Well, the girl I’m seeing, I suppose. If it’s all the same to you.
She said: Hm. Then she added: You mean woman, I hope.
He smiled. Ah, let’s be a little bit friendly, he said.
Do you go around behind my back calling me a girl?
Certainly not. I don’t call you anything. Whenever your name comes up, I just get flustered and leave the room.
Disregarding this, the woman asked: When did you meet her?
Oh, I don’t know. About six weeks ago.
She’s not another one of these twenty-two-year-old Scandinavian women, is she?
No, she’s not Scandinavian, he said.
With an exaggeratedly weary expression, the woman tossed her coffee cup in the waste bin outside the office door. Watching her, the man added: I can go alone if you’d rather.
We can make eyes at each other across the room.
Oh, you make me sound very desperate, she said.
God, I didn’t mean to.
For a few seconds she said nothing, just stood staring into the traffic. Presently she said aloud: She looked beautiful at the fitting. Lola, I mean. You were asking.
Still watching her, he replied: I can imagine.
Thanks for the coffee.
Thank you for the advice.
For the rest of the afternoon in the office, the woman worked on the same text-editing interface, opening new files, moving apostrophes around and deleting commas. After
closing one file and before opening another, she routinely checked her social media feeds. Her expression, her posture, did not vary depending on the information she encountered there: a news report about a horrific natural disaster, a photograph of someone’s beloved domestic pet, a female journalist complaining about death threats, a recondite joke requiring familiarity with several other internet jokes in order to be even vaguely comprehensible, a passionate condemnation of white supremacy, a promoted tweet advertising a health supplement for expectant mothers. Nothing changed in her outward relationship to the world that would allow an observer to determine what she felt about what she saw. Then, after some length of time, with no apparent trigger, she closed the browser window and reopened the text editor. Occasionally one of her colleagues would interject with a work-related question, and she would answer, or someone would share a funny anecdote with the office and they would all laugh, but mostly the work continued quietly.
At five thirty-four p.m., the woman took her jacket off the hook again and bid her remaining colleagues farewell. She unwound her headphones from around her phone, plugged them in, and walked down Kildare Street toward Nassau Street, then took a left, winding her way westward. After a twenty-eight-minute walk, she stopped at a new-build apartment complex on the north quays and let herself in, climbing two flights of stairs and unlocking a chipped white door. No one else was home, but the layout and interior suggested she was not the sole occupant. A small dim living room, with one curtained window facing the river, led onto a kitchenette with an oven, half-size fridge unit and sink. From the fridge the woman removed a bowl covered in clingfilm. She disposed of the clingfilm and put the bowl in the microwave.
After eating, she entered her bedroom. Through the window, the street below was visible, and the slow swell of the river. She removed her jacket and shoes, took the clasp from her hair and drew her curtains shut. The curtains were thin and yellow with a pattern of green rectangles. She took off her sweater and wriggled out of her trousers, leaving both items crumpled on the floor, the texture of the trousers a little shiny. Then she pulled on a cotton sweatshirt and a pair of grey leggings. Her hair, dark and falling loosely over her shoulders, looked clean and slightly dry. She climbed onto her bed and opened her laptop. For some time she scrolled through various media timelines, occasionally opening and half-reading long articles about elections overseas. Her face was wan and tired. In the corridor outside, two other people entered the apartment, having a conversation about ordering dinner. They passed her room, shadows visible briefly through the slit under the door, and then went through to the kitchen. Opening a private browser window on her laptop, the woman accessed a social media website, and typed the words ‘aidan lavelle’ into the search box. A list of results appeared, and without glancing at the other options she clicked on the third result. A new profile opened on-screen, displaying the name ‘Aidan Lavelle’ below a photograph of a man’s head and shoulders viewed from behind. The man’s hair was thick and dark and he was wearing a denim jacket. Beneath the photograph a text caption read: local sad boy.
normal brain haver. check out the soundcloud. The user’s most recent update, posted three hours earlier, was a photograph of a pigeon in a gutter, its head buried inside a discarded crisp packet. The caption read: same. The post had 127 likes. In her bedroom, leaning against the headboard of the unmade bed, the woman clicked on this post, and replies appeared underneath. One reply, from a user with the handle Actual Death Girl, read: looks like you and all. The Aidan Lavelle account had replied: youre right,
insanely handsome. Actual Death Girl had liked this reply. The woman on her laptop clicked through to the profile of the Actual Death Girl account. After spending thirty-six minutes looking at a range of social media profiles associated with the Aidan Lavelle account, the woman shut her laptop and lay back down on her bed.
By now it was after eight o’clock in the evening. With her head on the pillow, the woman rested her wrist on her forehead. She was wearing a thin gold bracelet, which glimmered faintly in the bedside light. Her name was Eileen Lydon. She was twenty-nine years old. Her father Pat managed a farm in County Galway and her mother Mary was a Geography teacher. She had one sister, Lola, who was three years older than she was. As a child, Lola had been sturdy, brave, mischievous, while Eileen had been anxious and often ill. They’d spent their school holidays together playing elaborate narrative games in which they took on the roles of human sisters who gained access to magical realms, Lola improvising the major plot events and Eileen following along.
When available, young cousins, neighbours and children of family friends were enlisted to take on the roles of secondary characters, including, on occasion, a boy named Simon Costigan, who was five years older than Eileen and lived across the river in what had once been the local manor house. He was an extremely polite child who was always wearing clean clothes and saying thank you to adults. He suffered from epilepsy and sometimes had to go to the hospital, once even in an ambulance. Whenever Lola or Eileen misbehaved, their mother Mary asked them why they could not be more like Simon Costigan, who was not only well behaved but had the added dignity of ‘never complaining’. As the sisters grew older, they no longer included Simon or any other children in their games, but migrated indoors, sketching up fictive maps on notepaper, inventing cryptic alphabets and making tape recordings. Their parents looked on these
games with a benign lack of curiosity, happy to supply paper, pens and blank tapes, but uninterested in hearing anything about the imaginary inhabitants of fictional countries.
At the age of twelve, Lola moved on from their small local primary school to an all-girls Mercy convent in the nearest large town. Eileen, who had always been quiet in school, became increasingly withdrawn. Her teacher told her parents she was gifted, and she was taken to a special room twice a week and given extra classes in reading and Maths.
At the convent, Lola made new friends, who started coming to the farm to visit, sometimes even to sleep over. Once, for a joke, they locked Eileen into the upstairs bathroom for twenty minutes. After that, their father Pat said Lola’s friends weren’t allowed to visit anymore, and Lola said it was Eileen’s fault. When Eileen was twelve she was also sent to Lola’s school, which was spread over several buildings and prefab units, with a student population of six hundred. Most of her peers lived in the town and knew one another from primary school, bringing with them prior alliances and loyalties in which she had no part. Lola and her friends were old enough to walk into town for lunch by then, while Eileen sat alone in the cafeteria, unpeeling tinfoil from home-packed sandwiches. In her second year, one of the other girls in her class came up behind her and poured a bottle of water over her head on a dare. The vice principal of the school made the girl write Eileen a letter of apology afterwards. At home, Lola said it would never have happened if Eileen didn’t act like such a freak, and Eileen said: I’m not acting.