I think I’m going to go home now, if that’s okay, she says.
Yeah. If that’s what you want.
She finds her clothes and puts them on. He starts getting dressed, he says he’ll drive her home at least, and she says she wants to walk. It becomes a farcical competition between them, who can dress faster, and having a head start she finishes first and runs down the stairs. He’s on the landing by the time she closes the front door behind her. Out on the street she feels like a petulant child, slamming the door on him like that while he raced out to the landing. Something has come over her, she doesn’t know what it is. It reminds her of how she used to feel in Sweden, a kind of nothingness, like there’s no life inside her. She hates the person she has become, without feeling any power to change anything about herself. She is someone even Connell finds disgusting, she has gone past what he can tolerate. In school they were both in the same place, both confused and somehow suffering, and ever since then she has believed that if they could return to that place together it would be the same. Now she knows that in the intervening years Connell has been growing slowly more adjusted to the world, a process of adjustment that has been steady if sometimes painful, while she herself has been degenerating, moving further and further from wholesomeness, becoming something unrecognisably debased, and they have nothing left in common at all.
By the time she lets herself into her own house it’s after ten. Her mother’s car isn’t in the driveway and inside the hall is cool and sounds empty. She takes her sandals off and puts them on the rack, hangs her handbag on a coat hook, combs her fingers through her hair.
At the end of the hall, Alan comes up from the kitchen with a bottle of beer in his hand.
Where the fuck were you? he says.
Connell’s house.
He moves in front of the staircase, swinging the bottle at his side.
You shouldn’t be going over there, he says.
She shrugs. She knows a confrontation is coming now, and she can do nothing to stop it. It’s moving towards her already from every direction, and there’s no special move she can make, no evasive gesture, that can help her escape it.
I thought you liked him, says Marianne. You did when we were in school.
Yeah, how was I supposed to know he was fucked in the head? He’s on medication and everything, did you know that?
He’s doing pretty well at the moment, I think.
What is he hanging around you for, so? says Alan.
I suppose you’d have to ask him.
She tries to move towards the stairs but Alan puts his free hand down on the banister.
I don’t want people going around town saying that knacker is riding my sister, says Alan.
Can I go upstairs now, please?
Alan is gripping his beer bottle very tightly. I don’t want you to go near him again, he says. I’m warning you now. People in town are talking about you.
I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I cared what people thought of me.
Before she’s really aware of what’s happening, Alan lifts his arm and throws the bottle at her. It smashes behind her on the tiles. On some level she knows that he can’t have intended to hit her; they’re only standing a few feet apart and it missed her completely. Still she runs past him, up the stairs. She feels her body racing through the cool interior air. He turns and follows her but she manages to make it into her room, pushing herself hard against the door, before he catches up. He tries the handle and she has to strain to keep it from turning. Then he kicks the outside of the door. Her body is vibrating with adrenaline.
You absolute freak! Alan says. Open the fucking door, I didn’t do anything!
Forehead against the smooth grain of the wood, she calls out: Please just leave me alone. Go to bed, okay? I’ll clean up downstairs, I won’t tell Denise.
Open the door, he says.
Marianne leans the whole weight of her body against the door, her hands firmly grasping the handle, eyes screwed shut. From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body. She tries to be a good person. But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.
