Normal People (Page 26)

After lunch he goes upstairs to shower. There are four bedrooms, so he has one to himself, with a huge sash window over the garden. After his shower he dresses in the only presentable clothes he has left: a plain white T-shirt and the blue jeans he has had since he was in school. His hair is wet. He feels clearheaded, an effect of the coffee, and the high water pressure in the shower, and the cool cotton on his skin. He hangs the damp towel over his shoulders and opens the window. Cherries hang on the dark-green trees like earrings. He thinks about this phrase once or twice. He would put it in an email to Marianne, but he can’t email her when she’s downstairs. Helen wears earrings, usually a pair of tiny gold hoops. He lets himself fantasise about her briefly because he can hear the others are downstairs anyway. He thinks about her lying on her back. He should have thought about it in the shower, but he was tired. He needs the WiFi code for this house.

*

Like Connell, Helen was popular in school. She still goes to lengths to keep in touch with old friends and extended family, remembering birthdays, posting nostalgic photographs on Facebook. She always RSVPs to parties and arrives on time, she’s always taking group photographs again and again until there’s one everybody is happy with. In other words she’s a nice person, and Connell is beginning to understand that he actually likes nice people, that he even wants to be one. She’s had one serious boyfriend in the past, a guy called Rory, who she broke up with in first year of college. He’s in UCD so Connell has never bumped into him, but he has looked at his photographs on Facebook. He’s not unlike Connell in build and complexion, but somehow gawky-looking and unfashionable. Connell admitted to Helen once that he’d looked him up online, and she asked what he’d made of him.

I don’t know, said Connell. He seems kind of uncool, doesn’t he?

She thought that was hilarious. They were lying in bed, Connell had his arm around her.

Is that your type, you like uncool guys? he said.

You tell me.

Why, am I uncool?

I think so, she said. I mean that in a nice way, I don’t like cool people.

He sat up slightly to look down at her.

Am I really? he said. I’m not offended but honestly, I thought I was kind of cool.

You’re such a culchie, though.

Am I? In what way am I?

You have the thickest Sligo accent, she said.

I do not. I can’t believe that. No one’s ever said that to me before. Do I really?

She was still laughing. He stroked his hand over her belly, grinning to himself because he was making her laugh.

I can hardly understand you half the time, she said. Thankfully you’re the strong and silent type.

He had to laugh then too. Helen, that is brutal, he said.

She tucked a hand behind her head. Do you honestly think you’re cool? she said.

Well, not anymore.

She smiled to herself. Good, she said. It’s good that you’re not.

Helen and Marianne first met back in February, on Dawson Street. He and Helen were walking along holding hands when he saw Marianne coming out of Hodges Figgis wearing a black beret. Oh, hi, he said in an agonised voice. He thought of dropping Helen’s hand but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Hi, Marianne said. You must be Helen. The two women then made perfectly competent and genial conversation while he stood there panicking and staring at various objects in the surrounding environment.

Afterwards Helen asked him: So you and Marianne, were you always just friends, or …? They were in his room then, off Pearse Street. Buses went by outside and threw a column of yellow light on the bedroom door.

Yeah, more or less, he said. Like, we were never together as such.

But you’ve slept together.

Yeah, kind of. No, yeah, to be fair, we have. Is that a big deal?

No, I’m just curious, said Helen. It was like a friends-with-benefits thing?

Basically. In final year of school, and for a while last year. It wasn’t serious or anything.

Helen smiled at him. He was raking his bottom lip with his teeth, something he remembered to stop doing only after she’d already seen him.

She looks like she goes to art college, said Helen. I guess you think she’s really chic.

He gave a little laugh, looked at the floor. It’s not like that, he said. We’ve known each other since we were kids.

It doesn’t have to be weird that she’s your ex, Helen said.

She’s not my ex. We’re just friends.

But before you were friends, you were …

Well, she wasn’t my girlfriend, he said.

But you had sex with her, though.

He covered his entire face in his hands. Helen laughed.

