In the waiting room he has to fill out a questionnaire. The seats are brightly coloured, arranged around a coffee table with a children’s abacus toy on it. The coffee table is much too low for him to lean forward and fill out the pages on its surface, so he arranges them awkwardly in his lap instead. On the very first question he pierces the page with his ballpoint pen and leaves a tiny tear in the paper. He looks up at the receptionist who provided him with the form but she’s not watching, so he looks back down again. The second question is headed ‘Pessimism’. He has to circle the number beside one of the following statements:
- I am not discouraged about my future
- I feel more discouraged about my future than I used to be
- I do not expect things to work out for me
- I feel my future is hopeless and will only get worse
It seems to him that any of these statements could plausibly be true, or more than one of them could be true at the same time. He puts the end of his pen between his teeth. Reading the fourth sentence, which for some reason is labelled ‘3’, gives Connell a prickling feeling inside the soft tissue of his nose, like the sentence is calling out to him. It’s true, he feels his future is hopeless and will only get worse. The more he thinks about it, the more it resonates. He doesn’t even have to think about it, because he feels it: its syntax seems to have originated inside him. He rubs his tongue hard on the roof of his mouth, trying to settle his face into a neutral frown of concentration. Not wanting to alarm the woman who will receive the questionnaire, he circles statement 2 instead.
It was Niall who told him about the service. What he said specifically was: It’s free, so you might as well. Niall is a practical person, and he shows compassion in practical ways. Connell hasn’t been seeing much of him lately, because Connell lives in his scholarship accommodation now
and doesn’t see much of anyone anymore. Last night he spent an hour and a half lying on the floor of his room, because he was too tired to complete the journey from his en suite back to his bed. There was the en suite, behind him, and there was the bed, in front of him, both well within view, but somehow it was impossible to move either forward or backwards, only downwards, onto the floor, until his body was arranged motionless on the carpet. Well, here I am on the floor, he thought. Is life so much worse here than it would be on the bed, or even in a totally different location? No, life is exactly the same. Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head. I might as well be lying here, breathing the vile dust of the carpet into my lungs, gradually feeling my right arm go numb under the weight of my body, because it’s essentially the same as every other possible experience.
- I feel the same about myself as ever
- I have lost confidence in myself
- I am disappointed in myself
- I dislike myself
He looks up at the woman behind the glass. It strikes him now for the first time that they’ve placed a glass screen between this woman and the people in the waiting room. Do they imagine that people like Connell pose a risk to the woman behind the glass? Do they imagine that the students who come in here and patiently fill out the questionnaires, who repeat their own names again and again for the woman to type into her computer – do they imagine that these people want to hurt the woman behind the desk? Do they think that because Connell sometimes lies on his own floor for hours, he might one day purchase a semi-automatic machine gun online and commit mass murder in a shopping centre? Nothing could be further from his mind than committing mass murder. He feels guilty after he stammers a word on the phone. Still, he can see the logic: mentally unhealthy people are contaminated in some way and possibly dangerous. If they don’t attack the woman behind the desk due to uncontrollable violent impulses, they might breathe some kind of microbe in her direction, causing her to dwell unhealthily on all the failed relationships in her past. He circles 3 and moves on.
- I don’t have any thoughts of killing myself
- I have thoughts of killing myself, but I would not carry them out
- I would like to kill myself
- I would kill myself if I had the chance
He glances back over at the woman again. He doesn’t want to confess to her, a total strangParaer, that he would like to kill himself. Last night on the floor he fantasised about lying completely still until he died of dehydration, however long that took. Days maybe, but relaxing days in which he wouldn’t have to do anything or focus very hard. Who would find his body? He didn’t care. The fantasy, purified by weeks of repetition, ends at the moment of death: the calm, silent eyelid that closes over everything for good. He circles statement 1.
