Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

  When Alice reached the bottom of the staircase a few minutes later, Eileen was coming out onto the landing. By the low light of a lamp in the hallway they saw one another and paused, Eileen at the top of the stairs looking down, Alice looking up, their faces anxious, wary, aggrieved, each like a dim mirror of the other, hanging there pale and suspended as the seconds passed. Then they went to each other, meeting halfway down the stairs, and they embraced, holding one another tightly, their arms clasped hard around each other’s bodies, and then Alice was saying: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and Eileen was saying: Don’t apologise, I’m sorry, I don’t know why we’re fighting. Both of them laughing then, with strange hiccupping laughter, and wiping their faces with their hands, saying: I don’t even know what we’re fighting about. I’m sorry. They sat down then on the staircase, exhausted, Alice one step below Eileen, their backs against the wall. Do you remember in college we had a fight and you wrote me a mean letter, said Eileen. On refill paper. I don’t remember what it said, but I know it wasn’t nice. Alice gave the hiccupping laugh again weakly. You were my only friend, she said. You had other friends, but I only had you. Eileen took her hand, lacing their fingers together. For a time they sat there on the stairs, not speaking, or speaking absently about things that had happened a long time ago, silly arguments they’d had, people they used to know, things they had laughed about together. Old conversations, repeated many times before. Then quiet again for a little while. I just want everything to be like it was, Eileen said. And for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different. Alice was smiling sadly. But if things are different, can we still be friends? she asked. Eileen put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. If you weren’t my friend I wouldn’t know who I was, she said. Alice rested her face in Eileen’s arm, closing her eyes. No, she agreed. I wouldn’t know who I was either. And actually for a while I didn’t. Eileen looked down at Alice’s small blonde head, nestled on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Neither did I, she said. Half past two in the morning. Outside, astronomical twilight. Crescent moon hanging low over the dark water. Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand. Another place, another time.

  29.

  Hello—I have attached a draft of the essay with notes below. It’s reading really nicely the way it is, but I wonder what you think about the idea of switching the two middle sections? So the biographical part would come later on. Have a look and see how you feel. Did JP ever get back to you with his notes? I suspect he would be much more useful than I am!

  I have so completely lost any sense of linear time that I was lying in bed last night thinking: it must be nearly a year now since the first time Eileen and Simon were here. And only very gradually—as I became conscious that I was lying under our big warm duvet rather than the light summer blanket—did I remember that it is now almost December, eighteen months since that first visit last summer. Eighteen months!! Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives? Time dissolving into thick dark fog, things that happened last week seeming years ago, and things that happened last year feeling like yesterday. I hope this is a side effect of lockdown and not simply a consequence of growing older. Speaking of which: happy belated. I did put a gift in the post on time, but have no idea when or whether it will arrive …

  No news on our end. Felix is as well as can be expected. He continues to experience periodic episodes of despair about the pandemic, and to hint darkly that if the situation continues much longer he won’t be responsible for his actions. But he usually cheers up again afterwards. In the meantime he has been doing the grocery shopping for several elderly people in the village, which gives him lots of opportunities to complain about elderly people, and he also spends quite a bit of time down at the community garden, making compost, complaining about making compost, and so on. For my part, the difference between lockdown and normal life is (depressingly?) minimal. Eighty to ninety per cent of my days are the same as they would be anyway—working from home, reading, avoiding social gatherings. But then it turns out that even a tiny amount of socialising is very different from none—I mean, one dinner party every two weeks is categorically different from no parties at all. And of course I continue to miss you passionately, and your boyfriend too. Seeing him on the news the other night was the thrill of our lives, by the way. Felix is convinced the dog recognised him, because she barked at the screen, but between you and me she barks at the television all the time.

  I don’t know if you’ve been following any of this, but about a month ago I was doing an interview over email and the journalist asked me what my partner thought of my books. Unthinkingly, I wrote back that he had never read them. So of course this became the headline of the interview—‘Alice Kelleher: my boyfriend has never read my books’—and afterwards Felix saw a popular tweet saying something like, ‘this is tragic … she deserves better’. He showed me the tweet on the screen of his phone one evening without saying anything, and when I asked him what he thought about it, he just shrugged. At first I thought: a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally and intellectually inferior, and the more books you read, the smarter and better you are than everyone else. But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity. An example of someone who genuinely believes that because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, she knows me personally—and in fact knows better than I do what is best for my life. And it’s normal! It’s normal for her not only to think these bizarre thoughts privately, but to express them in public, and receive positive feedback and attention as a result. She has no idea that she is, in this small limited respect, quite literally insane, because everyone around her is also insane in exactly the same way. They really cannot tell the difference between someone they have heard of, and someone they personally know. And they believe that the feelings they have about this person they imagine me to be—intimacy, resentment, hatred, pity—are as real as the feelings they have about their own friends. It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion. A sort of malignant growth where the sacred used to be.

