Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

inaudibly: I love you. I’m sorry. You don’t have to say it back.

She has lost sight of the brother Ivan has been describing, replacing him with herself, and therefore attributing to herself a greater understanding of his motives than she could possibly possess.

That he was becoming a person his father would never know.

He even begins to suspect that he might be the normal one, and they might after all be kind of weird and unnerving: a strangely guilt-inducing thought, which makes him go back to wishing them inner peace and happiness again.

And on some level, to be honest, I probably feel angry with you as well. For leaving me. Just to tell you the truth. Quietly she answers: If we had stayed together, you would have ended up hating me, Peter. And if you had left me, I would have hated you.

I just feel like I’ve failed you.

You know, I think in a way you actually like it, watching me humiliate myself like that. And you get to reject me all over again. I think there’s a part of you that enjoys it.

the only unhappy person in a world of thriving and self-confident individuals, can understand.

Are there even reasoned arguments to be made in matters of love, marriage, intimate life?

Gradually these situations arise, she can see that now, just one step after another, and by the time a few weeks or months have passed, your life is no longer recognisable. You are lying to almost everyone you know.

His love for her poisoned he thinks. With guilt, with shame.

Why anyway attachment, why always this attachment to particular people.

fault. I just get off on messing with her head, I don’t know why. I’m

Yeah, when I think too hard about my life, I do start feeling suicidal,

A proliferation of inappropriate feeling he thinks. Disorder of sentiment.

life, it’s like it’s this horrible dream that keeps going on and on, and I can’t wake up.

You’re so fucking sick in the head you don’t even see what you’re doing to yourself.

Enjoy every second. And on your twenty-fifth birthday, if you want my advice, jump off a fucking bridge.

Because you’re so perfect towards women. Pauses, without looking up. Cold feeling rather than hot. I was talking about your beliefs rather than your conduct, he answers. Conduct is more important than beliefs.

Who was looking out for me, Ivan? When I was the one who needed help, where were the two of you? No, you didn’t want to talk, you didn’t want to know. Neither of you. And why, because it made you feel awkward, you didn’t know what to say. You want to know why I treat you like a child? Because you are a fucking child. When things get difficult, you’re gone. You’re out of the room. And that’s alright, I don’t expect anything else. Maybe with Dad I did, but I learned my lesson. He didn’t want me to be his son, he wanted me to be his protector. And yours. So that’s what I was. All my life, I was looking out for the both of you. And neither of you ever even had the decency to say thanks.

The first child monologue

Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.

Thirty-two years old and running to his mother. When only minutes ago he was the one calling Ivan a child. The aspect of hypocrisy kind of jumps out.

So sick in the head you don’t even see what you’re doing to yourself.

To live, he has needed to live, to overcome the terrible event, yes, it was needed.

The event is over, the event has been overcome, and yet the loss is only beginning.

way. He wipes at his nose, his eyes, and

Margaret didn’t need anyone’s sympathy, she could look after herself. It was weak people who needed compassion, weak men especially, like Ricky, the unfortunate soul.

Margaret was strong, everyone always said so, a fine strong woman. For that alone, how many people hated her.

What loyalty had she purchased with her lifetime of good behaviour and self-sacrifice? None, nothing.

His life also was littered with difficulty, just as hers was, and these difficulties did not dissolve on contact, but rather seemed to coagulate and harden.

I really hated being that person, she said. Scolding and giving out all the time. I felt very trapped, having to live that way. I don’t know how to describe it, being trapped inside a feeling.

You know when you told me just now, ‘I need that.’ Like, that you need me to love you. For me, that felt very good. Yeah. Honestly, one of the best feelings I’ve probably ever had in my life.

A wild woman, her mother called her. A shocking piece of work. And so she is. Lord have mercy.

distracting him a little longer from the disaster he has made of his life.

Wanting too much. To love, to be loved. By her, yes, but not only.

As if it was him, his own fault, taking up too much space. I’m sorry. Everybody I love has to suffer. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t know how, I don’t know how to live.

Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.

You remind me of a child. Did you ever try to play a game with a child, and they start laying all their toys out exactly where they want them. And they’re making up all these rules, and they get annoyed if you don’t follow along. That’s you. That’s actually how you treat people.

I just want this year to be over. It will be, she says. Very soon. But that won’t bring him back, will it? No, it won’t.

Stay and suffer. You have to.

In fact he has held himself superior, his manners, his taste, he has considered himself above it all, impeccable, supreme.

I wouldn’t want to be a woman, he said. Who would? No offence, but the level of disrespect, I couldn’t take it.

Is that the sum total of your gender identity, she said, you’re just desperate for everyone to respect you?

Me

Feels he has at once too much power and too little, enough to make a mess of everything, not enough to sort it out.

Yes, what the two of them have in common after all, impatient, ambitious, hard on other people, hard also on themselves.

lunatic. To care so much. Grief does that.

That is life as well as loss and pain.

It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.