After completing the rest of the questions, all of which are intensely personal and the last one is about his sex life, he folds the pages over and hands them back to the receptionist. He doesn’t know what to expect, handing over this extremely sensitive information to a stranger. He swallows and his throat is so tight it hurts. The woman takes the sheets like he’s handing over a delayed college assignment and gives him a bland, cheerful smile. Thanks, she says. You can wait for the counsellor to call you now. He stands there limply. In her hand she holds the most deeply private information he has ever shared with anyone. Seeing her nonchalance, he experiences an impulse to ask for it back, as if he must have misunderstood the nature of this exchange, and maybe he should fill it out differently after all. Instead he says: Okay. He sits down again.
For a while nothing happens. His stomach is making a low whining noise now because he hasn’t eaten breakfast. Lately he’s too tired to cook for himself in the evenings, so he finds himself signing in for dinner on the scholars’ website and eating Commons in the Dining Hall. Before the meal everyone stands for grace, which is recited in Latin. Then the food is served by other students, who are dressed all in black to differentiate them from the otherwise identical students who are being served. The meals are always the same: salty orange soup to start, with a bread roll and a square of butter wrapped in foil. Then a piece of meat in gravy, with silver dishes of potatoes passed around. Then dessert, some kind of wet sugary cake, or the fruit salad which is mostly grapes. These are all served rapidly and whisked away rapidly, while portraits of men from
different centuries glare down from the walls in expensive regalia. Eating alone like this, overhearing the conversations of others but unable to join in, Connell feels profoundly and almost unendurably alienated from his own body. After the meal another grace is recited, with the ugly noise of chairs pulled back from tables. By seven he has emerged into the darkness of Front Square, and the lamps have been lit.
A middle-aged woman comes out to the waiting room now, wearing a long grey cardigan, and says: Connell? He tries to contort his face into a smile, and then, giving up, rubs his jaw with his hand instead, nodding. My name is Yvonne, she says. Would you like to come with me? He rises from the couch and follows her into a small office. She closes the door behind them. On one side of the office is a desk with an ancient Microsoft computer humming audibly; on the other side, two low mint- coloured armchairs facing one another. Now then, Connell, she says. You can sit down wherever you like. He sits on the chair facing the window, out of which he can see the back of a concrete building and a rusting drainpipe. She sits down opposite him and picks up a pair of glasses from a chain around her neck. She fixes them on her face and looks down at her clipboard.
Okay, she says. Why don’t we talk about how you’re feeling? Yeah. Not great.
I’m sorry to hear that. When did you start feeling this way? Uh, he says. A couple of months ago. January, I suppose.
She clicks a pen and writes something down. January, she says. Okay.
Did something happen then, or it just came on out of nowhere?
A few days into the new year, Connell got a text message from Rachel Moran. It was two o’clock in the morning then, and he and Helen were coming back from a night out. Angling his phone away, he opened the text: it was a group message that went out to all their school friends, asking if anyone had seen or been in contact with Rob Hegarty. It said he hadn’t been seen for a few hours. Helen asked him what the text said and for some reason Connell replied: Oh, nothing, just a group message. Happy New Year. The next day Rob’s body was recovered from the River Corrib.
Connell later heard from friends that Rob had been drinking a lot in the preceding weeks and seemed out of sorts. Connell hadn’t known anything about it, he hadn’t been home much last term, he hadn’t really
been seeing people. He checked his Facebook to find the last time Rob had sent him a message, and it was from early 2012: a photograph from a night out, Connell pictured with his arm around the waist of Marianne’s friend Teresa. In the message Rob had written: are u riding her?? NICE haha. Connell had never replied. He hadn’t seen Rob at Christmas, he couldn’t remember for certain whether he’d even seen him last summer or not. Trying to summon an exact mental picture of Rob’s face, Connell found that he couldn’t: an image would appear at first, whole and recognisable, but on any closer inspection the features would float away from one another, blur, become confused.
