Normal People

parties, he can tolerate the smiling and the exchange of repetitive
conversation. He can squeeze her hand while people ask him questions
about his future. When she touches him spontaneously, applying a little
pressure to his arm, or even reaching to brush a piece of lint off his collar,
he feels a rush of pride, and hopes that people are watching them. To be
known as her boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes
him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone
whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward.
The texts he sends Lorraine are fairly businesslike. He updates her when
they see historic landmarks or cultural treasures. Yesterday:
hey from vienna. stephen’s cathedral fairly overrated to be honest but
the art history museum was good. hope things are ok at home.
She likes to ask how Helen’s doing. The first time they met, Helen and his
mother hit it off right away. Whenever Helen visits, Lorraine is always
shaking her head at Connell’s little behaviours and saying: How do you put
up with him, sweetheart? But whatever, it’s nice they get along. Helen is
the first girlfriend he has introduced to his mother and he finds he’s
curiously eager to impress on Lorraine how normal their relationship is and
how nice a person Helen considers him to be. He’s not sure where this
stems from exactly.
In the weeks they’ve been apart, his emails to Marianne have become

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lengthy. He’s started drafting them on his phone in idle moments, while
waiting for his clothes in a launderette, or lying in the hostel at night when
he can’t sleep for the heat. He reads over these drafts repeatedly, reviewing
all the elements of prose, moving clauses around to make the sentences fit
together correctly. Time softens out while he types, feeling slow and dilated
while actually passing very rapidly, and more than once he’s looked up to
find that hours have gone by. He couldn’t explain aloud what he finds so
absorbing about his emails to Marianne, but he doesn’t feel that it’s trivial.
The experience of writing them feels like an expression of a broader and
more fundamental principle, something in his identity, or something even
more abstract, to do with life itself. In his little grey journal he wrote
recently: idea for a story told through emails? Then he crossed it out,
deciding it was gimmicky. He finds himself crossing things out in his
journal as if he imagines some future person poring over it in detail, as if he
wants the future person to know which ideas he has thought better of.
His correspondence with Marianne includes a lot of links to news
reports. At the moment they’re both engrossed in the Edward Snowden
story, Marianne because of her interest in the architecture of global
surveillance, and Connell because of the fascinating personal drama. He
reads all the speculation online, he watches the blurry footage from
Sheremetyevo Airport. He and Marianne can only talk about it over email,
using the same communication technologies they now know are under
surveillance, and it feels at times like their relationship has been captured in
a complex network of state power, that the network is a form of intelligence
in itself, containing them both, and containing their feelings for one
another. I feel like the NSA agent reading these emails has the wrong
impression of us, Marianne wrote once. They probably don’t know about
the time you didn’t invite me to the Debs.
She writes to him a lot about the house where she’s staying with Jamie
and Peggy, outside Trieste. She recounts the goings-on, how she feels, how
she surmises the others are feeling, and what she’s reading and thinking
about. He writes to her about the cities they visit, sometimes including a
paragraph describing a particular sight or scene. He wrote about coming up
from the U-Bahn station in Schönleinstraße to find it was suddenly dark
out, and the fronds of trees waving over them like spooky fingers, and the
noise from bars, and the smell of pizza and exhaust fumes. It feels powerful
to him to put an experience down in words, like he’s trapping it in a jar and
it can never fully leave him. He told Marianne once that he’d been writing
stories, and now she keeps asking to read them. If they’re as good as your
emails they must be superb, she wrote. That was a nice thing to read,
though he responded honestly: They’re not as good as my emails.

---

He and Niall and Elaine have arranged to get the train from Vienna to
Trieste to spend their last few nights in Marianne’s holiday home, before
they all fly back to Dublin together. A day trip to Venice has been
mentioned. Last night they got on the train with their backpacks and
Connell texted Marianne: should be there by tomorrow afternoon, won’t
have time to reply to your email properly before then. He has almost no
clean clothes left by now. He’s wearing a grey T-shirt, black jeans and dirty
white trainers. In his backpack: various lightly soiled clothes, one clean
white T-shirt, an empty plastic bottle for water, clean underwear, a rolled-
up phone charger, his passport, two packets of generic paracetamol, a very
beaten-up copy of a James Salter novel, and for Marianne, an edition of
Frank O’Hara’s selected poems he found in an English-language bookshop
in Berlin. One soft-covered grey notebook.
Elaine nudges Niall until his head jerks forward and his eyes open. He
asks what time it is and where they are, and Elaine tells him. Then Niall
links his fingers together and stretches his arms out in front of him. His
joints crack quietly. Connell looks out the window at the passing landscape:
dry yellows and greens, the orange slant of a tiled roof, a window cut flat
by the sun and flashing.
*
The university scholarships were announced back in April. The Provost
stood on the steps of the Exam Hall and read out a list of the scholars. The
sky was extremely blue that day, delirious, like flavoured ice. Connell was
wearing his jacket and Helen had her arm wrapped around his. When it
came to English they read out four names, alphabetically, and the last one
was: Connell Waldron. Helen threw her arms around him. That was it, they
said his name and moved on. He waited in the square until they announced
History and Politics, and when he heard Marianne’s name he looked around
to see her. He could hear a circle of her friends cheering, and some
applause. He put his hands in his pockets. Hearing Marianne’s name he
realised how real it was, he really had won the scholarship, they both had.
He doesn’t remember much of what happened then. He remembers calling
Lorraine after the announcements and she was just quiet on the phone,
shocked, and then she murmured: Oh my god, Jesus Christ.
Niall and Elaine arrived beside him, cheering and slapping his back and
calling him ‘an absolute fucking nerd’. Connell was laughing at nothing,
just because so much excitement demanded some kind of outward
expression and he didn’t want to cry. That night all the new scholars had to
go to a formal black-tie meal together in the Dining Hall. Connell borrowed
a tux from someone in his class, it didn’t fit very well, and at dinner he felt

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awkward trying to make conversation with the English professor seated
next to him. He wanted to be with Helen, and with his friends, not with
these people he had never met before and who knew nothing about him.
Everything is possible now because of the scholarship. His rent is paid,
his tuition is covered, he has a free meal every day in college. This is why
he’s been able to spend half the summer travelling around Europe,
disseminating currency with the carefree attitude of a rich person. He’s
explained it, or tried to explain it, in his emails to Marianne. For her the
scholarship was a self-esteem boost, a happy confirmation of what she has
always believed about herself anyway: that she’s special. Connell has never
really known whether to believe that about himself, and he still doesn’t
know. For him the scholarship is a gigantic material fact, like a vast cruise
ship that has sailed into view out of nowhere, and suddenly he can do a
postgraduate programme for free if he wants to, and live in Dublin for free,
and never think about rent again until he finishes college. Suddenly he can
spend an afternoon in Vienna looking at Vermeer’s