September 2012

September 2012 is a hinge in Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron’s relationship: after the summer has left them apart and uncertain of their status, they meet again in Dublin, while their continued correspondence preserves an intimacy neither has clearly resolved. The month’s episodes place hesitant face-to-face contact alongside the more deliberate closeness of their written exchanges.

The summer’s separation

By the time Connell returns to Foxfield after his exams, he and Marianne have not seen each other since May. He had said he wanted to see other people; she accepted this, but understood it as a breakup. Because she had never been his girlfriend in public terms, she thinks of herself as neither his current partner nor even his ex. Their old closeness remains vivid: they had stayed up talking and having sex, and Connell had called her his best friend. The contrast between that private bond and the uncertain status of their relationship shapes their reunion.

Their drive together begins with the practical details of Connell’s life back home. He has stopped working at the garage, which has closed, and now works in the Bistro. He mentions seeing Marianne’s mother, Denise Sheridan, there with her boyfriend. Rain starts to fall as they pass the football grounds; Connell switches on the wipers, whose mechanical rhythm accompanies a conversation in which neither says plainly what the other means to them.

A reunion that does not settle things

Connell asks about Marianne’s new boyfriend, Jamie, and notes that Jamie had always liked her. Marianne’s answer remains guarded. She is already experiencing distress connected to Jamie, but does not tell Connell about it in this exchange. The scene makes their distance more than a matter of geography: even after their earlier confidences, she is unsure whether telling him anything will help.

At her house, Marianne asks Connell to come in for tea. He declines because there is ice cream in the boot and Lorraine would be angry if it melted. The small, practical refusal closes off the opportunity for a private conversation. Marianne gets out of the car; Connell waves and says goodbye. The narration imagines the following morning at church, where they will meet for her father’s anniversary Mass, exchange relieved smiles, and become friends again. This anticipated reconciliation offers a modest possibility of renewed contact, not a resolution of their romantic uncertainty.

The September coffee

Six weeks later, Connell is late to meet Marianne for coffee on Capel Street. A protest has delayed his bus, and he arrives without knowing where the café is. Marianne is already seated in its quiet smoking garden. Their meeting is unusual enough that Connell has never met her simply for coffee before. Their conversation starts with the protest and turns to political disagreement: Marianne wishes the household-tax protestors a swift and brutal revolution, while Connell jokes that he might have more energy for protesting if it were more brutal.

Connell notices Marianne’s response when he says there are worse things than being beaten by the Gardaí. Her pause leads him to ask whether she has recently been attacked. She does not explain what lies behind it, instead asking whether he is going to get coffee. The brief exchange shows how much can pass between them without becoming explicit: Connell detects a change in her manner, but the conversation returns to ordinary practicalities rather than establishing what she has experienced or what she wants to tell him.

Distance, email, and private expression

The wider September frame shows Connell travelling through Europe with Niall and Elaine. The trip feels temporary and difficult for him to retain as a sequence of exact memories. In internet cafés, he follows a routine: he speaks with Helen over Skype, sends Lorraine a text, and emails Marianne. These communications occupy different places in his life, but his exchanges with Marianne become unusually extensive.

Connell drafts those emails in spare moments, including while waiting for laundry or lying awake in a hostel. He repeatedly revises their sentences, and the writing absorbs hours before he notices time passing. He cannot easily explain why the process matters so much, but experiences it as connected to his identity and to life more broadly. He considers writing a story in email form, then crosses the idea out in his journal. His correspondence is therefore not only a means of staying in touch: it becomes a space in which he attends to language and records experience.

Marianne and Connell exchange links and thoughts about the Edward Snowden story. Their shared interest gives their emails a subject beyond their own relationship, even as Marianne jokes that an intelligence analyst reading them would misunderstand their connection and miss the history between them. Connell also describes places he visits, including the evening scene around Schönleinstraße in Berlin. He finds that putting such experiences into words makes them feel held and less likely to disappear. Marianne encourages his writing, asking to read his stories and praising his emails; Connell replies that the stories are not as good as the emails.

Memory and moral complexity

September’s later reflection on Rob Hegarty complicates the memory of school. At his funeral, people remembered him as lively and devoted, but Marianne also recalls his insecurity and his part in bullying her. Eric had insulted her appearance in front of others, and Rob had laughed and whispered to him. Marianne’s account does not reduce Rob either to the admired figure of the funeral or to the boy who participated in cruelty: she considers how bullying can leave knowledge of wrongdoing with the person who inflicted it as well as pain with the person targeted.

After Rob’s death, Marianne had read the messages people left on his Facebook page and felt angry at the public forms of grief. In retrospect, she recognizes that the mourners had done nothing wrong, and that grief makes ordinary actions seem senseless. She wishes she could have forgiven Rob. When Connell asks whether she accepted Eric’s apology, Marianne says that she did and that she does not hold grudges. Her answer connects present intimacy with an unresolved past: she can acknowledge the harm without making forgiveness erase it.