by Sally Rooney
I didn’t know what to say. I shook my head or shrugged. I didn’t know you were feeling like that, I said.
No, well, I didn’t want you to know. I wanted to be like this cool person you thought I was. I know sometimes you felt like I wasn’t expressive enough. It was hard for me. That probably sounds like I’m making excuses.
I tried to smile back, I shook my head again. No, I said. We let a little pause form between us.
I was so cruel sometimes, I said. I feel horrible about that now.
Oh no, don’t be hard on yourself.
I stared at the tabletop. We were both quiet then. I finished my glass of Coke. He folded up his napkin and put it on his plate.
After a while, he told me that was the first time he had ever told the story of that year and what had happened. He said he had never actually heard the story from his own point of view before, because he was used to Melissa telling it, and of course their versions were different. It feels strange, he said, hearing myself talk about it like I was the main character. It almost feels like I’m lying, although I think everything I said was true. But Melissa would tell it differently.
I like the way you tell it, I said. Do you still want to have children?
Sure, but it’s off the table now I think.
You don’t know. You’re young.
He coughed. He seemed on the point of saying something and then he didn’t. He watched me sipping my Coke and I looked back up at him.
I think you’d be a great parent, I said. You have a kind nature. You’re very loving.
He made a funny, surprised face, then exhaled through his mouth.
That’s intense, he said. Thank you for saying that. I have to laugh now or I’m going to start crying.
We finished our food and left the restaurant. Once we crossed Dame Street and got down to the quays, Nick said: we should go away together. For a weekend or something, would you like that? I asked where and he said, what about Venice? I laughed. He put his hands in his pockets, he was laughing too, I think because he was pleased at the idea of us going away together, or just that he had made me smile.
That was when I heard my mother. I heard her say: well, hello, missus. And there she was on the street in front of us. She had a Bally black winter coat on, and a beanie hat with the Adidas logo. I remember Nick was wearing his beautiful grey overcoat. He and my mother looked like characters from different films, made by totally dissimilar directors.
I didn’t realise you were coming up tonight, I said.
I’ve just this minute parked the car, she said. I’m meeting your auntie Bernie for dinner.
Oh, this is my friend Nick, I said. Nick, this is my mother.
I could only glance at him quickly, but I saw that he was smiling and he held out his hand.
The famous Nick, she said. I’ve heard all about you.
Well, likewise, he said.
She did mention you were handsome all right.
Mum, for God’s sake, I said.
But I had you pictured older, said my mother. You’re only a young fellow.
He laughed and said he was flattered. They shook hands again, she told me she would see me the next morning, and we parted. It was the first of November. Lights sparkled on the river and buses ran past like boxes of light, carrying faces in the windows.
I turned to look at Nick, who had his hands back in his pockets. That was nice, he said. And no pointed remarks about me being married, that’s a bonus.
I smiled. She’s a cool lady, I said.
*
When I got home that night, Bobbi was in the living room. She was sitting at the table, staring at a print-out which was stapled together in one corner. Nick had gone back to Monkstown and said he would email me later about Venice. Bobbi’s teeth were chattering faintly. She didn’t look at me when I came in, which gave me a weird sensation of disappearance, like I was already dead.
Bobbi? I said.
Melissa sent it to me.
She held up the print-out. I could see it was double-spaced, with long paragraphs like an essay.
Sent you what? I said.
For a second she laughed, or maybe exhaled a breath she had been holding very tightly, and then she threw the pages at me. I caught them awkwardly against my chest. Looking down I saw the words printed in a light sans-serif font. My words. It was my story.
Bobbi, I said.
Were you ever going to tell me?
I stood there. My eyes ran over the lines I could see at the top of the page, the page where I described myself getting sick at a house party without Bobbi when I was still a teenager.
I’m sorry, I said.
Sorry for what? said Bobbi. I’m so curious. Sorry for writing it? I doubt you are.
No. I don’t know.
It’s funny. I think I’ve learned more about your feelings in the last twenty minutes than in the last four years.
I felt light-headed, staring down at the manuscript until the words wriggled like insects. It was the first draft, the one I had sent to Valerie. She must have let Melissa read it.
It’s fictionalised, I said.
Bobbi stood up from her chair and looked my body up and down critically. A strange energy wound itself up in my chest, as if we were going to fight.
I heard you’re getting good money for it, she said.
Yeah.
Fuck you.
I actually need the money, I said. I realise that’s an alien concept for you, Bobbi.
She grabbed the pages out of my hands then, and the back of the staple tugged against my index finger and broke the skin. She held the manuscript in front of me.
You know, she said. It’s actually a good story.
Thanks.
Then she tore the pages in half, threw them in the trash and said: I don’t want to live with you any more. She packed up her things that night. I sat in my room listening. I heard her wheel the suitcase out into the hall. I heard her close the door.
*
The next morning my mother picked me up outside the apartment building. I got into the car and strapped my seat belt on. She had the classical station on the radio, but she turned it off when I shut the door. It was eight in the morning and I complained about having to get up so early.
