Conversations with Friends

18

It was late August. In the airport Bobbi asked me: how long has that been going on for, between the two of you? And I told her. She shrugged like, okay. On the bus back from Dublin airport, we heard a news report about a woman who had died in hospital. It was a case I had been following some time ago and forgotten about. We were too tired to talk about it then anyway. It was raining against the bus windows as we pulled up outside college. I helped Bobbi lift her suitcase out of the luggage compartment and she rolled down the sleeves of her raincoat. Lashing, she said. Typical. I was getting the train back to Ballina to stay with my mother for a few nights, and I told Bobbi I would call her. She flagged a taxi and I walked toward the bus stop to get the 145 to Heuston.

When I arrived in Ballina that night, my mother put on a bolognese and I sat at the kitchen table teasing the knots out of my hair. Outside the kitchen window the leaves dripped rain like squares of watered silk. She said I was tanned. I let a few split hairs fall from my fingers to the kitchen floor and said: oh, am I? I knew I was.

Did you hear from your father at all while you were over there? she said.

He called me once. He didn’t know where I was, he sounded drunk.

She took a plastic packet of garlic bread from the fridge. My throat hurt and I couldn’t think of what to say.

He wasn’t always this bad, right? I said. It’s gotten worse.

He’s your father, Frances. You tell me.

I don’t exactly hang out with him on the day-to-day.

The kettle came to the boil, releasing a cloud of steam over the hob and toaster. I shivered. I couldn’t believe I had woken up in France that morning.

I mean, was he like this when you married him? I said.

She didn’t reply. I looked out at the garden, at the bird-feeder hanging off the birch tree. My mother favoured some species of birds over others; the feeder was for the benefit of small and appealingly vulnerable ones. Crows were completely out of favour. She chased them away when she spotted them. They’re all just birds, I pointed out. She said yes, but some birds can fend for themselves.

I could feel a headache coming on while I set the table, though I didn’t want to mention it. Whenever I told my mother I had headaches she always said it was because I didn’t eat enough and I had low blood sugar, although I had never looked up the science behind that claim. By the time the food was ready I could feel a pain in my back too, like a kind of nerve or muscular pain that made sitting straight uncomfortable.

After we ate, I helped load up the dishwasher and my mother said she was going to watch TV. I carried my suitcase to my room, though as I went up the stairs I was finding it physically difficult to walk upright. My vision seemed brighter and sharper than usual. I was scared of moving too vigorously, like I was afraid it would shake the pain out and make it worse. Slowly I walked to the bathroom, closed the door and steadied my hands against the sink.

I was bleeding again. This time the blood had soaked through my clothes, and I wasn’t feeling strong enough to take them all off right away. In various stages, using the sink to brace myself, I managed to get undressed. My clothes peeled off wet like skin from a wound. I wrapped myself in a bathrobe that was left hanging on the back of the door, then sat on the rim of the bath with my hands pressed hard into my abdomen, bloody clothes discarded on the floor. At first I felt better, then worse. I wanted to shower, but I was worried I was too weak and I’d fall over or faint.

I noticed that along with the blood were thick grey clots of what looked like skin tissue. I had never seen anything like this before and it scared me so badly that the only comforting idea I could think of was: maybe it’s not happening. I kept returning to this thought every time I felt myself starting to panic, as if going insane and hallucinating an alternate reality was less frightening than what was really going on. Maybe it’s not happening. I let my hands tremble and waited to start feeling normal again, until I realised that it wasn’t just a feeling, something I could dismiss to myself. It was an outside reality that I couldn’t change. The pain was like nothing I had ever felt before.

I crouched down to get my phone and then dialled the house number. When my mother answered I said: can you come up here for a second? I’m not feeling very well. I could hear her come up the stairs saying: Frances? Sweetheart? Once she came in I told her what had happened. I was in too much pain to feel embarrassed or squeamish.

Was your period late? she asked.

I tried to think about this. My periods had never really been regular, and I estimated it had been about five weeks since the last one, though it might have been closer to six.

I don’t know, maybe, I said. Why?

I suppose there’s no chance at all you were pregnant?

I swallowed. I said nothing.

Frances? she said.

It’s extremely unlikely.

It’s not impossible?

I mean, practically nothing is impossible, I said.

Well, I don’t know what to tell you. We’ll have to go up to the hospital if you’re in that kind of pain.

I held the rim of the bath with my left hand, until the knuckles went white. Then I turned my head and vomited into the bathtub. After a few seconds, when I knew I wouldn’t be sick again, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and said: maybe we should go to hospital, yeah.

After a lot of waiting around they gave me a bed in the Accident & Emergency ward. My mother said she would go home and get some sleep for a couple of hours, and that I was to ring her if there was any news. The pain had thinned out a little, but it wasn’t gone. I held onto her hand when she said goodbye, the big warm plane of it, like something that could grow from the earth.

Once I got into bed, a nurse hooked me up to a drip, but she didn’t tell me what the drip was doing. I tried to look calmly up at the ceiling and count down from ten in my head. The patients I could see from my bed were mostly elderly, but there was one young guy on the ward who seemed to be drunk or high. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him crying, and apologising to all the nurses who went past. And the nurses said things like, okay Kevin, you’re all right, good man.

The doctor who came to take my blood sample didn’t look much older than I was. He seemed to need a lot of blood, and a urine sample also, and he asked questions about my sexual history. I told him I had never had unprotected sex, and he moved his lower lip disbelievingly and said: never, okay. I coughed and said: well, not fully. Then he looked at me over his clipboard. It was clear from his expression that he thought I was an idiot.

Not fully unprotected? he said. I don’t follow you.

I could feel my face get hot, but I replied in as dry and unconcerned a voice as possible.

No, I mean, not full sex, I said.

Right.

Then I looked at him and said: I mean he didn’t come inside me, am I not being clear? He looked back down at his clipboard then. We hated each other energetically, I could see that. Before he went away, he said they would test the urine for pregnancy. Typically the hCG levels would remain elevated for up to ten days, that’s what he said before he left.

I knew that they were testing for pregnancy because they thought I was having a miscarriage. I wondered if the clots of tissue were making them think that. A searing anxiety developed inside me at this thought, in the same form it always took no matter what external stimulus triggered it: first the realisation that I would die, then that everyone else would die, and then that the universe itself would eventually experience heat death, a kind of thought sequence that expanded outward endlessly in forms too huge to be contained inside my body. I trembled, my hands were clammy, and I felt sure I would be sick again. I punched my leg meaninglessly as if that would prevent the death of the universe. Then I found my phone under my pillow and dialled Nick’s number.

He answered after several rings. I couldn’t hear my own voice when I spoke, but I think I said something about wanting to talk to him. My teeth were chattering and I might have been talking gibberish. When he spoke it was in a whisper.

Are you drunk? he said. What are you doing calling me like this?

I said I didn’t know. My lungs were burning and my forehead felt wet.

It’s only 2 a.m. here, you know, he said. Everyone’s still awake, they’re in the other room. Are you trying to get me in trouble?

I said again that I didn’t know and he told me again that I sounded drunk. His voice contained both secrecy and anger in a special combination: the secrecy enriching the anger, the anger related to the secrecy.

Anyone could have seen you trying to call me, he said. Jesus Christ, Frances. How am I supposed to explain if someone asks?

I began to feel upset then, which was a better feeling than panic. Okay, I said. Goodbye. And I hung up the phone. He didn’t call back, but he did send a text message consisting of a string of question marks. I’m in hospital, I typed. Then I held down the delete key until this message disappeared, character after evenly timed character. Afterwards I tucked my phone back underneath my pillow.

I tried to make myself think about things logically. Anxiety was just a chemical phenomenon producing bad feelings. Feelings were just feelings, they had no material reality. If I ever had been pregnant, then I was probably miscarrying anyway. So what? The pregnancy was already over, and I didn’t need to consider things like Irish constitutional law, the right to travel, my current bank balance, and so on. Still, it would mean that at some time I had been unknowingly carrying Nick’s child, or rather a child that consisted of a mysterious half-and-half mixture of myself and Nick, inside my own body. This seemed like something I should have to adjust to, though I didn’t know how or what ‘adjusting’ meant or whether I was being strictly logical about it any more. I was exhausted at this point and my eyes were shut. I found myself thinking about whether it had been a boy.

The doctor came back several hours later and confirmed that I had not been pregnant, that it was not a miscarriage, and that there was no sign of infection or any other irregularities in my blood work. He could see while he spoke to me that I was shivering, my face was damp, I probably looked like a spooked dog, but he didn’t ask me if I was all right. So what, I thought, I am all right. He told me the gynaecologist would see me when her rotation started at eight. Then he went away, leaving the curtain open behind him. It was beginning to get light outside and I hadn’t slept. The non-existent baby entered a new category of non-existence, that is, things which had not stopped existing but in fact had never existed. I felt foolish, and the idea that I had ever been pregnant now seemed wistfully naive.

The gynaecologist arrived at eight. She asked me some questions about my menstrual cycle and then drew the curtains closed to give me a pelvic exam. I didn’t really know what she was doing with her hands, but whatever it was, it was grievously painful. It felt like some extremely sensitive wound inside me was being twisted around. Afterwards I held my arms around my chest and nodded at what she was saying, though I wasn’t sure I could really hear her. She had just reached inside my body and caused some of the worst pain I had ever experienced, and the fact that she continued to speak as if she expected me to remember what she was saying struck me as truly crazy.

I do remember that she told me I needed an ultrasound, and that it could have been a number of things. Then she wrote me a script for the contraceptive pill and told me that if I wanted to I could run two boxes of pills together and only have one period every six weeks. I said I would do that. She told me I would get a letter about the ultrasound in the next couple of days.

That’s it, she said. You’re free to go.

My mother picked me up from the front of the hospital. When I shut the passenger door, she said: you look like you’ve been through the wars all right. I told her that if childbirth was anything like that pelvic exam I was surprised the human race had survived this long. She laughed and touched my hair. Poor Frances, she said. What will we do with you?

When I got home I fell asleep on the sofa until the afternoon. My mother had left me a note saying she had gone into work and to let her know if I needed anything. I was feeling well enough by then to walk around without hunching over and to make myself some instant coffee and toast. I buttered the toast thickly and ate it in small, slow bites. Then I showered until I felt really clean and padded back to my room wrapped in towels. I sat on the bed, water running from my hair down onto my back, and cried. It was okay to cry because nobody could see me, and I would never tell anyone about it.

By the time I was finished, I was very cold. The tips of my fingers had started to turn a creepy whitish-grey colour. I towelled my skin off properly and blow-dried my hair until it crackled. Then I reached for the soft part on the inside of my left elbow and pinched it so tightly between my thumbnail and forefinger that I tore the skin open. That was it. It was over then. It was all going to be okay.

19

My mother came home early from work that afternoon and fixed some cold chicken while I sat at the table drinking tea. She seemed a little cool with me while preparing the food and didn’t really speak until we both sat down to eat.

So you’re not pregnant, she said.

No.

You didn’t seem so sure about that last night.

Well, the test is pretty definitive, I said.

She gave a funny little smile and picked up the salt shaker. Carefully she applied a small amount of salt to her chicken and replaced the shaker beside the pepper grinder.

You didn’t tell me you were seeing anyone, she said.

Who says I’m seeing someone?

It’s not that friend of yours you went on holiday with. The handsome guy, the actor.

I swallowed some tea calmly, but I was no longer hungry for the food.

You know his wife was the one who invited us on the holiday, I said.

I don’t hear much about him any more. You used to mention his name a lot.

And yet for some reason you don’t seem to be able to remember it.

She laughed out loud then. She said, I remember it, it’s Nick something. Nick Conway. Nice-looking guy. I actually saw him on TV one night, I think I put it on the Sky Plus for you.

That was very thoughtful of you, mother.

Well, I wouldn’t like to think it has anything to do with him.

I said the food was nice, and that I appreciated her fixing it for me.

Do you hear me talking to you, Frances? she said.

I don’t feel up to this, I really don’t.

We finished the meal in silence. I went upstairs afterwards and looked at my arm in the mirror, where I’d pinched it. It was red and a little swollen and when I touched it, it stung.

I stayed at home for the next few days, lying around and reading. I had a lot of academic reading I could have been doing in advance of the college term, but instead what I started reading was the gospels. For some reason my mother had left a small leather-bound copy of the New Testament on the bookshelf in my room, sandwiched between Emma and an anthology of early American writing. I read online that you were supposed to start with Mark and then read the other gospels in this order: Matthew, then John, then Luke. I got through Mark pretty quickly. It was divided up into very small parts which made it easy to read, and I noted down interesting passages in a red notebook. Jesus didn’t talk very much during Mark’s gospel, which made me more interested in reading the others.

I’d hated religion as a child. My mother had taken me to Mass every Sunday until I was fourteen, but she didn’t believe in God and treated Mass as a social ritual in advance of which she made me wash my hair. Still, I came at the Bible from the perspective that Jesus was probably philosophically sound. As it turned out I found a lot of what he said cryptic and even disagreeable. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him, I didn’t like that, though I also wasn’t sure I fully understood it. In Matthew there was a passage where the Pharisees were asking Jesus about marriage, which I was reading at eight or nine in the evening, while my mother was looking at the papers. Jesus said that in marriage, man and wife are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate. I felt pretty low when I read that. I put away the Bible, but it didn’t help.

The day after the hospital I’d received an email from Nick.

hey. sorry about how i acted on the phone last night. i was just afraid someone had seen your name come up on the screen and it would become a thing. anyway no one saw and i told them it was my mother calling (let’s not get too psychological about that). i did notice you sounded weird though. is everything ok?

ps everyone tells me that i’ve been in a bad mood since you left. also evelyn thinks i’m ‘pining’ for you, which is awkward.

I read it many times but didn’t reply. The next morning the letter from the hospital arrived, scheduling the ultrasound for some time in November. I thought it seemed like a long time to wait, but my mother said that was public health care for you. But they don’t know what’s wrong with me, I said. She told me that if it was anything serious they never would have discharged me. I didn’t know about that. Anyway I filled out my prescription for the pill and started taking it.

I called my father a couple of times, but he didn’t pick up the phone or return my calls. My mother suggested I could ‘drop by’ his house, on the other side of town. I said I was still feeling ill and that I didn’t want to walk over for nothing, since he wasn’t answering his phone. In response she just said: he’s your father. It was like some kind of mantric prayer with her. I let the issue go. He wasn’t in touch.

My mother hated the way I talked about my father, like he was just another normal person rather than my distinguished personal benefactor, or a minor celebrity. This irritation was directed toward me, but it was also a symptom of her disappointment that my father had failed to earn the respect she wanted me to give him. I knew she’d had to sleep with her purse tucked inside her pillowcase when they were married. I’d found her crying the time he fell asleep on the stairs in his underwear. I saw him lying there, gigantic and pink, his head cradled in one of his arms. He was snoring like it was the best sleep of his life. She couldn’t understand that I didn’t love him. You must love him, she told me when I was sixteen. He’s your father.

Who says I have to love him? I said.

Well, I want to believe you’re the kind of person who loves her own parents.

Believe what you want.

I believe I raised you to be kind to others, she said. That’s what I believe.

Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.

I found a video of the documentary that Bobbi had mentioned in France, a 1992 TV production called Kid Genius! Nick wasn’t the primary kid genius on the programme, there were six featured children, each with different areas of interest. I skipped until I found some footage of Nick looking at books, while a voiceover explained that at the age of only ten, ‘Nicholas’ had read several significant works of ancient philosophy and written essays on metaphysics. As a child Nick was very thin like a stick insect. The first shot showed a gigantic family home in Dalkey, with two imposing cars parked outside. Later in the show Nick appeared with a blue backdrop behind him and a female interviewer asked him questions about Platonic idealism, which he answered competently, without seeming haughty. At one point the interviewer asked: What makes you love the ancient world so much? And Nick cast his eyes around nervously like he was looking for his parents. Well, I don’t love it, he said. I just study it. You don’t see yourself as a budding philosopher king? the interviewer said humorously. No, Nick said very seriously. He tugged on the sleeve of his blazer. He was still looking around like he expected someone to appear and help him. That would be my worst nightmare, he said. The interviewer laughed, and Nick relaxed visibly. Women laughing always relaxed him, I thought.

A few days after the hospital I called Bobbi to ask if we were still friends. I could feel my voice getting stupid when I asked her, though I was trying to make it sound like a joke. I thought you were going to call me the other night, she said. I was in hospital, I told her. My tongue felt huge and traitorous in my mouth.

What do you mean? she said.

I explained what had happened.

They thought you were miscarrying a pregnancy, she said. That’s kind of intense, isn’t it?

Is it? I don’t know, I didn’t know what to feel about it.

She sighed audibly into the receiver. I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect. I panicked, I wanted to tell her. I started thinking about the heat death of the universe again. I called Nick and then hung up on him. But these were all things I did because I thought something was happening to me which turned out not to happen. The idea of the baby, with all its huge emotional gravity and its potential for lasting grief, had disappeared into nothing. I had never been pregnant. It was impossible, maybe even offensive, to grieve a pregnancy that had never happened, even though the emotions I’d felt had still been real at the time that I felt them. In the past Bobbi had been receptive to my analyses of my own misery, but this time I couldn’t trust myself to deliver the argument without weeping into the phone.

I’m sorry that you feel like I lied to you about Nick, I said.

You’re sorry that I feel that way, okay.

It was just complicated.

Yeah, Bobbi said. I guess extramarital relationships can be.

Are you still my friend?

Yes. So when are you getting this ultrasound thing?

I told her November. I also told her about the doctor asking about unprotected sex, which made her snort. I was sitting on my bed, with my feet under the coverlet. In the mirror on the other wall I could see my left hand, my free hand, moving nervously up and down the seam of a pillowcase. I dropped it and watched it lie dead on the quilt.

Still, I can’t believe Nick would try to get away with not using a condom, Bobbi said. That’s fucked up.

I mumbled something defensive like: oh, we didn’t … you know, it wasn’t really …

I’m not blaming you, she said. I’m surprised at him, that’s all.

I tried to think of something to say. None of the idiotic things we did felt like they were Nick’s fault because he always just followed along with what I suggested.

It was probably my idea, I said.

You sound brainwashed when you talk like that.

No, but he’s actually very passive.

Right, but he could have said no, Bobbi said. Maybe he just likes to act passive so he doesn’t have to take the blame for anything.

In the mirror I noticed that my hand had started doing the thing again. This wasn’t the conversation I was trying to have.

You’re making him sound very calculating, I said.

I didn’t mean he was doing it consciously. Have you told him you were in hospital?

I said no. I felt my mouth opening again to explain about the phone call when he accused me of being drunk, then I decided against telling her, instead pronouncing the phrase: yeah, no.

But you’re close with him, she said. You tell him things.

I don’t know. I don’t know really how close we are.

Well, you tell him more than you tell me.

No, I said. Less than you. He probably thinks I never tell him anything.

That night I decided to start reading over my old instant message conversations with Bobbi. I’d taken on a similar project once before, shortly after our break-up, and now I had whole additional years of messages to read. It comforted me to know that my friendship with Bobbi wasn’t confined to memory alone, and that textual evidence of her past fondness for me would survive her actual fondness if necessary. This had been foremost in my mind at the time of the break-up also, for obvious reasons. It was important to me that Bobbi would never be able to deny that at one point she had liked me very much.

This time I downloaded our exchanges as one huge text file with time stamps. I told myself it was too large to read from start to finish, and it also didn’t take a coherent narrative shape, so I decided to read it by searching for particular words or phrases and reading around them. The first one I tried was ‘love’, which brought up the following exchange, from six months previously:

Bobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon

Bobbi: and try to understand it as a social value system

Bobbi: it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness

Bobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequality

Bobbi: and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatory

Bobbi: i.e. mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive

Bobbi: which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level

Bobbi: and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free

me: yes

me: capitalism harnesses ‘love’ for profit

me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect

me: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as such

Bobbi: that’s vapid frances

Bobbi: you have to do more than say you’re anti things

I got out of bed after I read that exchange and stripped my clothes off to look in the mirror. Periodically I found myself doing this out of a kind of compulsion, though nothing about me ever seemed to change. My hip bones still jutted out unattractively on either side of my pelvis, and my abdomen was still hard and round to the touch. I looked like something that had dropped off a spoon too quickly, before it had time to set. My shoulders were freckled with broken, violet-coloured capillaries. For a while I stood there just looking at myself and feeling my repulsion get deeper and deeper, as if I was experimenting to see how much I could feel. Eventually I heard a ringing noise in my bag and went to try and find it.

When I retrieved my phone it said I’d missed a call from my father. I tried calling back but he didn’t answer. By then I was getting cold so I put all my clothes back on and went downstairs to tell my mother I was going to drop by my father’s house. She was sitting at the table reading the paper; she didn’t look up. Good woman, she said. Tell him I was asking after him.

I walked the same old route through town. I hadn’t brought a jacket, and at his house I rang the doorbell and jogged from foot to foot to warm myself up. My breath fogged the glass. I rang again and nothing happened. When I opened the door, I could hear nothing inside the house. The hall smelt of damp and of something worse than damp too, something slightly sour. A refuse sack was tied up and abandoned under the hall table. I called my father’s name: Dennis?

I could see the light was on inside the kitchen so I pushed open the door and reflexively lifted a hand against my face. The smell was so rancid that it felt physical, like heat or touch. Several half-eaten meals had accumulated around the table and countertops, in various states of decay, surrounded by dirty tissues and empty bottles. The fridge door was ajar, leaking a triangle of yellow light onto the floor. A bluebottle crawled along a knife which had been abandoned in a large jar of mayonnaise, and four others were batting themselves against the kitchen window. In the bin I could see a handful of white maggots, writhing blindly like boiling rice. I stepped backwards out of the room and closed the door.

In the hallway I tried calling Dennis’s phone again. He didn’t answer. Standing in his house was like watching someone familiar smile at me, but with missing teeth. I wanted to hurt myself again, in order to feel returned to the safety of my own physical body. Instead I turned around and walked out. I pulled my sleeve over my hand to shut the door.

