Home > Beautiful World, Where Are You(7)

Beautiful World, Where Are You(7)
Author: Sally Rooney

taking care of me? Eileen was twenty-three then and her mother was fifty-one. Eileen held her fingertips lightly against one of her eyelids for a moment, and said: Aren’t you complaining to me about your life right now? Mary started crying then. Eileen watched her uneasily, and said: I really care that you’re unhappy, I just don’t know what you want me to do. Her mother was covering her face, sobbing. What did I do wrong? she said. How did I raise such selfish children? Eileen sat back against the sofa as if she was giving the question serious thought. What outcome do you want here? she asked. I can’t give you money. I can’t go back in time and make you marry a different man. You want me to listen to you complaining about it? I’ll listen. I am listening. But I’m not sure why you think your unhappiness is more important than mine. Mary left the room.

When they were twenty-four, Alice signed an American book deal for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She said no one in the publishing industry knew anything about money, and that if they were stupid enough to give it to her, she was avaricious enough to take it. Eileen was dating a PhD student named Kevin, and through him had found a low-paid but interesting job as an editorial assistant at a literary magazine. At first she was just copy-editing, but after a few months they allowed her to start commissioning new pieces, and at the end of the year the editor invited her to contribute some of her own work. Eileen said she would think about it. Lola was working at a management consultancy firm then and had a boyfriend called Matthew. She invited Eileen to have dinner with them in town one night. On a Thursday evening after work, the three of them waited forty-five minutes on an increasingly dark and chilly street to be seated in a new burger restaurant Lola particularly wanted to try. When the burgers arrived, they tasted normal. Lola asked Eileen about her career plans and Eileen said she was happy at the magazine. Right, for now, said Lola. But what’s next? Eileen told her she didn’t

know. Lola made a smiling face and said: One day you’re going to have to live in the real world. Eileen walked back to the apartment that night and found Alice on the sofa, working on her book. Alice, she said, am I going to have to live in the real world one day? Without looking up, Alice snorted and said: Jesus no, absolutely not. Who told you that?

The following September, Eileen found out from her mother that Simon and Natalie had broken up. They had been together for four years by then. Eileen told Alice she had thought they would get married. I always thought they were going to get married, she would say. And Alice would answer: Yeah, you’ve mentioned that. Eileen sent Simon an email asking how he was, and he wrote back: I don’t suppose you’re going to find yourself in Paris any time soon? I would really like to see you. At Halloween she went to stay with him for a few days. He was thirty by then and she was twenty-five. They went out to museums together in the afternoons and talked about art and politics.

Whenever she asked him about Natalie he responded lightly, self-effacingly, and changed the subject. Once, when they were sitting together in the Musée d’Orsay, Eileen said to him: You know everything about me, and I know nothing about you.

With a pained-looking smile he answered: Ah, now you sound like Natalie. Then he laughed and said sorry. That was the only time he mentioned her name. In the mornings he made coffee, and at night Eileen slept in his bed. After they made love, he liked to hold her for a long time. The day she arrived back in Dublin, she broke up with her boyfriend. She didn’t hear anything from Simon again until he came over to her family home at Christmas to drink a glass of brandy and admire the tree.

Alice’s book was published the following spring. A lot of press attention surrounded the publication, mostly positive at first, and then some negative pieces reacting to the fawning positivity of the initial coverage. In the summer, at a party in their friend Ciara’s apartment, Eileen met a man named Aidan. He had thick dark hair and wore linen trousers and dirty tennis shoes. They ended up sitting in the kitchen together until late that night, talking about childhood. In my family we just don’t discuss things, Aidan said. Everything is below the surface, nothing comes out. Can I refill that for you? Eileen watched him pouring a measure of red wine into her glass. We don’t really talk about things in my family either, she said. Sometimes I think we try, but we don’t know how. At the end of the night, Eileen and Aidan walked home together in the same direction, and he took a detour to see her to her apartment door. Take care of yourself, he said when they parted. A few days later they met for a drink, just the two of them. He was a musician and a sound engineer. He talked to her about his work, about his flatmates, about his relationship with his mother, about various things he loved and hated. While they spoke, Eileen laughed a lot and looked animated, touching her mouth, leaning forward in her seat. After she got home that night Aidan sent her a message reading: you are such a good listener! wow! and I talk too much, sorry. can we see each other again?

They went for another drink the following week, and then another. Aidan’s apartment had a lot of tangled black cables all over the floor and his bed was just a mattress. In the autumn, they went to Florence for a few days and walked through the cool of the cathedral together. One night when she made a witty remark at dinner, he laughed so much that he had to wipe his eyes with a purple serviette. He told her that he loved her.

Everything in life is incredibly beautiful, Eileen wrote in a message to Alice. I can’t

believe it’s possible to be so happy. Simon moved back to Dublin around that time, to work as a policy adviser for a left-wing parliamentary group. Eileen saw him sometimes on the bus, or crossing a street, his arm around one good-looking woman or another.

Before Christmas, Eileen and Aidan moved in together. He carried her boxes of books from the back of his car and said proudly: The weight of your brain. Alice came to their housewarming party, dropped a bottle of vodka on the kitchen tiles, told a very long anecdote about their college years which only Eileen and she herself seemed to find remotely funny, and then went home again. Most of the other people at the party were Aidan’s friends. Afterwards, drunk, Eileen said to Aidan: Why don’t I have any friends?

I have two, but they’re weird. And the others are more like acquaintances. He smoothed his hand over her hair and said: You have me.

For the next three years Eileen and Aidan lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the south city centre, illegally downloading foreign films, arguing about how to split the rent, taking turns to cook and wash up. Lola and Matthew got engaged. Alice won a lucrative literary award, moved to New York and started sending Eileen emails at strange hours of the day and night. Then she stopped emailing at all, deleted her social media profiles, ignored Eileen’s messages. In December, Simon called Eileen one night and told her that Alice was back in Dublin and had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Eileen was sitting on the sofa, her phone held to her ear, while Aidan was at the sink, rinsing a plate under the tap. After she and Simon had finished speaking, she sat there on the phone, saying nothing, and he said nothing, they were both silent. Right, he said eventually. I’ll let you go. A few weeks later, Eileen and Aidan broke up. He told her there was a lot going on and that they both needed space. He went to live with his parents and she moved into a two-bedroom apartment with a married couple in the north

inner city. Lola and Matthew decided to have a small wedding in the summer. Simon went on answering his correspondence promptly, taking Eileen out for lunch now and then, and keeping his personal life to himself. It was April and several of Eileen’s friends had recently left or were in the process of leaving Dublin. She attended the leaving parties, wearing her dark-green dress with the buttons, or her yellow dress with the matching belt. In living rooms with low ceilings and paper lampshades, people talked to her about the property market. My sister’s getting married in June, she would tell them. That’s exciting, they would reply. You must be so happy for her. Yeah, it’s funny, Eileen would say. I’m not.

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