Normal People

by Sally Rooney

Marianne is grinning now. She exercises an open contempt for people in school. She has no friends and spends her lunchtimes alone reading novels.

If she wanted, she could make a big show of saying hello to Connell in school. See you this afternoon, she could say, in front of everyone. Undoubtedly it would put him in an awkward position, which is the kind of thing she usually seems to enjoy. But she has never done it.

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.

It seemed so obviously insane to her then that she should have to dress up in a costume every morning and be herded around a huge building all day, and that she wasn’t even allowed to move her eyes where she wanted, even her eye movements fell under the jurisdiction of school rules.

She sat beside him and asked him if his friends Eric and Rob knew that he read so much outside school. They wouldn’t be interested in that stuff, he said. You mean they’re not interested in the world around them.

She was attuned to the presence of his body in a microscopic way, as if the ordinary motion of his breathing was powerful enough to make her ill.

Yeah. I’m not sure about the job prospects, though. Oh, who cares? The economy’s fucked anyway.

He was thinking about what a secretive, independent-minded person Marianne was, that she could come over to his house and let him have sex with her, and she felt no need to tell anyone about it. She just let things happen, like nothing meant anything to her.

Moments of emotional pain arrived like this, meaningless or at least indecipherable.

If he silently decides not to say something when they’re talking, Marianne will ask ‘what?’ within one or two seconds. This ‘what?’ question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.

Lately he’s consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind.

I would never pretend not to know you, Connell.

If people found out what he has been doing with Marianne, in secret, while ignoring her every day in school, his life would be over. He would walk down the hallway and people’s eyes would follow him, like he was a serial killer, or worse.

Marianne sometimes sees herself at the very bottom of the ladder, but at other times she pictures herself off the ladder completely, not affected by its mechanics, since she does not actually desire popularity or do anything to make it belong to her.

The barman looks frankly at her breasts while she’s talking. Marianne had no idea men really did such things outside of films and TV,

on-again off-again

He often makes blithe remarks about things he ‘wishes’. I wish you didn’t have to go, he says when she’s leaving, or: I wish you could stay the night. If he really wished for any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy.

The man slips an arm around her shoulders then. He’s very tall, she notices. Taller than Connell. His fingers rub her bare arm. She tries to shrug him off but he doesn’t let go. One of his friends starts laughing, and Eric laughs along. Nice dress, the man says. Can you let go of me? she says. Very low-cut there, isn’t it? In one motion he moves his hand down from her shoulder and squeezes the flesh of her right breast, in front of everyone. Instantly she jerks away from him, pulling her dress up to her collarbone, feeling her face fill with blood. Her eyes are stinging and she feels a pain where he grabbed her. Behind her the others are laughing.

Are you alright? Karen says. I’m fine, says Marianne. I’m sorry. I think I just had too much to drink. Leave her, says Rachel. Here, look, it was just a bit of fun, says Eric. Pat’s actually a sound enough guy if you get to know him. I think it was funny, says Rachel. At this Karen snaps around and looks at them. Why are you even out here if you think it was so funny? she says. Why don’t you go and pal around with your best friend Pat? If you think it’s so funny to molest young girls?

She presses her face very hard against his chest. My dad used to hit my mum, she says. For a few seconds, which seems like an unbelievably long time, Connell says nothing. Then he says: Jesus. I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. It’s okay, she says. Did he ever hit you? Sometimes.

No one except Lorraine knows who Connell’s father is. She says he can ask any time he wants to know, but he really doesn’t care to. On nights out his friends sometimes raise the subject of his father, like it’s something deep and meaningful they can only talk about when they’re drunk. Connell finds this depressing.

He started telling her that he loved her. It just happened, like drawing your hand back when you touch something hot. She was crying and everything, and he just said it without thinking. Was it true? He didn’t know enough to know that. At first he thought it must have been true, since he said it, and why would he lie? But then he remembered he does lie sometimes, without planning to or knowing why.

She doesn’t mind you cleaning their house but she doesn’t want your son hanging around with her daughter? What an absolute joke. That’s like something from nineteenth-century times, I’m actually laughing at that.

