Normal People(23)

Joanna wants to work in journalism, while Peggy doesn’t seem to want to work at all. So far this hasn’t been an issue for her, because she meets a lot of men who like to fund her lifestyle by buying her handbags and expensive drugs. She favours slightly older men who work for investment banks or accounting agencies, twenty-seven-year-olds with lots of money and sensible lawyer girlfriends at home. Joanna once asked Peggy if she ever thought she herself might one day be a twenty-seven-year-old whose boyfriend would stay out all night taking cocaine with a teenager. Peggy wasn’t remotely insulted, she thought it was really funny. She said she would be married to a Russian oligarch by then anyway and she didn’t care how many girlfriends he had. It makes Marianne wonder what she herself is going to do after college. Almost no paths seem definitively closed to her, not even the path of marrying an oligarch. When she goes out at night, men shout the most outrageously vulgar things at her on the street, so obviously they’re not ashamed to desire her, quite the contrary. And in college she often feels there’s no limit to what her brain can do, it can synthesise everything she puts into it, it’s like having a powerful machine inside her head. Really she has everything going for her. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.

In the shed, Peggy asked where Connell was.

Upstairs, said Marianne. With Teresa, I guess.

Connell has been casually seeing a friend of theirs called Teresa. Marianne has no real problem with Teresa, but finds herself frequently prompting Connell to say bad things about her for no reason, which he always refuses to do.

He wears nice clothes, volunteered Joanna.

Not really, said Peggy. I mean, he has a look, but it’s just tracksuits most of the time. I doubt he even owns a suit.

Joanna sought Marianne’s eye contact again, and this time Marianne returned it. Peggy, watching, took a performatively large mouthful of Cointreau and wiped her lips with the hand she was using to hold the bottle. What? she said.

Well, isn’t he from a fairly working-class background? said Joanna.

That’s so oversensitive, Peggy said. I can’t criticise someone’s dress sense because of their socio-economic status? Come on.

No, that’s not what she meant, said Marianne.

Because you know, we’re all actually very nice to him, said Peggy.

Marianne found she couldn’t look at either of her friends then. Who’s ‘we’? she wanted to say. Instead she took the bottle of Cointreau from Peggy’s hand and swallowed two mouthfuls, lukewarm and repulsively sweet.

Some time around two o’clock in the morning, after she had become extremely drunk and Peggy had convinced her to share a joint with her in the bathroom, she saw Connell on the third-storey landing. No one else was up there. Hey, he said. She leaned against the wall, drunk and wanting his attention. He was at the top of the stairs.

You’ve been off with Teresa, she said.

Have I? he said. That’s interesting. You’re completely out of it, are you?

You smell like perfume.

Teresa’s not here, said Connell. As in, she’s not at the party.

Then Marianne laughed. She felt stupid, but in a good way. Come here, she said. He came over to stand in front of her.

What? he said.

Do you like her better than me? said Marianne.

He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

No, he said. To be fair, I don’t know her very well.

But is she better in bed than I am?

You’re drunk, Marianne. If you were sober you wouldn’t even want to know the answer to that question.

So it’s not the answer I want, she said.

She was engaging in this dialogue in a basically linear fashion, while at the same time trying to unbutton one of Connell’s shirt buttons, not even in a sexy way, but just because she was so drunk and high. Also she hadn’t managed to fully undo the button yet.

No, of course it’s the answer you want, he said.

Then she kissed him. He didn’t recoil like he was horrified, but he did pull away pretty firmly and said: No, come on.

Let’s go upstairs, she said.

Yeah. We actually are upstairs.

I want you to fuck me.

He made a kind of frowning expression, which if she had been sober would have induced her to pretend she had only been joking.

Not tonight, he said. You’re wasted.

Is that the only reason?

He looked down at her. She repressed a comment she had been saving up about the shape of his mouth, how perfect it was, because she wanted him to answer the question.

Yeah, he said. That’s it.

So you otherwise would do it.

You should go to bed.

I’ll give you drugs, she said.

You don’t even— Marianne, you don’t even have drugs. That’s just one level of what’s wrong with what you’re saying. Go to bed.

Just kiss me.

He kissed her. It was a nice kiss, but friendly. Then he said goodnight and went downstairs lightly, with his light sober body walking in straight lines. Marianne went to find a bathroom, where she drank straight from the tap until her head stopped hurting and afterwards fell asleep on the bathroom floor. That’s where she woke up twenty minutes ago when Connell asked one of the girls to find her.

*



Now he’s flipping through the radio stations while they wait at a set of traffic lights. He finds a Van Morrison song and leaves it playing.