Conversations with Friends(54)

What are you doing? he said.

I think I should go.

He said okay. I pulled on my cardigan and stood up from the bed. I knew what I was going to tell him, the most desperate thing I could possibly tell him, as if even in the depths of my indignity I craved something worse.

The problem isn’t that you’re married, I said. The problem is that I love you and you obviously don’t love me.

He took a deep breath in and said: you’re being unbelievably dramatic, Frances.

Fuck you, I said.

I slammed his bedroom door hard on my way out. He shouted something at me on my way down the stairs but I didn’t hear what it was. I walked to the bus stop, knowing that my humiliation was now complete. Even though I had known Nick didn’t love me, I had continued to let him have sex with me whenever he wanted, out of desperation and a naive hope that he didn’t understand what he was inflicting on me. Now even that hope was gone. He knew that I loved him, that he was exploiting my tender feelings for him, and he didn’t care. There was nothing to be done. On the bus home I chewed the inside of my cheek and stared out the black window until I tasted blood.





23




When I tried to withdraw some cash for food on Monday morning, the ATM said I had insufficient funds. I was standing in the rain on Thomas Street with a canvas bag under my arm, feeling a pain behind my eyes. I tried the card again, though a small queue had formed and I could hear someone quietly call me a ‘fucking tourist’. The machine wheeled my card back out with a clicking noise.

I walked to the bank holding the canvas bag over my hair. Inside I stood in a line with people in business suits while a cool female voice announced things like: counter four, please. When I got to one of the windows, the boy behind the glass asked me to insert my card. His name badge read ‘Darren’ and he looked like he had not quite entered adolescence. After looking at the computer screen quickly, Darren said I was thirty-six euro in overdraft.

Sorry? I said. Excuse me, sorry, what?

He turned the screen around and showed me the most recent figures from the account: twenty-euro notes I had taken out of ATMs, coffees I had paid for by card. No money had come in for over a month. I felt the blood drain out of my face, and I distinctly remember thinking: this child who works in the bank thinks I’m stupid now.

Sorry, I said.

Were you expecting a payment into the account?

Yeah. Sorry.

It could take three to five working days for the payment to come through, Darren said kindly. Depending on how it was lodged.

I saw my own reflected outline in the glass window, pale and unpleasant.

Thanks, I said. I see what’s happened there. Thank you.

When I walked out of the bank, I stood outside the doors and dialled my father’s number. He didn’t pick up. I called my mother, still standing there in the street, and she answered. I told her what had happened.

Dad told me he paid my allowance, I said.

He must have just forgotten, love.

But he called me and told me that he did it.

Have you tried calling him? she said.

He won’t answer.

Well, I can help you out, she said. I’ll put fifty in your account this afternoon while you’re waiting to hear back from him. All right?

I was about to explain that once the overdraft was paid, that would only make up fourteen euro, but I didn’t.

Thanks, I said.

Don’t you worry.

We hung up.

When I got home I had an email from Valerie. She reminded me that she was interested in reading my work and said Melissa had passed on my email address. That I had managed to leave any lasting impact on Valerie filled me with a sense of spiteful triumph. Although she had ignored me at dinner, I was now the interesting thing she wanted to unravel. In this triumphantly recriminatory mood, I sent her the new story, without even looking it over again for typos. The world was like a crumpled ball of newspaper to me, something to kick around.

That evening the sickness started to happen again. I’d finished my second sheet of pills two days before, and when I sat down to eat dinner the food felt gluey and wrong in my mouth. I scraped my plate into the bin but the smell turned my stomach and I started to sweat. My back hurt and I could feel my mouth watering. When I pressed the back of my hand against my forehead it felt damp and scalding. It was happening again, I knew that, but I could do nothing.

At about 4 a.m. I went to the bathroom to get sick. Once my stomach was empty I lay on the bathroom floor shivering, while the pain moved up my spine like an animal. I thought: maybe I’ll die, who cares? I was conscious that I was bleeding copiously. When I felt well enough to crawl, I crawled to bed. I saw that Nick had sent me a text in the middle of the night saying: i tried calling you, can we talk? I knew that he didn’t want to see me any more. He was a patient person and I had exhausted the patience. I hated the terrible things I had said to him, I hated what they revealed about me. I wanted him to be cruel now, because I deserved it. I wanted him to say the most vicious things he could think of, or shake me until I couldn’t breathe.

The pain was still there in the morning but I decided to go to class anyway. I took a minor overdose of paracetamol and wrapped up in a coat before leaving the house. It rained all the way into college. I sat at the back of the classroom shivering and set up a stopwatch on my laptop to tell me when I could take my next dose. Several fellow students asked if I was okay, and after class even the lecturer asked me. He seemed nice, so I told him I had missed a lot of classes for medical reasons and now I wasn’t allowed to miss any more. He looked at me and said: oh. I smiled winningly despite the shivering and then my alarm went off to tell me I could have more paracetamol.