Marianne gets in the front seat of Connell’s car and closes the door. Her hair is unwashed and she pulls her feet up onto the seat to tie her shoelaces. She smells like fruit liqueur, not in a bad way but not in a fully good way either. Connell gets in and starts the engine. She glances at him.
Is your seatbelt on? he says.
He’s looking in the rear-view mirror like it’s a normal day. Actually it’s the morning after a house party in Swords and Connell wasn’t drinking and Marianne was, so nothing is normal. She puts her seatbelt on obediently, to show that they’re still friends.
Sorry about last night, she says.
She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional feigned embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to ‘make a big deal’.
Forget about it, he says.
Well, I’m sorry.
It’s alright.
Connell is pulling out of the driveway now. He has seemingly dismissed the incident, but for some reason this doesn’t satisfy her. She wants him to acknowledge what happened before he lets her move on, or maybe she just wants to make herself suffer unduly.
It wasn’t appropriate, she says.
Look, you were pretty drunk.
That’s not an excuse.
And high out of your mind, he says, which I only found out later.
Yeah. I felt like an attacker.
Now he laughs. She pulls her knees against her chest and holds her elbows in her hands.
You didn’t attack me, he says. These things happen.
*
This is the thing that happened. Connell drove Marianne to a mutual friend’s house for a birthday party. They had arranged to stay the night there and Connell would drive her back the next morning. On the way they listened to Vampire Weekend and Marianne drank from a silver flask of gin and talked about the Reagan administration. You’re getting drunk, Connell told her in the car. You know, you have a very nice face, she said. Other people have actually said that to me, about your face.
By midnight Connell had wandered off somewhere at the party and Marianne had found her friends Peggy and Joanna in the shed. They were drinking a bottle of Cointreau together and smoking. Peggy was wearing a beaten-up leather jacket and striped linen trousers. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and she was constantly throwing it to one side and raking a hand through it. Joanna was sitting on top of the freezer unit in her socks. She was wearing a long shapeless garment like a maternity dress, with a shirt underneath. Marianne leaned against the washing machine and retrieved her gin flask from her pocket. Peggy and Joanna had been talking about men’s fashion, and in particular the fashion sense of their own male friends. Marianne was content just to stand there, allowing the washing machine to support most of her body weight, swishing gin around the inside of her mouth, and listening to her friends speaking.
Both Peggy and Joanna are studying History and Politics with Marianne. Joanna is already planning her final-year thesis on James Connolly and the Irish Trades Union Congress. She’s always recommending books and articles, which Marianne reads or half-reads or reads summaries of. People see Joanna as a serious person, which she is, but she can also be very funny. Peggy doesn’t really ‘get’ Joanna’s humour, because Peggy’s form of charisma is more terrifying and sexy than it is comic. At a party before Christmas, Peggy cut Marianne a line of cocaine in their friend Declan’s bathroom, and Marianne actually took it, or most of it anyway. It had no appreciable effect on her mood, except that for days afterwards she felt alternately amused at the idea that she had done it and guilty. She hasn’t told Joanna about that. She knows Joanna would disapprove, because Marianne herself also disapproves, but when Joanna disapproves of things she doesn’t go ahead and do them anyway.
Joanna wants to work in journalism, while Peggy doesn’t seem to want to work at all. So far this hasn’t been an issue for her, because she meets a lot of men who like to fund her lifestyle by buying her handbags and expensive drugs. She favours slightly older men who work for investment banks or accounting agencies, twenty-seven-year-olds with lots of money and sensible lawyer girlfriends at home. Joanna once asked Peggy if she ever thought she herself might one day be a twenty-seven-year-old whose boyfriend would stay out all night taking cocaine with a teenager. Peggy wasn’t remotely insulted, she thought it was really funny. She said she would be married to a Russian oligarch by then anyway and she didn’t care how many girlfriends he had. It makes Marianne wonder what she herself is going to do after college. Almost no paths seem definitively closed to her, not even the path of marrying an oligarch. When she goes out at night, men shout the most outrageously vulgar things at her on the street, so obviously they’re not ashamed to desire her, quite the contrary. And in college she often feels there’s no limit to what her brain can do, it can synthesise everything she puts into it, it’s like having a powerful machine inside her head. Really she has everything going for her. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.
In the shed, Peggy asked where Connell was.
Upstairs, said Marianne. With Teresa, I guess.
Connell has been casually seeing a friend of theirs called Teresa. Marianne has no real problem with Teresa, but finds herself frequently prompting Connell to say bad things about her for no reason, which he always refuses to do.
He wears nice clothes, volunteered Joanna.
Not really, said Peggy. I mean, he has a look, but it’s just tracksuits most of the time. I doubt he even owns a suit.
Joanna sought Marianne’s eye contact again, and this time Marianne returned it. Peggy, watching, took a performatively large mouthful of Cointreau and wiped her lips with the hand she was using to hold the bottle. What? she said.
Well, isn’t he from a fairly working-class background? said Joanna.
That’s so oversensitive, Peggy said. I can’t criticise someone’s dress sense because of their socio-economic status? Come on.
No, that’s not what she meant, said Marianne.
Because you know, we’re all actually very nice to him, said Peggy.
Marianne found she couldn’t look at either of her friends then. Who’s ‘we’? she wanted to say. Instead she took the bottle of Cointreau from Peggy’s hand and swallowed two mouthfuls, lukewarm and repulsively sweet.
Some time around two o’clock in the morning, after she had become extremely drunk and Peggy had convinced her to share a joint with her in the bathroom, she saw Connell on the third-storey landing. No one else was up there. Hey, he said. She leaned against the wall, drunk and wanting his attention. He was at the top of the stairs.
You’ve been off with Teresa, she said.
Have I? he said. That’s interesting. You’re completely out of it, are you?
You smell like perfume.
Teresa’s not here, said Connell. As in, she’s not at the party.
Then Marianne laughed. She felt stupid, but in a good way. Come here, she said. He came over to stand in front of her.
What? he said.
Do you like her better than me? said Marianne.
He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
No, he said. To be fair, I don’t know her very well.
But is she better in bed than I am?
You’re drunk, Marianne. If you were sober you wouldn’t even want to know the answer to that question.