by Sally Rooney
He was laughing then, they both were. At midnight she went to brush her teeth and he turned the lights off in the kitchen. Emerging from the bathroom she said: See, I obviously had an ulterior motive, because I brought my toothbrush. She followed him into his room and he shut the door behind them, saying something inaudible. She laughed, and through the door her laughter was softened and musical. In the darkness the main room of the apartment lay quiet again and still. Two empty bowls had been left in the sink, two spoons, an empty water glass with a faint print of clear lip balm on the rim. Through the door the sound of conversation murmured on, the words rounded out, indistinct, and by one in the morning silence had fallen. At half past five the sky began to lighten in the east-facing living room window, from black to blue and then to silvery white. Another day. The call of a crow from an overhead power line. The sound of buses in the street.
16.
Alice, do you remember a few weeks or months ago I sent you an email about the Late Bronze Age collapse? I went on reading about it afterwards, and it seems that while little is known about the period, scholarly interpretations are more various than the Wikipedia page led me to believe. We do know that before the collapse, rich and literate palace economies in the Eastern Mediterranean traded in exorbitantly costly goods, apparently sending and receiving them as gifts to and from the rulers of other kingdoms. And we also know that afterwards, palaces were destroyed or abandoned, written languages were lost, and luxury goods were no longer produced in the same quantities or traded across the same distances. But how many people, how many inhabitants of this ‘civilisation’, actually lived in the palaces? How many wore the jewellery, drank from the bronze cups, ate the pomegranates? For every one member of the elite, thousands more were illiterate and impoverished subsistence farmers. After the ‘collapse of civilisation’, many of them moved elsewhere, and some may have died, but for the most part their lives probably did not change much. They went on growing crops. Sometimes the harvest was good and sometimes it wasn’t. And in another corner of the continent, those people were your ancestors and mine—not the palace-dwellers, but the peasants. Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?
As to the revelation about yourself and Felix: may I say, as your friend, for all your earlier talk about relational formlessness and experimental affective bonds, this did not come as a surprise to me at all. If he’s nice to you I will approve of him unconditionally, and if he’s not then I’ll be his enemy forever. Does that sound reasonable? But I’m sure he’ll be nice.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this to you before, but a few years ago, I started keeping a diary, which I called ‘the life book’. I began with the idea of writing one short entry each day, just a line or two, describing something good. I suppose by ‘good’ I must have meant something that made me happy or brought me pleasure. I went back to look at it the other day, and the early entries are all from that autumn, almost six years ago now. Dry upturned sycamore leaves scuttling like claws along the South Circular Road. The artificial buttered taste of popcorn in the cinema. Pale-yellow sky in the evening, Thomas Street draped in mist. Things like that. I didn’t miss a day through all of September, October, November that year. I could always think of something nice, and sometimes I would even do things for the purpose of putting them in the book, like taking a bath or going for a walk. At the time I felt like I was just absorbing life, and at the end of the day I never had to strain to think of anything good I had seen or heard. It just came to me, and even the words came, because my only aim was to get the image down clearly and simply so that I would later remember how it felt. And reading those entries now, I do remember what I felt, or at least what I saw and heard and noticed. Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things—I mean just the things that were in front of me. People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that—like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.
After a couple of months, I started to miss days. Sometimes I would fall asleep without remembering to write anything, but then other nights I’d open the book and not know what to write—I wouldn’t be able to think of anything at all. When I did make entries, they were increasingly verbal and abstract: song titles, or quotes from novels, or text messages from friends. By spring I couldn’t keep it up anymore. I started to put the diary away for weeks at a time—it was just a cheap black notebook I got at work—and then eventually I’d take it back out to look at the entries from the previous year. At that point, I found it impossible to imagine ever feeling again as I had apparently once felt about rain or flowers. It wasn’t just that I failed to be delighted by sensory experiences—it was that I didn’t actually seem to have them anymore. I would walk to work or go out for groceries or whatever and by the time I came home again I wouldn’t be able to remember seeing or hearing anything distinctive at all. I suppose I was seeing but not looking—the visual world just came to me flat, like a catalogue of information. I never looked at things anymore, in the way I had before.