20

My internship in the agency ended formally at the start of September. We each had one last meeting with Sunny, to talk about our plans for the future and what we’d learned from our experiences, though I didn’t foresee having anything to say about any of that. I came into her office on my last day and she asked me to close the door and sit down.

Well, you don’t want to work in a literary agency, she said.

I smiled like she was joking, while she looked at some papers and then put them aside. She put her elbows up on her desk, holding her chin in her hands contemplatively.

I wonder about you, she said. You don’t seem to have a plan.

Yeah, that’s something I definitely don’t have.

You’re just hoping to fall on your feet.

I looked out the window behind her onto the beautiful Georgian buildings and the buses passing. It was raining again.

Tell me about the holiday, she said. How is Melissa’s piece coming on?

I told her about Étables, about Derek, whom Sunny knew, and about Valerie, whom she had heard of. Sunny called her a ‘formidable woman’. I grimaced a little bit and we laughed. I realised that I didn’t want to leave Sunny’s office, that I felt as if I was letting go of something I wasn’t finished with.

I don’t know what I’m going to do, I said.

She nodded and then gave an expressive, accepting shrug.

Well, your reports were always very good, she said. If you ever want a reference you know where to find me. And I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.

Thank you, I said. For everything.

She gave me one last sympathetic or despairing look and then went back to the papers on her desk. She told me I could call Philip in on my way out. I did.

That night in my apartment I was up late tinkering with commas in a long poem I was working on. I saw Nick was online and I sent him a message: hello. I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking peppermint tea because the milk in the fridge was sour. He replied, asking if I’d received his email five days ago and I said yes, and not to worry about the awkward phone call. I didn’t want to tell him I had been in hospital, or why. It was a story with no conclusion, and anyway it was embarrassing. He told me they were all missing Bobbi and me over in France.

me: equally?

Nick: haha

Nick: well maybe i miss you like, slightly more

me: thanks

Nick: yeah i keep waking up at night when i hear people on the stairs

Nick: and then i remember you’re gone

Nick: crushing disappointment

I laughed to myself although there was no one there to see me. I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document which we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand. I liked to feel that he was my collaborator. I liked to think of him waking up at night and thinking of me.

me: that’s actually very cute

me: I miss your sweet handsome face

Nick: i wanted to send you a song earlier because it reminded me of you

Nick: but i anticipated your sarcastic reply and chickened out

me: hahaha

me: please send it!

me: I promise not to be sarcastic

Nick: would it be ok if i called you on the phone

Nick: ive been drinking and the effort of typing is killing me

me: oh you’re drunk, is that why you’re being nice

Nick: i think john keats had a name for women like you

Nick: a french name

Nick: you see where i’m going with this

me: please call

He called me. He didn’t really sound drunk on the phone, he sounded sleepy in a nice way. We said again that we missed one another. I held the cup of peppermint tea in my fingers, feeling it get cool. Nick apologised again about the phone call the other night. I’m a bad person, he said. I told him not to say that. No, I’m bad, he said. I’m a bad guy. He told me about what they’d been up to in Étables, about the weather, and some castle they went to visit. I told him about my internship finishing up, and he said I had never seemed invested in it anyway. Maybe I was distracted by drama in my personal life, I said.

Oh yeah, I meant to ask, he said. How are things with you and Bobbi? That wasn’t the best way for her to find out about us I guess.

Yeah, it’s been awkward. It’s kind of bothering me.

This is the first relationship you’ve been in since you two were together, isn’t it?

I guess so, I said. Do you think that’s why it’s weird?

Well, you didn’t really seem to separate that much after you broke up. In the sense that you still spend all your time together.

She was the one who broke up with me.

Nick paused, and when he spoke he sounded like he was smiling curiously. Yes, I know that, he said. Is it relevant?

I rolled my eyes, but I was enjoying him. I put down the cup of tea on the table. Oh I see, I said. I see why you’re calling me, okay.

What?

You want us to have phone sex.

He started laughing. This was the intended effect and I basked in it. He laughed a lot. I know, he said. Classic me. I wanted to tell him about the hospital then, because he was in such a nice mood with me, and he might say consoling things, but I knew it would make the conversation serious. I didn’t like cornering him into having serious conversations. By the way, he said, I saw a girl on the beach today who looked like you.

People are always saying someone looks like me, I said. And then when I see the person it’s always someone plain-looking and I have to pretend not to mind.

Oh, not this woman. This woman was very attractive.

You’re telling me about an attractive stranger you saw, how sweet.

She looked like you! he said. She was probably less hostile, though. Maybe I should have an affair with her instead.

I took a mouthful of tea and swallowed. I felt silly for not replying to his email for so long and grateful that he didn’t dwell on it or act hurt. I asked what he had been doing that day and he told me he was avoiding his parents’ calls and feeling guilty about it.

Is your dad as handsome as you are? I said.

Why, are you thinking about going there? He’s very right-wing. I would point out he’s also still married, but when has that stopped you before?

Oh, that’s nice. Now who’s hostile?

I’m sorry, he said. You’re so right, you should seduce my dad.

Do you think I’m his type?

Oh yeah. In the sense that you greatly resemble my mother, anyway.

I started to laugh. It was a sincere laugh but I still wanted to make sure he would hear it.

That’s a joke, said Nick. Are you laughing there, or weeping? You don’t resemble my mother.

Is your dad actually right-wing or was that a joke too?

Oh no, he’s a real wealth creator. Hates women. Absolutely detests the poor. So you can imagine he loves me, his camp actor son.

I was really laughing then. You’re not camp, I said. You’re aggressively heterosexual. You even have a twenty-one-year-old mistress.

That I think my father would actually approve of. Happily he’ll never know.

I looked around the empty kitchen and said: I cleaned my room today in advance of you getting back from France.

Did you really? I love that. I think this actually counts as phone sex now.

Will you visit me?

After a pause he said: of course. I didn’t feel I had lost him exactly, but I knew he was thinking about something else. Then he said: you sounded really out of it on the phone the other night, were you drunk?

Let’s forget about it.

You’re just not a big person for phone calls usually. You weren’t upset or anything, were you?

I heard something in the background on Nick’s end of the line, and then a little crackling noise. Hello? he called out. A door opened and then I heard Melissa’s voice say: oh, you’re on the phone. Nick said: yeah, give me one second. The door closed again. I said nothing.

I’ll visit you, he said quietly. I have to go, all right?

Sure.

Sorry.

Go ahead, I said. Live your life.

He hung up.

The next day, our friend Marianne came back from Brooklyn and told us about all the celebrities she had met. She showed us photographs on her phone over coffee: Brooklyn Bridge, Coney Island, Marianne herself smiling with a blurry man who I privately did not believe was actually Bradley Cooper. Wow, Philip said. Cool, I agreed. Bobbi licked the back of her teaspoon and said nothing.

I was happy to see Marianne again, happy to listen to her problems as if my own life was going exactly how it always went. I asked about her boyfriend Andrew, how he liked his new job, whatever happened with his ex messaging him on Facebook. I boasted to her about Philip’s internship in the agency, how he was going to become a predatory literary agent and make millions, and I could see I was pleasing him. It’s better than the arms trade, he said. Bobbi snorted. Jesus, Philip, is that your gold standard? she said. At least I’m not selling arms?

At this point the conversation slipped away from me. Before I could direct another question toward Marianne, Philip started to ask us about Étables. Nick and Melissa were still over there, they weren’t coming back for another two weeks. Bobbi told him we’d had ‘fun’.

Any luck with Nick yet? he asked me.

I stared at him. To Marianne he added: Frances is having an affair with a married man.

No I’m not, I said.

Philip is joking, said Bobbi.

Famous Nick? Marianne said. I want to hear about him.

We’re friends, I said.

But he definitely has a crush, said Philip.

Frances, you temptress, said Marianne. Isn’t he married?

Blissfully, I said.

To change the subject, Bobbi mentioned something about wanting to move out and find an apartment closer to town. Marianne said there was an accommodation crisis, she said she’d heard about it on the news.

And they won’t take students, Marianne said. I’m serious, look at the listings.

You’re moving out? said Philip.

It shouldn’t be legal to say No Students, Marianne said. It’s discrimination.

Where are you looking? I asked. You know we’ll be letting the second bedroom in my place.

Bobbi looked at me and then let out a little laugh.

We could be flatmates, she said. How much?

I’ll talk to my dad, I said.

I hadn’t spoken to my father since I’d visited his house. When I called him after coffee that evening, he answered, sounding relatively sober. I tried to repress the image of the mayonnaise jar, the noise of bluebottles hammering themselves against glass. I wanted to be speaking to someone who lived in a clean house, or someone who was only a voice, whose life I didn’t have to know about. On the phone we talked about the apartment’s second bedroom. He told me his brother had some viewings arranged and I explained that Bobbi was looking for a place.

Who’s this? he said. Who’s Bobbi?

You know Bobbi. We were in school together.

Your friend, is it? Which friend now?

Well, I really only had one friend, I said.

I thought you’d want another girl living with you.

Bobbi is a girl.

Oh, the Lynch girl, is it? he said.

Bobbi’s surname was actually Connolly, but her mother’s name was Lynch, so I let that one go. He said his brother could give her the room for six fifty a month, a price Bobbi’s father was willing to pay. He wants me to have somewhere quiet to study, she said. Little does he know.

The next day her father drove her over in his jeep with all her belongings. She had brought some bedlinen and a yellow anglepoise, and also three boxes of books. When we unloaded the car, her father drove off again and I helped Bobbi to dress the bed. She started sticking some postcards and photographs onto the wall while I put the pillows into cases. She put up a photograph of the two of us in our school uniforms, sitting on the basketball court. We had long tartan skirts on and ugly, dimpled shoes, but we were laughing. We looked at it together, our two little faces peering back at us like ancestors, or perhaps our own children.

Term didn’t start up for another week, and in the meantime Bobbi bought a red ukulele and took to lying on the couch playing ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ while I cooked dinner. She made herself at home by moving items of furniture around while I was out for the day and sticking magazine cut-outs on the mirrors. She took a great interest in getting to know the neighbourhood. We stopped into the butcher’s one day for mince and Bobbi asked the guy behind the counter how his hand was. I had no idea what she was talking about, I didn’t even know she’d been in the place before, but I did notice the guy was wearing a blue cast on his wrist. Stop, he said. Needs surgery now and everything. He was shovelling red meat into a plastic bag. Oh no, said Bobbi. When will that be? He told her Christmas. Fucked if I’m getting a day off either, the guy said. You’d have to be across in Massey’s before you get a day off in this place. He handed her the bag of meat and added: in your coffin.

The profile was published just before classes started up again. I went to Easons the morning it came out and flicked through the magazine looking for my name. I stopped at a full-page photograph of Bobbi and me, taken in the garden in Étables. I had no recollection of Melissa taking such a photograph. It depicted us sitting at the breakfast table together, me leaning over as if to whisper something in Bobbi’s ear, and Bobbi was laughing. It was an arresting image, the light was beautiful, and it conveyed spontaneity and warmth in a way the earlier posed photographs hadn’t. I wondered what Bobbi would say about it. The article that followed was a short, admiring account of our spoken word performances and of the spoken word scene in Dublin generally. Our friends read it and said the photograph was flattering, and Sunny sent me a nice email about it. For a while, Philip liked to carry a copy of the magazine around and read from it in a phony accent, but that joke exhausted itself eventually. Pieces like this were published in small magazines all the time, and anyway Bobbi and I hadn’t performed together in months.

Once term started, I had academic work to keep me busy again. Philip and I walked to seminars together having minor disagreements about various nineteenth-century novelists, which always ended with him saying things like: look, you’re probably right. One evening Bobbi and I called Melissa to thank her for the article. We put her on speakerphone so we could sit at the table to talk. Melissa told us all about what we’d missed in Étables, the thunderstorms, and the day they went to visit the castle, things I had already heard about. We told her we had moved in together and she sounded pleased. Bobbi said: we must have you over some time. And Melissa said that would be lovely. She told us they were coming home the next day. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and rubbed absent-mindedly at a little stain on the tabletop.

I continued to read through my log of conversations with Bobbi, entering search terms which seemed wilfully calculated to annoy me. Searching for the word ‘feelings’ unearthed this conversation, from our second year of college:

Bobbi: well you don’t really talk about your feelings

me: you’re committed to this view of me

me: as having some kind of undisclosed emotional life

me: I’m just not very emotional

me: I don’t talk about it because there’s nothing to talk about

Bobbi: i don’t think ‘unemotional’ is a quality someone can have

Bobbi: that’s like claiming not to have thoughts

me: you live an emotionally intense life so you think everyone else does

me: and if they’re not talking about it then they’re hiding something

Bobbi: well, ok

Bobbi: we differ on that

Not all the exchanges were like this. The ‘feelings’ search also brought up the following conversation, from January:

me: I mean I always had negative feelings about authority figures

me: but really only when I met you did I formulate the feelings into beliefs

me: you know what I mean

Bobbi: you would have gotten there on your own though

Bobbi: you have a communist intuition

me: well no, I probably only hated authority because I resent being told what to do

me: if not for you I could have become a cult leader

me: or an ayn rand fan

Bobbi: hey, i resent being told what to do!!

me: yes but out of spiritual purity

me: not a will to power

Bobbi: you are in many ways, the very worst psychologist

I remembered having this conversation; I remembered how effortful it felt, the sense that Bobbi was misunderstanding me, or even intentionally averting her gaze from what I was trying to say. I’d been sitting in the upstairs bedroom in my mother’s house, under the quilt, and my hands were cold. Having spent Christmas in Ballina away from Bobbi, I wanted to tell her that I missed her. That was what I had started to say, or thought about saying.

Nick came over to the apartment a few days after they got back, an afternoon when Bobbi was busy with lectures. When I let him in we looked at one another for a couple of seconds and it felt like drinking cold water. He was tanned, his hair was fairer than before. Oh, fuck, you look so good, I said. That made him laugh. His teeth were gorgeously white. He glanced around at the hall and said: yeah, nice apartment. It’s pretty central, what’s the rent like? I said my dad’s brother owned it and he looked at me and said: oh, you little trust fund baby. You didn’t tell me your family had property in the Liberties. The whole building or just the apartment? I punched his arm lightly and said: just the apartment. He touched my hand and then we were kissing again, and under my breath I was saying: yes, yes.

21

The following week, Bobbi and I went to the launch of a book in which one of Melissa’s essays appeared. The event was in Temple Bar, and I knew that Melissa and Nick would be there together. I selected a blouse that Nick particularly liked, and left it partly unbuttoned so my collarbone was visible. I spent several minutes carefully disguising the small blemishes on my face with make-up and powder. When Bobbi was ready to go she knocked on the bathroom door and said: come on. She didn’t comment on my appearance. She was wearing a grey turtleneck and looked much better than I did anyway.

Nick and I had seen each other a couple of times during the week, always while Bobbi was at lectures. He brought me little gifts when he visited. One day he brought ice cream, and on Wednesday a box of doughnuts from the booth on O’Connell Street. The doughnuts were still hot when he arrived and we ate them with coffee and talked. He asked me if I had been in touch with my father lately, and I wiped a crust of sugar from my lips and said: I don’t think he’s doing too well. I told Nick about the house. Jesus, he said. That sounds traumatic. I swallowed a mouthful of coffee. Yeah, I said. It was upsetting.

After this conversation I asked myself why it was that I could talk to Nick about my father, even though I’d never been able to broach the subject with Bobbi. It was true that Nick was an intelligent listener, and I often felt better after we spoke, but those things were true of Bobbi too. It was more that Nick’s sympathy seemed unconditional, like he rooted for me regardless of how I acted, whereas Bobbi had strong principles that she applied to everyone, me included. I didn’t fear Nick’s bad judgement like I did Bobbi’s. He was happy to listen to me even when my thoughts were inconclusive, even when I told stories about my own behaviour that showed me in an unflattering light.

Nick wore nice clothes when he visited the apartment, like he always did, clothes I suspected were expensive. Instead of leaving them on the floor when he undressed, he folded them over the back of my bedroom chair. He liked to wear pale-coloured shirts, sometimes linen ones that looked vaguely rumpled, sometimes Oxford shirts with button-downs, always worn with the sleeves rolled back over his forearms. He had a canvas golf jacket he seemed to like a lot, but on cold days he wore a grey cashmere coat with blue silk lining. I loved this coat, I loved how it smelled. It had only a shallow lip of collar and a single row of buttons.

On Wednesday I tried the coat on while Nick was in the bathroom. I got out of bed and slipped my naked arms through the sleeves, feeling the cool silk run over my skin. The pockets were heavy with personal items: his phone and wallet, his keys. I weighed them in my hands like they were mine. I gazed at myself in the mirror. Inside Nick’s coat my body looked very slim and pale, a white wax candle. He came back into the room and laughed at me in a good-natured way. He always dressed to go to the bathroom in case Bobbi came home unexpectedly. Our eyes met in the mirror.

You’re not keeping it, he said.

I like it.

Unfortunately, I like it too.

Was it expensive? I said.

We were still looking at each other in the mirror. He stood behind me and lifted the coat open with his fingers. I watched him looking at me.

It was, uh … he said. I don’t remember how much it was.

A thousand euro?

What? No. Two or three hundred maybe.

I wish I had money, I said.

He slipped his hand inside the coat then and touched my breast. The sexual way you talk about money is kind of interesting, he said. Though also disturbing, obviously. You don’t want me to give you money, do you?

In a way I do, I said. But I wouldn’t necessarily trust that impulse.

Yeah, it’s weird. I have money that I don’t urgently need, and I would rather you had it. But the transaction of giving it to you would bother me.

You don’t like to feel too powerful. Or you don’t like to be reminded how powerful you like to feel.

He shrugged. He was still touching me underneath the coat. It was nice.

I think I struggle enough with the ethics of our relationship already, he said. So giving you money would probably push it too far for me. Although, I don’t know. You’d probably be happier with the cash.

I looked at him, seeing my own face in my peripheral vision, my chin raised slightly. Blurred out on the periphery I thought I looked quite formidable. I slipped out of the coat and left him holding it. I got back onto the bed and ran my tongue between my lips.

Are you conflicted about our relationship? I said.

He stood there holding the coat kind of limply in his hands. I could tell he was enjoying himself and too distracted to think about hanging it up.

No, he said. Well, yes, but only in the abstract.

You’re not going to leave me?

He smiled, a shy smile. Would you miss me if I did? he said.

I lay back on the bed, laughing at nothing. He hung the coat up. I lifted one of my legs in the air and crossed it over the other one slowly.

I would miss dominating you in conversation, I said.

He lay down beside me and flattened his hand against my stomach. Go on, he said.

I think you would miss it too.

Being dominated? Of course I would. That’s like foreplay for us. You say cryptic things I don’t understand, I give inadequate responses, you laugh at me, and then we have sex.

I laughed. He sat up a little to watch me laughing.

It’s nice, he said. It gives me an opportunity to enjoy being so inadequate.

I propped myself up on one elbow and kissed his mouth. He leaned into it, like he really wanted to be kissed, and I felt a rush of my own power over him.

Do I make you feel bad about yourself? I said.

You can be a little hard on me from time to time. Not that I blame you really. But no, I think we’re getting along well at the moment.

I looked down at my own hands. Carefully, like I was daring myself, I said: if I lash out at you it’s just because you don’t seem very vulnerable to it.

He looked at me then. He didn’t even laugh, it was just a kind of frowning look, like he thought I was mocking him. Okay, he said. Well. I don’t think anyone likes being lashed out at.

But I mean you don’t have a vulnerable personality. Like, I find it hard to imagine you trying on clothes. You don’t seem to have that relationship with yourself where you look at your reflection wondering if you look good in something. You seem like someone who would find that embarrassing.

Right, he said. I mean, I’m a human being, I try clothes on before I buy them. But I think I understand what you’re saying. People do tend to find me kind of cold and like, not very fun.

I was excited that we shared an experience I found so personal, and quickly I said: people find me cold and lacking in fun.

Really? he said. You always seemed charming to me.

I was gripped by a sudden and overwhelming urge to say: I love you, Nick. It wasn’t a bad feeling, specifically; it was slightly amusing and crazy, like when you stand up from your chair and suddenly realise how drunk you are. But it was true. I was in love with him.

I want that coat, I said.

Oh, yeah. You can’t have it.

When we arrived at the launch the following night, Nick and Melissa were there already. They were standing together talking to some other people we knew: Derek, and a few others. Nick saw us coming in, but he didn’t hold my gaze when I tried to look at him. He noticed me and looked away, that was all. Bobbi and I flicked through the book and didn’t buy it. We said hello to the other people we knew, Bobbi texted Philip to ask where he was, and I pretended to read the author bios. Then the readings started.

Throughout Melissa’s reading, Nick watched her face very attentively and laughed in the right places. My discovery that I was in love with Nick, not just infatuated but deeply personally attached to him in a way that would have lasting consequences for my happiness, had prompted me to feel a new kind of jealousy toward Melissa. I couldn’t believe that he went home to her every evening, or that they ate dinner together and sometimes watched films on their TV. What did they talk about? Did they amuse each other? Did they discuss their emotional lives, did they confide in one another? Did he respect Melissa more than me? Did he like her more? If we were both going to die in a burning building and he could only save one of us, wouldn’t he certainly save Melissa and not me? It seemed practically evil to have so much sex with someone who you would later allow to burn to death.

After her reading, Melissa beamed while we all applauded. When she sat back down Nick said something in her ear and her smile changed, a real smile now, with her teeth and the sides of her eyes. He was always calling her ‘my wife’ in front of me. At the beginning I thought it was playful, maybe kind of sarcastic, like she wasn’t his real wife at all. Now I saw it differently. He didn’t mind me knowing that he loved someone else, he wanted me to know, but he was horrified by the idea that Melissa would find out about our relationship. It was something he was ashamed of, something he wanted to protect her from. I was sealed up in a certain part of his life that he didn’t like to look at or think about when he was with other people.

