Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music.

Bobbi and my mother got along famously. Bobbi studied History and Politics, subjects my mother considered serious. Real subjects, she would say, with an eyebrow lifted at me. My mother was a kind of social democrat, and at this time I believe Bobbi identified herself as a communitarian anarchist.

She had never taken much interest in my social or personal life, an arrangement that suited us both, but when I broke up with Bobbi she described it as “a real shame.”

I have to say, it all sounds very odd to me. I don’t know what this woman is doing hanging around with college students at her age. She’s thirty-seven, not fifty. And she’s writing a profile about us, I told you that.

Interesting comment

Will you see your father this evening? she said. I withdrew my hand and pocketed it. Maybe, I said.

Hmmm

My father had “moods.” Sometimes during his moods my mother would take me to stay with her sister Bernie in Clontarf, and they would sit in the kitchen talking and shaking their heads while I watched my cousin Alan play Ocarina of Time. I was aware that alcohol played a role in these incidents, but its precise workings remained mysterious to me.

During his periods of contrition he tried to make conversation with me about school and I had to choose between humoring and ignoring him. Humoring him made me feel dishonest and weak, a soft target. Ignoring him made my heart beat very hard and afterward I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. Also it made my mother cry.

One day, when I was twelve, he turned up unexpectedly after school to pick me up. Instead of going home, we drove away from town, toward Blackrock. The DART went past on our left and I could see the Poolbeg towers out the car window. Your mother wants to break up our family, my father said. Instantly I replied: please let me out of the car. This remark later became evidence in my father’s theory that my mother had poisoned me against him.

God. That's so sad and scary.

After he moved to Ballina, I visited every second weekend. He was usually on good behavior then, and we got takeaway for dinner and sometimes went to the cinema.

Bobbi had only met him once, at our school graduation. He came up to Dublin for the ceremony, wearing a shirt and a purple tie. My mother had told him about Bobbi, and when he met her after the ceremony he shook her hand and said: that was a grand performance.

I’m off, I said. You’re away, are you? That bin needs taking out. See you again, my father said.

Ugh. Heart breaking.

I’m from Dublin, but my parents live in Ballina. So you’re a culchie, the man said. I didn’t think Nick had culchie friends. Well, I grew up in Sandymount, I said.

They don’t even sleep together, I said. Our eyes met then and Bobbi lifted her chin just barely. I know, she said.

During the reading we didn’t whisper in each other’s ears like we usually did. It was a book of short stories by a female writer. I glanced at Bobbi but she kept looking forward, so I knew I was being punished for something.

I mean, you’ve never had an affair before. I don’t want to wreck your marriage. Oh, well, the marriage has actually survived several affairs, I just haven’t been involved in any of them.

When we went upstairs I told Nick I had never had sex with a man before.

Apparently Eleanor had thrown away some of Jerry’s possessions over the weekend, and at the height of the ensuing argument Lydia had locked herself in the bathroom and screamed that she wanted to die.