Normal People

Now a Major Motion Picture
along the top. The actress on the front has been their constant companion
for weeks. Connell feels an almost friendly affinity with her pale period-
drama face.
Whereabouts are we, do you know? says Connell.
Elaine looks up from the book. We passed Ljubljana about two hours
ago, she says.
Oh, right, he says. We’re not far, then.
Connell looks over at Niall, whose sleeping head is bobbing slightly on
his neck. Elaine follows his gaze. Out for the count as usual, she says.
There were others at the beginning. Some friends of Elaine’s went with
them from Berlin to Prague, and they met a few of Niall’s Engineering
classmates in Bratislava before they crossed over to Vienna on the train.
Hostels were cheap, and the cities they visited had a pleasantly temporary
feeling about them. Nothing Connell did there seemed to stay with him.
The whole trip felt like a series of short films, screened only once, and
afterwards he had a sense of what they were about but no exact memories
of the plot. He remembers seeing things out the windows of taxis.
In each city he finds an internet cafe and completes the same three
rituals of communication: he calls Helen on Skype, he sends his mother a
free text message from his phone network’s website, and he writes
Marianne an email.
Helen is on a J1 in Chicago for the summer. In the background of their
calls he can hear her girlfriends chatting, doing things with each other’s
hair, and sometimes Helen will turn and say something to them like: Guys,
please! I’m on the phone! He loves seeing her face on-screen, especially
when the connection is good and her movements are smooth and lifelike.
She has a great smile, great teeth. After the end of their call yesterday he
paid at the counter, walked back out into the sunshine and bought himself

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an overpriced glass of Coke with ice. Sometimes when Helen has a lot of
friends around or if the internet cafe is especially crowded, their
conversations can get a little awkward, but even still he feels better after
talking to her. He finds himself rushing to the end of the conversation so
they can hang up, and then he can retrospectively savour how much he
likes seeing her, without the moment-to-moment pressure of having to
produce the right expressions and say the right things. Just to see Helen, her
beautiful face, her smile, and to know that she continues loving him, this
puts the gift of joy into his day, and for hours he feels nothing but a light-
headed happiness.
Helen has given Connell a new way to live. It’s as if an impossibly
heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe
fresh air. It is physically possible to type and send a message reading: I love
you! It had never seemed possible before, not remotely, but in fact it’s easy.
Of course if someone saw the messages he would be embarrassed, but he
knows now that this is a normal kind of embarrassment, an almost
protective impulse towards a particularly good part of life. He can sit down
to dinner with Helen’s parents, he can accompany her to her friends’