Once all the readings were finished, I went to get a glass of wine. Evelyn and Melissa were standing nearby holding glasses of sparkling water, and Evelyn waved me over. I congratulated Melissa on her reading. Behind her shoulder I saw Nick coming toward us, and then he spotted me and hesitated. Evelyn was talking about the editor of the book. Nick arrived at her shoulder and they embraced, so warmly that it knocked Evelyn’s glasses sideways and she had to fix them. Nick and I nodded at each other politely. This time he held my eyes for a second longer than he had to, like he was sorry we were meeting this way.

You’re looking so well, Evelyn said to him. You really are.

He’s been practically living in the gym, said Melissa.

I took a huge mouthful of white wine and washed it around my teeth. Is that what he tells you, I thought.

Well, it’s working, said Evelyn. You have a look of radiant good health about you.

Thanks, he said. I’m feeling well.

Melissa was watching Nick with a kind of pride, like she had nursed him back to health after a long illness. I wondered what he meant by ‘I’m feeling well’, or what he meant for me to hear in it.

And how about you, Frances? said Evelyn. How are you keeping?

Fine, thanks, I said.

You’re looking a little glum tonight, said Melissa.

Cheerfully Evelyn said: I’d be glum if I were you, spending all your time around ancient people like us. Where’s Bobbi?

Oh, she’s here, I said. I gestured toward the cash register, though I didn’t actually know where she was.

Are you getting tired of ancient people? said Melissa.

No, not at all, I said. If anything I could go more ancient.

Nick stared into his glass.

We’ll have to find you a nice older girlfriend, Melissa said. Someone with a lot of money.

I didn’t have the nerve to look at Nick. Around the stem of my wine glass I sank my thumbnail into the side of my finger to feel it sting.

I’m not sure what my role would be in that relationship, I said.

You could write her love sonnets, said Evelyn.

Melissa grinned. Don’t underestimate the effect of youth and beauty, she said.

That sounds like a recipe for disastrous unhappiness, I said.

You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy.

I’m working on it, I said.

Someone else joined the conversation then to talk to Melissa, and I took the opportunity to go and find Bobbi. She was talking to the cashier near the front door. Bobbi had never had a job and she loved to talk to people about what they did at work. Even mundane details interested her, though she often forgot them quickly. The cashier was a lanky young man with acne, who was telling Bobbi enthusiastically about his band. The bookshop manager came over then and started to talk about the book, which none of us had read or bought. I stood beside them, watching Melissa from across the room as she put her arm absently on Nick’s back.

When I saw Nick look over at us, I turned to Bobbi, smiling, and moved her hair aside to whisper something in her ear. She looked at Nick and then suddenly grabbed my wrist, hard, harder than she had ever touched me in my life before. It hurt me, it drew a little gasp from my throat, and then she dropped my arm again. I cradled it against my ribs. In a deathly calm voice, staring directly into my face, Bobbi said: don’t fucking use me. She held my eyes for a second, with a terrifying seriousness, and then she turned back to the cashier.

I went to get my jacket. I knew that no one was watching me, that no one cared what I thought or did, and I seemed to feel myself almost vibrating with the power of this perverse new freedom. I could scream or take my clothes off if I wanted, I could walk in front of a bus on my way home, who would know? Bobbi wouldn’t follow me. Nick wouldn’t even be seen speaking to me in public.

I walked home on my own without telling anyone I was leaving. My feet were throbbing by the time I unlocked the front door. That night in bed I sat up and downloaded a dating app on my phone. I even put up a picture of myself, one of Melissa’s pictures, where my lips were parted and my eyes looked big and spooky. I heard Bobbi come home, I heard her drop her bag in the hall instead of hanging it up. She was singing ‘Green Rocky Road’ to herself, loudly enough that I knew she was drunk. I sat in the dark scrolling through a series of strangers in my area. I tried to think about them, to think about letting them kiss me, but instead I kept thinking of Nick, his face looking up at me from my pillow, reaching to touch my breast like he owned it.

I didn’t tell my mother that I’d brought the little leather copy of the New Testament back to Dublin with me. I knew she wouldn’t notice it was gone, and if I tried to explain, she wouldn’t understand why it interested me. My favourite part of the gospels was in Matthew, when Jesus said: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. I shared in this desire for moral superiority over my enemies. Jesus always wanted to be the better person, and so did I. I underlined this passage in red pencil several times, to illustrate that I understood the Christian way of life.

The Bible made a lot more sense to me, almost perfect sense, if I pictured Bobbi as the Jesus character. She didn’t deliver his lines entirely straight; often she pronounced them sarcastically, or with a weird, distant expression. The bit about husbands and wives was satirical, whereas the passage about loving your enemies she played sincerely. It made sense to me that she would befriend adulteresses, and also that she would have a pack of disciples spreading her message.

The day after the book launch, a Friday, I wrote Bobbi a long email apologising for what had happened between us in the bookshop. I tried to explain that I had felt vulnerable, but I did so without using the word ‘vulnerable’ or any synonyms. I did say sorry, I said that several times. She replied within a few minutes:

it’s okay, i forgive you. but lately i sometimes feel like i’m watching you disappear.

I stood up from my desk after reading this email and remembered I was in the college library, but without really seeing the library environment around me. I found my way to the bathrooms and locked myself in a stall. A mouthful of sour fluid washed up from my stomach and I leaned over the toilet basin to be sick. My body was gone then, vanished somewhere no one would ever see it again. Who would miss it? I wiped my mouth with a single square of tissue paper, flushed the toilet and went back upstairs. My MacBook screen had gone black and radiated a perfect rectangular glow from the reflected ceiling light. I sat back down, logged out of my email, and continued reading a James Baldwin essay.

I didn’t exactly start praying that weekend after the book launch, but I did look up online how to meditate. It mainly involved closing my eyes and breathing, while also calmly letting go of passing thoughts. I focused on my breathing, you were allowed to do that. You could even count the breaths. And then at the end you could just think about anything, anything you wanted, but after five minutes of counting my breath, I didn’t want to think. My mind felt empty, like the inside of a glass jar. I was appropriating my fear of total disappearance as a spiritual practice. I was inhabiting disappearance as something that could reveal and inform, rather than totalise and annihilate. A lot of the time my meditation was unsuccessful.

My father called me on Monday night at about eleven to say he had put my allowance in the bank that day. His voice rolled around on the line uncertainly and I felt a drenching sense of guilt. Oh, thanks, I said.

I put in a few extra quid for you, he said. You never know when you’ll need it.

You shouldn’t have. I have enough money.

Well, treat yourself to something nice.

After this phone call I felt restless and too warm, as if I had just run up a staircase. I tried lying down, but it didn’t help. Nick had sent me an email that day containing a link to a Joanna Newsom song. I sent back a link to the Billie Holiday recording of ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’, but he didn’t reply.

I went into the living room, where Bobbi was watching a documentary about Algeria. She patted the couch cushion beside her and I sat down.

Do you ever feel like you don’t know what you’re doing with your life? I said.

I’m actually watching this, said Bobbi.

I looked at the screen, where old wartime footage was overlaid with a voice-over explaining the role of the French military. I said: sometimes I just feel. And Bobbi placed a finger over her lips and said: Frances. I’m watching.

On Wednesday night I matched with somebody called Rossa on the dating thing and he sent me a couple of messages. He asked me if I wanted to meet up and I said: sure. We went for a drink together in a bar on Westmoreland Street. He was in college too, studying medicine. I didn’t tell him about the problems I’d had with my uterus. Actually I bragged about how healthy I was. He talked about how hard he had worked in school, which he seemed to consider a formative experience, and I said I was happy for him.

I’ve never worked hard at anything, I said.

That must be why you study English.

Then he said that he was just joking, and actually he had won his school’s gold medal for composition. I love poetry, he said. I love Yeats.

Yeah, I said. If there’s one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets.

He didn’t have anything else to say about poetry after that. Afterwards he invited me back to his apartment and I let him unbutton my blouse. I thought: this is normal. This is a normal thing to do. He had a small, soft upper body, not at all like Nick, and he did none of the usual things that Nick did to me before we had sex, like touching me for a long time and talking in a low voice. It started right away, with no introduction really. Physically I felt almost nothing, just a mild discomfort. I let myself become rigid and silent, waiting for Rossa to notice my rigidity and stop what he was doing, but he didn’t. I considered asking him to stop, but the idea that he might ignore me felt more serious than the situation needed to be. Don’t get yourself into a big legal thing, I thought. I lay there and let him continue. He asked me if I liked it rough and I told him I didn’t think so, but he pulled my hair anyway. I wanted to laugh, and after that I hated myself for feeling superior.

When I got home, I went to my room and took a single plastic-wrapped bandage from the drawer. I am normal, I thought. I have a body like anyone else. Then I scratched my arm open until it bled, just a faint spot of blood, widening into a droplet. I counted to three and afterwards opened the bandage, placed it carefully over my arm, and disposed of the plastic wrap.

22

The next day I started to write a story. It was a Thursday, I didn’t have class until three, and I was sitting up in bed with a cup of black coffee on my bedside cabinet. I didn’t plan to write a story, I just noticed after some time that I wasn’t hitting the return key and that the lines were forming full sentences and attaching to each other like prose. When I stopped, I had written over three thousand words. It was past three o’clock and I hadn’t eaten. I lifted my hands from the keyboard and in the light from the window they looked emaciated. When I did get out of bed, a wave of dizziness came over me, breaking everything into a shower of visual noise. I made myself four slices of toast and ate them without butter. I saved the file as ‘b’. It was the first story I ever wrote.

Bobbi and Philip and I went for milkshakes after the cinema that night. During the film I had checked my phone six times to see if Nick had replied to a message I sent him. He hadn’t. Bobbi was wearing a denim jacket and a lipstick that was such a dark purple it was nearly black. I folded our milkshake receipt up into a complex geometrical pattern, while Philip tried to convince us to start performing together again. We were being evasive about it, though I didn’t know why exactly.

I have college work, Bobbi said. And Frances has a secret boyfriend.

I looked up at her with an expression of total horror. I could feel it in my teeth, a hard banging of shock in the nerve endings. She frowned.

What? Bobbi said. He already knows, he was talking about it the other day.

Talking about what? said Philip.

About Frances and Nick, Bobbi said.

Philip stared at her, and then at me. Bobbi lifted her hand to her mouth, slowly, the hand flat and horizontal, and gave one tiny shake of her head. It was enough to signal to me that she was really freaked out and not playing a game.

I thought you knew, said Bobbi. I thought you said it the other day.

You’re joking, Philip said. You’re not really having some kind of affair with him, are you?

I tried to work my mouth into a sort of casual expression. Melissa was going away to visit her sister for the weekend, and I had messaged Nick asking if he wanted to come and stay with me while she was gone. Bobbi won’t mind, I wrote. He had seen the message and not replied.

He’s fucking married, said Philip.

Don’t be a moralist, Bobbi said. That’s all we need.

I just continued folding my mouth up smaller and smaller and didn’t look at anyone.

Is he going to leave his wife? said Philip.

Bobbi scrubbed at her eye with a fist. Quietly and with a tiny mouth I said: no.

After a long and uninterrupted silence at our table, Philip looked at me and said: I didn’t think you would let someone take advantage of you like that. He had a choked, embarrassed expression on his face while he pronounced these words, and I felt sorry for all of us, like we were just little children pretending to be adults. He left then and Bobbi slid his half-finished milkshake across the table toward me.

I’m sorry, she said. I honestly thought he knew.

I decided to drink as much milkshake as I could without taking a breath. When my mouth started hurting I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop when my head started hurting either. I didn’t stop until Bobbi said: Frances, are you planning to drown there? Then I looked up like everything was normal and said: what?

Nick invited me to come out and stay in his house that weekend. He was cooking when I arrived on Friday evening and I was so relieved to see him that I wanted to make some kind of silly romantic gesture, like throwing myself into his arms. I didn’t. I sat at the table chewing my fingernails. He told me I was being quiet and I tore a piece off my thumbnail with my teeth and looked at the nail critically.

So maybe I should tell you, I said, I slept with this guy I met on Tinder the other day.

Oh, really?

Nick was cutting vegetables into small pieces in the neat methodical way he always did. He liked to cook, he told me it relaxed him.

You’re not angry or anything, are you? I said.

Why would I be angry? You can sleep with other people if you want to.

I know. I just feel foolish. I think it was a stupid thing to do.

Oh really? he said. What was he like?

Nick hadn’t looked up from the chopping board. He moved the diced onion pieces to one side of the board with the flat part of his knife and started to slice a red pepper.

He was awful, I said. He told me he loved Yeats, can you believe that? I practically had to stop him reciting ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in the bar.

Wow, I feel terrible for you.

And the sex was bad.

No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.

We ate dinner without touching one another. The dog woke up and wanted to be let out, and I helped clear the plates into the dishwasher. Nick went outside for a cigarette and left the door open so we could talk. I felt like he wanted me to leave and he was too polite to say so. He asked how Bobbi was. Okay, I said. How’s Melissa? He shrugged. Finally he put the cigarette out and we went upstairs. I got onto his bed and started to undress.

And you’re sure this is what you want? Nick said.

He was always saying this kind of thing, so I just said yes or nodded and unbuckled the belt I was wearing. Behind me I heard him say abruptly: because I just feel, I don’t know. I turned around and he was standing there, rubbing his left shoulder with his hand.

You seem kind of distant, he said. If you’d rather be … If there’s somewhere else you’d rather be, I don’t want you to feel like you’re trapped here.

No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to seem distant.

No, I’m not … I feel like I’m having trouble talking to you. Maybe it’s my fault, I don’t know. I feel kind of …

He never usually trailed off his sentences this way. I started to feel agitated. I said again that I didn’t mean to be distant with him. I didn’t understand what he was trying to say and I was afraid of what it might have been.

If you’re doing this for any reason other than just wanting to, he said, then don’t do it. I really don’t, you know, I don’t have any interest in that.

I murmured something like sure, of course, but in fact it was unclear to me what he was talking about now. It sounded like he was worried that I’d developed feelings for him and he was trying to say that he wasn’t interested in anything other than sex. Anyway I agreed with him whatever he meant.

In bed he went on top and we didn’t make eye contact very much. Impulsively I lifted one of his hands and pressed it against my throat. He held it still for a few seconds and then said: what do you want me to do? I shrugged. I want you to kill me, I thought. He stroked the hard muscle of my throat with his fingers and then lifted his hand away.

After it was over, he asked me about the bandage on my arm. Did you hurt it? he said. I looked at it but didn’t say anything. I could hear Nick breathing, hard, like he was tired. I felt a lot of things I didn’t want to feel. I felt that I was a damaged person who deserved nothing.

Would you ever hit me? I said. I mean if I asked you to.

Nick didn’t look over at me, his eyes were closed. He said: uh, I don’t know. Why? Do you want me to? I closed my eyes too, and breathed out very slowly until there was no air in my lungs and my stomach was small and flat.

Yeah, I said. I want you to do it now.

What?

I want you to hit me.

I don’t think I want to do that, he said.

I knew that he was sitting up now, looking down at me, though I kept my eyes closed.

Some people like it, I said.

You mean during sex? I didn’t realise you were interested in that kind of thing.

I opened my eyes then. He was frowning.

Wait, are you okay? he said. Why are you crying?

I’m not crying.

Incidentally it turned out that I was crying. It was just something my eyes were doing while we were talking. He touched the side of my face where it was wet.

I’m not crying, I said.

Do you think I want to hurt you?

I could feel tears coming out of my eyes, but they didn’t feel hot like real tears. They felt cool like little streams from a lake.

I don’t know, I said. I’m just telling you that you can.

But is it something you want me to do?

You can do whatever you want with me.

Yeah, he said. I’m sorry. I don’t really know what to say to that.

I dried my face with my wrist. Never mind, I said. Forget about it. Let’s try and get some sleep. Nick didn’t say anything at first, he just lay there. I didn’t look over, but I sensed the tension of his body on the mattress, like he was preparing to sit up suddenly. Finally he said: you know we’ve talked about this, you can’t just lash out at me whenever you feel bad.

I’m not lashing out, I said.

How would you feel if I was sleeping with other women and then coming to your house to brag about it?

I froze. I had actually forgotten by then about the date with Rossa. Nick’s reaction when I’d told him had been so blank that the incident immediately felt insignificant, and I hadn’t thought of it again. I hadn’t even considered that it might have prompted Nick’s strange mood. Privately I had to admit that if he’d done the same thing to me — sought out another woman, had meaningless sex with her, and then flippantly told me about it while I prepared his dinner — I would never have wanted to see him again. But that was different.

You’re fucking married, I said.

Yeah, thanks. That’s very helpful. I guess because I’m married that means you can just treat me however you want.

I can’t believe you’re trying to play the victim.

I’m not, he said. But I think if you’re honest with yourself, you’re actually glad I’m married, because it means you can act out and I have to take the blame for everything.

I wasn’t used to being attacked like this and it was frightening. I thought of myself as an independent person, so independent that the opinions of others were irrelevant to me. Now I was afraid that Nick was right: I isolated myself from criticism so I could behave badly without losing my sense of righteousness.

You promised me you were going to tell Melissa about us, I said. How do you think I feel about lying to everyone all the time?

I don’t think it bothers you that much. To be honest, I think you only want me to tell her because you’d like to see us fighting.

If that’s what you think of me, why are we even doing this?

I don’t know, he said.

I got out of bed then and started to put my clothes on. He thought I was a cruel and petty person intent on destroying his marriage. He didn’t know why he was still seeing me, he didn’t know. I buttoned my blouse, feeling a humiliation so deep it was difficult to breathe comfortably.

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.

I went to the library after that to start an essay that was due in two weeks’ time. My clothes were still damp from the rain and I could hear a thin ringing noise in my right ear, but I mostly ignored that. My real concern was for the acuity of my critical faculties. I wasn’t sure if I remembered exactly what the word ‘epistemic’ meant, or if I was still able to read. For a few minutes I laid my head down on the library table and listened to the ringing noise get louder and louder, until it felt almost like a friend who was talking to me. You could die, I thought, and it was a nice relaxing thought at the time. I imagined death like a switch, switching off all the pain and noise, cancelling everything.

When I left the library it was still raining and it felt unbelievably cold. My teeth were chattering and I couldn’t remember any words in English. Rain moved across the footpath in shallow waves like a special effect. I had no umbrella and I perceived that my face and hair were becoming wet, too wet to feel normal. I saw Bobbi sheltering outside the arts building and I started to walk toward her, trying to remember what people usually said to each other as a greeting. This felt effortful in an unfamiliar way. I raised my hand to wave at her and she came toward me, very quickly I thought, saying something I didn’t understand.

Then I blacked out. When I woke up again I was lying under the shelter with some people standing around me, and I was saying the word: what? Everyone seemed relieved I was talking. A security guard was saying something into a walkie-talkie, but I couldn’t hear him. The pain in my abdomen felt tight like a fist and I tried to sit up and see if Bobbi was there. I saw her on the phone, holding her free ear shut with a hand as if struggling to hear the other person. The rain was loud like an untuned radio.

Oh, she’s awake, Bobbi said into the phone. One second.

Bobbi looked at me then. Are you okay? she said. She looked clean and dry like a model from a catalogue. My hair was leaking water onto my face. I’m fine, I said. She went back to talking on the phone, I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I tried to wipe my face with my sleeve but my sleeves were even wetter than my face was. Outside the shelter the rain fell white like milk. Bobbi put her phone away and helped me to sit up straight.

I’m sorry, I said. I’m so sorry.

Is it the thing you had before? said Bobbi.

I nodded my head. Bobbi pulled her sleeve over her hand and wiped my face. Her sweater was dry and very soft. Thanks, I said. People started to disperse, the security guard went to look around the corner.

Do you need to go back to hospital? she said.

I think they’ll just tell me to wait for this scan.

Let’s go home then. Okay?

She linked her arm under mine and we walked out onto Nassau Street, where there was a taxi passing right outside. The driver pulled up and let us get in the back even though the cars behind were beeping. Bobbi gave our address and I let my head loll back and gazed out the window while they talked. The streetlights bathed people’s figures in angelic light. I saw shopfronts, and faces in bus windows. Then my eyes closed.

When we reached our street, Bobbi insisted on paying. Outside the building I gripped the iron railings and waited for her to unlock the door. Inside she asked me if I’d like a bath. I nodded, yes. I braced myself against the corridor wall. She went to run the bath and I slowly took off my coat. A terrific pain was beating inside my body. Bobbi reappeared in front of me and took my coat to hang it up.

Are you going to need help getting out of your clothes? she said.

I thought of the story I had sent to Valerie that morning, a story which I now remembered was explicitly about Bobbi, a story which characterised Bobbi as a mystery so total I couldn’t endure her, a force I couldn’t subjugate with my will, and the love of my life. I paled at this memory. Somehow I hadn’t been conscious of it, or had forced myself not to be conscious, and now I remembered.

Don’t get upset, she said. I’ve seen you undressed hundreds of times.

I tried to smile, although my breath moved in and out of my lips in a way that probably contorted the smile.

Don’t remind me, I said.

Oh, come on. It wasn’t all bad. We had some fun.

You sound like you’re flirting.

She laughed. In the story I had described a house party after the Leaving Cert, when I drank a shoulder of vodka and then spent the night throwing up. Whenever anyone tried to look after me I would push them away and say: I want Bobbi. Bobbi wasn’t even at the party.

I’ll undress you in a very unsexy way, she said. Don’t worry.

The bath was still running. We went inside the bathroom and I sat on the closed toilet seat while she rolled her sleeves up to test the temperature. She told me it was hot. I was wearing a white blouse that day, and I tried to undo the buttons but my hands were trembling. Bobbi shut the tap off and crouched down to finish unbuttoning for me. Her fingers were wet and left little dark prints around the buttonholes. She scooped my arms out of the sleeves easily, like she was peeling a potato.

