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hannahssimblr · 7 months

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Chapter Two (Part 3)

We sit in the window of a vegan restaurant and we pick at our sweet potato and quinoa bowls while she goes on about some poetry night she was at last week. She always goes to poetry nights, she insists that she’s moved by the prose, which to me seems like endless spoken word performances about the Ballymun flats, soliloquies about the gentrification of the working class postcodes, references to things that Dubliners love, like the Poolbeg chimneys, which are… just chimneys.

Marnie is one of those people who loves pretending that she isn’t posh. She can lament about the flats, but she’s never been in or near them. She buys bags of tobacco, skins and filters for five euros when she could easily afford to buy her cigarettes pre-rolled, and does her best to uphold the most neutral of neutral accents, so ambiguous that nobody could ever guess where she’s from. It’s only on rare occasions when she lets her guard down that her plummy, south side accent peeks through and she can’t disguise affiliation with the fee paying school she attended in Blackrock. For both primary and secondary, no less.

I’ve been to poetry nights with her, but only once or twice, because I hate them. She likes to sit there and make outraged sounds in the right places, pretending to be furious at the bankers, even though her dad is one and he definitely benefited directly from the housing market crash. The whole reason she’s there though, really, although she’d never admit to such shallowness, is so that she can meet weird, literary boys who go to Trinity. They seem to love her, and I can only ever sit in amazement as she brings me to their tables and watch as she wraps them around her little finger using nothing but clever words and conspiratorial little smiles. None of them are that handsome, they’re all a bit gawky, and usually after a couple of weeks of knowing her they’ll do something earnest like write a poem about her which she’ll read to me mockingly, pretending that she isn’t privately delighted by it.

She’s not like anybody else I’ve ever met, which drives my fascination with her. She’s very interesting. She reads books about feminism, and always has high-brow, intelligent opinions about things like the patriarchy, which I am only now hearing about for the first time. And she’s very cool, and I know that she tries very hard to be cool, but it works, and when I’m around her I kind of feel like I’m cool by association. She’s got attitudes towards things that I know someone like my mam would say were “very modern”. She told me before that she used to be in an open relationship with a boy called Peter, and insists that humans were never supposed to be monogamous. But the open relationship arrangement only seemed to apply to her, as evidently Peter never went on a date with another person for the entire relationship, and they eventually split because he was jealous. Except she hadn’t said “jealous”. She’d said “Unevolved”.

“Come on, Evie.” She pesters me over our salads after my less than enthusiastic response to her invitation to yet another slam-poetry-spoken-word-whatever night. “It’s always a good laugh. I know that you have a good time, even just a small bit.”

I sigh. “I really don’t, Marnie. I’m just not that bothered about the poetry.”

“Well, if you don’t like poetry, at least come with me to flirt with a few cute guys. It would be good for you.”

I look at her doubtfully, knowing that there are never any cute boys there, only exceptionally odd looking ones wearing doc martens boots laced all the way up to their knees. “I’m not that bothered about the boys there either.” I say. “None of them are… really my type.”

She puts her hand on my wrist and looks at me worriedly. “I was actually wondering.” She says in a low voice. “Like, I’ve known you for over a month now, and we’ve been out in town so many times and met so many people and yet I’ve never seen you even flirt with a single person.”

“So what?” I say defensively.

“So do you like boys? Girls? Neither?”

“I’m shy.” I huff.

“I used to be shy.” She comments, and I don’t say anything to that, because I know that her definition of what shy looks like is extremely different to the kind of shy I’m living with. “I was a very quiet child, then my parents sent me to a therapist and I was alright after that.”

“You think I should go to therapy because I’m shy.”

“Oh, everyone should be in therapy, it’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, and actually, this country’s relationship with mental health has historically been shameful, so we have to make extra effort to challenge our prejudices about it.” She goes off on a tangent, all while gently stroking her thumb over my wrist, and I zone out for a few moments so I can look out the window onto the windy city street.

“So like, when’s the last time you got with someone?” She says suddenly.

I pull my hand away from her so I can rest it on my hot cheeks. She’s very good at asking direct questions in a very conversational way that are very difficult to twist your way out of, and I don’t know what to say so I grumble something incoherent. Then she pokes me in the arm. “Hey. It’s no big deal, just a simple question. How long has it been?”

I sigh. “A while.”

“What’s a while?”

I take my fork and start stabbing at my chunks of sweet potato, my hand fisted at my cheek. “Never.” I finally admit. “You got me, okay? I still have my… virginity.”