Oh, I’m sorry, she said. We could have given the hospital a ring and arranged for you to have a lie-in, would that have been better?
I thought the scan was tomorrow.
It’s this afternoon.
Fuck, I said mildly.
She placed a litre bottle of water on my lap and said: you can start that any time you like. I unscrewed the cap. No preparation was necessary for the scan except drinking a lot of water, but I still felt like the whole thing had been thrown at me unexpectedly. We didn’t speak for a while, and then my mother glanced at me sideways.
It was funny meeting you like that yesterday, she said. You looked like a real young lady.
As opposed to what?
She didn’t answer at first, we were going round a roundabout. I stared out the windscreen at the passing cars.
You looked very elegant together, she said. Like film stars.
Oh, that’s Nick. He’s just glamorous.
My mother reached suddenly and grabbed my hand. The car was stopped in traffic. Her grip was tighter than I expected, almost hard. Mum, I said. Then she let me go. She tidied her hair back with her fingers and then settled her hands on the steering wheel.
You’re a wild woman, she said.
I learned from the best.
She laughed. Oh, I’m afraid I’m no match for you, Frances. You’ll have to figure things out all on your own.
27
In the hospital I was advised to drink even more water, so much that I was in active discomfort while sitting in the waiting room. The place was busy. My mother bought me a bar of chocolate from the vending machine and I sat there tapping my pen against the front cover of Middlemarch, which I had to read for a class on the English novel. The cover
depicted a sad-eyed lady from Victorian times doing something with flowers. I doubted Victorian women actually touched flowers as often as art from the period suggested they did.
While I was waiting, a man came in with two little girls, one of them in a pushchair. The older girl climbed onto the seat next to me and leaned over her father’s shoulder to say something, although he wasn’t listening. The girl wriggled around to get his attention, so her light-up sneakers pushed against my handbag and then my arm. When her father finally turned around he said: Rebecca, look what you’re doing! You’re kicking that woman’s arm! I tried to catch his eye and say: it’s fine, it’s no problem. But he didn’t look at me. To him, my arm was not important. He was only concerned with making his child feel bad, making her feel ashamed. I thought about the way Nick handled his little dog whom he loved so much, and then I stopped thinking about it.
The registrar called me up and I went into a little room with an ultrasound machine and a medical couch covered in white filmy paper. The technician asked me to get onto the couch and she rolled some gel onto a plastic instrument while I lay there looking at the ceiling. The room was dim, evocatively dim, as if it contained a hidden pool of water somewhere. We chatted, I don’t remember about what. I had the sense that my voice was coming from somewhere else, like a small radio I kept in my mouth.
The technician pressed the plastic thing down hard into my lower abdomen then, and I stared upward and tried not to make any noise. My eyes were watering. I felt like at any moment she was going to show me a grainy image of a foetus and say something about a heartbeat, and I would nod wisely. The idea of making images of a uterus that had nothing in it struck me as sad, like photographing an abandoned house.
After it was over I thanked her. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands a number of times under the hot hospital taps. I may have scalded them a little, since my skin came up very pink and the tips of my fingers looked slightly swollen. Then I went back to wait for the consultant to call me. Rebecca and her family were gone.
The consultant was a man in his sixties. He squinted up at me as if I’d disappointed him in some way and then told me to sit down. He was looking at a folder with some writing in it. I sat on a hard plastic chair and looked at my fingernails. My hands were definitely scalded. He asked me some questions about the time I had been admitted to the hospital in August, what my symptoms were, and what the gynaecologist had said, and then asked more general questions about my menstrual cycle and sexual activity. While he asked these questions he was flipping sort of non-committally through his folder. Eventually he looked up at me.
Well, your ultrasound is clear, he said. No fibroids, no cysts, nothing like that. So that’s the good news.
What’s the other news?
He smiled, but it was a weird smile, as if he was admiring me for being brave. I swallowed, and I knew that I had made a mistake.
The doctor told me that I had a problem with the lining of my uterus, which meant that cells from inside the uterus were growing elsewhere in my body. He said these cells were benign, meaning non-cancerous, but the condition itself was incurable and in some cases progressive. It had a long name which I had never heard before: endometriosis. He called it a ‘difficult’ and ‘unpredictable’ diagnosis, which could only be confirmed with exploratory keyhole surgery. But it fits with all your symptoms, he said. And as many as one in ten women suffer from it. I sort of chewed on my scalded thumb and said things like, hm. He said there were some surgical interventions possible but they were only recommended in particularly severe cases. I wondered if that meant I wasn’t a severe case, or just that they didn’t know yet.
He told me that the primary problem for sufferers was ‘pain management’. He said that patients often experienced pain during ovulation, menstrual pain, and discomfort during sexual intercourse. I bit down into the side of my thumbnail and started to peel it away from my skin. The idea that sex could hurt me felt apocalyptically cruel. The doctor said ‘we’ wanted to prevent the pain from becoming debilitating or ‘reaching the level of disability’. My jaw started to hurt and I wiped at my nose mechanically.
