“The real life”

“The real life” is Marianne Sheridan’s name for a life of belonging that seems to be happening somewhere beyond her, rather than in the places and relationships she currently inhabits. The expression first takes shape at a school football match, where a rare moment of shared excitement offers a glimpse of inclusion; later, as Marianne prepares to leave Carricklea, the same longing returns as an unresolved question about whether a new place can make life feel like her own.

First Appearance at the Match

On the bus to watch the school team play, Marianne sits apart with her headphones on while the other students gather together. Through the window she sees cattle, meadows, and white houses; inside, the players drink water and slap one another’s shoulders. Against this ordinary social scene, she feels that her real life is happening far away, without her, and wonders whether she will ever find it and become part of it. The feeling is familiar from school, but she has no definite picture of what that life would look like. She imagines only that, once it begins, she will no longer have to imagine it.

The match makes that distant possibility briefly tangible. Marianne stands near the goalposts with Karen and other girls, unable to join in the school chants because she does not know their words. When Connell Waldron scores, however, everyone screams, including Marianne, and Karen puts an arm around her waist. Their cheering suspends the ordinary distance between them: for a moment, they have witnessed the same astonishing thing together. The scene does not establish that Marianne has found lasting belonging, but it shows how shared attention can momentarily make the life she feels excluded from accessible.

Carricklea and the Question of Belonging

Later, Marianne’s thoughts return to the phrase as she considers leaving Carricklea. She notices the town’s beauty in sunny weather: chalk-like clouds above the library, tree-lined avenues, a tennis ball arcing through blue air, and cars slowing at traffic lights with music coming from their windows. These details make the town vivid, but they do not make it feel like home. Marianne wonders what it would be like to walk down the street greeting people, to feel that life was happening here rather than somewhere far away.

Her impending move gives the question practical stakes. She packs clothes and household objects for a new existence, including silk dresses, flower-patterned teacups, towels, and a coffee pot. Yet she fears that the change will be external only: different people and a different place may await, while she remains the same person, trapped inside her own body. The earlier hope that life will simply begin someday has thus acquired a harder counterthought: relocation cannot guarantee belonging or release from herself.

Meaning and Recurrence

The expression holds together two different possibilities. At the football match, Marianne’s sense of separation is briefly interrupted by collective excitement and Karen’s gesture; as she prepares to leave town, the anticipated new life remains uncertain, and the familiar distance returns. The contrast prevents “the real life” from becoming a simple promise of escape. It is both a longing for participation and a way of describing the painful suspicion that other people are already living the life from which she is absent.