And there’s going to be blood everywhere, I said.

Lucky it’s me here and not your boyfriend.

No, don’t. I’m fighting with him. It’s, uh. Things aren’t very good.

She stood up and went to the bath again. She seemed distracted suddenly. In the white bathroom light her hair and fingernails gleamed.

Does he know you’re sick? she said.

I shook my head. She said something about getting me a towel and then left the room. Gradually I stood up, finished undressing myself and managed to climb into the bath.

In the story I had included an anecdote in which I did not appear. Bobbi had gone to study in Berlin for six weeks when we were sixteen, staying with a family who had a daughter our age called Liese. One night, without saying anything, Bobbi and Liese went to bed together. They were quiet, not wanting Liese’s parents to hear, and they never talked about it afterwards. Bobbi did not dwell on the sensory aspects of the incident, on whether she had nursed a desire for Liese before it happened, whether she knew of Liese’s feelings, or even what it was like. If anyone else in school had told me the same thing, I wouldn’t have believed them, but because it was Bobbi I knew immediately that it was true. I wanted Bobbi, and, like Liese, I would have done anything to be with her. She told me this story by way of explaining to me that she wasn’t a virgin. She pronounced Liese’s name without any particular love or hatred, just a girl she had known, and for months afterwards, maybe forever afterwards, I was afraid that someday she would say my name that way too.

The water was soapy and a little too hot. It left a rim of pink on my leg where it touched me. I forced myself to get all the way down into the tub, where the water licked me obscenely. I tried to visualise the pain draining out of my body, draining out into the water and dissolving. Bobbi knocked on the door and came in holding a big pink towel, one of the new ones she had brought with her from her parents’ house. She started to hang it on the towel rack while I closed my eyes. I heard her leave the bathroom again, a tap running in the other room, her bedroom door opening and closing. I could hear her voice, she must have been on the phone.

After a few minutes, she came back into the bathroom holding her phone outstretched toward me.

It’s Nick, she said.

What?

Nick’s on the phone for you.

My hands were wet. I lifted one of them out of the water and reached to dry it clumsily on a bathtowel before accepting the phone from her hand. She left the room again.

Hey, are you okay? said Nick’s voice.

I closed my eyes. He had a gentle tone in his voice and I wanted to climb into it, like it was something hollow I could be suspended inside.

I’m feeling all right now, I said. Thank you.

Bobbi told me what happened. It must have been really frightening.

For a few seconds neither of us said anything, and then we both started speaking.

You first, I said.

He told me he would like to come and see me. I said he was welcome to. He asked if I needed anything and I said no.

Okay, he said. I’ll get in the car. What were you going to say?

I’ll tell you when I see you.

I hung up and carefully placed the phone on the dry part of the bathmat. Then I closed my eyes again and let the warmth of the water into my body, the synthetic fruit scent of shampoo, the hard plastic of the tub, the fog of steam that wet my face. I was meditating. I was counting my breaths.

After what seemed like a long time, fifteen minutes or half an hour, Bobbi came back in. I opened my eyes and the room was very bright, radiantly bright, and strangely beautiful. All okay? Bobbi said. I told her Nick was coming over and she said: good. She sat on the side of the bath and I watched her take a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from her cardigan.

What she said to me after she lit the cigarette was: are you going to write a book? I realised then that she hadn’t answered Philip’s questions about our performances because on some level she knew that something had changed, that I was working on something new. The fact that she had noticed this gave me a kind of confidence but also served to demonstrate that nothing about me was impenetrable to Bobbi. When it came to sordid or mundane things, she might be slow to notice, but real changes that occurred inside me were never hidden from her.

I don’t know, I said. Are you?

She screwed one eye shut like it was bothering her and then opened it again.

Why would I write a book? she said. I’m not a writer.

What are you going to do? After we graduate.

I don’t know. Work in a university if I can.

This phrase, ‘if I can’, made it clear that Bobbi was trying to tell me something serious, something that couldn’t be communicated in words but instead through a shift in the way we related to each other. Not only was it nonsense for Bobbi to say ‘if I can’ at the end of her sentence, because she came from a wealthy family, read diligently and had good grades, but it didn’t make sense in the context of our relationship either. Bobbi didn’t relate to me in the ‘if I can’ sense. She related to me as a person, maybe the only person, who understood her ferocious and frightening power over circumstances and people. What she wanted, she could have, I knew that.

What do you mean ‘if’? I said.

This was too obvious, and for a while Bobbi said nothing and picked a loose hair off the sleeve of her cardigan instead.

I thought you were planning to bring down global capitalism, I said.

Well, not on my own. Someone has to do the small jobs.

I just don’t see you as a small-jobs person.

That’s what I am, she said.

I didn’t really know what I’d meant by a ‘small-jobs person’. I believed in small jobs, like raising children, picking fruit, cleaning. They were the jobs I considered the most valuable, the jobs that struck me as deserving the most respect of all. It confused me that suddenly I was telling Bobbi that a job in a university wasn’t good enough for her, but it also confused me to imagine Bobbi doing something so sedate and ordinary. My skin was the same temperature as the water, and I moved one knee outside, into the cold air, before dipping it back down again.

Well, you’ll be a world-famous professor, I said. You’ll lecture at the Sorbonne.

No.

She seemed irritable, almost about to express something, but then her eyes became calm and remote.

You think everyone you like is special, she said.

I tried to sit up and the bathtub was hard on my bones.

I’m just a normal person, she said. When you get to like someone, you make them feel like they’re different from everyone else. You’re doing it with Nick, you did it with me once.

No.

She looked up at me, without any cruelty or anger at all, and said: I’m not trying to upset you.

But you are upsetting me, I said.

Well, I’m sorry.

I gave a little grimace. Down on the bathmat her phone started buzzing. She picked it up and said: hello? Yeah, give me one second. Then she hung up again. It was Nick, she was going out to the hall to buzz him in.

I lay there in the bath not thinking, not doing anything. After a few seconds, I heard her open the front door, and then her voice saying: she’s had a really rough day, so just be nice to her. And Nick said: I know, I will. I loved them both so much in this moment that I wanted to appear in front of them like a benevolent ghost and sprinkle blessings into their lives. Thank you, I wanted to say. Thank you both. You are my family now.

Nick came into the bathroom and shut the door behind him. There’s that beautiful coat, I said. He was wearing it. He smiled, he rubbed at one of his eyes. I was worried about you, he said. I’m glad you’re feeling well enough to fetishise commodities as usual. Are you in pain? I shrugged. Not so much any more, I said. He kept looking at me. Then he started looking down at his shoes. He swallowed. Are you okay? I said. He nodded, he wiped at his nose with his sleeve. I’m happy to see you, he said. His voice sounded thick. Don’t worry, I said. I’m fine. He looked up at the ceiling, like he was laughing at himself, and his eyes were wet. It’s good to hear that, he said.

I told him I wanted to get out of the bath and he took the towel off the rack for me. When I stood up out of the water he looked at me in a way that was not at all vulgar, the kind of look you can give someone’s body when you’ve seen it many times and it has a particular relationship to you. I didn’t look away from him then or even feel embarrassed. I tried to imagine how I must have looked: dripping wet, flushed with steam heat, my hair leaking rivulets of water down my shoulders. I watched him standing there, not blinking, his expression calm and fathomless like an ocean. We didn’t have to speak then. He wrapped the cloth around me and I got out of the bath.

24

In my room Nick sat on the bed while I dressed in clean pyjamas and towelled my hair. We could hear Bobbi strumming her ukulele in the other room. Peace seemed to radiate outwards from the inside of my body. I was tired and very weak, but these were also peaceful feelings in their own way. Eventually I came to sit beside Nick and he put his arm around me. I could smell cigarette smoke on the collar of his shirt. He asked about my health, and I told him I’d been to hospital in August and that I was waiting for an ultrasound. He touched my hair and said he was very sorry I hadn’t told him about it before. I said I didn’t want him to pity me and for a while he was quiet.

I’m really sorry about the other night, he said. I felt like you were trying to hurt my feelings and I overreacted, I’m sorry.

For some reason all I could say was: it’s all right, don’t worry. Those were the only words that would come, so I said them as soothingly as I could.

All right, he said. Well, can I tell you something?

I nodded.

I spoke to Melissa, he said. I told her we’ve been seeing each other. Is that okay?

I closed my eyes. What happened? I said quietly.

We talked for a while. I think she’s all right. I told her that I wanted to keep seeing you and she understands that, so.

You didn’t have to do that.

I should have done it at the beginning, he said. There was no need to put you through any of this, I was just being cowardly.

We were silent for a few seconds. I felt blissfully tired, like each cell in my body was winding down into a deep private sleep of its own.

I know I’m not a great guy, he said. But I do love you, you know. Of course I do. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but I didn’t know if you wanted to hear it. I’m sorry.

I was smiling. My eyes were closed still. It felt good to be wrong about everything. Since when have you loved me? I said.

Since I met you, I would think. If I wanted to be very philosophical about it, I’d say I loved you before then.

Oh, you’re making me very happy.

Am I? he said. That’s good. I want to make you very happy.

I love you too.

He kissed my forehead. When he spoke, his words were light but in his voice I heard a concealed emotion, which moved me. All right, he said. Well, you’ve suffered enough. Let’s just be very happy from now on.

The next day, I received an email from Melissa. I was sitting in the library, typing up a page of notes, when her email arrived. I decided that before reading it I would take a walk around the library desks. Slowly I arose from my seat and began my walk. Inside, everything was very brown. Out of the windows I could see a rattle of wind making its way through the trees. On the cricket green a woman in shorts was running with her elbows working up and down like small pistons. I cast a glance back at my own library desk to ensure my laptop was still there. It sat glowing ominously into the nothingness. I walked halfway around the room before looping back to my own seat, as if this circuit around the library desks was actually a physical endurance test of some kind. Then I opened the email.

Hi Frances. I’m not angry at you, I want you to know that. I’m just getting in touch with you because I think it’s important that we’re on the same page with this. Nick doesn’t want to leave me & I don’t want to leave him. We are going to keep living together & being married. I’m putting this in an email because I don’t trust Nick to be straight with you about it. He has a weak personality & compulsively tells people what they want to hear. In short if you’re sleeping with my husband because you secretly believe that one day he will be your husband, then you’re making a serious mistake. He’s not going to divorce me & if he did he would never marry you. Equally if you’re sleeping with him because you believe his affection proves you to be a good person, or even a smart or attractive person, you should know that Nick is not primarily attracted to good-looking or morally worthy people. He likes partners who take complete responsibility for all his decisions, that’s all. You will not be able to draw a sustainable sense of self-respect from this relationship you’re in. I’m sure you find his total acquiescence charming now, but over the course of a marriage it actually becomes exhausting. Fighting with him is impossible because he’s pathologically submissive, & you can’t scream at him without hating yourself. I know because today I screamed at him for a long time. Because I myself have ‘made mistakes’ in the past, it’s hard to feel truly cathartically wronged by the fact that he’s been having sex with a 21-year-old behind my back, & I hate that. I feel like any other person would feel in this situation. I’ve cried copiously, not only in fits & starts but also for sustained periods of over an hour each. But just because I once slept with another woman at a literary festival & then several years later while Nick was in psychiatric hospital began an affair with his best friend which continued even after I knew Nick had found out about it, my feelings don’t count. I know I’m a monster & he probably tells you bad things about me. Sometimes I find myself thinking: if I’m so awful, why doesn’t he leave me? And I know what kind of person has those thoughts about their own spouse. The kind of person who later murders their spouse, probably. I wouldn’t murder Nick but it’s important for you to know that if I tried, he would absolutely go with it. Even if he figured out that I was planning his murder he wouldn’t bring it up in case it upset me. I’ve become so used to seeing him as pathetic & even contemptible that I forgot anybody else could love him. Other women have always lost interest once they got to know him. But not you. You love him, don’t you? He tells me your father is an alcoholic, so was mine. I wonder if we gravitate toward Nick because he gives us a sense of control that was lacking in childhood. I actually believed him when he told me nothing had happened between you & it was just a crush. I felt relieved, isn’t that terrible? I thought oh well, he only met you during the summer, he still wasn’t really himself then, he’s been so much better since. And now I realise that you’re actually a function of the betterness, or it’s a function of you. Are you making my husband better, Frances? What gives you the right to do that? He’s awake during the day now, I’ve noticed. He’s started replying to emails & answering the phone again. When I’m at work he sometimes sends me interesting articles about leftists in Greece. Does he send you the same ones or are they personalised? I admit I’m threatened by your extreme youth. It’s very shocking thinking about your own husband being into younger women. I never noticed it before with him. 21 is young, right? But what if you were 19, would he still have done it then? Is he the kind of morbid guy in his 30s who secretly finds 15-year-old girls attractive? Has he ever used the search term ‘teen’? These are things I didn’t have to think about before you came into our lives. Now I wonder if he hates me. I didn’t hate him when it was me seeing someone else; in fact I think I liked him more, but if he tried to tell me that I’d want to spit at him. I think most of all I’m shocked that he doesn’t want to do the easy thing & leave you. That’s how I know I’ve been replaced. He says he still loves me, but if he doesn’t do what I say any more, then how can I believe him? Of course he never overreacted like this in my case, & I always thought I was so lucky that he didn’t. Now I wonder if he ever loved me at all. It’s hard to imagine marrying someone you don’t love, but actually it’s just the kind of thing Nick would do, out of loyalty & a craving for punishment. Do you know him that way too, or am I the only one? Part of me wishes I could be friends with you. I used to find you very cold & unkind, and at first I thought it was because of Bobbi, which I resented. Now that I know it was just jealousy & fear, I feel differently about you. But you don’t need to be jealous, Frances. For Nick you’re probably indistinguishable from happiness. I don’t doubt that he considers you the great love of his adult life. He & I never had a tempestuous affair behind anyone’s back. I know I can’t ask him to stop seeing you, although I want to. I could ask you to stop seeing him, but why should I? Things are better now, even I can see that. I used to come home in the evening & he’d be in bed already. Or else sitting in front of the TV having not changed the channel since he woke up. Once I came home & saw him watching some kind of softcore pornographic film where two cheerleaders were kissing each other, & when he saw me he shrugged & said ‘I’m not watching this, I just didn’t know where the remote was.’ At the time I actually pretended not to believe him, because I thought it would be less upsetting if he were really watching the cheerleader film rather than just sitting there reluctantly allowing the film to keep playing because he was too depressed to find the remote. Now I keep thinking about all the evenings I’ve come home this month & he’s been cooking & listening to something on the radio. And he’s always clean-shaven & asking me how my day was & his gym clothes are always in the washing machine. I see him looking in the mirror sometimes with quite an appraising expression. Of course, how could I not have known? But I always said I wanted him to be happy, & now I know it was true all along. I do want that. Even when it looks like this I still want it. So. Anyway. Maybe we could all have dinner together some time. (I’ll invite Bobbi too.)

I read the email several times. It seemed like an affectation on Melissa’s part not to include paragraph breaks, as if she was saying: look at the tide of emotion that has swept over me. I also believed she had edited the email carefully for effect, the effect being: always remember who is the writer, Frances. It is me, and not you. These were the thoughts I sprang to, unkind thoughts. She didn’t call me a bad person, she didn’t say any of the horrible things about me that the situation would excuse. Maybe a tide of emotion really did sweep over her. The part of the email about my youth affected me, and I realised it didn’t matter whether it was calculated or not. I was young and she was older. That was enough to make me feel bad, like I had put extra coins into the vending machine. On the second reading I let my eyes skip over that section.

The only part of the email I really wanted to know about was the information relating to Nick. He had been in psychiatric hospital, which was news to me. I wasn’t repelled as such; I had read books, I was familiar with the idea that capitalism was the really crazy thing. But I had thought people who were hospitalised for psychiatric problems were different from the people I knew. I could see I had entered a new social setting now, where severe mental illness no longer had unfashionable connotations. I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed. By this logic Nick and Melissa were like my parents bringing me into the world, probably hating and loving me even more than my original parents did. This also meant I was Bobbi’s evil twin, which didn’t seem at the time like taking the metaphor too far.

I followed this pattern of thought superficially, like letting my eyes follow the trajectory of a passing car. My body was twisted up in the library chair like a coiled spring and my legs were crossed twice over, the arch of my left foot pressed tightly into the base of the chair. I felt guilty that Nick had been so ill, and that I knew about it now even though he had chosen not to tell me. I didn’t know how to handle the information. In the email Melissa had been callous about it, like Nick’s illness was a dark comic backdrop to her affair, and I wondered if she felt that way or if that was a way of disguising what she really felt. I thought of Evelyn in the bookshop telling him again and again how well he looked.

After an hour, the email I wrote in response was as follows:

Lots to think about. Dinner sounds good.

25

It was the middle of October by then. I put some cash together from whatever I could find in my room, as well as some birthday and Christmas money I’d forgotten to lodge in the bank. Altogether this came to forty-three euro, four fifty of which I spent in a German supermarket buying bread, pasta and tinned tomatoes. In the mornings I asked Bobbi for the use of her milk and she waved me away like: use whatever you want. Jerry gave her an allowance every week, and I also noticed she had started wearing a new black wool coat with tortoiseshell buttons. I didn’t want to tell her what had happened with my account, so I just described myself as ‘broke’ in a tone of voice I calculated to be flippant. Every morning and evening I called my father, and every morning and evening he didn’t pick up. We did go to Melissa and Nick’s house to have dinner.

We went more than once. Increasingly I noticed that Bobbi had started to enjoy Nick’s company, even to enjoy it more than the company of Melissa or myself. When the four of us spent time together, she and Nick often engaged in pretend arguments or other competitive activities from which Melissa and I were excluded. They played video games after dinner, or magnetic travel chess, while Melissa and I talked about impressionism. Once when they were drunk they even raced each other around the back garden. Nick won but he was tired afterwards, and Bobbi called him ‘elderly’ and threw dead leaves on him. She asked Melissa: who’s prettier, Nick or me? Melissa looked at me and in an arch tone she replied: I love all my children equally. Bobbi’s relationship with Nick affected me in a curious way. Seeing them together, each giving the other all of their attention, gave me a weird aesthetic thrill. Physically they were perfect, like twins. At times I caught myself wishing they would move closer or even touch one another, as if I was trying to complete something which in my mind remained unfinished.

We often had political discussions, in which we all shared similar positions but expressed ourselves differently. Bobbi, for example, was an insurrectionist, while Melissa, from a grim pessimism, tended to favour the rule of law. Nick and I fell somewhere between the two of them, more comfortable with critique than endorsement. We talked one night about the endemic racism of criminal justice in the US, the videos of police brutality that we had all seen without ever seeking them out, and what it meant for us as white people to say they were ‘difficult to watch’, which we all agreed they were although we couldn’t fix on one exact meaning for this difficulty. There was one particular video of a black teenage girl in a bathing suit crying for her mother while a white police officer knelt on her back, which Nick said made him feel so physically ill he couldn’t finish watching it.

I realise that’s indulgent, he said. But I also thought, what good even comes of me finishing it? Which is depressing in itself.

We also discussed whether these videos in some way contributed to a sense of European superiority, as if police forces in Europe were not endemically racist.

Which they are, Bobbi said.

Yeah, I don’t think the expression is ‘American cops are bastards,’ said Nick.

Melissa said she didn’t doubt that we were all a part of the problem, but it was difficult to see how exactly, and seemingly impossible to do anything about it without first comprehending that. I said I sometimes felt drawn to disclaiming my ethnicity, as if, though I was obviously white, I wasn’t ‘really’ white, like other white people.

No offence, Bobbi said, but that’s honestly very unhelpful.

I’m not offended, I said. I agree.

Certain elements of my relationship with Nick had changed since he told Melissa we were together. I sent him sentimental texts during daytime hours and he called me when he was drunk to tell me nice things about my personality. The sex itself was similar, but afterwards was different. Instead of feeling tranquil, I felt oddly defenceless, like an animal playing dead. It was as though Nick could reach through the soft cloud of my skin and take whatever was inside me, like my lungs or other internal organs, and I wouldn’t try to stop him. When I described this to him he said he felt the same, but he was sleepy and he might not really have been listening.

Piles of dead leaves had formed all over campus, and I spent my time attending lectures and trying to find books in the Ussher Library. On dry days, Bobbi and I walked along underused paths kicking leaves and talking about things like the idea of landscape painting. Bobbi thought the fetishisation of ‘untouched nature’ was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. I like houses better than fields, I observed. They’re more poetic, because they have people in them. Then we sat in the Buttery watching rain come down the windows. Something had changed between us, but I didn’t know what it was. We still intuited each other’s moods easily, we shared the same conspiratorial looks, and our conversations still felt lengthy and intelligent. The time she ran me that bath had changed something, had placed Bobbi in a new relation to me even as we both remained ourselves.

One afternoon toward the end of the month, when my supply of money was down to about six euro, I got an email from a man called Lewis, who was the editor of a literary journal in Dublin. The email said that Valerie had sent the story on with a view to having it published, and that if I was willing to give my permission, he would very much like to print it in an upcoming issue. He said he was ‘very excited’ by the prospect and that he had some thoughts on possible revisions if I was interested.

I opened the file I had sent to Valerie and read it all in one go, without stopping to think about what I was doing. The figure in the story was recognisably Bobbi, her parents recognisable as her parents, myself identifiably myself. No one who knew us could fail to see Bobbi in the story. It wasn’t an unflattering portrait, exactly. It emphasised the domineering aspects of Bobbi’s personality and of my own, because the story was about personal domination. But, I thought, things always have to be selected and emphasised, that’s writing. Bobbi would understand that more than anyone.

Lewis also mentioned I would be paid for the story, and included a scale of fees for first-time contributors. If published at its current length, my story would be worth over eight hundred euro. I sent Lewis a reply thanking him for his interest and telling him I would be delighted to work with him on whatever revisions he thought appropriate.