Reading the book again now gives me such a strange sensation. Was I really like that once? A person capable of dropping down into the most fleeting of impressions, and dilating them somehow, dwelling inside them, and finding riches and beauty there. Apparently I was—‘for a couple of hours, but I am not that person’. I wonder whether the book itself, the process of writing the book, caused me to live that way, or whether I wrote because I wanted to record that kind of experience as it was happening. I’ve tried to remember what was going on in my life at the time, in case that might help me to understand. I know I was twenty-three, I had just started working at the magazine, you and I were living together in that horrible flat in the Liberties, and Kate was still in Dublin, and Tom, and Aoife. We went out to parties together, we had people over for dinner, we drank too much wine, we got into arguments. Sometimes Simon would call me on the phone from Paris so we could complain to each other about work, and while we were laughing, I would hear Natalie in the background, putting away plates in the kitchen. All my feelings and experiences were in one sense extremely intense, and in another sense completely trivial, because none of my decisions seemed to have any consequences, and nothing about my life—the job, the apartment, the desires, the love affairs—struck me as permanent. I felt anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy. Maybe that explains in some way the openness I felt toward the world—maybe without knowing it, I was anticipating my future, I was watching for signs.
A couple of nights ago, I was getting a taxi home on my own after a book launch. The streets were quiet and dark, and the air was oddly warm and still, and on the quays the office buildings were all lit up inside, and empty, and underneath everything, beneath the surface of everything, I began to feel it all over again—the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything. As soon as I realised what I was feeling, I tried to move toward it in my thoughts, to reach out and handle it, but it only cooled a little or shrank away from me, or slipped off further ahead. The lights in the empty offices had reminded me of something, and I had been thinking about you, trying to imagine your house, I think, and I remembered I’d had an email from you, and at the same ti
me I was thinking of Simon, the mystery of him, and somehow as I looked out the taxi window I started to think about his physical presence in the city, that somewhere inside the city’s structure, standing or sitting, holding his arms one way or another, dressed or undressed, he was present, and Dublin was like an advent calendar concealing him behind one of its million windows, and the quality of the air was instilled, the temperature was instilled, with his presence, and with your email, and with this message I was writing back to you in my head even then. The world seemed capable of including these things, and my eyes were capable, my brain was capable, of receiving and understanding them. I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.
I had no idea you had been reading the Bible in hospital. What made you want to do that? And did you find it helpful? I thought it was very interesting what you said about the forgiveness of sins. I asked Simon the other night whether he prays to God, and he told me yes—‘to say thank you’. And I think if I believed in God, I wouldn’t want to prostrate myself before him and ask for forgiveness. I would just want to thank him every day, for everything.
17.
The second Friday evening in May, Felix spent eight minutes in the security queue leaving work. One of the people ahead of him had set the machine off and was taken into a side room to be searched. A sheet of paper on the door read: SUPERVISORS ONLY, ID TO ENTER. The queue stalled outside and the sound of raised voices came from inside the room. Felix exchanged a glance with the person standing in front of him, but neither spoke. By the time he got through the scanner and into his car, it was thirteen minutes past seven. The sky was dense and white overhead, with shafts of sunlight penetrating here and there through the low cloud. He switched the CD player on, reversed out of the parking space and left the industrial estate.
A few minutes down the road, he pulled off into a flat gravel area overlooking the sea. A wooden visitor centre at the entrance was closed up and no other cars were nearby. At one end a large yellow posterboard displayed information of historical and geographical interest. Felix parked at the outermost edge of the lot, the Atlantic stretching grey and rough outside the windshield. He unbuckled his seatbelt and unzipped the black puffer jacket he was wearing, revealing a faded-green sweatshirt underneath, with a small white embroidered logo. He took his phone out of his pocket, switched it on, and then opened the glovebox and started to roll himself a joint. The phone made various buzzing noises, receiving messages which had come in while he was at work, and his eyes flicked back and forth between the screen in his lap and the rolling paper on the steering wheel. When he was finished, he held the unlit joint in his mouth and scrolled through the messages and notifications on-screen: various social media alerts and app notifications, and one direct text message, from his brother Damian.
Damian: What time are you off tonight? You can come over here or I can bring everything over to yours if it suits better, let me know
Felix reclined the driver’s seat, looked up at the fuzzy grey interior of the car ceiling, and sparked his lighter. For a moment he closed his eyes, inhaling, and then he lifted his phone and opened the message thread. The previous text was one Felix had sent yesterday, reading: Off work tmr night, will call u. Before that were several missed call notifications from Damian. Ten days previously, a text from Felix read: Hey sorry no im away. He stared at the thread blankly and then closed it. For a while, taking long drags and exhaling slowly, he scrolled through his other notifications, dismissing or checking them as he went along. He had received one new message through a dating app, which he opened up on-screen.
Patrick: you around tonight?
Felix tapped on the name ‘Patrick’ and flicked through the uploaded photographs. In one image, a group of men posed at a social event with their arms around one another’s shoulders. In another, a bearded man knelt by a body of water holding an enormous fish, its body mottled and iridescent under sunlight. Felix went back to the message and typed in the reply field: Might be, whats up? Without hitting send, he returned to the message he had received from his brother. He locked his phone then and went on smoking and listening to music. At times he hummed or sang along absent-mindedly, his voice light and pleasant. Outside, rain started to drum on the windshield.