  In other news that isn’t news, the saga of my poor health continues as before. With one thing and another I am in pain almost every day now. In my better moods, I tell myself this is just a consequence of all the accumulated stress and exhaustion of the last few years, and it will resolve itself with time and patience. And in my worse moods I think: this is it, this is my life. I have been reading a lot about ‘stress’ in the medical literature. Everyone seems to agree it is about as bad for your health as smoking, and beyond a certain point practically guarantees a major adverse health outcome. And yet the only recommended treatment for stress is not to experience it in the first place. It’s not like anxiety or depression, where you can go to your doctor and get treated and hopefully experience some degree of symptomatic improvement. It’s like taking illegal drugs—you’re just not supposed to do it, and if you do, you should try to do it less. There is no available medication to treat the problem, and no therapeutic regime backed by any real evidence. Just don’t get stressed! It’s very important, or you could make yourself really sick!! Anyway, from an aetiological standpoint I feel like I’ve been locked in a smoke-filled room with thousands of people shouting at me incomprehensibly day and night for the last several years. And I don’t know when it will end, or how long it will take me to feel better afterwards, or if I ever will. On one hand, I know the human body can be incredibly resilient. On the other, my sturdy peasant ancestors did little to prepare me for a career as a widely despised celebrity novelist. What do you think? Gradual return to a state of fair-to-moderate physical health? Or gradual acceptance of chronic poor health, perhaps presenting new opportunities for spiritual growth?

  Speaking of which: when Felix saw I was writing you an email, he said, ‘You sho
uld tell her you’re Catholic now.’ This is because he recently asked me if I believed in God, and I said I didn’t know. He went around shaking his head all day after that, and then told me that if I go off and join a convent, I shouldn’t expect any visits from him. Needless to say, I am not going to join a convent, nor am I even Catholic, as far as I know. I only feel, rightly or wrongly, that there is something underneath everything. When one person kills or harms another person, then there is ‘something’—isn’t there? Not simply atoms flying around in various configurations through empty space. I don’t know how to explain myself, really. But I feel that it does matter—not to hurt other people, even in one’s own self-interest. Felix of course agrees with this sentiment as far as it goes, and he points out (quite reasonably) that nobody goes around committing mass murders just because they don’t believe in God. But increasingly I think it’s because, in one way or another, they do believe in God—they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything. Goodness regardless of reward, regardless of our own desires, regardless of whether anyone is watching or anyone will know. If that’s God, then Felix says fine, it’s just a word, it means nothing. And of course it doesn’t mean heaven and angels and the resurrection of Christ—but maybe those things can help in some way to put us in touch with what it does mean. That most of our attempts throughout human history to describe the difference between right and wrong have been feeble and cruel and unjust, but that the difference still remains—beyond ourselves, beyond each specific culture, beyond every individual person who has ever lived or died. And we spend our lives trying to know that difference and to live by it, trying to love other people instead of hating them, and there is nothing else that matters on the earth.

  The book was proceeding by leaps before, but has now slowed to a kind of intermittent trickle. Naturally my sanguine temperament has prevented me from reading anything ominous into this turn of events. Haha! But really, I am trying not to go down that rabbit hole again this time—worrying that my brain has stopped working and that I’ll never write another novel. One day I’ll be right, and then I can’t imagine I’ll be glad that I spent so much time feeling anxious in advance. I know I am lucky in so many ways. And when I forget that, I just remind myself of the fact that Felix is alive, and you are, and Simon is, and then I feel wonderfully and almost frighteningly lucky, and I pray that nothing bad will ever happen to any of you. Now write back and tell me how you are.

  30.

  Alice—thank you so much for your notes—and the birthday gift, which arrived in a timely fashion and was characteristically generous!—and sorry for the short delay. I know you’ll forgive me, because I am writing with important and confidential news. Confidential for the moment, though, as you’ll soon figure out, not for long. The news is this: I’m pregnant. I found out for certain a few days ago by cutting a test out of its plastic packaging using a kitchen scissors and then urinating on it in the bathroom before Simon got home from a committee hearing he had to attend in person. When the test was positive I sat down at the kitchen table and started crying. I’m not really sure why. I can’t say I was shocked, because my doctor had taken me off the pill months ago, and my period was three weeks late. I won’t bore or embarrass you with any more specific details about how I came to be pregnant—I’m sure you cannot at this stage in our friendship be surprised by any irresponsible behaviours on my part, but suffice it to say that even Simon is only human. Anyway, I had no idea when he was going to get home from this hearing—in an hour, two hours, or maybe he would be really late and I’d be sitting there alone all evening in the apartment—and then just as I was thinking that, I heard his keys in the door. He came inside and saw me sitting at the table, doing nothing, and I asked him to sit with me. He stood there looking at me for what seemed like a long time, and then without speaking he came over and sat down. Even before I said anything, I knew that he knew. I told him I was pregnant, and he asked me what I wanted to do. As strange as this might sound, I hadn’t thought about that at all until he asked me. But only a few minutes had passed, really, and all I had thought about in that time was where he was—whether he was still at work or on his way back, whether he had stopped in a pharmacy or a supermarket—and how long it would take him to get home. When he asked me, I found it was easy to answer, I didn’t have to think about it. I told him I wanted to have the baby. He cried then and said he was very happy. And I believed him, because I was very happy too.