That evening Nick picked me up from the apartment to take me out to Monkstown. Melissa was staying with her family in Kildare for a few days. In the car I explained about the story, and about the conversation I’d had with Bobbi in the bath and what she’d said about not being special. Slow down, Nick said. You’ve sold this story for how much did you say? I didn’t even know you wrote prose. I laughed, I liked when he acted proud of me. I told him it was my first one and he called me intimidating. We talked about Bobbi appearing in the story, and he said he appeared in Melissa’s work all the time.

But only passingly, I said. Like ‘my husband was there.’ Bobbi is the main character in this one.

Yeah, I forgot you’ve read Melissa’s book. You’re right, she doesn’t dwell on me that much. Anyway I’m sure Bobbi won’t mind.

I’m contemplating never telling her. It’s not like she reads the magazine.

Well, I think that’s a bad idea, he said. It would involve a lot of other people also not telling her. That guy Philip who you hang around with, people like that. My wife. But you’re the boss, obviously.

I made a ‘hm’ noise, because I thought he was right but I didn’t want to think so. I liked when he called me the boss. He tapped his hands on the steering wheel cheerfully. What is it with me and writers? he said.

You just like women who can wreck you intellectually, I said. I bet you had crushes on your teachers at school.

I was actually notorious for that kind of thing. I slept with one of my college lecturers, have I told you about that?

I asked him to, and he told me. The woman was not just a teaching assistant, she was a real professor. I asked what age she was and Nick smiled coyly and said: like forty-five? Maybe fifty. Anyway she could have lost her job, it was insane.

I see it from her perspective, I said. Didn’t I kiss you at your wife’s birthday party?

He said he struggled to understand why he made people feel that way, that it had happened rarely in his life but always with a violent intensity and no real sense of agency on his part. A friend of his elder brother had developed a similar thing for him when he was fifteen. And this girl was nearly twenty, Nick said. Obsessed with me. That’s how I lost my virginity.

Were you obsessed with her? I said.

No, I was just frightened of saying no to her. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

I told him that sounded bleak and it made me sad. Quickly he said: oh, I wasn’t going for sympathy points. I did say yes to her, it wasn’t … Well, it probably was illegal, but I consented to it.

Because you were too frightened to say no, I said. Would you call it consent if it happened to me?

Well, no. But it wasn’t like I felt physically threatened. I mean, it was weird behaviour from her, but we were both teenagers. I don’t think she was an evil person.

We were still in town, sitting in traffic on the north quays. It was early evening, but dark already. I looked out the window at passers-by and at the veil of rain that moved around under the streetlights. I told him I thought he was such an appealing love object partly because he was so curiously passive. I knew I would have to be the one to kiss you, I said. And that you would never kiss me, which made me feel vulnerable. But I also felt this terrible power, like, you’re going to let me kiss you, what else will you let me do? It was sort of intoxicating. I couldn’t decide if I had complete control over you or no control at all.

And now what do you feel? he said.

More like complete control. Is that bad?

He said he didn’t mind. He thought it was healthy for us to try and correct the power disparity, though he added that he didn’t think we would ever be able to do it completely. I told him that Melissa thought he was ‘pathologically submissive’ and he said it would be a mistake to assume that meant he was powerless in relationships with women. He told me he thought helplessness was often a way of exercising power. I told him he sounded like Bobbi and he laughed. The highest compliment a man can ever get from you, Frances, he said.

That night in bed we talked about his sister’s baby, how much he loved her, how sometimes when he was depressed he would go over to Laura’s house just to be closer to the baby and see her face. I didn’t know if he and Melissa planned to have children, or why they didn’t have them already if he loved children so much. I didn’t want to ask, because I was afraid of finding out that they did plan to, so instead I affected an ironic tone and said: maybe you and I could have children together. We could raise them in a polyamorous commune and let them choose their own first names. Nick told me he already had sinister ambitions to that effect.

Would you still find me attractive if I was pregnant? I said.

Sure, yeah.

In a fetishistic way?

Well, I don’t know, he said. I do feel like I’m more aware of pregnant women than I was ten years ago. I tend to imagine myself doing nice things for them.

That sounds fetishistic.

Everything is a fetish with you. I meant more like cooking them meals. But would I still want to fuck you if you were pregnant, yes. Rest assured.

I turned around then and put my mouth up next to his ear. My eyes were closed so I felt like I was just playing a game and not being completely real. Hey, I said, I really want you. And I could feel Nick nodding his head, this sweet eager nod. Thanks, he said. He said that. We kissed. I pressed my back against the mattress and he touched me cautiously like a deer touches things with its face. Nick, you’re such a gift, I said. I left my wallet in my coat, he replied. One second. And I said: just do it like this, I’m on the pill anyway. He had his hand laid flat on the pillow beside my head, and for a second he did nothing and his breath felt very hot. Yeah, do you want to? he said. I told him that I did and he kept breathing and then said: you make me feel so good about myself.

I put my arms around his neck and he slipped his hand between my legs so he could get inside me. We had always used condoms before and this felt different to me, or maybe he was being different about it. His skin was damp and he was sighing very hard. I felt my body opening up and then closing like a stop-motion video of a flower with its petals blooming open and closed, and it was so real it was like hallucinating. Nick said the word fuck and then said: Frances, I didn’t know it would feel so good, I’m sorry. His mouth was extremely soft and close. I asked if he needed to come already and he inhaled for a second and then said: sorry, I’m sorry. I thought of his sinister desire to get me pregnant, how full and huge I would feel, how he would touch me so lovingly and with such pride, and then I heard that I was saying: no it’s good, I want it. It felt very weird and nice then, and he was telling me that he loved me, I remember that. He was murmuring it in my ear: I love you.

I had several essay deadlines approaching at the time, so I drew up a rough personal timetable. In the mornings, before the library opened, I sat in bed and worked on the revisions Lewis sent me. I could see the story I had written gaining shape, unfolding itself, becoming longer and more solid. Then I showered and dressed in oversized sweaters to go and work in college all day. I often managed without eating until late in the evening, and when I got home I cooked two handfuls of pasta and ate it with olive oil and vinegar before falling asleep, sometimes without getting undressed.

Nick had started rehearsing for a production of Hamlet, and after work on Tuesdays and Fridays he came to stay in the apartment. He complained that there was never any food in the kitchen, but after I said I was broke in a sarcastic voice, he said: oh really? I’m sorry, I didn’t know that. Then he started to bring food with him when he visited. He brought fresh bread from the Temple Bar bakery, jars of raspberry jam, tubs of hummus and full-fat cream cheese. When he watched the way I ate this food, he asked me how broke I was. I shrugged. After that he started to bring over chicken breasts and plastic things of minced beef to put in my fridge. This makes me feel like a kept woman, I said. He said things like: well look, you can freeze them if you don’t want them tomorrow. I felt I had to act amused and glib about the food, because I thought Nick would be uncomfortable if he knew I really had no money and I was living on the bread and jam he brought me.

Bobbi seemed to enjoy Nick’s presence in our apartment, partly because he made himself so useful. He showed us how to fix the leaky tap in our kitchen. Man of the house, she said sarcastically. Once while he was cooking dinner for us, I heard him on the phone to Melissa, talking about some editorial dispute of hers and reassuring her that the other party was being ‘totally unreasonable’. For most of the call he was just nodding and moving saucepans around on the hob while saying: mm, I know. This was the role that seemed to appeal to him more than anything, listening to things and asking intelligent questions that showed he had been listening. It made him feel needed. He was excellent on the phone that time. I had no doubt that Melissa was the one who’d made the call.

We stayed up late talking those nights, sometimes until we could see it getting bright behind the blinds. One night I told him I was on a financial assistance scheme to cover my college fees. He expressed surprise and then immediately said: sorry for sounding surprised, that’s ignorant of me. I shouldn’t presume everyone’s parents can pay for that stuff.

Well, we’re not poor, I said. I’m not saying that defensively. I just don’t want you to get the impression that I grew up very poor or anything.

Of course.

You know, but I do feel different from you and Bobbi. Maybe it’s a small difference. I feel self-conscious about the nice things I have. Like my laptop, that’s second-hand, it was my cousin’s. But I feel self-conscious with it, still.

You’re allowed to have nice things, he said.

I pinched the duvet cover between my thumb and finger. It was hard, scratchy cloth, not like the Egyptian cotton Nick had in his house.

My dad’s been kind of unreliable about paying my allowance, I said.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Like at the moment I basically have no money.

Are you serious? said Nick. What are you living on?

I rolled the duvet cover between my fingers, feeling the grain of it. Well, Bobbi lets me share her things, I said. And you’re always bringing food.

Frances, that’s insane, he said. Why didn’t you tell me? I can give you money.

No, no. You said yourself it would be weird. You said there were ethical concerns.

I would be more concerned about you starving yourself. Look, you can pay me back if you want, we can call it a loan.

I stared down at the duvet, its ugly printed pattern of flowers. I have money coming in from that story, I said. I’ll pay you back then. The next morning, he went out to an ATM while Bobbi and I ate breakfast. When he came back, I could see he was too shy to give me the money while she was there, and I was glad. I didn’t want her to know I needed it. I went into the hallway with him when he was leaving and he took out his wallet and counted out four fifty-euro notes. I found it unsettling to watch him handle money like that. That’s too much, I said. He gave me a pained expression and said: then give it back another time, don’t worry about it. I opened my mouth and he interrupted: Frances, it’s nothing. For him it probably was nothing. He kissed my forehead before he left.

On the last day of October, I handed in one of my essays and Bobbi and I went out afterwards to meet friends for coffee. I was happy with my life then, happier than I could ever remember. Lewis was pleased with my revisions and ready to go ahead with printing the story in the January issue of the magazine. With Nick’s loan, and the money I would have left over from the magazine even after I repaid him, I felt invincibly wealthy. It was like I’d finally escaped my childhood and my dependence on other people. There was no way for my father to harm me any more, and from this vantage point I felt a new and sincere compassion toward him, the compassion of a good-natured observer.

We met Marianne that afternoon, as well as her boyfriend Andrew, who nobody really liked. Philip was there too, with Camille, a girl he had started seeing. Philip seemed awkward in my company, careful to catch my eye when he could and smile at my jokes but in a way that seemed to communicate sympathy, or even pity, rather than real friendship. I found his behaviour too silly to be offensive, though I remember hoping that Bobbi would notice it too so we could talk about it later.

We were sitting upstairs in a small cafe near College Green, and at some point the conversation turned to monogamy, a subject I didn’t have anything to say about. At first Marianne was discussing whether non-monogamy was an orientation, like being gay, and some people were ‘naturally’ non-monogamous, which led Bobbi to point out that no sexual orientation was ‘natural’ as such. I sipped on the coffee Bobbi had bought me and said nothing, just wanting to hear her talk. She said that monogamy was based on a commitment model, which served the needs of men in patrilineal societies by allowing them to pass property to their genetic offspring, traditionally facilitated by sexual entitlement to a wife. Non-monogamy could be based on an alternative model completely, Bobbi said. Something more like spontaneous consent.

Listening to Bobbi theorise in this way was exciting. She spoke in clear, brilliant sentences, like she was making shapes in the air out of glass or water. She never hesitated or repeated herself. Every so often she would catch my eye and I would nod: yes, exactly. This agreement seemed to encourage her, like she was searching my eyes for approval, and she would look away again and continue: by which I mean …

She didn’t seem to be paying attention to the other people at the table while she spoke, but I noticed that Philip and Camille were exchanging glances. At one point Philip looked at Andrew, the only other man seated with us, and Andrew raised both his eyebrows as if Bobbi had started talking gibberish or promoting anti-Semitism. I thought it was cowardly of Philip to look at Andrew, whom I knew he didn’t even like, and it made me uncomfortable. Gradually I realised that no one else had spoken in some time and that Marianne had started staring at her lap awkwardly. Even though I loved to listen to Bobbi when she was like this, I started to wish she would stop.

I just don’t think it’s possible to love more than one person, Camille said. I mean, with all your heart, really love them.

Did your parents have a favourite child? said Bobbi. That must have been hard for you.

Camille laughed nervously, unable to tell whether Bobbi was joking and not knowing Bobbi well enough to know that this was normal.

It’s not really the same with children, Camille said. Is it?

Well, it depends whether you believe in some kind of transhistorical concept of romantic love consistent across diverse cultures, said Bobbi. But I guess we all believe silly things, don’t we?

Marianne glanced at me, just briefly, but I could tell that she felt the same way I did: that Bobbi was being more than usually aggressive now, that she was going to hurt Camille’s feelings, and that Philip would be annoyed. I looked at Philip and saw it was too late. His nostrils were flared slightly, he was angry, and he was going to argue with Bobbi and lose.

Lots of anthropologists agree that humans are a naturally monogamous species, said Philip.

Is that really where you’re at theoretically? Bobbi said.

Not everything goes back to cultural theory, said Philip.

Bobbi laughed, an aesthetically gorgeous laugh, a performance of total self-assurance which made Marianne wince.

Oh my God, and they’re going to let you graduate? Bobbi said.

What about Jesus? I said. He loved everybody.

He was also celibate, said Philip.

A matter of historical dispute, Bobbi said.

Why don’t you tell us about your Bartleby essay, Philip? I said. You handed that in today, didn’t you?

Bobbi grinned at my awkward intervention and sat back in her chair. Philip wasn’t looking at me, but at Camille, smiling like they were sharing a private joke. I bristled, since I had stepped in to save him from humiliation, and it was graceless of him not to acknowledge my effort. He turned away then and talked about his essay, as if he was humouring me, and I pretended not to listen. Bobbi began to search her bag for a packet of cigarettes, lifting her head once to say: you should have read Gilles Deleuze. Philip glanced at Camille again.

I did read him, said Philip.

You missed his point then, Bobbi said. Frances? Do you fancy coming out for a cigarette?

I followed her. It was still early evening, and the air was crisp and navy blue. She started to laugh and I laughed too, from the joy of being alone with her. She lit both our cigarettes and then exhaled, a white cloud, and coughed with laughter.

Human nature, I ask you, she said. You’re such a pushover.

I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.

That amused her. She fixed a strand of my hair behind my ear fondly.

Is that a hint? she said.

Oh no. If I could talk like you I would talk all the time.

We smiled at one another. It was cold. The tip of Bobbi’s cigarette glowed a spectral orange colour and released tiny sparks into the air. She lifted her face toward the street like she was showing off the perfect line of her profile.

I feel like shit lately, she said. All this stuff at home, I don’t know. You think you’re the kind of person who can deal with something and then it happens and you realise you can’t.

She balanced her cigarette on her lower lip, near the corner of her mouth, and started to gather her hair back in a knot with her hands. It was Halloween, the streets were busy, and little knots of people went by dressed in capes or fake spectacles or tiger costumes.

What do you mean? I said. What happened?

You know Jerry’s kind of temperamental, right? It doesn’t really matter. Family drama, what do you care?

I care about everything that happens to you.

She put her cigarette back between her fingers and wiped her nose with her sleeve. In her eyes the orange light reflected like fire.

He’s not really on board with the divorce, Bobbi said.

I didn’t realise that.

Yeah, he’s being a real jerk about it. He has all these conspiracy theories about Eleanor, like she’s out to get his money or whatever. And the worst thing is that he actually expects me to be on his side.

I thought of her saying to Camille: did your parents have a favourite child? I knew Bobbi had always been Jerry’s favourite, that he thought her sister was spoilt, that he considered his wife hysterical. I knew he told Bobbi these things in order to win her confidence. I had always thought that being Jerry’s favourite was a privilege for Bobbi, but now I saw it was also something cumbersome and dangerous.

I didn’t know you were going through all that, I said.

Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through. You have all this shit going on with your dad that you never talk about. It’s not like things are so perfect for you.

I said nothing. She exhaled a thin stream of smoke from her lips and then shook her head.

Sorry, she said. I didn’t mean that.

No, you’re right.

For a moment we stood there like that, huddled together behind the smoking barrier. I became aware that our arms were touching, and then Bobbi kissed me. I accepted the kiss, I even felt my hand reaching for hers. I could sense the soft pressure of her mouth, her lips parting, the sweet chemical scent of her moisturiser. I thought she was about to put her arm around my waist, but instead she drew away. Her face was flushed and extraordinarily pretty-looking. She stubbed her cigarette out.

Should we go back upstairs? she said.

The inside of my body hummed like a piece of machinery. I searched Bobbi’s face for some acknowledgement of what had just happened but there was none. Was she just confirming that she felt nothing for me any more, that kissing me was like kissing a wall? Was it some kind of experiment? Upstairs we got our coats and then walked home together talking about college, about Melissa’s new book, about things that didn’t really concern us.

26

The next evening, Nick and I went to see an Iranian film about a vampire. On the way to the cinema I told him about Bobbi kissing me and he thought about it for a few seconds and then said: Melissa kisses me sometimes. Not knowing what I felt, I started to make jokes. You kiss other women behind my back! We were nearly at the cinema anyway. I do want to make her happy, he said. Maybe you’d prefer not to talk about it. I stood at the door of the cinema with my hands in my coat pockets. Talk about what? I said. About you kissing your wife?

We’re getting along better now, he said. Than we were before all this. But I mean, maybe you don’t want to know about that.

I’m glad you’re getting along.

I feel like I should thank you for making me a tolerable person to live with.

Our breath hung between us like fog. The door of the cinema swung open with a rush of warmth and the smell of popcorn grease.

We’re going to be late for the film now, I said.

I’ll stop talking.

Afterwards we went to get falafel on Dame Street. We sat in the booth, and I told him my mother was coming to Dublin the next day to visit her sister and that she was taking me home in the car after that for my ultrasound. Nick asked me what day the appointment was and I told him the afternoon of November third. He nodded, he wasn’t forthcoming on these kinds of topics. I changed the subject by saying: my mother is suspicious of you, you know.

Is that bad? said Nick.

Then the woman brought us our food and I stopped talking to eat. Nick was saying something about his parents, something about not seeing them much ‘after everything last year’.

Last year seems to come up a lot, I said.

Does it?

In fragments. I’m picking up that it was a bad time.

He shrugged. He went on eating. He probably didn’t know that I knew he had been in hospital. I sipped on my glass of Coke and said nothing. Then he wiped his mouth on a napkin and started to talk. I hadn’t really expected him to start, but he did. There was nobody in either of the booths near us, nobody listening in, and he talked in a sincere, self-effacing way, not trying either to make me laugh or to make me feel bad.

Nick told me that last summer he had been working in California. He said the schedule was gruelling and he was run-down and smoking too much, and then one of his lungs collapsed. He couldn’t finish filming, he said he ended up in some awful hospital in the States with no one he knew anywhere nearby. At the time Melissa was travelling around Europe for an essay about immigrant communities and they weren’t in touch very much.

By the time they were both back in Dublin, he told me, he was exhausted. He didn’t want to go out anywhere with Melissa, and if she had friends over he would mostly stay upstairs trying to sleep. They were bad-tempered with one another and argued frequently. Nick told me that when they first married they had both wanted to have children, but increasingly when he brought it up Melissa would refuse to talk about it. She was thirty-six by then. One night in October she told him she had decided she didn’t want children after all. They fought. He told me that he’d said some unreasonable things. We both did, he said. But I regret what I said to her.

Eventually he moved into the spare room. He slept a lot during the day, he lost a lot of weight. At first, he said, Melissa was angry, she thought he was punishing her, or trying to force her into something she didn’t want. But then she realised he was really sick. She tried to help, she made appointments with doctors and counsellors, but Nick never went. I can’t really explain it now, he said. I look back on how I behaved and I don’t understand it myself.

Finally in December he was admitted to a psychiatric unit. He stayed there for six weeks, and during that time Melissa started seeing someone else, a mutual friend of theirs. He realised it was going on because she sent him a text that was intended for the other person. It probably wasn’t great for my self-esteem, he said. But I don’t want to exaggerate. I don’t know if at that point I had any self-esteem left anyway. When he came out, Melissa said she wanted a divorce, and he said okay. He thanked her for everything she had done to try and help him and suddenly she started crying. She told him how scared she had been, how guilty she felt just for leaving the house in the morning. I thought you were going to die, she said. They talked for a long time, they apologised to one another. In the end they agreed to keep living together until they could find some other arrangement.

Nick started working again in the spring. He was exercising more, he took a small part in an Arthur Miller play one of his friends was directing. Melissa fell out with Chris, the man she was seeing, and Nick said their lives just sort of continued. They tried to negotiate what he described as a ‘quasi-marriage’. They saw one another’s friends, they ate together in the evenings. Nick renewed his gym membership, took the dog down to the beach in the afternoons, started reading novels again. He drank protein shakes, he put the weight back on. Life was okay.

At this point you have to understand, he said, I was used to everyone seeing me as a burden. Like my family and Melissa, they all wanted me to get better, but it’s not as if they enjoyed my company. In as much as I was functioning again, I still felt like this very worthless, pathetic person, you know, like I was just a waste of everyone’s time. So that’s kind of where I was at when I met you.

I stared at him across the table.

And it was so hard to believe you had any interest in me, he said. You know, you were sending me these emails, and sometimes I’d find myself thinking, is this a thing? And as soon as I thought about it, I’d feel mortified that I would even let myself imagine that. Like, what’s more depressing than some awful married man who convinces himself that a beautiful younger woman wants to sleep with him? You know.

I didn’t know what to say. I shook my head or shrugged. I didn’t know you were feeling like that, I said.

No, well, I didn’t want you to know. I wanted to be like this cool person you thought I was. I know sometimes you felt like I wasn’t expressive enough. It was hard for me. That probably sounds like I’m making excuses.

I tried to smile back, I shook my head again. No, I said. We let a little pause form between us.

I was so cruel sometimes, I said. I feel horrible about that now.

Oh no, don’t be hard on yourself.

I stared at the tabletop. We were both quiet then. I finished my glass of Coke. He folded up his napkin and put it on his plate.

