He wakes up just after eight. It’s bright outside the window and the carriage is warming up, a heavy warmth of breath and sweat. Minor train stations with unreadable names flash past and vanish. Elaine is already awake but Niall is still sleeping. Connell rubs his left eye with his knuckles and sits up. Elaine is reading the one novel she has brought with her on the journey, a novel with a glossy cover and the words Now a Major Motion Picture along the top. The actress on the front has been their constant companion for weeks. Connell feels an almost friendly affinity with her pale period-drama face.

Whereabouts are we, do you know? says Connell.

Elaine looks up from the book. We passed Ljubljana about two hours ago, she says.

Oh, right, he says. We’re not far, then.

Connell looks over at Niall, whose sleeping head is bobbing slightly on his neck. Elaine follows his gaze. Out for the count as usual, she says.

There were others at the beginning. Some friends of Elaine’s went with them from Berlin to Prague, and they met a few of Niall’s Engineering classmates in Bratislava before they crossed over to Vienna on the train. Hostels were cheap, and the cities they visited had a pleasantly temporary feeling about them. 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. He remembers seeing things out the windows of taxis.

In each city he finds an internet cafe and completes the same three rituals of communication: he calls Helen on Skype, he sends his mother a free text message from his phone network’s website, and he writes Marianne an email.

Helen is on a J1 in Chicago for the summer. In the background of their calls he can hear her girlfriends chatting, doing things with each other’s hair, and sometimes Helen will turn and say something to them like: Guys, please! I’m on the phone! He loves seeing her face on-screen, especially when the connection is good and her movements are smooth and lifelike. She has a great smile, great teeth. After the end of their call yesterday he paid at the counter, walked back out into the sunshine and bought himself an overpriced glass of Coke with ice. Sometimes when Helen has a lot of friends around or if the internet cafe is especially crowded, their conversations can get a little awkward, but even still he feels better after talking to her. He finds himself rushing to the end of the conversation so they can hang up, and then he can retrospectively savour how much he likes seeing her, without the moment-to-moment pressure of having to produce the right expressions and say the right things. Just to see Helen, her beautiful face, her smile, and to know that she continues loving him, this puts the gift of joy into his day, and for hours he feels nothing but a light-headed happiness.

Helen has given Connell a new way to live. It’s as if an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air. It is physically possible to type and send a message reading: I love you! It had never seemed possible before, not remotely, but in fact it’s easy. Of course if someone saw the messages he would be embarrassed, but he knows now that this is a normal kind of embarrassment, an almost protective impulse towards a particularly good part of life. He can sit down to dinner with Helen’s parents, he can accompany her to her friends’ parties, he can tolerate the smiling and the exchange of repetitive conversation. He can squeeze her hand while people ask him questions about his future. When she touches him spontaneously, applying a little pressure to his arm, or even reaching to brush a piece of lint off his collar, he feels a rush of pride, and hopes that people are watching them. To be known as her boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward.

The texts he sends Lorraine are fairly businesslike. He updates her when they see historic landmarks or cultural treasures. Yesterday:

She likes to ask how Helen’s doing. The first time they met, Helen and his mother hit it off right away. Whenever Helen visits, Lorraine is always shaking her head at Connell’s little behaviours and saying: How do you put up with him, sweetheart? But whatever, it’s nice they get along. Helen is the first girlfriend he has introduced to his mother and he finds he’s curiously eager to impress on Lorraine how normal their relationship is and how nice a person Helen considers him to be. He’s not sure where this stems from exactly.

In the weeks they’ve been apart, his emails to Marianne have become lengthy. He’s started drafting them on his phone in idle moments, while waiting for his clothes in a launderette, or lying in the hostel at night when he can’t sleep for the heat. He reads over these drafts repeatedly, reviewing all the elements of prose, moving clauses around to make the sentences fit together correctly. Time softens out while he types, feeling slow and dilated while actually passing very rapidly, and more than once he’s looked up to find that hours have gone by. He couldn’t explain aloud what he finds so absorbing about his emails to Marianne, but he doesn’t feel that it’s trivial. The experience of writing them feels like an expression of a broader and more fundamental principle, something in his identity, or something even more abstract, to do with life itself. In his little grey journal he wrote recently: idea for a story told through emails? Then he crossed it out, deciding it was gimmicky. He finds himself crossing things out in his journal as if he imagines some future person poring over it in detail, as if he wants the future person to know which ideas he has thought better of.

