Normal People

by Sally Rooney

  The bed is massive, he says, don’t worry about it.

  The house is dark when they get back inside. In Connell’s room they undress down to their underwear. Marianne is wearing a white cotton bra that makes her breasts look small and triangular. They lie side by side under the quilt. He’s aware that he could have sex with her now if he wanted to. She wouldn’t tell anyone. He finds it strangely comforting, and allows himself to think about what it would be like. Hey, he would say quietly. Lie on your back, okay? And she would just obediently lie on her back. So many things pass secretly between people anyway. What kind of person would he be if it happened now? Someone very different? Or exactly the same person, himself, with no difference at all.

  After a time he hears her say something he can’t make out. I didn’t hear that, he says.

  I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne. I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.

  Her voice sounds oddly cool and distant, like a recording of her voice played after she herself has gone away or departed for somewhere else.

  In what way? he says.

  I don’t know why I can’t make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born.

  Lots of people love you, Marianne. Okay? Your family and friends love you.

  For a few seconds she’s silent and then she says: You don’t know my family.

  He had hardly even noticed himself using the word ‘family’; he’d just been reaching for something reassuring and meaningless to say. Now he doesn’t know what to do.

  In the same strange unaccented voice she continues: They hate me.

  He sits up in bed to see her better. I know you fight with them, he says, but that doesn’t mean they hate you.

  Last time I was home my brother told me I should kill myself.

  Mechanically Connell sits up straighter, pushing the quilt off his body as if he’s about to get up. He runs his tongue around the inside of his mouth.

  What did he say that for? he says.

  I don’t know. He said no one would miss me if I was dead because I have no friends.

  Would you not tell your mother if he talked to you like that?

  She was there, says Marianne.

  Connell moves his jaw around. The pulse in his neck is throbbing. He’s trying to visualise this scene, the Sheridans at home, Alan for some reason telling Marianne to commit suicide, but it’s hard to picture any family behaving the way that she has described.

  What did she say? he asks. As in, how did she react?

  I think she said something like, oh, don’t encourage her.

  Slowly Connell breathes in through his nose and exhales the breath between his lips.

  And what provoked this? he says. Like, how did the argument start?

  He senses that something in Marianne’s face changes now, or hardens, but he can’t name what it is exactly.

  You think I did something to deserve it, she says.

  No, obviously I’m not saying that.

  Sometimes I think I must deserve it. Otherwise I don’t know why it would happen. But if he’s in a bad mood he’ll just follow me around the house. There’s nothing I can do. He’ll just come into my room, he doesn’t care if I’m sleeping or anything.

  Connell rubs his palms on the sheet.

  Would he ever hit you? he says.

  Sometimes. Less so since I moved away. To be honest I don’t even mind it that much. The psychological stuff is more demoralising. I don’t know how to explain it, really. I know it must sound …

  He touches his hand to his forehead. His skin feels wet. She doesn’t finish the sentence to explain how it must sound.

  Why didn’t you ever tell me about it before? he says. She says nothing. The light is dim but he can see her open eyes. Marianne, he says. The whole time we were together, why didn’t you tell me any of this?

  I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t want you to think I was damaged or something. I was probably afraid you wouldn’t want me anymore.

  Finally he puts his face in his hands. His fingers feel cold and clammy on his eyelids and there are tears in his eyes. The harder he presses with his fingers, the faster the tears seep out, wet, onto his skin. Jesus, he says. His voice sounds thick and he clears his throat. Come here, he says. And she comes to him. He feels terribly ashamed and confused. They lie face-to-face and he puts his arms around her body. In her ear he says: I’m sorry, okay? She holds onto him tightly, her arms winding around him, and he kisses her forehead. But he always thought she was damaged, he thought it anyway. He screws his eyes shut with guilt. Their faces feel hot and damp now. He thinks of her saying: I thought you wouldn’t want me anymore. Her mouth is so close that her breath is wet on his lips. They start to kiss, and her mouth tastes dark like wine. Her body shifts against him, he touches her breast with his hand, and in a few seconds he could be inside her again, and then she says: No, we shouldn’t. She draws away, just like that. He can hear himself breathing in the silence, the pathetic heaving of his breath. He waits until it slows down again, not wanting to have his voice break when he tries to speak. I’m really sorry, he says. She squeezes his hand. It’s a very sad gesture. He can’t believe the stupidity of what he’s just done. Sorry, he says again. But Marianne has already turned away.

  Five Months Later

  (DECEMBER 2013)

  In the lobby of the Languages and Literature building she sits down to check her email. She doesn’t remove her overcoat because she’ll be getting up in a minute. Beside her on the desk is her breakfast, which she just purchased from the supermarket across the street: one black coffee with brown sugar, one lemon pastry roll. She eats this exact breakfast regularly. Lately she has started to eat it slowly, in lavish sugary mouthfuls that congeal around her teeth. The more slowly she eats, and the more consideration she gives to the composition of her food, the less hungry she feels. She won’t eat again until eight or nine in the evening.

