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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