None of This Is Serious, page 22
‘I just . . . I don’t want to end up like my parents . . .’
But that’s what’s going to happen; that’s what he does. He did it to Cassie, and he’s done it to me, with my twin, even after I told him everything. He knew what he was doing to me, and he did it anyway.
‘But I love you,’ he says, which we both know is not true, and that’s the reason he says it.
I’m pacing around my room now, energy coursing through me. It feels as though I’ve been struck by a bolt of truth, and my words hang around me as physical things the moment I utter them.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. I can hear his breath hitch, and I think he’s crying. At one point, this would have broken my heart. I still feel the impulse to reach across the space between us, but it’s weaker than it’s ever been.
Instead, I listen quietly, as though I’m keeping vigil to the fact that he has a heart. Perhaps this is the first time he’s ever faced consequences in his life.
After a while, he says, into the silence, ‘Can we go back to just being friends?’
When he realises the answer is no, he hangs up.
I sit on my bed, unfeeling. It’s better this way.
I refresh social media, looking for someone to talk to, but there’s no one. My chat log is full of the names of people I no longer speak to. Grace is right: I’ve let distance grow between me and everyone I care about. She says they still care about me, but I can’t break the barriers I’ve constructed in my mind. It feels impossible to message anyone, and even more impossible that they might reply.
I scroll up through our group chat, to before Dan moved away and Steph started working, back to when it was all normal. The messages feel as though they’re from strangers. I want to go back to that time, to when things felt like they would never change. To when I could believe the words I read. But even now, looking back, I’m not sure that kind of certainty ever existed.
I listen to a podcast about the crack. The camaraderie of the hosts almost feels like friendship. Their banter is at odds with what they’re talking about. No progress has been made on the crack; no one knows what it is, and they’re saying no one ever will. This is just something we have to get used to. They’ve started attaching words like emergency and crisis to the discourse, but in an almost quizzical way. Everyone keeps repeating that it’s not going to end the world. I’m not so sure, although I’ve never been sure the world’s not already ending.
Finn’s words echo in my ears: I don’t want to end up like my parents. He spent so long running away from the idea that he’s circled back: trapped. I don’t want to end up like my parents either; I don’t think it’s even possible I could. When they were my age, the world was different, and full of possibilities that no longer exist.
I’m tired of apathy, especially apathy towards the future. The hosts of the podcast seem secure in the idea that the present will continue like this for ever. But that present is based on a past I never got to live. The future is yet unmapped, and I can’t keep looking back before taking a step forward.
My phone goes off. It’s a notification from the app that Japanese teenager made. I’m filled at once with a kind of longing, which in other terms might be called hope. Maybe the podcast hosts are powerless, maybe I’m powerless, but there are people using the tools they have now to imagine a better future. Maybe, somewhere out there, there is a solution. We just need to look in the right places.
I want to move on from now. I want to grasp the future that is available to me and stop fixating on what I’ve done. I’m not alone, I’ve never been alone; I just had the wrong idea of what loneliness meant. I want to stop pretending I believe what I’ve been taught happiness is: I have to find out for myself.
The future starts like this: I look up flats in Dublin, in London, in Tokyo; anywhere I might like to go. I could stay with Dan for a while. There’s nothing keeping me here, in this moment, except for me. Maybe I could do a Masters, or teach English abroad, or write a novel. Maybe I could do all three. Things are changing, and I want to change too.
I send a message into the group chat, and I wait.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not exist without so many wonderful, weird and inspiring people, and this acknowledgements section couldn’t possibly do justice to the debt I owe them.
Without Paddy O’Doherty, you would not be holding this book in your hands. It would be gathering metaphorical digital dust and never have seen the light of day. Her support and guidance started me down this path and gave me the confidence to think I might be able to walk it.
Thank you to my agent, Marianne Gunn O’Connor, who has more faith in me than I do myself.
Thank you to all the team at Canongate, who’ve quite literally made my dreams come true. In particular to my editor Megan Reid, who understood my vision for this novel and whose carefully considered comments were invaluable. And to Jamie Byng. I never thought I’d be lucky enough to find such a supportive and enthusiastic team.
Thank you to my mother, for everything she’s given me. To my father, who never laughed when I talked about fantasy literature. To John for his early encouragement, and to Sally for showing me this was possible. And to Paul, who was always so sure I would end up surprising everyone.
Thank you to every member of my extended family. To Sunny McDonagh for loving books as much as I do. To Josh Oren for giving me my first favourite book, and to his parents Diane and Bill for giving it to him. To Bríd O’Doherty and Denise Milmo-Penny, because even though they never knew about this book, I can’t help but feel that they had something to do with it. To my grandmother, Georgia Prasifka, whose love for me I know is unconditional. And to the grandmother I never got to know, Roisín McDonagh, who was also a writer.
Thank you to my dear friends. Dee Courtney, who read it first. Lorna Staines, who was always ready for three a.m. conversations and five-minute-long voice notes. Julia McCarthy, for dreaming big ideas with me over a few glasses of wine. And to Heather Murray, who’s been here for it all, who always knew I could do it, and without whom I would be a fundamentally different person. And thank you to the entire Murray family.
Thank you to Clare Hanlon, who’s been there for the start of nearly every good idea I’ve had, and to her family for their hospitality. To Molly Barnicle, and Emma Jackson, and Doireann O’Brien, and Robyn Lawrence, and Chris Paschali, and Suzanne Elliot, and so many others whose support helped me to bring this book into being. Thank you for being there to discuss ideas and listen to me talk through plot points. Thank you for laughing at the jokes I considered putting into the manuscript and then cut for not being funny.
Thank you to Catriona Fyfe, who was there when this wild journey started, although it feels like much longer. And to Niamh O’Connell, whose early comments on the first chapter were so insightful and brilliant they changed the whole book.
And thank you, reader, for giving this weird little book a chance.
‘Hilarious, moving and poetic’
Glamour
‘Savagely witty’
Observer
‘Lyrical, imaginative’
Daily Mail
Catherine Prasifka, None of This Is Serious