I know as soon as the words leave my mouth that she’s going to have something grandiose to say, and she does. “Virginity doesn’t exist.” She announces. “It’s made up by men to control the sex that we do or don’t have, completely based on the obsessive patriarchal ideological rhetoric that leads to the idea that daughters belong to their fathers before they belong to their husbands.”

“Okay.” I say.

“So go out and have it.”

“It’s not that simple.” I say half-heartedly, already tired from years of having this exact conversation with first Kelly, then Claire, neither of whom have ever understood me, or tried to. “Everyone else already has experience, and will expect me to have experience too. Because I should have some experience by now. And when I finally do… it with someone, I’m going to disappoint them.”

“Because you’re not immediately a porn star?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there is that, and men will always have unrealistic expectations of what is physically possible…” she says unhelpfully, then stops when she sees my forlorn expression. “But you’re too in your head about it. The best way to get over it is to just do it.”

“Yeah. Great. With who though?”

“Someone, any lad will do.”

“It’s supposed to be special.” I say weakly. “Everyone says you don’t forget your first time, and if I’m going to remember it forever then I want it to be perfect.”

“People have sex sometimes, Evie. It’s not a big deal. Can you imagine the pressure of having to live up to the kinds of expectations that you have?”

I never considered the effect of my expectations. Maybe she’s right, maybe I am piling the pressure on too high for everyone involved, but I have no idea how I’m going to even begin to untangle the web that is my intimacy issues. I groan and rub my eyes with the heels of my hands in resignation. “I know I have to try. It’s not like I want to be like this, but I just feel so stuck.”

“We have to unstick you.”

“We?”

“Yes I’ve decided to help you.”

“Marnie…”

“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. Think about it, you and I out on the pull together, chatting to men. I could definitely hook you up with someone.”

I fix her with my best warning look. “I don’t ever want you to try and set me up with anybody. I want free will and choice.”

“I have great taste.”

She doesn’t. The last guy she hooked up with had an infected eyebrow piercing and curly mohawk in this queasy, seasick colour where it used to be blue.

“Fine, next time we’re out, I’ll give you complete agency.” She relents. “I won’t bring anybody over to you, even if he’s an absolute babe who’s exactly your type.” Then she reaches out and touches my wrist again. “But I think this is good, Evie. It’s time to push past your anxiety, and just see who’s out there.”

“I suppose.” I say grimly, and go back to stabbing my salad. “But I’m not ready to sleep with anybody. I just want to talk, and maybe kiss someone. Maybe.”

“That’s so secondary school.” She teases. “But look, I get it. It’s probably been ages since you even kissed someone.” A pause. “If ever?”

“I’m not Drew Barrymore, I’ve been kissed.” I scoff. “Just not in a while.”

“What’s a while?”

“My debs date tried to kiss me.” I say elusively.

“Tried to? Or actually did?”

“Tried to.” I admit, and then shudder with the memory of Bootsy’s dead eyed face looming toward me on the dancefloor, mouth already open. He didn’t even have the decency to look disappointed when I rejected him either, and ten minutes later I saw him devouring Cristina the Horse Girl by the bar.

“Okay so you objectively did not have your last kiss at your debs.”

“I suppose not.”

“So it was when?”

I feel too embarrassed to answer. Since the dawn of my love life, since my very first kiss at thirteen, I’ve never gone more than a few weeks or months without it happening. It used to be something I did just to get it out of the way, so that I could say that I’d done it, but now something has switched. I’ve had an intense aversion to it, to anybody showing interest in me. It all just seems too much, too overwhelming, something so gross and unappealing to me now that the idea of it makes me feel a little sick.

“A while ago.” I say, feeling flustered at the old memory. “It was back during the summer after fifth year.”

“So like, a good year and a half?”

“Yeah when you put it like that it sounds so sad.”

She doesn’t need to tell me that yes, in fact, she does think it’s sad, she just shakes her head in dismay. “You’re getting back on the kiss train, firstly. Let’s start there. Once you’ve broken the seal it’ll be easy. It’s just about pushing through fear.” She says it like she really knows what she’s talking about, with absolute conviction, and I kind of believe that she does. Marnie gets all the boys, all the time, even if they’re not handsome boys, she still gets them, so surely she knows a thing or two that I don’t. I find myself nodding along to what she’s saying.

“Alright.” I say. “I’ll get back on the kissing train.”

“Amazing.” She grins. “Let’s go out tonight.”

I take a shaky breath. “Wow, that’s soon.”

“Come on, Evie, it’s never too early, just push through it.”

“Alright. But can we go to a normal bar? Not one of those Trinity pubs, please, I don’t fancy any of those academic types.”

“I feel as though you’re just making excuses.”

“I’m really not, just, please, can we go somewhere normal.”