Conversations with Friends: A Novel by Sally Rooney

Author:Sally Rooney [Rooney, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780451499059
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

19

My mother came home early from work that afternoon and fixed some cold chicken while I sat at the table drinking tea. She seemed a little cool with me while preparing the food and didn’t really speak until we both sat down to eat.

So you’re not pregnant, she said.

No.

You didn’t seem so sure about that last night.

Well, the test is pretty definitive, I said.

She gave a funny little smile and picked up the salt shaker. Carefully she applied a small amount of salt to her chicken and replaced the shaker beside the pepper grinder.

You didn’t tell me you were seeing anyone, she said.

Who says I’m seeing someone?

It’s not that friend of yours you went on holiday with. The handsome guy, the actor.

I swallowed some tea calmly, but I was no longer hungry for the food.

You know his wife was the one who invited us on the holiday, I said.

I don’t hear much about him anymore. You used to mention his name a lot.

And yet for some reason you don’t seem to be able to remember it.

She laughed out loud then. She said, I remember it, it’s Nick something. Nick Conway. Nice-looking guy. I actually saw him on TV one night, I think I put it on the Sky Plus for you.

That was very thoughtful of you, Mother.

Well, I wouldn’t like to think it has anything to do with him.

I said the food was nice, and that I appreciated her fixing it for me.

Do you hear me talking to you, Frances? she said.

I don’t feel up to this, I really don’t.

We finished the meal in silence. I went upstairs afterward and looked at my arm in the mirror, where I’d pinched it. It was red and a little swollen and when I touched it, it stung.

—

I stayed at home for the next few days, lying around and reading. I had a lot of academic reading I could have been doing in advance of the college term, but instead what I started reading was the gospels. For some reason my mother had left a small leather-bound copy of the New Testament on the bookshelf in my room, sandwiched between Emma and an anthology of early American writing. I read online that you were supposed to start with Mark and then read the other gospels in this order: Matthew, then John, then Luke. I got through Mark pretty quickly. It was divided up into very small parts, which made it easy to read, and I noted down interesting passages in a red notebook. Jesus didn’t talk very much during Mark’s gospel, which made me more interested in reading the others.

I’d hated religion as a child. My mother had taken me to Mass every Sunday until I was fourteen, but she didn’t believe in God and treated Mass as a social ritual in advance of which she made me wash my hair. Still, I came at the Bible from the perspective that Jesus was probably philosophically sound. As it turned out I found a lot of what he said cryptic and even disagreeable.

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