After a while, he told me that was the first time he had ever told the story of that year and what had happened. He said he had never actually heard the story from his own point of view before, because he was used to Melissa telling it, and of course their versions were different. It feels strange, he said, hearing myself talk about it like I was the main character. It almost feels like I’m lying, although I think everything I said was true. But Melissa would tell it differently.

I like the way you tell it, I said. Do you still want to have children?

Sure, but it’s off the table now I think.

You don’t know. You’re young.

He coughed. He seemed on the point of saying something and then he didn’t. He watched me sipping my Coke and I looked back up at him.

I think you’d be a great parent, I said. You have a kind nature. You’re very loving.

He made a funny, surprised face, then exhaled through his mouth.

That’s intense, he said. Thank you for saying that. I have to laugh now or I’m going to start crying.

We finished our food and left the restaurant. Once we crossed Dame Street and got down to the quays, Nick said: we should go away together. For a weekend or something, would you like that? I asked where and he said, what about Venice? I laughed. He put his hands in his pockets, he was laughing too, I think because he was pleased at the idea of us going away together, or just that he had made me smile.

That was when I heard my mother. I heard her say: well, hello, missus. And there she was on the street in front of us. She had a Bally black winter coat on, and a beanie hat with the Adidas logo. I remember Nick was wearing his beautiful grey overcoat. He and my mother looked like characters from different films, made by totally dissimilar directors.

I didn’t realise you were coming up tonight, I said.

I’ve just this minute parked the car, she said. I’m meeting your auntie Bernie for dinner.

Oh, this is my friend Nick, I said. Nick, this is my mother.

I could only glance at him quickly, but I saw that he was smiling and he held out his hand.

The famous Nick, she said. I’ve heard all about you.

Well, likewise, he said.

She did mention you were handsome all right.

Mum, for God’s sake, I said.

But I had you pictured older, said my mother. You’re only a young fellow.

He laughed and said he was flattered. They shook hands again, she told me she would see me the next morning, and we parted. It was the first of November. Lights sparkled on the river and buses ran past like boxes of light, carrying faces in the windows.

I turned to look at Nick, who had his hands back in his pockets. That was nice, he said. And no pointed remarks about me being married, that’s a bonus.

I smiled. She’s a cool lady, I said.

When I got home that night, Bobbi was in the living room. She was sitting at the table, staring at a print-out which was stapled together in one corner. Nick had gone back to Monkstown and said he would email me later about Venice. Bobbi’s teeth were chattering faintly. She didn’t look at me when I came in, which gave me a weird sensation of disappearance, like I was already dead.

Bobbi? I said.

Melissa sent it to me.

She held up the print-out. I could see it was double-spaced, with long paragraphs like an essay.

Sent you what? I said.

For a second she laughed, or maybe exhaled a breath she had been holding very tightly, and then she threw the pages at me. I caught them awkwardly against my chest. Looking down I saw the words printed in a light sans-serif font. My words. It was my story.

Bobbi, I said.

Were you ever going to tell me?

I stood there. My eyes ran over the lines I could see at the top of the page, the page where I described myself getting sick at a house party without Bobbi when I was still a teenager.

I’m sorry, I said.

Sorry for what? said Bobbi. I’m so curious. Sorry for writing it? I doubt you are.

No. I don’t know.

It’s funny. I think I’ve learned more about your feelings in the last twenty minutes than in the last four years.

I felt light-headed, staring down at the manuscript until the words wriggled like insects. It was the first draft, the one I had sent to Valerie. She must have let Melissa read it.

It’s fictionalised, I said.

Bobbi stood up from her chair and looked my body up and down critically. A strange energy wound itself up in my chest, as if we were going to fight.

I heard you’re getting good money for it, she said.

Yeah.

Fuck you.

I actually need the money, I said. I realise that’s an alien concept for you, Bobbi.

She grabbed the pages out of my hands then, and the back of the staple tugged against my index finger and broke the skin. She held the manuscript in front of me.

You know, she said. It’s actually a good story.

Thanks.

Then she tore the pages in half, threw them in the trash and said: I don’t want to live with you any more. She packed up her things that night. I sat in my room listening. I heard her wheel the suitcase out into the hall. I heard her close the door.

The next morning my mother picked me up outside the apartment building. I got into the car and strapped my seat belt on. She had the classical station on the radio, but she turned it off when I shut the door. It was eight in the morning and I complained about having to get up so early.

Oh, I’m sorry, she said. We could have given the hospital a ring and arranged for you to have a lie-in, would that have been better?

I thought the scan was tomorrow.

It’s this afternoon.

Fuck, I said mildly.

She placed a litre bottle of water on my lap and said: you can start that any time you like. I unscrewed the cap. No preparation was necessary for the scan except drinking a lot of water, but I still felt like the whole thing had been thrown at me unexpectedly. We didn’t speak for a while, and then my mother glanced at me sideways.

It was funny meeting you like that yesterday, she said. You looked like a real young lady.

As opposed to what?

She didn’t answer at first, we were going round a roundabout. I stared out the windscreen at the passing cars.

You looked very elegant together, she said. Like film stars.

Oh, that’s Nick. He’s just glamorous.

My mother reached suddenly and grabbed my hand. The car was stopped in traffic. Her grip was tighter than I expected, almost hard. Mum, I said. Then she let me go. She tidied her hair back with her fingers and then settled her hands on the steering wheel.

You’re a wild woman, she said.

I learned from the best.

She laughed. Oh, I’m afraid I’m no match for you, Frances. You’ll have to figure things out all on your own.

27

In the hospital I was advised to drink even more water, so much that I was in active discomfort while sitting in the waiting room. The place was busy. My mother bought me a bar of chocolate from the vending machine and I sat there tapping my pen against the front cover of Middlemarch, which I had to read for a class on the English novel. The cover depicted a sad-eyed lady from Victorian times doing something with flowers. I doubted Victorian women actually touched flowers as often as art from the period suggested they did.

While I was waiting, a man came in with two little girls, one of them in a pushchair. The older girl climbed onto the seat next to me and leaned over her father’s shoulder to say something, although he wasn’t listening. The girl wriggled around to get his attention, so her light-up sneakers pushed against my handbag and then my arm. When her father finally turned around he said: Rebecca, look what you’re doing! You’re kicking that woman’s arm! I tried to catch his eye and say: it’s fine, it’s no problem. But he didn’t look at me. To him, my arm was not important. He was only concerned with making his child feel bad, making her feel ashamed. I thought about the way Nick handled his little dog whom he loved so much, and then I stopped thinking about it.

The registrar called me up and I went into a little room with an ultrasound machine and a medical couch covered in white filmy paper. The technician asked me to get onto the couch and she rolled some gel onto a plastic instrument while I lay there looking at the ceiling. The room was dim, evocatively dim, as if it contained a hidden pool of water somewhere. We chatted, I don’t remember about what. I had the sense that my voice was coming from somewhere else, like a small radio I kept in my mouth.

The technician pressed the plastic thing down hard into my lower abdomen then, and I stared upward and tried not to make any noise. My eyes were watering. I felt like at any moment she was going to show me a grainy image of a foetus and say something about a heartbeat, and I would nod wisely. The idea of making images of a uterus that had nothing in it struck me as sad, like photographing an abandoned house.

After it was over I thanked her. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands a number of times under the hot hospital taps. I may have scalded them a little, since my skin came up very pink and the tips of my fingers looked slightly swollen. Then I went back to wait for the consultant to call me. Rebecca and her family were gone.

The consultant was a man in his sixties. He squinted up at me as if I’d disappointed him in some way and then told me to sit down. He was looking at a folder with some writing in it. I sat on a hard plastic chair and looked at my fingernails. My hands were definitely scalded. He asked me some questions about the time I had been admitted to the hospital in August, what my symptoms were, and what the gynaecologist had said, and then asked more general questions about my menstrual cycle and sexual activity. While he asked these questions he was flipping sort of non-committally through his folder. Eventually he looked up at me.

Well, your ultrasound is clear, he said. No fibroids, no cysts, nothing like that. So that’s the good news.

What’s the other news?

He smiled, but it was a weird smile, as if he was admiring me for being brave. I swallowed, and I knew that I had made a mistake.

The doctor told me that I had a problem with the lining of my uterus, which meant that cells from inside the uterus were growing elsewhere in my body. He said these cells were benign, meaning non-cancerous, but the condition itself was incurable and in some cases progressive. It had a long name which I had never heard before: endometriosis. He called it a ‘difficult’ and ‘unpredictable’ diagnosis, which could only be confirmed with exploratory keyhole surgery. But it fits with all your symptoms, he said. And as many as one in ten women suffer from it. I sort of chewed on my scalded thumb and said things like, hm. He said there were some surgical interventions possible but they were only recommended in particularly severe cases. I wondered if that meant I wasn’t a severe case, or just that they didn’t know yet.

He told me that the primary problem for sufferers was ‘pain management’. He said that patients often experienced pain during ovulation, menstrual pain, and discomfort during sexual intercourse. I bit down into the side of my thumbnail and started to peel it away from my skin. The idea that sex could hurt me felt apocalyptically cruel. The doctor said ‘we’ wanted to prevent the pain from becoming debilitating or ‘reaching the level of disability’. My jaw started to hurt and I wiped at my nose mechanically.

The secondary problem he said was ‘the issue of fertility’. I recall these words very clearly. I said, oh, really? Unfortunately, he said, the condition does leave many women infertile, that’s one of our biggest concerns. But then he talked about IVF treatments and how rapidly they were advancing. I nodded with my thumb in my mouth. Then I blinked several times quickly, as if I could blink the thought out of my mind, or blink the entire hospital away.

After that the consultation was over. I went back out to the waiting room and saw my mother reading my copy of Middlemarch. She was only about ten pages in. I went to stand beside her and she looked up at me with an expectant face.

Oh, she said. There you are. What did the doctor say?

Something seemed to close up over my body, like a hand held hard over my mouth or my eyes. I couldn’t begin to phrase the explanation of what the doctor had told me, because there were so many parts to it, and it would take so long, and involve so many individual words and sentences. The thought of saying so many words about it made me feel physically sick. Out loud I heard myself say: oh, he said the ultrasound was clear.

So they don’t know what it is? my mother said.

Let’s get in the car.

We went out to the car and I strapped my seat belt on. I’ll explain more when we get home, I thought. I’ll have more time to think about it when we’re home. She started the engine and I ran my fingers through a knot in my hair, feeling it stretch and then give way, the little pieces of dark hair snapping off and falling away through my hand. My mother was asking questions again and I could feel my mouth formulating responses.

It’s just bad period pain, I said. He says it’ll get better now that I’m on the pill.

She said oh. Well. That’s a relief then, isn’t it? You must be feeling good about that. I wanted to be hard and frictionless. I produced some kind of facial expression by reflex and she indicated left out of the car park.

When we got back home I went up to my room to wait for the train while my mother stayed downstairs tidying up. I could hear her putting away pots and pans into kitchen drawers. I got into bed and looked at the internet for a while, where I found a number of health features on women’s websites about this incurable disease I had. Usually these took the form of interviews with people whose lives had been destroyed by suffering. There were a lot of stock photographs of white women looking out windows with concerned expressions, sometimes with a hand on their abdomen to indicate pain. I also found some online communities where people shared gruesome after-surgery images with questions like ‘how long should it take for hydronephrosis to improve once a stent is in place?’ I viewed this information as dispassionately as possible.

When I had read as much of this as I could, I closed my laptop and took the little bible out of my bag. I turned to the part of Mark where Jesus says: Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague. All sick people were good for in the Bible was to be healed by people who were well. But Jesus didn’t really know anything, and neither did I. Even if I had any faith, it wasn’t going to make me whole. There was no use thinking about it.

My phone started to ring then and I saw it was Nick calling. I picked up and we said hello. Then he said: hey, I should probably tell you something. I asked what, and there was a short but perceptible pause before he spoke again.

So, Melissa and I have started sleeping together again, he said. I feel weird telling you about it on the phone, but then I also feel weird keeping it from you. I don’t know.

At this I lifted the phone away from my face, slowly, and looked at it. It was just an object, it didn’t mean anything. I could hear Nick say: Frances? But I could only hear it faintly, and it was like any other sound. I put the phone down carefully onto my bedside table, though I didn’t hang up. Nick’s voice became a kind of buzzing noise, with no identifiable words in it. I sat on my bed breathing in and out very slowly, so slowly I almost wasn’t breathing at all.

Then I picked the phone up and said: hello?

Hey, Nick said. Are you there? I think the signal did something weird just now.

No, I’m here. I heard you.

Oh. Are you all right? You sound upset.

I closed my eyes. When I spoke I could hear my voice thinning out and hardening like ice.

About you and Melissa? I said. Be real, Nick.

But you did want me to tell you, didn’t you?

Sure.

I just don’t want things to change between us, he said.

Relax about it.

I could hear him breathe in apprehensively. He wanted to reassure me, I could tell, but I wasn’t going to let him. People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy, I knew all about that.

How are you otherwise? he said. That scan is happening tomorrow, right?

Only then I remembered that I had given him the wrong date. He hadn’t forgotten, it was my mistake. He had probably set a reminder on his phone for the next day: ask Frances how the scan went.

Right, I said. I’ll let you know about it. The other phone is ringing so I’m going to go, but I’ll give you a call after the thing.

Yeah, do that. I hope it goes okay. You’re not worried about it, are you? I guess you don’t worry about things.

I held the back of my hand to my face silently. My body felt cold like an inanimate object.

No, that’s your job, I said. Talk soon, okay?

Okay. Keep in touch.

I hung up the phone. After that I put some cold water on my face and dried it, the same face I had always had, the one I would have until I died.

On the way to the station that evening my mother kept glancing at me, as if something about my behaviour was off-putting, and she wanted to reprimand me for it but couldn’t decide what it was. Eventually she told me to take my feet off the dashboard, which I did.

You must be relieved, she said.

Yeah, delighted.

How are you managing for money?

Oh, I said. I’m okay.

She glanced in the rear-view mirror.

The doctor didn’t say anything else, did he? she said.

No, that was it.

I looked out the window at the station. I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe. I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would. I thanked my mother for the lift to the station and got out of the car.

28

That week I went to class every day and spent every evening in the library writing CVs and printing them off on the library printers. I had to get a job so I could give Nick the money back. I had become obsessed with repaying the money, as if everything else depended on it. Whenever he called me I hit the reject button and sent him texts saying I was busy. I said the scan was clear and there was nothing to worry about. Okay, he texted back. Is that good news? I didn’t reply. It would be really nice to see you, he wrote. Later he sent me an email saying: melissa mentioned bobbi moved out of your apartment, is everything all right? I didn’t reply then either. By Wednesday he sent me another email.

hey. i know you’re angry at me and i feel really bad about it. i would like if we could talk about what’s bothering you. at this point i’m presuming it has something to do with melissa but i guess i might be wrong about that too. i had the impression that you knew this kind of thing might happen and you just wanted me to tell you if it did. but maybe i was enormously naive about that and what you actually wanted was for it not to happen. i’d like to do what you want but i can’t if i don’t know what it is. otherwise maybe you’re not feeling well or something else has upset you. i find it hard not knowing if you’re ok. it would be really good to hear from you.

I didn’t write back.

Before class one day I bought myself a cheap grey notebook and used it to keep track of all my symptoms. I wrote them out very neatly with the date printed up at the top. It helped me to become more intimately acquainted with phenomena like fatigue and pelvic pain, which had previously seemed like vague discomforts with no particular beginning or end. Now I came to know them as personal nemeses which dogged me in various ways. The grey notebook even helped me to feel out the contours of words like ‘moderate’ and ‘severe’, which no longer felt ambiguous but definitive and categorical. I paid so much attention to myself that everything I experienced came to seem like a symptom. If I felt dizzy after getting out of bed, was that a symptom? Or what if I felt sad? I decided to be completist in my approach. For several days in the grey notebook, I noted down in tidy handwriting the phrase: mood swings (sadness).

Nick was having a birthday party that weekend in Monkstown, he was turning thirty-three. I didn’t know whether to attend or not. I read his email again and again while I tried to decide. On one reading it might give an impression of devotion and acquiescence, and on another it appeared indecisive or ambivalent. I didn’t know what I wanted from him. What I seemed to want, though I didn’t like to believe this, was for him to renounce every other person and thing in his life and pledge himself to me exclusively. This was outlandish not only because I had also slept with someone else during our relationship but because even now I was often preoccupied by other people, particularly Bobbi and how much I missed her. I didn’t believe that the time I spent thinking about Bobbi had anything to do with Nick, but the time he spent thinking about Melissa I felt as a personal affront.

On Friday I called him. I told him I was having a strange week and he said how nice it was to hear my voice. I rubbed my tongue against my teeth.

You kind of threw me with that phone call last week, I said. Sorry if I overreacted.

No, I don’t think you did. Maybe I underreacted. Are you upset?

I hesitated and said: no.

Because if you are, we can talk about it, he said.

I’m not.

He was oddly quiet for a few seconds and I worried he had something else bad to tell me. Finally he said: I know you don’t like to seem upset by things. But it’s not a sign of weakness to have feelings. A kind of hard smile came over my face then, and I felt the radiant energy of spite fill my body.

Sure, I have feelings, I said.

Right.

I just don’t have feelings concerning whether you fuck your wife or not. It’s not an emotive topic for me.

Okay, he said.

You want me to have feelings about it. Because you were jealous when I slept with someone else and it makes you insecure that I’m not jealous.

He sighed into the phone, I could hear him. Maybe, he said. Yeah, maybe, that’s something to think about. I was just trying to, uh … yeah. I’m glad you’re not upset.

I was really smiling then. I knew he could hear my smile when I said: you don’t sound glad. He sighed again, a weak sigh. I felt like he was lying on the floor and I was tearing his body apart with my smiling teeth. I’m sorry, he said. I’m just finding you kind of hostile.

You’re interpreting your failure to hurt me as hostility on my part, I said. That’s interesting. This party is tomorrow night, right?

He didn’t say anything for so long then that I was afraid I had gone too far, that he would tell me I was not a nice person, that he had tried loving me and it wasn’t possible. Instead he said: yeah, in the house. Do you think you’ll come?

Sure, why wouldn’t I? I said.

Great. It’ll be nice to see you again, obviously. You can arrive whenever.

Thirty-three is so old.

Yeah, I guess it is, he said. I’ve been feeling it.

By the time I got to the party, the house was noisy and full of people I didn’t know. I saw the dog hiding behind the TV set. Melissa kissed me on the face, she was obviously very drunk. She poured me a glass of red wine and told me I looked pretty. I thought about Nick shuddering into her body when he came. I hated them both, with the intensity of passionate love. I swallowed a huge mouthful of red wine and crossed my arms over my chest.

What’s going on with you and Bobbi? said Melissa.

I looked at her. Her lips were stained with wine, also her teeth. Under her left eye was a small but visible shadow of mascara.

I don’t know, I said. Is she here?

Not yet. You need to sort it out, you know. She’s been sending me emails about it.

I stared at Melissa and a shiver of nausea ran over my skin. I hated that Bobbi had been emailing her. It made me want to step on her foot very hard and then look in her face and deny that I had done it. No, I would say. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And she would look at me and know that I was evil and insane. I said I would go and wish Nick a happy birthday and she pointed out the double doors to the conservatory.

You’re in a bad mood with him, Melissa said. Aren’t you?

I clenched my teeth. I thought of how hard I could step on her if I put my whole weight onto the foot.

I hope it’s not my fault, she said.

No. I’m not in a bad mood with anyone. I should go say hello.

In the conservatory, the stereo was playing a Sam Cooke song and Nick was standing there in conversation with some strangers, nodding his head. The lights were dim and everything looked blue. I needed to leave. Nick saw me, our eyes met. I felt it like always, a key turning hard inside me, but this time I hated the key and hated being opened up to anything. He came toward me and I stood there holding my arms crossed, probably scowling, or maybe looking scared.

He was drunk too, so drunk his words sounded slurred and I didn’t like his voice any more. He asked if I was okay and I shrugged. Maybe you should tell me what’s wrong so I can apologise, he said.

Melissa seems to think we’re fighting, I said.

Well, are we?

Is it any of her business if we are?

I don’t know, he said. I don’t know what you mean by that.

A rigidity had settled over my whole body so that my jaw felt painfully tight. He touched my arm and I pulled away from him like he had slapped me. He looked hurt, like any normal person would look hurt. There was something wrong with me, I knew that.

Two people I had never met came over to wish Nick happy birthday then: a tall guy and a dark-haired woman holding a little baby. Nick seemed very happy to see them. The woman kept saying: we’re not staying, we’re not staying, it’s a flying visit. Nick introduced me to them, it was his sister Laura and her husband Jim and their baby, the baby Nick loved. I wasn’t sure if Laura knew who I was. The infant had blonde hair and huge, celestial eyes. Laura said it was nice to meet me and I said: your baby is so gorgeous, wow. Nick laughed and said, isn’t she? She’s like a model baby. She could do ads for baby food. Laura asked me if I wanted to hold her and I looked at her and said: yes, can I?

Laura handed me the baby and said she was going to get herself a glass of soda water. Jim and Nick were talking about something, I don’t remember what. The baby looked at me and opened and closed her mouth. Her mouth was very mobile, and for a while she put her entire hand into it. It was hard to believe that such a perfect creature was dependent on the whims of adults who drank soda water and handed her to strangers at parties. The baby looked up at me with her wet hand in her mouth and blinked. I held her tiny body against my chest and thought about how small she was. I wanted to talk to her, but the others would have heard me, and I didn’t want anybody else to hear.

When I looked up I saw that Nick was watching me. We looked at one another for a few seconds and it felt so serious that I tried to smile at him. Yeah, I said. I love this baby. This is a great infant, ten out of ten. Jim replied: oh, Rachel is Nick’s favourite member of the family. He likes her more than we do. Nick smiled at that, and he reached over and touched the baby’s hand, which was waving around in the air like she was trying to balance herself. She held onto the joint of Nick’s thumb then. Oh, I’m going to weep, I said. She’s perfect.

