Normal People(57)

The night of the funeral he and Helen lay in his room in the dark, not sleeping. Helen asked him why he hadn’t introduced her to any of his friends. She was whispering so as not to wake Lorraine.

I introduced you to Eric, didn’t I? Connell said.

Only after he asked. To be honest, you didn’t seem like you really wanted him to meet me.

Connell closed his eyes. It was a funeral, he said. You know, someone just died. I don’t think it’s really a good occasion for meeting people.

Well, if you didn’t want me to come you shouldn’t have asked me, she said.

He breathed in and out slowly. Okay, he said. I’m sorry I asked you, then.

She sat upright in bed beside him. What does that mean? she said. You’re sorry I was there?

No, I’m saying if I gave you the wrong impression about what it was going to be like, then I’m sorry.

You didn’t want me there at all, did you?

I didn’t want to be there myself, to be honest, he said. I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time, but like, it was a funeral. I don’t know what you expected.

She breathed in quickly through her nose, he could hear it.

You weren’t ignoring Marianne, she said.

I wasn’t ignoring anyone.

But you seemed particularly happy to see her, wouldn’t you say?

For fuck’s sake, Helen, he said quietly.

What?

How does every argument come back to this? Our friend just killed himself and you want to start in with me about Marianne, seriously? Like, yeah, I was glad to see her, does that make me a monster?

When Helen spoke it was in a low hiss. I’ve been very sympathetic about your friend and you know that, she said. But what do you expect me to do, just pretend I don’t notice that you’re staring at another woman in front of me?

I was not staring at her.

You were, in the church.

Well, it wasn’t intentional, he said. Believe me, it was not a very sexy atmosphere for me in the church, okay? You can trust me on that.

Why do you have to act so weird around her?

He frowned, still lying with his eyes shut, face turned to the ceiling. How I act with her is my normal personality, he said. Maybe I’m just a weird person.

Helen said nothing. Eventually she just lay back down beside him. Two weeks later it was over, they broke up. By then Connell was so exhausted and miserable he couldn’t even summon up a response. Things happened to him, like the crying fits, the panic attacks, but they seemed to descend on him from outside, rather than emanating from somewhere inside himself. Internally he felt nothing. He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid. Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.

*



Yvonne nods slowly, moving her mouth around in a sympathetic way. Do you feel you’ve made friends here in Dublin? she says. Anyone you’re close with, that you might talk to about how you’re feeling?

My friend Niall, maybe. He was the one who told me about this whole thing.

The college counselling service.

Yeah, says Connell.

Well, that’s good. He’s looking out for you. Niall, okay. And he’s here in Trinity as well.

Connell coughs, clearing the dry feeling from his throat, and says: Yeah. I have another friend who I would be pretty close with, but she’s on Erasmus this year.

A friend from college?

Well, we went to school together but she’s in Trinity now as well. Marianne. She would have known Rob and everything. Our friend who died. But she’s away this year, like I said.

He watches Yvonne write down the name on her notepad, the tall slopes of the capital ‘M’. He talks to Marianne almost every night on Skype now, sometimes after dinner or sometimes late when she comes home from a night out. They’ve never talked about what happened in Italy. He’s grateful that she’s never brought it up. When they speak the video stream is high quality but frequently fails to match the audio, which gives him a sense of Marianne as a moving image, a thing to be looked at. People in college have been saying things about her since she went away. Connell’s not sure if she knows about it or not, what people like Jamie have been saying. Connell isn’t even really friends with those people and he’s heard about it. Some drunk guy at a party told him that she was into weird stuff, and that there were pictures of her on the internet. Connell doesn’t know if it’s true about the pictures. He’s searched her name online but nothing has ever come up.

Is she someone you might talk with about how you’re feeling? Yvonne says.

Yeah, she’s been supportive about it. She, uh … She’s hard to describe if you don’t know her. She’s really smart, a lot smarter than me, but I would say we see the world in a similar way. And we’ve lived our whole lives in the same place, obviously, so it is a bit different being away from her.

It sounds difficult.

I just don’t have a lot of people who I really click with, he says. You know, I struggle with that.

Do you think that’s a new problem, or is it something familiar to you?

It’s familiar, I suppose. I would say in school I sometimes had that feeling of isolation or whatever. But people liked me and everything. Here I feel like people don’t like me that much.