People in school don’t like her, do they? says Lorraine. So I suppose you were afraid of what they would say about you, if they found out. He doesn’t respond.

Well, I’ll tell what I have to say about you, Lorraine says. I think you’re a disgrace. I’m ashamed of you.

The smell of petrol infiltrates the car interior, heavy like a headache.

It was true what she had said about Connell. He didn’t do anything that bad. He had never tried to delude her into thinking she was socially acceptable; she’d deluded herself.

In just a few weeks’ time Marianne will live with different people, and life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She’ll be the same person, trapped inside her own body.

He understands now that his classmates are not like him. It’s easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don’t worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. They are not stupid people, but they’re not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.

Connell laughs, happy for some reason to find her being so uncharacteristically weak and unscrupulous.

Would you be embarrassed if they found out? he said. In some ways, yeah. He turned over then, so he wasn’t looking up at the ceiling anymore but facing her. Why? he said. Because it was humiliating. You mean like, the way I treated you. Well, yeah, she said. And just the fact that I put up with it.

She squeezed his hand and he squeezed back, so tightly it almost hurt her, and this small gesture of desperation on his part made her smile.

Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves, says Marianne.

she said: You won’t touch me, but no one else is allowed to either?

He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him. The idea frightens him so badly that he pulls his chair back and stands up. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why he thought about it. Maybe he wants to do it. But it makes him feel sick.

Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.

Marianne, he said, I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.

It was so much more painful to look at her than anyone had warned him it would be, and he wanted to do something terrible, like set himself on fire or drive his car into a tree. He always reflexively imagined ways to cause himself extreme injury when he was distressed.

Nothing Connell did there seemed to stay with him. The whole trip felt like a series of short films, screened only once, and afterwards he had a sense of what they were about but no exact memories of the plot.

Helen became irritable, and on the walk home she told Connell that she found Marianne ‘self-absorbed’.

knew that Helen was a nice person, but he forgot sometimes how old-fashioned her values were.

After a time he said uncomfortably: Here, she’s my friend, alright? Don’t be talking about her like that.

Later he would wonder if he was really defending Marianne or just defending himself from an implied accusation about his own sexuality, that he was tainted somehow, that he had unacceptable desires.

By now the unspoken consensus is that Helen and Marianne don’t like each other very much. They’re different people.

How could his feeling for her ever be anything like his feeling for other people? But part of the feeling was knowing the terrible hold he’d had over her, and still had, and could not foresee ever losing.

He was sad for Marianne after that, sad that nothing in her life had ever truly seemed healthy, and sad that he’d had to turn away from her. He knew that it had caused her pain.

It’s an old style of champagne glass, says Marianne. They belonged to my dad. Go inside and get yourself a flute if you prefer, they’re in the press over the sink. Jamie makes wide ironic eyes and says: I didn’t realise it was such an emotional issue for you. Marianne puts the bottle in the centre of the table and says nothing. Connell has never heard Marianne mention her father like that in casual conversation. Nobody else at the table seems aware of this; Elaine may not even know Marianne’s father is dead. Connell tries to catch Marianne’s eye, but he can’t.

Though in terms of financial circumstances too, obviously, she said. I mean, it’s kind of ridiculous they don’t means-test these things. I guess we’re from very different backgrounds, class-wise. I don’t think about it much, she said. Quickly she added: Sorry, that’s an ignorant thing to say. Maybe I should think about it more. You don’t consider me your working-class friend? She gave a smile that was more like a grimace and said: I’m conscious of the fact that we got to know each other because your mother works for my family. I also don’t think my mother is a good employer, I don’t think she pays Lorraine very well.

I just feel weird about all this, he said. I feel weird wearing black tie and saying things in Latin. You know at the dinner last night, those people serving us, they were students. They’re working to put themselves through college while we sit there eating the free food they put in front of us. Is that not horrible? Of course it is. The whole idea of ‘meritocracy’ or whatever, it’s evil, you know I think that. But what are we supposed to do, give back the scholarship money? I don’t see what that achieves.

Well, it’s always easy to think of reasons not to do something.