At five to eight, he flicked his stub out the window and reversed out of the car park. His eyes were a little glassy now. Approaching the village, he hit the indicator, and then picked his phone up off the dashboard and squinted at it again. There were no new messages. For no apparent reason, he switched off his indicator light and continued driving straight. A car behind him beeped its horn and Felix murmured peaceably: Yeah, alright, fuck off. He kept one hand on the steering wheel and used the other to make a phone call.
After two rings, a voice answered: Hello?
You at home? said Felix.
In my house? Yes.
Busy?
No, not at all. Why?
I’m just out of work, he said. Thought I might swing by and see you if you’re around. What do you think?
Well, I’m certainly around. I’m right here.
Be there in a minute, then, said Felix.
He hung up and dropped his phone noiselessly onto the passenger seat. After a few more minutes on the road, a large white house appeared on the left, and he hit the indicator once again.
It was still raining when he rang the bell. Alice came out to the door wearing a woollen jumper over a dark skirt. Her feet were bare. She had her arms crossed over her chest, and then she uncrossed them. Felix stood looking at her, put a hand in his pocket and slightly closed one eye as if he was having trouble focusing.
Hey, he said. Am I disturbing you?
Not remotely. Would you like to come in?
Seeing as I’m here, I suppose.
He followed her inside, closing the door. She went through to the living room, a large space, painted red, with an open fire in the hearth. Facing the fire was a couch, laden with throws and cushions in various colours. On the coffee table a book was splayed open, pages down, next to a hot cup of tea. Felix stopped inside the doorway as Alice walked in.
All looks very cosy, he said.
She leaned against the couch, crossing her arms again.
What are you up to, reading? he asked.
Yes, I was.
I hope I’m not disturbing you.
You said that already, she said. And I told you you’re not.
For a moment neither said anything further. Felix looked down at the fawn-coloured carpet, or at his own shoes.
I haven’t heard from you in a while, she said then.
Apparently unsurprised, he continued to study the carpet. Yeah, he answered.
She said nothing. After a moment he flicked a quick glance up at her.
Are you annoyed? he asked.
I’m not annoyed, no. I have been feeling confused. Honestly, I assumed you didn’t want to see me anymore. I was wondering if I’d done something wrong.
He frowned. Ah no, he said. You didn’t do anything. Look, you’re right, I was conscious the days had gone by a bit.
She nodded, inexpressive.
Do you want me to go? he said.
She moved her mouth around uncertainly for a moment. I’m not sure what’s going on exactly, she said. But then maybe that’s my fault.
He appeared to give this some thought, or perhaps made a show of doing so. Well, I wouldn’t say it’s your fault only, he said. I know what you mean by it. I think the fault is shared. I’m not really looking for any big commitments in my life at the moment, if I’m honest.
I see.
Yeah, he said. And what with the whole trip to Italy, I thought, you know. Maybe best to take it a bit more casually after that.
Right.
He rocked back a little on his heels. Alright so, he said. I’ll go, then, will I?
If you like.
For a few moments he didn’t move, but stayed looking around the room vaguely. You don’t care anyway, do you not? he said.
Excuse me?
He took a deep breath in through his nose and repeated slowly: You don’t care anyway, or do you?
Care about what?
I mean, if I go or I don’t go. If you hear from me or not. You don’t care either way.
I should think it’s obvious I do care, she said. You’re the one saying you don’t.
But you’re not acting like you do.
With a kind of amazed smile, she replied: What would you like me to do, fall on my knees and beg you not to leave?
He laughed to himself. Good question, he said. I don’t know, maybe I do want that.
Well, you’re not going to get it.
I can see I’m not.
They looked at one another. She frowned at him, and he laughed again, shook his head and turned his face away.
Fuck me, he said. I don’t know. Why do I always feel like you’re the boss and I just have to do what you tell me?
I have no idea why you feel that way. I don’t think I ever tell you what to do.
She was still looking at him but he would not return her gaze, looking off in the direction of the skirting board.
Finally she said: Since you’re here, would you like a drink?
Gazing around the room, he gave a kind of shrug. Yeah, alright, why not, he said.
I have a bottle of wine out there, shall I get some glasses?
He frowned to himself, and then said: Okay, yeah. He cleared his throat and added: Thanks.
She went out to the kitchen and he took off his jacket, hung it over the back of an armchair and sat down on the sofa. He took his phone from his pocket and looked at the screen, which displayed a missed call from Damian. He opened the notification with a swipe and then typed a message.