After the funeral he cried, but the crying felt like nothing. Back in fifth year when Connell had scored a goal for the school football team, Rob had leapt onto the pitch to embrace him. He screamed Connell’s name, and began to kiss his head with wild exuberant kisses. It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches. Connell still remembers the too-hard grip of his arms. And on Debs night, Rob showing them those photographs of Lisa’s naked body. Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance. Connell couldn’t judge him for that. He’d been the same way himself, or worse. He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing. It was Marianne who had shown him other things were possible. Life was different after that; maybe he had never understood how different it was.

The night of the funeral he and Helen lay in his room in the dark, not sleeping. Helen asked him why he hadn’t introduced her to any of his friends. She was whispering so as not to wake Lorraine.

I introduced you to Eric, didn’t I? Connell said.

Only after he asked. To be honest, you didn’t seem like you really wanted him to meet me.

Connell closed his eyes. It was a funeral, he said. You know, someone just died. I don’t think it’s really a good occasion for meeting people.

Well, if you didn’t want me to come you shouldn’t have asked me, she said.

He breathed in and out slowly. Okay, he said. I’m sorry I asked you, then.

She sat upright in bed beside him. What does that mean? she said. You’re sorry I was there?

No, I’m saying if I gave you the wrong impression about what it was going to be like, then I’m sorry.

You didn’t want me there at all, did you?

I didn’t want to be there myself, to be honest, he said. I’m sorry you didn’t have a good time, but like, it was a funeral. I don’t know what you expected.

She breathed in quickly through her nose, he could hear it.

You weren’t ignoring Marianne, she said.

I wasn’t ignoring anyone.

But you seemed particularly happy to see her, wouldn’t you say?

For fuck’s sake, Helen, he said quietly.

What?

How does every argument come back to this? Our friend just killed himself and you want to start in with me about Marianne, seriously? Like, yeah, I was glad to see her, does that make me a monster?

When Helen spoke it was in a low hiss. I’ve been very sympathetic about your friend and you know that, she said. But what do you expect me to do, just pretend I don’t notice that you’re staring at another woman in front of me?

I was not staring at her.

You were, in the church.

Well, it wasn’t intentional, he said. Believe me, it was not a very sexy atmosphere for me in the church, okay? You can trust me on that.

Why do you have to act so weird around her?

He frowned, still lying with his eyes shut, face turned to the ceiling. How I act with her is my normal personality, he said. Maybe I’m just a weird person.

Helen said nothing. Eventually she just lay back down beside him. Two weeks later it was over, they broke up. By then Connell was so exhausted and miserable he couldn’t even summon up a response. Things happened to him, like the crying fits, the panic attacks, but they seemed to descend on him from outside, rather than emanating from somewhere inside himself. Internally he felt nothing. He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid. Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.

Yvonne nods slowly, moving her mouth around in a sympathetic way. Do you feel you’ve made friends here in Dublin? she says. Anyone you’re close with, that you might talk to about how you’re feeling?

My friend Niall, maybe. He was the one who told me about this whole thing.

The college counselling service.

Yeah, says Connell.

Well, that’s good. He’s looking out for you. Niall, okay. And he’s here in Trinity as well.

Connell coughs, clearing the dry feeling from his throat, and says: Yeah. I have another friend who I would be pretty close with, but she’s on Erasmus this year.

A friend from college?

Well, we went to school together but she’s in Trinity now as well. Marianne. She would have known Rob and everything. Our friend who died. But she’s away this year, like I said.

He watches Yvonne write down the name on her notepad, the tall slopes of the capital ‘M’. He talks to Marianne almost every night on Skype now, sometimes after dinner or sometimes late when she comes home from a night out. They’ve never talked about what happened in Italy. He’s grateful that she’s never brought it up. When they speak the video stream is high quality but frequently fails to match the audio, which gives him a sense of Marianne as a moving image, a thing to be looked at. People in college have been saying things about her since she went away. Connell’s not sure if she knows about it or not, what people like Jamie have been saying. Connell isn’t even really friends with those people and he’s heard about it. Some drunk guy at a party told him that she was into weird stuff, and that there were pictures of her on the internet. Connell doesn’t know if it’s true about the pictures. He’s searched her name online but nothing has ever come up.

Is she someone you might talk with about how you’re feeling? Yvonne says.

Yeah, she’s been supportive about it. She, uh … She’s hard to describe if you don’t know her. She’s really smart, a lot smarter than me, but I would say we see the world in a similar way. And we’ve lived our whole lives in the same place, obviously, so it is a bit different being away from her.

It sounds difficult.

I just don’t have a lot of people who I really click with, he says. You know, I struggle with that.

Do you think that’s a new problem, or is it something familiar to you?

It’s familiar, I suppose. I would say in school I sometimes had that feeling of isolation or whatever. But people liked me and everything. Here I feel like people don’t like me that much.

He pauses, and Yvonne seems to recognise the pause and doesn’t interrupt him.

Like with Rob, that’s my friend who died, he says. I wouldn’t say we clicked on this very deep level or anything, but we were friends.

Sure.

We didn’t have a lot in common, like in terms of interests or whatever. And on the political side of things we probably wouldn’t have had the same views. But in school, stuff like that didn’t really matter as much. We were just in the same group so we were friends, you know.

I understand that, says Yvonne.

And he did do some stuff that I wasn’t a big fan of. With girls his behaviour was kind of poor at times. You know, we were eighteen or whatever, we all acted like idiots. But I guess I found that stuff a bit alienating.