In the following days, people from school posted status updates about suicide awareness. Since then Connell’s mental state has steadily, week after week, continued to deteriorate. His anxiety, which was previously chronic and low-level, serving as a kind of all-purpose inhibiting impulse, has become severe. His hands start tingling when he has to perform minor interactions like ordering coffee or answering a question in class. Once or twice he’s had major panic attacks: hyperventilation, chest pain, pins and needles all over his body. A feeling of dissociation from his senses, an inability to think straight or interpret what he sees and hears. Things begin to look and sound different, slower, artificial, unreal. The first time it happened he thought he was losing his mind, that the whole cognitive framework by which he made sense of the world had disintegrated for good, and everything from then on would just be undifferentiated sound and colour. Then within a couple of minutes it passed, and left him lying on his mattress coated in sweat.
Now he looks up at Yvonne, the person assigned by the university to listen to his problems for money.
One of my friends committed suicide in January, he says. A friend from school.
Oh, how sad. I’m very sorry to hear that, Connell.
We hadn’t really kept up with each other in college. He was in Galway and I was here and everything. I guess I feel guilty now that I wasn’t in touch with him more.
I can understand that, Yvonne says. But however sad you might be feeling about your friend, what happened to him is not your fault. You’re not responsible for the decisions he made.
I never even replied to the last message he sent me. I mean, that was years ago, but I didn’t even reply.
I know that must feel very painful for you, of course that’s very painful. You feel you missed an opportunity to help someone who was suffering.
Connell nods, dumbly, and rubs his eye.
When you lose someone to suicide, it’s natural to wonder if there’s anything you could have done to help this person, Yvonne says. I’m sure everyone in your friend’s life is asking themselves the same questions now.
But at least other people tried to help.
This sounds more aggressive, or more wheedling, than Connell intended it to. He’s surprised to see that instead of responding directly, Yvonne just looks at him, looks through the lenses of her glasses, and her eyes are narrowed. She’s nodding. Then she lifts a sheaf of paper off the table and holds it upright, businesslike.
Well, I’ve had a look at this inventory you filled out for us, she says. And I’ll be honest with you, Connell, what I’m seeing here would be pretty concerning.
Right. Would it?
She shuffles the sheets of paper. He can see on the first sheet where his pen made the small tear.
This is what we call the Beck Depression Inventory, she says. I’m sure you’ve figured out how it works, we just assign a score from zero to three for each item. Now, someone like me might score between, say, zero and five on a test like this, and someone who’s going through a mild depressive episode could expect to see a score of maybe fifteen or sixteen.
Okay, he says. Right.
And what we’re seeing here is a score of forty-three. Yeah. Okay.
So that would put us in the territory of a very serious depression, she says. Do you think that matches up with your experience?
He rubs at his eye again. Quietly he manages to say: Yeah.
I’m seeing that you’re feeling very negatively towards yourself, you’re having some suicidal thoughts, things like that. So those are things we’d have to take very seriously.
Right.
At this point she starts talking about treatment options. She says she’s going to recommend that he should see a GP in college to talk about the option of medication. You understand I’m not in a position to make any prescriptions here, she says. He nods, restless now. Yeah, I know that, he says. He keeps rubbing at his eyes, they’re itchy. She offers him a glass of water but he declines. She starts to ask questions about his family, about his mother and where she lives and whether he has brothers and sisters.
Any girlfriend or boyfriend on the scene at the moment? Yvonne says. No, says Connell. No one like that.
*
Helen came back to Carricklea with him for the funeral. The morning of the ceremony they dressed in his room together in silence, with the noise of Lorraine’s hairdryer humming through the wall. Connell was wearing the only suit he owned, which he had bought for a cousin’s communion when he was sixteen. The jacket was tight around his shoulders, he could feel it when he lifted his arms. The sensation that he looked bad preoccupied him. Helen was sitting at the mirror putting on her make-up, and Connell stood behind her to knot his tie. She reached up to touch his face. You look handsome, she said. For some reason that made him angry, like it was the most insensitive, vulgar thing she possibly could have said, and he didn’t respond. She dropped her hand then and went to put her shoes on.