Laura came back and said she would take the kid off my hands. She’s heavy, isn’t she? she said. I nodded dumbly and then said: she’s so lovely. Without the baby my arms felt thin and empty. She’s a little charmer, Laura said. Aren’t you? And she touched the baby’s nose lovingly. Wait until you have your own, she said. I just stared at her and blinked and said something like yeah or hm. They had to leave then, they went to say goodbye to Melissa.

When they were gone Nick touched my back and I told him how much I liked his niece. She’s beautiful, I said. Beautiful is a stupid thing to say, but you know what I mean. Nick said he didn’t think it was stupid. He was drunk, but I could tell he was trying to be nice to me. I said something like: actually I don’t feel very well. He asked if I was okay and I didn’t look at him. I said: you don’t mind if I head off, do you? There are so many people here anyway, I don’t want to monopolise you. He tried to look at me but I couldn’t look back at him. He asked me what was wrong and I said: I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

He didn’t follow me out of the front door. I was shivering and my lower lip had started to tremble. I paid for a taxi back into town.

Late that night I got a call from my father. I woke up to the noise of the ringtone and knocked my wrist on the bedside cabinet trying to pick up the phone. Hello? I said. It was after three in the morning. I nursed my arm against my chest and squinted into the darkness, waiting for him to speak. The noise in the background of the call sounded like weather, like wind or rain.

Is that you, Frances? he said.

I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.

I know, I know. Listen.

He sighed then, into the phone. I didn’t say anything, but neither did he. When he next spoke, he sounded immensely tired.

I’m sorry, love, he said.

Sorry for what?

You know, you know. You know yourself. I am sorry.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, I said.

Although I had spent weeks calling him about my allowance, I knew that I wouldn’t mention it now and that I might even deny the money was missing if he brought it up.

Listen, he said. It’s just been a bad year. It’s gotten out of hand.

What has?

He sighed again. I said: Dad?

Sure, you’d be better off without me at this stage, he said. Wouldn’t you?

Of course not. Don’t say that. What are you talking about?

Ah. Nothing. Only nonsense.

I was shivering. I tried to think about things that made me feel safe and normal. Material possessions: the white blouse drying on a hanger in the bathroom, the alphabetised novels on my bookshelf, the set of green china cups.

Dad? I said.

You’re a great woman, Frances. You’ve never given us a bit of bother.

Are you okay?

Your mother tells me you have a boyfriend up there now, he said. Nice-looking fellow, I’ve heard.

Dad, where are you? Are you outside somewhere?

He was quiet for a few seconds, and then he sighed again, almost like a groan this time, like he was suffering from some physical ailment he couldn’t speak of or describe.

Listen, he said. I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry.

Dad, wait.

He hung up. I closed my eyes and felt all the furniture in my room begin to disappear, like a backwards game of Tetris, lifting up toward the top of the screen and then vanishing, and the next thing that would vanish would be me. I dialled his number again and again, knowing he wouldn’t answer. Eventually it stopped ringing, maybe his battery had run flat. I lay there in the dark until it was bright.

The next day Nick called me on the phone when I was still in bed. I’d fallen asleep at around ten in the morning and it was past noon by then. The window blinds were casting an ugly grey shadow on the ceiling. When I answered, he asked if he’d woken me up and I said: it’s okay. I didn’t sleep well. He asked if he could come over. I reached a hand to pull the blinds open and said all right, sure.

I waited in bed while he got in the car. I didn’t even get up to shower. I put on a black T-shirt to buzz him into the building and he came through looking very freshly shaven and smelling like cigarettes. I gripped my throat when I saw him and said something like, oh, it didn’t take you long to get into town. We went into my room together and he said yeah, the roads were pretty clear.

For a few seconds we stood there looking at each other and then he kissed me, on the mouth. He said: is this okay? I nodded and murmured something stupid. He said: sorry again about last night. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I’ve missed you. It sounded like he’d prepared these statements in advance so that I couldn’t later accuse him of not saying them. My throat hurt like I was going to cry. I felt him touch me underneath my T-shirt and then I did start crying, which was confusing. He said: oh no, what’s wrong? Hey. And I shrugged and made weird meaningless hand gestures. I was crying very hard. He just stood there looking awkward. He was wearing a pale blue shirt that day, a button-down shirt, with white buttons.

Can we talk about it? he said.

I said there was nothing to talk about, and then we had sex. I was on my knees and he was behind me. He used a condom this time, we didn’t discuss that. When he spoke to me I mostly pretended I couldn’t hear him. I was crying pretty badly still. Certain things made me cry harder, like when he touched my breasts, and when he asked me if it felt okay. Then he said he wanted to stop, so we stopped. I pulled the bedsheets over my body and pressed my hand down on my eyes so I didn’t have to look at him.

Was it not good? I said.

Can we talk?

You used to like it, didn’t you?

Can I ask you something? he said. Do you want me to leave her?

I looked at him then. He looked tired, and I could see that he hated everything I was doing to him. My body felt completely disposable, like a placeholder for something more valuable. I fantasised about taking it apart and lining my limbs up side by side to compare them.

No, I said. I don’t want that.

I don’t know what to do. I’ve been feeling fucking awful about it. You seem so upset with me and I don’t know how I can make you happy.

Well, maybe we shouldn’t see each other any more.

Yeah, he said. Okay. I guess you’re probably right.

I stopped crying then. I didn’t look at him. I pulled my hair back from my face and took an elastic tie off my wrist to wrap around it. My hands were trembling and I was starting to see faint lights in my eyeline where there were no real lights. He said he was sorry, and that he loved me. He said something else also, like he didn’t deserve me or something like that. I thought: if only I hadn’t picked up the phone this morning, Nick would still be my boyfriend, and everything would be normal. I coughed to clear my throat.

After he left the apartment I took a small nail scissors and cut a hole on the inside of my left thigh. I felt that I had to do something dramatic to stop thinking about how bad I felt, but the cut didn’t make me feel any better. Actually it bled a lot and I felt worse. I sat on the floor of my room bleeding into a rolled-up piece of tissue paper and thinking about my own death. I was like an empty cup, which Nick had emptied out, and now I had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and my pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t. While I was full of these things I couldn’t see them. Now that I was nothing, only an empty glass, I could see everything about myself.

I got cleaned up and found a plaster to put over the cut. Then I pulled the blinds and opened my copy of Middlemarch. Ultimately it didn’t matter that Nick had taken the first opportunity to leave me as soon as Melissa wanted him again, or that my face and body were so ugly they made him sick, or that he hated having sex with me so much that he had to ask me to stop halfway through. That wasn’t what my biographers would care about later. I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.

The cut kept on throbbing badly even after it stopped bleeding. By that time I was a little frightened that I had done something so stupid, although I knew I never had to tell anyone about it and it would never happen again. After Bobbi had broken up with me I hadn’t cut any holes into my skin, although I did stand in the shower and let the hot water run out and then keep standing there until my fingers went blue. I privately termed these behaviours ‘acting out’. Scratching my arm open was ‘acting out’, and so was giving myself hypothermia by accident and having to explain it to a paramedic on the phone.

That evening I thought about my father’s phone call from the night before, and how I had wanted to tell Nick about it, and for a moment I really thought: I will call Nick and he will come back. Things like this can be undone. But I knew that he would never come back again, not really. He wasn’t only mine any more, that part was over. Melissa knew things that I didn’t know. After everything that had happened between them they still desired one another. I thought about her email, and about how I was sick and probably infertile anyway, and how I could give Nick nothing that would mean anything to him.

For the next few days I stared at my phone for hours on end and accomplished nothing. The time moved past visibly on the illuminated onscreen clock and yet I still felt as though I didn’t notice it passing. Nick didn’t call me that evening, or that night. He didn’t call me the next day, or the day after that. Nobody did. Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. I applied for jobs and turned up for seminars. Things went on.

29

I was offered a job working evenings and weekends serving coffee in a sandwich shop. On my first day a woman called Linda gave me a black apron and showed me how to make coffee. You pressed a little lever to fill the portafilter with grounds, once for a single shot and twice for a double shot. Then you screwed the filter tightly into the machine and hit the water switch. There was also a little steam nozzle and a jug for milk. Linda told me lots of things about coffee, the difference between a latte and a cappuccino, things like that. They served mochas, but Linda told me mochas were ‘complicated’ so I could just let one of the others do it. People never order mochas, she said.

I never saw Bobbi in college, though I was convinced I would. I spent long periods lingering in the arts building, on the ramp where she usually smoked, or near the debating society rooms where they had free copies of the New Yorker and you could use their kitchen to make tea. She never appeared. Our timetables weren’t similar anyway. I wanted to run into her at a time that suited me, a time when I would appear wearing my camel coat, maybe with my arms full of books, and I could smile at her with the tentative smile of someone who wants to forget an argument. My overriding fear was that she would come into the sandwich shop where I worked and see that I had a job. Whenever a slim woman with a dark fringe came through the door, I turned compulsively toward the coffee machine and pretended to steam milk. In the preceding months, I felt as if I’d glimpsed the possibility of an alternative life, the possibility of accumulating income just by writing and talking and taking an interest in things. By the time my story was accepted for publication, I even felt like I’d entered that world myself, like I’d folded my old life up behind me and put it away. I was ashamed at the idea that Bobbi might come into the sandwich shop and see for herself how deluded I had been.

I told my mother about the phone call from my father. In fact, we had a fight about it over the phone, after which I felt too tired to speak or move for an hour. I called her ‘an enabler’. She said: oh it’s my fault, is it? Everything is my fault. She said his brother had seen him in town the day before and that he was fine. I repeated the incident from my childhood where he had thrown a shoe at my face. I’m a bad mother, she said, that’s what you’re saying. If that’s the conclusion you draw from the facts, that’s your business, I said. She told me I had never loved my father anyway.

According to you the only way to love someone is to let them treat you like shit, I said.

She hung up on me. Afterwards I lay on my bed feeling like a light had been switched off.

One day toward the end of November, Evelyn posted a video link on Melissa’s Facebook wall with the message: just came across this again and I’m DEAD. I could see from the thumbnail that the video had been filmed in the kitchen of Melissa’s house. I clicked and waited for it to load. The lighting in the video was buttery yellow, there were fairy lights strung up in the background, and I could see Nick and Melissa standing side by side at the kitchen countertops. Then the sound came on. Someone behind the camera was saying: okay, okay, settle down. The camerawork was shaky, but I saw Melissa turn to Nick, they were both laughing. He was wearing a black sweater. He nodded along as if she was signalling something to him, and then he sang the words: I really can’t stay. Melissa sang: but baby, it’s cold outside. They were singing a duet, it was funny. Everyone in the room was laughing and applauding and I could hear Evelyn’s voice saying, sh! sh! I had never heard Nick singing before, he had a sweet voice. So did Melissa. It was good the way they acted it out, Nick being reluctant and Melissa trying to make him stay. It suited them. They had obviously practised it for their friends. Anyone could see from the video how much they loved each other. If I had seen them like this before, I thought, maybe nothing would have happened. Maybe I would have known.

I only worked from 5 until 8 p.m. on weekdays, but by the time I got home I felt so exhausted I couldn’t eat. I fell behind on college work. With my hours in the sandwich shop, I had less time to finish my academic reading, but the real problem was my focus. I couldn’t concentrate. Concepts refused to arrange themselves into patterns, and my vocabulary felt smaller and less precise. After my second pay cheque came in, I withdrew two hundred euro from my bank account and put it in an envelope. On a slip of notepaper I wrote: thank you for the loan. Then I mailed it to Nick’s address in Monkstown. He never got back to me to say he received it, but by then I didn’t expect him to.

It was almost December. I had three pills left in the cycle, then two, then one. As soon as I finished the packet the feeling came back, like before. It lasted days. I went to class as usual, gritting my teeth. The cramps came on in waves and left me weak and sweating when they receded. A teaching assistant called on me to say something about the character of Will Ladislaw and although I had actually finished Middlemarch, I just opened and closed my mouth like a fish. Eventually I managed to say: no. I’m sorry.

That evening I walked home down Thomas Street. My legs were trembling and I hadn’t eaten a whole meal in days. My abdomen felt swollen, and for a few seconds I braced my body against a bicycle stand. My vision was beginning to disintegrate. My hand on the bicycle stand appeared translucent, like a photo negative held up in front of a light. The Thomas Street church was just a few steps ahead of me and I walked with a lopsided shuffle toward the door, holding my ribcage with one arm.

The church smelled of stale incense and dry air. Columns of stained glass rose up behind the altar like long piano-playing fingers and the ceiling was the white and mint-green colour of confectionery. I hadn’t been in a church since I was a child. Two old women were sitting off to the side with rosary beads. I sat at the back and looked up at the stained glass, trying to fix it in my visual field, as if its permanence could prevent my disappearance. This stupid disease never killed anyone, I thought. My face was sweating, or else it had been damp outside and I hadn’t noticed. I unbuttoned my coat and used the dry inside of my scarf to wipe my forehead.

I breathed in through my nose, feeling my lips part with the effort of filling my own lungs. I clasped my hands together in my lap. The pain kicked against my spine, radiating up into my skull and making my eyes water. I’m praying, I thought. I’m actually sitting here praying for God to help me. I was. Please help me, I thought. Please. I knew that there were rules about this, that you had to believe in a divine ordering principle before you could appeal to it for anything, and I didn’t believe. But I make an effort, I thought. I love my fellow human beings. Or do I? Do I love Bobbi, after she tore up my story like that and left me alone? Do I love Nick, even if he doesn’t want to fuck me any more? Do I love Melissa? Did I ever? Do I love my mother and father? Could I love everyone and even include bad people? I bowed my forehead into my clasped hands, feeling faint.

Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I’m sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by human beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me here in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labour of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain which is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.

When I opened my eyes I felt that I had understood something, and the cells of my body seemed to light up like millions of glowing points of contact, and I was aware of something profound. Then I stood up from my seat and collapsed.

Fainting had become normal for me. I assured the woman who helped me up that it had happened before and she seemed a little annoyed then, like: sort it out. My mouth tasted bad, but I was strong enough to walk unsupported. My experience of spiritual awakening had deserted me. I stopped in the Centra on the way home, bought myself two packets of instant noodles and a boxed chocolate cake, and completed the walk slowly and carefully, one foot in front of the other.

At home I opened the lid of the cake box, took out a spoon, and dialled Melissa’s mobile number. It rang, the ringing like a satisfied purr. Then her breath.

Hello? said Melissa.

Can we talk for a second? Or is it a bad time?

She laughed, or at least I think that’s the noise she was making.

You mean generally or right now? she said. Generally it’s a bad time, but right now is fine.

Why did you send Bobbi my story?

I don’t know, Frances. Why did you fuck my husband?

Is that supposed to shock me? I said. You’re the shocking person who uses bad language, okay. Now that we’ve established that, why did you send Bobbi my story?

She went quiet. I ran the tip of the spoon over the cake icing and licked it. It tasted sugary and flavourless.

You really do have these sudden bursts of aggression, don’t you? she said. Like with Valerie. Are you threatened by other women?

I have a question for you, if you don’t want to answer it then hang up.

What entitles you to an explanation of my behaviour?

You hated me, I said. Didn’t you?

She sighed. I don’t even know what that means, she said. I dug the spoon down into the cake, into the sponge part, and ate a mouthful.

You treated me with total contempt, said Melissa. And I don’t mean because of Nick. The first time you came to our house you just looked around like: here’s something bourgeois and embarrassing that I’m going to destroy. And I mean, you took such enjoyment in destroying it. Suddenly I’m looking around my own fucking house, thinking: is this sofa ugly? Is it kitsch to drink wine? And things I felt good about before started to make me feel pathetic. Having a husband instead of just fucking someone else’s husband. Having a book deal instead of writing nasty short stories about people I know and selling them to prestigious magazines. I mean, you came into my house with your fucking nose piercing like: oh, I’ll really enjoy eviscerating this whole set-up. She’s so establishment.

I wedged the spoon into the cake so that it stood upright on its own. I then used my hand to massage my face.

I don’t have a nose piercing, I said. That’s Bobbi.

Okay. My deepest apologies.

I didn’t realise you found me so subversive. In real life I didn’t feel any contempt for your house. I wanted it to be my house. I wanted your whole life. Maybe I did shitty things to try and get it, but I’m poor and you’re rich. I wasn’t trying to trash your life, I was trying to steal it.

She made a kind of snorting noise, but I didn’t believe she was really dismissing what I’d said. It was more a performance than a reaction.

You had an affair with my husband because you liked me so much, said Melissa.

No, I’m not saying I liked you.

Okay. I didn’t like you either. But you weren’t a very nice person.

We both paused then, like we had just raced each other up a set of stairs and we were out of breath and thinking about how foolish it was.

I regret that, I said. I regret not being nicer. I should have tried harder to be your friend. I’m sorry.

What?

I’m sorry, Melissa. I’m sorry for this aggressive phone call, it was stupid. I don’t really know what I’m doing at the moment. I’m having a hard time maybe. I’m sorry I called you. And look, I’m sorry for everything.

Jesus, she said. What’s wrong, are you okay?

I’m fine. I just feel like I haven’t been the person that I should have been. I don’t know what I’m saying now. I wish I had gotten to know you better and treated you with more kindness, I want to apologise for that. I’ll hang up.

I hung up before she could say anything. I ate some cake, fast and hungrily, then wiped my mouth, opened up my laptop and wrote an email.

Dear Bobbi,

Tonight I fainted in a church, you would have found it pretty funny. I’m sorry my story hurt your feelings. I think the reason it hurt is because it showed I could be honest with someone else even when I wasn’t honest with you. I hope that’s the reason. I called Melissa on the phone tonight asking her why she sent the story to you. It took me some time to realise that what I was really asking was: why did I write the story? It was a very embarrassing and garbled phone call. Maybe I think of her as my mother. The truth is that I love you and I always have. Do I mean that Platonically? I don’t object when you kiss me. The idea of us sleeping together again has always been exciting. When you broke up with me I felt you beat me at a game we were playing together, and I wanted to come back and beat you. Now I think I just want to sleep with you, without metaphors. That doesn’t mean I don’t have other desires. Right now for example, I’m eating chocolate cake out of the box with a teaspoon. To love someone under capitalism you have to love everyone. Is that theory or just theology? When I read the Bible I picture you as Jesus, so maybe fainting in a church was a metaphor after all. But I’m not trying to be intelligent now. I can’t say sorry for writing that story or for taking the money. I can say sorry that it shocked you, when I should have told you before. You’re not just an idea to me. If I’ve ever treated you like that I’m sorry. The night when you talked about monogamy I loved your intellect. I didn’t understand what you were trying to tell me. Maybe I’m a lot more stupid than either of us thought. When there were four of us I always thought in terms of couples anyway, which threatened me, since all the possible couples that didn’t involve me seemed so much more interesting than the ones that did. You and Nick, you and Melissa, even Nick and Melissa in their own way. But now I see that nothing consists of two people, or even three. My relationship with you is also produced by your relationship with Melissa, and with Nick, and with your childhood self, etc., etc. I wanted things for myself because I thought I existed. You’re going to write back and explain what Lacan really meant. Or you might not write back at all. I did faint, if you object to my prose style. That wasn’t a lie and I’m still shivering. Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other? I’m not drunk. Please write back. I love you.

Frances.

At some point the chocolate cake was gone. I looked into the box and saw crumbs and icing smeared around the paper rim which I had neglected to remove. I got up from the table, put the kettle on, and emptied two spoonfuls of coffee into the French press. I took some painkillers, I drank the coffee, I watched a murder mystery on Netflix. A certain peace had come to me and I wondered if it was God’s doing after all. Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.

At ten past eleven that night I heard her keys in the door. I went to the hall and she was unzipping her raincoat, the one she had brought to France that summer, and streams of water were trickling down her sleeves and dripping with a light percussive sound onto the floorboards. Our eyes met.

That was a weird email, Bobbi said. But I love you too.

30

We talked about our break-up for the first time that night. It felt like opening a door that’s been inside your own house all along, a door that you walk past every day and try never to think about. Bobbi told me I had made her miserable. We were sitting on my bed, Bobbi against the headboard with the pillows propped behind her, me at the foot of the mattress sitting with crossed legs. She said that I’d laughed at her during arguments, like she was a moron. I told her what Melissa said, that I wasn’t a very nice person. Bobbi laughed herself then. Melissa would know, she said. When has she ever been nice to anyone?

Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said.

Of course it’s really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it’s harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on ‘niceness’ as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel ‘nicer’ than Palestine. You know what I’m saying.

I do.

Jerry is certainly ‘nicer’ than Eleanor.

Yes, I said.

I had made Bobbi a cup of tea, and she was holding it on her lap, between her thighs. She warmed her hands on either side of it while we were talking.

I don’t resent you writing about me for profit, by the way, said Bobbi. I find it funny as long as I’m actually in on the joke.

I know. I could have told you and I didn’t. But at some level I still see you as the person who broke my heart and left me unfit for normal relationships.

You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi’s rich, Nick’s a man, I can’t hurt these people. If anything they’re out to hurt me and I’m defending myself.

I shrugged. I could think of nothing to say. She lifted the tea and sipped it, then settled the cup back between her thighs.

You could go to counselling, she said.

Do you think I should?

You’re not above it. It might be good for you. It’s not necessarily normal to go around collapsing in churches.

I didn’t try to explain that the fainting wasn’t psychological. Anyway, what did I know? If you think so, I said.

I think it would kill you, said Bobbi. To admit that you needed help from some touchy-feely psychology graduate. Probably a Labour voter. But maybe it would kill you in a good way.

Truly I say to you, unless one is born again.

Yeah. I came not to send peace, but a sword.

After that night, Bobbi started to walk with me from college to the sandwich shop in the evenings. She learned Linda’s name and made small talk with her while I put my apron on. Linda’s son was in the Irish army, Bobbi learned that. When I came home in the evening we ate dinner together. She moved some of her clothing into my room, some T-shirts and clean underwear. In bed we folded around each other like origami. It’s possible to feel so grateful that you can’t get to sleep at night.

