August 2011

August 2011 is framed by two forms of absence: Marianne Sheridan withdraws into the stillness of her family’s garden, while Connell Waldron’s achievement reaches her through Alan’s taunting announcement. The month’s significance deepens in later recollections of Rob Hegarty’s suicide, which expose how distance, guilt, and grief persist after the people involved have lost contact.

Marianne at home

Four months after Lorraine confronts Connell, Marianne lies in the garden wearing sunglasses, her arms freckling in the fine weather. Alan calls from the patio to tell her that Annie Kearney has scored five hundred and seventy points. Marianne does not answer. When she sits up to apply sun lotion, she sees that he is on the phone and continues smoothing lotion over her arms while he calls out that someone in her year has earned six hundred points.

The scene makes Marianne’s withdrawal visible through small refusals to engage. She knows at once who must have achieved the higher score but says nothing, then lies back in the deckchair and closes her eyes. Alan eventually names Connell, adding that Marianne scored five hundred and ninety and asking whether she is angry. She remains silent. Academic results arrive not as a shared celebration but as a comparison Alan uses to provoke her.

Her silence belongs to a wider pattern of isolation. That summer, Marianne eats little: on this day, only two cups of sweetened coffee with milk before Alan speaks to her. Her days tend to pass in her bedroom, where she reads long articles about Syria and the European sovereign debt crisis, researches the journalists who wrote them, and then sleeps, showers, or lies down alone. She sometimes takes coffee upstairs so she will not have to see her family. The garden scene briefly brings her into the household’s orbit, but even there she refuses the conversation Alan tries to impose.

Connell’s result and the family’s taunt

Alan discovers Connell’s result while making a phone call and announces it to Marianne as news of someone who has done better than she has. He calls Connell by his surname and asks whether Connell is there with her. Marianne challenges the familiarity, pointing out that Alan hardly knows him. Alan replies that he knows him well because he saw him at Eric’s house recently. Marianne regrets speaking, and Alan continues pacing down the patio toward the grass.

The exchange links Connell’s public success to Marianne’s private discomfort. She recognizes his likely result before Alan confirms it, yet does not volunteer his name. Alan turns that knowledge into a means of needling her, while his claim of knowing Connell introduces a social connection Marianne had not expected. The scene gives no account of Connell’s own response to his score; its focus is on how his achievement enters Marianne’s home as an occasion for Alan’s provocation.

Rob’s death and Connell’s guilt

A later university counselling session returns to the New Year and reveals the death that has shaped Connell’s emotional deterioration. A few days into January, at two in the morning, he receives a group message from Rachel Moran asking whether anyone has seen or been in contact with Rob. Connell is coming back from a night out with Helen, and when she asks what the message says, he tells her it is nothing and wishes her a happy New Year. The following day, Rob’s body is recovered from the River Corrib.

Connell later hears that Rob had been drinking heavily and seemed out of sorts in the weeks before his death. Connell had not known: he had not been home much during the previous term and had not really been seeing people. Looking through Facebook, he finds that Rob’s last message to him dates from early 2012. It included a photograph of Connell with his arm around Teresa, a friend of Marianne’s, and a crude question about whether Connell was sleeping with her. Connell had never replied. He cannot remember whether he saw Rob the previous summer, and when he tries to picture Rob’s face, the image blurs as he looks at it more closely.

The silence of the unanswered message becomes one of the particulars through which Connell understands his guilt. He tells Yvonne, the university counsellor, that he feels responsible for not keeping in touch, then adds that he never replied to Rob’s last message, even though it had been sent years earlier. Yvonne distinguishes his grief from responsibility for Rob’s decisions, but Connell finds the thought that other people tried to help more difficult: his response sounds more aggressive or pleading than he intended. The conversation does not resolve his guilt; it shows how the past keeps returning in fragments—an old message, a missed connection, and a face he cannot hold clearly in memory.

Grief in different registers

Rob’s death affects Connell physically as well as emotionally. After January, his formerly chronic, low-level anxiety becomes severe. Small interactions such as ordering coffee or answering a question in class make his hands tingle; he has major panic attacks involving hyperventilation, chest pain, and pins and needles. During them, his senses seem detached from him and the world appears slowed, artificial, and unreal. In counselling, he completes the Beck Depression Inventory and receives a score of forty-three, which Yvonne identifies as indicating very serious depression. She recommends that he speak to a college GP about possible medication.

Marianne’s later reflections on Rob complicate any uncomplicated account of loss. After the funeral, she had scrolled through his Facebook page and felt angry at classmates’ messages to the dead. Looking back, she recognizes that they were grieving, even if their public expressions of loss seemed pointless to her at the time. Grief had made nothing seem meaningful, including the messages themselves. She wishes she could have forgiven Rob, and remembers him only indirectly, his face turned away behind a locker door or the rolled-up window of his car.

That distance matters because Rob had helped bully Marianne at school. Eric once called her flat-chested in front of others, and Rob laughed and whispered to him, either affirming the insult or adding something worse. Marianne now considers the cruelty as a harm to both victim and perpetrator: being bullied does not necessarily teach a person something profound about herself, she thinks, but bullying someone else teaches the aggressor something difficult to forget. In this recollection, mourning does not erase what Rob did, and remembering his cruelty does not erase the human complexity of grieving him. August 2011 begins with Marianne silent in the sun; the later memories attached to this period show how the silences between friends and the unresolved injuries between classmates endure beyond the moment in which they were made.