They stopped in the vestibule of the church to speak to someone Lorraine knew. Connell’s hair was wet from the rain and he kept smoothing it, not looking at Helen, not speaking. Then, through the opened church doors, he saw Marianne. He’d known she was coming back from Sweden for the funeral. In the doorway she looked very slim and pale, wearing a black coat, carrying a wet umbrella. He hadn’t seen her since Italy. She looked, he thought, almost frail. She started putting her umbrella in the stand inside the door.
Marianne, he said.
He said this aloud without thinking about it. She looked up and saw him then. Her face was like a small white flower. She put her arms
around his neck, and he held her tightly. He could smell the inside of her house on her clothes. The last time he’d seen her, everything had been normal. Rob was still alive then, Connell could have sent him a message or even called him and talked to him on the phone, it was possible then, it had been possible. Marianne touched the back of Connell’s head with her hand. Everyone stood there watching them, he felt that. When they knew it couldn’t go on any longer, they let go of one another. Helen patted his arm quickly. People were moving in and out of the vestibule, coats and umbrellas dripping silently onto the tiles.
We’d better go and pay our respects, Lorraine said.
They lined up with everyone else to shake hands with the family. Rob’s mother Eileen was just crying and crying, they could hear her the whole way down the church. By the time they got halfway up the queue Connell’s legs were shaking. He wished Lorraine were standing with him and not Helen. He felt like he was going to be sick. When it was finally his turn, Rob’s father Val gripped his hand and said: Connell, good man. I hear you’re doing great things above in Trinity. Connell’s hands were wringing wet. I’m sorry, he said in a thin voice. I’m so sorry. Val kept gripping his hand and looking in his eyes. Good lad, he said. Thanks for coming. Then it was over. Connell sat down in the first available pew, shivering all over. Helen sat down beside him, looking self-conscious, pulling at the hem of her skirt. Lorraine came over and gave him a tissue from her handbag, with which he wiped his forehead and his upper lip. She squeezed his shoulder. You’re alright, she said. You’ve done your bit, just relax now. And Helen turned her face away, as if embarrassed.
After Mass they went to the burial, and then back to the Tavern to eat sandwiches and drink tea in the ballroom. Behind the bar a girl from the year below in school was dressed in a white shirt and waistcoat, serving pints. Connell poured Helen a cup of tea and then one for himself. They stood by the wall near the tea trays, drinking and not talking. Connell’s cup rattled in its saucer. Eric came over and stood with them when he arrived. He was wearing a shiny blue tie.
How are things? Eric said. Long time no see.
I know, yeah, said Connell. It’s been a fair while alright. Who’s this? Eric said, nodding at Helen.
Helen, said Connell. Helen, this is Eric.
Eric held out his hand and Helen shook it, balancing her teacup politely in her left hand, her face tensed in effort.
The girlfriend, is it? Eric said.
With a glance at Connell she nodded and replied: Yes. Eric released her, grinning. You’re a Dub anyway, he said. She smiled nervously and said: That’s right.
Must be your fault this lad never comes home anymore, Eric said. It’s not her fault, it’s my fault, said Connell.
I’m only messing with you, Eric said.
For a few seconds they stood looking out at the room in silence. Helen cleared her throat and said delicately: I’m very sorry for your loss, Eric. Eric turned and gave her a kind of gallant nod. He looked back at the room again. Yeah, hard to believe, he said. Then he poured himself a cup of tea from the pot behind them. Good of Marianne to come, he remarked. I thought she was off in Sweden or someplace.
She was, said Connell. She’s home for the funeral. She’s gone very thin, isn’t she?
Eric took a large mouthful of tea and swallowed it, smacking his lips. Marianne, detaching herself from another conversation, made her way towards the tea tray.