His correspondence with Marianne includes a lot of links to news reports. At the moment they’re both engrossed in the Edward Snowden story, Marianne because of her interest in the architecture of global surveillance, and Connell because of the fascinating personal drama. He reads all the speculation online, he watches the blurry footage from Sheremetyevo Airport. He and Marianne can only talk about it over email, using the same communication technologies they now know are under surveillance, and it feels at times like their relationship has been captured in a complex network of state power, that the network is a form of intelligence in itself, containing them both, and containing their feelings for one another. I feel like the NSA agent reading these emails has the wrong impression of us, Marianne wrote once. They probably don’t know about the time you didn’t invite me to the Debs.

She writes to him a lot about the house where she’s staying with Jamie and Peggy, outside Trieste. She recounts the goings-on, how she feels, how she surmises the others are feeling, and what she’s reading and thinking about. He writes to her about the cities they visit, sometimes including a paragraph describing a particular sight or scene. He wrote about coming up from the U-Bahn station in Schönleinstraße to find it was suddenly dark out, and the fronds of trees waving over them like spooky fingers, and the noise from bars, and the smell of pizza and exhaust fumes. It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he’s trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him. He told Marianne once that he’d been writing stories, and now she keeps asking to read them. If they’re as good as your emails they must be superb, she wrote. That was a nice thing to read, though he responded honestly: They’re not as good as my emails.

He and Niall and Elaine have arranged to get the train from Vienna to Trieste to spend their last few nights in Marianne’s holiday home, before they all fly back to Dublin together. A day trip to Venice has been mentioned. Last night they got on the train with their backpacks and Connell texted Marianne: should be there by tomorrow afternoon, won’t have time to reply to your email properly before then. He has almost no clean clothes left by now. He’s wearing a grey T-shirt, black jeans and dirty white trainers. In his backpack: various lightly soiled clothes, one clean white T-shirt, an empty plastic bottle for water, clean underwear, a rolled-up phone charger, his passport, two packets of generic paracetamol, a very beaten-up copy of a James Salter novel, and for Marianne, an edition of Frank O’Hara’s selected poems he found in an English-language bookshop in Berlin. One soft-covered grey notebook.

Elaine nudges Niall until his head jerks forward and his eyes open. He asks what time it is and where they are, and Elaine tells him. Then Niall links his fingers together and stretches his arms out in front of him. His joints crack quietly. Connell looks out the window at the passing landscape: dry yellows and greens, the orange slant of a tiled roof, a window cut flat by the sun and flashing.

The university scholarships were announced back in April. The Provost stood on the steps of the Exam Hall and read out a list of the scholars. The sky was extremely blue that day, delirious, like flavoured ice. Connell was wearing his jacket and Helen had her arm wrapped around his. When it came to English they read out four names, alphabetically, and the last one was: Connell Waldron. Helen threw her arms around him. That was it, they said his name and moved on. He waited in the square until they announced History and Politics, and when he heard Marianne’s name he looked around to see her. He could hear a circle of her friends cheering, and some applause. He put his hands in his pockets. Hearing Marianne’s name he realised how real it was, he really had won the scholarship, they both had. He doesn’t remember much of what happened then. He remembers calling Lorraine after the announcements and she was just quiet on the phone, shocked, and then she murmured: Oh my god, Jesus Christ.

Niall and Elaine arrived beside him, cheering and slapping his back and calling him ‘an absolute fucking nerd’. Connell was laughing at nothing, just because so much excitement demanded some kind of outward expression and he didn’t want to cry. That night all the new scholars had to go to a formal black-tie meal together in the Dining Hall. Connell borrowed a tux from someone in his class, it didn’t fit very well, and at dinner he felt awkward trying to make conversation with the English professor seated next to him. He wanted to be with Helen, and with his friends, not with these people he had never met before and who knew nothing about him.

Everything is possible now because of the scholarship. His rent is paid, his tuition is covered, he has a free meal every day in college. This is why he’s been able to spend half the summer travelling around Europe, disseminating currency with the carefree attitude of a rich person. He’s explained it, or tried to explain it, in his emails to Marianne. For her the scholarship was a self-esteem boost, a happy confirmation of what she has always believed about herself anyway: that she’s special. Connell has never really known whether to believe that about himself, and he still doesn’t know. For him the scholarship is a gigantic material fact, like a vast cruise ship that has sailed into view out of nowhere, and suddenly he can do a postgraduate programme for free if he wants to, and live in Dublin for free, and never think about rent again until he finishes college. Suddenly he can spend an afternoon in Vienna looking at Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, and it’s hot outside, and if he wants he can buy himself a cheap cold glass of beer afterwards. It’s like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.

