✲

‘How was school, Naoise?’

‘Mam!’

‘What?’

‘Don’t.’

Up her teenage daughter went. From her bedroom came the thud of a bag being dropped.

This was nothing new, for ever since Naoise had started at the High School (that was its name, the High School, Dublin), her mood had darkened. Along with her clothes. Black on black. And with them a full face of make-up that only accentuated her look of gloom. Hormones, people said. Typical teenage hormones. But no, it was more than that, her mother thought. Behind the disguise of an emo-obsessed adolescent she glimpsed confusion and brittleness.

The new school, her mother thought. The jump from 80 to 800 pupils. A jump in pressure too, given the thousands of euros in annual tuition fees. That might be part of it. And Naoise was sixteen now. Possibly some boy trouble? Not that she knew of. The vegan diet? She had nothing against it, Naoise having always been a fussy eater, but perhaps a pubescent girl – nearly a young woman – needed more, what was it, vitamin B-something or other.

Maybe, just maybe, it was related to all the time her daughter was spending on her phone and laptop. Simply accessing the news in 2008 was enough to depress the stoutest heart. Crisis. Crash. Slump. A global recession we must start preparing for. That was the prediction of the Irish Independent. ‘Hundreds of Staff Face Axe’, cried every second or third headline.

Her mother didn’t know. She didn’t know what to think. None of the above explained the sunglasses in November, or the hugs from relatives her daughter always found too tight. None of it explained how she was with other teenagers, in the agonies of indecision, wanting every conversation – online and off – to end and never to end, and worrying, once it did, what she’d done to cause it to do so. No wonder, however rote or trite, these conversations robbed her of all her energy. Some mornings even the shower was too far. She rarely finished what she started – a meal, a sentence – with the fortunate exception of homework.

Hey, Thursday, Naoise thought in her room, could you try not being quite so awful next week?

She lay her head on the pillow and closed her eyes and listened through earphones to the songs emo girls listen to. Tegan and Sara. Radiohead. The raw, melancholic songs absorbed her as novels did. She mouthed along to the lyrics as outside the Dublin rain drummed on the roofs of Terenure, on the managers and consultants returning home from their offices.

Naoise was soon reflecting on how hard-up she was, how dull and plain, hemmed in by her little life, compared with her latest obsession, Blair Waldorf. Oh, Blair! High maintenance and worth her weight in gold. A different role model to Emma Woodhouse, but no less appealing. Naoise never missed an episode of Gossip Girl – the gorgeous women waltzing fragrantly out of a cocktail bar, into the Manhattan sun, every inch of them polished to a sheen, draped in designer garments, the world their oyster. In every shot, they made a fashion show of their wardrobes. Blair’s clothes in particular were just wow: the pumps were Louboutin, her blouses Moschino, her dresses Marc Jacobs. The character luxuriated in her showy confidence.

Nothing gave Naoise more pleasure than admiring that confidence; she relished the cast’s zippy one-liners and their debonair talk: no one ever simply had nothing to wear, they had ‘fashion emergencies’. Orange juice in a mimosa they called ‘OJ’. To ‘have moves’ was to dance well.

She found herself entertaining vague schemes to make money. Enough not to have to think about money. Buy dollars cheap and sell later at higher prices – that sort of thing. Majoring in economics might be a wise investment. She began to think of all the people she might invite, or disinvite, to her imaginary champagne brunch.

The other, rawer, show she couldn’t miss in those days was Skins – it dazzled her how the teenage characters let their every thought hang out. The storylines had it all: sex, drugs, moody music, expletives and dramatic flashbacks.

Certain evenings, after an episode, she opened Word on her laptop and transposed the characters from Bristol to Ireland, giving them new names and similar problems, sketching scenes and trimming them, feeling a furtive joy such as she was to know half a dozen years later when, far away from here, she began drafting Edith and Julian.

✲

Wasn’t she young, well-meaning voices said, didn’t she have her whole life in front of her. But that was not a thought to put Naoise’s mind to rest.