The secondary problem he said was ‘the issue of fertility’. I recall these words very clearly. I said, oh, really? Unfortunately, he said, the condition does leave many women infertile, that’s one of our biggest concerns. But then he talked about IVF treatments and how rapidly they were advancing. I nodded with my thumb in my mouth. Then I blinked several times quickly, as if I could blink the thought out of my mind, or blink the entire hospital away.
After that the consultation was over. I went back out to the waiting room and saw my mother reading my copy of Middlemarch. She was only about ten pages in. I went to stand beside her and she looked up at me with an expectant face.
Oh, she said. There you are. What did the doctor say?
Something seemed to close up over my body, like a hand held hard over my mouth or my eyes. I couldn’t begin to phrase the explanation of what the doctor had told me, because there were so many parts to it, and it would take so long, and involve so many individual words and sentences. The thought of saying so many words about it made me feel physically sick. Out loud I heard myself say: oh, he said the ultrasound was clear.
So they don’t know what it is? my mother said.
Let’s get in the car.
We went out to the car and I strapped my seat belt on. I’ll explain more when we get home, I thought. I’ll have more time to think about it when we’re home. She started the engine and I ran my fingers through a knot in my hair, feeling it stretch and then give way, the little pieces of dark hair snapping off and falling away through my hand. My mother was asking questions again and I could feel my mouth formulating responses.
It’s just bad period pain, I said. He says it’ll get better now that I’m on the pill.
She said oh. Well. That’s a relief then, isn’t it? You must be feeling good about that. I wanted to be hard and frictionless. I produced some kind of facial expression by reflex and she indicated left out of the car park.
When we got back home I went up to my room to wait for the train while my mother stayed downstairs tidying up. I could hear her putting away pots and pans into kitchen drawers. I got into bed and looked at the internet for a while, where I found a number of health features on women’s websites about this incurable disease I had. Usually these took the form of interviews with people whose lives had been destroyed by suffering. There were a lot of stock photographs of white women looking out windows with concerned expressions, sometimes with a hand on their abdomen to indicate pain. I also found some online communities where people shared gruesome after-surgery images with questions like ‘how long should it take for hydronephrosis to improve once a stent is in place?’ I viewed this information as dispassionately as possible.
When I had read as much of this as I could, I closed my laptop and took the little bible out of my bag. I turned to the part of Mark where Jesus says: Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague. All sick people were good for in the Bible was to be healed by people who were well. But Jesus didn’t really know anything, and neither did I. Even if I had any faith, it wasn’t going to make me whole. There was no use thinking about it.
My phone started to ring then and I saw it was Nick calling. I picked up and we said hello. Then he said: hey, I should probably tell you something. I asked what, and there was a short but perceptible pause before he spoke again.
So, Melissa and I have started sleeping together again, he said. I feel weird telling you about it on the phone, but then I also feel weird keeping it from you. I don’t know.
At this I lifted the phone away from my face, slowly, and looked at it. It was just an object, it didn’t mean anything. I could hear Nick say: Frances? But I could only hear it faintly, and it was like any other sound. I put the phone down carefully onto my bedside table, though I didn’t hang up. Nick’s voice became a kind of buzzing noise, with no
identifiable words in it. I sat on my bed breathing in and out very slowly, so slowly I almost wasn’t breathing at all.
Then I picked the phone up and said: hello?
Hey, Nick said. Are you there? I think the signal did something weird just now.
No, I’m here. I heard you.
Oh. Are you all right? You sound upset.
I closed my eyes. When I spoke I could hear my voice thinning out and hardening like ice.
About you and Melissa? I said. Be real, Nick.
But you did want me to tell you, didn’t you?
Sure.
I just don’t want things to change between us, he said.
Relax about it.
I could hear him breathe in apprehensively. He wanted to reassure me, I could tell, but I wasn’t going to let him. People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy, I knew all about that.
How are you otherwise? he said. That scan is happening tomorrow, right?
Only then I remembered that I had given him the wrong date. He hadn’t forgotten, it was my mistake. He had probably set a reminder on his phone for the next day: ask Frances how the scan went.
Right, I said. I’ll let you know about it. The other phone is ringing so I’m going to go, but I’ll give you a call after the thing.
Yeah, do that. I hope it goes okay. You’re not worried about it, are you? I guess you don’t worry about things.
I held the back of my hand to my face silently. My body felt cold like an inanimate object.
No, that’s your job, I said. Talk soon, okay?
Okay. Keep in touch.
I hung up the phone. After that I put some cold water on my face and dried it, the same face I had always had, the one I would have until I died.
*
On the way to the station that evening my mother kept glancing at me, as if something about my behaviour was off-putting, and she wanted to reprimand me for it but couldn’t decide what it was. Eventually she told me to take my feet off the dashboard, which I did.
You must be relieved, she said.