  Alice, is this the worst idea I’ve ever had? In one sense, maybe yes. If everything goes right with the pregnancy, the baby will probably be due around the start of July next year, at which point we may still be in lockdown, and I would have to give birth alone in a hospital ward during a global pandemic. Even shelving that more immediate concern, neither you nor I have any confidence that human civilisation as we know it is going to persist beyond our lifetimes. But then again, no matter what I do, hundreds of thousands of babies will be born on the same day as this hypothetical baby of mine. Their futures are surely just as important as the future of my hypothetical baby, who is distinguished only by its relationship to me and also to the man I love. I suppose I mean that children are coming anyway, and in the grand scheme of things it won’t matter much whether any of them are mine or his. We have to try either way to build a world they can live in. And I feel in a strange sense that I want to be on the children’s side, and on the side of their mothers; to be with them, not just an observer, admiring them from a distance, speculating about their best interests, but one of them. I’m not saying, by the way, that I think that’s important for everyone. I only think, and I can’t explain why, that it’s important for me. Also, I could not stomach the idea of having an abortion just because I’m afraid of climate change. For me (and maybe only for me) it would be a sort of sick, insane thing to do, a way of mutilating my real life as a gesture of submission to an imagined future. I don’t want to belong to a political movement that makes me view my own body with suspicion and terror. No matter what we think or fear about the future of civilisation, women all over the world will go on having babies, and I belong with them, and any child I might have belongs with their children. I know in a thin rationalist way that what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense. But I feel it, I feel it, and I know it to be true.

  The other question, which may seem to you even more pressing—I wish I knew what you thought! please write back quickly and tell me!—is whether I am fit to parent a child in the first place. On the one hand, I’m in good health, I have a supportive partner who loves me, we’re financially secure, I have great friends and family, I’m in my thirties. The circumstances are probably as good as they’re going to get. On the other hand, Simon and I have only been together for eighteen months (!), we live in a one-bed apartment, we don’t have a car, and I’m a huge idiot who recently broke down in tears because I couldn’t answer any of the starter questions on ‘University Challenge’. Is that appropriate behavioural modelling for a child? When I spend the day moving commas around and then cook dinner and then wash the dishes, and after this simple set of tasks I feel so tired I could physically sink through the floor and become one with the earth—is that the mentality of someone who’s ready to have a baby? I have talked with Simon about this, and he says feeling tired after dinner is probably normal in your thirties and nothing to worry about, and that ‘all women’ have crying spells, and although I know that’s not true, I do find his paternalistic beliefs about women charming. Sometimes I think he’s so perfectly suited to being a parent, so relaxed and dependable and good-humoured, that no matter how awful I am, the child will turn out fine anyway. And he loves so much the idea of us having a baby together—already I can tell how happy and proud he is, and how excited—and it’s so intoxicating to make him happy in that way. I find it hard to believe anything really bad about myself when I consider how much he loves me. I do try to remind myself that men can be foolish about women. But maybe he’s rig
ht—maybe I’m not so bad, maybe even a good person, and we’ll have a happy family together. Some people do, don’t they? Have happy families, I mean. I know you didn’t, and I didn’t. But Alice, I’m still so glad we were born. As for the apartment, Simon says not to worry about that, because we can just buy a house in a less expensive area. And of course, he has suggested again that we might think about getting married, if I want to …

  Can you imagine me, a mother, a married woman, owning a little terraced house somewhere in the Liberties? With crayon on the wallpaper and Lego bricks all over the floor. I’m laughing even typing that—you have to admit it doesn’t sound like me at all. But then, last year, I couldn’t really imagine myself as Simon’s girlfriend. I don’t just mean that it was hard to imagine what our families would say, or what our friends would think. I mean, I couldn’t imagine we were going to be happy together. I thought it would be the same as everything else in my life—difficult and sad—because I was a difficult and sad person. But that’s not what I am anymore, if I ever was. And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It’s not just one thing or another—it doesn’t get fixed into a groove called ‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end. But I really used to believe that it did. Every evening now when we’ve finished our work, Simon turns on the news while I cook dinner, or I turn on the news while he cooks dinner, and we talk about the latest public health guidance, and what’s been reported about what everyone is saying in cabinet and what Simon has privately heard everyone is actually saying in cabinet, and then we eat and wash up, and afterwards I read him a chapter of ‘David Copperfield’ while we lie on the couch, and then we look through the trailers on various streaming services for an hour until one or both of us falls asleep and then we go to bed. And in the morning I wake up feeling almost painfully happy. To live with someone I really love and respect, who really loves and respects me—what a difference it has made to my life. Of course everything is terrible at the moment, and I miss you ardently, and I miss my family, and I miss parties and book launches and going to the cinema, but all that really means is that I love my life, and I’m excited to have it back again, excited to feel that it’s going to continue, that new things will keep happening, that nothing is over yet.