by Sally Rooney
That was very thoughtful of you, mother.
Well, I wouldn’t like to think it has anything to do with him.
I said the food was nice, and that I appreciated her fixing it for me.
Do you hear me talking to you, Frances? she said.
I don’t feel up to this, I really don’t.
We finished the meal in silence. I went upstairs afterwards and looked at my arm in the mirror, where I’d pinched it. It was red and a little swollen and when I touched it, it stung.
*
I stayed at home for the next few days, lying around and reading. I had a lot of academic reading I could have been doing in advance of the college term, but instead what I started reading was the gospels. For some reason my mother had left a small leather-bound copy of the New Testament on the bookshelf in my room, sandwiched between Emma and an anthology of early American writing. I read online that you were supposed to start with Mark and then read the other gospels in this order: Matthew, then John, then Luke. I got through Mark pretty quickly. It was divided up into very small parts which made it easy to read, and I noted down interesting passages in a red notebook. Jesus didn’t talk very much during Mark’s gospel, which made me more interested in reading the others.
I’d hated religion as a child. My mother had taken me to Mass every Sunday until I was fourteen, but she didn’t believe in God and treated Mass as a social ritual in advance of which she made me wash my hair. Still, I came at the Bible from the perspective that Jesus was probably philosophically sound. As it turned out I found a lot of what he said cryptic and even disagreeable. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him, I didn’t like that, though I also wasn’t sure I fully understood it. In Matthew there was a passage where the Pharisees were asking Jesus about marriage, which I was reading at eight or nine in the evening, while my mother was looking at the papers. Jesus said that in marriage, man and wife are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate. I felt pretty low when I read that. I put away the Bible, but it didn’t help.
The day after the hospital I’d received an email from Nick.
hey. sorry about how i acted on the phone last night. i was just afraid someone had seen your name come up on the screen and it would become a thing. anyway no one saw and i told them it was my mother calling (let’s not get too psychological about that). i did notice you sounded weird though. is everything ok?
ps everyone tells me that i’ve been in a bad mood since you left. also evelyn thinks i’m ‘pining’ for you, which is awkward.
I read it many times but didn’t reply. The next morning the letter from the hospital arrived, scheduling the ultrasound for some time in November. I thought it seemed like a long time to wait, but my mother said that was public health care for you. But they don’t know what’s wrong with me, I said. She told me that if it was anything serious they never would have discharged me. I didn’t know about that. Anyway I filled out my prescription for the pill and started taking it.
I called my father a couple of times, but he didn’t pick up the phone or return my calls. My mother suggested I could ‘drop by’ his house, on the other side of town. I said I was still feeling ill and that I didn’t want to walk over for nothing, since he wasn’t answering his phone. In response she just said: he’s your father. It was like some kind of mantric prayer with her. I let the issue go. He wasn’t in touch.
My mother hated the way I talked about my father, like he was just another normal person rather than my distinguished personal benefactor, or a minor celebrity. This irritation was directed toward me, but it was also a symptom of her disappointment that my father had failed to earn the respect she wanted me to give him. I knew she’d had to sleep with her purse tucked inside her pillowcase when they were married. I’d found her crying the time he fell asleep on the stairs in his underwear. I saw him lying there, gigantic and pink, his head cradled in one of his arms. He was snoring like it was the best sleep of his life. She couldn’t understand that I didn’t love him. You must love him, she told me when I was sixteen. He’s your father.
Who says I have to love him? I said.
Well, I want to believe you’re the kind of person who loves her own parents.
Believe what you want.
I believe I raised you to be kind to others, she said. That’s what I believe.
Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.
I found a video of the documentary that Bobbi had mentioned in France, a 1992 TV production called Kid Genius! Nick wasn’t the primary kid genius on the programme, there were six featured children, each with different areas of interest. I skipped until I found some footage of Nick looking at books, while a voiceover explained that at the age of only ten, ‘Nicholas’ had read several significant works of ancient philosophy and written essays on metaphysics. As a child Nick was very thin like a stick insect. The first shot showed a gigantic family home in Dalkey, with two imposing cars parked outside. Later in the show Nick appeared with a blue backdrop behind him and a female interviewer asked him questions about Platonic idealism, which he answered competently, without seeming haughty. At one point the interviewer asked: What makes you love the ancient world so much? And Nick cast his eyes around nervously like he was looking for his parents. Well, I don’t love it, he said. I just study it. You don’t see yourself as a budding philosopher king? the interviewer said humorously. No, Nick said very seriously. He tugged on the sleeve of his blazer. He was still looking around like he expected someone to appear and help him. That would be my worst nightmare, he said. The interviewer laughed, and Nick relaxed visibly. Women laughing always relaxed him, I thought.
