have just told me. No need for such advanced tactics. She turned her face away, shaking her head. No, it wasn’t that, she said. He went on observing her a moment longer, and then said in a friendly voice: Not to worry. See you soon. He walked away, the wheels of his bicycle padded and quiet on the paved street surface.
Eileen took her keys from her pocket and let herself into the building, making her way directly up the stairs and through the front door of her apartment. Pushing her bedroom door open blindly and banging it shut, she lay down on the bed and started crying. Her face was red, a vein in her temple was visible. She hugged her knees to her chest and sobbed with a painful catching sound in her throat. Taking off one of her flat leather shoes, she threw it hard at the opposite wall and it fell limply on the carpet. She let out a noise almost like a scream then and put her face in her hands, shaking her head. A minute went by. Two minutes. She sat up and wiped her face, leaving black make-up smudged under her eyes and on her hand. Three, four minutes. She got to her feet, went to the window and looked out between the curtains. The headlights of a car swept past.
Her eyes were pink and swollen. She scrubbed them once more with her hand and then took her phone from her pocket. The time was 00:41. She opened a messaging app and tapped Simon’s name. An exchange from earlier that day appeared on-screen. Into the reply field Eileen slowly typed the words: Jesus Christ Simon I fucking hate you.
Calmly she surveyed this message, and then, with apparent deliberation, added the lines: Like in your mind we were really just “having fun” all week and you were seeing someone else the whole time? When you were crying all over me the other night telling me how lonely you are, was that your idea of a joke? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Her eyes moved once again over the text, slowly, thoughtfully. Then, holding her thumb to the backspace key, she deleted the draft. Taking deep hard breaths now, she began to
type again. Simon I’m sorry. I feel awful. I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes I hate myself so much I wish something heavy would fall on my head and kill me. You are the only person who is ever nice to me and now you probably don’t even want to speak to me anymore. I don’t know why I ruin everything good in my life. I’m sorry. By the time she had finished typing, the clock on-screen read 00:54. She scrolled back to reach the top of the message, and down again to read over the final line. Then she held the pad of her thumb down once more on the backspace key. Again the reply field was blank, the cursor blinking rhythmically over greyed-out text that read: Type a message. She locked her phone and lay back down on the bed.
20
Alice, I am feeling a bit mystified that you’re on another work trip already. When we talked back in February, I got the impression you were leaving Dublin because you didn’t want to see people, and you needed time to rest and recover. When I expressed my concerns about you being on your own all the time, you actually told me that was what you needed. I find it a little bit strange that you’re now sending me these chatty emails about the award ceremonies you’re attending in Paris. If you’re feeling better and you’re happy to be back at work, that’s great, obviously. But presumably you’re flying from Dublin airport for all these trips? Could you not have let any of your friends know you were going to be in town? You obviously didn’t tell Simon or myself, and Roisin has just told me she texted you two weeks ago and got no reply. I completely understand if you’re not feeling up to being sociable, but then maybe you’re pushing yourself to get back to work too quickly. Do you see what I mean?
I’ve been thinking about the later parts of your message for a few days now – about whether, as you say, ‘the failure is general’。 I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is （with very few exceptions） irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living
compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.