Here’s herself, said Eric. You’re very good to come all the way back from Sweden, Marianne.
She thanked him and started to pour a cup of tea, saying it was nice to see him.
Have you met Helen here? Eric asked.
Marianne put her teacup down in her saucer. Of course I have, she said. We’re in college together.
All friendly, I hope, said Eric. No rivalry, I mean. Behave yourself now, said Marianne.
Connell watched Marianne pouring the tea, her smiling manner, ‘behave yourself’, and he felt in awe of her naturalness, her easy way of moving through the world. It hadn’t been like that in school, quite the opposite. Back then Connell had been the one who understood how to behave, while Marianne had just aggravated everyone.
After the funeral he cried, but the crying felt like nothing. Back in fifth year when Connell had scored a goal for the school football team, Rob had leapt onto the pitch to embrace him. He screamed Connell’s
name, and began to kiss his head with wild exuberant kisses. It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches. Connell still remembers the too-hard grip of his arms. And on Debs night, Rob showing them those photographs of Lisa’s naked body. Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance. Connell couldn’t judge him for that. He’d been the same way himself, or worse. He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing. It was Marianne who had shown him other things were possible. Life was different after that; maybe he had never understood how different it was.
The night of the funeral he and Helen lay in his room in the dark, not sleeping. Helen asked him why he hadn’t introduced her to any of his friends. She was whispering so as not to wake Lorraine.
I introduced you to Eric, didn’t I? Connell said.
Only after he asked. To be honest, you didn’t seem like you really wanted him to meet me.
Connell closed his eyes. It was a funeral, he said. You know, someone just died. I don’t think it’s really a good occasion for meeting people.
Well, if you didn’t want me to come you shouldn’t have asked me, she said.
He breathed in and out slowly. Okay, he said. I’m sorry I asked you, then.
She sat upright in bed beside him. What does that mean? she said.
You’re sorry I was there?
No, I’m saying if I gave you the wrong impression about what it was going to be like, then I’m sorry.
You didn’t want me there at all, did you?
I didn’t want to be there myself, to be honest, he said. I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time, but like, it was a funeral. I don’t know what you expected.
She breathed in quickly through her nose, he could hear it. You weren’t ignoring Marianne, she said.
I wasn’t ignoring anyone.
But you seemed particularly happy to see her, wouldn’t you say? For fuck’s sake, Helen, he said quietly.
What?
How does every argument come back to this? Our friend just killed himself and you want to start in with me about Marianne, seriously? Like, yeah, I was glad to see her, does that make me a monster?
When Helen spoke it was in a low hiss. I’ve been very sympathetic about your friend and you know that, she said. But what do you expect me to do, just pretend I don’t notice that you’re staring at another woman in front of me?
I was not staring at her. You were, in the church.
Well, it wasn’t intentional, he said. Believe me, it was not a very sexy atmosphere for me in the church, okay? You can trust me on that.
Why do you have to act so weird around her?
He frowned, still lying with his eyes shut, face turned to the ceiling. How I act with her is my normal personality, he said. Maybe I’m just a weird person.
Helen said nothing. Eventually she just lay back down beside him. Two weeks later it was over, they broke up. By then Connell was so exhausted and miserable he couldn’t even summon up a response. Things happened to him, like the crying fits, the panic attacks, but they seemed to descend on him from outside, rather than emanating from somewhere inside himself. Internally he felt nothing. He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid. Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.
*
Yvonne nods slowly, moving her mouth around in a sympathetic way. Do you feel you’ve made friends here in Dublin? she says. Anyone you’re close with, that you might talk to about how you’re feeling?
My friend Niall, maybe. He was the one who told me about this whole thing.
The college counselling service. Yeah, says Connell.
Well, that’s good. He’s looking out for you. Niall, okay. And he’s here in Trinity as well.