A few days after the hospital I called Bobbi to ask if we were still friends. I could feel my voice getting stupid when I asked her, though I was trying to make it sound like a joke. I thought you were going to call me the other night, she said. I was in hospital, I told her. My tongue felt huge and traitorous in my mouth.
What do you mean? she said.
I explained what had happened.
They thought you were miscarrying a pregnancy, she said. That’s kind of intense, isn’t it?
Is it? I don’t know, I didn’t know what to feel about it.
She sighed audibly into the receiver. I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect. I panicked, I wanted to tell her. I started thinking about the heat death of the universe again. I called Nick and then hung up on him. But these were all things I did because I thought something was happening to me which turned out not to happen. The idea of the baby, with all its huge emotional gravity and its potential for lasting grief, had disappeared into nothing. I had never been pregnant. It was impossible, maybe even offensive, to grieve a pregnancy that had never happened, even though the emotions I’d felt had still been real at the time that I felt them. In the past Bobbi had been receptive to my analyses of my own misery, but this time I couldn’t trust myself to deliver the argument without weeping into the phone.
I’m sorry that you feel like I lied to you about Nick, I said.
You’re sorry that I feel that way, okay.
It was just complicated.
Yeah, Bobbi said. I guess extramarital relationships can be.
Are you still my friend?
Yes. So when are you getting this ultrasound thing?
I told her November. I also told her about the doctor asking about unprotected sex, which made her snort. I was sitting on my bed, with my feet under the coverlet. In the mirro
r on the other wall I could see my left hand, my free hand, moving nervously up and down the seam of a pillowcase. I dropped it and watched it lie dead on the quilt.
Still, I can’t believe Nick would try to get away with not using a condom, Bobbi said. That’s fucked up.
I mumbled something defensive like: oh, we didn’t … you know, it wasn’t really …
I’m not blaming you, she said. I’m surprised at him, that’s all.
I tried to think of something to say. None of the idiotic things we did felt like they were Nick’s fault because he always just followed along with what I suggested.
It was probably my idea, I said.
You sound brainwashed when you talk like that.
No, but he’s actually very passive.
Right, but he could have said no, Bobbi said. Maybe he just likes to act passive so he doesn’t have to take the blame for anything.
In the mirror I noticed that my hand had started doing the thing again. This wasn’t the conversation I was trying to have.
You’re making him sound very calculating, I said.
I didn’t mean he was doing it consciously. Have you told him you were in hospital?
I said no. I felt my mouth opening again to explain about the phone call when he accused me of being drunk, then I decided against telling her, instead pronouncing the phrase: yeah, no.
But you’re close with him, she said. You tell him things.
I don’t know. I don’t know really how close we are.
Well, you tell him more than you tell me.
No, I said. Less than you. He probably thinks I never tell him anything.
That night I decided to start reading over my old instant message conversations with Bobbi. I’d taken on a similar project once before, shortly after our break-up, and now I had whole additional years of messages to read. It comforted me to know that my friendship with Bobbi wasn’t confined to memory alone, and that textual evidence of her past fondness for me would survive her actual fondness if necessary. This had been foremost in my mind at the time of the break-up also, for obvious reasons. It was important to me that Bobbi would never be able to deny that at one point she had liked me very much.
This time I downloaded our exchanges as one huge text file with time stamps. I told myself it was too large to read from start to finish, and it also didn’t take a coherent narrative shape, so I decided to read it by searching for particular words or phrases and reading around them. The first one I tried was ‘love’, which brought up the following exchange, from six months previously:
Bobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon
Bobbi: and try to understand it as a social value system
Bobbi: it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness
Bobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequality
Bobbi: and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatory
Bobbi: i.e. mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive
Bobbi: which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level
Bobbi: and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free
me: yes
me: capitalism harnesses ‘love’ for profit
me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect
me: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as such
Bobbi: that’s vapid frances
Bobbi: you have to do more than say you’re anti things
I got out of bed after I read that exchange and stripped my clothes off to look in the mirror. Periodically I found myself doing this out of a kind of compulsion, though nothing about me ever seemed to change. My hip bones still jutted out unattractively on either side of my pelvis, and my abdomen was still hard and round to the touch. I looked like something that had dropped off a spoon too quickly, before it had time to set. My shoulders were freckled with broken, violet-coloured capillaries. For a while I stood there just looking at myself and feeling my repulsion get deeper and deeper, as if I was experimenting to see how much I could feel. Eventually I heard a ringing noise in my bag and went to try and find it.