Marianne saw us holding hands in college one day and said: you’re back together! We shrugged. It was a relationship, and also not a relationship. Each of our gestures felt spontaneous, and if from the outside we resembled a couple, that was an interesting coincidence for us. We developed a joke about it, which was meaningless to everyone including ourselves: what is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?

In the mornings Bobbi liked to get out of bed before me, so she could use up all the hot water in the shower like she used to when she was staying in the other room. Then she would drink an entire pot of coffee with her hair dripping wet at the kitchen table. Sometimes I carried a towel from the hot press and draped it onto her head, but she’d just continue to ignore me and read about social housing online. She peeled oranges and left the soft, sweet-smelling peel wherever she dropped it, to turn dry and crinkly on the tabletop or an arm of the sofa. In the evenings we walked through Phoenix Park under an umbrella, linking arms and smoking at the foot of the Wellington monument.

In bed we talked for hours, conversations that spiralled out from observations into grand, abstract theories and back again. Bobbi talked about Ronald Reagan and the IMF. She had an unusual respect for conspiracy theorists. She was interested in the nature of things, but she was also generous. I didn’t feel with her, like I did with many other people, that while I was talking she was just preparing the next thing she wanted to say. She was a great listener, an active listener. Sometimes while I spoke she would make a sudden noise, like the force of her interest in what I was saying just expressed itself from her mouth. Oh! she would say. Or: so true!

One night in December we went out to celebrate Marianne’s birthday. Everyone was in a good mood, the Christmas lights were all lit up outside, and people were telling funny stories about things Marianne had done and said while drunk or sleepy. Bobbi did an impression of her, tipping her head down and glancing up sweetly through her eyelashes, lifting her shoulders in a feigned shrug. I laughed, it really was funny, and said: again! Marianne was wiping tears away. Stop it, she said. Oh my lord. Bobbi and I had bought Marianne a pair of gloves, a nice blue leather pair, one glove from each of us. Andrew called us cheap and Marianne said he lacked imagination. She put them on in front of us: the Frances glove, she said. And the Bobbi glove. Then she mimed them talking to each other like puppets. On and on and on, she said.

That night we talked about the war in Syria, and the invasion of Iraq. Andrew said Bobbi didn’t understand history and she just blamed everything on the West. Everyone at the table made an ‘ooh’ noise like we were all on a game show together. In the ensuing disagreement, Bobbi displayed a remorseless intelligence, seeming to have read everything on whatever topic Andrew mentioned, correcting him only when necessary for her broader argument, not even alluding to the fact that she’d almost completed a history degree. I knew it was the first thing I would have mentioned if someone belittled me. Bobbi was different. While she spoke, her eyes often pointed upward, at light fixtures or far-off windows, and she gesticulated with her hands. All I could do with my attention was use it on other people, watching them for signs of agreement or irritation, trying to invite them into the discussion when they fell silent.

Bobbi and Melissa were still in touch at the time, but it was clear that they’d drawn away from one another. Bobbi had formulated new theories about Melissa’s personality and private life which were noticeably less flattering than those she had earlier advanced. I was striving to love everyone, which meant I tried to stay quiet.

We shouldn’t have trusted them, Bobbi said.

We were eating Chinese food from paper boxes at the time, sitting on my sofa and half-watching a Greta Gerwig film.

We didn’t know how codependent they were, Bobbi said. I mean, they were only ever in it for each other. It’s probably good for their relationship to have these dramatic affairs sometimes, it keeps things interesting for them.

Maybe.

I’m not saying Nick was intentionally trying to mess with you. Nick I actually like. But ultimately they were always going to go back to this fucked-up relationship they have because that’s what they’re used to. You know? I just feel so mad at them. They treated us like a resource.

You’re disappointed we didn’t get to break up their marriage, I said.

She laughed with a mouth full of noodles. On the television screen, Greta Gerwig was shoving her friend into some shrubbery as a game.

Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It’s sinister. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship?

I don’t know. What is ours sustained by?

That’s it! That’s exactly what I mean. Nothing. Do I call myself your girlfriend? No. Calling myself your girlfriend would be imposing some prefabricated cultural dynamic on us that’s outside our control. You know?

I thought about this until the film was over. Then I said: wait, so does that mean you’re not my girlfriend? She laughed. Are you serious? she said. No. I’m not your girlfriend.

Philip said he thought Bobbi was my girlfriend. We went out for coffee together during the week, and he told me that Sunny had offered him a part-time job, with real wages. I told him that I wasn’t jealous, which disappointed him, though I was also worried it was a lie. I liked Sunny. I liked the idea of books and reading. I didn’t know why I couldn’t enjoy things like other people did.

I’m not asking you if she’s my girlfriend, I said. I’m telling you she’s not.

But she obviously is. I mean, you’re doing some radical lesbian thing or whatever, but in basic vocabulary she is your girlfriend.

No. Again, this isn’t a question, it’s a statement.

He was crinkling up a sugar sachet in his fingers. We’d been talking for a while about his new job, a conversation that had left me feeling flat like a soft drink.

Well, I think she is, he said. I mean, in a good way. I think it’s really good for you. Especially after all that unpleasantness with Melissa.

What unpleasantness?

You know, whatever weird sex thing was going on there. With the husband.

I stared at him and I was at a loss to say anything at all. I watched the blue ink of the sugar sachet rub off onto his fingers, etching his fingerprints in thin blue ridges. Finally I said ‘I’ several times, which he didn’t seem to notice. The husband? I thought. Philip, you know his name.

What weird thing? I said.

Weren’t you sleeping with both of them? That’s what people were saying.

No, I wasn’t. Not that it would be wrong if I was, but I wasn’t.

Oh, okay, he said. I heard all kinds of weird things were going on.

I don’t really know why you’re saying this to me.

At this, Philip looked up with a shocked expression, and he reddened visibly. The sugar sachet slipped and he had to pinch it quickly with his fingers.

Sorry, he said. I didn’t mean to upset you.

You’re just telling me about these rumours because you think, what, I’ll laugh about it? Like it’s funny to me that people say nasty things behind my back?

I’m sorry, I just assumed that you knew.

I breathed in deeply through my nose. I knew I could walk away from the table, but I didn’t know where to walk to. I couldn’t think of anywhere I would like to go. I stood up anyway and took my coat from the back of the chair. I could see Philip was uncomfortable, and that he even felt guilty for hurting me, but I didn’t want to stay there any longer. I buttoned my coat up while he said weakly: where are you going?

It’s okay, I said. Forget about it. I’m just getting some air.

I never told Bobbi about the ultrasound or the meeting with the consultant. By refusing to admit that I was sick, I felt I could keep the sickness outside time and space, something only in my own head. If other people knew about it, the sickness would become real and I would have to spend my life being a sick person. This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl. I used internet forums to assess if this was a problem for anyone else. I searched ‘can’t tell people I’m’ and Google suggested: ‘gay’ and ‘pregnant’.

Sometimes at night when Bobbi and I were in bed together, my father called me. I would take the phone into the bathroom quietly to answer it. He had become less and less coherent. At times he seemed to believe that he was being hunted. He said: I have these thoughts, bad thoughts, you know? My mother said his brothers and sisters had been getting the phone calls too, but what could anyone do about it? He was never in the house when they went over. Often I could hear cars passing in the background, so I knew he was outside. Occasionally he seemed concerned for my safety also. He told me not to let them find me. I said: I won’t, Dad. They’re not going to find me. I’m safe where I am.

I knew my pain could begin again at any time, so I started taking the maximum dose of ibuprofen every day just in case. I concealed my grey notebook along with the boxes of painkillers in the top drawer of my desk, and I only removed them when Bobbi was showering or gone to class. This top drawer seemed to signify everything that was wrong with me, everything bad I felt about myself, so whenever it caught my eye I started to feel sick again. Bobbi never asked about it. She never mentioned the ultrasound or asked who was calling me on the phone at night. I understood it was my fault but I didn’t know what to do about it. I needed to feel normal again.

My mother came up to Dublin that weekend. We went shopping together, she bought me a new dress, and we went for lunch in a cafe on Wicklow Street. She seemed tired, and I was tired too. I ordered a smoked salmon bagel and picked at the slimy pieces of fish with my fork. The dress was in a paper bag under the table and I kept kicking it accidentally. I had suggested the cafe for lunch, and I could tell my mother was being polite about it, though in her presence I noticed that the sandwiches were outrageously expensive and served with side salads nobody ate. When she ordered tea, it came in a pot with a fiddly china teacup and saucer, which she smiled at gamely. Do you like this place? she said.

It’s okay, I replied, realising I hated it.

I saw your father the other day.

I speared a piece of salmon with my fork and transferred it into my mouth. It tasted of lemon and salt. I swallowed, dabbed at my lips with a napkin and said: oh.

He’s not well, she said. I can see that.

He’s never been well.

I tried to have a word with him.

I looked up at her. She was staring down at her sandwich blankly, or maybe affecting a blank expression to conceal something else.

You have to understand, she said. He’s not like you. You’re tough, you can cope with things. Your father finds life very difficult.

I tried to assess these statements. Were they true? Did it matter if they were true? I put my fork down.

You’re lucky, she said. I know you might not feel that way. You can go on hating him for the rest of your life if you want.

I don’t hate him.

A waiter went past precariously holding three bowls of soup. My mother looked at me.

I love him, I said.

That’s news to me.

Well, I’m not like you.

She laughed then, and I felt better. She reached for my hand across the table and I let her hold it.

31

The following week my phone rang. I remember exactly where I was standing when it started: just in front of the New Fiction shelves in Hodges Figgis, and it was thirteen minutes past five. I was looking for a Christmas present for Bobbi, and when I fished the phone out of my coat pocket, the screen read: Nick. My neck and shoulders felt rigid and suddenly very exposed. I slid my fingertip across the screen, lifted the phone to my cheek and said: hello?

Hey, Nick’s voice said. Listen, they don’t have red peppers, but is yellow okay?

His voice seemed to hit me somewhere behind my knees and travel upward in a flood of warmth, so that I knew I was blushing.

Oh dear, I said. I think you have the wrong number.

For a second he said nothing. Don’t hang up, I thought. Don’t hang up. I started to walk around the New Fiction shelves trailing my finger along the spines as if I was still browsing.

Jesus Christ, said Nick slowly. Is this Frances?

Yes. It is me.

He made a sound which momentarily I mistook for laughter, though I realised then that he was coughing. I started to laugh and had to hold the phone away from my face in case he thought I was crying. When he spoke he sounded measured, his confusion genuine.

I have no idea how this happened, he said. Did I just place this call to you?

Yes. You asked me a question about peppers.

Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I can’t explain how I dialled your number. It really was an honest mistake, I’m sorry.

I moved over to the display near the front of the bookshop, which showcased a selection of new books from diverse genres. I picked up a science fiction novel and pretended to read the back.

Were you trying to get Melissa? I said.

I was. Yeah.

That’s okay. I gather you’re in the supermarket.

He did laugh then, like he was laughing at how absurd the situation was. I put down the science fiction and opened the cover of a historical romance. The words lay flat on the page, my eyes didn’t try to read them.

I am in the supermarket, he said.

I’m in a bookshop.

Are you, really. Christmas shopping?

Yes, I said. I’m looking for something for Bobbi.

He made a noise like ‘hm’ then, not quite laughing but still amused or pleased. I closed the cover of the book. Don’t hang up, I thought.

They’ve reissued that Chris Kraus novel recently, he said. I read a review, it sounded like you might enjoy it. Although I realise now you didn’t actually ask for my advice.

Your advice is welcome, Nick. You have an enchanting voice.

He said nothing. I exited the bookshop, gripping the phone tightly to my face, so that the screen felt hot and a little oily. Outside it was cold. I was wearing a fake-fur hat.

Did I take our playful repartee too far there? I said.

Oh no, I’m sorry. I was just trying to come up with something nice to say to you, but everything I can think of sounds …

Insincere?

Too sincere, he said. Needy. I’m thinking, how do you flatter your ex-girlfriend, but in a kind of aloof way?

I laughed then and so did he. The relief of our mutual laughter was very sweet, and it dispelled the feeling that he would hang up on me, at least for the moment. Beside me a bus rattled through some standing water and wet my shins. I was walking away from college, toward St Stephen’s Green.

You were never a big compliments guy, I said.

No, I know. It’s something I regret.

Sometimes when drunk, you were nice.

Yeah, he said. Is that it, I was only nice to you when I was drunk?

I laughed again, on my own this time. The phone seemed to be transmitting some weird radioactive energy into my body, making me walk very fast and laugh about nothing.

You were always nice, I said. That’s not what I meant.

You’re feeling sorry for me, are you?

Nick, I haven’t heard from you in a month, and we’re only talking now because you got my name mixed up with your wife’s. I don’t feel sorry for you.

Well, I’ve been very strict with myself about not calling you, he said.

We were quiet then for a few seconds but neither of us hung up.

Are you still in the supermarket? I said.

Yeah, where are you? You’re outside now.

Walking up the street.

The restaurants and bars all had miniature Christmas trees and fake sprigs of holly in the window. A woman went past holding the hand of a tiny blonde child who was complaining about the cold.

I waited for you to call me, I said.

Frances, you told me you didn’t want to see me any more. I wasn’t going to harass you after that.

I stopped randomly outside an off-licence, looking at the bottles of Cointreau and Disaronno stacked up in the window like jewels.

How’s Melissa? I said.

She’s okay. She’s under a lot of pressure with deadlines. You know, which is why I’m calling to make sure I won’t be in trouble for buying the wrong kind of vegetable.

Groceries seem to play a big role in how she responds to stress.

I’ve actually tried explaining that to her, he said. How’s Bobbi?

I turned away from the window and went on walking up toward the top of the street. The hand holding the phone was getting cold, but my ear was hot.

Bobbi’s good, I said.

I hear you’re back together now.

Well, she’s not my girlfriend as such. We’re sleeping together, but I think that’s a way of testing the limits of best friendship. I actually don’t know what we’re doing. It seems to be working okay.

That’s very anarchist of you, he said.

Thanks, she’ll be pleased with that.

I waited at the lights, to cross over to St Stephen’s Green. The headlamps of cars flashed past and at the top of Grafton Street some buskers were singing ‘Fairytale of New York’. An illuminated yellow billboard read THIS CHRISTMAS … EXPERIENCE TRUE LUXURY.

Can I ask your advice on something? I said.

Yeah, of course. I think I show consistently poor judgement in my own decision-making, but if you think it would help we can give it a shot.

You see, there’s something I’m keeping from Bobbi, and I don’t know how to tell her about it. I’m not being coy, it’s nothing to do with you.

I’ve never suspected you of coyness, he said. Go on.

I told him I would cross the road first. It was dark then, and everything was gathered around points of light: shop windows, faces flushed with cold, a row of taxis idling along the kerb. I heard a shake of reins and the sound of hooves across the street. Entering the park through a side gate the noise of traffic seemed to turn itself down, like it caught in the bare branches and dissolved in air. My breath laid a white path in front of me.

Remember I had to go to the hospital for a consultation last month? I said. And I told you it went fine.

At first Nick said nothing. Then he said: I’m still in the shop now. Maybe I’ll get back in my car and we can talk, okay? It’s kind of noisy here, just give me ten seconds. I said sure. In my left ear I could hear the soft white sound of water, footsteps approaching and receding, and in my right ear I could hear the voice of the automated cashier as Nick walked past the tills. Then the automatic doors, and then the car park. I heard the beep that his car made when he unlocked it remotely, and then I could hear him get inside and shut the door. His breath was louder in the silence.

You were saying, he said.

Well, it turns out I have this condition where the cells in my uterus are growing in the wrong places. Endometriosis, you’ve probably heard of it, I hadn’t. It’s not dangerous or anything, but they can’t cure it, so it’s kind of a chronic pain issue. I faint pretty often, which is awkward. And I might not be able to have children. I mean, they don’t know if I will or not. It’s probably a stupid thing to be upset about since they don’t even know yet.

I walked by a streetlight which cast my shadow long and witchy in front of me, so long that the tips of my body faded into nothing.

It’s not stupid to be upset about that, he said.

Is it not?

No.

The last time I saw you, I said. When we got into bed together and then you told me you wanted to stop, I thought, you know. I don’t feel good to you any more. Like, you can feel that there’s something wrong with me. Which is crazy since I’ve had this disease the whole time anyway. But that was the first time we were together after you started sleeping with Melissa and maybe I was feeling vulnerable, I don’t know.

He breathed in and out into the receiver. I didn’t need him to say anything then, to explain what he was feeling. I stopped at a small damp bench beside a bronze bust and sat down.

And you haven’t told Bobbi about the diagnosis, he said.

I haven’t told anyone. Just you. I feel like talking about it will make people see me as a sick person.

A man walking a Yorkshire terrier went past, and the terrier noticed me and strained at its lead to get at my feet. It was wearing a quilted jacket. The man flashed me a quick smile, apologetic, and they moved on. Nick said nothing.

Well, what do you think? I said.

About Bobbi? I think you should tell her. You can’t control what she thinks of you anyway. You know, sick or healthy, you’re never going to be able to do that. What you’re doing now is deceiving her just for the illusion of control, which probably isn’t worth it. I don’t rate my own advice very highly, though.

It’s good advice.

The cold of the bench had travelled through the wool of my coat and into my skin and bones. I didn’t get up, I stayed sitting. Nick said how sorry he was to hear that I was ill, and I accepted that and thanked him. He asked a couple of questions about how to treat the symptoms and whether they might just get better with time. He knew another woman who had it, his cousin’s wife, and he said they had children, just for whatever it was worth. I said IVF sounded scary to me and he said, yeah, they didn’t use IVF I don’t think. But are those treatments getting less invasive now? They’re definitely improving. I said I didn’t know.

He coughed. You know the last time we saw one another, he said, I wanted to stop because I was afraid I was hurting you. That’s all.

Okay, I said. Thanks for telling me that. You weren’t hurting me.

We paused.

I can’t tell you how strict I’ve been with myself about not calling you, he said eventually.

I thought you’d forgotten all about me.

The idea of forgetting anything about you is kind of horrifying to me.

I smiled. I said: is it really? My feet were getting cold in their boots then.

Where are you now? he said. You’re not walking any more, you’re somewhere quiet.

I’m in Stephen’s Green.

Oh, really? I’m in town too, I’m like ten minutes away from you. I won’t come see you or anything, don’t worry. It’s just curious to think of you being so close by.

I imagined him sitting in his car somewhere, smiling to himself on the phone, how aggravatingly handsome he would look. I tucked my free hand up inside my coat to keep it warm.

When we were in France together, I said, do you remember we were in the sea one day and I asked you to tell me that you wanted me, and you splashed water on my face and told me to fuck off?

When Nick spoke, I could hear he was still smiling. You’re making me sound like such a prick, he said. I was just kidding with you, I wasn’t seriously telling you to fuck off.

But you couldn’t just say that you wanted me, I said.

Well, everyone else was always talking about it. I thought you were being a little gratuitous.

I should have known it wouldn’t work out between us.

Didn’t we always know that? he said.

I paused for a second. Then I just said: I didn’t.

Well, but what does it mean for a relationship to ‘work out’? he said. It was never going to be something conventional.

I got up from the bench. It was too cold to sit outside. I wanted to be warm again. Lit from below, empty branches scratched at the sky.

I didn’t think it had to be, I said.

You know, you’re saying that, but you obviously weren’t happy that I loved someone else. It’s okay, it doesn’t make you a bad person.

But I loved someone else.

Yeah, I know, he said. But you didn’t want me to.

I wouldn’t have minded, if …

I tried to think of a way to finish this sentence without saying: if I were different, if I were the person I wanted to be. Instead I just let it fall off into silence. I was so cold.

I can’t believe you’re on the phone saying you waited for me to call you, he said quietly. You really don’t know how devastating it is to hear that.

How do you think I feel? You didn’t even want to speak to me, you just thought I was Melissa.

Of course I wanted to speak to you. How long have we been on the phone now?

I got to the gate I had come through, but it was locked. My eyes were starting to sting with cold. Outside the railing a line of people queued for the 145. I walked toward the main gate, where I could see the lights of the shopping centre. I thought of Nick and Melissa singing ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ in their warm kitchen with all their friends around them.

You said it yourself, I said. It never would have worked.

Well, is it working now? If I come and pick you up and we drive around talking and I say, oh, sorry for not calling you, I’ve been a fool, is that working then?

If two people make each other happy then it’s working.

You could smile at a stranger on the street and make them happy, he said. We’re talking about something more complicated.

As I got closer to the gate I heard the bell ringing. The noise of traffic opened up again, like a light getting brighter and brighter.

Does it have to be complicated? I said.

Yeah, I think so.

There’s the thing with Bobbi, which is important to me.

You’re telling me, he said. I’m married.

It’s always going to be fucked up like this, isn’t it?

But I’ll compliment you more this time.

I was at the gate. I wanted to tell him about the church. That was a different conversation. I wanted things from him that would make everything else complicated.

Like what kind of compliment? I said.

I have one that’s not really a compliment but I think you’ll like it.

Okay, tell me.

Remember the first time we kissed? he said. At the party. And I said I didn’t think the utility room was a good place to be kissing and we left. You know I went up to my room and waited for you, right? I mean for hours. And at first I really thought you would come. It was probably the most wretched I ever felt in my life, this kind of ecstatic wretchedness that in a way I was practically enjoying. Because even if you did come upstairs, what then? The house was full of people, it’s not like anything was going to happen. But every time I thought of going back down again I would imagine hearing you on the stairs, and I couldn’t leave, I mean I physically couldn’t. Anyway, how I felt then, knowing that you were close by and feeling completely paralysed by it, this phone call is very similar. If I told you where my car is right now, I don’t think I’d be able to leave, I think I would have to stay here just in case you changed your mind about everything. You know, I still have that impulse to be available to you. You’ll notice I didn’t buy anything in the supermarket.

I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.

Come and get me, I said.