  She has two new emails, one from Connell and one from Joanna. She dabs her mouse back and forth between them, and then selects Joanna’s.

  no real news from here, as usual. I’ve recently taken to staying home at night and watching my way through a nine part documentary series about the american civil war. I have a lot of new information about various civil war generals to share with you next time we’re on Skype. how are you? how is Lukas? did he take those photos yet or is that today? and the big question … can I see them when they’re done?? or is that prurient. I await your word. xx

  Marianne lifts the lemon pastry, takes a large, slow bite, and lets it dissolve in layers on her tongue. She chews, swallows, then lifts the coffee cup. One mouthful of coffee. She replaces the cup and opens Connell’s message.

  I don’t know what you mean by your last sentence there exactly. Do you mean just because we’re far away from each other or because we’ve actually changed as people? I do feel like a pretty different person now than I was then but maybe I don’t seem that different, I don’t know. By the way I looked your friend Lukas up on Facebook, he’s what you would call ‘Scandinavian looking’. Sadly Sweden did not qualify for the World Cup this time so if you end up with a Swedish boyfriend I’ll have to think of another way to bond with him. Not that I’m saying this guy Lukas is going to be your boyfriend or would want to talk to me about football if he was, although it’s something I am putting out as a possibility. I know you like the tall handsome guys as you say, so why not Lukas, who looks tall and is also handsome (Helen has seen his photo and agrees). But whatever, I’m not pushing the boyfriend thing, I just hope you have confirmed he’s not a psychopath. You don’t always have a good radar on that.

  Unrelatedly we were getting a taxi through Phoenix Park last night and we saw a lot of deer. Deer are kind of strange looking creatures. In the night they have a ghostly appearance and their eyes can reflect headlights in an olive green or silver colour, like a special effect. They paused to observe our taxi before moving on. To me it’s weird
when animals pause because they seem so intelligent, but maybe that’s because I associate pausing with thought. Deer are elegant anyway I have to say. If you were an animal yourself, you could do worse than be a deer. They have those thoughtful faces and nice sleek bodies. But they also kind of startle off in unpredictable ways. They didn’t remind me of you at the time but in retrospect I see a similarity there. I hope you’re not offended by the comparison. I would tell you about the party prior to us getting the taxi through Phoenix Park but it was honestly boring and not as good as the deer. No one was there who you would know that well. Your last email was really good, thank you. I look forward to hearing more as always.

  Marianne checks the time in the top-right corner of the screen: 09:49. She navigates back to Joanna’s message and hits reply.

  He’s taking the photos today, I’m actually heading over there now. Of course I will send them to you when they are finished AND I expect long flattering commentary on each individual photograph. I’m excited to hear what you’ve learned about the US Civil War. All I’ve learned here is how to say ‘no thank you’ (nej tack) and ‘really, no’ (verkligen, nej). Talk soon xxx

  Marianne closes her laptop, eats another two bites of the pastry and folds the rest up in its little greaseproof wrap. She slips her laptop into her satchel and removes her soft felt beret, which she pulls down over her ears. The pastry she disposes of in a nearby bin.

  Outside it’s still snowing. The exterior world looks like an old TV screen badly tuned. Visual noise breaks the landscape into soft fragments. Marianne buries her hands in her pockets. Flakes of snow fall on her face and dissolve there. A cold flake alights on her top lip and she feels for it with her tongue. Head down against the cold, she is on her way to Lukas’s studio. Lukas’s hair is so blonde that the individual strands look white. She finds them on her clothing sometimes, finer than thread. He dresses all in black: black shirts, black zip-up hoodies, black boots with thick black rubber soles. He’s an artist. The first time they met, Marianne told him she was a writer. It was a lie. Now she avoids talking to him about it.

  Lukas lives near the station. She takes her hand from her pocket, blows on her fingers and presses the buzzer. He answers, in English: Who is it?

  It’s Marianne, she says.

  Ah, you’re early, says Lukas. Come on in.

  Why does he say ‘you’re early’? Marianne thinks as she climbs the stairs. The connection was fuzzy but he seemed to say it with a smile. Was he pointing it out to make her appear too eager? But she finds she doesn’t care how eager she appears, because there is no secret eagerness to be discovered in her. She could be here, ascending the staircase to Lukas’s studio, or she could be in the campus library, or in the dorm making herself coffee. For weeks now she has had this feeling, the feeling of moving around inside a protective film, floating like mercury. The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside. So whatever Lukas’s reason for saying ‘you’re early’, she finds it doesn’t matter to her.

  Upstairs he’s setting up. Marianne removes her hat and shakes it. Lukas looks up, then back at the tripod. Are you getting used to the weather? he says. She hangs her hat on the back of the door and shrugs. She begins to take off her coat. In Sweden we have a saying, he says. There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.

  Marianne hangs her coat beside her hat. What’s wrong with my clothes? she says mildly.

  It’s just an expression, says Lukas.

