I didn’t tell my mother that I’d brought the little leather copy of the New Testament back to Dublin with me. I knew she wouldn’t notice it was gone, and if I tried to explain, she wouldn’t understand why it interested me. My favourite part of the gospels was in Matthew, when Jesus said: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. I shared in this desire for moral superiority over my enemies. Jesus always wanted to be the better person, and so did I. I underlined this passage in red pencil several times, to illustrate that I understood the Christian way of life.
The Bible made a lot more sense to me, almost perfect sense, if I pictured Bobbi as the Jesus character. She didn’t deliver his lines entirely straight; often she pronounced them sarcastically, or with a weird, distant expression. The bit about husbands and wives was satirical, whereas the passage about loving your enemies she played sincerely. It made sense to me that she would befriend adulteresses, and also that she would have a pack of disciples spreading her message.
The day after the book launch, a Friday, I wrote Bobbi a long email apologising for what had happened between us in the bookshop. I tried to explain that I had felt vulnerable, but I did so without using the word ‘vulnerable’ or any synonyms. I did say sorry, I said that several times. She replied within a few minutes:
it’s okay, i forgive you. but lately i sometimes feel like i’m watching you disappear.
I stood up from my desk after reading this email and remembered I was in the college library, but without really seeing the library environment around me. I found my way to the bathrooms and locked myself in a stall. A mouthful of sour fluid washed up from my stomach and I leaned over the toilet basin to be sick. My body was gone then, vanished somewhere no one would ever see it again. Who would miss it? I wiped my mouth with a single square of tissue paper, flushed the toilet and went back upstairs. My MacBook screen had gone black and radiated a perfect rectangular glow from the reflected ceiling light. I sat back down, logged out of my email, and continued reading a James Baldwin essay.
I didn’t exactly start praying that weekend after the book launch, but I did look up online how to meditate. It mainly involved closing my eyes and breathing, while also calmly letting go of passing thoughts. I focused on my breathing, you were allowed to do that. You could even count the breaths. And then at the end you could just think about anything, anything you wanted, but after five minutes of counting my breath, I didn’t want to think. My mind felt empty, like the inside of a glass jar. I was appropriating my fear of total disappearance as a spiritual practice. I was inhabiting disappearance as something that could reveal and inform, rather than totalise and annihilate. A lot of the time my meditation was unsuccessful.
My father called me on Monday night at about eleven to say he had put my allowance in the bank that day. His voice rolled around on the line uncertainly and I felt a drenching sense of guilt. Oh, thanks, I said.
I put in a few extra quid for you, he said. You never know when you’ll need it.
You shouldn’t have. I have enough money.
Well, treat yourself to something nice.
After this phone call I felt restless and too warm, as if I had just run up a staircase. I tried lying down, but it didn’t help. Nick had sent me an email that day containing a link to a Joanna Newsom song. I sent back a link to the Billie Holiday recording of ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’, but he didn’t reply.
I went into the living room, where Bobbi was watching a documentary about Algeria. She patted the couch cushion beside her and I sat down.
Do you ever feel like you don’t know what you’re doing with your life? I said.
I’m actually watching this, said Bobbi.
I looked at the screen, where old wartime footage was overlaid with a voice-over explaining the role of the French military. I said: sometimes I just feel. And Bobbi placed a finger over her lips and said: Frances. I’m watching.
*
On Wednesday night I matched with somebody called Rossa on the dating thing and he sent me a couple of messages. He asked me if I wanted to meet up and I said: sure. We went for a drink together in a bar on Westmoreland Street. He was in college too, studying medicine. I didn’t tell him about the problems I’d had with my uterus. Actually I bragged about how healthy I was. He talked about how hard he had worked in school, which he seemed to consider a formative experience, and I said I was happy for him.
I’ve never worked hard at anything, I said.
That must be why you study English.
Then he said that he was just joking, and actually he had won his school’s gold medal for composition. I love poetry, he said. I love Yeats.
Yeah, I said. If there’s one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets.
He didn’t have anything else to say about poetry after that. Afterwards he invited me back to his apartment and I let him unbutton my blouse. I thought: this is normal. This is a normal thing to do. He had a small, soft upper body, not at all like Nick, and he did none of the usual things that Nick did to me before we had sex, like touching me for a long time and talking in a low voice. It started right away, with no introduction really. Physically I felt almost nothing, just a mild discomfort. I let myself become rigid and silent, waiting for Rossa to notice my rigidity and stop what he was doing, but he didn’t. I considered asking him to stop, but the idea that he might ignore me felt more serious than the situation needed to be. Don’t get yourself into a big legal thing, I thought. I lay there and let him continue. He asked me if I liked it rough and I told him I didn’t think so, but he pulled my hair anyway. I wanted to laugh, and after that I hated myself for feeling superior.
When I got home, I went to my room and took a single plastic-wrapped bandage from the drawer. I am normal, I thought. I have a body like anyone else. Then I scratched my arm open until it bled, just a faint spot of blood, widening into a droplet. I counted to three and afterwards opened the bandage, placed it carefully over my arm, and disposed of the plastic wrap.
22