He watches Yvonne write down the name on her notepad, the tall slopes of the capital ‘M’. He talks to Marianne almost every night on Skype now, sometimes after dinner or sometimes late when she comes home from a night out. They’ve never talked about what happened in Italy. He’s grateful that she’s never brought it up. When they speak the video stream is high quality but frequently fails to match the audio, which gives him a sense of Marianne as a moving image, a thing to be looked at. People in college have been saying things about her since she went away. Connell’s not sure if she knows about it or not, what people like Jamie have been saying. Connell isn’t even really friends with those people and he’s heard about it. Some drunk guy at a party told him that she was into weird stuff, and that there were pictures of her on the internet. Connell doesn’t know if it’s true about the pictures. He’s searched her name online but nothing has ever come up.
Is she someone you might talk with about how you’re feeling? Yvonne says.
Yeah, she’s been supportive about it. She, uh … She’s hard to describe if you don’t know her. She’s really smart, a lot smarter than me, but I would say we see the world in a similar way. And we’ve lived our whole lives in the same place, obviously, so it is a bit different being away from her.
It sounds difficult.
I just don’t have a lot of people who I really click with, he says. You know, I struggle with that.
Do you think that’s a new problem, or is it something familiar to you?
It’s familiar, I suppose. I would say in school I sometimes had that feeling of isolation or whatever. But people liked me and everything. Here I feel like people don’t like me that much.
He pauses, and Yvonne seems to recognise the pause and doesn’t interrupt him.
Like with Rob, that’s my friend who died, he says. I wouldn’t say we clicked on this very deep level or anything, but we were friends.
Sure.
We didn’t have a lot in common, like in terms of interests or whatever. And on the political side of things we probably wouldn’t have had the same views. But in school, stuff like that didn’t really matter as much. We were just in the same group so we were friends, you know.
I understand that, says Yvonne.
And he did do some stuff that I wasn’t a big fan of. With girls his behaviour was kind of poor at times. You know, we were eighteen or whatever, we all acted like idiots. But I guess I found that stuff a bit alienating.
Connell bites on his thumbnail and then drops his hand back into his lap.
I probably thought if I moved here I would fit in better, he says. You know, I thought I might find more like-minded people or whatever. But honestly, the people here are a lot worse than the people I knew in school. I mean everyone here just goes around comparing how much money their parents make. Like I’m being literal with that, I’ve seen that happen.
He breathes in now, feeling that he has been talking too quickly and at too great a length, but unwilling to stop.
I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life, he says. But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again. I mean, those friendships are gone. Rob is gone, I can never see him again. I can never get that life back.
Yvonne pushes the box of tissues on the table towards him. He looks at the box, patterned with green palm leaves, and then at Yvonne. He touches his own face, only to discover that he has started crying. Wordlessly he removes a tissue from the box and wipes his face.
Sorry, he says.
Yvonne is making eye contact now, but he can’t tell anymore whether she’s been listening to him, whether she’s understood or tried to understand what he’s said.
What we can do here in counselling is try to work on your feelings, and your thoughts and behaviours, she says. We can’t change your circumstances, but we can change how you respond to your circumstances. Do you see what I mean?
Yeah.
At this point in the session Yvonne starts to hand him worksheets, illustrated with large cartoon arrows pointing to various text boxes. He takes them and pretends that he’s intending to fill them out later. She also hands him some photocopied pages about dealing with anxiety, which he pretends he will read. She prints a note for him to take to the college health service advising them about his depression, and he says he’ll come back for another session in two weeks. Then he leaves the office.
*
