The summer she was fifteen, their neighbours’ son Simon came over to help her father out on the farm. He was twenty years old and studying Philosophy at Oxford. Lola had just finished school and was hardly ever in the house, but when Simon stayed for dinner
she would come home early, and even change her sweatshirt if it was dirty. In school, Lola had always avoided Eileen, but in Simon’s presence she began to behave like a fond and indulgent older sister, fussing over Eileen’s hair and clothes, treating her like a much younger child. Simon did not join in this behaviour. His manner with Eileen was friendly and respectful. He listened to her when she spoke, even when Lola tried to talk over her, and looking calmly at Eileen he would say things like: Ah, that’s very interesting. By August she had taken to getting up early and watching out her bedroom window for his bicycle, at the sight of which she would run downstairs, meeting him as he came through the back door. While he boiled the kettle or washed his hands, she asked him questions about books, about his studies at university, about his life in England. She asked him once if he still suffered from seizures, and he smiled and said no, that had been a long time ago, he was surprised she could remember. They would talk for a little while, ten minutes or twenty, and afterwards he would go out to the farm and she would go back upstairs and lie in bed. Some mornings she was happy, flushed, her eyes gleaming, and on other mornings she cried. Lola told their mother Mary it had to stop. It’s an obsession, she said. It’s embarrassing. By then, Lola had heard from her friends that Simon attended Mass on Sunday mornings even though his parents didn’t, and she no longer came home for dinner when he was there. Mary began to sit in the kitchen herself in the mornings, eating breakfast and reading the paper. Eileen would come down anyway, and Simon would greet her in the same friendly manner as always, but her retorts were sullen, and she withdrew quickly to her room. The night before he went back to England, he came over to the house to say goodbye, and Eileen hid in her room and refused to come down. He went upstairs to see her, and she kicked a chair and said he was the only person she could talk to. In my life, the only one, she said. And
they won’t even let me talk to you, and now you’re going. I wish I was dead. He was standing with the door half-open behind him. Quietly he said: Eileen, don’t say that.
Everything will be alright, I promise. You and I are going to be friends for the rest of our lives.
At eighteen, Eileen went to university in Dublin to study English. In her first year, she struck up a friendship with a girl named Alice Kelleher, and the following year they became roommates. Alice had a very loud speaking voice, dressed in ill-fitting second-hand clothes and seemed to find everything hilarious. Her father was a car mechanic with a drinking problem and she’d had a disorganised childhood. She did not easily find friends among their classmates, and faced minor disciplinary proceedings for calling a lecturer a ‘fascist pig’. Eileen went through college patiently reading all the assigned texts, submitting every project by the deadline and preparing thoroughly for exams. She collected almost every academic award for which she was eligible and even won a national essay prize. She developed a social circle, went out to nightclubs, rejected the advances of various male friends, and came home afterwards to eat toast with Alice in the living room. Alice said that Eileen was a genius and a pearl beyond price, and that even the people who really appreciated her still didn’t appreciate her enough. Eileen said that Alice was an iconoclast and a true original, and that she was ahead of her time.
Lola attended a different college in another part of the city, and never saw Eileen except on the street by coincidence. When Eileen was in her second year, Simon moved to Dublin to study for a legal qualification. Eileen invited him to the apartment one night to introduce him to Alice, and he brought with him a box of expensive chocolates and a bottle of white wine. Alice was extremely rude to him all evening, called his religious beliefs ‘evil’ and also said his wristwatch was ugly. For some reason Simon seemed to
find this behaviour amusing and even endearing. He called around to the apartment quite often after that, standing with his back against the radiator, arguing with Alice about God, and cheerfully criticising their poor housekeeping skills. He said they were
‘living in squalor’. Sometimes he even washed the dishes before he left. One night when Alice wasn’t there, Eileen asked him if he had a girlfriend, and he laughed and said: What makes you ask that? I’m a wise old man, remember? Eileen was lying on the sofa, and without lifting her head she tossed a cushion at him, which he caught in his hands. Just old, she said. Not wise.
When Eileen was twenty, she had sex for the first time, with a man she had met on the internet. Afterwards she walked back from his house to her apartment alone. It was late, almost two o’clock in the morning, and the streets were deserted. When she got home, Alice was sitting on the couch typing something on her laptop. Eileen leaned on the jamb of the living room door and said aloud: Well, that was weird. Alice stopped typing. What, did you sleep with him? she said. Eileen was rubbing her upper arm with the palm of her hand. He asked me to keep my clothes on, she said. Like, for the whole thing. Alice stared at her. Where do you find these people? she said. Looking at the floor, Eileen shrugged her shoulders. Alice got up from the sofa then. Don’t feel bad, she said. It’s not a big deal. It’s nothing. In two weeks you’ll have forgotten about it.
Eileen rested her head on Alice’s small shoulder. Patting her back, Alice said softly: You’re not like me. You’re going to have a happy life. Simon was living in Paris that summer, working for a climate emergency group. Eileen went to visit him there, the first time she had ever got on a plane alone. He met her at the airport and they took a train into the city. That night they drank a bottle of wine in his apartment and she told him the story of how she lost her virginity. He laughed and apologised for laughing.
They were lying on the bed in his room together. After a pause, Eileen said: I was going to ask how you lost your virginity. But then, for all I know, you still haven’t. He smiled at that. No, I have, he said. For a few seconds she lay quietly with her face turned up toward the ceiling, breathing. Even though you’re Catholic, she said. They were lying close together, their shoulders almost touching. Right, he answered. What does Saint Augustine say? Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.
After graduating, Eileen started a Master’s degree in Irish Literature, and Alice got a job in a coffee shop and started writing a novel. They were still living together, and in the evenings Alice sometimes read aloud the good jokes from her manuscript while Eileen was cooking dinner. Sitting at the kitchen table, pushing her hair back from her forehead, Alice would say: Listen to this. You know the main guy I was telling you about? Well, he gets a text from the sister character. In Paris, Simon had moved in with his girlfriend, a French woman named Natalie. After finishing her Master’s, Eileen got a job in a bookshop, wheeling loaded trolleys across the shop floor to be unloaded and placing individual adhesive price stickers onto individual copies of bestselling novels.
By then her parents had run into financial trouble with the farm. On Eileen’s visits home, her father Pat was sullen and restless, pacing around the house at strange hours, switching things off and on. At dinner he barely spoke, and often left the table before the others had finished eating. In the living room one night when they were alone, her mother Mary told her that something would have to change. It can’t go on like this, she said. With a concerned expression, Eileen asked whether she meant the financial situation or her marriage. Mary turned her hands palm up, looking exhausted, looking older than she really was. Everything, she said. I don’t know. You come home complaining about your job, complaining about your life. What about my life? Who’s