Normal People (Page 30)

It’s just an expression, says Lukas.

She honestly can’t tell now if he meant to criticise her clothes or not. She’s wearing a grey lambswool sweater and a thick black skirt with knee-high boots. Lukas has bad manners, which, to Marianne, makes him seem childish. He never offers her coffee or tea when she arrives, or even a glass of water. He starts talking right away about whatever he has been reading or doing since her last visit. He doesn’t seem to crave her input, and sometimes her responses confuse or disorientate him, which he claims is an effect of his bad English. In fact his comprehension is very good. Anyway, today is different. She removes her boots and leaves them by the door.

There’s a mattress in the corner of the studio, where Lukas sleeps. The windows are very tall and run almost to the floor, with blinds and thin trailing curtains. Various unrelated items are dotted around the room: several large potted plants, stacks of atlases, a bicycle wheel. This array impressed Marianne initially, but Lukas later explained he had gathered the items intentionally for a shoot, which made them seem artificial to her. Everything is an effect with you, Marianne told him once. He took this as a compliment about his art. He does have immaculate taste. He’s sensitive to the most minuscule of aesthetic failures, in painting, in cinema, even in novels or television shows. Sometimes when Marianne mentions a film she has recently watched, he waves his hand and says: It fails for me. This quality of discernment, she has realised, does not make Lukas a good person. He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly.

She and Lukas have had an arrangement for a few weeks now. Lukas calls it ‘the game’. Like any game, there are some rules. Marianne is not allowed to talk or make eye contact while the game is going on. If she breaks the rules, she gets punished later. The game doesn’t end when the sex is finished, the game ends when she gets in the shower. Sometimes after sex Lukas takes a long time before he lets her get in the shower, just talking to her. He tells her bad things about herself. It’s hard to know whether Marianne likes to hear those things; she desires to hear them, but she’s conscious by now of being able to desire in some sense what she does not want. The quality of gratification is thin and hard, arriving too quickly and then leaving her sick and shivery. You’re worthless, Lukas likes to tell her. You’re nothing. And she feels like nothing, an absence to be forcibly filled in. It isn’t that she likes the feeling, but it relieves her somehow. Then she showers and the game is over. She experiences a depression so deep it is tranquillising, she eats whatever he tells her to eat, she experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter.

Since she arrived here in Sweden, but particularly since the beginning of the game, people have seemed to her like coloured paper shapes, not real at all. At times a person will make eye contact with Marianne, a bus conductor or someone looking for change, and she’ll be shocked briefly into the realisation that this is in fact her life, that she is actually visible to other people. This feeling opens her to certain longings: hunger and thirst, a desire to speak Swedish, a physical desire to swim or dance. But these fade away again quickly. In Lund she’s never really hungry, and though she fills a plastic Evian bottle with water every morning, she empties most of it back into the sink at night.

She sits on the corner of the mattress now while Lukas switches a lamp on and off and does something with his camera. I still don’t know with the light yet, he says. Maybe we can do, like, first one and then another one. Marianne shrugs. She doesn’t understand the import of what he’s saying. Because all his friends speak Swedish, it has been difficult for her to work out how popular or well regarded Lukas is. People spend time in his studio often and seem to move a lot of artistic equipment up and down his stairs, but are they fans of his work, grateful for his attention? Or are they exploiting him for the convenient location of his working space while making fun of him behind his back?

Okay, I think we’re ready to go, says Lukas.

Do you want me to …

Maybe just the sweater now.

Marianne pulls her sweater off over her head. She places it in her lap, folds it, and then puts it to one side. She is wearing a black lace bra with little flowers embroidered on it. Lukas starts doing something with his camera.

*

She doesn’t hear from the others much anymore: Peggy, Sophie, Teresa, that crowd. Jamie wasn’t happy about the break-up, and he told people he wasn’t happy, and people felt sorry for him. Things started to turn against Marianne, she could sense that before she left. At first it was unsettling, the way eyes turned away from her in a room, or conversation stopped short when she entered; the sense of having lost her footing in the social world, of being no longer admired and envied, how quickly it had all slipped away from her. But then she found it was easy to get used to. There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality. It depressed her to think people were so predictable. Whether she was respected or despised, it didn’t make much difference in the end. Would every stage of her life continue to reveal itself as the same thing, again and again, the same remorseless contest for dominance?

With Peggy it had been hard. I’m your best friend, Peggy kept saying at the time, in an increasingly weird voice. She couldn’t accept Marianne’s laissez-faire attitude to the situation. You realise people are talking about you, Peggy said one night while Marianne was packing. Marianne didn’t know how to respond. After a pause, she replied thoughtfully: I don’t think I always care about the same things you care about. But I do care about you. Peggy threw her hands in the air wildly, walked around the coffee table twice.

I’m your best friend, she said. What am I supposed to do?

I don’t really know what that question means.

I mean, what position does this put me in? Because honestly, I don’t really want to take sides.

Marianne frowned, zipping a hairbrush into the pocket of her suitcase.

You mean, you don’t want to take my side, she said.

Peggy looked at her, breathing hard now from her exertion around the coffee table. Marianne was kneeling down by her suitcase still.

I don’t know if you really understand how people are feeling, Peggy said. People are upset about this.

About me breaking up with Jamie?

About the whole drama. People are actually upset.

Peggy looked at her, awaiting a response, and Marianne replied eventually: Okay. Peggy rubbed a hand over her face and said: I’ll leave you to pack up. As she went out the door she added: You should consider seeing a therapist or something. Marianne didn’t understand the suggestion. I should see a therapist because I’m not upset? she thought. But it was hard to dismiss something she had admittedly been hearing all her life from various sources: that she was mentally unwell and needed help.

Joanna is the only one who has kept in touch. In the evening they talk on Skype about their coursework, films they’ve seen, articles Joanna is working on for the student paper. On-screen her face always appears dimly lit against the same backdrop, her cream-coloured bedroom wall. She never wears make-up anymore, sometimes she doesn’t even brush her hair. She has a girlfriend now called Evelyn, a graduate student in International Peace Studies. Marianne asked once if Joanna saw Peggy often, and she made a quick wincing expression, only for a fraction of a second, but long enough for Marianne to see. No, said Joanna. I don’t see any of those people. They know I was on your side anyway.

I’m sorry, said Marianne. I didn’t want you to fall out with anyone because of me.

Joanna made a face again, this time a less legible expression, either because of the poor lighting, the pixelation on-screen, or the ambivalent feeling she was trying to express.

Well, I was never really friends with them anyway, said Joanna. They were more your friends.

I thought we were all friends.

You were the only one I got on with. Frankly I don’t think Jamie or Peggy are particularly good people. It’s not my business if you want to be friends with them, that’s just my opinion.

No, I agree with you, said Marianne. I guess I just got caught up in how much they seemed to like me.

Yeah. I think in your better judgement you did realise how obnoxious they were. But it was easier for me because they never really liked me that much.

Marianne was surprised by this matter-of-fact turn in the conversation, and felt a little castigated, though Joanna’s tone remained friendly. It was true, Peggy and Jamie were not very good people; bad people even, who took joy in putting others down. Marianne feels aggrieved that she fell for it, aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that she’d participated in the commodity market they passed off as friendship. In school she had believed herself to be above such frank exchanges of social capital, but her college life indicated that if anyone in school had actually been willing to speak to her, she would have behaved just as badly as anyone else. There is nothing superior about her at all.