When I retrieved my phone it said I’d missed a call from my father. I tried calling back but he didn’t answer. By then I was getting cold so I put all my clothes back on and went downstairs to tell my mother I was going to drop by my father’s house. She was sitting at the table reading the paper; she didn’t look up. Good woman, she said. Tell him I was asking after him.
I walked the same old route through town. I hadn’t brought a jacket, and at his house I rang the doorbell and jogged from foot to foot to warm myself up. My breath fogged the glass. I rang again and nothing happened. When I opened the door, I could hear nothing inside the house. The hall smelt of damp and of something worse than damp too, something slightly sour. A refuse sack was tied up and abandoned under the hall table. I called my father’s name: Dennis?
I could see the light was on inside the kitchen so I pushed open the door and reflexively lifted a hand against my face. The smell was so rancid that it felt physical, like heat or touch. Several half-eaten meals had accumulated around the table and countertops, in various states of decay, surrounded by dirty tissues and empty bottles. The fridge door was ajar, leaking a triangle of yellow light onto the floor. A bluebottle crawled along a knife which had been abandoned in a large jar of mayonnaise, and four others were batting themselves against the kitchen window. In the bin I could see a handful of white maggots, writhing blindly like boiling rice. I stepped backwards out of the room and closed the door.
In the hallway I tried calling Dennis’s phone again. He didn’t answer. Standing in his house was like watching someone familiar smile at me, but with missing teeth. I wanted to hurt myself again, in order to feel returned to the safety of my own physical body. Instead I turned around and walked out. I pulled my sleeve over my hand to shut the door.
20
My internship in the agency ended formally at the start of September. We each had one last meeting with Sunny, to talk about our plans for the future and what we’d learned from our experiences, though I didn’t foresee having anything to say about any of that. I came into her office on my last day and she asked me to close the door and sit down.
Well, you don’t want to work in a literary agency, she said.
I smiled like she was joking, while she looked at some papers and then put them aside. She put her elbows up on her desk, holding her chin in her hands contemplatively.
I wonder about you, she said. You don’t seem to have a plan.
Yeah, that’s something I definitely don’t have.
You’re just hoping to fall on your feet.
I looked out the window behind her onto the beautiful Georgian buildings and the buses passing. It was raining again.
Tell me about the holiday, she said. How is Melissa’s piece coming on?
I told her about Étables, about Derek, whom Sunny knew, and about Valerie, whom she had heard of. Sunny called her a ‘formidable woman’. I grimaced a little bit and we laughed. I realised that I didn’t want to leave Sunny’s office, that I felt as if I was letting go of something I wasn’t finished with.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, I said.
She nodded and then gave an expressive, accepting shrug.
Well, your reports were always very good, she said. If you ever want a reference you know where to find me. And I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.
Thank you, I said. For everything.
She gave me one last sympathetic or despairing look and then went back to the papers on her desk. She told me I could call Philip in on my way out. I did.
*
That night in my apartment I was up late tinkering with commas in a long poem I was working on. I saw Nick was online and I sent him a message: hello. I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking peppermint tea because the milk in the fridge was sour. He replied, asking if I’d
received his email five days ago and I said yes, and not to worry about the awkward phone call. I didn’t want to tell him I had been in hospital, or why. It was a story with no conclusion, and anyway it was embarrassing. He told me they were all missing Bobbi and me over in France.
me: equally?
Nick: haha
Nick: well maybe i miss you like, slightly more
me: thanks
Nick: yeah i keep waking up at night when i hear people on the stairs
Nick: and then i remember you’re gone
Nick: crushing disappointment
I laughed to myself although there was no one there to see me. I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document which we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand. I liked to feel that he was my collaborator. I liked to think of him waking up at night and thinking of me.
me: that’s actually very cute
me: I miss your sweet handsome face
Nick: i wanted to send you a song earlier because it reminded me of you
Nick: but i anticipated your sarcastic reply and chickened out
me: hahaha
me: please send it!
me: I promise not to be sarcastic
Nick: would it be ok if i called you on the phone
Nick: ive been drinking and the effort of typing is killing me
me: oh you’re drunk, is that why you’re being nice
Nick: i think john keats had a name for women like you
Nick: a french name
Nick: you see where i’m going with this
me: please call
He called me. He didn’t really sound drunk on the phone, he sounded sleepy in a nice way. We said again that we missed one another. I held the cup of peppermint tea in my fingers, feeling it get cool. Nick apologised again about the phone call the other night. I’m a bad person, he said. I told him not to say that. No, I’m bad, he said. I’m a bad guy. He told me about what they’d been up to in Étables, about the weather, and some castle they went to visit. I told him about my internship finishing up, and he said I had never seemed invested in it anyway. Maybe I was distracted by drama in my personal life, I said.
