, most of them elderly. From the gallery behind them the choir was singing: I will make their darkness bright. Eileen shifted in her seat to keep Simon in sight as he reached the altar and received communion. Turning away, he blessed himself. She sat with her hands in her lap. He looked up at the vast domed ceiling above them, and his lips were moving silently. With a searching expression she watched him. He came and took his seat beside her, laying his hand on hers, and his hand was heavy and very still. Then he knelt down beside her on the cushioned hassock attached to the pew. Bowing his head over his hands, he did not look grave or serious, only calm, and his lips were no longer moving. Lacing her fingers together in her lap, she watched him. The choir sang: I have heard you calling in the night. Simon blessed himself once more and sat up beside her again. She moved her hand toward him and calmly he took it in his and held it, smoothing his thumb slowly over the little ridges of her knuckles. They sat like that until the Mass was over. On the street outside they were smiling again, and their smiles were mysterious. It was a cool bright Sunday morning, the white facades of buildings reflected the sunlight, traffic was passing, people were out walking dogs, calling to each other across the street. Simon kissed Eileen’s cheek, and they wished one another goodbye.