They get to Marianne’s house at three, in baking afternoon heat. The undergrowth outside the gate hums with insects and a ginger cat is lying on the bonnet of a car across the street. Through the gate Connell can see the house, the same way it looks in the photographs she’s sent him, a stonework facade and white-shuttered windows. He sees the garden table with two cups left on its surface. Elaine rings the bell and after a few seconds someone appears from around the side of the house. It’s Peggy. Lately Connell has become convinced that Peggy doesn’t like him, and he finds himself watching her behaviour for evidence. He doesn’t like her either, and never has, but that doesn’t strike him as relevant. She races towards the gate, her sandals clapping on the gravel. The heat beats down on the back of Connell’s neck like the feeling of human eyes staring. She unlocks the gate and lets them in, grinning and saying ciao, ciao. She’s wearing a short denim dress and huge black sunglasses. They all walk up the gravel towards the house, Niall carrying Elaine’s backpack as well as his own. Peggy fishes a set of keys from her dress pocket and unlocks the front door.

Inside the hall a stone archway leads down a short flight of steps. The kitchen is a long room with terracotta tiles, white cupboards and a table by the garden doors, flooded with sunlight. Marianne is standing outside, in the back garden among the cherry trees, with a laundry basket in her arms. She’s wearing a white dress with a halter-neck and her skin looks tanned. She’s been hanging washing on the line. The air outside is very still and the laundry hangs there in damp colours, not moving. Marianne puts her hand to the door handle and then sees them inside. This all seems to happen very slowly, though it only takes a few seconds. She opens the door and puts the basket on the table, and he feels a sort of enjoyably painful sensation in his throat. Her dress looks immaculate and he’s conscious of how unwashed he must appear, not having showered since they left the hostel yesterday morning, and that his clothes aren’t really clean.

Hello, says Elaine.

Marianne smiles and says ciao, as if she’s making fun of herself, and she kisses Elaine’s cheeks and then Niall’s and asks about their journey and Connell stands there, overwhelmed by this feeling, which might only be total exhaustion, an exhaustion that has been accumulating for weeks. He can smell the scent of laundry. Up close he sees Marianne’s arms are lightly freckled, her shoulders a bright rose colour. Presently she turns to him and they exchange kisses on each cheek. Looking in his eyes she says: Well, hello. He senses a certain receptivity in her expression, like she’s gathering information about his feelings, something they have learned to do to each other over a long time, like speaking a private language. He can feel his face get warm as she looks at him but he doesn’t want to look away. He can gather information from her face too. He gathers that she has things she wants to tell him.

Hi, he says.

Marianne has accepted an offer to spend her third year of college in Sweden. She’ll be leaving in September and, depending on their plans for Christmas, Connell may not see her again until next June. People are always telling him he’s going to miss her, but until now he’s been looking forward to how long and intense their email correspondence will be while she’s away. Now he looks into her cold interpretive eyes and thinks: Okay, I will miss her. He feels ambivalent about this, as if it’s disloyal of him, because maybe he’s enjoying how she looks or some physical aspect of her closeness. He’s not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about each other.

In a series of emails they exchanged recently about their own friendship, Marianne expressed her feelings about Connell mainly in terms of her sustained interest in his opinions and beliefs, the curiosity she feels about his life, and her instinct to survey his thoughts whenever she feels conflicted about anything. He expressed himself more in terms of identification, his sense of rooting for her and suffering with her when she suffers, his ability to perceive and sympathise with her motivations. Marianne thought this had something to do with gender roles. I think I just like you a lot as a person, he replied defensively. That’s actually very sweet, she wrote back.

Jamie comes down the steps behind them now and they all turn around to greet him. Connell makes a half-nodding gesture, just barely inclining his chin upwards. Jamie gives him a mocking smile and says: You’re looking rough, mate. Jamie has been a continual object of loathing and derision for Connell since he became Marianne’s boyfriend. For several months after he first saw them together Connell had compulsive fantasies about kicking Jamie in the head until his skull was the texture of wet newspaper. Once, after speaking to Jamie briefly at a party, Connell left the building and punched a brick wall so hard his hand started bleeding. Jamie is somehow both boring and hostile at the same time, always yawning and rolling his eyes when other people are speaking. And yet he is the most effortlessly confident person Connell has ever met. Nothing fazes him. He doesn’t seem capable of internal conflict. Connell can imagine him choking Marianne with his bare hands and feeling completely relaxed about it, which according to her he in fact does.