‘Smile, love. It might never happen.’ But soon ‘it’ did. Her difficulties felt insurmountable. Writing. Reading. Homework. Daily functioning. She wasn’t in the right headspace for anything. There were always too many things that needed doing: washing, swallowing, choosing, answering, filling in. Not that she didn’t know where to start. She knew where to start. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was having to mentally review every single action, in sequence and exhausting detail, on the days when habit stood her up.

Nine a.m., ten a.m., sometimes all through a morning, she stayed in bed, immobile – it felt like such a trek even to her toothbrush. Her head ached, then throbbed. Possibly she was thirsty. She remembered listening to a doctor explain to her that moods go up and down. Whenever she was feeling low, the woman had said, she made some me-time for herself. She curled up to easy listening or had a good long soak in the bath.

Naoise told another doctor about her anxiety, her sleeplessness. Turning in at midnight only for her body clock to choose 3 a.m., of all hours, to rouse her. Counting down then from 500, getting all the way down to zero. Wide awake still, she’d lie on her side, her eyes squeezed tight, for as many minutes as her prodding thoughts would allow, and then turn over and repeat, over and bloody over again, until the thoughts at last released her, or else exhaustion overran them.

This wasn’t a phase, she learned. But, rest assured, there were treatments available. And small adjustments which, combined, could add up to a big difference. Reducing her screen time for one.

She heard this doctor say ‘autism spectrum’ and ‘a possibility’.

✲

‘What are you reading?’ Reluctantly, Naoise looks up and responds, ‘Nothing.’ She has played out this scene in her mind a hundred times before. The man – for it is always a man – fidgets in his bus seat, his face plump and perspiring. Or he is skinnier, nearer her age and chatting to her on some stupid dare probably. Or he’s someone who could be her grandfather, arthritic legs apart, a cane between his knees.

She is reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, but that is nobody’s business but her own, and perhaps the college library’s. As it is, she must drop the book to her lap, then into her bag, and wait for any impudent-looking man to alight at the next stop, or the stop after that, before resuming. While she waits, she glares down at the flats of her empty palms as though reading them.

The blue and yellow double-decker is inching towards Trinity College Dublin; its other passengers stare blankly at their phones or at their reflections in the dirty panes. The space beside her is taken by her bag. ‘Not much of a talker are you?’ says the man, whichever one he is. She hates riding the bus. She hates the scrums at rush hour and the teenage boys who snigger or shout ‘queer’ when they pass The George. She hates the men who threaten to break in on her concentration. On her free time.

Plenty of Trinity students rode this bus, but Naoise, a senior fresher, soon preferred to cycle the thirty-minute route with its honking motorists to negotiate, the passing cars that sent up spray. She toughed out the awful rain, cold and clinging. It was only rain after all. She’d known worse, though some days it really lashed down. Only rain, it couldn’t help being wet. And besides, she wasn’t made of sugar.

✲

For years before she went, Naoise was going to university. With a head like hers there had never been any question of her not going. The only question had been whether she would go to Trinity, as everyone recommended she do, given her grades in English, her love of thick books, or to an art college, since she also had her father’s eye (he was an amateur photographer) and loved to draw. By way of compromise she became a ‘Trinner’ and contributed drawings, as well as articles, to the student newspaper.

In her junior freshman year she read French and Russian. She found quite a few of the sentences unreadable. They defeated her. Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a something, and a student of the something academy, returning home from something, kept walking on the path by the something meadows. There was Russian’s strange alphabet (though she’d dabbled in both Japanese and Arabic for a time online), but grammar was the bigger obstacle. The French subjunctive, the Russian dative, not that either would have been insuperable, for she enjoyed the time spent in another language – she had some Irish – and her reserves of patience were large. Simply, she couldn’t resist it any longer.