Connell coughs, clearing the dry feeling from his throat, and says: Yeah. I have another friend who I would be pretty close with, but she’s on Erasmus this year.
A friend from college?
Well, we went to school together but she’s in Trinity now as well. Marianne. She would have known Rob and everything. Our friend who died. But she’s away this year, like I said.
He watches Yvonne write down the name on her notepad, the tall slopes of the capital ‘M’. He talks to Marianne almost every night on Skype now, sometimes after dinner or sometimes late when she comes home from a night out. They’ve never talked about what happened in Italy. He’s grateful that she’s never brought it up. When they speak the video stream is high quality but frequently fails to match the audio, which gives him a sense of Marianne as a moving image, a thing to be looked at. People in college have been saying things about her since she went away. Connell’s not sure if she knows about it or not, what people like Jamie have been saying. Connell isn’t even really friends with those people and he’s heard about it. Some drunk guy at a party told him that she was into weird stuff, and that there were pictures of her on the internet. Connell doesn’t know if it’s true about the pictures. He’s searched her name online but nothing has ever come up.
Is she someone you might talk with about how you’re feeling?
Yvonne says.
Yeah, she’s been supportive about it. She, uh … She’s hard to describe if you don’t know her. She’s really smart, a lot smarter than me, but I would say we see the world in a similar way. And we’ve lived our whole lives in the same place, obviously, so it is a bit different being away from her.
It sounds difficult.
I just don’t have a lot of people who I really click with, he says. You know, I struggle with that.
Do you think that’s a new problem, or is it something familiar to you?
It’s familiar, I suppose. I would say in school I sometimes had that feeling of isolation or whatever. But people liked me and everything. Here I feel like people don’t like me that much.
He pauses, and Yvonne seems to recognise the pause and doesn’t interrupt him.
Like with Rob, that’s my friend who died, he says. I wouldn’t say we clicked on this very deep level or anything, but we were friends.
Sure.
We didn’t have a lot in common, like in terms of interests or whatever. And on the political side of things we probably wouldn’t have had the same views. But in school, stuff like that didn’t really matter as much. We were just in the same group so we were friends, you know.
I understand that, says Yvonne.
And he did do some stuff that I wasn’t a big fan of. With girls his behaviour was kind of poor at times. You know, we were eighteen or whatever, we all acted like idiots. But I guess I found that stuff a bit alienating.
Connell bites on his thumbnail and then drops his hand back into his lap.
I probably thought if I moved here I would fit in better, he says. You know, I thought I might find more like-minded people or whatever. But honestly, the people here are a lot worse than the people I knew in school. I mean everyone here just goes around comparing how much money their parents make. Like I’m being literal with that, I’ve seen that happen.
He breathes in now, feeling that he has been talking too quickly and at too great a length, but unwilling to stop.
I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life, he says. But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again. I mean, those friendships are gone. Rob is gone, I can never see him again. I can never get that life back.
Yvonne pushes the box of tissues on the table towards him. He looks at the box, patterned with green palm leaves, and then at Yvonne. He touches his own face, only to discover that he has started crying. Wordlessly he removes a tissue from the box and wipes his face.
Sorry, he says.
Yvonne is making eye contact now, but he can’t tell anymore whether she’s been listening to him, whether she’s understood or tried to understand what he’s said.
What we can do here in counselling is try to work on your feelings, and your thoughts and behaviours, she says. We can’t change your circumstances, but we can change how you respond to your circumstances. Do you see what I mean?
Yeah.
At this point in the session Yvonne starts to hand him worksheets, illustrated with large cartoon arrows pointing to various text boxes. He takes them and pretends that he’s intending to fill them out later. She also hands him some photocopied pages about dealing with anxiety, which he pretends he will read. She prints a note for him to take to the college health service advising them about his depression, and he says he’ll come back for another session in two weeks. Then he leaves the office.