  She honestly can’t tell now if he meant to criticise her clothes or not. She’s wearing a grey lambswool sweater and a thick black skirt with knee-high boots. Lukas has bad manners, which, to Marianne, makes him seem childish. He never offers her coffee or tea when she arrives, or even a glass of water. He starts talking right away about whatever he has been reading or doing since her last visit. He doesn’t seem to crave her input, and sometimes her responses confuse or disorientate him, which he claims is an effect of his bad English. In fact his comprehension is very good. Anyway, today is different. She removes her boots and leaves them by the door.

  There’s a mattress in the corner of the studio, where Lukas sleeps. The windows are very tall and run almost to the floor, with blinds and thin trailing curtains. Various unrelated items are dotted around the room: several large potted plants, stacks of atlases, a bicycle wheel. This array impressed Marianne initially, but Lukas later explained he had gathered the items intentionally for a shoot, which made them seem artificial to her. Everything is an effect with you, Marianne told him once. He took this as a compliment about his art. He does have immaculate taste. He’s sensitive to the most minuscule of aesthetic failures, in painting, in cinema, even in novels or television shows. Sometimes when Marianne mentions a film she has recently watched, he waves his hand and says: It fails for me. This quality of discernment, she has realised, does not make Lukas a good person. He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly.

  She and Lukas have had an arrangement for a few weeks now. Lukas calls it ‘the game’. Like any game, there are some rules. Marianne is not allowed to talk or make eye contact while the game is going on. If she breaks the rules, she gets punished later. The game doesn’t end when the sex is finished, the game ends when she gets in the shower. Sometimes after sex Lukas takes a long time before he lets her get in the shower, just talking to her. He tells her bad things about herself. It’s hard to know whether Marianne likes to hear those things; she desires to hear them, but she’s conscious by now of being able to desire in some sense what she does not want. The quality of gratification is thin and hard, arriving too quickly and then leaving her sick and shivery. You’re worthless, Lukas likes to tell her. You’re nothing. And she feels like nothing, an absence to be forcibly filled in. It isn’t that she likes the feeling, but it relieves her somehow. Then she showers and the game is over. She experiences a depression so deep it is tranquillising, she eats whatever he tells her to eat, she experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter.

  Since she arrived here in Sweden, but particularly since the beginning of the game, people have seemed to her like coloured paper shapes, not real at all. At times a person will make eye contact with Marianne, a bus conductor or someone looking for change, and she’ll be shocked briefly into the realisation that this is in fact her life, that she is actually visible to other people. This feeling opens her to certain longings: hunger and thirst, a desire to speak Swedish, a physical desire to swim or dance. But these fade away again quickly. In Lund she’s never really hungry, and though she fills a plastic Evian bottle with water every morning, she empties most of it back into the sink at night.

  She sits on the corner of the mattress now while Lukas switches a lamp on and off and does something with his camera. I still don’t know with the light yet, he says. Maybe we can do, like, first one and then another one. Marianne shrugs. She doesn’t understand the import of what he’s saying. Because all his friends speak Swedish, it has been difficult for her to work out how popular or well regarded Lukas is. People spend time in his studio often and seem to move a lot of artistic equipment up and down his stairs, but are they fans of his work, grateful for his attention? Or are they exploiting him for the convenient location of his working space while making fun of him behind his back?

  Okay, I think we’re ready to go, says Lukas.

  Do you want me to …

  Maybe just the sweater now.

  Marianne pulls her sweater off over her head. She places it in her lap, folds it, and then puts it to one side. She is wearing a black lace bra with little flowers embroidered on it. Lukas starts doing something with his camera.

  *

  She doesn’t hear from the others much anymore: Peggy, Sophie, Teresa, that crowd. Jamie wasn’t happy about the break-up, and he told people he wasn’t ha
ppy, and people felt sorry for him. Things started to turn against Marianne, she could sense that before she left. At first it was unsettling, the way eyes turned away from her in a room, or conversation stopped short when she entered; the sense of having lost her footing in the social world, of being no longer admired and envied, how quickly it had all slipped away from her. But then she found it was easy to get used to. There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality. It depressed her to think people were so predictable. Whether she was respected or despised, it didn’t make much difference in the end. Would every stage of her life continue to reveal itself as the same thing, again and again, the same remorseless contest for dominance?

  With Peggy it had been hard. I’m your best friend, Peggy kept saying at the time, in an increasingly weird voice. She couldn’t accept Marianne’s laissez-faire attitude to the situation. You realise people are talking about you, Peggy said one night while Marianne was packing. Marianne didn’t know how to respond. After a pause, she replied thoughtfully: I don’t think I always care about the same things you care about. But I do care about you. Peggy threw her hands in the air wildly, walked around the coffee table twice.

  I’m your best friend, she said. What am I supposed to do?

  I don’t really know what that question means.

  I mean, what position does this put me in? Because honestly, I don’t really want to take sides.

  Marianne frowned, zipping a hairbrush into the pocket of her suitcase.

  You mean, you don’t want to take my side, she said.

  Peggy looked at her, breathing hard now from her exertion around the coffee table. Marianne was kneeling down by her suitcase still.