Mr Salary

by Sally Rooney

I didn’t know what the aftershave was called but I knew what the bottle looked like. I saw it in drugstores sometimes and if I was having a bad day I let myself screw the cap off.

It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance.

They hated each other and I mediated their mutual hatred in a way that made me feel successfully feminine.

Death was, of course, the most ordinary thing that could happen, at some level I knew that. Still, I had stood there waiting to see the body in the river, ignoring the real living bodies all around me, as if death was more of a miracle than life was. I was a cold customer. It was too cold to think of things all the way through.

found his distraction comforting. In a way I wanted to live inside it, as if it was a place of its own, where he would never notice I had entered.