by Sally Rooney
Afterwards I lay with my head on his chest and listened to his heart beat.
Melissa seems like a good person, I said. You know, I mean, deep down.
Yeah, I believe she is.
Does that make us bad people?
I hope not, he said. Not you anyway. Me, maybe.
His heart continued to beat like an excited or miserable clock. I thought about Bobbi’s dry and ideological reading of non-monogamous love, and I felt like bringing it up with Nick, as a joke maybe, not being completely serious but just floating the possibility to see what he thought.
Have you considered telling her about us? I said.
He sighed, the kind of audible sigh that’s like a word. I sat up and he looked at me with sad eyes, as if the subject weighed on him.
I know I should tell her, he said. I feel bad making you lie to people for my sake. And I’m not even good at lying. Melissa asked me the other day if I had feelings for you and I said yes.
The palm of my hand was resting on his sternum and I could still feel his blood pumping below the surface of his skin. Oh, I said.
But what happens if I do tell her? he said. I mean, what would you want to happen? I don’t get the impression that you want me to move in with you.
I laughed and so did he. Although we were laughing about the impossibility of our relationship, it still felt nice.
No, I said. But she’s had affairs and she never moved out of your house.
Yeah, but you know, circumstances were very different. Look, obviously the ideal thing is that I tell her and she says, well go ahead and live your life, what do I care. I’m not even saying that won’t happen, I’m just saying it might not.
I ran my finger along his collarbone and said: I can’t remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily.
He nodded, looking at me. I did, he said. I just thought it would be worth it.
For a few seconds we were silent. What do you think now? I said. I guess it depends how unhappy it gets.
No, said Nick. In a weird way I don’t think it does. But look, I will tell her, all right? We’ll work it out.
Before I could say anything, we heard footsteps coming up the back staircase. We both went quiet, while the footsteps came to the door. There was a knock, and Bobbi’s voice said: Nick? He switched the light off and said: yeah, one second. He got out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. I lay on the mattress watching him. Then he answered the door. I couldn’t see Bobbi through the crease of light, I could only see the silhouette of Nick’s back and his arm leaning against the frame.
Frances isn’t in her room, Bobbi said. I don’t know where she is.
Oh.
I checked in the bathroom and outside in the garden. Do you think I should go and look for her? Should we wake up the others?
No, don’t, Nick said. She’s, um. Oh, Jesus Christ. She’s in here with me.
There was a long silence then. I couldn’t see Bobbi’s face, or his. I thought of her kissing my lips earlier and calling me self-righteous. It was terrible that Nick had told her like this. I could see how terrible it was.
I didn’t realise, said Bobbi. I’m sorry.
No, of course.
Well, sorry. Goodnight then.
He wished her goodnight and closed the door. We listened to her footsteps descending the back staircase to the basement rooms. Oh fuck, Nick said. Fuck. Expressionlessly I said: she won’t tell anyone. Nick made an irritable sighing noise and said: well yeah, I hope not. He seemed distracted, as if he no longer noticed I was in the room. I put my nightdress back on and said I would sleep downstairs. Sure, okay, he said.
Nick was still in bed when Bobbi and I left the next morning. Melissa walked us down to the station with our luggage and watched us, quietly, as we boarded the bus.
PART TWO
18
It was late August. In the airport Bobbi asked me: how long has that been going on for, between the two of you? And I told her. She shrugged like, okay. On the bus back from Dublin airport, we heard a news report about a woman who had died in hospital. It was a case I had been following some time ago and forgotten about. We were too tired to talk about it then anyway. It was raining against the bus windows as we pulled up outside college. I helped Bobbi lift her suitcase out of the luggage compartment and she rolled down the sleeves of her raincoat. Lashing, she said. Typical. I was getting the train back to Ballina to stay with my mother for a few nights, and I told Bobbi I would call her. She flagged a taxi and I walked toward the bus stop to get the 145 to Heuston.
When I arrived in Ballina that night, my mother put on a bolognese and I sat at the kitchen table teasing the knots out of my hair. Outside the kitchen window the leaves dripped rain like squares of watered silk. She said I was tanned. I let a few split hairs fall from my fingers to the kitchen floor and said: oh, am I? I knew I was.
Did you hear from your father at all while you were over there? she said.
He called me once. He didn’t know where I was, he sounded drunk.
She took a plastic packet of garlic bread from the fridge. My throat hurt and I couldn’t think of what to say.
He wasn’t always this bad, right? I said. It’s gotten worse.
He’s your father, Frances. You tell me.
I don’t exactly hang out with him on the day-to-day.
The kettle came to the boil, releasing a cloud of steam over the hob and toaster. I shivered. I couldn’t believe I had woken up in France that morning.
I mean, was he like this when you married him? I said.
She didn’t reply. I looked out at the garden, at the bird-feeder hanging off the birch tree. My mother favoured some species of birds over others; the feeder was for the benefit of small and appealingly vulnerable ones. Crows were completely out of favour. She chased them away when she spotted them. They’re all just birds, I pointed out. She said yes, but some birds can fend for themselves.