*
A couple of weeks ago Connell attended a reading by a writer who was visiting the college. He sat at the back of the lecture hall on his own, self- conscious because the reading was sparsely attended and everyone else was sitting in groups. It was one of the big windowless halls in the Arts Block, with fold-out tables attached to the seats. One of his lecturers gave a short and sycophantic overview of the writer’s work, and then the man himself, a youngish guy around thirty, stood at the lectern and thanked the college for the invitation. By then Connell regretted his decision to attend. Everything about the event was staid and formulaic, sapped of energy. He didn’t know why he had come. He had read the writer’s collection and found it uneven, but sensitive in places, perceptive. Now, he thought, even that effect was spoiled by seeing the writer in this environment, hemmed off from anything spontaneous, reciting aloud from his own book to an audience who’d already read it. The stiffness of this performance made the observations in the book seem false, separating the writer from the people he wrote about, as if he’d observed them only for the benefit of talking about them to Trinity students. Connell couldn’t think of any reason why these literary events took place,
what they contributed to anything, what they meant. They were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them.
Afterwards a small wine reception had been set up outside the lecture hall. Connell went to leave but found himself trapped by a group of students talking loudly. When he tried to press his way through, one of them said: Oh, hi Connell. He recognised her, it was Sadie Darcy- O’Shea. She was in some of his English classes, and he knew she was involved in the literary society. She was the girl who’d called him ‘a genius’ to his face back in first year.
Hey, he said.
Did you enjoy the reading?
He shrugged. It was alright, he said. He felt anxious and wanted to leave, but she kept speaking. He rubbed his palms on his T-shirt.
You weren’t blown away? she said.
I don’t know, I don’t really get the point of these things. Readings?
Yeah, said Connell. You know, I don’t really see what they’re for.
Everyone looked away suddenly, and Connell turned to follow their gaze. The writer had emerged from the lecture hall and was approaching them. Hi there, Sadie, he said. Connell had not intuited any personal relationship between Sadie and the writer, and he felt foolish for saying what he’d said. You read so wonderfully, said Sadie. Irritated and tired, Connell moved aside to let the writer join their circle and started to edge away. Then Sadie gripped his arm and said: Connell was just telling us he doesn’t see the point of literary readings. The writer looked vaguely in Connell’s direction and then nodded. Yeah, same as that, he said. They’re boring, aren’t they? Connell noticed that the stilted quality of his reading seemed to characterise his speech and movement also, and he felt bad then for attributing such a negative view of literature to someone who was maybe just awkward.
Well, we appreciated it, said Sadie.
What’s your name, Connell what? said the writer. Connell Waldron.
The writer nodded. He picked up a glass of red wine from the table and let the others continue talking. For some reason, though the opportunity to leave had at last presented itself, Connell lingered. The writer swallowed some wine and then looked at him again.
I liked your book, said Connell.
Oh, thanks, said the writer. Are you coming on to the Stag’s Head for a drink? I think that’s where people are heading.
They didn’t leave the Stag’s Head that night until it closed. They had a good-natured argument about literary readings, and although Connell didn’t say very much, the writer took his side, which pleased him. Later he asked Connell where he was from, and Connell told him Sligo, a place called Carricklea. The writer nodded.
I know it, yeah, he said. There used to be a bowling alley there, it’s probably gone years now.
Yeah, Connell said too quickly. I had a birthday party there once when I was small. In the bowling alley. It is gone now, though, obviously. Like you said.
The writer took a sip of his pint and said: How do you find Trinity, do you like it?
Connell looked at Sadie across the table, her bangles knocking together on her wrist.
Bit hard to fit in, to be honest, Connell said.
The writer nodded again. That mightn’t be a bad thing, he said. You could get a first collection out of it.
Connell laughed, he looked down into his lap. He knew it was just a joke, but it was a nice thought, that he might not be suffering for nothing. He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. When someone mentioned the austerity protests that night in the Stag’s Head, Sadie threw her hands up and said: Not politics, please! Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure
inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.