After that, Helen was determined to make friends with Marianne, as if to prove a point. When they saw her at parties Helen went out of her way to compliment her hair and clothing, and Marianne would nod vaguely and then continue expressing some in-depth opinion about the Magdalene Laundry report or the Denis O’Brien case. Objectively Connell did find Marianne’s opinions interesting, but he could see how her fondness for expressing them at length, to the exclusion of lighter conversation, was not universally charming. One evening, after an overly long discussion about Israel, Helen became irritable, and on the walk home she told Connell that she found Marianne ‘self-absorbed’.

Because she talks about politics too much? said Connell. I wouldn’t call that self-absorbed, though.

Helen shrugged, but drew a breath inwards through her nose that indicated she didn’t like his interpretation of her point.

She was the same way in school, he added. But she’s not putting it on, she’s genuinely interested in that stuff.

She really cares about Israeli peace talks?

Surprised, Connell replied simply: Yeah. After a few seconds of walking along in silence he added: As do I, to be honest. It is fairly important. Helen sighed aloud. He was surprised that she would sigh in that petulant way, and wondered how much she had had to drink. Her arms were folded up at her chest. Not being preachy, he went on. Obviously we’re not going to save the Middle East by talking about it at a house party. I think Marianne just thinks about that stuff a lot.

You don’t think maybe she does it for the attention? said Helen.

He frowned in a conscious effort to look thoughtful. Marianne was so totally uninterested in what people thought of her, so extremely secure in her own self-perception, that it was hard to imagine her caring for attention one way or another. She did not altogether, as far as Connell knew, actually like herself, but praise from other people seemed as irrelevant to her as disapproval had been in school.

Honestly? he said. Not really.

She seems to like your attention well enough.

Connell swallowed. He only then understood why Helen was so annoyed, and not trying to veil her annoyance. He didn’t think Marianne had been paying him any special notice, though she did always listen when he spoke, a courtesy she occasionally failed to pay others. He turned his head to look at a passing car.

I didn’t notice that, he said eventually.

To his relief, Helen dropped this specific theme and settled back into a more general critique of Marianne’s behaviour.

Every time we see her at a party she’s always flirting with like ten different guys, said Helen. Talk about craving male approval.

Pleased that he was no longer implicated in the censure, Connell smiled and said: Yeah. She wasn’t like that in school at all.

You mean she didn’t act so slutty? said Helen.

Feeling suddenly cornered, and regretting that he had let his guard down, Connell again fell silent. He knew that Helen was a nice person, but he forgot sometimes how old-fashioned her values were. After a time he said uncomfortably: Here, she’s my friend, alright? Don’t be talking about her like that. Helen didn’t respond, but hiked her folded arms further up her chest. It was the wrong thing to say anyway. Later he would wonder if he was really defending Marianne or just defending himself from an implied accusation about his own sexuality, that he was tainted somehow, that he had unacceptable desires.

By now the unspoken consensus is that Helen and Marianne don’t like each other very much. They’re different people. Connell thinks the aspects of himself that are most compatible with Helen are his best aspects: his loyalty, his basically practical outlook, his desire to be thought of as a good guy. With Helen he doesn’t feel shameful things, he doesn’t find himself saying weird stuff during sex, he doesn’t have that persistent sensation that he belongs nowhere, that he never will belong anywhere. Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.

One night he was waiting for Helen in college, just outside the Graduates Memorial Building. She was coming from the gym at the other end of campus and they were going to get the bus to her house together. He was standing on the steps looking at his phone when the door behind him opened and a group of people came out in formal dresses and suits, all laughing and talking together. The light in the hallway behind them cast them into silhouette, so it took him a second to recognise Marianne. She was wearing a long dark-coloured dress and had her hair piled up high on her head, making her neck look slender and exposed. She caught his eye with a familiar expression. Hello, she said. He didn’t know the people she was with; he guessed they were from the debating society or something. Hi, he said. How could his feeling for her ever be anything like his feeling for other people? But part of the feeling was knowing the terrible hold he’d had over her, and still had, and could not foresee ever losing.