I could feel a headache coming on while I set the table, though I didn’t want to mention it. Whenever I told my mother I had headaches she always said it was because I didn’t eat enough and I had low blood sugar, although I had never looked up the science behind that claim. By the time the food was ready I could feel a pain in my back too, like a kind of nerve or muscular pain that made sitting straight uncomfortable.
After we ate, I helped load up the dishwasher and my mother said she was going to watch TV. I carried my suitcase to my room, though as I went up the stairs I was finding it physically difficult to walk upright. My vision seemed brighter and sharper than usual. I was scared of moving too vigorously, like I was afraid it would shake the pain out and make it worse. Slowly I walked to the bathroom, closed the door and steadied my hands against the sink.
I was bleeding again. This time the blood had soaked through my clothes, and I wasn’t feeling strong enough to take them all off right away. In various stages, using the sink to brace myself, I managed to get undressed. My clothes peeled off wet like skin from a wound. I wrapped myself in a bathrobe that was left hanging on the back of the door, then sat on the rim of the bath with my hands pressed hard into my abdomen, bloody clothes discarded on the floor. At first I felt better, then worse. I wanted to shower, but I was worried I was too weak and I’d fall over or faint.
I noticed that along with the blood were thick grey clots of what looked like skin tissue. I had never seen anything like this before and it scared me so badly that the only comforting idea I could think of was: maybe it’s not happening. I kept returning to this thought every time I felt myself starting to panic, as if going insane and hallucinating an alternate reality was less frightening than what was really going on. Maybe it’s not happening. I let my hands tremble and waited to start feeling normal again, until I realised that it wasn’t just a feeling, something I could dismiss to myself. It was an outside reality that I couldn’t change. The pain was like nothing I had ever felt before.
I crouched down to get my
phone and then dialled the house number. When my mother answered I said: can you come up here for a second? I’m not feeling very well. I could hear her come up the stairs saying: Frances? Sweetheart? Once she came in I told her what had happened. I was in too much pain to feel embarrassed or squeamish.
Was your period late? she asked.
I tried to think about this. My periods had never really been regular, and I estimated it had been about five weeks since the last one, though it might have been closer to six.
I don’t know, maybe, I said. Why?
I suppose there’s no chance at all you were pregnant?
I swallowed. I said nothing.
Frances? she said.
It’s extremely unlikely.
It’s not impossible?
I mean, practically nothing is impossible, I said.
Well, I don’t know what to tell you. We’ll have to go up to the hospital if you’re in that kind of pain.
I held the rim of the bath with my left hand, until the knuckles went white. Then I turned my head and vomited into the bathtub. After a few seconds, when I knew I wouldn’t be sick again, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and said: maybe we should go to hospital, yeah.
*
After a lot of waiting around they gave me a bed in the Accident & Emergency ward. My mother said she would go home and get some sleep for a couple of hours, and that I was to ring her if there was any news. The pain had thinned out a little, but it wasn’t gone. I held onto her hand when she said goodbye, the big warm plane of it, like something that could grow from the earth.
Once I got into bed, a nurse hooked me up to a drip, but she didn’t tell me what the drip was doing. I tried to look calmly up at the ceiling and count down from ten in my head. The patients I could see from my bed were mostly elderly, but there was one young guy on the ward who seemed to be drunk or high. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him crying, and apologising to all the nurses who went past. And the nurses said things like, okay Kevin, you’re all right, good man.
The doctor who came to take my blood sample didn’t look much older than I was. He seemed to need a lot of blood, and a urine sample also, and he asked questions about my sexual history. I told him I had never had unprotected sex, and he moved his lower lip disbelievingly and said: never, okay. I coughed and said: well, not fully. Then he looked at me over his clipboard. It was clear from his expression that he thought I was an idiot.
Not fully unprotected? he said. I don’t follow you.
I could feel my face get hot, but I replied in as dry and unconcerned a voice as possible.
No, I mean, not full sex, I said.
Right.
Then I looked at him and said: I mean he didn’t come inside me, am I not being clear? He looked back down at his clipboard then. We hated each other energetically, I could see that. Before he went away, he said they would test the urine for pregnancy. Typically the hCG levels would remain elevated for up to ten days, that’s what he said before he left.
I knew that they were testing for pregnancy because they thought I was having a miscarriage. I wondered if the clots of tissue were making them think that. A searing anxiety developed inside me at this thought, in the same form it always took no matter what external stimulus triggered it: first the realisation that I would die, then that everyone else would die, and then that the universe itself would eventually experience heat death, a kind of thought sequence that expanded outward endlessly in forms too huge to be contained inside my body. I trembled, my hands were clammy, and I felt sure I would be sick again. I punched my leg meaninglessly as if that would prevent the death of the universe. Then I found my phone under my pillow and dialled Nick’s number.
He answered after several rings. I couldn’t hear my own voice when I spoke, but I think I said something about wanting to talk to him. My teeth were chattering and I might have been talking gibberish. When he spoke it was in a whisper.
Are you drunk? he said. What are you doing calling me like this?
I said I didn’t know. My lungs were burning and my forehead felt wet.