English. Which, to her mind, had always been a charmingly, frustratingly foreign language as well. She’d spent twenty years reading it, so why not four more? It proved to be a sound decision, not least because of her long acquaintance with many of the assigned works, so that her essays earned high marks while not requiring too much thought, and also because it left her time to prep for a new-found passion she’d discovered: college debating.

This House would occupy Wall Street.

This House believes that it is always immoral to kill another human being.

This House regrets Lara Croft.

College debating was a world largely of young men, sons of Dublin 4, loud with bow ties and rowdy ‘points of information’. But it was also a world in which clarity and precision of speech were prized. Naoise was a fast learner; the verbal jousts enlivened her imagination. She drew facts and ideas from the relevant parts of her brain at a split-second’s notice, and for her allotted seven minutes in a debate she could hold the room. Her hands grew animated as she spoke, pulling at the air around her face, bunching and uncurling fingers. Listening, her opponents and audience looked up past the fingers at her experiment in red hair, at her spiky spectacles, her colourful neck wraps, which were all a part of her evolving style.

Dressing snappily, speaking her mind, the brassy persona she adopted in these debates owed more than a little to Blair Waldorf. Owed something also to John, her debating partner, floppy-haired and bright-eyed, who spoke with the verve of a lawyer’s son, the force of an ambassador’s grandson.

John Prasifka. What kind of a name was that, people who heard it wondered. Russian? No, it wasn’t Russian. It was Moravian. Czech we would say today. Prašivka, perhaps John had been told or learned online, is a word still heard in Czechia. It can refer to a dusty room, much like the kind in which he and Naoise conducted their debates. Primarily, though, it describes a certain type of mushroom, puffballs filled with brown or grey spores, or others that pickers don’t know what to make of, and so leave alone.

‘Don’t get him started on God and free will,’ John’s mates warned.

Like Naoise, he could lose himself in thought. Theology and numbers and equations – the more abstract, the better.

Naoise knew John’s girlfriend, Sally, an ace debater herself, who was two years above her in English. They flew far and wide, Naoise and John and Sally, representing the College’s colours in international debating contests. Galway, London, Cambridge, Edinburgh (where Naoise’s future best friend and flatmate was studying), Venice, Helsinki, Belgrade, Malaysia – she racked up more miles than Phileas Fogg. Everywhere she was met by new questions to take apart, the ping-pong of arguing points, a hall’s applause singling out her sharpest responses. Her best results would go up on social media, prompting classmates to text that they were just after seeing them. Fantastic. Brill. Well done.

You might imagine that she was living the high life, but she wasn’t really. All those ultra-low-cost flights at ungodly hours. Hotel windows which afforded only views of drainpipes. But at least, for a few days at a time, she was leaving Dublin behind her. Overseas were the great rolling hills and cityscapes that offered relief to her eye. Food and drink tasted better in Finnish, Serbian, Malay.

More and more these days she was living in the future, which she placed abroad. What about here, she thought, or here, or here, getting warmer as she travelled further east. She put in this future glamorous dresses and heels high enough to be murder on cobblestones – but so worth it – and shiny buildings that rose and rose until they scraped the sky, their many stories lifting her out of herself.

✲

September 2016. Word quickly got around that Sally had a novel coming out. No really. It had been announced in the press and everything. It had gone to Faber and Faber.

Naoise was in Singapore when the news reached her. How mad to picture the name of John’s girlfriend on a book cover: Sally Rooney.

Naoise had quit Ireland with her bags and degree a few weeks earlier, having grown bone-tired of Terenure, wanting nothing more than for the home town to make itself scarce, vacate the space it occupied in her life and leave it to some farflung place more promising. English was what had brought her out here, teaching it paid good Singapore dollars. Between the classes she could go sightseeing, shouldering a backpack with zip pockets for keys and snacks and the funny money, a round flask pocket, pockets to keep her passport and other papers dry and legible, pockets for the pockets.

That was the plan anyway. But haze – like smog in a Dickens novel – had set in and the island lay under a mist of acrid smoke. And then she learned that teaching English – specifically, early literacy – paid even better Hong Kong dollars.