Connell bites on his thumbnail and then drops his hand back into his lap.

I probably thought if I moved here I would fit in better, he says. You know, I thought I might find more like-minded people or whatever. But honestly, the people here are a lot worse than the people I knew in school. I mean everyone here just goes around comparing how much money their parents make. Like I’m being literal with that, I’ve seen that happen.

He breathes in now, feeling that he has been talking too quickly and at too great a length, but unwilling to stop.

I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life, he says. But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again. I mean, those friendships are gone. Rob is gone, I can never see him again. I can never get that life back.

Yvonne pushes the box of tissues on the table towards him. He looks at the box, patterned with green palm leaves, and then at Yvonne. He touches his own face, only to discover that he has started crying. Wordlessly he removes a tissue from the box and wipes his face.

Sorry, he says.

Yvonne is making eye contact now, but he can’t tell anymore whether she’s been listening to him, whether she’s understood or tried to understand what he’s said.

What we can do here in counselling is try to work on your feelings, and your thoughts and behaviours, she says. We can’t change your circumstances, but we can change how you respond to your circumstances. Do you see what I mean?

Yeah.

At this point in the session Yvonne starts to hand him worksheets, illustrated with large cartoon arrows pointing to various text boxes. He takes them and pretends that he’s intending to fill them out later. She also hands him some photocopied pages about dealing with anxiety, which he pretends he will read. She prints a note for him to take to the college health service advising them about his depression, and he says he’ll come back for another session in two weeks. Then he leaves the office.

A couple of weeks ago Connell attended a reading by a writer who was visiting the college. He sat at the back of the lecture hall on his own, self-conscious because the reading was sparsely attended and everyone else was sitting in groups. It was one of the big windowless halls in the Arts Block, with fold-out tables attached to the seats. One of his lecturers gave a short and sycophantic overview of the writer’s work, and then the man himself, a youngish guy around thirty, stood at the lectern and thanked the college for the invitation. By then Connell regretted his decision to attend. Everything about the event was staid and formulaic, sapped of energy. He didn’t know why he had come. He had read the writer’s collection and found it uneven, but sensitive in places, perceptive. Now, he thought, even that effect was spoiled by seeing the writer in this environment, hemmed off from anything spontaneous, reciting aloud from his own book to an audience who’d already read it. The stiffness of this performance made the observations in the book seem false, separating the writer from the people he wrote about, as if he’d observed them only for the benefit of talking about them to Trinity students. Connell couldn’t think of any reason why these literary events took place, what they contributed to anything, what they meant. They were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them.

Afterwards a small wine reception had been set up outside the lecture hall. Connell went to leave but found himself trapped by a group of students talking loudly. When he tried to press his way through, one of them said: Oh, hi Connell. He recognised her, it was Sadie Darcy-O’Shea. She was in some of his English classes, and he knew she was involved in the literary society. She was the girl who’d called him ‘a genius’ to his face back in first year.

Hey, he said.

Did you enjoy the reading?

He shrugged. It was alright, he said. He felt anxious and wanted to leave, but she kept speaking. He rubbed his palms on his T-shirt.

You weren’t blown away? she said.

I don’t know, I don’t really get the point of these things.

Readings?

Yeah, said Connell. You know, I don’t really see what they’re for.

Everyone looked away suddenly, and Connell turned to follow their gaze. The writer had emerged from the lecture hall and was approaching them. Hi there, Sadie, he said. Connell had not intuited any personal relationship between Sadie and the writer, and he felt foolish for saying what he’d said. You read so wonderfully, said Sadie. Irritated and tired, Connell moved aside to let the writer join their circle and started to edge away. Then Sadie gripped his arm and said: Connell was just telling us he doesn’t see the point of literary readings. The writer looked vaguely in Connell’s direction and then nodded. Yeah, same as that, he said. They’re boring, aren’t they? Connell noticed that the stilted quality of his reading seemed to characterise his speech and movement also, and he felt bad then for attributing such a negative view of literature to someone who was maybe just awkward.

Well, we appreciated it, said Sadie.

What’s your name, Connell what? said the writer.

Connell Waldron.

The writer nodded. He picked up a glass of red wine from the table and let the others continue talking. For some reason, though the opportunity to leave had at last presented itself, Connell lingered. The writer swallowed some wine and then looked at him again.

I liked your book, said Connell.

Oh, thanks, said the writer. Are you coming on to the Stag’s Head for a drink? I think that’s where people are heading.

They didn’t leave the Stag’s Head that night until it closed. They had a good-natured argument about literary readings, and although Connell didn’t say very much, the writer took his side, which pleased him. Later he asked Connell where he was from, and Connell told him Sligo, a place called Carricklea. The writer nodded.

I know it, yeah, he said. There used to be a bowling alley there, it’s probably gone years now.

Yeah, Connell said too quickly. I had a birthday party there once when I was small. In the bowling alley. It is gone now, though, obviously. Like you said.

The writer took a sip of his pint and said: How do you find Trinity, do you like it?

Connell looked at Sadie across the table, her bangles knocking together on her wrist.

Bit hard to fit in, to be honest, Connell said.

The writer nodded again. That mightn’t be a bad thing, he said. You could get a first collection out of it.

Connell laughed, he looked down into his lap. He knew it was just a joke, but it was a nice thought, that he might not be suffering for nothing.

He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured. When someone mentioned the austerity protests that night in the Stag’s Head, Sadie threw her hands up and said: Not politics, please! Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.