For a while nothing happens. His stomach is making a low whining noise now because he hasn’t eaten breakfast. Lately he’s too tired to cook for himself in the evenings, so he finds himself signing in for dinner on the scholars’ website and eating Commons in the Dining Hall. Before the meal everyone stands for grace, which is recited in Latin. Then the food is served by other students, who are dressed all in black to differentiate them from the otherwise identical students who are being served. The meals are always the same: salty orange soup to start, with a bread roll and a square of butter wrapped in foil. Then a piece of meat in gravy, with silver dishes of potatoes passed around. Then dessert, some kind of wet sugary cake, or the fruit salad which is mostly grapes. These are all served rapidly and whisked away rapidly, while portraits of men from different centuries glare down from the walls in expensive regalia. Eating alone like this, overhearing the conversations of others but unable to join in, Connell feels profoundly and almost unendurably alienated from his own body. After the meal another grace is recited, with the ugly noise of chairs pulled back from tables. By seven he has emerged into the darkness of Front Square, and the lamps have been lit.
A middle-aged woman comes out to the waiting room now, wearing a long grey cardigan, and says: Connell? He tries to contort his face into a smile, and then, giving up, rubs his jaw with his hand instead, nodding. My name is Yvonne, she says. Would you like to come with me? He rises from the couch and follows her into a small office. She closes the door behind them. On one side of the office is a desk with an ancient Microsoft computer humming audibly; on the other side, two low mint-coloured armchairs facing one another. Now then, Connell, she says. You can sit down wherever you like. He sits on the chair facing the window, out of which he can see the back of a concrete building and a rusting drainpipe. She sits down opposite him and picks up a pair of glasses from a chain around her neck. She fixes them on her face and looks down at her clipboard.
Okay, she says. Why don’t we talk about how you’re feeling?
Yeah. Not great.
I’m sorry to hear that. When did you start feeling this way?
Uh, he says. A couple of months ago. January, I suppose.
She clicks a pen and writes something down. January, she says. Okay. Did something happen then, or it just came on out of nowhere?
A few days into the new year, Connell got a text message from Rachel Moran. It was two o’clock in the morning then, and he and Helen were coming back from a night out. Angling his phone away, he opened the text: it was a group message that went out to all their school friends, asking if anyone had seen or been in contact with Rob Hegarty. It said he hadn’t been seen for a few hours. Helen asked him what the text said and for some reason Connell replied: Oh, nothing, just a group message. Happy New Year. The next day Rob’s body was recovered from the River Corrib.
Connell later heard from friends that Rob had been drinking a lot in the preceding weeks and seemed out of sorts. Connell hadn’t known anything about it, he hadn’t been home much last term, he hadn’t really been seeing people. He checked his Facebook to find the last time Rob had sent him a message, and it was from early 2012: a photograph from a night out, Connell pictured with his arm around the waist of Marianne’s friend Teresa. In the message Rob had written: are u riding her?? NICE haha. Connell had never replied. He hadn’t seen Rob at Christmas, he couldn’t remember for certain whether he’d even seen him last summer or not. Trying to summon an exact mental picture of Rob’s face, Connell found that he couldn’t: an image would appear at first, whole and recognisable, but on any closer inspection the features would float away from one another, blur, become confused.
In the following days, people from school posted status updates about suicide awareness. Since then Connell’s mental state has steadily, week after week, continued to deteriorate. His anxiety, which was previously chronic and low-level, serving as a kind of all-purpose inhibiting impulse, has become severe. His hands start tingling when he has to perform minor interactions like ordering coffee or answering a question in class. Once or twice he’s had major panic attacks: hyperventilation, chest pain, pins and needles all over his body. A feeling of dissociation from his senses, an inability to think straight or interpret what he sees and hears. Things begin to look and sound different, slower, artificial, unreal. The first time it happened he thought he was losing his mind, that the whole cognitive framework by which he made sense of the world had disintegrated for good, and everything from then on would just be undifferentiated sound and colour. Then within a couple of minutes it passed, and left him lying on his mattress coated in sweat.