Marianne puts on a pot of coffee while Peggy cuts bread into slices and arranges olives and Parma ham onto plates. Elaine is telling them about Niall’s antics and Marianne is laughing in a generous way, not because the stories are so funny but to make Elaine feel welcome. Peggy passes plates around the table and Marianne touches Connell’s shoulder and hands him a cup of coffee. Because of the white dress and because of the small white china cup, he wants to say: You look like an angel. It’s not even something Helen would mind him saying, but he can’t talk like that in front of people anyway, saying whimsical affectionate things. He drinks the coffee, he eats some bread. The coffee is very hot and bitter and the bread is soft and fresh. He starts to feel tired.

After lunch he goes upstairs to shower. There are four bedrooms, so he has one to himself, with a huge sash window over the garden. After his shower he dresses in the only presentable clothes he has left: a plain white T-shirt and the blue jeans he has had since he was in school. His hair is wet. He feels clearheaded, an effect of the coffee, and the high water pressure in the shower, and the cool cotton on his skin. He hangs the damp towel over his shoulders and opens the window. Cherries hang on the dark-green trees like earrings. He thinks about this phrase once or twice. He would put it in an email to Marianne, but he can’t email her when she’s downstairs. Helen wears earrings, usually a pair of tiny gold hoops. He lets himself fantasise about her briefly because he can hear the others are downstairs anyway. He thinks about her lying on her back. He should have thought about it in the shower, but he was tired. He needs the WiFi code for this house.

Like Connell, Helen was popular in school. She still goes to lengths to keep in touch with old friends and extended family, remembering birthdays, posting nostalgic photographs on Facebook. She always RSVPs to parties and arrives on time, she’s always taking group photographs again and again until there’s one everybody is happy with. In other words she’s a nice person, and Connell is beginning to understand that he actually likes nice people, that he even wants to be one. She’s had one serious boyfriend in the past, a guy called Rory, who she broke up with in first year of college. He’s in UCD so Connell has never bumped into him, but he has looked at his photographs on Facebook. He’s not unlike Connell in build and complexion, but somehow gawky-looking and unfashionable. Connell admitted to Helen once that he’d looked him up online, and she asked what he’d made of him.

I don’t know, said Connell. He seems kind of uncool, doesn’t he?

She thought that was hilarious. They were lying in bed, Connell had his arm around her.

Is that your type, you like uncool guys? he said.

You tell me.

Why, am I uncool?

I think so, she said. I mean that in a nice way, I don’t like cool people.

He sat up slightly to look down at her.

Am I really? he said. I’m not offended but honestly, I thought I was kind of cool.

You’re such a culchie, though.

Am I? In what way am I?

You have the thickest Sligo accent, she said.

I do not. I can’t believe that. No one’s ever said that to me before. Do I really?

She was still laughing. He stroked his hand over her belly, grinning to himself because he was making her laugh.

I can hardly understand you half the time, she said. Thankfully you’re the strong and silent type.

He had to laugh then too. Helen, that is brutal, he said.

She tucked a hand behind her head. Do you honestly think you’re cool? she said.

Well, not anymore.

She smiled to herself. Good, she said. It’s good that you’re not.

Helen and Marianne first met back in February, on Dawson Street. He and Helen were walking along holding hands when he saw Marianne coming out of Hodges Figgis wearing a black beret. Oh, hi, he said in an agonised voice. He thought of dropping Helen’s hand but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Hi, Marianne said. You must be Helen. The two women then made perfectly competent and genial conversation while he stood there panicking and staring at various objects in the surrounding environment.

Afterwards Helen asked him: So you and Marianne, were you always just friends, or …? They were in his room then, off Pearse Street. Buses went by outside and threw a column of yellow light on the bedroom door.

Yeah, more or less, he said. Like, we were never together as such.

But you’ve slept together.

Yeah, kind of. No, yeah, to be fair, we have. Is that a big deal?

No, I’m just curious, said Helen. It was like a friends-with-benefits thing?

Basically. In final year of school, and for a while last year. It wasn’t serious or anything.