It’s only 2 a.m. here, you know, he said. Everyone’s still awake, they’re in the other room. Are you trying to get me in trouble?
I said again that I didn’t know and he told me again that I sounded drunk. His voice contained both secrecy and anger in a special combination: the secrecy enriching the anger, the anger related to the secrecy.
Anyone could have seen you trying to call me, he said. Jesus Christ, Frances. How am I supposed to explain if someone asks?
I began to feel upset then, which was a better feeling than panic. Okay, I said. Goodbye. And I hung up the phone. He didn’t call back, but he did send a text message consisting of a string of question marks. I’m in hospital, I typed. Then I held down the delete key until this message disappeared, character after evenly timed character. Afterwards I tucked my phone back underneath my pillow.
I tried to make myself think about things logically. Anxiety was just a chemical phenomenon producing bad feelings. Feelings were just feelings, they had no material reality. If I ever had been pregnant, then I was probably miscarrying anyway. So what? The pregnancy was already over, and I didn’t need to consider things like Irish constitutional law, the right to travel, my current bank balance, and so on. Still, it would mean that at some time I had been unknowingly carrying Nick’s child, or rather a child that consisted of a mysterious half-and-half mixture of myself and Nick, inside my own body. This seemed like something I should have to adjust to, though I didn’t know how or what ‘adjusting’ meant or whether I was being strictly logical about it any more. I was exhausted at this point and my eyes were shut. I found myself thinking about whether it had been a boy.
The doctor came back several hours later and confirmed that I had not been pregnant, that it was not a miscarriage, and that there was no sign of infection or any other irregularities in my blood work. He could see while he spoke to me that I was shivering, my face was damp, I probably looked like a spooked dog, but he didn’t ask me if I was all right. So what, I thought, I am all right. He told me the gynaecologist would see me when her rotation started at eight. Then he went away, leaving the curtain open behind him. It was beginning to get light outside and I hadn’t slept. The non-existent baby entered a new category of non-existence, that is, things which had not stopped existing but in fact had never existed. I felt foolish, and the idea that I had ever been pregnant now seemed wistfully naive.
The gynaecologist arrived at eight. She asked me some questions about my menstrual cycle and then drew the curtains closed to give me a pelvic exam. I didn’t really know what she was doing with her hands, but whatever it was, it was grievously painful. It felt like some extremely sensitive wound inside me was being twisted around. Afterwards I held my arms around my chest and nodded at what she was saying, though I wasn’t sure I could really hear her. She had just reached inside my body and caused some of the worst pain I had ever experienced, and the fact that she continued to speak as if she expected me to remember what she was saying struck me as truly crazy.
I do remember that she told me I needed an ultrasound, and that it could have been a number of things. Then she wrote me a script for the contraceptive pill and told me that if I wanted to I could run two boxes of pills together and only have one period every six weeks. I said I would do that. She told me I would get a letter about the ultrasound in the next couple of days.
That’s it, she said. You’re free to go.
My mother picked me up from the front of the hospital. When I shut the passenger door, she said: you look like you’ve been through the wars all right. I told her that if childbirth was anything like that pelvic exam I was surprised the human race had survived this long. She laughed and touched my hair. Poor Frances, she said. What will we do with you?
When I got home I fell asleep on the sofa until the afternoon. My mother had left me a note saying she had gone into work and to let her know if I needed any
thing. I was feeling well enough by then to walk around without hunching over and to make myself some instant coffee and toast. I buttered the toast thickly and ate it in small, slow bites. Then I showered until I felt really clean and padded back to my room wrapped in towels. I sat on the bed, water running from my hair down onto my back, and cried. It was okay to cry because nobody could see me, and I would never tell anyone about it.
By the time I was finished, I was very cold. The tips of my fingers had started to turn a creepy whitish-grey colour. I towelled my skin off properly and blow-dried my hair until it crackled. Then I reached for the soft part on the inside of my left elbow and pinched it so tightly between my thumbnail and forefinger that I tore the skin open. That was it. It was over then. It was all going to be okay.
19
My mother came home early from work that afternoon and fixed some cold chicken while I sat at the table drinking tea. She seemed a little cool with me while preparing the food and didn’t really speak until we both sat down to eat.
So you’re not pregnant, she said.
No.
You didn’t seem so sure about that last night.
Well, the test is pretty definitive, I said.
She gave a funny little smile and picked up the salt shaker. Carefully she applied a small amount of salt to her chicken and replaced the shaker beside the pepper grinder.
You didn’t tell me you were seeing anyone, she said.
Who says I’m seeing someone?
It’s not that friend of yours you went on holiday with. The handsome guy, the actor.
I swallowed some tea calmly, but I was no longer hungry for the food.
You know his wife was the one who invited us on the holiday, I said.
I don’t hear much about him any more. You used to mention his name a lot.
And yet for some reason you don’t seem to be able to remember it.
She laughed out loud then. She said, I remember it, it’s Nick something. Nick Conway. Nice-looking guy. I actually saw him on TV one night, I think I put it on the Sky Plus for you.